That's why there's Craiglist. And now there's a Provo Craigslist. Let the Mormon hook ups begin!
Man, I am so late to the game. I really should start reading more blogs more regularly.
So you think you are really good with that lever pulling the slots in Vegas? Try my one-eyed bandit. If you pull it long enough it pays out a load.
If this jackass actually gets any action off of this ad, there is no fucking justice in this world.
I haven't read the study, just the commentary, but I'd be interested to see how the numbers were calculated. My sense is that it's in many ways easier to keep in contact with old friends (i.e., college buddies) than it was for my parents, but that reduces the incentive to go out and make new friends in a new location.
But a chat with an old friend might not include all the details of everyday life, plus you don't go out and just have a drink with a friend that's hundreds of miles away, so people feel lonelier.
I sense many good laughs ahead reading the Provo Casual Encounters.
Cala, I think the numbers were calculated by asking how many people they'd discussed an important personal matter with in the last six months. I am shocked it's so low. I think it would be above twenty for me. But I'm an information slut.
4 has it right. It's easier to maintain casual friendships with people through IM and the like, but it doesn't do a lot to facilitate stronger relationships, I've found.
Has anyone read the David Foster Wallace essay E Unibus Pluram? It's all over the place, but most of what it's about is the isolating effect of television and what that isolation has done to modern fiction.
Yeah, I think my number would probably be at least fifteen. Also, I can think of at least ten people who regularly come to me (why, I can't imagine, because I usually am not particularly helpful) for advice on sensitive matters. But then again, those same people have told me that they can't talk to anyone else.
I think the confiding you get is equal to the confiding you give, and so it's a vicious circle of tight-lippedness that infects our society.
You know, in my life, TV is not isolating. American Idol despite one incident, helped me relate to my roommates. We all gathered around the electronic hearth every Tuesday night. The various HBO shows are another common cultural element I can talk to lots of different people about.
I did look at the underlying study. I'm suspicious of the long timelag (1985 and 2004, IIRC) between data collection efforts, and other differences that make it very hard to see if we're comparing apples to apples.
Another troubling aspect -- and the researchers admit this -- is how fuzzy this concept of "important matters" is. Is it having a friend to talk to about your divorce? Or is it talking with your pastor about The Fate of the World? There is some speculation that September 11 caused a shift in how people define "important," so that the divorce might have made it as "important" to more people in 1985 than in 2004.
I dunno. I just don't think people change that much over time. We're pretty stable, we human societies. So I'm skeptical of these results.
In my life, I have to say the single most isolating thing was having a kid. Suddenly there is just not a lot of time for an actual social life; it's all about work and "family time," pretty much. Thank god for the internet, which can be fitted into odd corners without having to actually plan ahead.
the single most isolating thing was having a kid
Oh, how very, very true.
I'd need to reread the essay to talk about it sensibly -- as I recall it, his point was a combination of the amount of time most people spend watching TV, which on some level precludes other simultaneous activities, and the heightened attractiveness of the life available to be watched on TV compared to the life most of us actually live. This sounds horrendously banal when I summarize it like that, but the essay was very worth reading. Maybe I'll see if I can find it when I go home.
11 - I don't know. I think there is some validity to it. I was talking about this with my mother when I was home at Christmas and she was lamenting how difficult it was to make adult friends with common interests in her suburban Midwestern town. Everything is so child-centric there that there are very few opportunities for the adults to get to know each other independent of children's activities. She feels like she doesn't get to make her own friends. If she's lucky, she hits it off with one of my brothers' friends' moms. That seemed really sad.
12, 13: Yup. I feel incredibly guilty about socializing in any way that takes non-work time away from my kids; I end up not doing much.
Huh. I thought you make your college friends, your work friends, and then women you met on the bench at the playground with your kids. I thought it was a whole new round of friend-making. That's what it was like for my mom.
s/b "friends with women you met on the bench"
I vote for the Internet making people lonelier, actually.
1) It's fun, so you don't go make new friends.
