Comment by cm2012
20 days ago
Humanity's revealed preferences are really, really strong here.
As basically every country on Earth gets richer, two things happen in survey results.
One is that as people get richer they spend more time apart. Household sizes get smaller, the number of social interactions per week goes down, etc.
You'll also see that as countries get richer people say that they report feeling less lonely. Loneliness is less of an issue for the rich countries who live more apart. The correlation between this and GDP is comical. As you get to poorer countries, like clockwork, people report being lonelier in surveys.
The evidence suggests that as people get more choice they decide to see people less and they also feel happier for it and less lonely. So I don't think there's a problem here.
I think the problem is that self-reported scores of loneliness go down, but a lot of the data suggests that our increasing solitude and isolation isn’t good for us, whether we feel lonely or not.
Good article on this a few days ago that I’ve been thinking about a lot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49812533
Do you have data for this? This contradicts common sense and every datapoint I’ve seen so far that isolation is a rapidly rising issue.
Face validity. Someone may have pulled together numbers for this in a study, but this area is a new facet of interpersonal behavior at a macro-economic level, so there won't be much published on the subject yet.
Here are some good high quality surveys:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5547349/
https://ourworldindata.org/lonely-not-alone
But frankly I wasn't kidding when I said every quality survey shows this.
If you have ever seen an article suggesting that loneliness is higher in the West or in capitalist economies or whatever, you have been 100% misled. That is essentially just a made up narrative that plays well in articles
Those surveys are both about how elderly people in the Nordic countries report being less lonely than those in Mediterranean countries. They discuss things like whether extended families live together, but don’t really touch on people’s social lives more broadly. I’m not sure that you can draw a sweeping generalization from this that wealthier countries prefer less socialization.
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