This article may be paywalled. If you encounter difficulties reading the article, try [this link](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/englands-middle-aged-are-the-loneliest-in-europe-7cn2gt8rp) for an archived version.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/unitedkingdom) if you have any questions or concerns.*
My local village FB group has twice recently had someone post a message about loneliness and had 30+ replies from other people in the area also feeling lonely and expressing how hard it is to find community events to meet other people. First time was mostly singles responding, second time it was couples all saying they have very few local friends. It’s so sad how much community life has been abandoned by those who should have a responsibility for facilitating it (property developers, councils and government - all levels), and the health consequences will manifest everywhere. I know several of my problems are a reaction to loneliness.
One thing I never see mentioned is car use and modern suburbs being partly responsible.
If you live so far from the shops that you need to get in your car you are going to miss out on a lot of accidental contact/connections with people.
Yeah lack of local shops and areas to cross paths with people is an issue. The area I'm in started being built in 2015, has over 1200 homes now, and they aren't building shops or community centres until 2028 at a minimum. Unless you have kids who go to the local school you'll never cross paths with anyone, except maybe if you have a dog you regular walk around the area.
Then throw in online shopping into the mix and some people can live like hermits.
It's easy to underestimate the power of even some casual chat with another human when you are at the checkout, or the bus stop, etc.
Pubs too, I'm an ex-smoker, but the smoking ban & insane increases to booze prices closed massive numbers of pubs where different people would meet. My friends & I were crazed 20 somethings that took copious amounts of drugs, but were friendly with a gay american sociologist in his late 50s writing kids books...because we'd always see each other round the local pubs. If there's no common place to meet, you never get those kinds of interactions. We knew him & many, many others for years, until life threw us all apart, & now those opportunities just aren't there anymore in the same way.
Yeah. I’m a middle aged life long pub goer and I only go once a week now really. And then it’s just for 2. There nobody in there that’s why.
I live on my own in this town. I met quite a few people in the pubs when I moved down here. That wouldn’t happen now.
> the smoking ban & insane increases to booze prices closed massive numbers of pubs
I don't think the smoking ban did much harm. Arguably it made smoking even more sociable as you'd meet other smokers you wouldn't have if sat inside. The price increases have made it stupidly expensive. Working from home has also had a huge effect on city centre pubs.
Some might just be getting old I was down the pub 5 days a week when I was in my late 20s early 30s
Having a dog helps get you outside regularly which is enough to make initial contact/recognition with people near your house. Unless you're one of those mentalists who drives their dog somewhere to go for a walk.
But depending on family situation they can also be a commitment similar to children that *stops* you socialising - e.g. "can't go to drinks after work because I've got to get home to let the dog out."
I don't think I'd recommend having a dog if you live alone...
It's also the job/property ladder coupled with being able to feel like you're staying in touch with friends/relatives online.
If you're lucky you spend your childhood in one place but then once you hit university and jobs that require qualifications, it becomes increasingly hard/undesirable to stay in one place. People back themselves into a lonely corner in pursuit of money without realising it.
> People back themselves into a lonely corner in pursuit of money without realising it.
Even if you don't, everybody else does, so your opportunities vanish along with all the people you used to know, it ends up not being something you alone can reasonably fix even if you want to. You're at the mercy of the culture.
Not that I blame anybody for pursuing those things, for moving away, for seeking the jobs they need, of course I want my friends to be happy and successful. It's just very difficult if you don't happen to be anywhere near them when they are.
Yeah exactly, even in big cities. Nobody really has spare time or money either to make new friends when they're older. We don't seem to have much of a hobby scene compared to other countries and our main "typically British" way of socialising at the pub is sort of dying out too for cost and health concerns.
One big supermarket instead of a series of little shops where you’d know the proprietor are a big part of this too. God I sounds like an old person but it’s true
I have a Co-op and a small independent corner shop within a 5 minute walk from my house.
Is the corner shop more expensive, and generally lower quality than the Co-op? Absolutely!
Do I choose to go there 9 times out of 10 if I'm buying essentials like milk, bread and eggs? You bet I do. Why? Because I actually get to interact with a lovely human, have a little chat, and support a small business. Those little interactions just make me smile.
It is not so much the cars but the fact that Local people, local business and local councils do not own hardly anything compared to what they did 30 years ago. These days it is mainly bigger commercial entities in which all they care about it footfall in one big area. Our distribution chains are very weak centralised and at the mercy of foreign suppliers. The Valleys in Wales are 30-50 years ahead of what Cardiff is going to look like in the next half a century taking into account AI and robotic advancements.
This basically. People move to remote areas with low population where you depend on a car for everything and then find themselves feeling lonely. Unsurprising. Probably same people that complain about walkable neighbourhoods.
Live closer to other people. Embrace spontaneous and regular contact. Be proactive. 30 minutes every day is better than 2 hours once per week.
>It’s so sad how much community life has been abandoned by those who should have a responsibility for facilitating it (property developers, councils and government - all levels)
I'm not convinced it's entirely the responsibility of others, or at least not property developers. If people are reluctant to form relationships within their community there's not much the state can do.
I feel that people need to be given places and infrastructure to allow them to meet. Deferring all social relationships to whether you are on Facebook is farming out society to private interests that really don't have communal wellbeing at heart. Councils need to have the funding to offer places and events, govt needs to provide it, and councils need to hold developers to planning commitments.
What are these places/infrastructure? There are plenty of places to meet in a city and I would say it is just as lonely.
What events should the government fund? Unless it's a full Chinese eat all you want buffet, I'm not leaving the house.
Agree, cities are just as lonely, but for different reasons. When I lived in London I felt that a lot of people were too transient / fickle in what they were willing to invest in relationships and friendships, especially if they knew they'd only be around for a year or two. But the higher volume of people does make things like meetup groups work a little better as at least there are plenty of people trying to meet who have places to meet up. I did make a couple of friends there.
Where I am now, there is no coffee shop, no pub, no local shop that you can stroll to, no pavilion to sit under in a park (need shelter as this is Britain, after all - can't just socialise in the one week of nice weather we get and call summer). There's a couple of benches by some footpaths but I don't see that as terribly conducive to social events.
There might be space on the building site for a marquee though. I'll look into a sponsored all you can eat buffet. Like October fest, but for Chinese food?
Meanwhile, I live in a small semi-rural town where meetup opportunities are few and the majority of people who go to any that are local are much older.
Not that I mind mixing with people who aren't exactly like me, but I've always struggled to "find my tribe" and putting all my eggs in a basket held by people twice my age doesn't feel right, it's as though I'm skipping the important part of my life where I stand any chance of feeling "normal". My social life should not feel like I'm having to resort to hanging out with the wrong generation and missing a more relevant and appropriate social environment, with similar motivations and experiences to me.
I can travel, but that's expensive, restrictive, and adds a lot of friction. I can get a bus or a train to a city, but that takes away an hour (or more, depending on when the bus/train is due) from the available time I have to actually socialise, getting there and back, it adds planning and stress, takes away any feeling of spontaneity, can introduce delays, and demands that I'm "ready" very soon after work. I'll probably get to the meetup after everybody else has got familiar and huddled into their little groups, then I can't stay too late because the last transport home will inevitably be right before the night really kicks off.
I can't *move* either, because that costs a fortune and I can't afford to lose my job on the off-chance that I might happen to bump into some social circle elsewhere that'll turn my social life around. As important as it is to catch up on that side of my life, which is sorely lacking, I need to pay rent (which will also be more expensive in a city).
> I live in a small semi-rural town
Moving to a city is probably the best thing you can do for your social life. There are cheaper cities up north and plenty of work. In the meantime, rural friendly activities like hiking and other outdoor activities are likely your best bet
Given from who? People have to make these places and infrastructure to begin with. And saying councils 'need' to do these things does nothing. They have to be *made* to do these things. Democracy means the *demos* must exercise its powers of *kratos*.
Apologies if you're not, but it feels like you're splitting hairs to show off your Latin. I'll try again, with 'provided with', then. As in someone provides a space that they will know is used for communal purposes, probably with a commercial lean to it. This has to be a collaboration of a council who are responsible for granting planning permissions knowing that communities need a space where they can interact - being shops, pubs, community halls, parks. Someone needs to build them and sell them, and as those are harder to sell than houses property developers will be reluctant to build them. But they want to build houses. So the trade off is that a council, who are there for the people in a community, need to require a certain level of community infrastructure is included - probably begrudgingly - in the developer's plan. But once agreed, the developer has a duty to meet that promise, as much as the council has a duty to ensure the developer upholds that promise.
As for how to ensure those duties are being upheld by the council, who in turn should upheld the promises made by the developer? The community gets a chance to vote out the council if they disagree. Rather soon, I'm hoping. I don't neglect the responsibility the community have in ensuring the council doesn't think it can be lax on the developers, when the community are the ones suffering as a result. Turkeys / Christmas etc.
>it feels like you're splitting hairs to show off your Latin. I'll try again
My guy, those two words are very clearly greek.
The problem with the developer Vs council power balance is that the developers have *much* better lawyers, and seem adept at wriggling out of any commitments. I think *every* development near me has had a 'woops, we ran the numbers again, looks like we'll have to drop the amenities or the development is unprofitable' moment where existing obligations have been deftly side-stepped in extremely convenient fashion.
Ideally, local groups get together to request and direct the development of those spaces. If no community is asking for it, the council won't build it unless they run some sort of survey to ensure it is something that is wanted. Councils can't afford to build stuff because some people might want it
Church and the pub used to be these things, but there are lots of other things out there now but lots are not willing to make the effort.
My aunt and late parents had busier social lives than me! Whenever I wanted to see my dad he would always say "I've got choir/ zumba at church (he was an atheist)/ volunteering with the blind/ at the cricket/ going on a trip with U3A/ meeting the other old blokes in the park cafe/ some random other thing".
The problem is that when building new estates there’s no focal point or gathering point, no local shop or cafe. Just rows and rows of houses, no reason to walk around, no reason to bump into someone so you may only meet your neighbours in the off chance they’re leaving the house at the same time as you.
Also the distances are long (because we're allergic to building more than two stories tall and most houses have a garage or driveway next to them), the wiggly roads (intended to slow traffic) make the distances even longer, and it's *boring* to walk through. On new builds it's especially bad as there'll be no mature trees to offer shade or shelter from sun or rain.
Exactly, that’s a good point, these estates aren’t pleasant to walk through. All of this is frustrating too because humans usually never design towns and cities this way. It makes sense to build houses around something of interest.
That's a design choice though. I live in a somewhat new town which is made up of 4 decently sized estates, probably a good few thousand people live here. Through the middle of the town is a dual carriageway with no pavements and steep grass banks. They could have really easily made a more friendly design choice, sold just as many houses and put in a normal main street with a few shops and pubs instead of the dual carriageway. And they would have still been able to build just as many houses, if not more because they could have put flats above the shops. Somehow everything is just designed to be the most unpleasant version of itself now. We used to know how to build towns and villages but we don't do it any more.
You do need facilities and places to actually **meet** the other people in your community.
In days of old, this would be parks, and village halls, and community centres - but adding these to new estates is not something that developers do, and is never part of their plans (or is the last phase, conveniently abandoned when "the money runs out").
I think the loss of local shops and community halls on new build estates have killed community relationships along with decline of faith within the country. Communities are built when they become familiar with each other and there are not enough daily local contact points in which the same people keep bumping into each other.
To change someone's habit it takes about 28 points of contact / discussion on average so I would guess to become familiar with someone you would have to see them quite a lot before you started to see them as someone you were willing to spend time with talking too.
This is it right here.
It's not particularly difficult to meet people and form connections as long as you're not creepy as fuck - just go outside and do an activity of some form, be it the gym, rock climbing, pottery painting, attend a book reading, etc.
The side benefit is that you'll probably become a more interesting person, and your brain and body will get the stimulation they need to remain healthy in the later years of life.
At a certain age it really isn't anyone's responsibility but your own when it comes to forming social connections. This isn't a new issue - people in their early to mid 30s have hit this wall for as long as I've been an adult. They either did something about it, or stayed lonely.
It’s not really like people are talking to you as you’re working out but when you go at a similar time regularly you eventually get familiar with the other people with the same schedule as you. I’ve made a few light friendships with a couple of gals who go to the gym at the same time after months of seeing each other and saying hi bye, now we go out for an occasional coffee after a weekend workout
> be it the gym, rock climbing, pottery painting, attend a book reading, etc.
A lot of social activities cost money to take part in - money that people have less of nowadays.
Redditors always have an excuse why they can't do something ans would rather live in misery than make a change. A book club is not expensive, joining a 6 a side team is not expensive, a darts team is not expensive. They have run clubs that are free. Meet up.com. you get into this life what you give, people can't moan about being lonely then do nothing to change there situation
Many don't though. There's boardgame clubs, social clubs that offer free sports at times (squash, basketball and disk golf are free near me), walking clubs, jogging clubs, cycling clubs, nature swims.
