Item — HN Reader

This article resonates with me and my experiences online to a startling degree. Specifically:

“We are not beefing endlessly because we do not desire peace or because we do not know how to engineer peace. We are beefing because we no longer know who we are, each of us individually, and collectively as a species.”

I think we are seeing a genuine lack of strong family, social, and organizational ties among most people, myself (sadly) included. I don’t think I or any of my peers fully grasp what we’re missing and how isolated we truly are. I think we as a cohort had very good reasons for participating in that change, such as me (an LGBT person) leaving the Catholic church I was raised in rather than bury that other part of myself to fit in. The problem is that I replaced it with nothing, and I think the same pattern has repeated across many other people and many other traditions. The temptation is to suggest MeetUps and other things built to connect people, but those suggested replacements don’t come with the same assumption of trust built in like many traditional organizational and family ties do.

17 comments

The thing is it's not just religion. There's been a commensurate, if not larger, decline in participation in "civic organizations" as well.

Sports leagues, fraternal societies (like the Elks or Masons), parent-teach organizations, volunteer organizations (like the Boy Scouts or Red Cross), and labor unions have all seen their memberships steadily decline for the better part of the last 50 years.[1] Doubly so among the youngest generations.

Beyond that, in general we have much fewer close social ties than we used to. Marriage rates have plummeted[2], which means many fewer people have a spouse. Surveys show that Americans have only about half the number of close friends as they did a generation ago.[3] The sizable majority of Americans don't even know their neighbors.[4] And of course birth rates have plummeted, which means that the number of siblings the average person has, and eventually aunts, uncles and cousins are all decreasing.

In general the central sociological fact of the modern-era is the unprecedented degree of social atomization that most of us now face.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone [2] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/14/as-u-s-marr... [3] https://www.barna.com/research/friends-loneliness/ [4] https://www.studyfinds.org/sign-of-the-times-75-of-adults-ar...

Our social connections have been replaced with commercial ones. Where at one point we socialized to relieve boredom and need, now we have never ending entertainment and those that would capitalize on selling it to us over everything else.

And, yet, here you are talking with other people all over the world for free.

Someone older than me, of the hippie generation, once said to me "There were like three TV channels and they went off the air at 10pm. If you were still awake after that, there was nothing to do but sex and drugs."

I strongly suspect the 24/7 availability of free entertainment, live online discussion, etc is a large contributing factor to the trend towards celibacy. I don't think this is a bad thing. And it's being achieved without some preacher putting the fear of God in you and telling you impure thoughts will get you an eternity in hell.

Trust is earned. It's not something you can assume.

That "assumption of trust" you speak of included an assumption that either you weren't LGBT or you would bury it your entire life for the comfort of the larger community.

Matthew 10:34-36

34"Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35For I have come to turn "'a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law- 36a man's enemies will be the members of his own household.'

I would say you did the actual Christian thing by leaving. But I'm not Christian, so I'm sure many will find that assertion offensive.

Community cannot be founded upon an assumption that some people will bury an important part of themselves like that. That's a foundation of sand and will not last.

We are seeing such things dissolve because we have other options these days. In the past, people often grudgingly tolerated it because they had no place to go, not because being part of some larger community was some wonderfully fulfilling experience most of the time.

If the world is seeing a loss of identity, it is because we are being freed from the shackles of our old identity. It's normal for there to be a transition period where no one knows what's what.

That's not a problem. It's just a stage in a process.

It's only a problem if we get stuck here and fail to establish a new identity. Then the great experiment fails, the opportunity to become something better is lost and we likely see things crash and burn so the world can sort of return to it's old ways that kind of worked.

> That "assumption of trust" you speak of included an assumption that either you weren't LGBT or you would bury it your entire life for the comfort of the larger community.

The LGBT community comes with it's own shackles. They assume the only natural thing is for someone to structure their whole identity and lives around what might just be a developmental phase of their youth. I'm certainly glad that type of thinking wasn't promoted when I was growing up.

This struck me as too tidy, so in the spirit of debate let me offer a little pushback:

>We are seeing such things dissolve because we have other options these days.

