Online or offline. News keeps reporting about loneliness and disconnection, but in my experience it’s just that it’s harder to interact with people in a civil way because they are so hostile, angry, and arrogantly convinced their viewpoints and experiences are the only legitimate ones.
Not to mention the lack of civility towards servers and other service workers. I can’t recall if I was just indifferent 10 years ago, but on a almost daily basis it blows my mind how openly rude many people are to servers and such, which seemed like a much more rare thing when I was younger.
Online, no, the discourse is actually better. 20 years ago phrases ending with !!!111!!! were not just a joke. By 2016 that was a lot better, but I think the trend has still continued, somewhat. The pain of the internet now is paywalls and ads and slop everywhere.
IRL, quite possibly. Where I am service workers still get treated with respect (elitism seems to be left-coded), but on the other hand you never know if you’re talking to a far-right wingnut or a normal person, and that makes it harder.
Only online. Harder now only because more and more illiterate people are online every day.
Algorithmic (and I specifically mean the ones meant to drive engagement through rage/fear) social media is the biggest tipping point in my mind, particularly when people started having it in their pockets with smartphones all the time. To a lesser degree, when always-on internet became common.
I think of interacting with people in '26, '16, '06 (no widespread smartphones yet), '96 (no widespread cellphones yet), teens chatting on phones and the newfangled IM thing for those with internet and computers at home, and '86 (though I was rather young) when online communication was still quite niche (BBS’s and the like). I would say that that the tipping point came around 2010 +/- a couple of years (probably varying by region).
I would be remiss not to mention the 24/7 news cycle ushered in in the wake of 9-11 (2001) and fox news and such after that also playing in the same dark ways.
I was part of a third space for years. But I left because people decided it had to be a ‘safe space’, and started getting nasty and confrontational to people who didn’t look/talk/speak like them. This was in '23, like right after we opened back up from COVID closures… basically they wanted to restrict it to only ‘the right kind of people’.
It was sad and gross and I left in protest. And they labeled me ‘one of the bad people’.
And I have noticed a lot of public spaces are more like this now, they are less public and more about ‘only people who aren’t different than us’ are allowed or invited to be there.
I was part of a third space for years. But I left because people decided it had to be a ‘safe space’, and started getting nasty and confrontational to people who didn’t look/talk/speak like them.
What was being said in this space that people were being confronted about that caused you to choose to leave?
oh no, they’d never confront anyone. they were way too cowardly to do that.
they’d just snipe at meetings behind closed doors and express their ‘concern’ that ‘we aren’t not catering people that truly deserve help’. It was all in code dude. that’s how these folks work. If you call them out that way they can immediately deny any accountability.
and i raised the question how can you know someone’s ethnicity, or identity, or financial status based on looking at them? are you going to ask them that when they walk through the door and then tell them to leave or something if they are the ‘wrong’ answers? you going to ask them for a tax return or a birth certificate?
Then I was told I was ‘being problematic’. Because again, they never directly want to confront anything or address how bigoted and arrogant their presumptions about other people were.
Used to be a really cool space where nobody cared about your appearance, which is why I got involved. all sorts of folks from all walks of life would come and mingle, there was never a really ever an issue. the only time we ever had to ask anyone to leave was one homeless guy who was harassing people and clearly unwell. this went on like this for YEARS
But new people who came in the past few years were completely judgemental douchebags who were only volunteering to score leftist brownie points on their instagram, and would get mad because the people we were helping were ‘too white’ for them to feel like they were good people. they kept proposing we no longer be an ‘open space’ but we be like lgbt only one night, latino one night, black one night… it was fucked up IMO. and if you pointed out what about asian or south india night, you were an asshole, because those groups aren’t ‘oppressed’.
anyway, it sucked and I am not going to participate in the active division of people based on their skin color or their sex. that shit is fucking gross. the joy of the space for me is that I could help anyone, regardless of their appearance.
the folks in question proposing this crap also were all white/asian tech workers… which six figure salaries, of course. trying to min max their social equity scores in their heads. also the same douches who wanted us to start applying for grant money so we could start paying the people who ran the space… e.g. themselves. because what is the point of volunteering and helping people if you aren’t also going to get paid to do it?!
anyway i do other volunteer stuff now instead where none of that matters and nobody gets paid, but it’s definitely not a third space, because it’s outdoors.