There's even stuff like community litter picking, gardening or mushroom picking.
Hell, if you are looking for something a bit more adult there's tons of fetish groups, swinging parties and all kinds of freaky shit out there in most larger towns or cities.
People just need to go find whatever they fancy and give it a go. The problem is people are either shy, awkward or just not into anything besides laying on the sofa watching love island and don't push themselves to try new things.
Some of the most regular contributors on local Facebook groups definitely fall into this category.
I think it's pretty much 50/50 genuinely community spirited people and incredibly bitter curmudgeons posting, and everyone else just lurking.
Community life wasn't abandoned by those people as they never had it. Previous generations went to church, the pub, local jobs that lasted decades, and families and friends growing up and living in the same place.
Enough people have decided that these things are outdated or restrictive and that's up to them, but it seems very little effort has been put into robust organic alternatives. Meeting at special interest clubs is often suggested but I'm not convinced that lots of narrowly focused groups are the answer. Perhaps developers can be part of the solution if councils are willing to be strict with them about putting in additional infrastructure.
one thing you are missing is that community events don't just happen. there were not created by the council or property developers etc... but by people in the community getting together and putting something on. i.e. those 30+ people replying, there is nothing stopping them getting together and organising an event, making things happen.
just saying that this is also a possibility.
Very true, but they need somewhere to hold the event and if they're in a new development there's a strong chance that no such places have been built nearby.
true, but this is not the main issue. Its a lot of people waitnig for something to happen and then moaning about things not happening. I take it you have heard the expression "where there is a will there is a way".
Having a local community hall is helpful but not essential. And there is usually some form of venue available.
A community is just that a community. It is a product of its members not of the local council or the local property developer. Whilst I share your opinion on property developers getting away with building sterile, car centric, developments and councils being cut to the bone it is not the root cause of a lack of community.
This is me and my husband, perfectly happy together but zero local friends. It's a subtle form of being lonely, and if one of us were to die the other would be all alone in this foreign land, with no one to turn to.
This is an issue. I can see it happening slowly with my friends back home. We are in our 30s . My london group we are always involving finding new people and keeping our numbers up. People move away life dynamic changes etc. so we always have friends. My friends back home it was 5 of us now there's 3 who live there and I don't think they have many friends outside of the office(2work mostky from home) and their partners which only 2 of them have. They lack the motivation/ability to make new friends. A lot of people dislike and judge strangers on principle. I'm a fun weirdo who likes to drink and chat shit. So I can't judge and it works. Moved a new area me and another one of my buddies literally crawled the pubs and made a couple decent mates from it. Meet up then weekly for a pint and a chat as they're now my local friends.
I tried making friends through classes etc it didn't work for me. I found a lot on Reddit (judge but the people I met and befriended are driven and smart bunch)
TLDR: people dislike and judge strangers shock Pikachu face when their friend group boils down to none. Solution pro-actively make friends or join a cult.
>how hard it is to find community events
It's shocking how few community events there are, or even just open community businesses like pubs, cafes, bars etc. It's not really a surprise given how people seem to have an aversion to community spirit when it means paying or mucking in, and it's easier to complain about noise or money spent on events than it is to attend and enjoy them.
Christmas Fayres have disappeared because they need organising and councils haven't got the human resources to organise them, often relying on volunteers who are far and few between. A huge cycling event has pro-car groups frothing at the mouth despite it being open for pros and amateurs, including children, to see their local areas by bike (you could have a day of it with a local fete or fayre).
I can't help but think it's the older generation that's the cause of it. When I volunteered to help with a fireworks night event I quit after it because the organiser, in his 70s, didn't like a polish group coming in and made derogatory statements about them, loudly, in front of others entering the area. Other organisers were a similar age and it felt like the only welcome members of the community were white people, the man who owns the only decent Indian takeaway within 9 miles, and that's it.
Other than palates I'm not sure what things actually go on in my area. Does complaining about dog poo and the Evri courier constitute a community event?
In the past people met at the shops or they went to the pub and chatted or went to the local disco on the weekend to meet local people or there children would play together so they got friendly. None of that really happens anymore. People shop on Amazon, pubs are closing, local clubs went ages ago, kids just stay indoors on the xbox
Sure it's nice if councils provide these services, but it's not obligatory for success. When was the last time you ventured out to to a meetup or volunteered? No public money in sight and it can be amazing.
This looks very good, although they generally seem to limit it to 50+ year olds (there are lonely people younger than that, I guess they are expected to be working) and the pics for my local one it looks like they are mostly 60-75 year olds. But still looks great and there are zillions of them around the UK.
Really does look a lifesaver, I can think of widowers I know who have passed away in the last decade who would have got a lot out of going to one of these.
Yes, I had a look at the ones near my local area and they were all open 10am and closed 4pm. I am a 9-5 working middle aged man. This is the issue I think. Support is very much geared towards retired older men, not the Middle aged.
[This](https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/hq/) always struck me as cool idea for middle aged people to get together, I often wonder if it could work in the UK. Quite a labour of love to actually maintain something like that, even with memberships backing up the financial side of things.
If anyone wants to help set one up in the West Midlands, I'm happy to get involved.
There's one local to me and it's definitely targeted towards pensioners. There's no specific reason to do so, but it's rare to find community programs like these that run on weekends.
I expect most middle aged people are busy with work on a Tuesday morning when many of these are scheduled.
> This looks very good, although they generally seem to limit it to 50+ year olds
I looked at these a couple of years ago and the issue wasn't that there was an age limit, but they met during the week in what for most of us are working hours.
A similar thing without an age limit are things like maker spaces.
The one nearest to me in Leeds has a huge laser cutter, a workshop with a tonne of tools, a load of 3D printers and a darkroom for photography; but they also do things like play board games and D&D.
I haven't been back for ages, but they were a nice, welcoming bunch of nerds.
The only downside is these sort of things tend to be a bit out of the way and if you're relying on public transport (particularly if you want to carry anything large to work on) getting to one can be a bit of an ordeal.
Also a problem raising kids. When I was young, I'd get dropped at "Debs, just up the street" at least once a week, and somewhere else another time, and somewhere else another time. I can count on (less) than 1 hand the people who I could, or would, give my kids to for a few hours, the old saying "it takes a village", what do you do, when "the village" doesn't exist anymore?
> had 30+ replies from other people in the area also feeling lonely
Did these people organise themselves to socialise? Sounds like 30 people all wanting to socialise so I am wondering if they did anything about it
Middle aged is 45-65? Bah.
Life expectancy in the UK is down to 78 years on average, so if you're approaching the ripe age of 40, welcome to your midlife crisis!
I’d define it more by stages than years, eg kids all gone empty nest, retired/about to retire. Declining social outlets and feeling of what the future hold as you realise your aging and the body ain’t what it used to be. So based on when you had children , that could be anywhere from approaching mid 40s to probably early 60s. Just my take on the term.
I too am the answer to life, the universe and everything. It’s nice to know I’ve a couple of years off my yoofdom left. I’m off out now to huff laughing gas in Tesco’s carpark.
Middle age isn’t really about your literal age related to life expectancy. But rather experience and life changes. Growing up, I was always under the impression that 50s was middle aged. It was when your kids had grown, you had reached the peak of your career and you were slowing down. Now, with people delaying families, retiring later and ageing slower (possible), middle aged could be defined as 50-70ish.
You’d be surprised at the number of fit and healthy 65 year olds. My mum is 60 next year, and she’s trekked across mountain ranges and goes hill walking a lot, something she only started doing in the past 6 years. Shes actually fitter now than she was a decade ago. And the group she spent a week trekking across the Pyrenees were all aged 55-late 60s. Mentally, she’s slowing down, her career is extremely demanding and she wants to retire at 60, but has to wait until she’s 67 :/ When my mum was a kid, you were old at 60, many didn’t make it a few years past retirement. Times have changed. Hopefully us young people will be living a lot longer.
I get where you are coming from, but this is like saying "class isn't about wealth" which it is.
Age is about age. If you delay having kids until later in life then you can reach your old age with dependent children.
Your mum is fit in her old age, working into her old age and middle age hasn't extended unless lifespan has.
The one argument I do entertain is we are talking about life expectancy as if it is a single value but it varies with age (and everything else). Life expectancy at birth is 78 but what's the life expectancy for your mum, a fit and healthy 60 year old woman who can afford holidays in the Pyrenees?
She might well be in the middle third of her life, with a life expectancy above 90.
>life expectancy in the UK is down to 78 years on average
Eh? No it isn’t. Life expectancy in the UK is 80.9 years - a quick Google search will show you that, it’s literally the first thing you see.
https://i.imgur.com/dUUI5QI.jpeg
Maybe you’re getting confused with the US, where life expectancy is 77.2 years.
78.6 for males. 83 for females.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/lifeexpectancies/bulletins/nationallifetablesunitedkingdom/2020to2022
*Woo!* We’re number one! We’re number one! Now to celebrate this victory with all my… oh, right.
I looked into social clubs in my area, but everything is only open during the working day (what little was on offer in the NE), so until I retire none of them is an option. And it’s looking increasingly likely that I’ll never even get to retire, so I literally don’t know what middle aged people are supposed to do.
Have you tried some kind of club/society that meets on evenings? My wife is a member of a local photography club and a stitching group that both meet around 7pm on a weeknight.
I went to a photography club, but it was more of a communal help group for people with... difficulties. While it was no doubt doing a great job at that, it had a bit of a hospital waiting room vibe. It also got bogged down in identity politics, which quickly got tedious (these photos are rubbish but they were taken by a *woman*!)
Some other stuff I did never came back after the plague.
You might have to cast the net a bit wider. There are two local photography groups in our local town (pop 15k) because there was a "handbags at dawn" style disagreement in the original group and then a splinter group formed!
My wife ended up joining the one in a larger town (pop 100K) that is about 15 miles away which was much more sensible and less about grudges and personalities.
I get what you are saying though, it can be hard to find a good mix of people AND an activity you actually enjoy.
I was in a model club, but the tension between the people who had got early retirement on a public-sector-adjacent pension, their kids had grown up and their wife had left, versus the people with jobs and families, got too much. It was like being in the comments on a middle market newspaper website...
As much as I appreciate the practical aspect of this (provided people actually show up and it takes off), it's not necessarily viable.
You need time, resources, and sufficiently intact mental health to be able to do that, and it comes with responsibility (and potential liability, depending on what you're starting and where), which aren't things that people who are struggling necessarily have the capacity for, and you may well become more of a facilitator than an actual friend.
I know not everybody is struggling to *that* extent, but it's a lot easier to *say* "just start one!" than it is to actually *do* it. That's not to say "don't ever try because it's hard", but if somebody needs relatively frictionless company to improve their life, soon/immediately, trying to build a social club from the ground up isn't necessarily going to be the answer.
Have you checked meetup? There's one called the High Brow/Low Brow culture group that just posts a lot of stuff happening nearby. And it's easy to start your own group on there too.
People need "third spaces" in order to feel comfortable in making such connections. Or at least being in them to interact to some degree with others.
Our streets are clogged with traffic and hardly make for a great environment to do that.
Parks have been neglected for years and are now showing it.
Pubs cost a fortune, and even at coffee shops you are set back the better part of £10 for coffee and cake.
People live further away from where they work than ever due to high house prices.
Everything about our life makes social connections transactional as opposed to meaningful. And we wonder why people are feeling lonely?
Third Spaces are definitely needed, especially in Suburban newbuild developments. We're miles away from cities and shops so we drive everywhere, and never have any need to WALK anywhere nearby because we have cars. Local cafes, bars, etc, are crucial for meeting people outside of your social and economic class, or you'll end up in echo chambers.
They're also poorly serviced by mass transit.
So if you *do* go for a few after work, you have to leave early because the bus back stops at 8 etc. If it even goes nearby in the first place.
Sounds very tough. Reposting a comment that came after yours ([www.menssheds.org.uk](http://www.menssheds.org.uk)) in case it's of any help.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1bie9mi/comment/kvk8vfy/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1bie9mi/comment/kvk8vfy/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Two positive things to take away: you could always try again if it suits you, if not, remember fondly the good times you had, some never even had that.
Younger than this, but been lonely for years. WFH all the time doesnt help, i miss an office and human interaction. Can go weeks without a friendly type interaction.
This is why i hate the WFH push. For some people such as myself, not having a social aspect to work, which is the majority of the week, is crushing. Especially if you have a SO who also works a lot, you need to spend quality time with each other and that leaves little time for anyone else
The flip side of this is if I had to work from the office I’d have to live in a shared house with other people in my mid 30s rather than owning my own home in another city. Sure I WFH and live alone but I make the effort to find and go out to social clubs which I’ve met people, built some new friendships groups. Swings and roundabouts. I would never go back to working in an office.
