Well, yes, we've doubled down on mediating social interactions through economic relationships. Most of the interactions adults have in their lives are with or in the framing of economic relations. Homes, are being invaded with tablets and mobile devices which bring along with them framing interactions as economic relations through ad and consumer frames. Workplaces are inherently settings of economic relations, and third places outside of the consumer setting are becoming extinct because they are non-monetizable.
This last category, non-consumer third places are formerly the domain of kid-friendly community-building activities. When we talk about creating more of these and the response is, "they aren't economically viable," it's exactly the kind of economic calculus framing that I'm talking about.
What frustrates me is that, it seems (Read as: the following is just my vibe) that the majority of 3rd places left are religious in nature, but I, personally, don't want to be religious or raise children that are.
There are some options, of course, but they're limited and often of poor quality, at least locally. Libraries are trying to adapt to fill this gap, and maker spaces spring up but most don't have funding to be good - or if they do, that funding brings things that ruin the spirit. Once you're looking for a place as an Adult, especially without kids, the number of relevant events and things to do drops quickly too - so these same children aren't going to find better options as they grow older.
The mad rush to as quickly abolish religious practices in mainstream U.S. culture without any form of societal replacement is puzzling to me.
I am no fan of religion having grown up in an exceedingly religious environment. But it was always completely obvious to me even as a child that the primary purpose of religion was to form local communities and have others with shared values to rely on.
We seem to be doing it with more than just religion these days, but it’s the canary in the coal mine.
Lack of investment in your community will very rapidly erode any sort of high trust society you once had within a single generation. Once it’s gone, it’s pretty much gone for good.
I believe no one is talking about this aspect of WFH either. It’s taking away maybe the last “socially expected” regular commitment to your local community. Your daily life is not supposed to be lived in complete social comfort with planned interactions with a tiny group of people being your sole source of socialization. At times you should be feeling uncomfortable or obligated in some community or social setting or you are not growing as a human being. I don’t think the office is the best place at all for this, but for many folks I know it was their last social interaction of any sort outside of family.
I’ve been unable to articulate these thoughts very well for decades now - since my late high school days I was already the crazy guy telling friends I was really worried how our hobbies and social interactions were so much less investment on average than our grandparents generation. On average having a bunch of Quake guild buddies is simply not the same as my grandpa who had a bunch of fishing buddies. It’s been on my mind for quite some time, and I think the data is starting to show those concerns were legitimate.
It is a problem, but… religion isn’t true. How do you square that with any sort of culture that values reality?
There are certain elements that are not true. But other ones are true. There are many ways to alleviate suffering.
God is not true, at least not the sense that any religion claims (God as an abstraction and a meme is as real as any other, as real as Harry Potter or Slenderman) Claims of absolute moral right or authority derived from divine right are not true. Claims made by the religious that belief in God is a prerequisite to morality, community or cultural identity are not true. Claims made by religious teachings about the nature of the universe are not true.
So what does that leave? Philosophy, ethics and cultural mythology? Why do we need to keep religion around for any of that, any more than we need alchemy when we now have chemistry?
Growing up in Nashville I've frequently heard that religion is a prerequisite to ethics. While I disagree in principle, I struggle to come up with an example where philosophy and ethics are discussed in a secular setting outside of school(academia included) and politics.
It would not surprise me that on the whole our society is worse off for lack of a widespread secular tradition of discussing these concepts with your community.
edit: substitute "secular setting" for "secular state", definitely not arguing for the integration of church and state.
It's always looked to me like from a first approximation, people just do whatever they want and come up with justifications. The smarter they are, the more elaborate the justification. I doubt I'm above it.
I think you're right, but that developing a sense of ethics and believing those ethics and morals down to your bones will make you not want to do certain things. People without empathy don't have trouble lying to, stealing from, or committing violence against other people - but those things feel wrong to me intrinsically, because I was raised to feel empathy. But empathy is taught. Seemingly immoral things can be everyday occurrences. For example, it used to be acceptable for husbands to beat their wives up, and now it's not. Probably most people truly believe it's immoral now, unless they grew up with their father regularly beating their mother.
I suspect empathy is mostly nature with some influence via nurture. Once you encounter a few genuine psychopaths who aren’t particularly good at hiding it, it sure seems like it’s just something innate to them.
Certainly you can instill reverence in people - give people a challenge that involves using a cross as a hammer to complete and they’ll recoil instinctively, but I think that’s just software tapping into something more akin to firmware.
This is just my conjecture, but I think that it's that psychopaths lack the capacity for empathy, and empathy is otherwise like a muscle in that it can be trained. I suspect this because I've grown more empathetic compared to when I was a kid, and some other people I've talked to said it was like that for them (not very scientific, I know). I remember being somewhat selfish and amoral.
I think it's a combination of the environment you grew up in, the behavior of the people you grew up with, the values you were raised with, and the education you received, and some of it is also purely self-driven. And so toddlers and little kids are like amoral sponges, since they're still developing their senses of justice, morality, and empathy.
Right. I would argue that organized religion provides(provided?) a guided framework of accountability, transparency, and acceptance for your "justifications" amongst your community. In a vacuum, these differences compound into a complete breakdown of understanding.
It's harder to call someone a "libtard" or a "troglodyte" if you have to sit next to them in a pew for the rest of your life.
I fail to see how being forced to confess your crimes to someone who can then informally blackmail you or your employer, for the benefit of an elected dictator-for-life living on the other side of the ocean, provides any "transparency" or "accountability" towards the community.
> an example where philosophy and ethics are discussed in a secular setting
That's what the intellectual cafes of 18th/19th century were. In a more bastardized way, that's what pubs can be today.
This said, school and "politics" have always been the main locations for such arguments - "politics", after all, was effectively built as an alternative to religious establishments to discuss matters without pesky clerics around.
This is stating as fact several things that have not and cannot be proven by tools such as the scientific method. Seems ironic, given the subject matter. :)
The list of claims made by religion which have been disproved by science is innumerable, and the list of claims made by science which have been disproved by religion does not exist. But sure, let's pretend religion and science are equally valid....
Hey now, you're moving the goal posts quite a bit there! :)
I was just pointing out that you said several things as if they were proven facts, and they are not. That's all.
The religious do that all the time, but only atheists ever seem to get called out for it. Why the double standard, I wonder?
I invite you to consider The Shroud of Turin (https://www.shroud.com/78exam.htm) and the documented miracles at Lourdes (https://www.lourdes-france.org/en/the-miracles-of-lourdes/).
God is not a testable hypothesis. There is no empirical way to conclude God does not exist except by assuming that anything that cannot be tested does not exist. Such an assumption also rules out morality, as there is no empirical basis for that either.
Assuming you're utilitarian, you're working off of the untestable belief that making people happier has some property called 'goodness', and that there is some inherent value to it. But that doesn't even matter because happiness is a qualia that cannot be tested anyway.
So, while I agree that faith in God is not a prerequisite for morality, faith in something certainly is. And once you've allowed faith into your worldview, stating with certainty that God doesn't exist becomes inconsistent.
Faith in something doesn't need presuppose faith in anything supernatural.
And theists have no empirical basis for their morality either, because faith by definition is belief in the absence of such evidence. People just believe what they believe. I prefer to be fed rather than starve, I prefer peace to suffering, I prefer liberty to slavery. I'm a social being capable of empathy and extending my beliefs about myself to include my expectations for others. I prefer others be fed, rather than starve. I prefer others have peace rather than suffer. I prefer others have liberty rather than slavery. I believe human life has value because I value my own life, and therefore value the lives of others.
What do I need to have faith in, here, other than nature and mortality?
Faith in something that is the basis for any morality absolutely does presuppose faith in something supernatural. If you know of anything in the natural world that proves the existence of right and wrong, by all means let me know.
I don't disagree that theists lack empirical basis for morality, both because I don't think anyone does and because I don't believe there is an empirical basis for God.
But it doesn't sound like you have a morality*. It sounds like you have preferences. One doesn't decide one's preferences, and even if they did, they would need a morality to do so rightly. This suggests that your being a good person is strictly luck of the draw. If my friend Bob the sadist says he loves it when people starve, would you be in the right to tell him he's wrong? On what grounds?
*Don't take this the wrong way- I don't mean to insult you, and I fully expect you do have morality. I'm only criticizing the argument here.
You first. You don't believe there is an empirical basis for God yet you believe morality absolutely presupposes faith in the supernatural. Presumably, you also consider yourself to have morality. On what supernaturally-derived basis would you (presumably) believe Bob is wrong? and given that the supernatural cannot be objectively proven, how does that faith differ from a preference, on your part?
An activist god, in the old testament sense, would be rather visible.
God as defined by Jews/Christians as ‘being itself’ doesn’t seem disprovable. Especially if you believe that love is real in the whatever- sense.
False beliefs are often much more instrumentally useful than true beliefs.
I notice I usually walk away from conversations with fellow believers about the nature of God, the Bible etc feeling closer to and more trusting of them even compared to if I talk with them about e.g. trolley problems or what their take on moral realism is, especially if I later confirm they in fact walk the walk by living in a way which agrees with those principles. There's just something about the religious framing that gives it that extra kick.
The actual question of whether God is real is irrelevant. I just assume they're playing ball the same way I am, and that's often enough to kickstart the friendship.
Empiricism doesn't help you with the questions of "who are my people?" or "what matters?" You can make a legitimate case for some of religion's claims being empirically unsound, it doesn't take away from the fact that religion is very effective at giving a lot of people meaning and community, orthogonal to those specific claims.
It's arguably only effective if you genuinely believe the truth claims of the faith. There is this sort of strange very online revival of "trad" beliefs but you can literally tell that the people are trying to gaslight themselves into believing something they don't. Sort of a split-brain religion at best.
Nietzsche's aphorism about God being dead was correct, as was his prediction about the future. Religion wouldn't immediately die out but it would take increasingly pathological forms, it's arguably why religion has taken such a political turn as the capital 'f' Faith portion is just gone.
At least for Judaism that not true at all. There are enormous numbers of Jews who do not believe, and yet consider themselves Jewish and go to occasional services, and find meaning in them even while not believing.
There are even pulpit Rabbis who do not believe and yet faithfully follow all the practices and teach.
There aren't, which is exactly why they're exceptional. After the experiences of the 20th century Jews have retained an acute awareness of threats to their very survival as a group which is why they tend to adhere to practice despite secularization. It's also likely why secular Jewish women are the only secular group with a high birth rate.
There's no historical analog to this in pretty much any other modern society, which is why you don't see secular Swedes drag themselves out of bed to go to mass on Sundays.
> After the experiences of the 20th century
... And the 19th, and the 18th, and the 17th, and the 16th, and...
The Jewish condition was obviously affected by the Shoah, but the fundamental elements of otherness from the communities it lived in (since the exodus), with all the very real threats that they inevitably attract, have always been there.
(Sadly any further elaboration on this point cannot be made in a public forum today.)
