I volunteered at an old folks home from age 10-16 or so, this was back in early/mid 90s - before the Internet stole my attention - and the old people were of the Greatest Generation cohort (maybe some of the oldest from 1800s). I really enjoyed those talks and have always liked talking with old people since. I can sit with any of them and just talk for hours but rarely ever do this with younger/my aged people. They just chit chat about everything and silence is never awkward, they could talk about anything from the weather to big social/political issues with an open mind. Unfortunately, I fear this is ending soon as this latest generation of old people is kind of vile and not really seeking positive conversation (wild generalization but it's my experience). Instead they tend to want to tell you how to live, what to believe, who to vote for, etc. and then judge/ridicule you when you don't comply or voice a differing opinion.

FWIW, I also think it's largely because boomer's collectively lost their minds and started acting out when their parent/grandparent generation was gone. It's like they didn't want to disappoint them so were acting on good behavior, but now their true colors show.

I don’t have a direct response to your zoning idea but have observed in European cities there seems to be less age segregation.

I’m not arguing that today is the worst time to ever exist in the history of humanity.

I’m arguing there are legitimate reasons why people are exhausted and disillusioned with the current state of the world.

I think people are actually increasingly exhausted and disillusioned with life, but that increase is basically entirely due to spending hours doomscrolling and similar behavior.

Life has become increasingly expensive. Safety nets that used to be there, aren’t anymore. We’re surrounded by enshittification. Social divides, and antagonism between social groups are high.

Your contempt for humanity is blinding you to real issues people face every day. Yes, some things have gotten better over the years, but some things have gotten a lot worse.

One could argue that both parents having to work is much more difficult than when one person could support a household. Houses, healthcare and education are objectively much more expensive as well. It's not "victim mindset", it's literal exhaustion because everything is much more expensive. There's also no way to retire vs pensions and other baby boomer offramps.

This might be controversial, and I'm not saying it has to be the case, but I believe at least part of it is due to lack of sunlight / outside movement (vs all day in office, car, train, home with stuffy air and sometimes not even openable windows) and nutrition (too much processed and fortified food, not enough protein for many people).

I'm trying to focus on both in my life, and I have become much happier as a result.

>the 20th century was overwhelmingly a flight from rural areas to cities

You're talking about an entirely different phenomena. The move from rural areas to cities and exurbs happened in the 50s/60s with cheap mortgage rates, WWII-provisioned education, and large sweeping social services being enacted. White flight is a phenomena that started in the mid-60s to 80s that specifically coincided with integration.

>The median adult is spending 5+ hours on their phone a day. This is what is exhausting people

There's much to be said about the behavioral manipulation and dark patterns in apps and devices, sure. But I don't think television inherently was employing Skinner-boxes to get people to watch and that's what I was specifically speaking to. Regardless, that dark pattern of it is class struggle related if that's the direction you want to frame it (I see it more as just MBA-brained corporate sociopathy) because it seeks to extract capital from its users while externalizing all negatives onto the users themselves.

>Maybe that's true for some people, but the data usually shows that income and free time is inversely related to community time. Poorer people are making more time for friends and family.

Obviously. And this is clearly related to the fact that the more impoverished you are, the more you need to pool resources to survive. The pain points I illuminated are for individuals who are still showing up to community organizing work and much of what we do in these spaces is effectively providing enough mutual aid for them to survive.

> A steelworker in the 1920s coming off of a 10-hour shift would still find the time and energy to go out dancing.

You have proof of this? That they wouldn't just go home and get shitfaced or otherwise incapacitated? All steelworkers, per capita, were going out dancing regularly? And even so, this wasn't because they were economically incentivized by the rise of labor unions to be in community with others, building power and fighting for better rights? The 30 years of post-Reagan neoliberal expanisionism has effectively neutered unions - and that's something that wasn't covered either by Putnam.

I suspect another thing largely missed by Putnam was the rise of online social spaces. Connecting with friends via the phone, on Discord, in video game spaces - that's community. It's just different from the community envisioned by people in more elderly generations. The fact that you're even commenting on HackerNews is effectively proof against Putnam's claims.

In places like Detroit racism was very much the primary reason in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s at least. Some of it was just personal racism, pure and simple. See "blockbusting" techniques used by realtors who would hire a black mother to walk down the street with a baby carriage to give the impetus for white people to sell quickly and cheaply. Or a black family moving into a house, the white neighbors trying to push them out via lawsuit for breaking a racially restrictive covenant, then losing so that all the white people left the neighborhood (e.g. read about Orsel and Minnie McGhee in Detroit, I was the primary author of the National Register nomination for their house).

