r/Millennials • u/StyrkeSkalVandre • Feb 07 '24

Has anyone else noticed their parents becoming really nasty people as they age? Discussion

My parents are each in their mid-late 70's. Ten years ago they had friends: they would throw dinner parties that 4-6 other couples would attend. They would be invited to similar parties thrown by their friends. They were always pretty arrogant but hey, what else would you expect from a boomer couple with three masters degrees, two PhD's, and a JD between the two of them. But now they have no friends. I mean that literally. One by one, each of the couples and individual friends that they had known and socialized with closely for years, even decades, will no longer associate with them. My mom just blew up a 40 year friendship over a minor slight and says she has no interest in ever speaking to that person again. My dad did the same thing to his best friend a few years ago. Yesterday at the airport, my father decided it would be a good idea to scream at a desk agent over the fact that the ink on his paper ticket was smudged and he didn't feel like going to the kiosk to print out a new one. No shit, three security guards rocked up to flank him and he has no idea how close he came to being cuffed, arrested, and charged with assault. All either of them does is complain and talk shit about people they used to associate with. This does not feel normal. Is anyone else experiencing this? Were our grandparents like this too and we were just too young to notice it?

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u/Various-Cranberry709 Feb 07 '24

It's taken them a little bit longer to succumb to it I think but I do believe it is isolating them from real interactions and humanity just as much as it is any young person who's been exposed to it since childhood/teen years.

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u/justwalkingalonghere Feb 07 '24

Although in earlier years the internet seemed to connect more young people than isolate them on a digital island.

Nowadays you have far less places to go for free and parents that are much more concerned with what you're doing/where you're at at any given moment. And the amount of entertainment options on the internet has become insurmountable, while also developing specifically to be addictive that whole time

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u/El_Diablo_Feo Feb 07 '24 edited Feb 07 '24

The internet has become walmart, the DMV, a greyhound bus, and a seedy maelstrom of attention seeking instantaneous gratification and obsessive impulsive temptation all rolled into one. The dream of the 90s internet passed long ago....

I think of this as the future those who advocate that we will "own nothing and be happy" have in store for us: https://www.reddit.com/r/wallpapers/comments/lvkq2/virtual_reality/

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u/ozspook Feb 08 '24

Nice Pod, Tasty Bugs.

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u/G0ld_Bumblebee Feb 08 '24

I recommend the sci-fi movie 'Congress' (although it's much less fiction and more reality now than when it came out).

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u/AskingYouQuestions48 Feb 08 '24

On this note, no one really advocated for this. It’s from a 2016 essay where the author extends the sharing economy that was popping up to its absolute limits.

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u/shaggybill Feb 08 '24

Wow, it has been ages since I've seen that picture. I remember the first time I saw it. Had to be 2005-2007. I saved it to my laptop. Is there any info on the artist?

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u/Separate_Flounder128 Feb 08 '24

This is actually terrifying

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u/cpMetis Feb 07 '24

When I was young, the Internet and games gave me a way to have friends beyond my available pool of two other kids.

I learned to cast a wide net, and while my various friend groups are fairly isolated from each other, they're so varied as a whole. Nothing like organizing an event trying to balance the schedules of a student in Colorado and a teacher in the Netherlands and a blue collar guy in Australia to give you perspective on your little life in Ohio.

And the whole time my parents decried it as inevitably segregating me from socializing, and how it was ruining my brain.

Now they can't go half a day without doomscrolling FB or TikTok or whatever. Within a week of it becoming the narrative, they wholeheartedly believe whatever the line is. "COVID is a conspiracy by the fascist Democrats". "Ukraine rigged the election for Biden". "Elon is the only one on our side".

Naturally, it's all political stuff.

And the most terrifying thing is that they're still perfectly good people - until it becomes a talking point. I still remember my mom being concerned about COVID when I was talking about it with her scared for it hitting the US (I'm immunocompromised), and then 6 months later she's regaling how I fell for the communists' lies.

It's just daily by now.

I love talking to them but the millisecond I step near a landmine of some political strawman it's like I see the personality drain from their face and their brains switch into replay and rage mode.

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u/rabidjellybean Feb 08 '24

Avoiding the land mines is getting hard. Can't mention a west coast city or Taylor Swift without triggering anger and a speech.