It's actually 'okay' to gaslight yourself into believing something you don't. That is the basis of human society and mental health. I mean, everyone gaslights themselves into believing all sorts of weird statements on reality, such as 'my parents love me unconditionally' (realistically, there are probably conditions attached).
It's okay to make aspirational claims or commitments like, "I'm going to do my best to love my children unconditionally". It's not mentally healthy to tell yourself "my marriage is great" when your marriage is in fact in shambles. In an extreme case say, believing your parents or spouse love you unconditionally if they're abusing you might destroy a life. A lot of relationships probably decay beyond repair because people don't face reality early enough.
Personal commitments, even if idealistic are good, trying to talk yourself into facts about reality that you don't even believe is never good. And most religions of course make those demands. It's basically like being in the late Soviet Union. Everything is great, everyone is equal, you leave the house and there's a doctor selling cigarettes and vodka on the streets to survive. And basically when in your mind you see that double-think it's already over in a way.
The church that I was raised in and grew up in for the first 18 years of my life... I became a militant atheist when I left that church at 18, close to 30 years ago. In my 30s, I started to drift between Zen Buddhism, Druidry, wicca, paganism, looked into Daoism, and on and on it went. And I finally realized, quite recently, that I had a God-shaped hole running right through the center of me. I still haven't quite figured out what to do about that, I've been looking deeply into Eastern Orthodox Christianity because I find it very compelling, and I have no interest in going back to Protestantism and am deeply troubled by the Catholic Church and it's hierarchy, but I have my doubts and skepticism still.
Regardless, I personally find all of that to be vastly preferable to whatever the fuck is happening to us in the absence of Christianity.
I (somewhat unknowingly) spent several months of immersion in a Hindu monastery. At least in the branch they practiced, they were very clear that your internal beliefs on the theology were far less important than doing the practices that will bring you benefits in this very lifetime—no need to reincarnate to enjoy your positive karma. Christianity puts too much emphasis on belief and not enough on rituals & practices to thrive in a skeptical public.
Catholic and Orthodox Christians still retain and practice vast repertoires of rituals. They are not thriving amidst our skeptical public.
I asked many of these same questions when I lost my faith. I found compelling answers as to why I had a god shaped hole in D.S. Wilson’s Darwin’s Cathedral. It’s taken 15 years, but I also finally have plans about what the fuck we should be doing about it.
As a low key non-religious person, I find the German Mennonites pretty appealing. They have a sort of DIY approach to religious practice and very little decorum. But AFAIK the US branch is much more radical, I'm not even sure if there are others than the Pennsylvania Dutch.
Protestants in Europe are also very different from the US btw - they are more moderate than Catholics, not less. I grew up Protestant and have always had doubts, which turned into being pretty sure that it's all bogus from age 20 or so. Having something to believe in is probably nice, but it doesn't work for me.
I am surprised this needs to be pointed out, but people generally believe their religion to be true and do not find it at odds with reality at all. That doesn't mean you have to agree with them just because they believe it, but it is certainly not the case that religion is false in a provable sense, nor that religiosity is incompatible with valuing reality.
His point is a criticism of the role of religion as a community accessible to everyone; what if you don't believe in it? What if you can't? This makes the idea that everyone should just join their local church group a non starter.
I feel this is a very 'Protestant' (for lack of better word) view of the situation.
If you don't believe in it, you should just do all the actions and move on as normal. This is the 'liturgical' approach to religion and doesn't require belief.
I myself have confessed many times to my priest a lack of belief, but by virtue of the fact I'm there, I'm clearly still practicing. I mean, as a very analytical person, sometimes I feel very skeptical, and sometimes I feel as if God obviously exists. But either way, it doesn't matter because the answer is unknowable by observation, so it's a choice to believe or not. But even if my choice feels strained, being liturgical[1] about it still provides the same benefits.
[1] By liturgical, I mean, doing the actions, like kneeling, standing, bowing, etc. This builds community independent of any belief.
On the contrary, most religions assert that their particular views are the _only_ valid ones -- and many require their adherents to actively proselytize, to try to convert others to their dogma.
These views are replete with many untestable and non-falsifiable axiomatic assumptions, which must be accepted on "faith."
That word means "accepting the validity of those axioms _despite_ their lack of congruence with reality."
Well since we ended up with the most popular religions being monotheistic, it follows that regardless of what is true, most religious people are wrong. We just can’t prove which ones.
Religion is literally false but metaphorically true. Our brain filters existence through metaphors. I’m not religious but my metaphors of understanding reality are built on a culture that was for thousands of years until the state got separated from church within my lifetime here in Norway. And it hasn’t made things better.
What does this even mean?
Is reality true? Like all these agents in the comment section below who claim to know the unknowable, are they true?
That model of reality you are describing, thinking that it is reality itself, is that true?
Religious pursuits of ‘why anything’ are true to the right hemisphere and false to the left hemisphere.
What culture values reality?
In fact, how often is your own brain lying to you for one reason or another?
It seems in 2024 that one simply chooses their religion. Arbitrary GDP growth in a finite environment isn’t true either, it’s just another convenient fiction. More recently the AI doom/effective altruist community has just made some hypothetical AI thing into a god. Even rational things like environmentalism and social progressivism have taken on many of the trappings of a religion.
It might be time to start judging which faith-based organizing principles produce the best outcomes.
You examine all cultures and find that, despite their claims, none truly value reality. Then you choose to believe, or have experiences that lead you to believe, one that explicitly says that there is more to life than what you can see.
I understand what you mean, I grew up in a church with a youth group and group friends which I valued.
However I also grew up with constant anxiety about sin and hell. It still gets back to me when my insomnia is bad.
So churches and church membership aren't necessarily a net-positive. I too wish there was some sort of community my family could belong to. But I'm not taking my kids to church anytime soon.
Not all religious societies are like that. Doing it properly looks more like exercise towards a higher good than fear of failure.
I think it's unavoidable in Christianity. Even if one's immediate religious society doesn't believe in hell, it is trivially easy to find other societies which do, and other societies that believe that everyone is damned except for people who've accepted the 'right' concept in the 'right' way. I can't tell you how relieved I was when I realized I could become an Atheist and mostly put the matter out of my mind.
Quick edit: I'm aware there are a lot of theological and historical publications nature of hell and whether or not it is misunderstood. I knew that at the age of 12. It doesn't matter. No minister or theologian or historian can _prove_ that there is no hell and that I won't end up there.
God, Messiah, Heaven, Hell - we are into the area of the unknowable. We don't have training and testing data.
Speaking as a Christian I think Hell is often looked at the wrong way. It's easy to fall into, yes, but not because "you're just doing it wrong" but because "you want to". I can't speak for other denominations than Catholic, but no one goes to Hell because they just-didn't-know. They go to Hell because they want to serve someone other than God.
The reason to be afraid isn't "here's someone who's just waiting for you to fail" it's (speaking for myself) "I'm _very_ stubborn and _very_ set in my own ways. Can I do the work of letting God work in me? He's eager to work in me, but He won't without my consent. Can I die to myself to serve the good?"
What about those who never had a chance to hear about God? That is between them and God. But God isn't looking to throw them into Hell - if they go to Hell it is because they decided they'd rather serve "something other than the good" even if they never connected "the good" to God.
Ah yes, I "wanted to" think of hell as a lake of eternal fire that most of humanity, likely myself included, would be thrown into and gawked at by the virtuous. Certainly had nothing to do with what I was indoctrinated with from birth. You realize you literally are telling us we are "just doing it wrong"? Worse, that we're doing it wrong because we want to?!
Hell is a fantasy that causes more mental illness than any marginal reduction in antisocial behavior.
How many lifetimes were wasted fearing/sacrificing, arguing, killing, and dying over meaningless and unprovable silliness like heaven and hell? How many children scarred by things they read for themselves after years of being told it's--some measure of--the highest truth?
"Fall into" was a reference to the act of choosing "something other than God" in a permanent way (that is, "fall into Hell") not the act of being afraid of punishment (that is "fall into fear of Hell"). I am sorry that you have had to deal with such a fear!
I 'chose' God for decades until it became clear he/she/it doesn't exist any more than santa, the toothfairy, and leprechauns. So until there is some evidence besides vibes and evidence-free testimony, I'm choosing to believe there is no God.
Thankfully beliefs aren't permanent, or I'd still be anxious and miserable. Perhaps you should not permanently choose a god who has caused so much harm for no benefit.
I hope and pray that you are not anxious or miserable and that you can find your way to the path to permanent happiness and stick with it to the end!
this is really odd to read, since almost all of the Protestant-related theology in the US West seems to have dropped evil and hell almost entirely. At a graduate theology seminar on the History of Religion in America, Professor Robert McDermott asked the group "How many of you believe in 'evil' ?" and only half the class raised their hands (about a dozen).
You are speaking of what is called "mainline Protestantism."
Catholicism is, by far, the largest Christian denomination in the US.
Moreover, large areas in the south, midwest, and California favor the "evangelical" and "fundamentalist" varieties of Protestant theology, where Hell (and inculcating mass fear of Hell) is very much the central concern today.
Your immediate local community likely does not have many of either group.
The universal human intuition of the concept of God is equally valid as the human intuitions on causality that stands as the ultimate fundamentals of modern science. Math is the mother of all sciences, philosophy the root of math, human intuitions the root of philosophy. The very psychologist under his article we're talking, Jonathan Haidt, have proven this, that the concept of God exists from birth even in Japanese kids raised in Shinto culture, commenting 'extraordinary' on his research being an atheist himself.
There's no point in favoring one natural human intuition over the other.
Then the number of people througout history who claimed to have taken revelation from God must be evaluated for authenticity of their miracles, one of which can still be verified today as his entire life is preserved through formal chain of transmissions: Muhammad (pbuh). Jesus, we can't even agree on the exact wording of the revelation he received let alone his life.
This makes no sense. There are myriad cognitive biases that prevent or hinder the ability to model reality, that may or may not be advantageous to an animal depending on the environment it is in.
That's a caricature of any serious grasp of what Hell is.
If God, as Ipsum Esse Subsistens (i.e., not the straw man sky fairy), is the Summum Bonum, the Highest Good, and the only thing, in its infinity, that fully realizes Man, makes him whole, fulfills his nature, brings him everlasting peace, joy, and happiness (and all who are old enough can agree that nothing on earth can accomplish this end)...
If sin is willfully choosing inferior or illusory goods over and above the Highest Good, acting against what is objectively good instead of conforming to it, choosing a path away from the Highest Good toward something else...
If Man is created with the capacity to know the truth and the freedom to make choices and thus be responsible for those choices...
...then Hell is, first, his voluntary rejection of Heaven, which is unity with God and what is called the Beatific Vision, and second, justice received for committing the greatest injustice of hating God, which is frankly a kind of self-hatred because it involves hating one's own highest good. In other words, God, having made us free, does not violate the free exercise of choice, as love cannot be forced, but free. And since following one's own way away from the objective truth and the Highest Good necessarily leads to misery, and God permits that to occur even if He may "propose" through life events a change of heart, someone obstinate in his evil will be allowed to go exactly where he is choosing to go, much like a drug user can follow his drug use to his own self-destruction.
