A social circle is like a garden, inasmuch as you have to put in work to tend and maintain it. You have to put yourself in a position of potential awkwardness or rejection, which isn't easy. Interacting with people (especially strangers) also takes practice - small talk is a skill like any other.
If you already have a friendship circle, start being the one to propose meetups (cafe, pub, picnic, hike, etc.) If you don't, it's harder - join a social sporting league, group fitness class, dance class, DnD group, anything where people have to talk with each other. When you arrive, turn your phone off for the interval. It might take a couple of goes to find something that sticks or the right environment.
I think that the real trick of "solving" the loneliness epidemic is that it isn't spread evenly. Everyone has their own individual level of opportunity for social interaction, so the solution is hyper-local and individualised. There's no one size fits all solution.
I continue to be broadly in favour of this idea. I agree that there's some wiggle room around the specific age (15 vs 16), but for a population-level change you just need to pick an arbitrary value, implement, and re-assess later. I also acknowledge that 1) online age-gate mechanisms tend to suck, 2) the evidence of harm is weak, and 3) it really should be up to parents to manage at the individual level. But ultimately, I feel that a restriction like this would be a net positive for the mental health of the vast majority of young teens.
Make the change, assess the effects, adjust/repeal as needed (just like everything else). It seems like the kind of change that's well-suited to undoing later, in case of unintended consequences. It's not like we're going to be permanently stunting the growth of an entire cohort or something.
> But OK let's assume social media is always bad for kids and also that someone invents a perfect age gate... kids are just going to find places to hang out online that are less moderated and less regulated and less safe.
Straw man argument, much? Might as well argue "We can't make any changes, ever, just in case something else happens!
We'll address the next issue when/if it happens, same as always.
I came here to comment on this specific issue. The level of unsustainable groundwater extraction and inefficient consumption by agriculture and industry in Iran is just wild.
> The level of unsustainable groundwater extraction and inefficient consumption by agriculture and industry in Iran is just wild.
It's an important note that middle America is also currently speedrunning unsustainable levels of groundwater extraction and inefficient consumption by agriculture and industry.
They've just not yet hit dust .. but they have achieved significant depletion and the projections aren't good.
Interestingly both the Saudi's and the Chinese operate sizable ag operations in the US and export that s/water/food/ back to their home countries.
In Australia we've treated the family home as an investment, a primary mechanism for wealth creation (rather than an essential for life) for far too long. I fully agree that supply is the #1 driver for housing affordability, but like many things it's mult-factorial. Tax incentives, market forces, town planning, land use regulation, etc. all play their role.
I'm hopeful that successive governments over here show the courage of their convictions and enact enough change that my kids have a chance of getting into their own places, same as I did.
Tangent: how should we approach changing the housing mix in a city like Perth where 95% of new homes are large four-bedroom detached houses? It's all very well saying "That's what the market wants" when that's also all the market supplies. How do we bootstrap the idea of smaller, denser, affordable, more-diverse housing options?
YIMBYs would argue (and in my view rightly) that if you allow townhouses and apartments to be built, the market will build them where there is a demand.
The only problem is that in the US, if you let apartments and townhouses to be built, homeowners will get muscled out by large builder concerns and single family homes will be converted into dense housing--which sounds great, until you realize there's no way those housing concerns will SELL those units--they're going to be rented forever. There's no incentive to actually sell those to people and every reason to keep them as rentable apartments forever.
So you have attractive locations being completely dominated by rentable corporate owned housing and the net outcome is that people are completely boxed out of home ownership. There's no way pricing comes down because they do this in areas where people are willing to pay top dollar to live.
I live near Ann Arbor and we're seeing it play out right now--more dense housing in the inner core is being allowed (as current thinking says should be done) and whats happening is that smaller old-timey landlords and homeowners are being pushed out and their homes and apartment buildings are being replaced with brand new high dollar rentals. Not condos (although there are some of those as well, but fewer), rentals. And the rental prices are going up! Normal people get pushed further and further from the attractive areas to live, and pressure from these people moving out pushes up rent in the surrounding areas.
Usually it means that supply gets bought up and converted (and leaves the supply, often).
The desire is that a row of single family homes (say a block has 10) get slowly redeveloped into a row of brownstones or similar density - but they're still single family and owned by the residents, but now you have 20 in the same space, or 30. You can triple the density and not really change anything else.
But what ends up happening is that the single family homes remain single family, get slowly bought up by a developer and rented, and then the entire block gets turned into an apartment complex, perhaps with the same or even more units, but they're all rentals forever.
This might be fine, and perhaps even encouraged in some areas, but it does reduce the supply of homes to buy.
I mean, they could, but there's no incentive for the builders to sell them. You can make way more money with rentals (if the demand is there) then you can with condos. Condos are a way time hit of money, rentals are smaller profit, but comes reliably.
Right now holding rental apartments is a "good deal" and they'll have buyers for that (the builders don't want to hold anything usually, they want to sell, sell, sell and get building the next thing) - just larger institutional buyers.
When the market turns around (and every time in the past it was "only going up" it eventually ended) then suddenly you have apartment complexes turning into condos to sell off capital and stop the bleeding.
The problem for people "on the ground/in the rentals" is that can force you to act when you're not financially prepared to - it's easy to find situations where someone can afford the rent; even afford the mortgage to BUY the apartment as a condo; but cannot afford the downpayment (or otherwise qualify for the loan).
It's the same in New Zealand - property is the primary mechanism for wealth creation, and you have boomers with 10+ properties that they use for rental income for their retirement.
The issue is exacerbated by the tax structures not incentivizing investments in other assets - e.g. in NZ if you invest over $50k in offshore equities, there is an annual FIF tax that must be paid, even for unrealized gains.
> In Australia we've treated the family home as an investment
That's true of most of the Western world, unfortunately.
> a primary mechanism for wealth creation
I don't disagree but this needs to be correctly framed publicly as simply stealing from the next generation because that's what it is.
> