politics

I completely agree, but this type of response to it is snake oil. Many anti-capitalists view our social alienation as a required part to keep capitalism functioning, and any superficial attempt to fix it such as this post shows, is just to make it look like they are trying to fix it. See regulatory bodies allowing .. everything bad.

Gangs, neo nazis, even flat earth groups survive because lonely people can find a sense of community in them.

Which is why conservatives are preemptively shrieking about this. They don't want recruitment to go down.

Our oligarchs know that it's more productive to control us less intensely and give us more time off work etc. The common mistake is to think they care about profit, when that's more of a secondary feature. The truly rich care about power, and maintaining it. They will demoralise their staff to prevent unions even if that costs them heavily, even if the unions will only lose them a million at worst, they would sacrifice 5 million to prevent slaves rebelling.

if these actually work they will be dismantled immediately

Yeah, I don't doubt Murphy's heart is in the right place - he's been a big advocate of mental health legislation since his House days, and he was the congressman for Newtown when Sandy Hook happened - but I'm skeptical that the sorts of techniques we use to combat smoking or obesity would work on loneliness; it's more of a symptom of a larger problem than a problem in its own right.

I'm not arguing for car dependency, and it is component to the loneliness epidemic, but it's not the sole cause. More than 1 in 10 Europeans are lonely, so car dependency can't be the only factor.

This widespread loneliness has really only hit its stride in earnest in the last decade or so. And what hit the scene about 10 years ago? Social media, ironically. The thing that is ostensibly designed to connect us has pushed us apart.

We can't have an honest conversation about this without identifying who it affects the most: young men. As a crude metric, /r/ForeverAlone has literally an order of magnitude more users than /r/ForeverAloneWomen. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the latter subreddit literally banned male users because the female users were getting asked out on dates ... literally this meme.

Which brings me to dating apps. They have insanely lopsided demographics that make half of all men who use them persona non grata. They have a greater matching inequality than the economic inequality of Venezuela. This is not a comfortable conversation to have, but ignoring it won't help solve the problem.

Speaking of the economy, that sure isn't helping either. What limited opportunities for real-world social interaction still exist are becoming less and less accessible when more and more people have to spend more of their time earning piss-all income just to scrape by.

The loneliness epidemic is a coalescence of these, and other factors, that have been accumulating over decades of consolidating organic social opportunities into overorganized spaces with inherent and high barriers to entry.

The problem in Portland is that we decriminalized most drugs, so now potential third spaces are over-run with homeless tents and drug use.

From my house I have either a 1/4 mile uphill walk to a major busline, or a 3/4 mile downhill walk to one. Either way isn't particularly safe, and the bus lines themselves aren't particularly safe.

https://www.koin.com/news/passenger-violence-increasing-at-trimet-during-severe-staffing-shortage/

Crazy idea: if drugs are decriminalized, what if we had two versions of public spaces: one that disallows use of drugs, and one where drugs were allowed and handed out for free? Like if you were a drug addict, would you really want to go to that boring "sober" library where you might get hassled when you could get unlimited drugs at the library across the street?