And because being forced into Heaven would be hellish for anyone who doesn't want to be there, Hell is actually a kind of mercy. But it is ridiculous to expect Hell to be a wonderful condition, as what satisfies Man is a matter of objective fact, not subjective fancy. In other words, it is not a false ultimatum between loving God or getting it good and hard, as if it were some kind of threat. Human nature points toward Heaven, something we can know to be the case, just as we can know many things that are good for us, and that by refusing them, we harm ourselves.
If thoughts of Hell are paralyzing to you, instead of instilling a healthy kind of vigilance and humility toward God, then you may come from a strange sect that is confused about the topic, suffer from scrupulosity, or have a burden of unaddressed guilt.
It's not a question of what team you're on. That relativizes the truth, making "religion" a matter of some kind of personal and preferred fairy tale. Truth is the only consideration. If these claims are untrue, then they're nonsense and should not be followed. It would be dishonest to do so. While we can tolerate a certain range of sincerely held beliefs that are obviously false, and a certain measure of that is necessary for any society, it is bad faith and a lack of integrity to "believe" instrumentally, for a purported practical result of doing so.
Between Christianity as a false religion with its unintuitive teachings ultimately and rationally leading to atheism and the modern American way of life with its freedom extremism at the expense of everything elde, there's a third, albeit unthinkable to many, option: Islam.
We're doing great in terms of societal bonds.
Please don't start religious flame wars.
Two other contenders: Vedanta & Buddhism.
Erik Butler has a fantastic book on this overall subject called "The Devil and His Advocates" that you might be interested in.
This is all a very valid set of concerns; not quite a new one, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone (2000), but definitely a Thing.
People need to acknowledge how much the downside of this kind of closeness was conformism, enforced by shunning (or worse) the noncompliant. A lot of religious communities have coped incredibly badly with the sexual revolution of the 20th century; if the only foray of your church into politics is against abortion or LGBT freedom, it's not really surprising that young people and women are going to run in the opposite direction as soon as they get a chance - often facilitated by the Internet. While simultaneously responding to actual abuse with coverups and complicity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_sexual_abuse_c...
The sexual revolution is intrinsically linked to the lack of community. The sexual revolution is not actually about free sex. People have been having weird sex for centuries; with or without their partners knowing.
What is novel about the sexual revolution is that it dismissed any needs for norms. Over the past two decades we've seen non-religious attempts to reinstate those norms (consent, kink, safe words, etc). However, what's unpalatable to religious people is not the sex per se, but the lack of norms.
And we need norms to function as a community with a common culture. Throwing those out does not actually help.
You mention the sexual abuse by the Catholic church, but that was caused by the sexual revolution. At the time, the psychological community encouraged moving pedophiles around. The church was -- at the time -- attempting to modernize, and part of the modernization was listening to 'science', including psychologists. Psychologists at the time insisted these things could be cured and criminalization would not help.
The church is not the only organization to have been affected by this, but it is one of the few prominent examples of institutions being held accountable for it. The same ideology caused the German foster care scandals [1] [2].
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/26/the-german-exp...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmut_Kentler
The Catholic sex abuse scandal was never about the actual abuse, which is presumed constant between religions. It was always about the coverup. Only the Catholic Church has the preexisting organization to pull off such a scandal; the others simply had controversial youth pastors who stopped showing up one day.
If there were any other groups with an organization capable of pulling off coverups, we'd never know about it, because they would have covered it up.
IMO, at least for Catholics, it is the Church's insistence that condoms and birth control are sinful that led to the mass defections from belief in the legitimacy of Church teaching. Yes, even more so than anti-homosexual rhetoric or the sex abuse coverups.
It's an attitude of "these delusional celibate people care too much about abstract deductive logic, not empirical observations."
I just don't think that is true for or to many, likely most, religious people. Community is an aspect but at its core it's a religion. You can't be a part of the community without believing, or at least pretending to believe, in the religion.
Religion is a meta-organism that uses minds as it’s substrate.
Just like ordinary organisms, it undergoes mutations and evolution - its characteristics are seldomly 'designed'.
Without community to keep it alive, it will die out. So religions that include practices to tie communities together are at an evolutionary advantage.
You can't because the only people remaining (or the overwhelming majority) in those communities are people who are actually religious and take the whole thing pretty seriously.
In the past (of course it depended on the exact time and place) occasionally going to church even if many treated it mostly as a formality was the default for most people. Even if you didn't, chances are that you couldn't ignore it entirely because you still had some links to the community surrounding it through family members, various organizations, events etc.
What you’re describing is basically Unitarianism.
In the US, it's been a slow process over 35 years, since 1991.[1] England and Wales are much further along - believers are below 50%. But Islam is on the way up in the UK, at 6%.
The high-intensity religions, the ones that require religious activity once a day or more, seem to be thriving.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/how-u-s-reli...
I'd say longer than that. I'd say religious participation in the USA has been declining since at least the 1970s.
See the chart in the article linked. The line is reasonably flat from 1972 to 1991, and then starts to climb linearly.
The rise of Islam in UK is due to immigration from Islamic countries, not natives converting.
It seems to me that a lot of the "community" hole left by religion declining is being quickly filled in by politics, which itself is taking on quasi-religious attributes.
Maybe it always was one and the same.. separation of church and state in Western culture was a hard won, radical political innovation not very long ago. And Christians today are a highly motivated special interest group in the States, openly attempting to lock their social agenda into law. See also sharia law.
Separation of C/S at the time was about not instituting a state religion and protecting religious practice from the strong arm of the state (the only corporation we allow violence from).
I don’t get this part. The only time I had a job in my local community was high school. Most of the adults (which was 95+% of the employees) commuted 20-60 minutes to get to it, though, so even that wasn’t my local community. You’d never run into your coworkers at the park or the store because they went to totally different parks and stores. Same’s held for my career as an adult. Coworkers are rarely people you’ll see anywhere other than work unless you go way out of your way to make it happen.
My edit window’s gone, but thinking more on this: it seems to me that remote work makes it easier to be in one’s local community. Less time lost to commute, more time to do local stuff. Can work from the local coffee shop, library, or coworking space, all of which are likely to have a far higher proportion of locals in them than an office park halfway across the city would. Can have lunch out at a sandwich joint near your house, instead of one so far away that you’d rarely or never go to it if you didn’t have to commute to an distant office.
That is an atheist point of view. I grew up in religious environment too and people really believed in god. Some were hypocrites and some values stand in a real life way (commitment to not lie makes for the worst business), but the basic believe that god exist was really real. And when you play the part just for social reasons, then I think you are just a hypocrite. Which would be good reason for people to leave - so that they dont have to pretend.
Facebook makes money by advertising someone else's products, while religious organizations make money by advertising their own. Is the devil somewhere in those details? Could the disingenuousness of advertising be interfering with the desired authenticity of personal relationships?
There was a post recently about dunbar's number and it seemed straightforward to me, while reading it, that what it's really revealing is what it takes to scale above dunbar's number and that what we call "religion" is exactly that "binding" and "reification".
"Religion" in this case is not just about religion either, but also nations. The U.S. has our gods, such as Washington & Hamilton, and places of worship such as the "temples" in D.C., but we've also censored leaders like Jackson & Lee, and torn down slave-owning statues.
We're living through a deconstruction of history and rebuilding an inverted digital world. I don't think it's been productive. It actually almost feels like an end to history to me.
Knowing that the US will never, in my lifetime, be high trust like it is in Japan at the moment means we have to focus on the seeds for helping push it towards that after we die.
Maybe go fishing?
In the religious community I grew up in, the idea that the purpose of the church was "community" was loudly vilified. There was an active purism regarding sincerity of belief and the centricity faith should have in one's life.
Of course, one can see how cult-like devotion and suppression of dissent are conducive to social cohesion, but as a young adult, I only wanted to get away from an environment that stymied my mind and spirit, and that feeling writ large has shuttered churches, I think.
I see the way US cities are designed, with sprawling suburbs and lack of shared spaces as a key contributor. Where I'm at the parks are filled with people throughout the day. The density of the city also means people tend to know their neighbors and watch out for each other much more that I've seen in the burbs.
Sports, hobby groups, book clubs? There are plenty of options to meet like-minded people other than churches.
The extent to which such a list is accurate and complete is the extent to which it’s a great list of startup ideas to destroy some community institution, make it impossible to do without an app, and put ads on it.
Maybe in your experience. It isn't in mine. You can make due with email lists and flyers and word of mouth and if someone tries to push an app for it everyone is welcome to ignore it.
Chess clubs in my city mostly closed down due to online games. I remember the largest club owner complaining of this in the early 2000s
Yeah, this really is the key. I've moved several times as an adult, and my new friend group always comes from doing sports or some hobby regularly with the same group of people.
Libraries are a great place to be, enjoy, learn, and relax, but a terrible place to meet new people. You're not really supposed to talk, and most people don't go there expecting to interact with a stranger or strike up a conversation.
It depends. Many libraries host events on a regular basis where socialization is half the point.
Libraries are trying to do that (with community events, conference rooms, etc.) though. Depends on the library.
I hear you, but it sounds like you’re saying you want program that delivers high value without paying for it.
The way to make this happen is get out there and volunteer your big dollar software engineer time to make it happen. Use all of the knowledge about how to get things done that you get from reading HN, join a team, and start building.
My volunteering experience has been amazing, but there were some negative experiences where it was clear we should have required more buy-in or up front investment.
I'm willing to help, but as one person, I can only do so much. Hyper-locally, it's actually a problem of community here instead of money anyway. There's a half-way decent maker-space, but it's all old men. Think "ham radio guys" stereotype. They're knowledgeable, but without any young blood (and the artistic pursuits younger people tend to bring) it's not fun.
May I ask where you're based in? I'm a little intrigued.
One of the major issues with libraries these days is that because a lot of cities want to pretend really hard that homelessness doesn't exist, libraries end up as the only social resource available to many homeless people, which leads to other people avoiding them.
In a few of the local libraries near me homeless people occupy the bank of public computers and are frequently watching hardcore pornography. I'm terrified of my young children seeing that.
My local library employs internet filters, similar to parental control software for your home. This seems to significantly reduce porn watching.
Religious places didn't use to be indoctrinating. Nowadays they mostly are, because religions have to justify them economically.
My guess is that "place" have become a way too expensive good, that people just can't afford to share for free.
Religious places were always indoctrinating, they were just the norm for such a long time people didn't recognize such. It was just the thing you did.
You could even go so far as to say that third spaces that are tied to political, religious, or other types of groups are "monetized" in the sense that they exist to further the cause of growing that group.
What's nearly extinct is neutral third spaces with zero agenda.
I suppose parks (national, provincial/state, or just local) and libraries are neutral.
Perhaps this was always true, but it seems for a brief time places like shopping malls were not as concerned as much somehow with having purely immediately profitable people inside and that’s why they were able to be that third place.
Hopefully in time a new generation of voters will want to fund more third places with taxes, because that seems to be the way to get long lasting third places that really do serve their purpose without an agenda.