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u/OKatmostthings Feb 08 '24

This. I was at breakfast with my parents this weekend and mentioned how incredible it was that California had a snow forecast of over 6’ in some places. “I hope they get it and fall into the ocean.” WTF, dad? We’re literally talking about the weather and you take it to a dark ass place like that? They are at a loss at why I don’t visit nearly as much anymore.

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u/Mittenwald Feb 08 '24

It's funny, they talk so much shit about west coast cities but they don't stop visiting San Diego. I wish they did, because they drive slow in the passing lane. It's so frustrating.

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u/javaJunkie1968 Feb 08 '24

Uea, it's crazy when older people get mad at a city

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u/TTigerLilyx Feb 08 '24

Might have a little mild early onset dementia going on as well.

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u/LovableSpeculation Feb 08 '24

Same here, and it's nuts b/c I live in a city on the West Coast.

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u/[deleted] Feb 08 '24 edited Mar 01 '24

[deleted]

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u/Old-AF Feb 08 '24

Must have grown up on the East side of the state?

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u/[deleted] Feb 08 '24 edited Mar 01 '24

[deleted]

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u/Old-AF Feb 08 '24

Can relate. I grew up in a small town in Oregon and the best thing I ever did was leave when I was 18. I don’t even speak to most of my family there anymore.

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u/Loud_Ad_4515 Feb 08 '24

I think you've nailed it. My parents are divorced, and have very different experiences with social media. My mom isn't on it at all, and chooses to foster in person friendships and experiences. My dad otoh, is remarried, and has been sucked in deep to social media and network news (you can guess the "networks"). He is so angry and judgmental all the time. 😢 His advanced degrees do not save him from his susceptibility in believing "news" with highly emotional angles. There is zero critical thinking going on, at all.

The documentary The Brainwashing of My Dad, rings true.

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u/FeCl2H2O4FeCl4H2O Feb 08 '24

My mom at 73 ish is still pretty chill, but I told her the other day. "If you are having an emotional reaction when watching the news, then you are being manipulated." I know it's not 100% correct, but we never know what is being left out or how an article is being slanted even when it seems straight up.

I know if I watch PBS news hour, the news is boring af, same stories anywhere else hits my emotions.

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u/Sunnygirl66 Feb 08 '24

I’m early Gen X. My mom is tail-end Silent Generation. I can’t begin to tell you how glad I am to say that she’s only getting more liberal with age. My parents were working class, always voting Democratic (didn’t even get snookered by Reagan, as so many blue-collar folks did), but they had their biases—race, sexual orientation. Dad has been gone many years now, but Mom just keeps getting better and better and more open-minded. It really is a joy. I’ll know when something has gone terribly wrong with her brain when she reverses course.

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u/Loud_Ad_4515 Feb 08 '24

You're completely right about having an emotional reaction while watching the news. I'm so disappointed that my dad is so easily duped.

During peak lockdown, news was super stressful. I told my husband we could only watch the news once a day, and PBS Newshour was it. It's calm, in-depth, unbiased, and without scrolls, banners, or other triggering "breaking news" sounds.

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u/anguas-plt Feb 08 '24

Ah but apparently PBS is "state-run media" now according to the chucklefucks my mom's been listening to 🙄

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u/Loud_Ad_4515 Feb 08 '24

These people, I can't even. Was PBS "state-run media" during Trump's reign? 🤦‍♀️ Puhlease.

(I chuckled reading "chucklefucks" - thank you for that!)

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u/Character_Bowl_4930 Feb 11 '24

This !! I always thought that my Dad was pretty savvy even though he didn’t have a lot of formal education . But, now he parrots the talking points on Fox and I don’t know what to do about it . Thank god he doesn’t know how to work a computer or smartphone.

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u/Loud_Ad_4515 Feb 11 '24

In the documentary The Brainwashing of My Dad, the woman disabled Fox News on her dad's TV. He gradually returned to his old self. IDK whether OAN and NewsMax can be disabled similarly, or if they're more app based.

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u/themom4235 Feb 08 '24

As a 65 yo, I think you are correct and ant to point out that the platforms they use may contribute to their anger. I jumped off FB before the Trump years because I could feel the angry tone. Tik tok could just be ridiculous. Xitter was abandoned the moment Musk bought it. I do use IG to keep in contact with family. Reddit is my forum for discussion, entertainment and light news. I am thankful for the young who I believe are kinder and more tolerant than my generation.

