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"They repeatedly feel rejected. They are frustrated when at a social get-together they once again fail to connect with anyone and return home feeling alone," she said.
"How Soon Is Now?" by The Smiths:
There's a club if you'd like to go
You could meet somebody who really loves you
So you go and you stand on your own
And you leave on your own
And you go home and you cry
And you want to die
People nowadays seem to forget that socialising is a skill. And to learn a skill one must learn by putting effort into and initially failing a lot.
Social platforms give the sensation of allowing one to skip this by jumping straight into ongoing conversations for a brief post, but that's also not building any social skill.
There’s no place to socialize though. I wouldn’t know where I could meet people my age (20s) that doesn’t cost money or includes activities that I don’t like (e.g. clubbing).
honestly as much as I feel similarly, it hurts me to know people your age are struggling in such a way.
My 20s were filled with opportunity, things to do, and it didn't even break the bank. My university had a bar connected to the building, I think pints of alright beer were about £1.50.
I really hope things get better soon. Y'all should at least have the options of things like I did, yet half the things around me closed down or are priced out of range now!
There are so many places that cost nothing or very little, especially in Germany. Don't get into the doomer mindset that is so prevalent on the internet, that tell you that it's the same suburban car infested shithole that is north america. There are so many clubs (Vereine) that struggle to find new members, but you're right that you often won't meet too many people around your age, it's mostly older people and children, but that also depends on what the club is for. Be the change you want to see in the world.
Has that changed over the years? Have such places and activities disappeared or gone up in price?
I mean, everything got more expensive. And I do hear that more and more youth centres and such are closing down, taking away places to socialise for young people in particular.
What has disappeared for me personally though is school/uni as a place to socialise at. I’ve never had the need before to search out specific places to meet people. It just happened organically. Now I don’t even know where I‘d even find new people. I’m stuck with just the few I knew back in school and uni and they mostly don’t live anywhere close by.
You're in the awful moment after college. I'm 40 and this happened to anyone I know as well. Older people than me will tell you the same. It really sucks.
So, I'm gonna give a few suggestions where you don't have to spend any money and don't involve clubbing, which is not cheap either.
Plenty of group activities don't cost anything and are the most fulfilling...
Just one quick note. Don't concern yourself too much with age groups. People are organised by age groups in school. Everywhere else the organisation is mutual interests or common goals. And then you'll go there and find people of all ages.
So...
Find projects of your interest where you can volunteer.
If you like animals, give some of your time to local animal shelters and animal associations.
If you want to give Nature a hand, volunteer to go plant trees on the weekend, plenty of groups outthere always asking for more to come.
Check the activities at your local library, most of them are state funded and free of charge to participate in.
The same goes for Cultural Associations. Plenty of them have state funded events that are free of charge to attend.
There are also amateur groups that you can join. Just find anything of your liking. If you like to draw, almost any place has a "drink and draw" event or an Urban Sketchers group. Nobody will care if you don't consume at these events. And if you think you can't draw, nobody cares. People of all levels of skill show up. I know this because I go to them and nobody cares how well you draw. As long as you like drawing, looking at drawings or watching people drawing you're always welcomed at them.
If drawing is not of your interest but you like singing, there's for sure an amateur singing group near you. My girlfriend met a group of funny and energetic elderly ladies this way. She loves their company. And nobody young or old is there to make it to a stage. They just enjoy singing and each other's company.
If you don't like singing but you play an instrument, plenty of Jam sessions around and in some the musicians that play don't pay for their drinks. And the ones where they do, you can just not consume anything. They know you're there to play. But there's a few who even pay some musicians to be there. It's a matter of finding out.
There's dancing groups.
There's film clubs.
There's book clubs.
There's poetry gatherings. A lot of the poetry there will be awful and that's fine. It's part of the charm.
And the reason why I know of all these events I suggested so far is because I go to them and I even help organise some of them with two of my local cultural associations. The next event I'm helping out on is an Animation festival that is now in its fourth annual edition. Although not all, some of the screenings are free. But the ones that aren't are dirt cheap anyways.
These are some examples, there are so many more. And in almost if not all of them you'll find people of all ages, including yours and younger.
Don't go out looking for a romantic partner. Go look for a community. You're also more likely to find a partner in a community of people anyway.
While you were in school, you were in a secluded and rigid environment.
Welcome to the shit.
Where everyone is as clueless as you probably think you are.
Yep, I'm 30 and married and thats how it is. You make friends with old people and married people and all sorts of other people and when people go out for a bite afterwards you join them. And when you do it, yeah you might still want a partner, but you're likely to find that the main source of loneliness was that you lacked a community. And when you've got a community it's a lot easier to find a partner.
You see it on dating apps as well. "Uhm, don't even try to start with a "hi" or "how are you?" Be a bit more creative."
When was the last time they met a person? You can be as creative as you want, all i know about you is 3 pictures and a weird attitude.
I have zero money to go out and many formerly free ways to socialize have been commodified beyond my reach. It's not impossible but it takes a lot more time and effort than it used to.