I've had the exact same feeling. I think this is some latent cultural zeitgeist that more people are starting to notice.
My thought was to start a "philosopher's club", for Platonic friendships. Right now it's just me and one neighbor meeting every 2 weeks for coffee, but I think an ideal size might be around 3-4 "regulars" plus 2-5 sporadic attendees. Big enough to get boisterous but small enough to carpool.
I've found the only way to make friends/community as an adult outside of religion, at least for me, is to go to events relevant to my hobbies and interests. Yes it's difficult, but communities for just about everything are out there if you put yourself out there. If you choose events that occur regularly I've found you get to know people and make friends just by trying to become a regular face too.
If you don't have a hobby/interest with a local group, you can try picking new ones until you find one that clicks too. It does take some effort initially though. The shared interest is critical to removing barriers to making those relationships for me.
Professor Michael Rosenfeld at Stanford does research on how heterosexual couples in the US meet ( https://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/ ).
In 1940, over 50% met via friends or family. About 36% met at school.
In 2021, about 20% met via friends or family. About 10% met at school. Over 50% met online. So the majority of US couples are now meeting via profit-maximizing corporations. He has a 2019 paper on this (and it has only increased since that paper).
I'm surprised dating sites work well enough that 50% of customers meet via it. They've no incentive to help you leave.
They probably have some internal churn targets to hit, else people will start to figure out that the app isn't worth their time and try a different one
It creates a much worse problem actually. Why have a committed relationship when you can always press a button to look at hotties and have a pull at the sex slot machine?
If they design the system right, their audience just won't marry or have long term stable relationships
I think committed relationships are on the decline more because of the change in how women interact with and are viewed by society, than technology. Each successive generation of women over the last several decades has increased their ability to earn an independent successful living, control their sex life without negative labels, and remove the expectations that their only value is domestic-oriented.
Where in the past women settled for a number of reasons, including economic and societal/familial expectations, they no longer do. And because women are much less apt to settle down, men settle down less too. More free women = more free men = less committed relationships. (assuming we are seeing fewer committed relationships - I didn't fact-check that)
Not at all scientific, just a vibe.
Fewer children -> fewer commitments
Also, being in a relationship with a bad partner is worse than being in a relationship with no partner, especially for women who are in more physical danger.
Therefore, with increased ability to live independently, expect more risk adverse behavior, which means a larger percentage of the “bottom” of the dating market goes uncoupled forever.
Only the people that have really huge success rates, which is very small, and gets way worse as one ages. Have you seen the swipe stats from many Tinder users? What you describe is not a reality for even the top 1% of hetero male users.
It is true for the top 99% of women.
online dating (apps) did not invent uncommitted sex.
debatable if it got more prevalent because of them, as afaik the statistics indicate both, less short _and_ less long term relationships, so :shrug:
I think it really depends on the people. The slot machine would always get more boring and meaningless as time goes on and if someone wants meaningful relationship because they find the slot machine boring, this is what they will look to make happen. Maybe it is for the good to get it out of their system faster so they know what they want and get something meaningful.
I can think of a few reasons why people want (either already or after enough pulls of the slot machine) a committed relationship.
Though to be clear, just because I think the other more stable thing is valuable to folks even with the availability of the sex slot machine, I still don't love businesses trying to push slot machines or any kind really.
Do people go on dating sites to look at "hotties"? I've heard there are better websites to do that, many free of charge!
(Not a rhetorical question - as a queer person who's never used a dating site or app and who's been in a long-term relationship (now married) for almost 8 years now, I really do have no idea what people do on there.)
That's both a horrible thought and a near-certainty.
Good thing Match is a monopoly that owns all of the giant dating apps except for Bumble!
I'm surprised dating sites work well enough that 50% of customers meet via it
It’s not that surprising when you think of selection effects. Suppose you have a sack full of marbles. Half of the marbles are pink and the other half are random assorted colours. Now reach into the sack and pull out two marbles. If they match then they get married and you set them aside, otherwise return them to the sack.
It’s easy to see that it won’t take very long until hardly any pink marbles remain. After that it’s going to be a total crapshoot to pull out a pair of matching marbles. Maybe some more pink ones get added at a later date but they’ll match and get removed.
The fundamental problem with dating sites cannot be solved by any business model: marriageable people (or otherwise people who can form and maintain a longterm relationship) are removed from the pool of potential dates. What’s left are all those who can’t or won’t form relationships. These “misfits” (for lack of a better term) tend to get concentrated in the pool over time. Perhaps it even gets so bad that marriageable people give up and just avoid dating sites.
This describes what I have intuited happens while dating in ones 40s.
Seems to start in the 30s, in your 20s there's still hope. After that finding someone unscorned is rare, becoming such yourself. Ask me how I know
Well, it can be solved but not by a dating site (evidence: this was a solved problem in the past). But it'd have to be very radical compared to modern dating. Arguably the branding couldn't be as a dating site, but as a stable community where people don't get removed over time so the concentration of non-pink marbles never rises.
That is something like the old model that church communities would have used. The marriageable ones pair off, but they are still in the community of people talking to each other. New marriageable people entered the community, didn't feel overwhelmed or different and eventually pair with other new entrants. The business model has to be that drawing a pair isn't ever expected to result in marriage and is fun by itself but serious dates might happen. Then the system would be viable.
It might not be dating sites. I've heard of people in WoW guilds dating back in the day.
I have a friend who met her husband on an old Dance Dance Revolution forum!
Let me guess: DDRFreak?
I had a couple of very fulfilling relationships with people I met on a band fan site.
50% of heterosexual couples meeting online is not the same as 50% of customers of dating sites entering a relationship.
It could be the case that say, only 10% of dating site customers end up in a relationship, and this 10% amounts to 50% of the total couples, and the math would work out.
E.g.: suppose the total population is 1000 people, 500 of which are on a dating site, and the total number of couples is 20, 10 of which were formed via the dating site and 10 of which were formed by other means, and 960 people are out of luck.
That's a possible theory, but we know the reality is opposite.
Customer success stories are free advertising.
And the need for the service doesn't need to be fabricated, it's innate.
they have plenty of incentive to get you some dates, after that what are they gonna do?
Get you bad dates with incompatible people?
Wonder what that percentage would look like as a function of relationship length.
They just need to work once. Who knows how many failed attempts at finding someone preceded the one that suck.
There is no shortage of potential customers, there is a shortage of actual customers. Anything they can do to attract more business helps them. So if they have tons of success stories they'll get far more business.
It would be different in a saturated market, where they might want to try to keep people on the site, but that's not the case here.
Hasn't the divorce rate also gone down. So one question is if the method of meeting is improving that rate
Yeah.
Marriage rate and divorce rate have plummeted since 1940.
Probably not much to do with electronic media there. A lot more likely that financial and social pressures are squeezing what were previously considered cultural imperatives. ie - church, marriage, home ownership, etc.
We are living the most affluent lives ever known to mankind, even so-called low income people. We all have more money than we know what to do with, let alone more money than our forefathers.
Rather, I think the drop in marriage (and by extension divorce) has to do with increasing individualism and jade-ism.
The more humanity (namely the west) advances, the more it is drilled in that all men are created equal with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. People are increasingly more concerned with living their lives the way they want to the exclusion of spouses and children if such things are not what makes them happy.
Combine that with the brutal realities of life, because life is fucking hard at the best of times (no matter how rich you are), and the media constantly sensationalizing on everyones' fears and anger aren't helping matters either.
Also as an aside and anecdata: I'm in my mid-30s now, not married, never married, and never intend to marry because I do not find it appealing at all. I can more than afford to marry, but I am far too busy with other matters more important to me and I frankly find marriage to be nothing short of a human rights violation anyway.
Just curious, but how could marriage be a rights violation?
First the axiom so we're all on the same page: I truly and wholeheartedly agree with and believe in the notion that life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness are unalienable rights.
Marriage is many things, but chief among them is that marriage is an inevitable compromise of each others' liberties and therein lies the violation. Who am I to compromise my would-be wife's unalienable right to liberty? Who is my would-be wife to compromise my unalienable right to liberty? This is absolutely irreconcilable and thus I consider marriage to be a violation of human rights.
If we also were to have children, I/we would also be imposing my/our will upon them. I/we would be violating our childrens' unalienable right to liberty and potentially pursuit of happiness. I cannot accept that.
I am also of the position that if I were to get a divorce for any reason, I must question why I got married in the first place. Marriage is not a thing that can nor should be taken lightly; divorce is an out, but I consider the entire premise of marriage is that it is a permanent thing until death do us part.
As such, if we end up in an unhappy marriage (eg: constant bickering over the kitchen or finances) then this is also a violation of our respective unalienable rights to pursuit of happiness and we both wasted significant amounts of our limited time that each of us have in this world.
Therefore, along with other personal convictions, I find no appeal in marriage and have no intentions of ever pursuing it or finding myself in such an arrangement of my free will.
I think that axiomatically quoting the US declaration of independence is a deeply unhealthy way of approaching the world the world at large.
So you disagree that life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness are unalienable rights?
Are you saying that they can (or should?!) be violated?
Why?
No GP but I think they such rights cannot be absolute because the same right can conflict with itself.
Say it's the 18 century with slavery is common. The slave owners are depriving the slaves of liberty and happiness. But the deprivation of the slaves liberty brings the owners happiness.
If you cannot persuade the owners to stop depriving slaves of liberty, then there two options remain.
One, you respect the owners right to happiness. But at the expense of the slave's liberty.
Two, you use force to stop the owners from violating the slaves rights. But in doing so you violate the owners right to happiness.
What's the answer then here if there no options that do not harm someone's unalienable rights?
Simple: A man's rights end where another man's rights begin.
To use your example, the slave owner's right to pursuit of happiness ends where the slaves' rights to liberty and pursuit of happiness begin. A would-be slave owner cannot and should not violate another man's (a would-be slave's) right to liberty and pursuit of happiness.
Going back to the subject of marriage, my right to liberty ends where my would-be wife's right to liberty begins and vice versa. Marriage is inevitably a compromise of both our rights to liberty. Thus, I find marriage a violation of human rights.
Except you've chosen to violate the owners right to happiness by attempting to place limitations on the rights that were so called inalienable. What you think the limit should be and what the slave owner thinks the limit should be differ.
Same right, but in this case brought into conflict by disagreement of interpretations.
Second, what happens when the other side refuses to stop because he believes that your interpretation is wrong? What do you do then?
Two rights colliding is essentially an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. The two can not (should not) violate each other, thus one's rights end where another's begins.
Governments are also tasked with guaranteeing those rights, and those who violate another's rights are deprived of their rights as mandated by laws.
For example, a murderer (violator of another's right to life) is imprisoned (deprived of his right to liberty) and possibly even executed (deprived of his right to life).
Yes they can conflict. I chose slavery because it did conflict. 13 States left succeeded from the United States to form the Confederacy to protect slavery at the behest of their own citizens. And the remaining Union disagreed. Violently. The US Civil War was one of the bloodiest in it's history.