2) You keep in touch with old friends, so you don't go make new friends and then
3) But your old friends are still separated by distance, so they're not really there for you in the same way. Fine if you need to talk, but not so fine if what you need is a night out so you can get out of a mental rut.
You do some -- Buck and I hang out with a couple we like a lot who we met because Sally and Newt play with their little girls. (It doesn't hurt that their babysitters are also good friends.) But mostly I'm not on the bench at the playground.
18 - Well, I think my mother would be better off if she was in another city, like NYC, where the parents were more her age and shared her interests. She had my brothers late in life (post-40) and all of the other moms at the soccer games, etc. are 15 years her junior so they have little in common. They're also all Bush-lovin' Republicans.
She should be in my neighborhood. I felt like a pregnant teen having my first at 27.
Should I go look up the passage in Hannah Arendt about how social isolation is the essential basis for constructing a totalitarian society, or will you all just believe me that it's there?
Well, the thing is, even if you do like the other moms or dads, it's still fucking hard to find time to get together. I mean, you can bring your kid over to their house and the kids can play, but they'll interrupt you every five minutes and there are a zillion things you can't discuss honestly with kids around even if they're not being pains in the ass.
My mother worked. Was it just that the 70s were more freewheeling and not about play-dates?
I made my list and it came out a little lower than I thought: 15, although if I expand it to people I've discussed personal matters with in the last year and with whom I'm confident I could again any time I wanted, I get up to 20.
Four of the people are from Unfogged.
I think it was that the 70s had real 40 hour work weeks and kids were allowed to spend more time by themselves or playing outside unsupervised.
24: Sure, I'll take your word for it.
I think there's some of that -- kids are expected to be more supervised now.
I have very few people I talk about personal stuff with -- my sister, when she's around; my husband, but not a lot of others. I'm not good at keeping in contact with friends.
People move around more, too -- half of my good friends live on the other side of the continent, and it's just harder to feel close to people when they're geographically so far away.
But I think Witt's also right, in #11 -- I think our standards for closeness have changed. I can imagine my dad thinking that a debate about politics constitutes a discussion of an important matter; and that he has lots of such conversations. By that standard, I probably have the same number of close contacts as he does. But that's not the standard that counts for me.
I have 20, but a bunch of them are people who don't live in NYC. I have just had one or two long chats with them over the phone.
Here is the paper. It's not a hard read. The discussion section addresses many questions raised in sentences beginning, "I haven't read the paper but I wonder ..." There's still plenty of room for speculation as to the causes of the change, because really it's the magnitude of the observed effect (and its persistence in the face of efforts to make it go away) that's the main story of the paper.
I pretty much agree with everything B.Ph.D. has written here.
Kieran, are you ever going to tell us whether it make sense, medically or ethically, to hunt people for their kidneys?
re 35. Here as in this comment thread prior to my comment. Although I have agreed with her before (and not just to annoy her, though it appears to have done that before).
I think you're all neglecting the obviously explanation: we're much less likeable people than the prior generation.
At which point feminist hegemony will have been achieved.
37: Don't worry. Everything annoys me. It's not personal.
40: We can only hope. Viva la Revolucion!
Rather, it's not personal to you, it's personal to all existing humans and I suspect some non-existing ones.
Kieran, are you ever going to tell us whether it make sense, medically or ethically, to hunt people for their kidneys?
You'll have to buy my book. You think I give this stuff away for free?
(I'm not guaranteeing the book contains an answer to your question, btw. I'm just telling you you'll have to buy it.)
Really, I feel all hackneyed and quaintsy saying this sort of thing, but I really believe that the constant availabilty of professional entertainment (TV, recorded music) has a pernicious effect on relationships. I have clever friends; not many are as clever as Aaron Sorkin. And they expect me to be amusing as well, when I'm tired. Easier to just go home and soak up the entertainment.
And the more you do that, the weaker your relationships are, until you find yourself with few or none.
I watch the WB all the time.
