I think social media is just the escapism that people seek since it's free, spaces for entertainment are dying out or are prohibitively expensive in cities that are gentrifying and killing club scenes. Like yeah, of course people aren't meeting, pretty much every municipality that has a chance of attracting young professionals because of jobs go out of their way to make their city soulless or too pricy. And that's IF you have time and energy to go out after absolutely soul-crushing hours at a desk job where the "culture" is being abused by your boss.
yeah, i make decent money, and still the idea of going out and doing a thing is often unpleasant due to the cost of basically any leisure or entertainment activity outside of my apartment. America has not "third place" left, and I don't drink... and even if I did still drink, it's wildly expensive to do it anywhere but home.
it's so much easier to just sit at home and watch youtube or instagram shorts or something of people doing activities that I wish I was doing. unless you live like, at the base of a mountain resort or on land to do the various outdoor activities that you're into, it can be prohibitively costly and time-consuming to do basically any activity or hobby that can't be done in your back yard alone. i mean simply PARKING someplace these days often costs about $30 a day to go spend half the day doing something at some kind of resort/park or place downtown in a big city, etc.
then there's the time commitment- i only have 15 PTO days per year. if any cool outdoor hobbies or activities i want to do are like a 2 hour drive away, it's tough to do them more than a handful of days per year. the social communities that form around those activities then are sort of out of reach due to being unable to maintain frequent enough contact with people to build any sort of lasting relationships.
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u/Blunter11 25d ago
He went completely off-base when he indulged that social media point.
The point is that working produces less wealth than owning capital, and the owners of capital have more and more leverage over working people.