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"They repeatedly feel rejected. They are frustrated when at a social get-together they once again fail to connect with anyone and return home feeling alone," she said.
"How Soon Is Now?" by The Smiths:
There's a club if you'd like to go
You could meet somebody who really loves you
So you go and you stand on your own
And you leave on your own
And you go home and you cry
And you want to die
44 years ago
This shouldn't his as hard as it does.
Thanks for the tunes!
People nowadays seem to forget that socialising is a skill. And to learn a skill one must learn by putting effort into and initially failing a lot.
Social platforms give the sensation of allowing one to skip this by jumping straight into ongoing conversations for a brief post, but that's also not building any social skill.
There’s no place to socialize though. I wouldn’t know where I could meet people my age (20s) that doesn’t cost money or includes activities that I don’t like (e.g. clubbing).
honestly as much as I feel similarly, it hurts me to know people your age are struggling in such a way.
My 20s were filled with opportunity, things to do, and it didn't even break the bank. My university had a bar connected to the building, I think pints of alright beer were about £1.50.
I really hope things get better soon. Y'all should at least have the options of things like I did, yet half the things around me closed down or are priced out of range now!
Has that changed over the years? Have such places and activities disappeared or gone up in price?
I mean, everything got more expensive. And I do hear that more and more youth centres and such are closing down, taking away places to socialise for young people in particular.
What has disappeared for me personally though is school/uni as a place to socialise at. I’ve never had the need before to search out specific places to meet people. It just happened organically. Now I don’t even know where I‘d even find new people. I’m stuck with just the few I knew back in school and uni and they mostly don’t live anywhere close by.
And I do hear that more and more youth centres and such are closing down, taking away places to socialise for young people in particular.
Is that due to austerity or something else?
I can't speak for wherever the original commentator ist from. In Germany most youth centres were partly or completely volunteer run. There are fewer people volunteering today, so the centres don't find enough people to open up or supervise events/gatherings. And at some point then they're closing forever.
On that note, looking for a volunteer group near you is also an awesome way to socialise.
Any hunch as to why there's fewer volunteers today?
Just some personal anecdotes and comments on the matter.
In my opinion, there appears to be a societal trend towards more egoistical behaviour in people. Whereas in the past, more people strived to work for their greater community and society (at least here in Europe), in the last couple of years American individualism and with that, a more egoistic focus became more prevalent. Many people today wonder why they should give their time freely when they could use it for other interests, paid employment, or (quality) alone time. Even disregarding that some of their hobbies can only be done because others still volunteer their time (sports coaches, etc.).
The "I want to use my spare time for myself" attitude is one of the most heard answers when I am asking people why they won't join us in volunteer work (be it community work or sports).
Fewer* people
Thanks, I need to practice my English skills a bit. I'm getting rusty.
There are so many places that cost nothing or very little, especially in Germany. Don't get into the doomer mindset that is so prevalent on the internet, that tell you that it's the same suburban car infested shithole that is north america. There are so many clubs (Vereine) that struggle to find new members, but you're right that you often won't meet too many people around your age, it's mostly older people and children, but that also depends on what the club is for. Be the change you want to see in the world.
I have zero money to go out and many formerly free ways to socialize have been commodified beyond my reach. It's not impossible but it takes a lot more time and effort than it used to.
I think the more important issue is that that social media, to an extent, acts as a substitute for face-to-face social interaction - you can talk with online strangers, or all those old classmates and college friends who aren't even living in the same city as you do. Rejection and being awkward sucks, so it's easy to stick with the inferior substitute, but you're still missing out on face-to-face interaction, human touch and meeting potential romantic partners.
You see it on dating apps as well. "Uhm, don't even try to start with a "hi" or "how are you?" Be a bit more creative."
When was the last time they met a person? You can be as creative as you want, all i know about you is 3 pictures and a weird attitude.
I learned that skill but socializing has become too cumbersome in today‘s social landscape where almost everyone is either online on an app that doesn‘t incentivize equal relationships (Think Instagram, Youtube, TikTok) or busy hustling and making insane posts on LinkedIn. Just meeting up is something nobody does anymore it seems.
Why would you require a good socializing skill though? Making this some requirement doesn't seem to solve any issue. Just let people be the way they are. They should still be able to have friends.
It's not a requirement per se, but people without social skills make contact with others harder. The proliferation of online "meeting places" lead to the degradation of social skills that is then making people connect more difficult, making everyone lonelier.
In my opinion at least.
It's interesting that you oppose "being yourself" to "socializing skills"...
I am saying that because it seemed to me like you're implying people need to learn and train their socializing skills, even when it's not in their nature.
Can confirm, I'm German and haven't made a new friend in over 10 years and most of the old ones live far away. I was kind of getting somewhere at one point in the middle, but that completely crashed and burned for love reasons.
I used to make actual friends and have meaningful relationships in german internet forums. We would meet up somewhat frequently. Come to think of it I haven‘t had that since installing Discord. In fact I have not made a single friend on Discord in nearly 10 years. Everyone on there is too busy with themselves, so it‘s not that surprising I guess. There was a time when I was a trainee and made a lot of friends through room mates but that‘s all gone since I moved and the pandemic.
I struggle with this as well.
I wonder if maintaining a social life could be more difficult today, because the "social infrastructure" isn't what it used to be. Your society's habits don't carry you as much as your parents', so you have to do more work yourself.