I don't know that having a large number of people to talk to is an indicator of my fantastic mental health, though. Maybe it's just a sign that I'm really needy.
Yeah, and what's especially funny is that professional entertainment isn't even something people are even that willing to pay for. So TV and magazines have to be supported by advertising. (Yes, movie theaters, and books, and live/recorded music. Humph.)
Anyway, I've confided in 3 different people in the last six months. Looks like I'm about average. (Probably not for my age group.)
47: Something like 80% of the country has cable.
49: If people had to pay the whole cost of cable, they wouldn't be nearly as willing.
If people had to pay the whole cost of cable, they wouldn't be nearly as willing.
I don't know what that means. Reading it broadly, people pay for the advertising through the products they buy.
@45: Really, I feel all hackneyed and quaintsy saying this sort of thing, but I really believe that the constant availabilty of professional entertainment (TV, recorded music) has a pernicious effect on relationships.
This isn't a bad theory, but -- as you imply when you say you feel "hackneyed and quaintsy" bringing it up -- the trouble with it is that it's been around since at least the 1930s and the Frankfurt School's early critique of mass culture. You can have more refined versions of it: e.g., the availability of more targetted kinds of entertainment makes it easier to withdraw, but then market segmentation is just the kind of thing that encourages fan- and discussion-groups to form, which pushes against the trend toward isolation. Kind of a Simmelian dynamic.
Dr B's observation about kids is a good one. Dyadic withdrawal is an old and well-recognized phenomenon, and classically it's something your circle of friends or community acted against. But (i) increasing geographical mobility and (ii) changes in working hours, amongst other things, might make it harder to fight withdrawal while -- in the presence of children -- simultaneously making it harder for the couple to talk about things.
46: Well, yeah. I've also been lonely even though I've never (well, since age 19, say) lacked for confidantes, because sometimes my confidantes have been insufficiently available for face to face hanging.
51: In the absence of advertising on cable, the price would be much higher.
54: Products would cost less, and we'd have more money to pay for cable. (I'll stop now.)
I also think that (this will converge on the themes of the other thread) one of the reasons I'm so much emotionally healthier now than I was in college is that I have demands on me that are much less forgiving than those of my college days (my work is not going to understand if I have to lie in bed for a week because I'm sad) and there are fewer people around me to talk to. In college, if I was sad, a bunch of people in my immediate environment wanted to hear about it, and I ruminated.
Hey, what about "marinate" for a verb for performing the receptive act in anal sex. "I marinated his stake last night"?
Re my 43: Actually, I was recently reading a couple of old comment threads where B and I had a really interesting argument (if I say so myself, and I just did0 about the guy at my law school who aksed Scalia "Do you sodomize your wife?"
But I thought 41 was an opening that needed to be filled.
Anyway, I think as time passes and virtual communities start to more commonly incorporate sophisticated avatars that can display emotion in realtime along with actual speech, the ease of forming and maintaining real relationships online will increase. This doesn't obviate the need for local (or at least local-ish) relationships for things that require a physical presence, like going to restaurants or movies or shopping, but maybe those latter things will simply become less common, or be replaced by virtual online analogues. Given the popularity of blogging and bulletin boards, I think it's likely that something like this will become very popular, once the technology is mature and the necessary bandwidth is widespread.
@56: OK, if that's the direction this thread is going, I shall flee and take whatever remains of my professional credibility with me.
I just made my list and it's 21. Damn.
But I would probably say that 85% of the conversations were with about 4 people.
Don't flee, just start commenting as Nareik or something like that>
Don't flee, just start commenting as Nareik or something like that
Or John Lott.
I was trying to come up with something more indepth than 'what are you, high?'
artists need solitude to create. therefore, we are all artists. and besides, two is just as bad as one.
The various comments on kids and isolation are interesting. Our experience has been pretty much the opposite--we've built a number of good friendships with people we met through my son's schools and sports--and I initially wondered if later childbearing might be a contributing factor to isolation. But we also live in the kind of town where we tend to run into some of the same people in different settings, so maybe that has more to do with it than kids per se.
