Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?

Alcohol.

Learn to use smartphones as tools, not as all consuming attention sinks.

stop inventing and endorsing divisive ideas

Make as many third places as you can. People need to get out to do other things than work, and these should be low cost activities. If you introduce subscriptions and then ramp up prices, then you are the scum of the world.

Church.

together

Telos

In the USA, the loneliness epidemic is compounded by isolation. A large portion of our society has moved into suburban communities that are largely impersonal. There is very little in the way of in-person community outside of churches or political movements that only certain kinds of people want to be involved with.

With the Internet giving us the ability to interact with our chosen niche with little effort, we are willing to accept this still-impersonal alternative to our stagnant communities.

I have found that, as a city-dweller, I benefit from separating myself from social media and going out into the world looking for more personal connections, but this is somewhat of a privilege afforded to those people who live in more densely populated areas. Even then, my distance from social media can sometimes be a handicap when you interact with people who are still reliant on it to coordinate everything.

For most people, the social opportunities that existed in the 70's through the 90's simply doesn't exist anymore. If you aren't using social media, you're practically being anti-social, but there is something inherently anti-social about social media to begin with, so you're screwed if you do and screwed if you don't.

Not with technology.

Organize things.

Start a bowling league, a DnD group, a book club, a charitable organization... whatever.

Have a dinner party. Join the chess club. Start or join a sports league.

Many of these community events aren't happening because nobody has created them yet and it might just be up to you to do it.

Part of the loneliness epidemic is somebody actually has to initiate things and not enough people do. YOU can do it.

It's so interesting to see the tech community all angsty about the loneliness epidemic.

20 years ago, the Pope warned of the coming "epidemic of loneliness" that the tech industry would bring us, and the tech industry laughed at him. They said he was just an old man who didn't understand and that technology would bring us together in unity and happiness.

And yet, here we are 20 years later, and hardly a day goes by that someone doesn't submit an article to HN about loneliness.

We (reading this) can't do anything. An enlightened government might set policy in such ways as to fix this over the course of decades, but I don't even seen that being acknowledged as possible or desirable in those same decades. The problem will continue to deteriorate until it becomes catastrophic.

In person RPGs, tabletop wargames and boardgames are amazing for geek culture. Thanks to local Discord groups, I have an active nerd community that I play games with at least once a week. This has revolutionized by social life!

There is a introverted crafty side of painting and 3D printing miniatures that works great for me too.

These games all work as essentially offline alternatives to videogames and are way more fun!

Also, my local game store serves beer; so its essentially a nerd bar even though most people don't drink.

Wargaming related references: Tabletop Minions on YouTube, The HiveScum podcast, Companies such as Black Site Studios and Conferences such as Adepticon.

Go look these up!

To paraphrase Barney Stinson:

When I'm feeling lonely, I stop feeling lonely and feel awesome instead.

There are lots of good suggestions in here. People just need to go do them. And if there are structural impediments to doing them, then eliminate those impediments.

I wasn't getting out enough during the day because I share the car with my wife. So I bought an EBike and now I go out all the time.

I chose to live in a place with things near by that I can go to.

Whenever I'm thinking, I'd like to go do an activity, but I need something else first, it's usually not true, or the other thing I need is easy to get.

People just need to decide to stop doing things that make them unhappy.

Easy, same as obesity and environmental problems: fix the built environment by building places for humans, not cars. It all stems from that in North America.

undo urbanization, education, and technology. retvrn to monke.

go volunteer. they're needed everywhere. problem solved. most able-bodied lonely people are that way because they can't be arsed to get off the damn couch. they would just rather discuss loneliness on social media. I can't be arsed either, but I don't feel lonely when I'm alone, which is the majority of the time.

The deeper you get the lonlier you get.

And that can happen even when you are among 1000s of people, not just alone , if you are among people thinking of something else, staring into the void or that you can't connect etc. you are a deep person.

Deep person + deep thinker is the worse. Also people aren't doing them any favor by singing the praise of being a deep person and a deep thinker.

It also has to do with abundance of everything and being not in need of cooperating 24/7/365 to avoid starving ....some people slip into deep thinking and deep emotional introspection...yeah fuck that

I think part of the problem is that social media is normalized and it is easy. It is way easier to engage socially (or at least you feel like you're engaging socially) with likes and lurking and stuff. It is way harder to put on pants and go out and it is normalized to do so (phrasing like bedrotting is super casual, whereas it is actually really hard to maintain an eating disorder because you have to be constantly hiding it from people).