And then you may even not know how to do the work - as other commenter here said: being social is a skill that is learned. I haven't figured it out the puzzle myself. I'm a few years after college where many people just moved away and I'm in the same spiral that other people in my situation describe.
My coping approach has been more like "leave the house" rather than "meet new people" which sorta works for me, for now. Being around people is also humanizing. At the risk of describing something banal, I'll describe my learnings below.
One of the first struggles I've come across is that staying up to date with what's happening in the city is work. As I described in the beginning, the reason that building social capital for yourself is so hard is that the social infrastructure isn't there. One of the best ways to learn what's going on in the city is to have something mentioned to you in a conversation, or to be invited by someone who's already going. You passively learn or participate by leaning back on the other person. It's expensive to be poor.
The way reduce the amount of work is to find cyclical events. That way, you learn about the date just once then keep coming. I've found that the best way to learn about them is to subscribe to e-mail newsletters of cultural institutions (museums, galleries, operas, theaters, cultural centers). Some will never send you an e-mail, but some are pretty active. Sometimes the e-mails contain info that isn't available anywhere else - my local museum holds free visits with a tour guide every Sunday at 9AM, but that isn't mentioned anywhere. The benefit with e-mail is that you're passively being poked by the institution about an event. What doesn't work in such a way is e.g. Instagram, where you have to open the app and doomscroll through unrelated things in the eventual hope of finding some event.
Instead of e-mail you can also sometimes use RSS but completing the list of institutions, finding the feeds and then remembering to read through them is very work-like, as opposed to e-mail.
This of course doesn't solve the problem of loneliness, as you'll be going somewhere, but still alone. In spoonfeeding-a-social-novice terms, random events are a bit further in the social pipeline, where you're "not supposed to" go alone, but where you're going because you've already met people people to go with in earlier in the social pipeline in hobby groups.
The connection to political extremism seems as obvious as it is concerning, and I haven't seen much research on that. This also relates to the topic of "male loneliness epidemic" - there is a particular radicalization pipeline that is IMO much more likely to draw in lonely men than lonely women, so even if men are just as lonely as women, the outcomes won't necessarily be the same.
the extreme right ideologies seem to be effective at making their movements feel like social communities even at large scales. Really shitty fandom communities complete with cosplaying and their own fictional universe and two dimensional enemies but communities nonetheless.
A topic that has been discussed before, but not way enough and no solution has been reached.
The death of third spaces.
Honestly, I'm not sure if that really applies to Germany. A lot of downtown areas are kind of dying because they don't know what to do with the space that is left empty when stores close, but it's usually not the kind of store you would consider a third place. I suppose those stores drew people into the downtown areas and then people also went to a café or something, but the cafés are still there and people still go there. I haven't heard much about closures of theatres, museums, libraries and so on. What kind of third spaces are you missing?
Young people who suffer from loneliness are more susceptible to authoritarian thinking, according to Claudia Neu. The sociologist has studied what happens when loneliness causes young people to stray down a path of political extremism.
I'm wondering whether Tiktok - or (most) other social media platforms - is a good way to discuss lonliness as the article mentions. The algorithms will likely exploit that rather then helping you to find a solution.
That's a general question: "Do you leave a popular but problematic platform, reducing the size of your audience and maybe also the 'counterweight' to problematic content? Or do you stay and contribute to the popularity of the platform with your content?"
This is a good question, and hard to answer. It depends certainly on many individual factors, e.g., whether you use it professionally or private, how often you use it, and things like that. I personally have reduced the size of my audience (I don't use Facebook nor Tiktok, in part also because I think no one needs 10,000 likes for a post, that has no value for me), but that aligns also with my private and professional life. Others may have a different view, though. It's hard to generalize as it depends on many individual things imho, and likely no answer is completely right or wrong.
If you are lonely and German, I can be your friend. You can teach me the ways of the apfelstrudel, and I can show you the age old tradition of "långburk & parkbänk".
Sooo...sitting in the park and enjoying a can of beer? Is there more to it?
In good company, what more would you need?
Oh yeah i guess there is a translation issue, I was only directly translating the written words but couldn't find out whether this is an expression with a deeper meaning/ tradition to it, so that's what I tried to ask 😊
I will buy some frozen Apfelstrudel 🙂
sorry to break it to you but it's gonna be Currywurst and Köstritzer at least for a few years until you're ready
Reminds me a LOT of a meme I've seen on the net a long time ago:
Relationship > No Relationship
BUT!
Relationship > No Relationship > TOXIC Relationship
and as having a good, stable, lasting and healthy relationship seems to be more luck than anything else, choosing the middle path is the choice most take. Because no, there's no shortage in finding a toxic relationship...
According to a recent study by the World Health Organization, one in six people worldwide feels lonely.
That's the foundation for the headline. How can they make it about Germany? They support that study with German numbers but there is nothing about a specific German epidemic. A bit ironic for an article that warns about the AfD mindset.
Germany sees loneliness epidemic among young people
It's a problem that is present in Germany, even if it's also present in other countries, and the article does mention studies and statistics that show that it's definitely happening in Germany, too (e.g. Techniker Krankenkasse Loneliness Report 2024).
Also note "This article was originally written in German." - it was written for a German-speaking audience, they're speaking with German experts and they're citing studies and statistics from Germany, alongside the WHO study.
DW is Deutsche Welle - a German international broadcaster.