Re 40: "feminist hegemony" means we're all equal and live in peace and harmony, right?
Mine would probably be around four or five, if we're counting serious as serious enough to know about fucked up life shit as just normal day-to-day stuff, and three of those four or five are no longer on the 'serious' conversation list. So maybe one or two.
And everyone on the list is at least 300 miles away. I am pretty sure I could stay in my bedroom for a month during the summer without anyone noticing. This is one of the reasons I hate the academy.
I may be the hypothetical lonely American in the study.
"feminist hegemony" means we're all equal and live in peace and harmony, right?
Right DaveL.
(Psst, B, get the pruning shears!)
And we wonder why everyone's too nervous to socialize.
I should go ahead and qualify my 59. I don't see this happening at the level of sophistication I described it for many years. I expect to see it in various less sophisticated forms in the near future with current technologies like Second Life. I'm not claiming it will solve any problems or create new ones. (It probably will, but that wasn't what 59 was about.)
I am pretty sure I could stay in my bedroom for a month during the summer without anyone noticing. This is one of the reasons I hate the academy.
Ah, memories. Although I'd add "with occasional trips to the library without anyone noticing those, either."
Semi-related question I've been musing about: is there an inverse correlation between people's willingness to confide and the severity of the problems that they're dealing with? Sometimes it seems like the people who are working hardest to maintain a facade of invincibility seem to be the ones who spend a lot of energy obsessing about trivial shit, while people with actual problems tend to develop the coping skills to deal with it, talk about it, and move on.
For me it's a direct correlation. (Generally sorted under 'polite banter about life' and 'stuff that will make mom worry.')
Yikes, I said that badly. I meant the bigger the problems, the greater the willingness to confide. Shouldn't have changed formulations of the thought in mid-sentence.
I'm going to sound like an ass for saying this, but what with this thread and my score of 8 on the Asperger's test, I'm feeling like like a freakishly social butterfly. I think it in part owes to my girlfriend going overseas and how things have gone with that—I have much more time for confiding with friends. But 20 seems awfully low to me.
69: Normally I'd tell you it'll all be cooler in college. . . .
You're supposed to say it'll be cooler when you teach college.
78: I don't think "sharing something important" includes your man-meat, 'Smasher.
I can't help it if you're a bunch of sad, lonely Americans, and Kieran.
"Unfogged: Some of My Best Friends Are Lurkers!"
Also, just in case Kieran is on the fence about returning to the thread, Tia's 56 made me think this thread could be written up as an influential article: "Boweling Alone."
I think I really just confide in my wife. There are 4-5 other people who I could confide in if I had to.
My number is 2: my mom and my sister. Mostly my sister, really, since we can identify with each other's experiences more.
Has anyone read the David Foster Wallace essay E Unibus Pluram?
People who don't know Latin should refrain from using it to title their productions.
I would say, "Bite me," but tracking down Wallace and biting him is probably preferable.
You didn't title it, so why would I bite you? Other than because I was feeling lustful, say.
You didn't title it, so why would I bite you?
Hence the final clause in my previous comment.
LB did say she has few confidants.
I think DFW wanted it to register as a pun, for which purpose the correct Latin would have been useless.
The most annoying thing about that comment is that now I'm trying to figure it out, and my Latin is basically all gone by now. E Uno[long 'o'] Pluras, right?
When they say "discuss important matters" in the paper, this is a little vague. What do they mean by "discuss"? Would the secretary at my work who tells me uncomfortably personal things about her dissatisfying marriage count? I wouldn't consider myself a confidant, as I don't really engage that much (I mostly just nod, say "huh", etc.), but it could be different from her perspective.
The most recent comment on this thread AOTW (93) and the most recent comment on the thread most recently commented on prior to this one AOTW (this one) both are about Latin translations
...
Nerds!
Also, if this proposed amendment goes to the states, I swear I will burn at least one flag in protest. I'm wondering how counter-productive it would be to organize a mass burn-in.