Also I think there's more groups whose social norms online teach you to be repulsive offline and again there's not enough social pushback against it. We do need to be harder on casual edginess online because it is teaching habitual behaviors that make it hard to engage socially. Your 50 year old hiking buddy is not going to understand your soycuck joke you are trying to show him on your phone. Your average wine mom at women-only book club is not going to love if you insist on talking about banning trans people from the club because they're "men invading the women's spaces" especially when there's very likely 0 trans people to exclude in the first place on account of trans people being rare.

Lastly there is usually a ton of stuff happening but the instructions on how to engage with it is nebulous. People who know the algorithm find it easy, the people who don't know the algorithm find it super hard. And IDK how to solve that because there's so much going on in people's heads that they don't realize the people around them seriously aren't scrutinizing them that much. There's like a socialization death spiral where every small awkward interaction hurts way more when you don't have enough experience to know that the small awkward interactions are normal. So you can't tell someone "just go to book club" because they'll go, have 1 normal situation like mishearing someone and then decide they are so embarrassed they can never go to book club again-- but since it is so normal it happens at every social event and they end up lonely.

Why do they feel they can't join any local groups? Fix that.

Move to Latin America

Burn capitalism to the ground?

Step one might be to stop calling it the loneliness epidemic. Loneliness is an emotion, isolation is a condition, and we might even expect that if people felt lonely more often they would try harder to be social and actually be less isolated. This is also a network effect: my reaction to my loneliness affects someone else's loneliness if I go talk to them (or not).

Many of these comments recommend church. While valid if it works for you, it doesn't mesh with me.

I found community through a shared enjoyment of an activity that must be done as a group. Grass roots motorsports in my case, but any activity that needs you to be there with others should work the same. The key is that you should enjoy it and you should have time to interact with people. I like to make car go vroom, but generalize the approach and it should work.

My first season, I won an event with a hero run that sent me from 5th to 1st. When I parked, a random guy stuck his head in my window and started hyping me up for it. I still think about that 3 years later and it still makes me feel good. That feeling made me want to do that for others.

I started approaching random people I'd seen before and just starting a conversation. It was rough the first few times but it gets easier. You already have a shared activity so just start with that. I made a point to remember people's names or at least their car (bad with names, but cars stick for some reason). If the name didn't stick, I'll ask again next time and maybe bring up their car so they know I remember them. When I know their name, I use it when I see them again. Maybe just "Hey bob!" as I'm passing, but something to let them know someone there knows them and cares enough to say hi. They're not a stranger at least. If I haven't seen them in a while, I ask how they've been and spend a bit more effort on the conversation than just a "hey".

It started with the regulars. Now I'm looking for the new faces. I know stuff and they need to know that stuff, so it's easy to talk. If they come back, they should be able to find someone to talk to so I introduce them to some of the other regulars.

I look for people eating lunch alone and I go talk to them. Maybe 2 to 5 minutes, maybe longer. Depends on them. Sometimes I'm awkward. Sometimes I say dumb stuff. Whatever. I'm trying to help these people not be alone at a social event if they don't want to be. If they do, that's fine too, but I'll try again next time.

Some people are closed off and don't really want to talk. That's fine. I still say hi by name and see how it goes. Not trying to push, just keeping the door open. After a few times of trying, a lot of people will start to open up our let the guard down. Some don't.

I'm an introvert and all of this takes extra mental energy on top of the events being competition and work. I don't have the time to compete at the highest level every event because I'm spending time helping others. Rather than getting a better driver in my car to tell me where I'm making mistakes, I'm trying to get the less skilled drivers in my car so they can see why I'm faster. Instead of reviewing data over lunch to see where I'm losing time, I'm trying to build community. I want people to come back. There's a cost to it.

I moved to the middle of nowhere 10 years ago and had no local friends. Work friends are rarely real friends. Tech meets, young professionals groups, nothing came out of those. It sucks to go to a bar alone. None of that produced anything.

Motorsport has been the only activity I've tried where I've started making friends who I talk to outside the events. A lot of it is still about motorsports, but I've gained a few friends who I sim race with or talk to online in the off season. It could have been any other group or activity, but those are the people who made me feel welcome.

Real figures, there are at least 25 people I can walk up to and start a conversation with at an event and have good rapport, more that I know by name and just haven't clicked with, 2-3 people I consider actual friends. I started putting in the effort like this after my first season, so this is the product of 2 seasons of effort (winter doesn't count because there are no events). I'm still kind of lonely, but it's better and getting better.