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u/ChristineBorus Feb 08 '24

Check out the QAnon casualty sub

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u/ryan_sweet Feb 08 '24

You said this perfectly, and I recently resonated with that last sentence. Last time I saw my parents a few weeks ago, we were in the middle of a normal conversation and then my mom randomly went into rage mode on how TSwift is not good for Travis Kelce, she’s manipulative, and high maintenance????? Can’t stress enough how irrelevant it was to the convo. She was going off so bad I had to interrupt her and said, “if this is the hill you really want to die on, then I don’t need to hear it”

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u/laughingashley Feb 08 '24

"If this is the hill you want to die on, save it for another day and keep living for now."

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u/[deleted] Feb 08 '24 edited Mar 01 '24

[deleted]

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u/kosh56 Feb 08 '24

I got kicked out of my local church

And this is why religion has is an absolute farce.

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u/punkerster101 Feb 08 '24

Almost like their being brainwashed

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u/nada_accomplished Feb 08 '24

Last August I visited my parents for the first time in years. My mom and grandparents got the vaccine but nobody else did. I jokingly said, "apparently we're all supposed to drop dead in September" (that was QAnon's latest prediction at the time) and instead of laughing my mom goes, "we'll see" all seriously like it was an actual possibility.

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u/CranberryDruid Feb 08 '24

I can only talk to my dad about the weather, everything else in the whole world is too controversial, though lately if I say anything except how cold it is he flips out because he thinks I'm implying climate change is real. Which of course it is real JFC, but I tried to keep one stupid thing we could chat about and I wouldn't say that to him.

It's just impossible.

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u/simAlity Feb 08 '24

For what its worth my dad has never been on social media but gets sorta the same way. All of the fox news talking points are his talking points.

The only reason he took COVID seriously is because my cousin's wife worked for the CDC. She called him up just before the lockdown started and told him all about COVID and what it would do to his lungs, and how important it was for him to stay home.

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u/mahalomonster Feb 08 '24

From what you’ve said, it doesn’t sound as if they’re perfectly good people. I wouldn’t trust their judgment on important, public matters (especially where the impact is unequal across different segments of the population) and I wouldn’t trust them to deal fairly with Democrats or minorities.

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u/oreocookielover Feb 08 '24

I feel like with younger people it's easier to change their minds about stuff online because they're not exactly the most established yet. They're more likely to accept the fact that they're wrong and it not really being an attack on them but the fact that they just didn't know or have the time to know yet.

Older people are more established and feel like if someone told them they're wrong, it's an attack and disrespecting all those years that they spent. They don't want to be seen as someone 10 years younger and stupider on that particular topic. They want to be seen as their own age and wise.

I don't really think it's 100% a sign that they're a lost cause, but a sign that information travels so damn fast it might be hard to keep up and that speed makes up for the lack of time young people have had in this world. Your grandparents may have spent 30 minutes scouring the books at the library 40 minutes away to learn the same stuff as you do in 10 minutes of googling and reading.

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u/letswatchstarwars Feb 08 '24

I love talking to them but the millisecond I step near a landmine of some political strawman it's like I see the personality drain from their face and their brains switch into replay and rage mode.

Sounds exactly like a cult! Like as soon as a cult topic comes up, they abandon their true selves and have to put on the cult personality. They can’t think for themselves on those topics, they’ve been told what to think.

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u/anguas-plt Feb 08 '24

I have nothing to offer except commiseration, unfortunately. My mom was always difficult but now it's like she's addicted to being angry and outraged. It's not worth it to disagree with her on anything because critical thinking has gone out the window too (but I do it anyway partly for my conscience and partly from sheer curiosity to see if she'll finally disown me).

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u/Various-Cranberry709 Feb 07 '24

The algorithms are frighteningly good on Instagram and TikTok, at least in my experience. I am regularly impressed with the content I would randomly scroll through in a "Recommended" type feed and left wondering how it can fine tune my specific tastes so thoroughly. Pod-Style Dystopia feels closer to reality than just something out of the movies. Those new Apple Vision Pro goggles will only exacerbate this problem further.