Have it in Washington Square Park. I'll bring the kerosene.
Uno[long 'o'] Pluras, right?
I was thinking more, etc etc "canis femina".
E Uno[long 'o'] Pluras
Wouldn't it be "ex uno"?
Ex Uno Plures, I think. (Assuming pluribus is 3rd declension masculine plural. I guess it's whatever 'many' is supposed to be modifying. Except that isn't 'multus' many? Fucking Latin.)
"pluribus" is from "plus". "Plures" was, according to Lewis & Short, used to indicate the multitude.
Then "pluribus" would be from "plures", here?
Well, sure, but "plures" is just the plural of "plus".
Anyway, I think that the original line "one is the loneliest number" is a reference to vaginal sex (by metonymy on the familiar one/two pissing/shitting dichotomy), with "number" in the sense of "performance" (as when a musician announces an upcoming number). The next lines, "two can be as bad as one / it's the loneliest number since the number one" shows that, at least in Nilsson's opinion, salvation is not to be found in anal sex, though it can be an improvement.
Oh, okay, so I was on the right track. If "plures [men]" meant "multitude", then it would act like it's masculine, &c, no?
Hmm. Somewhat surprisingly - to me - I can count 5-7 people with whom I've discussed important matters in the last 6 months, under some reasonable interpretation of "discussed" "important" "matters" "with" and "people."
I'd make a distinction between frequency of conversation and importance of the matters discussed, though.
I think the survey asked "how many people you confide in outside your family". For me that brings it down to maybe 3 people. A couple of cross-country moves, an isolating relationship and then the break-up of that relationship, and a period of depression, plus a time-consuming avocation, pretty much did me in socially. It's a wonder I talk to anybody at all. thank god when you finally go home (figuratively, I mean) they have to let you in. I have a much stronger relationship with my sisters now than when we were young.
Hmm, well, if it's outside your family then I'm down to zero.
I'm probably another one of those 'lonely' people alluded to in the article.
Over the past few months, I've probably confided or had otherwise meaningful or personal conversations with both my parents, my sister, my wife, and three or perhaps four friends that I see fairly regularly.
It'd be more but at the moment everyone I know is finishing up graduate school, or getting married, or moving to the US, back in Scotland, etc. So the crop of friends anywhere in my immediate vicinity has shrunk rapidly over the past two years. While there may be quite a few more people I'd be happy confiding in there's probably only 3 or 4 of them within 100 miles of me at any given time.
I'm amazed people are able to make or maintain large groups of friends in the face of constant moving and relocation, insane workloads (or in my case trying to study full-time and work full-time simultaneously), children and so on. That doesn't mean not having lasting friendships but, at least for me, it means going fairly long periods without seeing a lot of my friends.
I had thought so based on Kieran's post, but I haven't read the study.
For me it's not that I don't have friends, it's just that they're all far away, and phone calls are relatively infrequent, and no one wants to start off a phone call with the equivalent of "I'm so glad to hear from you! Oh, can't complain, that fourth suicide attempt didn't work out at all. How're you?" Plus, my life doesn't suck, it's just frightfully dull most of the time compared to the people getting married, getting jobs, and having babies. Can't talk politics when people's allegiances have shifted... so...
Because contact is relatively rare (compared to everyday, in town friends), there's a fair amount of self-induced pressure to keep conversation light.
My intimates are in the dozens, I think.
I never knew One is the Lonliest Number was by Nilsson. And we established that Well I've Never Been To Spain was by Hoyt Axton. So what did they write? I have my wife's It Ain't Easy in my hand. Says all arrangements are by them, nothing about who wrote the songs. Is the title song the one Keith Carodine sang in Altman's Nashville?
In my case it's not so much that I don't have friends that I see frequently, because I do, it's just that I generally don't think of them as the sort of people I can discuss really important stuff with. It's a matter of comfort and trust.
re: 114
Yeah, that also chimes with me. The good friends I have who live a long way away, I wouldn't open up to them on the phone or by email. It takes close proximity (and beer usually). Instead, contact is intermittent and usually, as you say, conversation is light.
