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megaBiteToEat01/15/20261 replyview on HN

Is there a loneliness epidemic? Or is this viewing history through rose colored glasses?

Is the shift from how society used to work to how society has come to work real or just a grammatically correct statement?

Statistics are biased by those who compute them. Have we asked everyone or inferred and p-hacked up data points?

The single salary family is largely a myth. A relatively small percentage of the population ever achieved that. Is the same true for loneliness? Is it a bigger problem now than it has been?

Is this like in medicine where we think ADHD is up, cancer is up... it's an epidemic! When in reality as a percent of society things are normal, we just had no idea before how prevalent those things were before we measured.


Replies

morshu900101/16/2026

Unlike the supposedly golden 1950s, a lot of people today were adults before and after the 2010s and would say similar things comparing the two.