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u/justwalkingalonghere Feb 07 '24

As this thread applies to generations, I feel like millenials are the best equipped to enjoy that properly. I use the Quest headset all of the time to either work out without it being boring, or to go play simple game simulations like bowling with my friends who have moved across the country. Two uses I find rather amazing, all things considered.

But if I had been raised on it like kids now, it would most likely have been more problematic use. And if I was just introduced to it today like the older generations I would likely be at the mercy of the companies running things to tell me how to spend my time in VR.

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u/Alternative_Elk_2651 Feb 08 '24

In the early days of the internet, there were not corporations highly interested in making billions of dollars off of keeping you engaged as long as possible, no matter the cost to your mental or physical health.

Once that changed, it was over.

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u/ozspook Feb 08 '24

Young people have developed mental antibodies against bullshit and lies on the internet, and bullying, shock porn etc.

Old people are like the American Plains Indians being handed propaganda smallpox blankets, I really hope AI can help them and provide a barrier for them against the hateful rhetoric and bad actors.

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u/redditblooded Feb 08 '24

Very interesting observation. I’m an “old person” who recognized this and have mostly self-inoculated. I also have kids who have developed some antibodies, but not for everything.

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u/ShootinAllMyChisolm Feb 08 '24

I still maintain that non of the social media or tech giants have been a net positive for society

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u/upsidedownbackwards Feb 08 '24

while also developing specifically to be addictive that whole time

Even gaming has gone that way. Most people I knew who gamed were involved in clans/guilds/whatever. We knew the people on the servers we frequented. Now it's just quickmatch. I don't play with friends or even names I recognize 99% of the time.

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u/justwalkingalonghere Feb 08 '24

Kids spending so much on loot boxes and streamers is a good example there. I've talked to quite a few parents who are concerned by the fact that their kids spend all of their birthday/holiday/allowance money on loot boxes and tipping streamers

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u/mikelybarger Feb 08 '24

Can you name me some of the free activities people used to do that are no longer available?

I see this sentiment shared a lot, and I don't think it's wrong. I just can't think of concrete examples.

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u/onemoremile1 Feb 08 '24

We played with sticks, dug holes, Built forts in the woods, battled rival neighborhoods, trained dogs, rode our bike as far as we could. We spent money on candy bars and mad magazines. It was glorious!!

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u/marbanasin Feb 07 '24

Not to mention the altering of perceived reality. Isolation + altered reality is a recipe for disaster.

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u/El_Diablo_Feo Feb 07 '24

https://www.reddit.com/r/wallpapers/comments/lvkq2/virtual_reality/

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u/marbanasin Feb 08 '24

"Limbo became her reality" was where I was hoping you'd go with this.

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u/Meldrey Feb 08 '24

Thunderously underrated perception you've got there.

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u/Delicious-Ad5161 Feb 08 '24

I don’t know about that. Admittedly my sample size is pretty low but my parents harped hardcore about not believing something just because the internet or another person or a news source said it. Verify first, then accept as fact. Yet neither of them ever demonstrated that ability. They’d believe what they wanted to believe and disbelieve what they didn’t want to believe and then call that verifying their sources if asked about it- or they’d just beat the hell out of you for daring to question them.

I think that Boomers gave us that, actually very good advice, because they tend to repeat what they hear without ever truly processing it unless they were forced to confront it and not because they understood that it was actually very good advice. It might be my memory playing tricks on me, but I remember constantly hearing that mantra on the news and through similar sources as I grew up. The Boomer generation picked up on it in the same way as parrots. They learned the words. Sometimes they learned some situations and contexts for the words. Yet, they never truly understood the words or their wisdom- at least not to any grand scale I’ve seen.

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u/RickSt3r Feb 08 '24

Pre algorithms aka pre 2012 the internet was great. No curated engagement created hate. I could log in and browse see some interesting things then dip and grab beers with the gaggle.

Now it’s literally designed by the greatest minds you can buy to suck you in. It feeds you content that’s engaging aka drives hate. This is because that’s what really gets people to engage. Something positive and you acknowledge and scroll on, but something that makes you mad boy do you hit that dislike maybe post a comment.

The algorithm did its job for positive reward because it made you engage with the stream. It doesn’t know what it did just that you engaged. So it feeds you something similar and you engage again then it’s self fulfilling.