1) Do we have other options? I think we do, but I don't think the saturation is nearly as high as churchgoing or temple-attending was throughout history.

>In the past, people often grudgingly tolerated it because they had no place to go, not because being part of some larger community was some wonderfully fulfilling experience most of the time.

2) Religions grew and spread in every civilization for millenia. Ancestor worship in East Asia. Hinduism in South Asia. Animism among natives everywhere. Christianity in the West. What if religion and religious community grew and took the forms they did, because they met humanity's social and emotional needs?

So I would restate the original comment as asking (i) what problems arise when something everyone depended on so long disappears in a relatively short time, and (ii) how can we handle those problems. Importantly, stating these questions isn't suggesting that everyone needs to return to religion (which wouldn't even be possible without un-discovering science).

I'm sure you can find passages of the Bible to fit your narrative, but those lines are hardly representative of the majority of Christ's teachings. For the most part he was concerned with healing the sick, feeding the poor and showing love to the unloved. If you were going to pick someone from two millennia ago to become a spiritual leader to half the worlds population, you could have done a lot worse.

>If the world is seeing a loss of identity, it is because we are being freed from the shackles of our old identity. It's normal for there to be a transition period where no one knows what's what.

The only problem is that there were other times of such "freedom from the shackles of our old identity" and they didn't end well -- even if centuries later things picked up.

The late Greek city states, the late Roman empire for one, modern Britain and France (second rate global players, politically and culturally, where they used to be first), and so on... US is close...

>If the world is seeing a loss of identity, it is because we are being freed from the shackles of our old identity. It's normal for there to be a transition period where no one knows what's what.

What if this old identity and social structures based on religious texts is essential for human beings and human beings are not capable of forging for themselves a new identity without guidance?

> That's not a problem. It's just a stage in a process. It's only a problem if we get stuck here and fail to establish a new identity.

I think that was exactly what the parent comment was saying, except for pointing out that millions of people have gotten stuck there, and it's been getting worse for decades across the entire developed world. It's even worse in Japan, for example, than in the US, and the collapsing customs and institutions there mostly don't include religion.

Around the world, we're getting out from under religious and secular systems that were pretty good for the majority and quite bad for the minority, but so far we've failed dramatically at replacing them with something that is better for everyone. This is progress, but it's not enough.

This is spot on. I wonder if this exodus has resulted in people trying to make workplaces their "religious community"; but obviously people who happen to be at the same company don't have any reason to agree on important issues. So then the mission becomes trying to make everyone at work care about and agree on <chosen social issue>.

I have spoke to many people who have said that they feel that work has replaced their social life, myself included to a degree. It also means that people don't want to move on in their careers as they get too comfortable with their work family and pass on better opportunities. I have a coworker who passed on a great opportunity just because he really likes working with everyone. A close friend had to be prodded by his wife to apply for better positions in other areas to advance his salary. Another friend's wife refuses to get a better job because she likes her coworkers so much.

I strongly suspect that the cause of isolation is that we don't treat our workplaces as our community anymore.

My parents' community all met their spouses and friends at work, whereas people of my age seem to find something unprofessional about this. And I believe that old-fashioned civic organizations like the Elks were built from a tangle of professional relationships.

And realistically, where are you going to find a stronger community than among the people with whom you spend 40 hours a week?

People replace God with something else I have noticed. Many of the Atheists in the Atheists community in the United States started a new organisation called Atheism+, which alienated a lot of group and those in Atheism+ started added a lot of dogma, which I find as someone who observed the split from the outside in the UK to be somewhat ironic.

I am not religious myself (but I am slowly having a greater appreciation of religion as I get older).

It's almost like our social bonds are being broken in the same way chemical bonds get broken when we digest food. Like our capitalist society is a higher-order organism that is extracting energy from our societal bonds.

My theory is that people have replaced religion with politics. They've fallen away from organized religion, but they still need somewhere deep down, the comfort and certainty, (or "faith"), that spiritual belief conferred.

Many have found that comfort and certainty in the ideological tenets of the political groups with which they form affinities. As a bonus, people find a sense of belonging that is fairly similar to what 50 years ago those same people would have found in the various churches or temples.

