Capitalism and convenience are making us lonely(medium.com) |
Capitalism and convenience are making us lonely(medium.com) |
Given only ~25% of the US population exercises regularly, this bodes poorly for actively being social. I suspect we need to "artificially" engineer living conditions to push people together naturally.
https://gist.github.com/numtel/28ffb7181ad1a296a077db76c474b...
Life has choices.
The point is that it used to not be a choice. Most people were constantly socialising because their work involved lots of socialising, and their housing was shared with lots of people. Those things are a lot less prevalent than they used to be.
At school it's very easy to make friends not just because you're a kid or that you're choosing to socialise, but just by default you spend 6+ hours a day with the same people.
It's easy, lazy, and politically opportunistic to attribute social problems to capitalism.
And ultimately wrong - because capitalism isn't some complex system of social organisation.
It simply means the efficient allocation of capital.
Dismissing criticism based on this arbitrary criterion is lazy. Someone being unaware of or unwilling to present an alternative doesn't mean there isn't one, but especially it doesn't mean they're wrong about their criticism.
> And ultimately wrong - because capitalism isn't some complex system of social organisation.
> It simply means the efficient allocation of capital.
Have you ever played the game go? One of the really incredible things about it is that has very few very simple rules, you can adequately explain them in 5 minutes. But the ways they interact with each other, and create and resolve influences and constraints is incredibly complex and it takes years to develop a full and reliable intuition for all of the consequences of those simple rules. Even then it's common to see a pattern and understand that it is true, and must derive from the rules, but be unable to articulate the mechanism precisely.
When we talk about capitalism we are talking about all of these second and third order effects on power and influence and selfhood and our lives, not the handful of simple rules they may derive from. People aren't generally much stupider than you; what you find simple we do as well. And yet we still find value in discussing it in these terms, find that it can reveal understanding more than just "simply efficient allocation of capital."
So speaking of "easy, lazy, and politically opportunistic" that's exactly what I will accuse your comment of. A shallow dismissal based on your own sense of intellectual superiority.
It’s so weird. Some things are not business opportunities. If people are feeling lonely because society is a mess, that’s not a business opportunity. That’s a social issue that should be solved.