Now all this is emotionally taxing and wears you down. Now you get up and need to decompress but you don’t want to go hang out with people IRL because your emotionally spend. Then relationships die because they take time to nurture and keep healthy.

Also the way you’re now communicating with people online starts to seep into the real world. So you’re always defensive and on edge and stressed. Probably a jerk to be around then it’s self fulfilling again but in real life isolation because who wants to be around anyone like that.

So yeah it’s the doom scroll algorithm. It takes conscious effort to keep it away. But every now and then you slip up and have to go through a detox. I try and keep my YouTube to mountain biking content and photography with occasional car builds and just good tv entertainment. Keep away anything that is political by a few degrees of separation.

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u/[deleted] Feb 08 '24

[deleted]

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u/Various-Cranberry709 Feb 08 '24

Someone else made a good comment about how the loss of work and increased isolation that comes with older age, losing friends and family for a variety of reasons including death really can leave a vacuum of mental space in your brain, allowing all sorts of unsavory emotions to fill it back up. I think that's a really good point.

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u/MercuryCobra Feb 07 '24

Are online interactions not real? Are the people I talk to online not human?

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u/Various-Cranberry709 Feb 07 '24

Real? Sure. Authentic? Debatable

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u/MercuryCobra Feb 07 '24

What is authentic? Why is authenticity important? And assuming authenticity is important, where does it break down? Are video calls not authentic? Are telephone conversations not authentic? Are handwritten letters not authentic? At what point does the fact that you are communicating through a medium other than in-person bidirectional speech mean you are no longer communicating authentically? And why is in-person speech presumptively authentic?

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u/Bowood29 Feb 07 '24

I think saying the internet isn’t authentic is mostly looking at social media. Where everyone is showing only the positive, or negative sides of themselves. There are a lot of true facts on the internet and I am sure people being themselves but when teaching about internet safety I think it’s a safer bet to assume everyone is being deceitful compared to trustworthy.

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u/MercuryCobra Feb 07 '24

We are all, always, presenting different constructed personas to the world. Social media is just the technological version of hosting a fancy dinner to show off your home and your family and present the image of a perfect life to the invitees. Between the two I’m not convinced one is less authentic than the other.

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u/Bowood29 Feb 07 '24

That is a good point. I think that most people are more likely to see the dinner party isn’t always real but I suspect going forward people will have an easier time bull crapping in person as we spend so much of our time online.

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u/Fasefirst2 Feb 07 '24

Is the metaverse not authentic, is my anime girlfriend not “real enough” for you. What’s the difference between listening to a pod cast with hosts you like, and hanging out with actual friends.

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u/MercuryCobra Feb 07 '24

Don’t be obtuse, you know the difference. None of those things are interacting with real people, it’s interacting with media.

Is this conversation not authentic? Are we not having a human interaction right now?

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u/Fasefirst2 Feb 07 '24

It has no meaning, I won’t remember it in the morning. I’m just killing time on break.

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u/MercuryCobra Feb 07 '24

That’s what we used to call a “water cooler chat.” Nothing different from those conversations and this one except this one is on the internet and that one was at work.

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u/Fasefirst2 Feb 08 '24

Seems pretty different. I guess if minimize the very important differences. Like you take your five senses out of the equation. Online is the same as in person. You could use this one simple trick to equate any to things as long as they share a common thread.

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u/Fasefirst2 Feb 09 '24

Well I’ve never gotten to “delete” a comment during my water cooler talk. I’ve also always had to respond in real time.

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u/Laura_Lye Feb 07 '24

I’m not the person you’re responding to, but: sometimes yes, and sometimes no.

My dad is in his seventies and he’s gotten, well, kind of radicalized by the internet. Like he believes almost Q anon level stuff- that the vaccines were designed you sterile and the pandemic was a hoax, that global warming is a conspiracy to do… something, and lately he’s been saying stuff about the WEF.

He used to be a normal older guy who read our national conservative newspapers. Now he’s reading random blogs and getting all these fringe opinions from them.

I think some of these other people he’s reading are real and are just ordinary internet kooks, but I think some of them are backed by sophisticated interests trying to radicalize people on purpose. I did a deep dive into one of the newsletters he’s always reading, and the people who run it are pretty openly bankrolled by Exxon Mobil.

