"What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.<p>While I sometimes understand the bemoaning of top engineers spending time on trivial apps, sometimes those apps aren't as trivial as you would think when you consider how they positively impact loneliness. Of course, there's plenty of garbage out there, but I do love to see efforts to connect people in ways that can be serendipitous and have the possibility of leading to more meaningful connection.<p>I can think of multiple long-time valuable real-life relationships I've had where our first connections were on some trivial platform. Sometimes it's hard to see past the glaring negatives that come with some of those platforms, but I'm hopeful that better options will evolve over time.
In a similar spirit, it could be cool if some coffeeshops and restaurants explicitly designated one of their communal table as a 'talk table'. Where if you sit at it, it means you are open to chatting with your neighbors.<p>I know that many places already have communal tables but I find that unless there's some explicit display a place is meant for a certain purpose, many people who want to chat / meet new people won't initiate because they can't be sure their neighbours are open to it. If they purposefully decide to sit at a 'talk table', then you can be sure they are.
Pubs and temples can be a bit similar spaces, but this seems great in that it is not connected to a religion or alcohol consumption.<p>I guess this is what cafes are could be like, but somehow they have turned out to be places where you are expected to keep to yourself.
This is an interesting concept because it's actually quite old. While traveling through the north of Holland playing shows we happened to play in a centuries-old historic public living room in a tiny township in the middle of nowhere. The place had been a home, but the occupants of the home historically (whomever they were) would open their living room most every day to travelers and neighbors, and serve small-fare food and drinks. The modern owners continue the tradition, and host house concerts occasionally.<p>It makes sense: it's a sparsely populated location. You could have called it a "cafe" and converted it, and maybe made a little extra money, but so much of the social aspect would be gone. The place actually adds more value to the community as a community living room than it would as a diner.<p>Edit: the place was also interesting in that it had the original "bedsteads" or box beds (example: [1]). These open (and latched!) from the outside: parents would basically lock their kids in these boxes overnight.<p>[1] <a href="https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/39/70/04/3970041ae87e76aa981ce1ceba4d6bd8.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/39/70/04/3970041ae...</a>
"A street is the living room of the community."<p><a href="http://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20161027.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20161027.php</a>
A recent post on the /r/campingandhiking subreddit [1] featured a photo of five young men, dressed in suits purchased at a thrift shop, at the northern terminus of the Pacific Crest Trail. The OP revealed that none of the men knew each other prior to the trip. Each just happened to start the trip at the same time, meeting the others during the <i>first day</i> on the trail. Together, they backpacked for 5 months over 2,650 miles.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/CampingandHiking/comments/5aydxu/i_also_hiked_2650_miles_to_the_northern_terminus/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/CampingandHiking/comments/5aydxu/i_...</a>
The best part of traveling along was talking to people in the common areas of hostels. I wish there were more social spaces like that where you can just randomly talk to strangers without seeming weird.
New condo developments in SF are trying this idea out.<p>Gentrification, etc, yadda aside, there are now big HOA club houses, sky decks, and other common areas designed to encourage mingling among neighbors. Now there will be undoubtedly those who will shut themselves in (just like in college), but I think it's bringing back a collegial atmosphere.<p>Our HOA is organizing a bring your own bottle and cheese event once a month on our sky deck.
One of the best things about living in a dorm in college was they had common areas, including a dining room. Most of the other students in the dorm became your friends that way.
It's obviously have been noted elsewhere in the comments, but aren't those essentially cafes? Of course, in some countries, it became normal not to talk to strangers in cafes — but wouldn't the same in the end happen in the same public living rooms? After all, many cafes and restaurants now are using giant tables to bring people together, and we're still reluctant to talk to one another. May be the problem isn't with spaces, it's with us?
If the social media of the past decades teaches us something, is that when given the chance, people tend to form cliques and tend to stay in their bubble when they find one. This persists in large cities where people have adequate and constant exposure to alternate cultures. Maybe people have gotten tired of trying to be tolerant to everyone, maybe they don't see enough value in having to resort to lowest-common-denominator communication and cultural memes. Maybe in the future the physical layout of cities will come to represent its ideological /cultural layout. As loneliness is a physical thing, maybe bringing compatible people closer together enhances communication.
I liked the article and the overall concept. The main issue in my opinion is that the sort of people who would be attracted to such a place would also have had already a great many opportunities to connect with others throughout their life and they likely failed in all of those attempts to form positive, valuable relationships. So the likelihood that they will succeed in this venue is very small. In other words, the reason they are there is that they could not do what this place is asking them to do in any other setting that normal people find plenty of social opportunity to successfully make friends and build a support network. Such spaces would likely be undermined in the United States by the fact that it would end up being a magnet for homeless mentally ill people. If you live in Chicago, as I do, and you want to talk to such people then you can just go to the library downtown, which has ended up being basically a day program for the marginalized, who sit there all day using the free computers and taking bird baths in the bathroom sinks. They don't talk to each other a whole heck of a lot though.<p>But yeah the modern world is super alienating for most people. The loneliness problem is, in my opinion, sort of like the 21st century version of slums. In the past the existence of slums was a sign that economic progress was not working to include everyone. In our times the isolation and loneliness of vast swaths of our population signals that the system is not creating the opportunity to form effective personal relationships. I doubt there is much we can do about that. Nobody is a stakeholder in the success of the lonely other than the lonely person themselves, and they wouldn't be lonely if the knew how to build relationships. So it's a catch 22 that only gets worse over time.
Not to diminish whats being done but it does feel like a band aid solution. This is such an important issue. I currently live in London, UK and loneliness is a big problem here. My parents were from India and it doesn't seem as bad there but may be I'm only seeing through my own lens and it is actually a problem there as well. I think the problems stem from a combination of culture, modern life style and tech.
Easy patch: keep a security guard watching over physical machines, which should be the case anyway.<p>The same can be done with paper ballots. The trick with this article is that the perpetrator has full and unrestricted access to the building. If that were the case it wouldn't matter what the medium was, any of it can be hacked. They could throw cameras up in the booths, keyloggers, virii, etc.
I just met a YC founder and I do think her startup fosters this type of community and builds deeper relationships beyond the typical "transactional" world.<p><a href="https://soundcloud.com/user-925097294/simbi-ceo-11116-316-pm" rel="nofollow">https://soundcloud.com/user-925097294/simbi-ceo-11116-316-pm</a>
I wonder if VR could play a part on this? My grandfather had a terrible brain tumor that didn't allow him to walk, although he was mentally fine. I could imagine virtual 'living rooms' where my grandfather could've interacted with other people etc.
This sounds nice and all but how long will it take for these to turn in to a bar or cafe or whatever, designed exclusively to extract money from participants?