How many souls end up being lurkers, throwing away everything that used to be humanly interactive, like asking questions, reaching out, inviting, or simply saying “how are you” in their chat? We are seeing a mass migration from interaction to consumption.
I’m 25. 23-24 was my experimental life phase: living without social media post, cutting off validation nonsense. I tried to be proactive irl, somehow making friends with a 40s+ harley gang. their sense of community and tribes is undoubtedly the strongest.
But now, when I reach out to people my age, they always give the same answer: “busy and not having time”. When I’m not in their attention media, such as Instagram or Tiktok, in their eyes I basically don’t exist.
Lately, I often think, “Why do my interactions always end up one-sided, with me being the only person who makes the first move?” and if I don’t move in the slightest, everything turns mutehollow. I often blame myself for that.
But when I zoom out, I wonder whether I just don’t fit with my society, or society really is that shallow. It works based on interest and momentum, not relations and bonds anymore. Both are true.
And now, when I observe the younger generation in their early 20s, they’re reaching a level of loneliness that is really concerning. lucky I have access to the education department, and monitoring them feels like witnessing a downward spiral.
One of the best things i got in my early 20s, the only thing that saves your soul: is hobbies. whether you’re introverted or extroverted, find your hobbies. Create something interesting, join conventions, find your tribes. Job, money, employment as long as you can eat and live with basic needs, it’s often enough. But if you want to feel alive, you must have a hobby and be proactive about it.
Seek friendships and rivals with people who have the same hobbies as you. You feel much less lonely when you have hobbies, and when you find a small community you can genuinely call a friends, that becomes a joyful life.
Again, that’s becoming rare in the world we’re currently living in. A lack of shonen energy, which sadly now seems to exist only in fiction. Even today’s villain are just deceptions sitting boringly on your screen.
…
I wanted to vent all of this because lately the internet feels lonelier than ever before.
oomf replies:
Having accepted how busy everyone seems to be now I find it hard to understand how there was so much time to do things in the past (10+ years ago). It feels like there is no simple answer but it has made it hard to develop a general sense of community.
Agree hobbies are great!
my replies:
Sometimes all of that doesn’t really need understanding, just a little effort to push oneself outward from themselves. Everyone feels too focused on themselves, to the point that many forget humans are social beings haha.
The sense of community has almost vanished in today’s social media realm, it’s been replaced with “brands” even our soul has become “personal brands”.
When you think about it, the possibilities of today’s internet and their infra, hardware, software, are so ungodly huge, but they’re gate kept by a (hard to describe force in our brain).
Imagine this: on here you can actually reply to builders, creators, artists, founders. You can find projects in the wilderness. You can type as long as you want. You can create feedback loops through replies with clear intention. And todays “large language” models itself can be the best tools being the bridge for communication. And the fact is, now you can see llms being slapped into every interface, in your post, in your replies, in your chat, in your dashboard.
Literally, language is no longer to be barrier. We’re in the huge open humane network. But who dares to dive into those aspects? So what’s the barrier now?
Simply because the numbers are psychological, the noise is psychological, the algorithm is psychological. Everything narrows into squished attention that gives stimulant human emotions and responses. Humans are pretty coward when dealing with the possibility of the void, not the void itself.
It’s always weird to me when I have that sudden realization. In our psyche “you can just do things” is not something just snapped, easily achieved, it’s blocked by our fears of being irrelevant.
If humanity are brave enough to break the pattern and dare to make exponential connections, the sense of community will emerge like never before.
I think for now, we’re on the bottleneck, we’re only losing to the system we created ourselves.
What stakes in order human to win? Simple: be kind. Be dangerously kind. Be kind like humanity never achieved before, just like the machine that we unexpectedly able to think before.