I don't think people necessarily appreciate what they're missing. Modern life makes it high friction to see other people. Making plans, getting reservations, etc., is a lot more work than watching Netflix. But that doesn't necessarily make you happy--or at least, it didn't make me happy when I was living in the city.

Since we moved to my current neighborhood in the suburbs, however, I socialize several times a week. It's impossible not to. There's a dozen kids within 100 feet on our street. Whether we feel like binge watching Netflix or not, the kids want to play--thus providing their own child care--and it's very easy to just grab a beer with the neighbors. Then there's church where I'm on committees that mandate face-to-face interactions several times a month on top of going weekly. I also live 10 minutes from my parents, so there's dinners over there several times a week. I don't work any less than I did when my social life was less active, and I have two more kids than I did back then. But I watch a lot less Netflix.

I think urban sprawl and car focused design is the cause. Having to arrange an event, drive, meet up, etc is too difficult when you can just play a game online or talk on discord.

I moved to an inner city apartment and suddenly my social life exploded. I have a few friends very close by and some are in the same building as me. A social event is now as simple as sending a message asking if any of them want to grab dinner with me in an hour. We meet up at the lobby and walk to a pub/restaurant. Cars and commuting are this huge barrier to socialization these days.

>The reason that college works in forming friendships and romantic relationships is the artificial environment it creates where people are obligated to show up and mingle with people who are from different backgrounds, and for at least 2 years.

It's not artificial. This is the tribal culture humans used to live in in prehistoric times. We are evolved to live like that.

Modern society is what is artificial.

Basically making friends is about proximity. If you want to make friends you need to live in an a tribal type community and environment.

Staying in contact with friends is a lot of effort. As people start jobs and have kids you have less and less time. It gets harder to schedule meeting meeting people. In high school and university spending time with someone was as simple as texting "Hey wanna come over?". Now I have to schedule things days or weeks in advance and half the things get cancelled because the kids got sick or something.

Binge watching Netflix on the other hand is easy. I can do it whenever I want.

The answer is pretty clear. University is the only time for most people where they live in a walkable area close by to their friends. Then they move out to the suburbs and become socially isolated for the rest of their lives while their initial friendships slowly decline. And now with working from home becoming common, we will probably see huge numbers of people who simply get no social interaction at all in their lives.

Sure and that's actually where I developed my love of walkability and bikability. But I live in the "bike-suburbs" (everything in easy biking distance or walking distance) and even then as my friends and I got older, it became harder to socialize. We still stay in touch frequently, but planning flesh meetups became a lot harder. For us it was mostly prioritization. After a while we all started prioritizing our family lives over our friendships. It started when most of us entered serious relationships. After that point, it became harder and harder to meet up. I sometimes wonder whether the tradeoff (choosing family over friends) is worth it but I still find that it is.

There are some interesting points on car-dependency which I agree with, and thusly I've structured my life around living in a bikable suburban area, where everything we need is within easy biking distance (1-3 mi.)

But mostly it's a matter of priorities. In school, my priorities were: Academics, Friends, distantly followed by Family, Personal Health, and Home (meaning dorm, flat, apartment, w/e). Now Family, Personal Health, Home, and Career are at the top and Friends are at the bottom. When I was in undergrad I could text my friend "Hey wanna grab food" and we walked to the nearest calzone place. Now I make sure my partner and I have spent time together, that I've done my chores around the house, and then I text a friends to meet. One friend is trying to lose weight and can't eat at a place with too many carbs, the other is trying to cut back alcohol and doesn't want to go to a place with lots of drinks, and I need something gentle on my stomach. Then we agree on the place and meet up. Walking to the nearest calzone place is just not a plan my friends and I would trivially agree on anymore and that's okay. Priorities change with age.

I don't think this has anything to do with the macro trend of decreasing socializing.

Absolutely not.

Humans are attuned to have happiness that's deeply connected to interacting and mutual appreciation of other.

Despite the best efforts of Twitch.com, television and other activities do not fill this void for deep appreciation.

Deep relationships are truly essential.

Upon what do you base this? I know that my perspective is anecdotal, but I am curious how you reconcile your view with the current state of globalized society. If humans on average really needed multiple deep relationships, then how can the post-college doldrums be explained? Wouldn't people have created a greater abundance of ways to socialize? Isn't one's own family and occasional visits with relatives usually enough?

I'm not saying that I relate to this at all, despite that I am particularly solitary. I would like to have more deep and frequent connections with others, but my impression isn't that people actually want that. They might like the fantasy of having lots of deep friendships that don't interfere with their technological somnolescence or romantic satisfaction.

