Ask Lemmy

We turn the Internet off at the weekends

Just have a war. Nothing brings people together like necessity and shared trauma.

The reason there were mountain men in the old days is that they appreciated nature and they didn't feel alone though they often were. It's not that hard to rekindle that feeling you only have to work at it a little. I was taking walks in the woods back when I was in grade school and I seldom feel alone though it's harder to feel like that in a city.

Is the epidemic one of loneliness or one of improper socialization, a background fear of people and purposelessness? Sadly, idk how to make people change their minds and hearts besides just talking to them and hoping something sticks.

Turn off internet access, or throttle it to the minimal usable speed.

Easy, stop considering any kind of digital communication as social interaction, it might seem like it but it is not.

We call it social media, social networks, communities, groups but rarely think about the individuals within them, it's I saw on Facebook or according to Reddit. We tend to think about the entire platform as a single entity, we barely notice the names of the users.

Messaging apps. How often do we ask to someone how's going? And to how many people? We might spend the whole day in the group chat of our actual friends and still not know if they are fine or not.

Plenty of good real solutions in the comments here. My creative solution is to add a feature to everyone's phone that automatically will FaceTime them with someone also on their phone in the area. You can't turn it off, you can only add people to your default list. No guarantee they're who you connect to though.

Mandatory copulation every 14 hours.

As any other problems, it's an issue with political will

• Have minimum delivery fee to force people to visit physical store over "online shopping" and promote farmer marker and city-centre (village-centre) shopping so people interact with each other

• End-up US style suburbanization, these nice house in a quiet area are great to sleep-in but means you're away from every social activity, and when you're too young/too old to drive it turns into house arrest

• Increase subsidises for non profit-club, especially for the one having under 25 and above 65 members If you go playing scrabble, theatre or practice Karate you stop being lonely

• Carpooling parking and lanes to push worker to interact with people living nearby