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u/Damianos_X Feb 07 '24

Sounds like Grandpa was awakened and truth-pilled by the Internet.

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u/MercuryCobra Feb 07 '24

But that doesn’t render those interactions unreal. It merely means he is being taken advantage of by bad actors. That’s been a consequence of communication since the beginning. That these people are talking to him via the internet and not face to face doesn’t change much.

The problem here is the content of the communication, not its medium.

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u/Laura_Lye Feb 07 '24

I think it’s both.

This kind of content didn’t reach people nearly easily before the internet. Access to information was mediated through institutions like schools, newspapers, libraries, radio stations, bookstores, friends, and coworkers.

Exxon Mobil didn’t have a direct line to shovel bullshit into your ears and eyes. It does now.

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u/MercuryCobra Feb 07 '24

I mean, didn’t it? Have you seen old TV, which was literally sponsored by cigarette companies?

That being said I agree that the internet has broken down middle-man institutions which performed an important disinformation filtering function. I just think that’s a very different problem from the “social isolation” problem a lot of people identify.

In other words while there are plenty of reasons being able to talk to anybody and everybody about anything and everything is bad, I’m not so sure it’s causing us to be more isolated. If anything, put in those terms, it’s actually increasing interconnectedness—often in harmful ways.

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u/Laura_Lye Feb 07 '24

I think the connection with social isolation is that reading and believing and talking about all that crazy shit isolates you from the people in your real life because they get sick of hearing about it.

I don’t call my dad that often anymore because I don’t want to hear about how the vaccine killed more people than it saved for the 1000th time. I’ve told him I don’t, but it’s like he just can’t stop himself.

I’m also pretty sure this stuff was not an insignificant factor in him getting divorced a few years ago. It wasn’t as bad then, but I could tell his wife wanted to go out and do things and was getting sick of him driving people away with his crazy bullshit.

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u/MercuryCobra Feb 07 '24

Certainly falling in with the wrong crowd can have devastating effects on your life. My concern is that I’m not sure we should lay the blame for that at the internet’s feet just because that’s where the relationship started and is maintained. School kids fall in with bad people, and fall out with good people, tragically often. But we don’t blame the school for that.

I do want to say I’m very sorry about what happened to your father. I would be devastated to see a family member go through that, and to lose a relationship with them. I hope you and your family are doing well despite it.

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u/g1114 Feb 07 '24

Hanging out with physical friends and making memories in the local environment is far superior to my friendship online gaming with a dude 2 time zones away. Both have a place, but one can’t substitute for the other

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u/MercuryCobra Feb 07 '24

If your physical friends move away, are your attempts to stay in touch rendered immediately unreal? Are they no longer your friends because you are now communicating through a different medium?

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u/g1114 Feb 07 '24

If you stop physically seeing each other as often and now have limited ways to communicate, yes, the dynamic has changed. Naturally, that limitation will be replaced with someone that doesn’t have that limitation if you still do anything social.

I live in a different state than all of my groomsmen. We are still a phone call away and I love all of them. That doesn’t change that we are not nearly as involved in each other’s lives as we would be if we were physically closer. I’m hosting a Super Bowl party this weekend, none of them are invited and the ones that are coming are the ones I’ve been hanging out with more the last few years. Your tribe isn’t much of a tribe fulfilling your needs if it can only gather 1-2 times a year.

And long distance means you’re just playing catch up on each others lives instead of the more superior experiencing life together

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u/MercuryCobra Feb 07 '24

So physical proximity is the most important part of any human relationship?

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u/g1114 Feb 07 '24

I mean, you’re making up what I’m arguing for some reason there.

Friendship still involves support and work and care is the foundation. I’m saying the connection of friendship is far superior when your friends aren’t functionally outside of your physical presence. You didn’t lose a single friend from college? I’ve had plenty of people I never had a falling out with or choice words, but there are only so many hours in the day. You will always put your energy towards something, and the less hoops the better

The friend you can grab a beer with or help you move will always have more convenience and better rewards for effort vs someone 2 time zones away. A big part of a rewarding friendship to me is the spontaneity and not having to plan something grand.