Despite my online persona, I'm actually quite guarded and private about my personal life. My confidantes would number somewhere between 5 and 10, though I do very little confiding so the 6-month count would be about 3 or 4. Also, I absolutely require a significant amount of quiet time alone, which is not unrelated to staying up until the wee hours of the morning most days.
So when do you sleep? I've noticed on occasion that you comment both late at night and early in the morning.
re: 116
That might be a guy thing?
The number of friends I'd open up to about *really* deep stuff -- if I was feeling particularly low or vulnerable, for example -- is tiny and I've known them all for a decade or more.
That doesn't really seem like a problem to me though, it's not really what friends are for (for me).
So when do you sleep?
When he finishes marinating my steak stake, obviously.
Could be. "It's not really what friends are for" basically sums up my attitude.
Although friends aren't really for marinating one's steak stake, either.
So when do you sleep?
Most nights, from 3 or 4 to 7am. I do that for a week or two, then crash on (usually) a Friday night for ten or eleven hours and start over. I know it seems nuts, but I've been doing that for about twenty years now.
Wow. Man, I really hope this "need less sleep once you stop being an adolescent" thing is for real; sleeping is seriously cramping my style. Because I don't "crash" for ten hours, sometimes I sleep that much on a normal evening.
I'm almost apo's age, and I sleep at least 7 hours a night, and would sleep more if I could make it work. When I get the chance, I sleep 9 or so.
Apo's sleep schedule sounds to me like something that violates the Geneva conventions.
I'm kind of jealous of people who can do that, but I can't. I can function OK on seven hours or a little less during the week, but if I dip much below that I'm into territory where it's possible to function fairly well if I only have one thing to focus on but the usual juggling act becomes very, very difficult.
Yeah, I know it sounds crazy. But as long as your schedule is somewhat regular, your body will adjust to it. I'd like to pretend that I was using that time to get stuff accomplished, but I'm generally too tired to do much of anything once I get home from work.
Go figure.
130: No, I don't think the body does adjust. I can handle routine stuff when I'm badly short of sleep, but complicated stuff gets pretty scary. The focus just isn't there.
I'm another person who needs at least 7-8 hours a night. I'm good on only a few hours of sleep (for some strange reason sleeping 5-6 hours makes me more tired than 3-4 hours), but more than 2-3 nights in a row of that little sleep will make me crash, and hard.
Also, about the Latin exercises earlier in this thread, I just wanted to point out some evidence that E Pluribus Unum is just a hard phrase to properly reverse:
http://economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4055114
Check out the last four letters under the Eurovisions heading
(Psst, B, get the pruning shears!)
Dude, I put up a big post today about sucking cock, for god's sake. I'm not in the pruning shear club.
Follow me, and all will be well. Really.
131: Okay, my body adjusts. I almost never get sick either.
I don't doubt for a minute that there are people can do it--I've worked with some of them, the bastards--but I think it's more a matter of individual variations in how much sleep your body needs than training yourself to get by on less.
133: That post was about sucking cock, but it wasn't exactly pro-sucking cock.
(Or anti-, I hasten to admit.)
Because contact is relatively rare (compared to everyday, in town friends), there's a fair amount of self-induced pressure to keep conversation light.
Nope. I can usually get to my pre-set level of intimacy with an old friend in about ten minutes. I don't make friends all that easily, and really only do because I was able to talk freely in some very early conversation. I tend to hit that same mark again and again, without aiming or meaning to at all.
I think of myself as being a little eccentric, so when I feel understood, I appreciate it.
But 20 seems awfully low to me.
Smasher is the neediest.
136: That post certainly didn't suck my cock.
I think people are using different definitions of "friend."
I'm just saying, I'm not the castrating bitch I have been accused of being.
What kind of castrating bitch are you?
I'm shocked, Ben, that you misread 140. Try again.