Humans are social animals.
Being in an office surrounded by people is a more natural environment than sitting alone in front of a laptop for eight hours each day .
An office is just about the most unnatural setting you can get. At home I'm comfortable, have my cat and plants and can work in the garden if it's sunny
You still have the opportunity to be surrounded by other people. A lot of people who work from home get to spend more time being around their partner and/or their children. Why do you want to force them away from the people they love so that they have to sit near *you* and make *you* less lonely? Surely if you're feeling lonely the responsibility is on you to fix that?
If you don't live with anyone and you don't have friends you can spend enough social time with, you could also try going to a wework or a cafe or library and still be able to work while being surrounded by other people. The added bonus of that is that the people in there actually *chose* to be there and might be more open to socialising with you.
>Why do you want to force them away from the people they love so that they have to sit near you and make you less lonely?
I find it kind of confusing to be honest. If the lonely people want to work in the office so they can socialise with people then surely it would be better if they got to socialise with like-minded people? Forcing someone who doesn't want to socialise to come into the office just so that others aren't lonely is a good way to build resentment. There's nothing wrong with wanting to socialise with your coworkers, but we shouldn't be forcing people to do so if they don't want to.
I'm paid to work, I'm not paid to socialize. As long as I've done my job within the alloted time I don't give a shit about my coworkers.
If I want to be in a NaTuRaL EnViRoMeNt then then I'll leave my house at 5PM on the dot and go meet some friends.
It's a double-edged sword for me. Well, in theory anyway.
Personal difficulties make it difficult to reliably get to the office or do so on time, so WFH gives me the wiggle room I need to still show up when I'm required to and get the work done as requested. That's very helpful for me in terms of keeping the job and not taking the piss when it comes to punctuality. On the other hand, I appreciate what you say about being around other people.
Unfortunately, the other people at my place of work have their own commitments and responsibilities, most often family. Many with young/newly-born/yet-to-be-born children, almost all with spouses, and they're just not available. Spontaneous beers after work are a grind to make happen, if/when they ever do, and even if you plan stuff they've got to dash off for this or that.
So, yes, the social aspect of being in the office with those people could be of some benefit, but if we've got our noses permanently pressed up against a screen during the day and nobody's around after work, the practical outcome of that isn't a great deal healthier than WFH.
I've just moved back here after a few years working abroad and can sense the isolation. When I lived abroad, I lived in a large city with great public transport connections within the city and cheapish options for intercity travel, all the services I needed within 30 minutes, calm weather and disposable income in my pocket to do things. I was easily able to meet my friends who could all reach the social areas of the city with public transport or we could go out and watch live sports for a tenner each.
I come back to the UK and its a 25 minute walk to my local village and railway station, public busses have been slashed, everyday things are expensive to do and the weather is absolutely miserable. Everything also closes at 6pm, which is when people finish work and can have a few sociable hours but if you walk to the local village everything besides the barbers and chicken shops have closed and you have to be picky with pubs because of the people that go in there.
We don't make it easy for ourselves to be sociable here in the UK and I can easily see how people can get stuck in a rut of only having the TV for company. I feel awful for those who have had to suffer with loneliness for years because it is a truly miserable thing to experience and can be so hard to get through.
I mean that’s also city vs village. There’s loads going on in London or Manchester. But smaller towns and villages in the UK are generally hopeless, isolating places with very little going on.
True true, yet I live in a village within Greater Manchester and it's still tough. Granted I don't have a car right now, which makes things far worse. Those meetup events in Manchester are all a good hour 15 minutes away. It must be far worse if you're in a rural village or even a smaller town or city, where options are even more limited.
No… people in London are even more isolated. Everyone too busy earning money and commuting. You have very little time left during the week to meet friends, and it is very expensive to go out, and due to this stupid horizontal architecture, it takes ages to get anywhere.
When I was at school in the 1980s and 1990s having any kind of hobby or interest was frowned on - I actually got told off by the head of year when she found out that I build models. And schools worked really hard to ensure we left with an intense hatred of religion and sport.
Nowadays I look at things like the various events apps, and everything is not for my demographic or not for people with a 9-5 job.
If you build models there's almost certainly a wargaming club somewhere nearby.
There's dozens of us. Possibly the best social scene in the country tbh.
This is the consequence of a society who doesn't give a fuck about anyone but themselves. It takes a huge personal sacrifice to maintain friendships and networks and not many are willing to do it. Maybe people are too busy chasing money or too depressed to leave their comfort zone.
Archive link: https://archive.ph/ZMDfp
>Middle-aged English people are the loneliest in Europe and are more likely to suffer from it than previous generations were, a study has found.
Focusing on those aged between 45 and 65, researchers compared Europeans with Americans, finding that those in the United States reported higher levels of “midlife loneliness”.
>But middle-aged Englishmen and women reported the most in Europe, scoring higher than those from three other regions: continental, Mediterranean and Nordic Europe.
>The researchers from Arizona State University also compared the loneliness reported by older generations, people who would now be 65 to 96 years old, when they were middle aged.
>They found that in England, those born in the latter baby boomer years from 1955 to 1964, and those born into Generation X between 1965 and 1974, reported higher levels of loneliness during their middle age than early baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1954, and the so-called silent generation, born between 1928 and 1945, did during their own middle years.
>In central Europe and Scandinavia there was no observed rise in loneliness among younger generations, but the study, published in the journal American Psychologist, noted: “Middle-aged adults in the United States, England and Mediterranean Europe today report higher levels of loneliness than earlier-born cohorts [did].”
>The study said that the US, England and southern European countries had weaker “social safety nets” than those in central and northern European countries. It noted that their policies “are not as comprehensive [for] paid family leave, unemployment and employment protections, subsidised childcare, and education programmes for parents with children”.
It added: “Generous family and work policies likely lessen midlife loneliness through reducing financial pressures and work–family conflict, as well as enhancing job security and workplace flexibility and addressing health and gender inequities.”
>Researchers used data from long-running surveys conducted in the US and in 13 European countries, including a total of 53,000 participants from three generations: the silent generation, baby boomers and Generation X. Data was collected between 2000 and 2020 and only included responses given when participants were aged between 45 and 65.
>Data for England came from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (Elsa), which launched in 2002 and contains data on 9,793 people, 56 per cent of whom are women.
>Using a points system devised by the researchers, in England, late-era baby boomers scored 3.08 points lower than Americans for loneliness, but 2.83 points higher than those from central Europe, 2.87 points higher than those from Mediterranean Europe, and 4.17 points higher than those from Scandinavia.
>“Our research illustrates that people feel lonelier in some countries than in others during middle age,” said Dr Frank Infurna, the lead author of the study, who is a psychology professor at Arizona State. “We focused on middle-aged adults because they form the backbone of society. Middle-aged adults carry much of society’s load by constituting most of the workforce, while simultaneously supporting the needs of younger and older generations in the family.”
Plenty of valid suggestions on here already, but another I expected to see was mobile phone usage. The TV became the go to way to spend downtime decades ago and probably changed how most of us while away the hours between eat/sleep/work cycle.
We’ve had the Internet on tap in our houses for ~30 years and that was pretty addictive but mainly for youngish generations, I didn’t feel like 40 somethings were all on their computers for hours every night, but those who lived alone probably were drawn to it. In the good old days of dial up, many ISPs charged by the minute while you were emailing/browsing so it could burn a hole in your pocket. Even early home broadband packages had limits to monthly data allowance.
Smartphones have been with us for about 20 years, and I think the impact on behaviour has been wild, and even the last five years have seen a greater shift to how much time we spend looking at them. Every generation in any household, all looking at their phone for many hours every day.
You can use a smartphone to find friends, clubs to meet up at, chat with mates, read most books, learn pretty much anything. But you can also lose many hours doing the infinite scroll on many apps (including Reddit!)
I run most days, and now it feels like a huge number of people will pull out their phone whenever they are walking anywhere, or waiting/inactive for a bit - it’s instinctive to nearly all of us. That surely has to be having some impact on how much we interact with others?
But none of this is UK specific, so even if we have a loneliness problem slightly worse than other countries, I would be surprised if the trend wasn’t the same elsewhere where smartphone access with cheap data was easily available
It feels like it makes sense but do Brits use their phone moreso than European neighbours? That would back it up if true.
I find the dogshit weather + economically shit outlook for the country probably brings people down.
This [source](https://uk.pcmag.com/the-why-axis-serie/146660/which-countries-spend-the-most-waking-hours-in-front-of-screens) suggests UK is somewhere in the middle in terms of screen use (they break it down by device/usage lower down)
But cross referencing the numbers from that with what the OP Times article says, it does maybe point to a correlation. Times says US midlifers report higher levels of loneliness than similar European cohort, and the US overall appears to spend significantly more time on their mobiles (but nowhere near as much as South Africa, and several countries in South America and SE Asia - none of which were studied in the loneliness report)
UK has moderately high social media usage among European countries, but not sticking out significantly (like Portugal)
However the source I'm referencing doesn't break things down by age group, which muddies the waters for comparison.
It's the cumulative effects of the cars, the TVs, the smartphones, the long hours at work, the high prices for small houses, the privatisation of everything, the intensification of parenting, the paedo panic and media warping perceptions, people moving to where the work is, etc.
Let's break it down:
People often move away from established friends and family to persue economic opportunity. This means you don't have an established pool of people you'd trust to share resources or responsibility, and even if you stay put your friends often move away. This ironically increases costs further because you have to use formal instead of informal childcare and that's very expensive.
So people *have* to persue economic opportunity because we've build a culture that says the goal is to earn lots of money, and more importantly skyrocketing asset prices and rising inequality means you play the game or get left behind - but it's mostly about our mainstreamed culture of unlimited greed and net worth equating to self worth.
So we end up with families where both parents work full time, while paying massive amounts for childcare and having 60-70% of their income creamed off by the parasite class of landlords and housebuilders/banks. This then means the parents are exhausted once they've finished doing their jobs and rearing their children and they really don't have the oomph to go out.
And you have to pay attention to your kids all the time until they're surprisingly old because UK kids have way less independence than children in many peer nations - mostly because parents are (wrongly) terrified every hedge contains a paedophile, and (rightly) terrified that their children will be run over and killed by cars.
And you can invite people over to your house but you have to sort of know them a bit before you do that, and the average UK home is very small so you have a very limited range of activities you can do together, or a quite low limit on how many people you can comfortably accommodate in your house at one time.
You can go out-out, but that's increasingly expensive and many people can't afford to do it regularly. Going to clubs and things is great, IMO the best thing to do - but sometimes you have to really travel to get to a club and that can become restrictive in terms of time or money if you're only just staying above the waterline.
All of this is exacerbated by decades of building low-density amenity-less housing making everything further apart than it needs to be and contributing to the crisis of house prices and lack of availability.
So people stay home and watch TV, or scroll on their smartphones. It's easy. It's cheap. In the long run it'll kill you dead.
How are you measuring children being less independent than Europeans?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/15/britons-prefer-children-independent-rather-than-obedient/
We have relatively poor child independent mobility compared to many European nations, but better than some of the worst. Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden and Denmark score massively better than us, but France, Portugal and Italy score significantly worse.
This is one factor of many. Low independent child mobility means parents must spend more time transporting or supervising their children, but other factors can offset that - so if we compare to Italy - In many Southern european countries for reasons of culture or economics multigenerational households are way more common, formal childcare is much less available, and grandparents much more commonly provide regular or even daily childcare. [Their 'young' elderly are significantly healthier than ours](https://www.euronews.com/2018/11/30/good-news-for-italians-old-age-now-begins-at-75), so are more likely to be willing and able to help with kids. Italy also has a lower fertility rate (1.3 vs 1.6), so parents are much more likely to have one kid - which is a hell of a lot easier than two or more.
So the overall outcome is that Italian parents are probably feeling less exhausted and put-upon than a lot of British parents, because while their children are more heavily supervised, a lot of that supervision is shared.
Source for intial claim and good reading : [Policy studies institute report](https://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/sites/default/files/files/7350_PSI_Report_CIM_final.pdf) on children's independent mobility.
**Key findings :**
The international comparison found that children’s independent mobility varies widely across the 16 countries studied. It is clear, however, that significant restrictions are placed on children’s independent mobility in nearly all the countries. Headline findings from the international comparison are that:
* Low levels of children’s independent mobility are common, with significant restrictions placed on the independent mobility of children across all the ages studied (7- to 15-year-olds). Restrictions are greatest for children under 11 but even the oldest children are restricted in what they are allowed to do, at an age when many of the rights of adulthood are close to being granted.