Even today. SCOTUS overturning Roe vs Wade and allowing States to prohibit abortions. A difference because of a disagreement on whether or not a human embryo is entitled to be treated as a full human being with all the same rights and responsibilities.
Hence the nuance. You can look at the same document that says these rights, but how they are achieved and what limits there are can differ due to differences in opinion.
You do realize the original quote from Locke was “life, liberty and pursuit of property”?
Right so you invented a notion of marriage which doesn't apply in the society you live in and then invented a problem created by that invented supposition.
This all sounds very normal.
If marriage is not some kind of "special" arrangement, why do we place so much value on the concept?
Marriage is clearly very different from and more significant than simple friendship or other mundane relationship arrangement, and everyone's reasoning as to why will vary depending upon their religious and/or cultural upbringing and values.
Personally, as I stated earlier, I consider marriage to be some kind of permanent-ish arrangement (and especially if children become involved). There is an artificial out (divorce), but as far as I'm concerned it isn't something that should be used with wanton abandon. Thus, I place a lot of weight on why I would marry in the first place; if I am going to divorce, I should not have married in the first place.
I am deliberately violating the "Do not let perfect be the enemy of good." rule precisely because I demand a would-be marriage to be perfect given how many human rights I would flagrantly violate. I know I am never going to marry with such prerequisites and I desire that, because otherwise I cannot live with myself.
If you have any worthwhile arguments to the contrary to bring to the table I am quite happy to hear them. My conclusions thus far are the result of many years of deep and thorough deliberation, but I am also aware that it is far from infallible.
Marriage is an economic and logistical framework for the raising of children.
Any society that doesn’t come up with a viable way to raise children ceases to exist almost immediately.
So that’s why.
So... you're part of a suicide cult basically.
The fact that I have no interest in violating human rights or propagating life have nothing to do with whether I am suicidal (which I am not).
What? The only way to avoid mass human rights violations is the extinction of the human race in one generation?
Or simply that fewer marginally good fit marriages are occurring.
Fewer teen marriages, shotgun weddings, ect.
There were always a lot of financial imperatives to wed.
There were always a lot of financial imperatives to wed.
The point is that now the financial imperative is not to wed. ("Girlfriend get serious! Why marry some loser who can't even buy a house?" or "Bro what? Do you know what will happen if you get divorced?")
The financial imperative is not to go to church. Working on Sunday has become the norm as people are regularly expected to be available on the weekends. This is especially true in the startup or tech space. And don't even get me started on how workers in the services sector, who would in any other era be the most likely to attend church, get so few weekends free between their multiple jobs, that church is now an afterthought for them.
The financial imperative is not to purchase a home. ("Bro! You don't have that kind of money! And what if you have to move for your job?")
I think we have very different perceptions of the world, but I don't have much interest in having a discussion predicated on quotes from imaginary characters.
Marriage rates are also plummeting, so it's more likely that the divorce rate has gone down simply because people wait to get married until they've proven it works. A couple that cohabitates and then separates doesn't get logged in the divorce rates.
Interestingly, there was another big shift happening from 1940-1980:
- in 1940, the top 3 were: met through family, met through friends, met in primary school. In that order, but pretty much equal
- From 1940-1980, two of those three (family, primary school) trended sharply downward, as did "met in church", while these trended upward: met through friends, met in bar or restaurant, met as or through coworkers, met in college. "met through friends" was by far the most common circa 1980
- starting in 1995 "met online" sees a sharp rise, and by 2010 it has overtaken them all.
The only other category that was still on the rise after 2010 was "met in a bar or restaurant". Is that really increasingly common? I have a strange feeling that some of those are just people too embarassed to say they met online...
Anyway, my point is there was (perhaps unsurprisingly) already a big shift going on 1940-1980, namely that the immediate family, church, childhood friends became less dominant in people's lives and friends, work, commercially-facilitated interactions (bars and restaurants) became more central. Did we learn anything from that adjustment? Were people in the 80's and 90's talking ad worrying about this the way we're talking today about the way social interactions are replacing the "old" ones?
(also, the values for "met online" on that graph seem to be small but non-zero in the 1980s! I'd like to hear the stories of some of those couples...)
Probably right. I don't really get the stigma, but I've known a few people personally who told the same lie and found later it was online. One in particular had a huge elaborate story about their bar meeting. His wife told me later one day he basically selected her from a website.
So like most questions, probably worth taking self reporting with a giant dose of salt.
Selected... What? Not matched? You are making it seem like she just listed herself for selection on a website and went with it?
Older dating sites were basically lists of profiles and you could send a message to anyone, without "matching".
She was from a foreign country. I'm guessing whatever the modern day equivalent of a mail order bride? I didn't ask for specifics past that.
In many countries where dating balance (i am not saying gender balance... because it's not really about numbers of guys and girls but about difference in their interest in dating), is not as skewed as in the West, this is still the case. You can actually write anyone, even on a free version of a dating app or website. Girls' feeds get a bit spammy, but not terribly so, it can still work. I know it sounds crazy but that's an upside of life in the Eastern Europe let's say, or ex-Communist bloc.
Also interesting insofar as what "met online" means. Dating apps are certainly the most common, but one of my partners and I met on a Discord server for a shared interest, which is certainly "online" but not necessarily in the same context as "dating apps"
This. I have a couple of friends who actually met their partner on World of Warcraft in the mid 2000s. But I suspect it's a very small fraction of the “online” group, especially nowadays with dating apps being so prevalent.
I'd expect that the fraction is much bigger, actually. In mid 2000s the couples that met through online games were the "weirdos", "normal" people met online on dating sites. Today gaming is pretty much mainstream and while dating apps are probably a majority, it's now absolutely normal to meet people while playing games.
You question the stigma and then finish your paragraph with “just selected her from a website”.
Explained a possibility in another comment.
When an older, morbidly obese person is with a much more attractive and younger foreign person, you can work out most of the details in your head. Is it not more embarrassing to make up some Top Gun-esque story? I don't know.
I met my first wife in person, second on Facebook(8ish years and going). I feel zero shame in the meeting place, more shame for having married the first. So yes, personally, I don't understand the stigma.
IIRC Jason Scott's BBS documentary mentions this a bit. There's a couple that shows up a number of times that met on a BBS.
If I message with someone on a dating app a few times and then make arrangements so the first time I encounter them in the physical world is a bar where did I “meet” them?
The subjective answer to this question might be at least part of this statistic.
Also you may be underestimating the number of people who pair up as part of nightlife outings. Based on my many many outings in cities around the world in recent years it does seem at a glance that people are still engaged in the practice.
this one, about two people having met online, was written in 1879 (not a typo):
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24353
There has also been about a 70% drop in number of marriages since the 50s.
And as someone else noted, a significant drop in the number of divorces since its peak in the 1980s.
Does that include breakups? Can't get divorced if you were never married.
No, unfortunately. And the number of divorce + breakups with kids involved is still rising…
Is that actually true? I read something recently (in an recent article in a major publication about how online dating sucks and people are getting tired of it), that the proportion is much lower. Like people put all this money and effort into dating apps, but must successful relationships still form outside of them.
Online is not necessary the same as dating app. It can be any online group where people have an in person meetup once in a while.
"Online" these days more likely means social networks, games and other services where people with common interest meet. Meaning, you meet through your hobby, instead of a dedicated service for meeting or because you just happen to live in the same area.
Well, of course. Today, approaching someone of the opposite sex whom you haven't previously chatted with online is creepy.
Really? How old are you? There are still school, work, parties, clubs, bars... I even know a couple that met in their church.
FWIW here in Korea the 1940 statistic still holds, yet I don't think youth mental health is any better.
I'm in my 30s but I'm feeling this so hard.
Growing up we used to have these kid/youth centres that were run by local Catholic organizations. We used to hang out there after school. Ostensibly the point was that there'd be 30 minutes of catechism doctrine, but we didn't really care about that. To us it was just a the place where everyone would be. I miss that so much. A place where you can just go and meet people your age, without any reason to be that and without having to pay an entrance fee.
Now as a grown up we have community centers, which are run, not by the Church, but by sort of hippie-lefty people. But it's not really the same atmosphere, because you go there, and it's just one demographic of people. It's not quite the same.
There's also pubs and climbing gyms which people often use as low effort places where one can mingle, but again, it's not quite the same. I don't like drinking multiple times a week and I really don't like climbing.
You don't like being drunk that much, or like climbing, but, were your parents really that Catholic? We, as humans, need a dream to build towards, be in service of, and find our place in. What are we doing here and why are we doing it? For those of us who haven't figured it out yet, attaching to someone else's purpose gives us one and we don't have to figure it out ourselves.
You need to find religion, just don't call it that. Find your dream that's impossible and work towards making it possible. figure out your role in making that possible. and then work on it. as hard as you can. find others along the way.
Parent poster doesn’t want to have to drink to socialize. And bar meets are just that. It’s actually a huge problem in society.
Ever stream something or go to the cinema ? What does it show you? You’re happy => you drink to celebrate. You’re sad => drink out of sorrow. You want to hang out with friends => you go for drinks. DEFCON for example perpetuates that same behavior.
Sure, one part is loss of community, but the other half is toxic social behavior that is perpetuated by Hollywood. The people that don’t like this but want to belong will perpetuate this cycle for fear of getting ostracized.
In most communities there's no longer much social stigma against going to a bar/pub and ordering non-alcoholic beverages. The latest non-alcoholic beers are actually pretty good. (I do understand that the environment itself can be difficult for recovering alcoholics.)
I used to go out not-drinking with my coworkers (I've been a teetotaler my entire life). The place we went to had free refills for sodas so I downed half a dozen glasses of Fanta while my coworkers were paying $3-$5 a beer. Seems ridiculous to me how much people pay for alcohol.
Some portion of alcohol prices are a barrier to entry to create the desired crowd. You might not want to attract the type of person looking to get shitfaced for cheap. Usually, non alcoholic non tap water is not way cheaper, especially if it is a “mocktail”.
Of course, some portion is also high rents. And I have never seen a restaurant or bar outside of Costco with free refills for anything other than tap water though.
Lots of places around me have free refills on fountain soft drinks and tea. In fact, it is pretty rare for a restaurant to not have free refills on things like sodas. Something fancier like a craft lemonade or whatever wouldn't have free refills though.
This is true for a lot of the places I travel to within the US as well.
Interesting. I’m most familiar with west coast and northeast, and can’t say I have ever seen that.
I've been to Patchogue, Montreal, Toronto, Cleavland, Myrtle Beach, Rehoboth, Baltimore, Louisville, Indianapolis, Nashville, Kansas City, Houston, Austin, Taos, Denver, Chicago, and a few other cities in the past couple of years. The majority of restaurants I visited had free refills for fountain drinks. The biggest places that I went to that didn't have free refills were places like food stands and what not, but that's expected.
But if you have to pay an expensive entry into that space, you will naturally limit who will go there and how often. And I do not just means "excludes people who get shitfaced". I mean "excludes people who are conscious about spending money or simply do not have super high salaries".
Yes, that is also sometimes an intended barrier to entry.