The racist pressure to move was also a structural issue supported by the Federal government. Redlining meant you couldn't get loans to buy houses in certain neighborhoods, and those neighborhoods were exactly where black people lived. Literal walls could be constructed between two similar communities of different races so that the white side could be higher rated and have better access to loans (e.g., the Birwood Wall in Detroit). A ton has been written about the topic, I can't really do it justice, but the idea that people just wanted a bigger house was not the case. A lot of Detroit actually consisted of single-family homes with yards anyhow, so it was literally white people leaving a house for a very similar one.

This has been written about broadly by social historians. This book, in particular, is illuminating: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691133867/wh...

Some other links:

https://news.iu.edu/live/news/24906-research-ties-persistenc...

https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2021/10/white-flight...

https://psmag.com/news/ghosts-of-white-people-past-witnessin...

There's also this rather infamous quote by one of the most powerful Republican strategists in the 80s, Lee Atwater: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater#:~:text=Later%20in...

I won't quote it here but it's very telling.

You don't have to live this way. To begin with, drinking a six pack at night on a regular basis is absolutely terrible for your health. It disrupts your sleep and so you will always be operating well below what you could be. The social problems are harder to solve because they are society-wide and not individual, but at your age a lot can change, and I think it's really important that you don't start to give up and think of your situation as inevitable, lest you ossify.

Uphill battles are often worth fighting.

The flip side is that you have time for hobbies, regular workouts instead of beer belly dad bod, you can play sports, bike or skateboard (including socializing), play chess, whatever you like, go to concerts, walk around town photographing.

Everything young parents don't have time for or are too tired for.

I guess my point was that the socializing depicted in media was older people, not just young singles.

If I didn't have kids, would I want to go out multiple nights a week for a few beers with friends? I don't know. I'd certainly think about the cost of it more now than when I was 25.

Similarly for restaurants - they've gotten so expensive, and often the food isn't as good as we remember - that my wife and I don't seem to be as interested in going out to eat as we used to.

The unfortunate thing to me is that outside of VERY upscale or VERY downscale dive bars, every place is full of screens now. People go to bars and look at screens instead of talking as much as they used to.

That's the thing, the Internet really spoiled us. Suddenly you can hang out with complete outliers interested in whatever niche interests you share.

Your friends just don't want to hangout.

There are different ways of approaching doing something:

"To do X requires me to do this and that. So heres how I'll do this and that to get to X. "

"I can't do X because it requires me to do this and that. "

There's a big difference between the 2. The latter is a lie, they just don't want to do what is required to do that. Its a way of phrasing things so people don't feel bad and they don't have to admit they don't want to do something.

Start looking for it and you'll see it in a lot of exchanges.

You don't have to go to fancy restaurants for a date you know. Maybe for your anniversary. People who insist on fancy everything are probably not worth the trouble.

Yeah, if you’re getting three drinks each and an uber sure. I don’t think it’s an insane amount to spend.

It was framed as ‘Every Activity’ costs that much though which is just not true.

That's eating at an expensive place. I paid $60 for two at a local restaurant last week, that's including an appetizer.

It's not hard to spend $200. But OP suggested that it was the standard going rate and that it's unaffordable to them.

The change in lifestyle expectations should be as well documented as the changes in social contact.

Those are the exact two I’ve lived in actually

> they weren't as common as they are today

We have a lot more people these days and we're a lot more urbanized.

> My point was that much of what was done "then" in one's house are now done elsewhere

Yeah, and I don't think I believe that.

For the last century (and still today) we called them cafés (in Germany). Coffee shop was the term we used for joints in Amsterdam where you could buy ... well, joints.

Wait until they find out that commodities markets started off as coffee shops.

Part of it may be high rents. I read that rents increased a lot because of fashion stores. They make so much revenue per hour that more traditional stores (like the laundry, the washing machine store, the sewing store, the tabletop games store, and maybe cheaper cafes and restaurants just can't compete.

When I was a kid kids used to just hang out. We'd take a bus, ride bikes, or walk to the mall, the park, the woods, fast food restaurant, record store, dollar store, etc and just loiter. Nobody had any money to buy anything, but boy we'd browse and loiter. Sometimes we'd just walk for hours. We'd walk miles and miles and miles just to sit at a table at Burger King with a single small fry between our group and hang out there.

Children don't do that anymore; they basically don't leave the house because they have the Internet. They communicate through texting and Discord so they don't even have to "hang out." Beyond the social change, when I was a young adult most malls went 18+ (unless accompanied by parents/guardians) and most other businesses nowadays allow teens to loiter the way we use to. Businesses want people in and out once they are done.

Even if business allowed it, most parents don't allow their kids to leave the house unattended anymore.

Does it count as a third space if you have to pay for it?