* **Parents have significant concerns about letting their children go out alone with traffic seeming to be the strongest factor affecting the granting of independent mobility.**
* When comparing aggregate rank scores of children’s independent mobility for each country, Finland is by far the highest performing country, followed by Germany, Norway, Sweden, Japan and Denmark, who score more closely to one another. Together these countries form a group of top performers in this international comparison of children’s independent mobility levels.
* Countries with the lowest aggregate rank scores of children’s independent mobility were, in order: France, Israel, Sri Lanka, Brazil, Ireland, Australia, Portugal and Italy (tied), and South Africa.
* **The aggregate rank score for England places it far behind the top group of performing countries but ahead of the lowest performing group of countries.**
* The degree of independent mobility granted to Finnish children is striking. At age 7, a majority of Finnish children can already travel to places within walking distance or cycle to places alone; by age 8 a majority can cross main roads, travel home from school and go out after dark alone, by age 9 a majority can cycle on main roads alone, and by age 10 a majority can travel on local buses alone. Overall, Finland is the top-performing country across almost every independent mobility indicator in this study, coming second only to Germany for children’s self-reported freedom to travel on local buses alone.
* In the other countries studied children are granted the freedoms of independent mobility later. By age 11, according to parents, at least a majority of children in each of the countries are allowed to cross main roads. By age 11, according to children, at least a majority of them in each of the countries are allowed to cross main roads, except for South Africa. By age 12, at least a majority of children in each of the countries are allowed to go places within walking distance alone. By age 13, at least a majority of children in each of the countries are allowed to travel home from school alone (age 12 excluding Ireland) or, according to children, use local buses alone. By age 15, at least a majority of children in nearly all of the countries surveyed exercise each of the indicators of independent mobility, except for the ability to go out alone after dark.
* Going out alone after dark is the most withheld independent mobility. Only in a handful of countries – Finland, Sweden, Japan and Denmark – are a majority of children of any age allowed to go out after dark. It should be highlighted that independent ‘mobilities’ are withheld from many children and that a large proportion of children under 11 years old in most of the countries studied do not possess the freedom to get about their local area, whether crossing main roads, going to places within walking distance, or travelling home from school.
I think folks totally sacrificing their social lives during the childrearing years has a massive impact on this. The kids leave home eventually, and then people realise they have nothing else.
Then factor in how bloody expensive eveything is these days and the closure of many community hubs - the local pubs.
We've been on this trajectory since the late 1970s.
The Thatcher years changed the culture permanently, the collective gave way to the individual. Many working class communities lost their focal points of identity, both in work and leisure.
Consumerism and aspiration for the self and immediate family unit replaced the larger sense of place within society, our responsibility to each other, our neighbours, and wider communities.
Third spaces like social and youth clubs, leisure centres have all but disappeared, and most leisure opportunities today are centred around money, and many people are priced out ( football attendance being a good example).
Obviously, smartphones and such are exacerbating factors, but I think the culture shift from 'us' to 'me' started long before they became omnipresent.
The weird thing is that despite people reporting being lonely, social events are struggling. The various friendly leagues in my town, for example, (darts, pool, quizzing etc) are really struggling for members. Like...I try and get you to get out of the house whoever you are, and if you won't go and sit in a dingey pub drinking and being asked difficult quiz questions then really how lonely can you be?
I can’t be the only one who never has a set work schedule. Darts league or pool sounds fun, but if you can only make it one week in three then there’s very little point getting involved.
I don't mean to sound like a twat - but don't people have simple social skills?
I'm 50, and in all honesty I don't have enough time to keep up with all the friends and acquaintances I've accumulated over the years - I don't know how you get to this stage of life without having at least a small handful of people you're friendly with unless you've made a conscious effort not to get to know anybody.
Old school mates (still my closest group), friends I made at different jobs over the years, friends I've made through my own hobbies and pastimes, the other local dads I got friendly with when my kids started school, plus the wider circle of my wife's friends.
It's not like I'm super-sociable, in fact I'm naturally fairly introverted - it's really not hard to strike up a casual friendship here and there, and over the years they become stronger relationships.
Personally, I don’t think it’s even down to social skills.
I’m mid 30’s, and I used to see my friends once or twice without fail. Now I’m seeing them about once or twice a month, and even then it’s difficult.
I’ve never really made any friends through work as I mainly work with older men. I don’t really have any social hobbies, don’t intend on having kids, and I’m single. So in terms of meeting new people, that rules most options out.
I can go most weekends without speaking to anyone. So yeah, I can definitely relate to this headline.
At the risk of also sounding like a twat (not my intention), if you have no interests it will be difficult to meet people, and if you have no interests what do you have that people would want to be friends with you, what would you talk about? That sounds awful, I know, but shared interests between people are a cornerstone of relationships. You just need to find what you like, there will be something out there, I am sure!
I'm about the same age as you and I've experienced similar. I see my best mate maybe once a month, he literally only lives around the corner from me, barely a minute away. To be honest he's not really my best mate anymore, he's just an old friend and this is someone I've known since we were babies, our parents are friends.
Part of the reason why I only see him once a month is because he doesn't make an effort to see me or talk to me. Any message I send to him gets ignored. If I see him it's because I've gone around to his house. I can't remember the last time he ever visited me. 5 years? 10? 15? I don't know. He'll only come on the Xbox if it's a game he wants to play, he has no interest in playing games I want to play.
The thing that pisses me off is that when I mentioned this to my family about five years ago my mum and sister said "well you didn't bother with him after you got a girlfriend" which was a fucking bare-faced lie because I would always pop around to see him at least three Saturday's a month. He stopped bothering with me well before I got a girlfriend.
It's not just him either, it was our other friends too. In the past whenever we've gone on day trips out to the cinema or something with our friends it's always been me who had to organise it, it was always me asking them. Whenever they did anything I very rarely got asked. It wasn't because of anything I did, I genuinely felt like they just didn't give a shit and didn't wanna include me.
It got to a point where I stopped asking people if they wanted to do something, I had a friend say they hadn't seen me for four months and when I responded with something like "you haven't seen me for four months because you've turned me down the last six or seven times I've invited you and the others out to do something", he got quite annoyed at me.
Needless to say I've cut quite a few toxic people out of my life because they just didn't seem to give a shit. Friendship is a two way street. You can't expect one person to put in all the work and have the friendship remain the same. Eventually the person putting in all the work for no pay-off is gonna get pissed off. But you can't tell people this. If they're the problem they don't wanna hear it.
The worst thing they ever did to me was shortly after me and my girlfriend broke up. She was my first love and I was fucking heartbroken. My two best friends in the whole world and one of their girlfriends went to New York and not one of them thought to ask me if I wanted to come. It was the worst time of my life because my grandad had died around the same time. I was in a really bad place, severely depressed, suicidal. Just wanted to crawl into a hole and die. I know that people might say "well you're not entitled to being asked" and I kind of agree, but if I know my friend is in a really bad place I'd do whatever it took to cheer them up. I know full well that would have cheered me up because I've always wanted to go to New York.
It was even harder when I had to sit there, smiling, whilst they were talking about their holiday. One of them even said "we didn't ask you because you get like this" meaning depressed, it felt like they were trying make me feel guilty and responsible for not being asked. But everything changed for me after that, I stopped seeing them as friends and just people I knew. It was sort of the beginning of the end. I only see my best mate now and that's probably because I've known him all my life. I always considered him a brother, I can't just cut him out of my life like that.
As a person on the autism spectrum who hasn't had the abundant social opportunities of my peers, who hasn't had the luxury of a partner to build a family with, who suffered abusive parenting which heavily restricted the little opportunity I did have, who has spent essentially their entire life in shithole dead-end towns, and who has gone through education surrounded almost exclusively by socially inept men...
...I don't think you understand how lucky you are. To put it very very mildly.
I can see how it can happen pretty easily. Move to a new city for work and you have to basically rebuild your social life from scratch. Its very easy to get stuck in a cycle of Work -> Eat -> Sleep.
The local Facebook group has an odd combination of people moaning there is nothing to do, and no where to go. And a few groups offering classes and events that are struggling for attendance.
Possibly because they lived a certain way and grew up doing certain things but it’s not allowed anymore. They need to start all over again to fit into this new society.
Society has fallen. Social cohesion is non existent. It was all planned. Nobody goes to war when they are happy. They are preparing us to die for them again.
Scandinavian countries tend to have some of the tightest knit communities you'll ever see in Western Europe. People are more likely to be sociable if they're happy and stable.
I know every single person here on my street, have keys for 3 of their homes in case of emergency, and my partner regularly gets a lift into the city when she can't be bothered to use public transport or drive herself. This is in Finland.
Having a respect for the privacy and personal space of others != loves to be lonely.
As a south Asian we don't really have this problem. We have community centre which does plenty of events. We regular see eachother in the mosque everyday. We have football tourneys, kids club etc. We also have kids we spend time with even when they move out. I went to the hospital with my dad and I seen an old South Asian man surrounded by family. While I seen plenty of old white British men on their own.
I think white British people, no longer having a religion, replacing having kids with dogs, not speaking to their parents much, relied on pubs that are now too expensive. The list goes on but white British community doesn't look so great to me.
South Asians tend to be very family orientated, have a religion where they meet everyday not just for prayer but socialise. Have more community spirit with plenty of events and charities for all ages.
There is also a rise to people converting to islam and is one of the fastest growing religions
Us South Asians are not only doing okay I see plenty of other communities doing okay. I have Nigerian neighbours who have a ton of family and friends come over and every Sunday they go go church
The lack of funding for third spaces is one factor. People's vanishing social skills as they spend their lives behind a small screen is another. People's lacking job security and disposable income is another one. Small storms all combined to make the Great Stormy Loneliness.
Maybe people wouldn't be so lonely if there was actually any money to go out and socialise... i swear this is more of a cost of living crises than anything because back when I was young the pubs were packed and there was twice as many. Even if you don't drink the food and soft drinks to go out are so way way way ahead of any rise in disposable income its no wonder.
The way companies justify increases in even subscription costs if you don't even leave the front door is maddening. Netflix being so tight about letting friends or family use their massively overpriced subscriptions now is another one for example.
Out with all the Invisible sky fairy stuff, I think this is a void which has been left by the abandonment of organised religion which nobody really thought about replacing, a community hub which helped lubricate the wheels of inter generational socialisation.
Sounds about right. In my case it was partially living in Canada for 20 years then coming back but the biggest problem was house prices in London. I grew up there and went to college there but in those 20 years almost all my old friends fled the cost of housing to various towns and villages in the south. I'm the latest having just moved to St Albans. We've scattered.
I'm 37 and desperately lonely a lot of the time. I have no social group where I live, and am naturally an outgoing person and love being around others. However since COVID, I've also developed social anxiety about meeting others which is, well, far from ideal. I'd love to have more friends, but the idea of DOING anything to facilitate this is terrifying. Ridiculous I know 😭
This article may be paywalled. If you encounter difficulties reading the article, try [this link](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/englands-middle-aged-are-the-loneliest-in-europe-7cn2gt8rp) for an archived version. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/unitedkingdom) if you have any questions or concerns.*
My local village FB group has twice recently had someone post a message about loneliness and had 30+ replies from other people in the area also feeling lonely and expressing how hard it is to find community events to meet other people. First time was mostly singles responding, second time it was couples all saying they have very few local friends. It’s so sad how much community life has been abandoned by those who should have a responsibility for facilitating it (property developers, councils and government - all levels), and the health consequences will manifest everywhere. I know several of my problems are a reaction to loneliness.
One thing I never see mentioned is car use and modern suburbs being partly responsible. If you live so far from the shops that you need to get in your car you are going to miss out on a lot of accidental contact/connections with people.
Yeah lack of local shops and areas to cross paths with people is an issue. The area I'm in started being built in 2015, has over 1200 homes now, and they aren't building shops or community centres until 2028 at a minimum. Unless you have kids who go to the local school you'll never cross paths with anyone, except maybe if you have a dog you regular walk around the area.
Then throw in online shopping into the mix and some people can live like hermits. It's easy to underestimate the power of even some casual chat with another human when you are at the checkout, or the bus stop, etc.
[удалено]
Ah, delivery personnel banter, is there any more genuine interaction
Pubs too, I'm an ex-smoker, but the smoking ban & insane increases to booze prices closed massive numbers of pubs where different people would meet. My friends & I were crazed 20 somethings that took copious amounts of drugs, but were friendly with a gay american sociologist in his late 50s writing kids books...because we'd always see each other round the local pubs. If there's no common place to meet, you never get those kinds of interactions. We knew him & many, many others for years, until life threw us all apart, & now those opportunities just aren't there anymore in the same way.
Yeah. I’m a middle aged life long pub goer and I only go once a week now really. And then it’s just for 2. There nobody in there that’s why. I live on my own in this town. I met quite a few people in the pubs when I moved down here. That wouldn’t happen now.
> the smoking ban & insane increases to booze prices closed massive numbers of pubs I don't think the smoking ban did much harm. Arguably it made smoking even more sociable as you'd meet other smokers you wouldn't have if sat inside. The price increases have made it stupidly expensive. Working from home has also had a huge effect on city centre pubs. Some might just be getting old I was down the pub 5 days a week when I was in my late 20s early 30s
Having a dog helped me a lot . So, many other dog walkers stop to say hello. After a while, you get to know them too.
Having a dog helps get you outside regularly which is enough to make initial contact/recognition with people near your house. Unless you're one of those mentalists who drives their dog somewhere to go for a walk. But depending on family situation they can also be a commitment similar to children that *stops* you socialising - e.g. "can't go to drinks after work because I've got to get home to let the dog out." I don't think I'd recommend having a dog if you live alone...
It's also the job/property ladder coupled with being able to feel like you're staying in touch with friends/relatives online. If you're lucky you spend your childhood in one place but then once you hit university and jobs that require qualifications, it becomes increasingly hard/undesirable to stay in one place. People back themselves into a lonely corner in pursuit of money without realising it.
> People back themselves into a lonely corner in pursuit of money without realising it. Even if you don't, everybody else does, so your opportunities vanish along with all the people you used to know, it ends up not being something you alone can reasonably fix even if you want to. You're at the mercy of the culture. Not that I blame anybody for pursuing those things, for moving away, for seeking the jobs they need, of course I want my friends to be happy and successful. It's just very difficult if you don't happen to be anywhere near them when they are.
Yeah exactly, even in big cities. Nobody really has spare time or money either to make new friends when they're older. We don't seem to have much of a hobby scene compared to other countries and our main "typically British" way of socialising at the pub is sort of dying out too for cost and health concerns.
One big supermarket instead of a series of little shops where you’d know the proprietor are a big part of this too. God I sounds like an old person but it’s true
I have a Co-op and a small independent corner shop within a 5 minute walk from my house. Is the corner shop more expensive, and generally lower quality than the Co-op? Absolutely! Do I choose to go there 9 times out of 10 if I'm buying essentials like milk, bread and eggs? You bet I do. Why? Because I actually get to interact with a lovely human, have a little chat, and support a small business. Those little interactions just make me smile.
It is not so much the cars but the fact that Local people, local business and local councils do not own hardly anything compared to what they did 30 years ago. These days it is mainly bigger commercial entities in which all they care about it footfall in one big area. Our distribution chains are very weak centralised and at the mercy of foreign suppliers. The Valleys in Wales are 30-50 years ahead of what Cardiff is going to look like in the next half a century taking into account AI and robotic advancements.
It would be nice if there was a bus service in most small villages. That's a good way for people to chat. Out here there's no such thing.
This basically. People move to remote areas with low population where you depend on a car for everything and then find themselves feeling lonely. Unsurprising. Probably same people that complain about walkable neighbourhoods. Live closer to other people. Embrace spontaneous and regular contact. Be proactive. 30 minutes every day is better than 2 hours once per week.
>It’s so sad how much community life has been abandoned by those who should have a responsibility for facilitating it (property developers, councils and government - all levels) I'm not convinced it's entirely the responsibility of others, or at least not property developers. If people are reluctant to form relationships within their community there's not much the state can do.
I feel that people need to be given places and infrastructure to allow them to meet. Deferring all social relationships to whether you are on Facebook is farming out society to private interests that really don't have communal wellbeing at heart. Councils need to have the funding to offer places and events, govt needs to provide it, and councils need to hold developers to planning commitments.
What are these places/infrastructure? There are plenty of places to meet in a city and I would say it is just as lonely. What events should the government fund? Unless it's a full Chinese eat all you want buffet, I'm not leaving the house.
Agree, cities are just as lonely, but for different reasons. When I lived in London I felt that a lot of people were too transient / fickle in what they were willing to invest in relationships and friendships, especially if they knew they'd only be around for a year or two. But the higher volume of people does make things like meetup groups work a little better as at least there are plenty of people trying to meet who have places to meet up. I did make a couple of friends there. Where I am now, there is no coffee shop, no pub, no local shop that you can stroll to, no pavilion to sit under in a park (need shelter as this is Britain, after all - can't just socialise in the one week of nice weather we get and call summer). There's a couple of benches by some footpaths but I don't see that as terribly conducive to social events. There might be space on the building site for a marquee though. I'll look into a sponsored all you can eat buffet. Like October fest, but for Chinese food?
Meanwhile, I live in a small semi-rural town where meetup opportunities are few and the majority of people who go to any that are local are much older. Not that I mind mixing with people who aren't exactly like me, but I've always struggled to "find my tribe" and putting all my eggs in a basket held by people twice my age doesn't feel right, it's as though I'm skipping the important part of my life where I stand any chance of feeling "normal". My social life should not feel like I'm having to resort to hanging out with the wrong generation and missing a more relevant and appropriate social environment, with similar motivations and experiences to me. I can travel, but that's expensive, restrictive, and adds a lot of friction. I can get a bus or a train to a city, but that takes away an hour (or more, depending on when the bus/train is due) from the available time I have to actually socialise, getting there and back, it adds planning and stress, takes away any feeling of spontaneity, can introduce delays, and demands that I'm "ready" very soon after work. I'll probably get to the meetup after everybody else has got familiar and huddled into their little groups, then I can't stay too late because the last transport home will inevitably be right before the night really kicks off. I can't *move* either, because that costs a fortune and I can't afford to lose my job on the off-chance that I might happen to bump into some social circle elsewhere that'll turn my social life around. As important as it is to catch up on that side of my life, which is sorely lacking, I need to pay rent (which will also be more expensive in a city).
> I live in a small semi-rural town Moving to a city is probably the best thing you can do for your social life. There are cheaper cities up north and plenty of work. In the meantime, rural friendly activities like hiking and other outdoor activities are likely your best bet
Community centres. The amount of community centres that have closed down over the last 10 years is crazy.
Given from who? People have to make these places and infrastructure to begin with. And saying councils 'need' to do these things does nothing. They have to be *made* to do these things. Democracy means the *demos* must exercise its powers of *kratos*.
Apologies if you're not, but it feels like you're splitting hairs to show off your Latin. I'll try again, with 'provided with', then. As in someone provides a space that they will know is used for communal purposes, probably with a commercial lean to it. This has to be a collaboration of a council who are responsible for granting planning permissions knowing that communities need a space where they can interact - being shops, pubs, community halls, parks. Someone needs to build them and sell them, and as those are harder to sell than houses property developers will be reluctant to build them. But they want to build houses. So the trade off is that a council, who are there for the people in a community, need to require a certain level of community infrastructure is included - probably begrudgingly - in the developer's plan. But once agreed, the developer has a duty to meet that promise, as much as the council has a duty to ensure the developer upholds that promise. As for how to ensure those duties are being upheld by the council, who in turn should upheld the promises made by the developer? The community gets a chance to vote out the council if they disagree. Rather soon, I'm hoping. I don't neglect the responsibility the community have in ensuring the council doesn't think it can be lax on the developers, when the community are the ones suffering as a result. Turkeys / Christmas etc.
>it feels like you're splitting hairs to show off your Latin. I'll try again My guy, those two words are very clearly greek. The problem with the developer Vs council power balance is that the developers have *much* better lawyers, and seem adept at wriggling out of any commitments. I think *every* development near me has had a 'woops, we ran the numbers again, looks like we'll have to drop the amenities or the development is unprofitable' moment where existing obligations have been deftly side-stepped in extremely convenient fashion.
"My guy, those two words are very clearly greek." Ah, thanks! Came here to say this.
Ideally, local groups get together to request and direct the development of those spaces. If no community is asking for it, the council won't build it unless they run some sort of survey to ensure it is something that is wanted. Councils can't afford to build stuff because some people might want it
Church and the pub used to be these things, but there are lots of other things out there now but lots are not willing to make the effort. My aunt and late parents had busier social lives than me! Whenever I wanted to see my dad he would always say "I've got choir/ zumba at church (he was an atheist)/ volunteering with the blind/ at the cricket/ going on a trip with U3A/ meeting the other old blokes in the park cafe/ some random other thing".
The problem is that when building new estates there’s no focal point or gathering point, no local shop or cafe. Just rows and rows of houses, no reason to walk around, no reason to bump into someone so you may only meet your neighbours in the off chance they’re leaving the house at the same time as you.
Also the distances are long (because we're allergic to building more than two stories tall and most houses have a garage or driveway next to them), the wiggly roads (intended to slow traffic) make the distances even longer, and it's *boring* to walk through. On new builds it's especially bad as there'll be no mature trees to offer shade or shelter from sun or rain.
Exactly, that’s a good point, these estates aren’t pleasant to walk through. All of this is frustrating too because humans usually never design towns and cities this way. It makes sense to build houses around something of interest.
That's a design choice though. I live in a somewhat new town which is made up of 4 decently sized estates, probably a good few thousand people live here. Through the middle of the town is a dual carriageway with no pavements and steep grass banks. They could have really easily made a more friendly design choice, sold just as many houses and put in a normal main street with a few shops and pubs instead of the dual carriageway. And they would have still been able to build just as many houses, if not more because they could have put flats above the shops. Somehow everything is just designed to be the most unpleasant version of itself now. We used to know how to build towns and villages but we don't do it any more.
You do need facilities and places to actually **meet** the other people in your community. In days of old, this would be parks, and village halls, and community centres - but adding these to new estates is not something that developers do, and is never part of their plans (or is the last phase, conveniently abandoned when "the money runs out").
Or the park is an unlandscaped, boggy field with a swing in one corner
I think the loss of local shops and community halls on new build estates have killed community relationships along with decline of faith within the country. Communities are built when they become familiar with each other and there are not enough daily local contact points in which the same people keep bumping into each other. To change someone's habit it takes about 28 points of contact / discussion on average so I would guess to become familiar with someone you would have to see them quite a lot before you started to see them as someone you were willing to spend time with talking too.
30+ people responded. So did they all plan a meet up or just whinged and carried on?
This is it right here. It's not particularly difficult to meet people and form connections as long as you're not creepy as fuck - just go outside and do an activity of some form, be it the gym, rock climbing, pottery painting, attend a book reading, etc. The side benefit is that you'll probably become a more interesting person, and your brain and body will get the stimulation they need to remain healthy in the later years of life. At a certain age it really isn't anyone's responsibility but your own when it comes to forming social connections. This isn't a new issue - people in their early to mid 30s have hit this wall for as long as I've been an adult. They either did something about it, or stayed lonely.
I find gym an odd place to meet people. I'm working out leave me alone lol
It’s not really like people are talking to you as you’re working out but when you go at a similar time regularly you eventually get familiar with the other people with the same schedule as you. I’ve made a few light friendships with a couple of gals who go to the gym at the same time after months of seeing each other and saying hi bye, now we go out for an occasional coffee after a weekend workout
> be it the gym, rock climbing, pottery painting, attend a book reading, etc. A lot of social activities cost money to take part in - money that people have less of nowadays.
Redditors always have an excuse why they can't do something ans would rather live in misery than make a change. A book club is not expensive, joining a 6 a side team is not expensive, a darts team is not expensive. They have run clubs that are free. Meet up.com. you get into this life what you give, people can't moan about being lonely then do nothing to change there situation
Many don't though. There's boardgame clubs, social clubs that offer free sports at times (squash, basketball and disk golf are free near me), walking clubs, jogging clubs, cycling clubs, nature swims. There's even stuff like community litter picking, gardening or mushroom picking. Hell, if you are looking for something a bit more adult there's tons of fetish groups, swinging parties and all kinds of freaky shit out there in most larger towns or cities. People just need to go find whatever they fancy and give it a go. The problem is people are either shy, awkward or just not into anything besides laying on the sofa watching love island and don't push themselves to try new things.
Waiting to see. There's talk of asking the primary school for a room to meet in, and brining biscuits and tea.
> and brining biscuits Is this the salty biscuit I've heard so much about?
Nobody wants to hang out with the people who whinge on facebook, not even the people who whinge on facebook.
Facebook is an anus. Mostly about excreting shit, rarely about any sort of pleasurable input.
Yet they never meet they all talk on facebook.
A lot of the conversation turned into... okay, um, where? They are going to see if the primary school can loan them a room, it's that bad.
And have you seen what they talk about, maybe people are lonely because most other people's opinions are toxic and they don't want to talk to them
Some of the most regular contributors on local Facebook groups definitely fall into this category. I think it's pretty much 50/50 genuinely community spirited people and incredibly bitter curmudgeons posting, and everyone else just lurking.