I think the more important issue is that that social media, to an extent, acts as a substitute for face-to-face social interaction - you can talk with online strangers, or all those old classmates and college friends who aren't even living in the same city as you do. Rejection and being awkward sucks, so it's easy to stick with the inferior substitute, but you're still missing out on face-to-face interaction, human touch and meeting potential romantic partners.
I learned that skill but socializing has become too cumbersome in today‘s social landscape where almost everyone is either online on an app that doesn‘t incentivize equal relationships (Think Instagram, Youtube, TikTok) or busy hustling and making insane posts on LinkedIn. Just meeting up is something nobody does anymore it seems.
A topic that has been discussed before, but not way enough and no solution has been reached.
The death of third spaces.
Honestly, I'm not sure if that really applies to Germany. A lot of downtown areas are kind of dying because they don't know what to do with the space that is left empty when stores close, but it's usually not the kind of store you would consider a third place. I suppose those stores drew people into the downtown areas and then people also went to a café or something, but the cafés are still there and people still go there. I haven't heard much about closures of theatres, museums, libraries and so on. What kind of third spaces are you missing?
I struggle with this as well.
I wonder if maintaining a social life could be more difficult today, because the "social infrastructure" isn't what it used to be. Your society's habits don't carry you as much as your parents', so you have to do more work yourself.
And then you may even not know how to do the work - as other commenter here said: being social is a skill that is learned. I haven't figured it out the puzzle myself. I'm a few years after college where many people just moved away and I'm in the same spiral that other people in my situation describe.
My coping approach has been more like "leave the house" rather than "meet new people" which sorta works for me, for now. Being around people is also humanizing. At the risk of describing something banal, I'll describe my learnings below.
One of the first struggles I've come across is that staying up to date with what's happening in the city is work. As I described in the beginning, the reason that building social capital for yourself is so hard is that the social infrastructure isn't there. One of the best ways to learn what's going on in the city is to have something mentioned to you in a conversation, or to be invited by someone who's already going. You passively learn or participate by leaning back on the other person. It's expensive to be poor.
The way reduce the amount of work is to find cyclical events. That way, you learn about the date just once then keep coming. I've found that the best way to learn about them is to subscribe to e-mail newsletters of cultural institutions (museums, galleries, operas, theaters, cultural centers). Some will never send you an e-mail, but some are pretty active. Sometimes the e-mails contain info that isn't available anywhere else - my local museum holds free visits with a tour guide every Sunday at 9AM, but that isn't mentioned anywhere. The benefit with e-mail is that you're passively being poked by the institution about an event. What doesn't work in such a way is e.g. Instagram, where you have to open the app and doomscroll through unrelated things in the eventual hope of finding some event.
Instead of e-mail you can also sometimes use RSS but completing the list of institutions, finding the feeds and then remembering to read through them is very work-like, as opposed to e-mail.
This of course doesn't solve the problem of loneliness, as you'll be going somewhere, but still alone. In spoonfeeding-a-social-novice terms, random events are a bit further in the social pipeline, where you're "not supposed to" go alone, but where you're going because you've already met people people to go with in earlier in the social pipeline in hobby groups.
Can confirm, I'm German and haven't made a new friend in over 10 years and most of the old ones live far away. I was kind of getting somewhere at one point in the middle, but that completely crashed and burned for love reasons.
I used to make actual friends and have meaningful relationships in german internet forums. We would meet up somewhat frequently. Come to think of it I haven‘t had that since installing Discord. In fact I have not made a single friend on Discord in nearly 10 years. Everyone on there is too busy with themselves, so it‘s not that surprising I guess. There was a time when I was a trainee and made a lot of friends through room mates but that‘s all gone since I moved and the pandemic.
Reminds me a LOT of a meme I've seen on the net a long time ago:
Relationship > No Relationship
BUT!
Relationship > No Relationship > TOXIC Relationship
and as having a good, stable, lasting and healthy relationship seems to be more luck than anything else, choosing the middle path is the choice most take. Because no, there's no shortage in finding a toxic relationship...
Well, not most. 61% of Germans 40-49 are married. Most people find someone they like enough to marry. It’s hard and is risky, but most people think it’s worth it.
The connection to political extremism seems as obvious as it is concerning, and I haven't seen much research on that. This also relates to the topic of "male loneliness epidemic" - there is a particular radicalization pipeline that is IMO much more likely to draw in lonely men than lonely women, so even if men are just as lonely as women, the outcomes won't necessarily be the same.
the extreme right ideologies seem to be effective at making their movements feel like social communities even at large scales. Really shitty fandom communities complete with cosplaying and their own fictional universe and two dimensional enemies but communities nonetheless.
Young people who suffer from loneliness are more susceptible to authoritarian thinking, according to Claudia Neu. The sociologist has studied what happens when loneliness causes young people to stray down a path of political extremism.
I'm wondering whether Tiktok - or (most) other social media platforms - is a good way to discuss lonliness as the article mentions. The algorithms will likely exploit that rather then helping you to find a solution.
That's a general question: "Do you leave a popular but problematic platform, reducing the size of your audience and maybe also the 'counterweight' to problematic content? Or do you stay and contribute to the popularity of the platform with your content?"
If you are lonely and German, I can be your friend. You can teach me the ways of the apfelstrudel, and I can show you the age old tradition of "långburk & parkbänk".