There are a bunch of studies that show that populations with the highest life expectancies tend to be those that not only benefit from high quality diets (usually seafood), in sunny areas, but also have strong family ties and sometimes live in multi-generational homes (Southern Italy, Spain, Okinawa).

Aa, now I see. Mutual appreciation = "like". Friend = someone who always clicks a like for you, no matter what.

> where people are obligated to show up and mingle with people who are from different backgrounds, and for at least 2 years.

I cant help ... college is when the peer group is the most uniform. They are all the same age and in the same life stage. They all study the same or similar thing, have similar interests. And are all being college educated. You meet trades people there. If you study CS, you will meet very few artists.

I liked college experience, but both high school, employment and sports clubs were more diverse in terms of who I met there.

I think you are correct, but I’m not sure if it’s a real “want” or a mere modality that is an expression of foolish contemporary social values combined with marketing combined with the notion that this is really living the good life. I cannot tell you how strongly convinced I am of how tastes are manufactured by prevailing attitudes and the need for approval and a limited selection on the table.

How many little boys in my neighborhood swear they want to grow up to be a pro football player, but this is the main activity they see gaining adult approval in the cafe. I wanted to be either an orchestra conductor or a luthier based upon two experiential impressions that aesthetically influenced me.

I know individual experience varies, but I can’t say I recognise this at all. At university I had a wonderful time and met a lot of people who, while not living close by, are still great friends.

I also moved to London from NZ, and have made great friends here and socialise a lot, so it’s certainly not just a major city effect. I’m not really one to preach, but to me I think your perspective is not one that I recognise at all.

Many of us definitely desire strong social bonds, but we have no idea how to even converse with people, so we don't try.

For some of us, we can read all the Dale Carnegie or Leil Lowndes available, and still go absolutely nowhere with actual, applicable social skills.

The only option is enormous quantities of alcohol, GHB, or phenibut, but the risks are often too great there.

> It seems that everyone these days is aware that friendship is on the decline, but so few actually seem willing to do anything about it. Maybe people really do love their Disney+, their Oculus, their Doordash, and their Cheeto-dust more than they do their relationships with other people. If so, that seems to be the way of the world from which there is no turning back.

The "metaverse" is already beginning to set in, and it's like a drug--no issue in moderation, but destructive if you get addicted, which is extremely easy to do. Do people love drugs more than relationships with other people? Well, drug addicts do, but we understand that as a neurological twitch (an illness, even) more than a high-minded desire.

> The reason that college works in forming friendships and romantic relationships is the artificial environment it creates where people are obligated to show up and mingle with people who are from different backgrounds, and for at least 2 years.

I'm not sure I agree. College doesn't "obligate" this, and it doesn't always happen. People of low social classes feel isolated and excluded (often without the excluders knowing what they are doing that alienates them) and people of high social classes have already set up their barriers. The middle classes are latest to form social class identity--around 19-21 in the US, as opposed to 15-18 for the lower and upper [1] social classes.

However, college is the closest thing we have in the US to an attempt at communism [2] (even if it is artificial and expensive, therefore indicative of what David Graeber calls the communism of the rich). The influences of pre-existing social class and personal wealth (which most college students don't have yet) are not completely blocked, but at a minimum--those things matter less than they did before college in terms of a person's living standard, and less than they will after college.

> Some people truly desire strong bonds, but it seems that most people decide that the strong bond with their spouse is good enough.

Sadly, I don't think most people in America have even that. They might think they do, but what's going to happen if they're unemployed for 12 months? Ultimately, even the family, as an institution, succumbs to corrosion in a bourgeois society. Unlike Marx, I don't seek to abolish the family--as somewhat of a tradleft, I'd rather protect it--but I agree with the Marxists that this form of capitalism creates a society in which all bonds are negotiable when living under a socioeconomic system that has no moral restraint when it comes to applying financial pressure.

You can still find a ride-or-die spouse in parts of the country, but in Silicon Valley? If you met her at a tech company, then as soon as you lose your Jira job, she's going to find a crypto bro.

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[1] I'm not the first to observe that the lower and upper class have more in common with each other than either does with the middle. At the extremes, people tend to be class realists who understand how much money matters in daily life. It's those in the middle who can afford to indulge in naivete.

[2] No, not USSR or CCP "communism", which neither of those systems even managed to approximate; rather, by communism I mean a post-scarcity social arrangement in which people form bonds and pursue interests for non-financial reasons... that is, a society free of economic totalitarianism. Since the USSR and CCP are merely another form of economic totalitarianism, run by the state rather than private employers but otherwise just as oppressive as our society, they don't qualify.