Again, just a theory, but I think this is why a lot of political arguments have started to resemble almost clashes of religious dogmas. Or what the author has termed, "beefs".

When I went to church as a kid I don't remember being anywhere this much beef between the religious vs non-religious. It's way worse. It's not just politics, it's sports, sexual orientation, gaming, and many more domains.

People like you who did not created ties to a group like that are quite better and less scary then people who have strong loyal unquestioning ties to groups - whether nationalist, traditionalist or radical Christians (some of Catholics in my country lately tie themselves to extremists).

Membership and trust in these apparently feels great. That feeling is dangerous. That trust is not build on truths being told, it is build on unquestioned authority and aggression.

Reflection from a country where such groups are on the rise and not a side players anymore.

Strong social ties can exist without an overarching authority, or even without any sort of authoritative structure at all- I think the best thing to look at in this regard are modern subcultures (punks, hipsters, hippies, goths, burners, etc) particularly as they exist in decently-sized cities. A bunch of like-minded and like-lifestyled people with an excuse to get together; that’s at least 90% of what the old conservative/religious structures offered.

Everyone is the same amount of religious in my experience. The people who join an established religion gain the quality of being predictable.

Indeed. A lot of the modern internet "beefs" remind me of football "ultras"; the sport is really a pretext for the punchup, or at least the singing of death threats at each other.

I've experienced plenty of that dangerous unquestioning extremist fervor from progressive/LGBT circles too.

Yeah it's possible that fearful people have intentionally made us lonely and isolated so they can feel safer.

Thank you for crystallising this succinctly.

The loss of cultural meeting places, be they churches, or arcades, or malls, is something I consider a huge loss as well. The pendulum might swing the other way yet, however.

If we can reinvest in our community centers and hacker spaces and make them part of the zeitgeist, we might all be rehumanize a bit.

There are many communities out there for people to join and find their tribe, they just aren't easily accessible or indexed centrally. A lot of them filter for like-minded folks -- even the ones that claim to accept anyone.

Focusing on community or hacker spaces is narrow view of one's options. I found mine via attending underground music events, then joining one of the groups and attending festivals with them, which eventually led to strong ties with the burner scene and some of the local artist communities.

I think people are forgetting that to experience these things you need to be present, and do so with some frequency. Open-mindedness and the right vibe will get you far socially. Unfortunately that doesn't really match well with the workoholic atmosphere that many jobs insist on, and so you end up with unfortunate situations like people mistaking their employers for family. I hope that those folks are secure in their employment because it is really easy to be cast out (e.g. laid off) under the guise of, "it's just business". Personally I think feelings of workplace-as-family are just another trap engendered by management to maintain employee retention.

I agree with you, and I too kept thinking "Hmm, that is a really good point." but I found the statement you called out somewhat at odds with the rest of the thesis.

What I understood him to say was that his thesis is that culture wars are not about identity and yet this endless conflict is about a lack of identity. So where does identity really fit in there?

The economic and political incentives of inciting "beefing" were spot on. And there is nothing like amping up the inequality of the distribution of wealth to put energy into the "beef battery" (if such a thing existed).

"And there is nothing like amping up the inequality of the distribution of wealth"

You're adding a little bit of beef flavor to your comment with that one. Inequality of wealth is something that is increasing. That's a fact. The causes and effects of it have pros and cons that should be debated. People "amping it up" is an assertion that tastes somewhat of beef - but it can be made about both sides.

Hello fellow LGBT person! We actually have it a lot better than many marginalized groups -- if you want community, you can find it. You just have to put yourself out there in an offline sense and disabuse yourself of any ideas that you are somehow better than anyone else in the community. Go on a bunch of coffee dates and you'll make plenty of friends.

It's not organized per se, but in many cities the queer people all know each other. I live in a big city with a big queer scene, and I can't tell you how many times I show up by myself somewhere only to see 3 or 4 people I already know there. Or find out that the new person I'm dating is besties with another friend. We all have pretty similar politics, but we also never talk politics or current events (that shit is depressing). Conversation is largely about our own lives and relationships, which IMO is how it should be. The focus is on making space for and supporting eachother, not winning an argument.