Yeah, Ben, you mean "which castrating bitch are you?"
Don't cross me, Teo, or you'll find out.
I was just correcting Ben's faulty parallelism. Don't castrate the messenger.
Especially if the message isn't even for you. It's bad form.
Apo's sleep schedule sounds to me like something that violates the Geneva conventions.
Apo is a lineal descendent of Lucifer. You can tell by the red hair. Of course he doesn't need much sleep--he recharges by drinking the blood of sleeping infants.
Yeah, ever since everybody told him he was cute. Someone's getting cocky, I think.
I find my sleep schedule ends up being something like apostropher's, even though I probably need 8.5 hours a night, when I don't get any light in the mornings. Light therapy (or, more recently, spending early mornings sitting next to a large sliding glass door) really helped me start sleeping more regularly.
But does light therapy also cure infanticide and castrating bitchiness? That's the question that leaps to mind, after that sequence.
Maybe I'm using an overly broad definition of confidant. I don't guess I have >20 BFF, but having left family and good friends in Texas and having made good friends in DC, and what with technology making it easier to keep in touch with folks at home, it seems that close friendships are some function of sociability, location (and relocation), and mobility (i.e., able to travel or otherwise maintain friendships).
Certainly, but the importance of each of those three factors varies considerably from person to person. Sociability is the key one for me; for others, location is likely more important.
I've often been struck by the stark difference between catching up with an old male friend that I haven't talked to in long time and catching up with an old female friend.
With female friends, a lot seems to get taken care of very quickly, particularly when it comes to relationships. "Are you still seeing X?" is one of the first three questions or so. With male friends, it takes an extended period of just kind of shooting the shit before any "touchy" questions get asked, and then in a fairly roundabout manner, e.g. "So, are you seeing anybody these days?"
This may just be the dynamics of my particular friendships, and have nothing to do with gender roles or anything like that. But I wonder. Has anyone else noticed anything resembling this?
Also, this observation tended mostly to apply when we were all in our early to mid twenties. As we've all gotten older and more settled and things like relationships tend to change less frequently, it's not as marked a difference.
I've never had any close male friends. I'm willing to blame gender roles, but it might have had something to do with being verbally abused by my father throughout my childhood and adolescence, so I'm probably not one to talk.
Does this comment raise my number?
I've had very few close female friends. I tended to think the other girls in elementary girl were stupid, so I'm sure that explains most of it. I seem to get along better with guys.
All this means, really, is that I stand a better chance of being a grooms[man] than a bridesmaid.
To 10 (I'm way slow): Everyone at the *Buffy* conference I went to agreed that television was not atall isolating.
I blame cars and suburbs instead.
Everyone at my auto club and my homeowners association agrees that cars and suburbs are not at all isolating. I blame pornography and general cultural decline.
To 25: you know, I dont get the chance to have a real conversation with *my wife* with the kids around. My number is probably close to two or three, but only because the kids sometimes sleep at the same time
I don't think I would want to be talking to twenty people about important personal matters every six months, though. Perhaps I'm just using a really high standard for "important" though.
Does this comment raise my number?
Aw, if I'd known I could count you guys I'd be a social butterfly.
Forgive me, I would say something substantive, but I am busy alienating all my blogospheric friends and acquaintances on other sites. Too busy for the likes of y'all.
That was very interesting from slolernr about Arendt, social isolation, and totalitarianism. Could make a vulnerable mind paranoid.
Was Arendt really the first to make that observation? 'Cause it seems like the conventional wisdom among the "modernity brings isolation, and with it dangers" crowd.
159: Everyone at the XXX theater and my monthly nude graveyard dance agrees that pornography and general cultural decline are not that socially isolating.
I blame Bill Clinton.
"not that socially" s/b "not at all"
126: Silvana, I was wondering when you found time to sleep, given that yesterday, on what I assume was a work night, you were up till 2 am smoking bango and commenting on Unfogged.
Confidants. I think I have, like, two. I actually do think that for me, there's an inverse relationship between the seriousness of the problem and the impulse to confide. I don't like to burden people.