A bunch of places now have "mocktails" which are just cocktails without alcohol so you can one up your alcoholic friends by spending $3-5 per glass of sugar water.
Visit SF, you can easily spend $10 on a mocktail out here.
Kinda makes sense, all the cost is in the labor and the cleaning, a shot of vodka is like $0.20
The spirit in a decent cocktail is closer to ~$3-5.
while there are clearly cash grabs by the industry, the money for drinks goes towards the bar's rent/staff, so going there and not spending any money doesn't help the establishment's continued existence. depending on the establishment, that may or may not be a concern.
Well, you can also go to the café.
The world religion comes from Latin meaning ‘to bond with ritual’
It’s not very smart to not have a ritual of community building in one’s life.
Consider the following:
1. The chief unit and source of community is the family. The married couple, the family, have been deteriorating for some time. It shouldn't be surprising that the consequences would spread outward. Societies are a manner of extended family organized according to the principle of subsidiary.
2. American culture especially is hyperindividualistic. It conceives of people not as persons, but as individuals, which is to say, atomic units that might enter into various transactions, if it suits them. There is no sense of moral duties I did not consent to. There is no real sense of a common good that is a superior and prior good. If you deny the social nature of human beings, and conceive the social sphere as transactional, a sphere for odious exchanges and extraction and gorging, then why should we be surprised that social life has gone south?
3. A common culture binds people together and give them a common heritage, a language without which you cannot communicate. Culture is far more than that, and I do not mean to belittle or instrumentalize it (some are already instrumentalizing religion, which is not the purpose of religion, even if it has that effect). But with the decay of ethnic culture and its replacement with an empty corporate pop culture (note how much discussion revolves around the latest episode of a show), we are robbed of a common identity. This explains the identity crises in the US. Subcultures, racial ideologies, sexual ideologies, and so on are just attempted substitutes for ethnic identity. Given how unsuitable they are for this purpose, it is also unsurprising that people feel alienated from society, as there really is no real society, just some people coexisting.
4. What we call "religion" is a fancy word for worldview with a superlative highest good that is worshiped and a tradition orienting us in life and our ultimate end according to it. Everyone has a religion, in that sense, because someone takes something to be the ultimate good. It's impossible otherwise, because it is by means of the ultimate good that we understand and order all other goods in relation to it. The religion of the US is liberalism (as in Hobbes, Locke, and Mill, not any particular partisan affiliation; all American parties presuppose liberalism). In this liberal worldview, freedom as absence of constraint is worshiped, hence the preoccupation with "transgression" and "crossing boundaries" and so on. It is an evangelical religion, concerned with bringing the good news of liberal freedom to the world. Of course, as many throughout history have noted, freedom thus understood is a recipe for disaster, and not freedom in any real sense. To be free is to be able to do what is good as determined by your human nature, which is the same as saying the freedom to be what you objectively are, not in opposition to it. Thus, I am not free when I become a drug user, but I am free when I attain self-mastery and self-restraint, much as a man on horseback is more free as horseback rider when his horse is obedient to his rationally informed will. We are free to be what we are when we attain this mastery, in light of objective truth, over ourselves, our appetites, our passions, our intellects, our wills, etc., what we used to call virtue. The opposite, vice, is a recipe for misery and the worst kind of enslavement that can occur. In light of that, and given how indulgent we are, how our economies cater to and feed the worst with pornography, excessive food, buying stuff, and how, generally speaking, we worship consumption and embrace a view of life that consists of consuming (even people, sexually speaking, including in our imaginations and through various media), again, why the surprise that we are miserable? We are incapable of healthy relationships, and functioning as human beings. It takes effort to become human. It's not a given that just falls in your lap.
This view stems from Judeo-Christian beliefs. The very invention of marriage was a separation of community, where men wanted ownership of women and their children.
I also wonder if you're fully aware of how much you've attempted to repackage the original sin in your comment.
Which communitarian society is less sexist? Best afaik, all the community minded societies are significantly more sexist. The individualism is one of the things that makes it easier to push and argue against it.
I think this would imply that non-Western societies (or even Western ones before the spread of Christianity) aren't organized out of families? Also, what is a "shotgun wedding" in this worldview?
Not at all. Family units are extremely widespread in cultures around the world, including those that have had little or no contact with Judeo-Christian beliefs. Nearly all cultures have them.
Marriage goes way beyond the Jewish and Christian spheres. It's a far-reaching anthropological value. Strictly speaking it's a natural state, which means it isn't an invention. What we're missing most of all in contemporary times is an appreciation and acceptance of our contingency as beings. For want of this restful appreciation of what we really are, we have a tendency to become angst-ridden, semi-nihilistic types trying to find our bearings through acts of will and experiencing misery because we can never get there from here by traveling that path.
It's really not, as marriage is present in pre-Christian belief and in non-Christian traditions.
Does it look exactly like Christian marriage / family? No
But it does share common characteristics. There is a single man, and one or more women who bear his children. The man and woman have particular authorities over their children, and as the children grow there is a system to determine how they inherit their parent's resources, and then perhaps some duties they owe their parents.
We see this in the Roman paterfamilias system, the Confucian filial piety system, the various Indic philosophies, the ancient Egyptian family system, the Babylonian familial system, etc. Together these encompass the basis of the vast majority of civilization.
You're right that in hunter gatherer tribes they may have not even understood how reproduction works, but given that these social systems are not sophisticated enough to run our society, I'm happy to just ignore them. There were hunter gatherer tribes that believed that prince phillip was a god; they're not that sophisticated
Why do you think a recognization of the very human tendency to do stuff which harms either you or the society a remark for the unintuitive Christian concept of original sin?
You talk and sermon awfully much against individualism, shouldn't you quit being online and do some family or society work? Don't tell me you're done already, that would be hypocritical.
Why do you seem to consider surfing HN a vice or a sin?
I don't?
I think he (she?) makes some good points about why community & social life are falling apart and what might be done about it.
JD Vance talked about this a lot in his RNC speech. He says:
And he's right. America does have a culture and social norms that are particular to this nation. Ask any immigrant, like my own parents, and they will tell you stories of adapting to them (if they've assimilated properly).
And yet, many Americans refuse to acknowledge that these exist, and if they do, some work actively against it, to disestablish them, as if that'd be good for a country.
IMO, this is the cause of the great divide in this country. On one side you have people that think that social norms and culture should exist and be protected by the government (to an extent) and on the other you have those that believe the norms are harmful. To the former group, the various 'small' changes proposed by the latter group feel 'gross' because they reduce community cohesion, even if any one particular instance of letting go of a norm isn't going to cause that much trouble.
See all the debate on whether English should be a national language for a good illustration of this whole phenomenon independent of most of the culture war issues.
This is not to say that America has no ideas, but any group of people pursuing a common goal is not just the idea, it's also their culture. For example, I've worked at several companies competing in the same space, and despite having the same goal (dominate the industry), the cultures are extremely different, to the point where you feel comfortable in one, and uncomfortable in the other. That's how people are, and we should recognize and acknowledge that.
Are you saying that a group where everyone has to be a catholic is somehow diverse?
Also, nothing will ever be like the stuff we had when we were kids. Because in all our minds, that is the norm.
You've clearly never lived in an area with high density of a specific religious group. At a certain threshold, yes, there can be more diversity in a single religious congregation than is present in most local environments short of the local public school.
If most of your neighbors are Catholic, then you'll often just show up for the Catholic events regardless of whether you deeply believe it because that's where the community is. That's essentially what OP said about their own experience—listening to the catechism was just the tax to pay for the community event.
I actually did. The people who went to these centers were definitely not diverse in any sense of the word.
And the range of accepted ideas or opinions, political or cultural, was remarkably small. Kids who went to these centers were very alike. That is why it felt so good to them .
It can be quite diverse in other factors besides the religion. e.g. mixing of race, class, politics, culture, ect
The Catholic church is racially and socioeconomically quite diverse, and produces the highest rate of interracial marriages of any religious group, and even slightly edges out atheists.
It's as diverse as any company or organization championing diversity, because obviously anyone part of one particular movement / entity is not diverse in one axis of their life (institutional allegiance)
I think more broadly you’re talking about the concept of “third places” and this has been suggested as another reason for decline of community. However, my argument is that the Internet replaced the “third place” for most people given it’s where people are spending time in terms of attention and resources rather than necessarily physical presence.
And how is that compliant with the human biology?
Free internet spaces (think old school forums, some subreddits, discord channels, of MMORPGs servers for instance) are pretty much OK, especially when the population is stable and not too big (idk how big is tolerable, but it's likely under 10k). The problem is that these ones too have declined a lot in favor of algorithmically managed internet places which attempt to boost “engagement” by using evolutionary psychology and neuroscience tricks.
You didn't answer my question. How is internet compatible with human biology, which was not designed for (no matter whether you believe in God or evolution) a technological lifestyle?
It should be noted that this wasn't free - as you said, you had to sit through a 30 minute ad before participating.
Ironically, to meet your definition of free you would have to violate the definition of community provided in the article.
We still have like ‘kids community center’ things in Japan, and it’s just fantasic how you can go there and have a whole building filled with kids and toys/books for ages 1-14ish, and all free. It doesn’t even have any sponsors, it’s government run. Unfortunately these are also all slowly disappearing.
This is both a loss in and of itself, and is also a rational response by people within this system. Everything MUST make money because everyone is FUCKING broke. People don't monetize their hobbies for fun, they do it because they're barely scraping by and the notion of spending time on things that don't make money is so beaten out of us that it feels wrong to do it. We can't go anywhere without spending money, we can't do anything without spending money.
I shit you not my wife and I wanted to visit a park the other day and realized the parks dept now has paid parking stalls. The PARK. An outdoor space, supposedly paid for by my tax dollars, that because of it's distance from me is not feasible to walk to (and because the streets here are fucking terrifying) now charges me to park my vehicle there, so I can get some nature. Just un-fucking-believably apple pie in the window sill, burgers and fries, fireworks on the fourth American.
I am so goddamn tired of every interaction I can have requiring money. I just want somewhere to go that's nice to be that doesn't demand my fucking credit card.
I think it’s pretty reasonable to expect people with cars to pay for parking?
I don't think so; the streets are paid for by whatever vehicular taxes, the sidewalks are paid for by property taxes, there's income and sales taxes for additional financing; charging for parking is just adding salt to the wound.
In fact... hear me out. It might be that, those that own the paid private parking lots in high traffic areas exacerbate the parking issues in contested areas, creating pressure on free parking areas; then they lobby to put parking meters in those free areas because "the city needs all the money it can get" (ehh, it shouldn't, it doesn't), and voilá, no more free parking anywhere.
Just a thought.
Well... yes, that is precisely what's needed to wean America off its unhealthy dependence on cars.
Come over here to Europe, visit our cities where you can actually walk on a sidewalk, where you can live without a car just fine because everything you need can be reached safely on foot, by bike or with public transport.