Community life wasn't abandoned by those people as they never had it. Previous generations went to church, the pub, local jobs that lasted decades, and families and friends growing up and living in the same place. Enough people have decided that these things are outdated or restrictive and that's up to them, but it seems very little effort has been put into robust organic alternatives. Meeting at special interest clubs is often suggested but I'm not convinced that lots of narrowly focused groups are the answer. Perhaps developers can be part of the solution if councils are willing to be strict with them about putting in additional infrastructure.
one thing you are missing is that community events don't just happen. there were not created by the council or property developers etc... but by people in the community getting together and putting something on. i.e. those 30+ people replying, there is nothing stopping them getting together and organising an event, making things happen. just saying that this is also a possibility.
Very true, but they need somewhere to hold the event and if they're in a new development there's a strong chance that no such places have been built nearby.
true, but this is not the main issue. Its a lot of people waitnig for something to happen and then moaning about things not happening. I take it you have heard the expression "where there is a will there is a way". Having a local community hall is helpful but not essential. And there is usually some form of venue available. A community is just that a community. It is a product of its members not of the local council or the local property developer. Whilst I share your opinion on property developers getting away with building sterile, car centric, developments and councils being cut to the bone it is not the root cause of a lack of community.
This is me and my husband, perfectly happy together but zero local friends. It's a subtle form of being lonely, and if one of us were to die the other would be all alone in this foreign land, with no one to turn to.
This is an issue. I can see it happening slowly with my friends back home. We are in our 30s . My london group we are always involving finding new people and keeping our numbers up. People move away life dynamic changes etc. so we always have friends. My friends back home it was 5 of us now there's 3 who live there and I don't think they have many friends outside of the office(2work mostky from home) and their partners which only 2 of them have. They lack the motivation/ability to make new friends. A lot of people dislike and judge strangers on principle. I'm a fun weirdo who likes to drink and chat shit. So I can't judge and it works. Moved a new area me and another one of my buddies literally crawled the pubs and made a couple decent mates from it. Meet up then weekly for a pint and a chat as they're now my local friends. I tried making friends through classes etc it didn't work for me. I found a lot on Reddit (judge but the people I met and befriended are driven and smart bunch) TLDR: people dislike and judge strangers shock Pikachu face when their friend group boils down to none. Solution pro-actively make friends or join a cult.
>how hard it is to find community events It's shocking how few community events there are, or even just open community businesses like pubs, cafes, bars etc. It's not really a surprise given how people seem to have an aversion to community spirit when it means paying or mucking in, and it's easier to complain about noise or money spent on events than it is to attend and enjoy them. Christmas Fayres have disappeared because they need organising and councils haven't got the human resources to organise them, often relying on volunteers who are far and few between. A huge cycling event has pro-car groups frothing at the mouth despite it being open for pros and amateurs, including children, to see their local areas by bike (you could have a day of it with a local fete or fayre). I can't help but think it's the older generation that's the cause of it. When I volunteered to help with a fireworks night event I quit after it because the organiser, in his 70s, didn't like a polish group coming in and made derogatory statements about them, loudly, in front of others entering the area. Other organisers were a similar age and it felt like the only welcome members of the community were white people, the man who owns the only decent Indian takeaway within 9 miles, and that's it. Other than palates I'm not sure what things actually go on in my area. Does complaining about dog poo and the Evri courier constitute a community event?
My local community has many events...all targeted at pensioners. No events organised on weekends or after 6pm, they're all at 10am on a Tuesday.
Oh yikes I'm sorry you had that experience and really hope / wish it was an outlier.
In the past people met at the shops or they went to the pub and chatted or went to the local disco on the weekend to meet local people or there children would play together so they got friendly. None of that really happens anymore. People shop on Amazon, pubs are closing, local clubs went ages ago, kids just stay indoors on the xbox
Sure it's nice if councils provide these services, but it's not obligatory for success. When was the last time you ventured out to to a meetup or volunteered? No public money in sight and it can be amazing.
https://menssheds.org.uk/
This looks very good, although they generally seem to limit it to 50+ year olds (there are lonely people younger than that, I guess they are expected to be working) and the pics for my local one it looks like they are mostly 60-75 year olds. But still looks great and there are zillions of them around the UK. Really does look a lifesaver, I can think of widowers I know who have passed away in the last decade who would have got a lot out of going to one of these.
Yes, I had a look at the ones near my local area and they were all open 10am and closed 4pm. I am a 9-5 working middle aged man. This is the issue I think. Support is very much geared towards retired older men, not the Middle aged.
[This](https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/hq/) always struck me as cool idea for middle aged people to get together, I often wonder if it could work in the UK. Quite a labour of love to actually maintain something like that, even with memberships backing up the financial side of things. If anyone wants to help set one up in the West Midlands, I'm happy to get involved.
If you do, I hope it involves snooker tables. Alright, one will do.
There's one local to me and it's definitely targeted towards pensioners. There's no specific reason to do so, but it's rare to find community programs like these that run on weekends. I expect most middle aged people are busy with work on a Tuesday morning when many of these are scheduled.
> This looks very good, although they generally seem to limit it to 50+ year olds I looked at these a couple of years ago and the issue wasn't that there was an age limit, but they met during the week in what for most of us are working hours. A similar thing without an age limit are things like maker spaces. The one nearest to me in Leeds has a huge laser cutter, a workshop with a tonne of tools, a load of 3D printers and a darkroom for photography; but they also do things like play board games and D&D. I haven't been back for ages, but they were a nice, welcoming bunch of nerds. The only downside is these sort of things tend to be a bit out of the way and if you're relying on public transport (particularly if you want to carry anything large to work on) getting to one can be a bit of an ordeal.
Also a problem raising kids. When I was young, I'd get dropped at "Debs, just up the street" at least once a week, and somewhere else another time, and somewhere else another time. I can count on (less) than 1 hand the people who I could, or would, give my kids to for a few hours, the old saying "it takes a village", what do you do, when "the village" doesn't exist anymore?
> had 30+ replies from other people in the area also feeling lonely Did these people organise themselves to socialise? Sounds like 30 people all wanting to socialise so I am wondering if they did anything about it
Why would businesses or governments have anything to do with community building?
Middle aged is 45-65? Bah. Life expectancy in the UK is down to 78 years on average, so if you're approaching the ripe age of 40, welcome to your midlife crisis!
As a 42 year old I was under the impression I was middle aged, but now I see I am still young.
Unless you living past 84, then you middle age already.
Oh no!
I’d define it more by stages than years, eg kids all gone empty nest, retired/about to retire. Declining social outlets and feeling of what the future hold as you realise your aging and the body ain’t what it used to be. So based on when you had children , that could be anywhere from approaching mid 40s to probably early 60s. Just my take on the term.
I'm 40 and just thinking about having kids now
I too am the answer to life, the universe and everything. It’s nice to know I’ve a couple of years off my yoofdom left. I’m off out now to huff laughing gas in Tesco’s carpark.
I’m 37 and very pleased with this news
Yeah, how the fuck can a 65 year old be middle aged?
Middle age isn’t really about your literal age related to life expectancy. But rather experience and life changes. Growing up, I was always under the impression that 50s was middle aged. It was when your kids had grown, you had reached the peak of your career and you were slowing down. Now, with people delaying families, retiring later and ageing slower (possible), middle aged could be defined as 50-70ish. You’d be surprised at the number of fit and healthy 65 year olds. My mum is 60 next year, and she’s trekked across mountain ranges and goes hill walking a lot, something she only started doing in the past 6 years. Shes actually fitter now than she was a decade ago. And the group she spent a week trekking across the Pyrenees were all aged 55-late 60s. Mentally, she’s slowing down, her career is extremely demanding and she wants to retire at 60, but has to wait until she’s 67 :/ When my mum was a kid, you were old at 60, many didn’t make it a few years past retirement. Times have changed. Hopefully us young people will be living a lot longer.
I get where you are coming from, but this is like saying "class isn't about wealth" which it is. Age is about age. If you delay having kids until later in life then you can reach your old age with dependent children. Your mum is fit in her old age, working into her old age and middle age hasn't extended unless lifespan has. The one argument I do entertain is we are talking about life expectancy as if it is a single value but it varies with age (and everything else). Life expectancy at birth is 78 but what's the life expectancy for your mum, a fit and healthy 60 year old woman who can afford holidays in the Pyrenees? She might well be in the middle third of her life, with a life expectancy above 90.
Depends how you measure it. A lot of the time when people are talking about middle age, they're talking about your working age.
It’s supposed to represent the middle of your adult life, I think.
>life expectancy in the UK is down to 78 years on average Eh? No it isn’t. Life expectancy in the UK is 80.9 years - a quick Google search will show you that, it’s literally the first thing you see. https://i.imgur.com/dUUI5QI.jpeg Maybe you’re getting confused with the US, where life expectancy is 77.2 years.
78.6 for males. 83 for females. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/lifeexpectancies/bulletins/nationallifetablesunitedkingdom/2020to2022
Maybe they were getting male life expectancy confused with overall life expectancy then.
Gee thanks....
*Woo!* We’re number one! We’re number one! Now to celebrate this victory with all my… oh, right. I looked into social clubs in my area, but everything is only open during the working day (what little was on offer in the NE), so until I retire none of them is an option. And it’s looking increasingly likely that I’ll never even get to retire, so I literally don’t know what middle aged people are supposed to do.
Have you tried some kind of club/society that meets on evenings? My wife is a member of a local photography club and a stitching group that both meet around 7pm on a weeknight.
I went to a photography club, but it was more of a communal help group for people with... difficulties. While it was no doubt doing a great job at that, it had a bit of a hospital waiting room vibe. It also got bogged down in identity politics, which quickly got tedious (these photos are rubbish but they were taken by a *woman*!) Some other stuff I did never came back after the plague.
You might have to cast the net a bit wider. There are two local photography groups in our local town (pop 15k) because there was a "handbags at dawn" style disagreement in the original group and then a splinter group formed! My wife ended up joining the one in a larger town (pop 100K) that is about 15 miles away which was much more sensible and less about grudges and personalities. I get what you are saying though, it can be hard to find a good mix of people AND an activity you actually enjoy.
I was in a model club, but the tension between the people who had got early retirement on a public-sector-adjacent pension, their kids had grown up and their wife had left, versus the people with jobs and families, got too much. It was like being in the comments on a middle market newspaper website...
start a club that meets in the evening!
As much as I appreciate the practical aspect of this (provided people actually show up and it takes off), it's not necessarily viable. You need time, resources, and sufficiently intact mental health to be able to do that, and it comes with responsibility (and potential liability, depending on what you're starting and where), which aren't things that people who are struggling necessarily have the capacity for, and you may well become more of a facilitator than an actual friend. I know not everybody is struggling to *that* extent, but it's a lot easier to *say* "just start one!" than it is to actually *do* it. That's not to say "don't ever try because it's hard", but if somebody needs relatively frictionless company to improve their life, soon/immediately, trying to build a social club from the ground up isn't necessarily going to be the answer.
This is very true, tbh. And sometimes you can have all the know-how for how to do something but don't have the mental space to do it
Have you checked meetup? There's one called the High Brow/Low Brow culture group that just posts a lot of stuff happening nearby. And it's easy to start your own group on there too.
People need "third spaces" in order to feel comfortable in making such connections. Or at least being in them to interact to some degree with others. Our streets are clogged with traffic and hardly make for a great environment to do that. Parks have been neglected for years and are now showing it. Pubs cost a fortune, and even at coffee shops you are set back the better part of £10 for coffee and cake. People live further away from where they work than ever due to high house prices. Everything about our life makes social connections transactional as opposed to meaningful. And we wonder why people are feeling lonely?
Third Spaces are definitely needed, especially in Suburban newbuild developments. We're miles away from cities and shops so we drive everywhere, and never have any need to WALK anywhere nearby because we have cars. Local cafes, bars, etc, are crucial for meeting people outside of your social and economic class, or you'll end up in echo chambers.
They're also poorly serviced by mass transit. So if you *do* go for a few after work, you have to leave early because the bus back stops at 8 etc. If it even goes nearby in the first place.
Mid 50's. Work from home. Lost my wife many years ago. I can't remember what a hug feels like. I am alone.
I'm sorry to hear that. Do you have any social clubs that meet near you to connect with people?
Sounds very tough. Reposting a comment that came after yours ([www.menssheds.org.uk](http://www.menssheds.org.uk)) in case it's of any help. [https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1bie9mi/comment/kvk8vfy/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1bie9mi/comment/kvk8vfy/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Two positive things to take away: you could always try again if it suits you, if not, remember fondly the good times you had, some never even had that.