I think it's that I put in effort. I know I've helped some of those people feel like part of a community. I gave them a few people they could talk to so they didn't feel so alone. Maybe my role was just keeping them coming back until they found their clique. Maybe I need more time to get to know them. Some introverts need an extrovert to help them get started. Sometimes that extrovert is an introvert tryhard.

The reason I do this is cause one guy stuck his head in my window after a run and said something like "bro that was awesome! Nice run!" And he was genuinely happy for me even though he barely knew me. I'm not good at that specific thing so I try in my own way.

I think people look for community. I did. I bounced off a few groups because I didn't fit in. I'm trying to do my part to help people "fit in". Tech solutions ain't gonna help here. Get face to face, make outsiders feel accepted, and see what happens.

And thanks, Clarke.

Lobby to shut down social media that doesn't encourage real life interaction. I honestly think things will keep getting worse until we unplug them.

I've been thinking recently about the scale at which it seems the vast vast majority of people participate in close to zero public discussion online and what a bummer it is.

Basically all discussion platforms are broken for any sort of long term meaningful discussion which I think is at least part of the problem. Even this thread and this comment just the fact that the thread is now 4 hours old the amount of views and chance of getting many responses drops precipitously. On most platforms unless you are someone with a large following you basically have to think like a marketer and post often and early on posts to stand a chance of getting a discussion going. It's always so ephemeral too. Even though posts on a platform like HN on reddit still exist and you can comment on old threads probably 99% of the activity happens in the first 6 or so hours and then it largely ends.

It makes me miss forums where at least you had long lived threads with simple time based post order and a good chance of replies. This doesn't seem to exist on only platforms now and forums have largely faded away.

The fragmentation of discussion has also messed things up. For example yesterday I was listening to a HardFork podcast episode which is a fairly popular pod, topping the charts in at least the tech category, and after listening I wanted to check for discussion around the episode and probably leave a comment or two. I assume this episode had to have gotten at least in the low tens of thousands of plays though perhaps that is way off. I went searching for discussion and basically found a largely dead subreddit for the podcast with no threads being regularly created for the episode and an empty comment section on nytimes which any site comment section is a useless place for discussion anyways. The pod is also posted on youtube which the youtube comment section had the most activity of anything I found but the youtube comment section and the way it is structured/operates is perhaps the most useless of all the platforms for trying to have any discussion. I just don't understand how if at least say ten thousand people listened to the episode surely at least 1% would be interested in discussing it and 100+ people going back and forth would be a large, active, healthy discussion somewhere.

Even threads that seem "active" on sites like HN or Reddit in the context of the actual audience sizes are shockingly small and confuse me. For example The Pitt season 2 just premiered and posted 5.4 million viewers, the subreddit post ep discussion currently has 5.3k comments which is quite high for a show. That is a joke of a percentage though, 0.1%! and even worse in the context of people that are posting probably post more than once in the thread. I understand many and even most people not wanting to post to discuss a show they just watched but how the hell is less than 1 in a thousand!

This post got long which also damages the chance of any engagement due to TLDR culture.

There is no easy solution to this problem. It's a conflux of many factors. (There are no more "third spaces". Too much rent-seeking behavior. The centralization of platforms consolidates power and creates inertia. The dopamine-hacking of recommendation algorithms. Social media in general.)

https://soatok.blog/2025/09/16/are-you-under-the-influence-t...

I've written at length about related topics. Unfortunately, there are powerful invested interests in keeping things shitty. It's often critiqued as "capitalism is bad" but we're seeing today is better described as techno-feudalism than capitalism.

IMO it is not possible. The world has changed. Until modernity, people made connections out of economic necessity. Either you get a wife or have fun farming by yourself - literally it doesn't work so you die. Either you're friends with the baker or you don't get bread or get absolute shittiest-quality goods and you die. And so on. Shut-ins didn't exist because it was physically impossible to survive without leaving your room. No UberEats, no Amazon Prime, no remote work, no internet.

When the economic necessity to form relationships with others disappeared, the naked truth was exposed - most people don't fucking like each other. Yes, when you're starving to death you'll be friends with the guy who has potatoes, but when you can buy the damn potatoes yourself in the supermarket, you're not going to tolerate his smelly ass.

Most friendships form over common participation in a project. Doing something together, knowing that you have to put up with the other one to achieve higher goals. Without those goals, there are no incentives to deal with others. And what goals am I supposed to have if by doing nothing I already have a roof above my head, full fridge, clean house, and an entire library of video games?