Coffee shops and such don't feel like good third spaces to me, because I don't always want to spend money just to exist

legister's comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50091295 mentions it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone

Additional citations:

https://ibs.colorado.edu/new-research-on-disappearing-third-...

https://www.aei.org/domestic-policy/americas-third-places-ar...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13538...

https://esl.uchicago.edu/2023/11/01/third-places-what-are-th...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/business/third-place-mean...

NYC is a thriving city of 8.5 million people and one of the most economically active cities in the world, so your experience may be different than say, Gary, Indiana.

This 40 hr/week need to be combined with

1) Increasing job/economic insecurity.

2) Prices rising faster then income for majority of population.

3) increasing commute time around employment, activity hubs

4) kids activities/sports are now taken as seriously as work project deliverables. Previously it could be just gifted kids in school teams now with pay-to-play a lot more kids are involved in "serious sports".

Dual income earners hasn't even increased that much, 44% in 1967 to 53% in 2011 - https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2014/ted_20140602.htm

The constant aggregate dopamine demand and chasing activities is certainly not helping, imho. "Work, home, doomscroll, repeat."

I may be incorrectly inferring that you think this is a good thing, but "traditionally tribal humanity" were constantly at war with one another. I'm not sure that's something we want to go back to.

I’ll take more of that homogenization of culture please.

The center is mostly offline, thinks both extremes are very small portions of the population, and doesn't post on social media. So they seem small but really there are a lot of people like this who aren't shouting into the internet 24/7, so you just remember that what you hear is all the extremists shouting, not the people you saw during the course of a week who weren't.

Society is going bimodal on the 1% of issues that bisect people. Those 1% of issues are consuming 99% of our mass-media airtime.

Talk to your neighbors and you'll find that everyone just cares about decent roads, decent schools, decent jobs, and decent healthcare.

The central part of their identity is to assume that they're the vast majority of people. It allows them not to have to think about stuff too hard - it's all settled, and it's settled on what the people I'm exposed to (i.e. friends, family, and the television) think. I'm safe just repeating that and reporting people who deviate from that.

They don't realize how much the "moral majority" differs in town as opposed to the city, the coasts as opposed to the bulk of the country, in small private liberal arts colleges in the east and at Mormon universities in Utah, or in China, Russia, or Bulgaria as compared to the suburb they grew up in.

If all of those people simply follow the central tendency, and give mass media the same (or greater) weight as they give their neighbors, that guarantees war all the time. It will always be better to listen and try to understand points of view that you aren't familiar with, rather than to hide in the safe (and always untrue depending on the shape of the border you draw) assumption that you represent the vast majority. This, without even considering whether the vast majority are right or wrong.

I mean, some people are so impervious to reality with this that they can lose election after election and believe that they are still 95% of people. Then they start theorizing about mind control and supernatural entities, just to keep from opening their eyes and ears.

Is that the type of "culture" that this statement is referring to?

> As long as you don’t have a common culture and a common understanding of the basic rules that everyone agrees on, no one can spend time with each other comfortably.

Doesn't seem so to me.

You are missing the point.

"Political issues" are by definition things that people disagree on. Saying people "disagree on political issues" is equivalent to saying "people disagree on things they disagree on."

But the vast majority of daily life is not driven by or meaningfully affected by any of these "issues on which people disagree." If you go and talk to your neighbors, even ones who you disagree with on disagreement-creating-topics, you will find you actually agree on nearly everything. The set of things you agree on is called "our culture."

It's not just social media, it's all solo entertainment - streaming, cable, 24 hour news, video games, everything.

I think turning off all social media would help if others do that as well but as an individual action it's likely to cut you off even more.

Both sides are at fault. Here in the Midwest many a supporter of the Democratic party are legitimately afraid of being fired if their support became public knowledge, while on the other hand in California (or other "Blue" states) it's the exact opposite. It's astonishing to see how much Americans relish oppressing their fellow citizens.

The internet is awash with seething tribal hatred. It's impossible to honestly believe this is only an issue with the right. The "demon-crat" attack is roughly analogous to the left's "nazi" attack (nazis, after all, are the secular-progressive equivalent of demons, with Adolf Hitler being their Satan), and the latter attack is infinitely more common than the former, even on HN.

I don't think so. Everyone was a lot happier 10-15 years ago when the culture felt less fucked. I think people can't feel happy if they don't feel basically safe, and the world's problems are so incomprehensible, and solutions to them see so impossible to imagine, that there is a background unsafety overlaid on everything, even if one's immediate conditions are pretty good.

I guess we are different then. A non-stop state of panic/fear does not make me feel like procreating.

You are getting a lot of downvotes but I 100% agree with you. These are the types of conversations where someone's cultural background / bias is evident and its obvious to me most of your responders have never spent time outside the US.