
The Price of Modern Life Is Depression and Loneliness? - Red_Tarsius
https://medium.com/festival-of-dangerous-ideas/the-price-of-modern-life-is-depression-and-loneliness-96a2367f3460
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pinkyand
He quotes 2 scientific research papers as claiming ‘spending large amounts of
time online for social purposes may increase social distress and have negative
impact on self-esteem.’ or similar stuff.

But look at the details, the first article is about correlation, not
causation.
[http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/21685655](http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/21685655)

Stopped reading after that.

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ducuboy
It's ridiculous how this statement gets so popular online.

This "Look Up" video has 46M views
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7dLU6fk9QY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7dLU6fk9QY).
Whatever post on this subject gets viral
[https://twitter.com/ducu/status/464018491738431488](https://twitter.com/ducu/status/464018491738431488)

"The modern technology (read 'facebook') keeps us from interacting face to
face, so it makes us lonely and depressed. It was so much better _back in my
day_ when we were playing ball, we were bumping into each other on the
streets, and we were definitely much happier." \- Such a load of crap.

These lonely people liking and sharing such nonsense are obviously online, and
they are probably keeping in touch only with their school mates, or work
colleagues at most. Imagine how lonely they must have felt if they could only
interact offline, with just a small fraction of their current facebook
friends, based solely on _geography_. Because that was the main criteria for
human connection before the internet.

When instead we should get in touch with the people sharing our interests,
regardless of where they are located on the map. That is one thing we can only
do online, and this kind of human connections would give a sense of meaning in
our lives.