Not only is social media designed to be addictive, it hardens our divisions. Combine that with a media ecosystem that saturates us with frictionless content at a scale and speed that are unmatched, a government intentionally stoking division and breaking norms, and an environment that primes us for manipulation, our psyches strain under the weight and the affects are apparent in the way we act and view the world. We haven’t been assaulted like this before.
No. I think people are more fearful now thanks to too much news. The world changes very slowly.
We change far faster.
I chat with strangers all the time. Airport, work, grocery store, wherever. I have never had anyone do anything more than have a very short conversation signaling that they weren’t interested. Polite but clear, so I don’t persist.
Nobody has ever said anything rude to me or been shitty.
Humans are social animals, even those self-proclaimed introverts. Everyone need social time, even if it is only with a small group for a short duration. Most people enjoy it, don’t believe the bs that society at large is crumbling and people are mean.
Fwiw, am a guy, short, not horrible looking but not special. I am good at making stupid jokes for most any situation. That seems to put people at ease.
You’ve got it backwards. The world changes very quickly. People don’t.
Eleven. It was easier to talk with people eleven years ago. By about this time in 2016 it was too late.
slightly offtopic:
This graph can’t be right… Why does it add up to exactly 100 min? What counts as social vs non-social? What are the other categories?
Trump/MAGA fucked up a lot of relationships for me. Covid, not a problem at all.
Yes, MAGA has absolutely shredded any social contract which used to exist in polite society. Literally any random person you meet now has a chance of being a completely unhinged fascist who will try to ruin your life for being a “radical Antifa terrorist.” Even in a city where statistically 8 in 10 of my neighbors are not trump supporters, the ones which are left are particularly radicalized and enthusiastic about being a MAGA warrior.
It has been trending that way for a while, but COVID really did a number on people randomly interacting with others and creating small talk.
Yes, but I’d argue the biggest contributing factor was COVID
Isolation just kinda “does that” to people. Yes, the problem predates 2020 but anecdotally I think we’ve all met that abrasive, lonely trucker and statistically mental health hospitalizations sky rocketed in 2020 and still hasn’t returned to the previous baseline, especially for those under 18
https://www.cdc.gov/mental-health/about-data/emergency-department-visits.html
I realize this isn’t a perfect measure but I suspect there’s a correlation
I would be a poor judge of this. I was one of the closed-off people earlier and life, but have opened up over the years as I’ve become a bit more self-assured and less concerned with how people see me. I still tend to prefer individual pursuits, though.
But there does seem to be a lot of loneliness going around, particularly with my kids’ generation and the elderly. Speaking to the former, it seems to stem from incessant online scrutiny following them around everywhere and causing them to withdraw into safer modes of limited social interaction. And I thought my high school experience was hell. It’s very sad.
I’ve noticed a very notable dropoff. As you said, people are angrier, but more-so I’ve noticed that far fewer people are willing/able to be open and empathetic, especially towards others. It feels like all that’s left is surface-level talk and shared activities, with no real care or consideration for those you’re with. For example, within my own circles, the things we used to do to mutually support one another have almost entirely stopped, and as no one discusses anything deeper than what they did today, connections are starting to die off.
people are willing/able to be open and empathetic
personally, I’ve been bitten too many times being open to random people and getting vitriol back. Well that may be because at the height of my online activities were in reddit, just at the right moment when it started gaining mass traction and getting all sorts of assholes.
being here in lemmy/piefed (can we settle on calling it threadiverse yet?) is of course a nice breath of fresh air.
Agreed. I feel like the definition of what empathy is also changed. Most people seem to use the term in a very adversarial way now, and not, as you said, in the sense of mutual exchange.
I definitely miss that sense of exchanging things, especially without expectation. Now it feels everyone is in a kind of empathy stand-off, or has all these ‘requirements’ you have to pass before you’re worthy of their regard as a fellow human being.