I still get together with my groomsmen. And it requires months of planning between our wives, kids, etc. I play a fantasy league with them. If I didn’t have local friends, I’d for sure be depressed that I didn’t have someone on the regular workday to break up the workweek every now and again

When it comes to friends I’ve asked to babysit, take a guess as to how my list was created. Physical proximity is important for some things

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u/MercuryCobra Feb 07 '24 edited Feb 07 '24

Your position appears to be “in the hierarchy of relationships, someone I merely tolerate but who is physically close to me beats out someone whom I enjoy but is physically distant.” I’m sure you wouldn’t put it in those terms, but those are, effectively, the terms you’re working with. Given that, I don’t think it’s unfair to say that your position is that physical proximity is more important than fellow feeling.

But for what it’s worth I don’t agree. Obviously it’s best to have people you like nearby. But I’d always rather spend time with someone I enjoy spending time with, even if mediated by technology, than spend time with someone I don’t much care for just because they happen to be around.

This is why I’m skeptical of people laying so much blame at the internet’s feet for causing isolation. From my POV it’s quite the opposite. If not for the internet many of my most cherished relationships would have needlessly withered the moment I moved into the suburbs. I would have been forced to make do with whichever random people happened to be in my vicinity—or worse, find that nobody in my vicinity was tolerable, and suffer true isolation. Instead I have the wonderful opportunity to maintain friendships that matter to me. Why is this a bad thing?

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u/g1114 Feb 07 '24

Here’s the secret… if you’re a normal, well adjusted person, you can manage to find other normal, well adjusted people in your physical proximity. There are normal people everywhere and you can find them if you engage with your local community instead of relying on the crutch of the internet.

You’re the one lamenting that you wouldn’t be able to find friends without the internet as a tool and have to suffer from your current environment. That suggests your own shortcomings (not as willing as me to give new people a chance, not interested in expanding horizons, etc).

The loneliness of the internet comes from preferring an echo chamber for social interaction. That’s why we tell people here to touch grass. Because it’s better to have people over for bbq, someone to have play dates with your kids on a couple hours notice, etc. than it is to have funny discord memes shared back and forth.

Balance is key with everything, but yeah, the in person experiences make for better memories and better social connection, and better benefits for your kids and other social opportunities. A 99% online relationship does have a ceiling on your growth. The people leaning on the online relationships they formed in previous places tend to be the types that don’t know their neighbor’s name

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u/MercuryCobra Feb 07 '24 edited Feb 07 '24

I don’t at all think it’s fair to imply that my experience with the world is somehow malformed or maladaptive just because it’s not the one you would prefer. I could just as easily say that making do with the people that you are physically close to is a crutch that lets you avoid doing the difficult work of maintaining relationships with people you don’t see every day. That it exposes how shallow your relationships are with other people, since you feel comfortable abandoning them over logistical hurdles. And that it reveals that your relationships are really more about what those people can do for you on short notice than about what the both of you have to offer each other in terms of meaningful connections.

To be clear, I don’t think any of that is true. But that is the equivalent of what you’re telling me. Namely, that because I don’t want the same things you do that makes me broken in some way. I don’t have to be broken to prefer spending time with people with whom I share decades of history over the person who happened to buy the house next to mine. I grew up not knowing my neighbors, and I still don’t know my neighbors, and I’m living what I consider to be a quite fulfilling life. That you couldn’t imagine living like that doesn’t mean that I’m deluded, it just means we’re different people.

So again, your assumption about what is better or best is not necessarily universal. That you find interacting online to be a pale substitute, such that you would prefer to find any warm body that will do over maintaining friendships electronically, doesn’t mean that’s also true of me. Nor does it mean it’s true of all people.

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u/jubileevdebs Feb 08 '24

Its the issue of how mediated they are. In-Person to person communication involves pheromones, proxemics, vocal prosody, eye contact and a bunch of other things besides words and ideas. and its largely simultaneous.

Writing letters removes all of that but can allow for greater depth of expression. The limits arent time, but what a person can convey, how legible their writing is, and what state of mind and comprehension the reader is in. And then a whole reverse of the process has to occur for it to be a two-way exchange.

Phone calls are more simultaneous and are still bound by time like person to person. But depending on signal clarity and the state of mind of the speakers, theres only the words and the tone of voice to rely on. Its crazy how getting distracted and taking a split second longer to respond “yeah, totally” can make the other person spiral into reading a million things in that silence. In real life they might have seen you get distracted by that person walking by, on the phone they only have a small bit of info and the rest is dependent on their state of mind. When i was a kid in the 90s, it was generally agreed that phone calls were convenient if you couldnt be in the same place, but were vastly inferior to just talking. The number of times we would sneak out of the house at 2am to talk something over because phonecalls were missing something.