If you're struggling to break in to the community, just set up a dating profile (Grindr if you're a gay man, OkCupid if you're not) with something along the lines of "baby queer here, I need friends". People will reach out to you because we've all been you. I have found people in the LGBT community to be incredibly caring and willing to invest in people they barely know, simply because they remember what it's like to be alone in the wilderness. Community is how we heal, and intentional family built one relationship at a time is stronger than relying on circumstances to provide you with social ties.

Much love, get out there and get involved, let yourself be vulnerable, and you will find your people <3

I appreciate your comment, but my experience has sadly been the opposite of what you describe. Perhaps I've just been unlucky, or maybe I just come off as an asshole, but people in Bay Area LGBT circles have been quicker to find disagreement and ghost me from their lives than any other group of people I've ever met. After the third or fourth time losing what I thought was a close friend over what felt like a petty disagreement I have become very disillusioned with the entire concept of "queer community". I feel like I've grown more as a person through my friendships with the handful of self-described religious people I've met here by accepting and being able to discuss issues where we disagree.

I'm also LGBT and I have to guess that

>in many cities the queer people all know each other

is massively untrue based on my own anecdatum. Where I'm from, there is certainly a group who all know each other, who hang out at the gay bars, and who seem to have dated many others in the same group at some point. I have seen this by snooping on instagram or facebook - the same set of faces shows up at any gay event, and they do all seem to know each other.

I assume you're in that kind of community in your city. I'm glad for you. I'm certainly not within my city, although I've had "encounters" with people in that group. Given the significant percentage (3.5% according to google) of LGBT people in the population, I have to believe the vast majority of LGBT people are on the outside of any such group you're describing. Our social life is probably drawn from much more average sources (work, college friends, possibly church) than what you describe.

I think the quality of your experience with dating apps for any given dating app will depend on 1) where you live (are you in an area with a high or low LGBT population density) 2) who you are looking for (very hard to find people if you are, for example, a trans or non-binary person looking for other trans or non-binary friends) and 3) how much time you invest (it can take hours just to get conversations started, and more time before you get to actually meet people). This applies whether you are looking for friends or something else.

I wholeheartedly agree but also don't know how to fill those gaps. I'd love a church-like institution. I think about going to church almost every sunday just to experience being together with people in that way.

I remember it fondly from being a child even though I no longer believe in it.

There are civic organizations that meet regularly, do work within a community, and either minimize or are avoid religious affiliation.

if you're in the US, see if there's a UU congregation in your area; it might be just what you're looking for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarian_Universalism

If you or anyone else is interested in this topic I strongly suggest the book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging by Sebastian Junger.

That book really made me think pretty hard about this stuff. It's also a short 180 pages.

I just ordered a copy and am looking forward to it. Thanks for the recommendation.

>The problem is that I replaced it with nothing, and I think the same pattern has repeated across many other people and many other traditions. The temptation is to suggest MeetUps and other things built to connect people, but those suggested replacements don’t come with the same assumption of trust built in like many traditional organizational and family ties do.

That's how I see it as well. I find all those "organized" attempts fake (and commercialized ones even more so). I include anything, from AAA meetings, to "meditation" schools in 21st century West countries (where you go do your Zen study, and then go on to your otherwise unaltered 21st century life in late capitalism), to the meetups you've mentioned, and so on.

They can't replace organically grown over the decades (or millennia) traditional institutions and mechanisms, the same way canned laugher can't replace actual audience laughter. They're like a 3D printed sculpture of an animal compared to an actual animal, warts and all.

That's not to say the old organic versions are not damaged and unable to sustain themselves.

I think the lack of strong social ties was also the norm through most of the 20th century (in the US at least) but people didn't have the opportunity to connect with focused interest groups as they do now. Prior to that social ties were enforced through religion and that created it's own problems.