HIGHLY disagree. If you want people off cars, you need to give them an alternative. Granted, I love cars. I would have cars whether I needed one or not, but I know I'm absolutely 100% in the minority on that issue, and like, when I say I would have cars either way, I mean fun cars. I wouldn't keep and maintain vehicles to just get around in my daily life if I didn't have to. I'd very much prefer to have just the vehicles I actually enjoy, and probably one truck and trailer to get around to tracks.
Most people don't like cars and don't like driving which is why most people drive like shit. It's a chore, a required to-do item on the way to doing something they actually want to do.
Never going to happen, outside of few dense city centers. Once an area is platted for detached single family homes and big box stores on stroads, the physical layout is incompatible with non car life, and hence you have to literally destroy everything and start over with narrow streets and smaller plots of land.
The expense of this is not going to win you any votes, especially as results will not be evident for at least 20 years while infrastructure is completely rebuilt and legal disputes are hashed out, hence it will not happen until nature forces it.
Not really. Repave the roads to make them slimmer, use the space gained to provide elevated sidewalks and bike lanes so people can see it with their own eyes that they can now participate in traffic without sharing infrastructure with cars. And whenever a reasonable sized lot goes up for sale, buy it up and convert it to a small store.
It won’t work, because until you provide everything without a car, people will want a car, which means space for a car, and once they have a car, they are going to use the car to travel to big box stores where they want parking for the car to buy their goods at lower prices due to economies of scale.
And you can’t just repave roads, there are utilities and sewer that needs to be moved, and that’s the small problem. The big problem is facing the outcry of very active voters for reducing their road space and making their commutes even a minute longer.
And if all the homes around this repaved area are detached homes with garages in 0.1+ acre lots, you will never have the density of customers to support businesses.
It kind of has to start at a city center and slowly, very slowly spread outward. But as soon as you hit the higher end suburbs with bigger plats, that’s where any of that high density hope stops, because the political will simply isn’t going to be there. Look at any US city and you will see the “trendy” or “hipster” or whatever areas with a few restaurants and whatever in a small walkable area are all in areas with postage stamp houses in tiny lots.
"And you can’t just repave roads, there are utilities and sewer that needs to be moved, and that’s the small problem. The big problem is facing the outcry of very active voters for reducing their road space and making their commutes even a minute longer."
You don't have to redo sewers etc when you just change the surface by removing stroad space and adding bike lane space.
Also you can own a car and still bike to places.
And to provide that infrastructure, you need space. Space that is reserved for parking cars at the moment. Just compare how much you pay per m² for the parking spot in your average city center vs the average rent mer m² that someone has to pay just for a basic shack.
the alternative is here and it's ebikes/scooters/something. it requires a huge culture change so it's gonna take some time, but batteries plus a motor is viable and is going to cause cities to evolve yet again.
At a lot at a shopping mall, sure. At a park in the suburbs, IMO significantly less so. Especially when ostensibly my property taxes are already paying for the fucking park.
I understand your frustration but I expect there are a lot of things that go into that decision. I expect adding a fee to parking makes it possible to enforce time limits, to remove squatting, and to ensure there are actually spots available. I doubt it is for the money but even if it is the park systems tend to be horribly underfunded (and often have to be held up with private donation money). A lot of our broken things are because someone with too many responsibilities and too little resources has to make a choice between a bunch of bad options and I wonder if this is similar.
From your rant we know you'll pick free open spots compared to paid open spots but what if the choice is between paid open spots and no spots at all? Or worse, paid open spots or shady looking cars parked all day selling drugs?
It seems like the more effective change is more parks but imagine the pushback if someone tried suggesting that! You're angry that you already pay taxes and now you have to pay again to have a special spot right at the park you can park your car in. Imagine the backlash if someone had the audacity to suggest raising your taxes for new parks. "I already pay for parks! I won't even use 95% of them! Why should I have to pay just because I'm a homeowner!"
I can hear my dads voice saying some of these things and it reminds me of his complaints about funding schools with property taxes and I see how people like him pivot this into "the socialists just trying to punish the straight white men".
It all makes me sad.
I wouldn't know, there weren't any free spots, open or otherwise, for consideration.
I'm not sure what constitutes a shady car in your mind. I'm pretty sure no one in my neighborhood sells drugs. I know that cuz I have to leave my neighborhood to buy the drugs I want. All things being equal I'd much prefer to just buy them in stores but for some insane reason we're still carrying on the war on drugs despite it being linked, in ink and in recordings, directly to the Nixon administration wanting to prevent black people and hippies from voting, so we make do the best we can.
I mean, we have plenty of parks. Some days they're pretty damn busy but most days they're not. I'm blessed to be a remote worker so I can also just go there (or you know, used to be able to!) and work for a bit too.
I actually pay pretty high taxes for my area. The trade-off is our snow collection is extremely good and the roads are well kept, as are the parks for that matter (now marred with stupid ass parking meters but alas).
I'm not opposed in the slightest to paying taxes. I participate in my local government, and I'm planning to bring this up at the next meeting because frankly I think it's bullshit that we're being asked to pay to park there when we're already funding that department. If they need more money or are running at a shortfall, that problem should be addressed with our community like everything else is, with a tax bump if required. I'm frankly infuriated that this was done not just from the principles of it but also because somehow it was done in a way that completely went under the radar of the city council I participate in. This was a huge change and should've been discussed.
Yes my position would be very unreasonable if it was even remotely this. Thankfully it's not.
FWIW I also am fine with paying for our schools too.
I agree with everything you've said here.
My only contribution was that I've seen folks make these kind of choices in good faith even though it isn't directly a thing they want because it's the best of the tools in their toolboxes.
it is a public space. we all pay for it via taxes. if it is criminal ridden, hire police. if there are squatters, hire police. charging parking at a non accessible location to a public resource, I'm sure you could find a solid argument for that being racist. charging for parking at a public park feels like charging to get to the voter polling location. it should be obviously wrong.
We should be friends, I like the way you think.
Not at a public location that's too far or unsafe to walk to.
We should have much higher density, high quality housing with plenty of public, walkable green spaces. They calling it "15-Minute Cities" now, but I always called it Tokyo.
I don't remember much "walkable green spaces" in Tokyo or other cities in Japan.
Libraries meet this need in many ways. But because of the dwindling number of alternatives, reductions in funding, and increases in the number of struggling community members, they're being asked to perform many more community-support functions (social services, education, technical support, shelter, bathrooms, clinics, after-primary-school socializing) for many more people than they used to. This is causing some struggles, which I hope libraries and their supporters rise to rather than writing off another critical type of third place.
I'm wondering if it comes with the size of the city. Everyone wanting to live in the same place at once is a logistical nightmare that won't be solved in our lifetime. One can compromise; a medium sized city with rapid growth offers high pay, low cost lifestyles that don't rely on genius politicians to have the answers. Such a city simply faces smaller, more solvable problems. Parking is free everywhere in at least one such city of 1M. And several others I've lived in or visited.
What—or who—made the streets terrifying?
Anything is economically viable if enough people want it.
Point == missed
Its a tragedy of the commons style problem.
The viability has to come from a group effort - as soon as there is a single entity running the show the economic incentives will warp or collapse the 3rd place into something different.
What single entity did you have in mind? An HOA will spend dues on parks, a regular city will spend taxes on parks. A luxury apartment will have common spaces or even activities. They make these expenditures because enough residents will pay extra for it. And a church will run community events paid for by donations. No "brought to you by Carl's Jr."
Tragedy of the commons is when there's no big entity with rules, and everyone does their own thing.
What often happens in these small community organizations is one or two volunteers join and begin to do a bunch of work to "transform" the organization and expand its reach. They inevitably become "indispensable" to the new organization, which they have wrapped around themselves like a cloak. Then they squeeze it around themselves until everyone leaves and the organization's soul has been sucked out. They move on to other organizations in the same area with a "resume" or "bio."
You'll often see these people everywhere in your community, and they may approach you very quickly to get you involved in their organizations. They are in constant need of new volunteers to burn out on their pet projects. They also constantly promote themselves and are always telling you about what they are doing with other organizations both to recruit you and to make sure everyone knows how "indispensable" they are.
These people are poisonous to community organizations because they will not abide any consensus-driven process that doesn't lead to agreement with them.
Not sure about the resumé part, but I've seen these authoritarian volunteers. They still don't ruin everything. And I think my local church has enough of them that they cancel each other out :D
They don't ruin it every time, but I've seen it happen and have also seen the end result and I'm very leery of specific kinds of people in communities I'm new to because of it.
Are these the techbros of community life? I can see a bunch of parallels.
A housing development will create parks because they are required to do it. This is not market forces at work.
There are definitely fancier HOAs with bigger and nicer parks and common spaces than the others, and I don't think it's because they have different city rules.
HOA style commons solutions means a city becomes thousands of micro, private, exclusive spaces.
Perhaps better than everyone sitting in their homes getting amazon deliveries every few hours.
but this isn't what people mean when they say public community spaces. We need interconnectedness across income, ideology, generation, education, etc, for stable democracy.
It's also a framing problem[1]. If we were creating an encyclopedia of ways third places are killed or aborted, centralization would definitely be a failure mode.
I'd add, the belief that projects should be financially self-sufficient and the fiscal individualistic belief that I shouldn't pay for things I don't personally benefit from.
There is a sense of fairness, that makes sense in isolation, yet have these downstream effects when applied to public goods like third spaces. "Kids are always on their phones," and "Youth programs and parks should be financially self-sufficient" are downstream contradictions of the primary belief.
1. among infinite ways to analyze it
A lot of the things people used to do on the Internet for fun, they now do for money or "points" (or the subconscious desire to do for money if they become successful enough). In the past, things you posted online tended to get a small number of manual responses from people you had a chance of forming an actual relationship with. Now, a good deal of interaction is mediated by a corporate algorithm (or an up/downvote button). People are also a lot more aware of automated actors (ie. bots).
In general, people seem to do a lot less unstructured leisure activity and social interaction. Quantitative goals are imposed by social expectations, gamified ad-funded software, or economic anxiety.
Be sure to like and subscribe.
I miss the pointless internet.
Me too. Nowadays if you die on the internet, you die in real life!
https://onecheckbox.com/
You could extend this even further to discussions about media that was traditionally used to escape, like sports, movies, even books. A lot of interactions regarding sports is focused on "advanced analytics" and highlighting obscure data points above all else, e.g., Team X is the fourth team on the West coast since 1970 to score Y points through N games. People rarely talk about how much they enjoy a movie, but everyone is quick to discuss box office numbers and Rotten Tomatoes scores. Books too now have an entire subculture associated with their economic framing ("buy books from local bookstores!") rather than actual discussions of the material.
I constantly see people lament some loss of "free" third places that apparently used to exist and be so common but no longer exist. What are these free third places which used to but no longer exist?
When I was a child my parents used to sit in front of our house and drink tea. The neighbors would do the same and all children would play together. But thanks to longer working hours and the fear induced by the 24/7 news cycle no one dares sit outside anymore. My nieces don't know their neighbors.
When I was a teenager there was a specific square where one would go after school (or during if you skipped class that day). As far as I know my nieces don't have such a tradition.