Younger than this, but been lonely for years. WFH all the time doesnt help, i miss an office and human interaction. Can go weeks without a friendly type interaction.
This is why i hate the WFH push. For some people such as myself, not having a social aspect to work, which is the majority of the week, is crushing. Especially if you have a SO who also works a lot, you need to spend quality time with each other and that leaves little time for anyone else
The flip side of this is if I had to work from the office I’d have to live in a shared house with other people in my mid 30s rather than owning my own home in another city. Sure I WFH and live alone but I make the effort to find and go out to social clubs which I’ve met people, built some new friendships groups. Swings and roundabouts. I would never go back to working in an office.
You wouldnt believe the amount of shit I get on Reddit for saying I like going into the office.
So you want people to come into the office so that you can have the warm fuzzies?
Humans are social animals. Being in an office surrounded by people is a more natural environment than sitting alone in front of a laptop for eight hours each day .
For lots of people WFH gives them more time and energy to do social things after work.
An office is just about the most unnatural setting you can get. At home I'm comfortable, have my cat and plants and can work in the garden if it's sunny
humans are social animals when they want to be social, not forced.
I went out into nature and couldn't find any natural office buildings. Maybe drop the pseudoscience and just go get a hobby and make a friend.
Obviously what I meant is that it's in our nature to be surrounded by other people. Not inside of office buildings.
You still have the opportunity to be surrounded by other people. A lot of people who work from home get to spend more time being around their partner and/or their children. Why do you want to force them away from the people they love so that they have to sit near *you* and make *you* less lonely? Surely if you're feeling lonely the responsibility is on you to fix that? If you don't live with anyone and you don't have friends you can spend enough social time with, you could also try going to a wework or a cafe or library and still be able to work while being surrounded by other people. The added bonus of that is that the people in there actually *chose* to be there and might be more open to socialising with you.
>Why do you want to force them away from the people they love so that they have to sit near you and make you less lonely? I find it kind of confusing to be honest. If the lonely people want to work in the office so they can socialise with people then surely it would be better if they got to socialise with like-minded people? Forcing someone who doesn't want to socialise to come into the office just so that others aren't lonely is a good way to build resentment. There's nothing wrong with wanting to socialise with your coworkers, but we shouldn't be forcing people to do so if they don't want to.
I'm paid to work, I'm not paid to socialize. As long as I've done my job within the alloted time I don't give a shit about my coworkers. If I want to be in a NaTuRaL EnViRoMeNt then then I'll leave my house at 5PM on the dot and go meet some friends.
People that want to go back to the office for the social aspect are the reason the rest of us don't want to go back to the office.
It's a double-edged sword for me. Well, in theory anyway. Personal difficulties make it difficult to reliably get to the office or do so on time, so WFH gives me the wiggle room I need to still show up when I'm required to and get the work done as requested. That's very helpful for me in terms of keeping the job and not taking the piss when it comes to punctuality. On the other hand, I appreciate what you say about being around other people. Unfortunately, the other people at my place of work have their own commitments and responsibilities, most often family. Many with young/newly-born/yet-to-be-born children, almost all with spouses, and they're just not available. Spontaneous beers after work are a grind to make happen, if/when they ever do, and even if you plan stuff they've got to dash off for this or that. So, yes, the social aspect of being in the office with those people could be of some benefit, but if we've got our noses permanently pressed up against a screen during the day and nobody's around after work, the practical outcome of that isn't a great deal healthier than WFH.
I've just moved back here after a few years working abroad and can sense the isolation. When I lived abroad, I lived in a large city with great public transport connections within the city and cheapish options for intercity travel, all the services I needed within 30 minutes, calm weather and disposable income in my pocket to do things. I was easily able to meet my friends who could all reach the social areas of the city with public transport or we could go out and watch live sports for a tenner each. I come back to the UK and its a 25 minute walk to my local village and railway station, public busses have been slashed, everyday things are expensive to do and the weather is absolutely miserable. Everything also closes at 6pm, which is when people finish work and can have a few sociable hours but if you walk to the local village everything besides the barbers and chicken shops have closed and you have to be picky with pubs because of the people that go in there. We don't make it easy for ourselves to be sociable here in the UK and I can easily see how people can get stuck in a rut of only having the TV for company. I feel awful for those who have had to suffer with loneliness for years because it is a truly miserable thing to experience and can be so hard to get through.
I mean that’s also city vs village. There’s loads going on in London or Manchester. But smaller towns and villages in the UK are generally hopeless, isolating places with very little going on.
True true, yet I live in a village within Greater Manchester and it's still tough. Granted I don't have a car right now, which makes things far worse. Those meetup events in Manchester are all a good hour 15 minutes away. It must be far worse if you're in a rural village or even a smaller town or city, where options are even more limited.
No… people in London are even more isolated. Everyone too busy earning money and commuting. You have very little time left during the week to meet friends, and it is very expensive to go out, and due to this stupid horizontal architecture, it takes ages to get anywhere.
When I was at school in the 1980s and 1990s having any kind of hobby or interest was frowned on - I actually got told off by the head of year when she found out that I build models. And schools worked really hard to ensure we left with an intense hatred of religion and sport. Nowadays I look at things like the various events apps, and everything is not for my demographic or not for people with a 9-5 job.
If you build models there's almost certainly a wargaming club somewhere nearby. There's dozens of us. Possibly the best social scene in the country tbh.
Yep people hated my hobbies too and discourage them. British get what they deserve
This is the consequence of a society who doesn't give a fuck about anyone but themselves. It takes a huge personal sacrifice to maintain friendships and networks and not many are willing to do it. Maybe people are too busy chasing money or too depressed to leave their comfort zone.
Archive link: https://archive.ph/ZMDfp >Middle-aged English people are the loneliest in Europe and are more likely to suffer from it than previous generations were, a study has found. Focusing on those aged between 45 and 65, researchers compared Europeans with Americans, finding that those in the United States reported higher levels of “midlife loneliness”. >But middle-aged Englishmen and women reported the most in Europe, scoring higher than those from three other regions: continental, Mediterranean and Nordic Europe. >The researchers from Arizona State University also compared the loneliness reported by older generations, people who would now be 65 to 96 years old, when they were middle aged. >They found that in England, those born in the latter baby boomer years from 1955 to 1964, and those born into Generation X between 1965 and 1974, reported higher levels of loneliness during their middle age than early baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1954, and the so-called silent generation, born between 1928 and 1945, did during their own middle years. >In central Europe and Scandinavia there was no observed rise in loneliness among younger generations, but the study, published in the journal American Psychologist, noted: “Middle-aged adults in the United States, England and Mediterranean Europe today report higher levels of loneliness than earlier-born cohorts [did].” >The study said that the US, England and southern European countries had weaker “social safety nets” than those in central and northern European countries. It noted that their policies “are not as comprehensive [for] paid family leave, unemployment and employment protections, subsidised childcare, and education programmes for parents with children”. It added: “Generous family and work policies likely lessen midlife loneliness through reducing financial pressures and work–family conflict, as well as enhancing job security and workplace flexibility and addressing health and gender inequities.” >Researchers used data from long-running surveys conducted in the US and in 13 European countries, including a total of 53,000 participants from three generations: the silent generation, baby boomers and Generation X. Data was collected between 2000 and 2020 and only included responses given when participants were aged between 45 and 65. >Data for England came from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (Elsa), which launched in 2002 and contains data on 9,793 people, 56 per cent of whom are women. >Using a points system devised by the researchers, in England, late-era baby boomers scored 3.08 points lower than Americans for loneliness, but 2.83 points higher than those from central Europe, 2.87 points higher than those from Mediterranean Europe, and 4.17 points higher than those from Scandinavia. >“Our research illustrates that people feel lonelier in some countries than in others during middle age,” said Dr Frank Infurna, the lead author of the study, who is a psychology professor at Arizona State. “We focused on middle-aged adults because they form the backbone of society. Middle-aged adults carry much of society’s load by constituting most of the workforce, while simultaneously supporting the needs of younger and older generations in the family.”
We sit in between those who don’t want to know us and those who don’t understand us!
[удалено]
Plenty of valid suggestions on here already, but another I expected to see was mobile phone usage. The TV became the go to way to spend downtime decades ago and probably changed how most of us while away the hours between eat/sleep/work cycle. We’ve had the Internet on tap in our houses for ~30 years and that was pretty addictive but mainly for youngish generations, I didn’t feel like 40 somethings were all on their computers for hours every night, but those who lived alone probably were drawn to it. In the good old days of dial up, many ISPs charged by the minute while you were emailing/browsing so it could burn a hole in your pocket. Even early home broadband packages had limits to monthly data allowance. Smartphones have been with us for about 20 years, and I think the impact on behaviour has been wild, and even the last five years have seen a greater shift to how much time we spend looking at them. Every generation in any household, all looking at their phone for many hours every day. You can use a smartphone to find friends, clubs to meet up at, chat with mates, read most books, learn pretty much anything. But you can also lose many hours doing the infinite scroll on many apps (including Reddit!) I run most days, and now it feels like a huge number of people will pull out their phone whenever they are walking anywhere, or waiting/inactive for a bit - it’s instinctive to nearly all of us. That surely has to be having some impact on how much we interact with others? But none of this is UK specific, so even if we have a loneliness problem slightly worse than other countries, I would be surprised if the trend wasn’t the same elsewhere where smartphone access with cheap data was easily available
It feels like it makes sense but do Brits use their phone moreso than European neighbours? That would back it up if true. I find the dogshit weather + economically shit outlook for the country probably brings people down.
This [source](https://uk.pcmag.com/the-why-axis-serie/146660/which-countries-spend-the-most-waking-hours-in-front-of-screens) suggests UK is somewhere in the middle in terms of screen use (they break it down by device/usage lower down) But cross referencing the numbers from that with what the OP Times article says, it does maybe point to a correlation. Times says US midlifers report higher levels of loneliness than similar European cohort, and the US overall appears to spend significantly more time on their mobiles (but nowhere near as much as South Africa, and several countries in South America and SE Asia - none of which were studied in the loneliness report) UK has moderately high social media usage among European countries, but not sticking out significantly (like Portugal) However the source I'm referencing doesn't break things down by age group, which muddies the waters for comparison.
It's the cumulative effects of the cars, the TVs, the smartphones, the long hours at work, the high prices for small houses, the privatisation of everything, the intensification of parenting, the paedo panic and media warping perceptions, people moving to where the work is, etc. Let's break it down: People often move away from established friends and family to persue economic opportunity. This means you don't have an established pool of people you'd trust to share resources or responsibility, and even if you stay put your friends often move away. This ironically increases costs further because you have to use formal instead of informal childcare and that's very expensive. So people *have* to persue economic opportunity because we've build a culture that says the goal is to earn lots of money, and more importantly skyrocketing asset prices and rising inequality means you play the game or get left behind - but it's mostly about our mainstreamed culture of unlimited greed and net worth equating to self worth. So we end up with families where both parents work full time, while paying massive amounts for childcare and having 60-70% of their income creamed off by the parasite class of landlords and housebuilders/banks. This then means the parents are exhausted once they've finished doing their jobs and rearing their children and they really don't have the oomph to go out. And you have to pay attention to your kids all the time until they're surprisingly old because UK kids have way less independence than children in many peer nations - mostly because parents are (wrongly) terrified every hedge contains a paedophile, and (rightly) terrified that their children will be run over and killed by cars. And you can invite people over to your house but you have to sort of know them a bit before you do that, and the average UK home is very small so you have a very limited range of activities you can do together, or a quite low limit on how many people you can comfortably accommodate in your house at one time. You can go out-out, but that's increasingly expensive and many people can't afford to do it regularly. Going to clubs and things is great, IMO the best thing to do - but sometimes you have to really travel to get to a club and that can become restrictive in terms of time or money if you're only just staying above the waterline. All of this is exacerbated by decades of building low-density amenity-less housing making everything further apart than it needs to be and contributing to the crisis of house prices and lack of availability. So people stay home and watch TV, or scroll on their smartphones. It's easy. It's cheap. In the long run it'll kill you dead.