I think you're seriously underestimating the decline of participation in organized religion in the US both during the second half of the 20th century and in the twenty years since. Here are just a few numbers to chew on from Gallop's long-running polls[1]:

* The number of religious "Nones" - people identifying themselves with no religion - was right around 1% through the 1950s. In the 1970s it increased from 3-7%, and stayed below 10% through the end of the century. It's now over 20%. In the 1950's, ~70% of people were Protestant Christians. Now it's half that amount.

* In the year 2000, 12% of Americans reported that religion was "not very important" in their lives. Now it's double that amount.

* In the year 2000, 13% of Americans reported that they "never" attend religious services. Now 29% never attend.

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/1690/religion.aspx

I’m not sure, I read In Cold Blood, which was as much about the family as the killers and was most struck by how full and vibrant and prosperous life in 1950s small midwest farm community was. It seemed like everyone from teenagers to adults had a huge range of social ties and activities even apart from religion. I’ve lived in small town middle America and nowadays its mostly a dump between meth, opiates and Walmart jobs. Reading that I felt like I understood for the first time why people my grandparents age really feel something has been lost.

I read this article a few days ago and said almost exactly the same thing. The mook stuff is fun, but the line you quoted:

>“We are not beefing endlessly because we do not desire peace or because we do not know how to engineer peace. We are beefing because we no longer know who we are, each of us individually, and collectively as a species.”

is the important part of the piece for me, and I'm happy to see you and others singling it out. I really relate to what Rao is saying here. It's a sensation not unlike boredom. Like we're all waiting for something, anything to happen.

A weird example: In 2016, I flew home to PA from Boston specifically to vote against Trump in a place that mattered. I stayed with my parents for the night, and when I came back from the voting booths, the TV was on and it suddenly became clear that the unthinkable was happening - Trump was winning. I vividly remember the sensation that came over me wasn't disappointment. It was excited anticipation, like the way you feel right before you leave for a big vacation. It was like "ok, here's something actually _happening_ that I'm a part of." It's kind of fucked up, but that emotion that washed over me felt "truer" than any principled argument that this guy could do real damage, etc. It felt like suddenly I was living -in- history, rather than beside it.

>Like we're all waiting for something, anything to happen.

I’ve noticed this trait in myself, beginning with hurricane Katrina. Half the world away, I immersed myself in New Orleans local live news streams, radio, webcams, blogs and forum threads from on-the-ground folks. I had a period of about three days solid obsessively scanning for new information.

There have been several other events that I responded to in similar ways, including the last US election and that airliner that got shot down over Ukraine a few years back.

The guilty enthusiasm you mention was present each time. The event is almost always something disastrous, yet the ‘rush’ to dig for information and get a sense that you’re witnessing unfolding major events is compelling.

I once got drunk with a German friend and, lacking all tact, lamented that the world hadn’t been very exciting since the end of WW2 and that it felt like we were overdue for something similar. I don’t think the point I intended to express was the one that registered with him, understandably.

Do you do the thing where worrying global stuff unfolding (e.g. North Korea’s periodic Sabre rattling) triggers you into obsessing about prepper SHTF stuff for a while? I feel like there’s a connection between the behaviours, but my sample size is only 1 currently.

There are places that exhibit this - they’re just not well advertised. Community organizations like the elks lodge and the masons were good examples but not very modern. Eventually these sorts of things will pop up to fill the need.

Chesterton's fence. You removed it, and now it's up to you to prove that you knew what your were doing.

This is the sad truth about fast and rapidly changing social norms. this lack of identity and community.

What rapid changes have we seen lately? The change in that person's comment has been in the making for over a hundred years. The first thing I personally can think of (in the context of America, as one of the last Western countries to accept GLBT people, not in the context of the wider world, which has been accepting for much longer than America) is American GLBT communes in the 1780s.

Given where we are in GLBT acceptance, it seems like, if anything, this was one of the slowest-changing social norms of all, and one that more than a few generations were pushing for before the ones that are currently here.

May I offer you two suggestions? There are other interesting religions that don’t care about sexual orientation so no need to give up on having a spiritual community. Also, you can find local groups on meetup.com for tech, blockchain, art, etc. to augment family ties that you get (for instance) by always calling at least one family member each day.

Really, nothing is as important as being with friends and family.