Less clear example: in my country of origin those living in apartments used to have monthly meetings to discuss any issues they had about the building. People used to complain going to those, but at least you'd get an overview of who is who. I believe these meetings are gone, replaced by email. No one complains about them anymore but, at the same time, no one knows who their apartment neighbors are.
My children are still a bit too young, but there are lots of kids that play in my neighborhood in DFW. The city park at the end of my street has families playing, people out walking their dogs, fishing in the ponds. People play sports at the fields in the park. People hang out on their front patios when it's not 100F outside, have trunk or treats at the park, etc.
The apartments I've lived in the past several years had get together events from time to time. I also met a lot of neighbors going to the gym or hanging out around the pool or playing billiards in the clubhouse.
None of this seems radically rare from my experiences in Houston and DFW.
Average amount of time spent working has trended downwards for nearly every income group for every decade except at best the last decade where it's been stabilizing around ~33 to 36 hours a week or 1700 - 1800 hours a year. I'm not specifying a country because I don't have to, the only country that has actually trended upwards in working hours is China.
This is so true. I'm a practicing Catholic which gives me the advantage of having access to a big community and I even met my wife through Church events after Mass so it's wonderful. Also our Church offers many other programs like counseling, support groups, volunteering, career opportunities, etc. Of course no one should be forced to attend "Church" just to find a community, that's silly but its benefits are pretty clear.
However for non-religious people there is really no third place to meet. Additionally, the truth is that outside of religious communities, people are not having children and thus it creates a further sense of isolation and loneliness. The best one can do is perhaps join meetup groups for hobbies but most of those cost money and may not be welcoming to everyone.
I would also say that this can be a cultural phenomenon, for example in my home country (Iran) people are always meeting and socializing, at 10PM streets are bursting with activities and it's very easy to find people to connect with. In the west, unfortunately it's much harder and society is more focused on the individual rather than the collective so to approach a stranger in the street feels like a risk as they might consider your actions rude, disruptive or invading their personal space.
I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and I have had the same observation as you that the access to community is so helpful.
I don't know about that, I think in the US it's more that parents end up spending more time with other parents than anything, notably because kids are overscheduled, so as a childless person you don't see folks with children as much.
I mean yes, if you have children and you have to be back at work at 9am, most folks aren't going to the bar every day (although those types of people do exist!)
Even economically mediated third places are being phased out in some respects. When I was a teen we often hung out at a local McDonalds. Super cheap food, free refills, as long as you didn't cause trouble you could stay for awhile. I went back there somewhat recently and I was shocked at the difference. It's been remodeled to have less seating, no refills, most of the lobby/counter area is touchscreens, and of course prices are way, way up compared to when I was a teen (which was not THAT long ago). It felt sterile inside, it was clear they didn't want you hanging out for long. Not a teen in sight.
I have seen some cities building skate and bike parks, I love seeing kids and teens doing physical activities with friends.
Teens also used to work at McDonalds. Now it's middle aged people who look and act like life has been kicking them in the face since they were born.
I also used to eat there quite often but I almost never go now because I don't like waiting 10 or 15 minutes for a sullen, indifferent person to hand me a bag of food that might or might not contain what I ordered and like you said the prices are crazy.
This is so accurate. There's been lots of talk of enshittification and it really is just everything now. Monetizing the well in modern capitalism means poisoning it. It all can be traced back to lobbying in politics. They need to ban money from politics immediately and everything will improve.
That just means the money moves in stealthier ways. Instead of soft corruption you get hard corruption.
Money moves in stealthy ways already, and there are ways to identify that. The problem is the legislature is supposed to be supervising the government entities that pursue financial corruption. Instead of reducing all problems to economic problems, where only the very rich have a voice, we should be encouraging a legislature with integrity to do what is right for everyone.
True. I have personally integrated this idea fully by trying to hire/work with friends and family whenever possible.
After years trying to see people weekly and failing miserably, this is best hack I have found. Caveat emptor, takes discipline and patience from everyone but it's great to see loved ones daily, fully engaged in a project.
It helps that I can afford to have hobby businesses.
Tell me more? You own businesses and hire your family / friends to work in them?
IMO the two culprits are high rents and efficient capital markets. Definitely many factors contributing to the first, but one of them is also the efficiency of capital markets.
Basically it's too expensive to make spaces available for below market rate due to the direct cost of rents (a middle or upper-middle class person could drop $1000/month on a passion project, but not so easily $5k/month) and there's a very high opportunity cost to forgoing revenue/profit, because you can find buyers willing to buy you out for 3-25x incremental profit. That opportunity cost makes it tempting for any community space to instead chase profit. But it also makes non-residential property more expensive because you're bidding against companies that are able to convert incremental $1000/mo profit to $50k-100k in realized value, even if you aren't intending to do that.
Rents themselves are very competitive not just from low supply but also because technology has made the rental market very "efficient"/liquid - it's easy to market a property and accurately price it, so sweetheart deals/underpriced leases are difficult to find. Plus rental properties themselves have been very well financialized as well - increases in incremental revenue/profit of commercial real estate can be recognized as many-times-more increases in equity by lenders, which can be accessed by loaning against the equity. So sweetheart deals are more costly to lessors than before.
I don’t remember where I read this, but I remember reading recently how somebody justified their decision to leave “the city” to move to a rural area, with the phrase “I was tired of competing with my neighbors”.
I they were trying to convey sense you describe, of intense economic pressure to make a certain income to pay for a certain living or working space, or alternatively be kicked out because there are ten people in line waiting to take your space.
Perhaps a healthy culture cannot survive this degree of “efficiency”.
On point and well articulated!
Great response.
Yes, corporations and governments aren't great parents. But then neither are parents, if they allow corporations and government free reign over developing minds.
This was essentially brought to us by neoliberalism. It's covered well in the documentary series 'The Century of The Self' (freely available on YouTube).
There are many different definitions of 'left' and 'right'. One perspective that can be useful is to think in terms of 'collective' and 'individualistic'. On this axis, neoliberalism is firmly to the right (not in the centre as is often portrayed). Communities are collective by definition and neoliberalism is inherently anti-community.
When I was younger I was always confused by the incessant political drive to 'privatise' everything despite the obvious bad outcomes. On the whole, the cost of services didn't go down, they didn't improve, and they didn't become more efficient. The opposite would happen, despite the promises to the contrary.
My eureka moment was when I realised that it really was simply about ideology. The essential aim was not to improve anything. It was to ensure all activity was turned into a 'market transaction' so as to provide those with capital more opportunities to invest. From that point of view, the push for privatisation makes perfect sense.
We have been fooled into selling our communities for profit (as if that's the only way to improve our lot).
To take this a step further, I’d argue such framings encourage either creation or amplification of risk perceptions in order to sell the remedy (and for political gain), at least in the US. Kids aren’t really allowed much autonomy the way even their parents enjoyed. All interactions are in a sense supervised and structured.
I believe this is what Marx termed "commodity fetishism" in the first chapter of Capital.
--Sheila Liming, "Hanging Out" (2023)
If anyone's interesting in reading more along these lines (the weird state we've gotten into where everything in our lives needs to be viewed through an economic lens for some reason, and the damage it causes) -- check out the book "Capitalist Realism" by the late Mark Fisher -- I really enjoyed it!
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6763725-capitalist-reali...
Very true. Long term effects are often neglected when framing considerations from a purely economic perspective, especially when these are externalized costs, like public health.
A lot of people seem to cite religious communities, if anything. It's consistently odd to me that no one on Hacker News ever seems to have been into sports. For me, the third places and communities of my youth were all oriented around some kind of physical athletic activity. This was mostly basketball personally, presumably because I passed 6 feet tall in 7th grade. Every park in the area and every school had outdoor courts and you'd just go down there early in the day with a ball, shoot around, wait for other people to show up, and play some pickup ball. The majority of my closest friends were just people I played basketball with.
It didn't need to be this. Richer kids might have been into swimming and water polo. I got into volleyball later and ad hoc sand courts were all over the place. Most of the parks near me also had tennis courts and I played tennis quite a bit. Even the more counter culture kids who weren't into team sports often did some combo of skating, surfing, and snowboarding and bonded over that.
Some of this is obviously mediated by where you happen to live. Southern California has a lot of open spaces, beaches and mountains, and the weather is pretty temperate all year. As much as Hacker News laments suburbs, the sprawl also means there are a lot of parks because there is so much space.
I've gravitated more toward individual athletic pursuits in middle age, so I'm not really involved in sporting communities any more. Seemingly, though, all this cheap, free to the consumer infrastructure in the form of concrete courts with nets still must exist, no? Nobody ever expected parks to turn a profit. They were just a thing cities and counties were expected to provide out of tax revenue and they're a minuscule portion of that compared to expenditure on schooling and law enforcement at the municipal level. There can't be any economically good reason to put them on the chopping block.
Capitalism has made its way into absolutely everything. Every piece of modern life is financialised and transactional. It is sad and sickening and weird how few even notice it.
We've doubled down on marketplaces to mediate interactions because they are rational systems. Rational systems like marketplaces, elections, and bureaucracies are the sine qua non of liberalism, which both ends of the political spectrum advocate for in their own ways. The right typically advocates more for marketplaces and corporations (i.e. market-based bureaucracies) and the left typically advocates for more government managemeant (election based bureaucracies).
Rational systems are in constrast to local cultures based on tradition, biology, and shared history. Its why there is so much homogenization in farming, music, clothing, architecture, etc.
The upside is that rational systems allow for scale, propserity, and individual liberty on an unprecedented level. On the downside, rational systems are fundamentally dehumanizing.
We mediate everything through marketplaces because we've don't have any place for non-rational organizing principles (locality, biology, shared history, etc)
It goes by various names (“trad life”, etc.) but whatever you call it the premise is dystopian and terrifying: people now become celebrity influencers on the back of appearing to live some semblance of a historically normal life.
For many that’s now the unattainable dream: a community with values that sit still long enough to even aim at upholding them, a robust partnership early enough in life to start a family the biological way, children who can look forward to the same.
On the surface there is a culture war around this, and it’s true that the old model had serious problems with admitting other lifestyles. That needed fixing, but not by obliterating the model that works for most people with overwhelming precedent.
The real culprit as always is the “monetization” of everything, a baton that has now firmly been passed from finance people to Silicon Valley people.
The #1 post on Y-Combinator’s news site is in some sense the central locus in the observable universe for this.
It's kinda impressive how often Marx's 19th century diagnoses of the ills of capitalism prove themselves true in the 21st century.
And even "economically viable" here is actually shorthand for "able to provide short-term monetary gain which can be captured by a private entity". Because things like quality education, parks, non-car centric infrastructure, etc. are actually EXCELLENT investments even from an economic perspective.
This is positively gut wrenching in its accuracy. Really well captured.
The rise of (lowercase L) liberalism and replacement of feudal society’s requirement that you be part of the community with the commodification of every relationship we have is the root cause here. We’re just late enough in this transition to really feel it, and people are looking at symptoms and seeing cause.