Think about the main message of feminism: "Girl, you can make it in life without a man. Don't settle for an aggressive alcoholic just because that's the only option. You can do it yourself.". It perfectly captures how forming relationships turned from an asset into a liability.

Loneliness epidemic started 30+ years ago. There were books written in the 90s about it(bowling alone). Nothing modern can be blamed on it. If anything, social media is helping the crisis; not causing.

The 'fixes' has been established for just as long. My nearby 'community centre' was built in 1987. Has this been successful at all? Not in the least bit.

The reality of what is causing this hasnt changed. Without fixing this key problem, the crisis obviously has continued for 30+ years. I'm not nostradamus here. However, from many previous conversations it's crazy how absolutely nobody is ready to talk about the cause. They'd rather just call it a paradox or feign ignorance for why this is happening. Honestly it's rather conspiratorial creating when you think about it.

Out of curiousity I asked what gemini 3 pro thinks.

1. Revival of third places.

As if that hasnt been tried for 30+ years... fail.

2. replacing 'socializing' with "service"

The idea is that cleaning a park will somehow make you less lonely is laughable at best.

3. Bridging the generational gap.

Elderly teach the young skills? while youth teach digital literacy. My community centre literally has this. F mark.

4. Urban design and walkability.

We need to spend trillions of dollars to completely redesign and rebuild cities? lol what.

5. digital hygiene

social media is a sedative? crazy.

I love gemini, but man they are getting it so wrong. All of this will likely just caused the crisis to be worse in my opinion.

To me, has this been done unintentionally through the typical 'road to hell is paved with good intentions' or has this been intentionally done and maintained? The refusal to acknowledge the cause seems to push toward intentional. Guess we just live with the loneliness epidemic.

You can't.

It is up to them to change. They won't change, and this "loneliness epidemic" is starting to become really fucking annoying. It is almost a grift now to shit on tech by mids.

These people don't want to go outside or engage with other people.

It is like people who are drug/alcohol/tobacco/gambling/sex/etc addicts. It is up to the individual to change. How is it anyone else's responsibility?

I surveyed a bunch of people on reddit, discords, etc. a couple years ago to figure out why people are lonely, back when this whole "loneliness" movement was starting.

A lot of these people say they have "trauma" or some other mental block as a primary reason why they're lonely (btw they're in discords with thousands of people, and playing online games with OTHER PEOPLE). I'm sorry but everyone has shit going on in their lives. You aren't really that special.

Maybe 1-5% of people have dealt with actual, really horrific trauma, and even they have managed to go on to have fulfilling lives. They chose to move on.

I'm an asshole, no doubt, and I've dealt with my own traumas in the past that were honestly way more fucking horrible than "I'm shy" or "nobody likes [insert some esoteric niche]" and guess what? Who cares? Go outside.

There is no helping these people, or anyone to be honest, unless they really want to make a change. These aren't starving Sudanese or people who live in India or something where you can't just "go outside". Mfs be in CALIFORNIA and crying. I'd understand if they were lonely because they were living in Iraq or Venezuela or something.

The only solution is we build a Matrix, and put all these people into it. I will bet 100% of my net worth and any earnings from my entire lineage for perpetuity that they will still fucking complain and be lonely. I was really hopeful for metaverse, too bad but maybe there's still a chance.

I never want to hear about "loneliness epidemic" again, to me it just sounds like DEI/ESG/Eacc and other bs grifting now to hate on tech. Everything is a choice. You press A in a video game even though you're lonely, why not press A to go outside?

These people aren't lonely, they exist in massive online echo chambers with other people. And honestly? I think they like it. Most drug addicts loved being on drugs even though it was a horrific existence. They don't like it when they're narcan'd during OD. But when they decide to get clean, I am proud that they actually did it how amazing is that? SO these lonely people have to stop crying and step outside.

on the topic of platonic friendship, I couldn’t disagree more with a lot of the comments. I have plenty of friends yet I don’t do clubs and will never, ever do organized religion. People advising it are religious freaks in my opinion. Some of my best friends took this advice to go to church and bible study. They complain every time I see them about the people in their church. Meanwhile I’ve made more and better friends online. Its not hard, get on social media, find an influencer/streamer that matches your vibes and go jump into the official or adjacent discord community and play video games with people in that community. If you engage in active listening and are a decent person, you will easily make plenty of friends. Additionally, I think in person hangouts are kinda mid, but I hangout with my friends in-person (at a minimum) every other day when I weight lift. Like seriously, I often would rather chill in Discord than go and hang out in-person.