It's all eb's fault, then. I see how it is.
I skimmed a bit of the paper - ok, I glanced at a couple of pages - and it looks like they're really interested in discussions of important matters first, and then at elaborating the relationships. So it's not just "how many confidants" but "how many people have you discussed things with" followed by "and in what ways are you related to the people you talked to" and "in what ways are the people you talked to related to each other."
So I'd put number of confidants pretty low for me, but number of people I've talked to a bit higher because it just happens that in the last six months I've talked to a few more people than that. And that's by including fairly non-personal career-related subjects as important. Restrict it to really personal matters and the number drops.
So I was talking to a confidant who reads Unfogged who explained to me that I don't, in fact, have gadzooks of confidants. Oh well. Back to my argument over the different sub-Earths in the DC Universe with J-Sanchez.
the different sub-Earths in the DC Universe
I thought this was a rather interesting way of describing things here until I realized that you were talking about comic books.
160 -- yeah, she certainly deserves a share of the blame.
well, my life has been disturbingly echoing sex and the city in that now that i have lots of married friends, i do think they ask me about my romantic life as a form of entertainment, but they say a lot less about their own, because once your married you *do* have to create an extra bubble of privacy as the interior of the couple-dom. so things get off-kilter. and it can be fine or really annoying depending on the friend. adding to increasing social isolation until i catch up with the marriage boom, i guess...
wow, my syntax is really great the day after drunk people play slavic dance music and dirges on their guitar all night in the park which is directly under my window...
hopefully the above made some kind of sense... i think it is nap time.
I don't think I would want to be talking to twenty people about important personal matters every six months, though. Perhaps I'm just using a really high standard for "important" though.
I don't know that I'm doing so much revealing in all these conversations. Often it's just getting to some level of "oh, right, this is why we're good friends," so that I keep the person, who may be geographically distant from me, in my life.
This morning on the train I was reading a book that mentioned the Nude Olympics at Princeton, and chuckled to myself, because one of my 20 was the woman who organized the first group of women to parcipate.
At my school, we would have a nude bike ride around campus on May Day. It was always quite the event, though I never got up the nerve to participate.
it seems like the conventional wisdom among the "modernity brings isolation, and with it dangers" crowd
I think it's different, or at least more specific.
What we call isolation in the political sphere, is called loneliness in the sphere of social intercourse. Isolation and loneliness are not the same. I can be isolated-that is in a situation in which I cannot act, because there is nobody who will act with me-without being lonely; and I can be lonely -that is in a situation in which I as a person feel myself deserted by all human companionship-without being isolated. Isolation is that impasse into which men are driven when the political sphere of their lives, where they act together in the pursuit of a common concern, is destroyed. Yet isolation, though destructive of power and the capacity for action, not only leaves intact but is required for all so-called productive activities of men....Totalitarian government, like all tyrannies, certainly could not exist without destroying the public realm of life, that is, without destroying, by isolating men, their political capacities. But totalitarian domination as a form of government is new in that it is not content with this isolation and destroys private life as well. It bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.
170: dagger, not wanting to burden people is a huge issue for me too.
I'm not close to most of my family at all. My sister and I had a huge fight a while ago, but we used to have a good relationship. I haven't talked to my mother in 5 years, and I don't usually mention that to people, because it makes them uncomfortable. I dread being the functional equivalent of the secretary who shares too much information. (IRL, online I probably reveal too much.)
In fact, I'm probably terribly isolated and lonely. Having a shitty job with irregular hours doesn't help at all. Bouts of depression don't help. When you're physically exhausted and can barely get up the energy to feed yourself, making time for relationships is hard. And then you feel better and don't feel that you need support etc.
BG, I worked for a couple of years in a job that had, at most, an hour of contact a day with other people. Despite the fact that I'm pretty introverted in real life and require lots of alone time, the lack of even meaningless chit-chat day to day just about drove me insane.
Just noticed this argument against friendship.