alt Hacker NewsI agree but if your goal is to socialize more, it's not enough to get off social media. You need to be in a place where enough other people do too.
Think of a city as both a spatial and a temporal grouping of people that are in the same place at the same time. Every hour a person spends at home on social media is an hour that they aren't really in the city and are not available for you to socialize with.
The cumulative hours that people spend staring at their phones are effectively a massive loss of population density. That lost density makes it harder to find people even if you yourself are getting off a screen and looking for them.
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This problem is not going to be solved by individual action. Sure there is some things you can and should do, but for it to be solved at a population scale it has to involve changing the actual structure of society that caused the problem in the first place.
Tackling phone addiction and lack of public spaces is going to be critical.
just find a hobby that involves other people. any kind of team sport, r/c airplanes, shooting, bird watching, the options are pretty endless. You'll meet other people, make friends, and not be so lonely.
A big problem for me personally is that, well, frankly, there really aren't many options around me. I live in a small farming town of 6000 people, and most things are 25-45 min away *by car*.
I thought of this the other day. I was on the train ride back from Chicago, and there was a family of four adults, sitting across from me, all just staring at their phones. I was effectively alone at that point in time. None of them were present. But you explained it in a new way I had not thought of before. They're quite literally not there in that moment, for however long that moment lasts.