To me the male loneliness epidemic is more about a lack of ability to find meaningful romantic relationships. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and as somebody who has been doing online dating since it essentially started, I am pretty sure that the problem (or at least a major piece) is that match group has commodified romantic relationships.

I know a lot of people will focus on meeting people in public or whatever, but it has been my experience that dating has become completely garbage and a large part is because all of the current popular dating apps disallow index search and funnel you into swiping. From a mate selection perspective this makes no sense. Not only does it muddy the waters about who is actually a real match, but it also does psychic damage to make so many shallow judgements.

Back before match group bought OkCupid, I used to have excellent results finding people their who shared a lot of common ground with, messaging them with a thoughtful message, and going on dates. Swiping is an absolute crap shoot, and often I feel like I am being used.

from what I've looked into, on an individual level, the main thing I need to do is learn how to be a good company for others. Be for other strangers what I would want them to be for me. But it's easier said then done.

From a practical perspective, there is the whole "3rd place" issue. How can I open a business that caters to the public, who will just sit there and loiter on their phones and laptops all day and be profitable. Starbucks sort of did it in the 90s, but they're not tolerating that anymore.

Forget businesses, can you walk to a park, a beach, a hiking trail on a whim and run into people? Can you hold events, watch parties,etc.. on public places easily like that? It's not easy at all these days.

I blame cars. I despise the idea that electric cars are the replacement to cars, without considering changing transportation so that it is more efficient with trams, trains,etc... The side-effect of that is you run into strangers on public transport. This doesn't just affect the loneliness epidemic, it is in my opinion a direct cause of cardiovascular diseases and diabetes, and of course obesity. You can't even be homeless and sleep on the streets these days. Even the park benches are built to be hostile to anyone that wants to chill there for too long.

Society was restructured between 1950s-1980s so that it is suburbanized. It's all about the family unit, single family homes, freeways and roads built to facilitate single family homes (after WW2, starting families was all the rage, plus white-flight didn't help). Shopping centers built to cater to consumers driving from their suburban homes. Malls you can walk in, after you drove some time to park there. Even when you buy food items at grocery stores, pay attention to serving sizes, it is improving a little, but you'll see at minimum a serving size of two typically.

Society was deliberately engineered so that you have more reasons to spend more as a consumer. Families spend more per-capita. suburbs mean more houses purchased, entire generations renting with their bank as a landlord via mortgages, home repair, home insurance, car insurance, car repairs, gas stations for cars where you can get the most unhealthy things out there in the most frequented and convenient places. Make kids, make wives, make ex-wives, get sick the whole lot of you for hospitals, health insurances,etc..

It wasn't planned by some central committees or secret cabal, but it was planned nonetheless by economists and policy makers.

If everyone just got married and had kids, they won't be lonely would they? you don't need to hang out at park with strangers, you'll feel less of a member of your local neighborhood who look and think like you, and start thinking more as one people.

All the interpersonal interactions and opportunities to build relationships with people are commercialized and controlled.

For one reason or another, people are just not getting married in their early 20's anymore, or having that many kids later on like before. Even when you get married, your interaction is by design with other married people, who are busy commuting in their cars to and fro work, kids school,kids sports, plays,etc... imagine taking your kids on busses and trains every day to these places which are fairly near-by, by necessity. you'll be spending time with them instead of operating machinery. They'll be meeting stranger kids from other schools, seeing random strangers all the time, you'll be talking to randos as you walk to the train, wait on the bus,etc.. but this can't be monetized.

Blame the economists and policy makers if you want to blame someone.

If you want solutions, let's talk explicitly about the policy changes that need to happen.

Too much traffic? tear down the freeways instead of building more lanes.

It costs $10B to build a simple metro line? pass better laws to regulate bidding and costs, investigate fraud and waste.

But to dig even deeper into the root of the matter, look at what is celebrated and prized in society. Most of its ills come from there. For most Americans, it is inconceivable to be able to just go out of your house without any plans or destination in mind and just start walking and see where you end up, and who you run into. That's a crucial and tragic ability that's been lost. We really have more urgent things to address to be fair, but ultimately, this can only be solved one small step at a time, but also big sweeping changes are needed. The first step is to define and accept what the problem is, and where the blame and cause lie.

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build another software platform

/s

This community is not going to be the one to solve that problem, sorry.

No. We are too busy worrying about an invading USA.