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Antonomon  1yr ago (novum.substack.com)   Edited 1yr ago   2532 thread views

The Social Recession: By the Numbers

novum.substack.com

Fewer friends, relationships on the decline, delayed adulthood, trust at an all-time low, and many diseases of despair. The prognosis is not great.

In 2000, political scientist Robert Putnam published his book Bowling Alone to much acclaim and was first comprehensive look at the decline of social activities in the United States. Now, however, all those same trends have fallen off a cliff. This particular piece looks at sociability trends across various metrics—friendships, relationships, life milestones, trust, and so on—and gives a bird's eye view of the social state of things in 2022.

A piece that I wrote that really picked up on HackerNews recently with over 300+ comments. Some excellent comments there, I suggest reading it over.

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I have to agree with the comments on HackerNews about WFH making this worse. I am a deeply socially averse person and I would probably be miserable at the office and even I think staying at home for 8 hrs and literally never seeing most of your coworker's faces for months is a problem.

If you have a social network the extra flexibility is good. If you don't... your chances of building one via work are...slim to say the least. I moved to a new city, basically losing all my connections, so I feel this acutely.

From a career perspective I also doubt it's good to be a face on a monitor to bosses and coworkers, especially if you're entry level like I am.

From a career perspective I also doubt it's good to be a face on a monitor to bosses and coworkers, especially if you're entry level like I am.

I think it depends on whether the company is full remote. At my company there's a new guy I'm familiar with. I have no idea where he live. His manager is in Montana, the other senior guy on his team is in New Orleans, and at most they all met each other once at the offsite. (Probably in 2023 there won't be a $3-5k/person offsite due to cost cutting.) I can't see how it's hurting him.

I suspect it would be different if his manager and half his team were in NYC, while he was just a face on the monitor from wherever. Highly recommend against that if you're entry level.

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