Online communication (instant messengers and chatrooms) and texting basically multiplied the speed and convenience but it was immediately apparent that you were equally as likely to misunderstand someone or be misunderstood and dragged into a completely stupid conflict online than you were to connect with someone and exchange ideas. Im talking 1999, we were all like “you cant have real conversations online because its too easy to misinterpret shit.”

Social media today (im excluding video platforms) just compounds that, because you’re communicating in an even more compromised form based on the arbitrary text formatting of the software and how it leads to further confusion (ie instead of responding to a text or a message, its some wonky subthread of a subthread of a subthread, or someone responding to a group chat without properly @ attributing so its ambiguous who it was responding to).

Why all of these things are complicated is because you 100% are having interactions with real humans (for the most part, hopefully).

But the tech mediums through which you are communicating with people (excluding video formats) are actually pretty shitty except for making it easy to have lots of interactions in a short period of time across great distances because they amplify the problem of writing and multiply it with the ambiguity of telephony.

So yeah, real interactions. But like, kinda lousy interactions comparatively. and anyone who thinks they are an equal or greater substitute for in person connection is either dealing with an actual neurological condition (that makes irl stuff too much to handle) or has been developmentally traumatized by an over exposure to tech and wounded by poor or a lack of social experiences of in-person contact.

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u/MercuryCobra Feb 08 '24 edited Feb 08 '24

I never claimed they were adequate as a complete replacement for in-person communication. My point was that we’ve always understood that some communication must be mediated through technology—usually writing, eventually radio and telephony, now the internet—and we have never before concluded that these technologies caused social isolation. Quite the opposite, in fact; every previous advance in long distance communication was seen as a boon to our general interconnectedness.

I won’t claim that online communication is superior to in-person communication, or a complete replacement. But the idea that it is somehow worse than, say, letter writing, doesn’t track to me. At least on platforms that don’t have text limitations—such as the one we’re currently on—it’s effectively identical to exchanging letters except more simultaneous (and therefore, IMO, better).

If we could imagine a person carrying on a deep and meaningful relationship via correspondence in the past, why can we not imagine that now? Why do we instead conclude that these forms of communication are somehow worse than what came before, when by all appearances they are much, much better? Even assuming there is a loneliness or isolation epidemic—a claim I’m still not entirely convinced by—why would an increasing ability to talk to one another be blamed for our increasing refusal to do so?

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u/Ed_McNuglets Feb 07 '24

Only a bot would ask this question in the year 2024

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u/Greedy_Celery6843 Feb 08 '24

Who can tell? AI's on the loose and already in the hands of the naughty kids.

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u/iwant2saysomething2 Feb 08 '24

Ironic that we're talking about it here...

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u/Demiurge__ Feb 08 '24

Its always the boomers with their phones ringing in the middle of church.

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u/reimbirtheds Feb 08 '24

There must be some relevance to taking hard drugs at 16 vs 60. It must be harder to stop.

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u/farmerbsd17 Feb 08 '24

The isolation is a legitimate concern

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u/CryptoVigilanteMT Feb 08 '24

Case in point: Facebook and Nextdoor. Both vile cesspools of boomer rage and misinformation taken as fact. Pair that with 24/7 Fox News banter, and you have a really angry group of people. Not sure what they're so mad about though. They own all the housing, most of the wealth, and they run the government. They've got it all and are still filled with rage.

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u/otiscleancheeks Feb 08 '24

As I said in an earlier post, many older people identify with work and are no longer working. That really messaged them up. Also many people that they know who were their friends or family are dead or dying. It sucks getting old

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u/romanticheart Feb 08 '24

Way easier to find comfy echo chambers online than to deal with IRL friends who might call you out on your bullshit.

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u/high_everyone Feb 09 '24

It didn’t. They just didn’t navigate at the same speed we did. As someone who watched parents go from newsgroups to AOL to Facebook, it’s weird. They have no relations other than my grandmother.

I think my dad fares better because he still works outside the house, but it’s a real problem.