Very curious about the requirements you’ve encountered.
mostly political and identity stuff. you have to have a degree from a fancy school, have read certain books or be in therapy, and have voted democrat only. sometimes it also requires your parents to have been educated/liberal as well.
because we all know if you don’t go to a fancy college, read Toni Morrison, and only ever have voted for democrats your entire life, you’re not a real human being or something.
my folks didn’t go to college and were republican. Had many a person in my life recently lecture me how this makes me a monster and i should disown them entirely. then I say they are dead, and they go ‘good riddance’. and I realize they are the awful person.
i can’t think of anything more disgusting than hating on someone for their parents choices. It’s so fucking weird.
I’m just trying to sort how all of this happens so blatantly at once.
To be completely clear I live in a deeply progressive part of the country and am surrounded by every stereotype of the bottom left quadrant. I know there’s a cliche of ‘doing the reading’ but I’ve never felt pressured by my education. I’m a college dropout and I kind of low key refuse to read theory out of a mild obstinance but that hasn’t been a barrier, def. Unsusre where to go to find those people.
My parents went to college in varying degrees and they were/are neoliberal conervatives. My Dad confessed some sex crimes to me from when ‘it was different in those days’ so yeah good riddance to him for that and a few other things but my Mom is a deeply toxic person, so I do gravitate towards the no contact crowd to commisserate. Genuinely though I do think that politics do reflect a personality to a certain degree so I’m not sure what to say there. Everyone from my parent’s generation were all about ‘never talking politics’ and I think it’s an admission that you probably would hunt the homeless for sport if it was legal and you don’t know how to not get baited in a conversation into admitting it. Keep in mind everyone from that generation voted for Reagan and that’s a huge ding any day.
I do think you’re abbreviating details here probably for good reason, but if the only people you meet are like this it’s time for a new bar. Or you’re maybe very young in a relative sense as it takes some time to temper the edges of this kind of purity politics. That and I think guilt by association is valid only if you are trying to be deeply guarded about something and that kind of defensiveness does get overblown in circles built on performativity.
Best example of an extreme I’d personally encountered and had to deal with for friend circle issues is a guy we hung out with for a while who was socially awkward, for sure, but I wanted to try giving him the benefit of a doubt. Dude even admitted to being a transphobe but ‘was just asking questions’ so I thought maybe there was a path to tolerance and change there. Sure enough though after a couple months all he did was creep out the women in the group and be really insistent that everyone should start playing Smash Bros at every hangout(an unfortunate red flag admittedly), and when I asked him how he thought he was coming off he went off the rails and started talking about how everyone had impossible standards and our trans friends were delusional, so later dude.
I say all of this to at least try to put the defensiveness you might run into in a sympathetic light. I imagine these people have run into some real creepos and if they get any sniff of it they shut down.
oh, dude people just assume I’m transphobic because I’m a white guy with visible muscles and short hair. I’ve literally been accosted on the street for voting for Trump too. Of course, neither of these things is true, but it doesn’t stop ‘woke’ people from assuming it solely based on how I look. Because you know, they take once glance at you and they KNOW WHO YOU REALLY ARE.
I live in Boston, plenty of horrible people here who think their leftist values gives them free reign to be bigoted assholes to everyone they don’t like the look of or who isn’t as ‘educated’ as they think they are. My neighbors call the cops on black people using the park across the street, despite having black lives matter signs on their laws. They never call the cops when it’s white or asian people having an event in the park… funny.
It’s peak leftist hypocrisy in this town. It’s all recent too, none of this crazy shit happened before Covid and Trump. I’ve lived here for 20 years and the weird ‘tests’ people demand of you is only very recent.
But I’m not responsible for other people being crazy bigoted nutters. I’m not going up to strangers and screaming at them about who they voted for, nor am I requiring folks have read certain books for me to converse with them.
Maybe just getting old and ready to enter my yelling at clouds phase, but feels like the younger generations are less and less open to the possibility of casual conversation. I can start a conversation with a 60 year old lady any day of the week anywhere about damn near anything.
Seems pretty much the same as it’s always been to me.
Nah, I feel like I keep getting better at it as I get older.