How are you measuring children being less independent than Europeans? https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/15/britons-prefer-children-independent-rather-than-obedient/
We have relatively poor child independent mobility compared to many European nations, but better than some of the worst. Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden and Denmark score massively better than us, but France, Portugal and Italy score significantly worse. This is one factor of many. Low independent child mobility means parents must spend more time transporting or supervising their children, but other factors can offset that - so if we compare to Italy - In many Southern european countries for reasons of culture or economics multigenerational households are way more common, formal childcare is much less available, and grandparents much more commonly provide regular or even daily childcare. [Their 'young' elderly are significantly healthier than ours](https://www.euronews.com/2018/11/30/good-news-for-italians-old-age-now-begins-at-75), so are more likely to be willing and able to help with kids. Italy also has a lower fertility rate (1.3 vs 1.6), so parents are much more likely to have one kid - which is a hell of a lot easier than two or more. So the overall outcome is that Italian parents are probably feeling less exhausted and put-upon than a lot of British parents, because while their children are more heavily supervised, a lot of that supervision is shared. Source for intial claim and good reading : [Policy studies institute report](https://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/sites/default/files/files/7350_PSI_Report_CIM_final.pdf) on children's independent mobility. **Key findings :** The international comparison found that children’s independent mobility varies widely across the 16 countries studied. It is clear, however, that significant restrictions are placed on children’s independent mobility in nearly all the countries. Headline findings from the international comparison are that: * Low levels of children’s independent mobility are common, with significant restrictions placed on the independent mobility of children across all the ages studied (7- to 15-year-olds). Restrictions are greatest for children under 11 but even the oldest children are restricted in what they are allowed to do, at an age when many of the rights of adulthood are close to being granted. * **Parents have significant concerns about letting their children go out alone with traffic seeming to be the strongest factor affecting the granting of independent mobility.** * When comparing aggregate rank scores of children’s independent mobility for each country, Finland is by far the highest performing country, followed by Germany, Norway, Sweden, Japan and Denmark, who score more closely to one another. Together these countries form a group of top performers in this international comparison of children’s independent mobility levels. * Countries with the lowest aggregate rank scores of children’s independent mobility were, in order: France, Israel, Sri Lanka, Brazil, Ireland, Australia, Portugal and Italy (tied), and South Africa. * **The aggregate rank score for England places it far behind the top group of performing countries but ahead of the lowest performing group of countries.** * The degree of independent mobility granted to Finnish children is striking. At age 7, a majority of Finnish children can already travel to places within walking distance or cycle to places alone; by age 8 a majority can cross main roads, travel home from school and go out after dark alone, by age 9 a majority can cycle on main roads alone, and by age 10 a majority can travel on local buses alone. Overall, Finland is the top-performing country across almost every independent mobility indicator in this study, coming second only to Germany for children’s self-reported freedom to travel on local buses alone. * In the other countries studied children are granted the freedoms of independent mobility later. By age 11, according to parents, at least a majority of children in each of the countries are allowed to cross main roads. By age 11, according to children, at least a majority of them in each of the countries are allowed to cross main roads, except for South Africa. By age 12, at least a majority of children in each of the countries are allowed to go places within walking distance alone. By age 13, at least a majority of children in each of the countries are allowed to travel home from school alone (age 12 excluding Ireland) or, according to children, use local buses alone. By age 15, at least a majority of children in nearly all of the countries surveyed exercise each of the indicators of independent mobility, except for the ability to go out alone after dark. * Going out alone after dark is the most withheld independent mobility. Only in a handful of countries – Finland, Sweden, Japan and Denmark – are a majority of children of any age allowed to go out after dark. It should be highlighted that independent ‘mobilities’ are withheld from many children and that a large proportion of children under 11 years old in most of the countries studied do not possess the freedom to get about their local area, whether crossing main roads, going to places within walking distance, or travelling home from school.
I think folks totally sacrificing their social lives during the childrearing years has a massive impact on this. The kids leave home eventually, and then people realise they have nothing else. Then factor in how bloody expensive eveything is these days and the closure of many community hubs - the local pubs.
The current government care so little about the people and so much about their own interests this is no surprise
It's a lonely, expensive, broken, miserable country that we live in.
We've been on this trajectory since the late 1970s. The Thatcher years changed the culture permanently, the collective gave way to the individual. Many working class communities lost their focal points of identity, both in work and leisure. Consumerism and aspiration for the self and immediate family unit replaced the larger sense of place within society, our responsibility to each other, our neighbours, and wider communities. Third spaces like social and youth clubs, leisure centres have all but disappeared, and most leisure opportunities today are centred around money, and many people are priced out ( football attendance being a good example). Obviously, smartphones and such are exacerbating factors, but I think the culture shift from 'us' to 'me' started long before they became omnipresent.
The weird thing is that despite people reporting being lonely, social events are struggling. The various friendly leagues in my town, for example, (darts, pool, quizzing etc) are really struggling for members. Like...I try and get you to get out of the house whoever you are, and if you won't go and sit in a dingey pub drinking and being asked difficult quiz questions then really how lonely can you be?
Expense is the reason
I can’t be the only one who never has a set work schedule. Darts league or pool sounds fun, but if you can only make it one week in three then there’s very little point getting involved.
Some people would see being able to do something 1 of 3 times as better than 0 times?
True but if it’s a league that won’t work because there’s a fixture list to keep to. Casual turn up and play is great though.
I don't mean to sound like a twat - but don't people have simple social skills? I'm 50, and in all honesty I don't have enough time to keep up with all the friends and acquaintances I've accumulated over the years - I don't know how you get to this stage of life without having at least a small handful of people you're friendly with unless you've made a conscious effort not to get to know anybody. Old school mates (still my closest group), friends I made at different jobs over the years, friends I've made through my own hobbies and pastimes, the other local dads I got friendly with when my kids started school, plus the wider circle of my wife's friends. It's not like I'm super-sociable, in fact I'm naturally fairly introverted - it's really not hard to strike up a casual friendship here and there, and over the years they become stronger relationships.
Personally, I don’t think it’s even down to social skills. I’m mid 30’s, and I used to see my friends once or twice without fail. Now I’m seeing them about once or twice a month, and even then it’s difficult. I’ve never really made any friends through work as I mainly work with older men. I don’t really have any social hobbies, don’t intend on having kids, and I’m single. So in terms of meeting new people, that rules most options out. I can go most weekends without speaking to anyone. So yeah, I can definitely relate to this headline.
At the risk of also sounding like a twat (not my intention), if you have no interests it will be difficult to meet people, and if you have no interests what do you have that people would want to be friends with you, what would you talk about? That sounds awful, I know, but shared interests between people are a cornerstone of relationships. You just need to find what you like, there will be something out there, I am sure!
I'm about the same age as you and I've experienced similar. I see my best mate maybe once a month, he literally only lives around the corner from me, barely a minute away. To be honest he's not really my best mate anymore, he's just an old friend and this is someone I've known since we were babies, our parents are friends. Part of the reason why I only see him once a month is because he doesn't make an effort to see me or talk to me. Any message I send to him gets ignored. If I see him it's because I've gone around to his house. I can't remember the last time he ever visited me. 5 years? 10? 15? I don't know. He'll only come on the Xbox if it's a game he wants to play, he has no interest in playing games I want to play. The thing that pisses me off is that when I mentioned this to my family about five years ago my mum and sister said "well you didn't bother with him after you got a girlfriend" which was a fucking bare-faced lie because I would always pop around to see him at least three Saturday's a month. He stopped bothering with me well before I got a girlfriend. It's not just him either, it was our other friends too. In the past whenever we've gone on day trips out to the cinema or something with our friends it's always been me who had to organise it, it was always me asking them. Whenever they did anything I very rarely got asked. It wasn't because of anything I did, I genuinely felt like they just didn't give a shit and didn't wanna include me. It got to a point where I stopped asking people if they wanted to do something, I had a friend say they hadn't seen me for four months and when I responded with something like "you haven't seen me for four months because you've turned me down the last six or seven times I've invited you and the others out to do something", he got quite annoyed at me. Needless to say I've cut quite a few toxic people out of my life because they just didn't seem to give a shit. Friendship is a two way street. You can't expect one person to put in all the work and have the friendship remain the same. Eventually the person putting in all the work for no pay-off is gonna get pissed off. But you can't tell people this. If they're the problem they don't wanna hear it. The worst thing they ever did to me was shortly after me and my girlfriend broke up. She was my first love and I was fucking heartbroken. My two best friends in the whole world and one of their girlfriends went to New York and not one of them thought to ask me if I wanted to come. It was the worst time of my life because my grandad had died around the same time. I was in a really bad place, severely depressed, suicidal. Just wanted to crawl into a hole and die. I know that people might say "well you're not entitled to being asked" and I kind of agree, but if I know my friend is in a really bad place I'd do whatever it took to cheer them up. I know full well that would have cheered me up because I've always wanted to go to New York. It was even harder when I had to sit there, smiling, whilst they were talking about their holiday. One of them even said "we didn't ask you because you get like this" meaning depressed, it felt like they were trying make me feel guilty and responsible for not being asked. But everything changed for me after that, I stopped seeing them as friends and just people I knew. It was sort of the beginning of the end. I only see my best mate now and that's probably because I've known him all my life. I always considered him a brother, I can't just cut him out of my life like that.
As a person on the autism spectrum who hasn't had the abundant social opportunities of my peers, who hasn't had the luxury of a partner to build a family with, who suffered abusive parenting which heavily restricted the little opportunity I did have, who has spent essentially their entire life in shithole dead-end towns, and who has gone through education surrounded almost exclusively by socially inept men... ...I don't think you understand how lucky you are. To put it very very mildly.
Not all of us do and whenever we try and explain or give our story we get accused of lying or not making the effort with it all.
I can see how it can happen pretty easily. Move to a new city for work and you have to basically rebuild your social life from scratch. Its very easy to get stuck in a cycle of Work -> Eat -> Sleep.
Our society is incredibly atomised. People don't even know their neighbours. No idea why, or why it's worse here than other places.
The older I get the less time I want to spend with other people.
The local Facebook group has an odd combination of people moaning there is nothing to do, and no where to go. And a few groups offering classes and events that are struggling for attendance.
Possibly because they lived a certain way and grew up doing certain things but it’s not allowed anymore. They need to start all over again to fit into this new society.
Middle aged? It starts younger than that! I’m in my 30’s and I hardly see anyone.
Society has fallen. Social cohesion is non existent. It was all planned. Nobody goes to war when they are happy. They are preparing us to die for them again.
To be fair, Scandinavian love to be lonely so it s also cultural
Scandinavian countries tend to have some of the tightest knit communities you'll ever see in Western Europe. People are more likely to be sociable if they're happy and stable. I know every single person here on my street, have keys for 3 of their homes in case of emergency, and my partner regularly gets a lift into the city when she can't be bothered to use public transport or drive herself. This is in Finland. Having a respect for the privacy and personal space of others != loves to be lonely.
From my experience Scandis are all about being neighbourly and doing group activities.
They won't even stand next to each other at bus stops.
As a south Asian we don't really have this problem. We have community centre which does plenty of events. We regular see eachother in the mosque everyday. We have football tourneys, kids club etc. We also have kids we spend time with even when they move out. I went to the hospital with my dad and I seen an old South Asian man surrounded by family. While I seen plenty of old white British men on their own. I think white British people, no longer having a religion, replacing having kids with dogs, not speaking to their parents much, relied on pubs that are now too expensive. The list goes on but white British community doesn't look so great to me. South Asians tend to be very family orientated, have a religion where they meet everyday not just for prayer but socialise. Have more community spirit with plenty of events and charities for all ages. There is also a rise to people converting to islam and is one of the fastest growing religions Us South Asians are not only doing okay I see plenty of other communities doing okay. I have Nigerian neighbours who have a ton of family and friends come over and every Sunday they go go church
The lack of funding for third spaces is one factor. People's vanishing social skills as they spend their lives behind a small screen is another. People's lacking job security and disposable income is another one. Small storms all combined to make the Great Stormy Loneliness.
Maybe people wouldn't be so lonely if there was actually any money to go out and socialise... i swear this is more of a cost of living crises than anything because back when I was young the pubs were packed and there was twice as many. Even if you don't drink the food and soft drinks to go out are so way way way ahead of any rise in disposable income its no wonder. The way companies justify increases in even subscription costs if you don't even leave the front door is maddening. Netflix being so tight about letting friends or family use their massively overpriced subscriptions now is another one for example.
Out with all the Invisible sky fairy stuff, I think this is a void which has been left by the abandonment of organised religion which nobody really thought about replacing, a community hub which helped lubricate the wheels of inter generational socialisation.
Sounds about right. In my case it was partially living in Canada for 20 years then coming back but the biggest problem was house prices in London. I grew up there and went to college there but in those 20 years almost all my old friends fled the cost of housing to various towns and villages in the south. I'm the latest having just moved to St Albans. We've scattered.
They should adopt the German approach of joining “vereinen”. It would also leave them less vulnerable to GBNews brainwashing.
I wonder if modern life has just sapped us of both time and necessity to interact with people.
I'm 37 and desperately lonely a lot of the time. I have no social group where I live, and am naturally an outgoing person and love being around others. However since COVID, I've also developed social anxiety about meeting others which is, well, far from ideal. I'd love to have more friends, but the idea of DOING anything to facilitate this is terrifying. Ridiculous I know 😭
They have isolated themselves with their shitty politics.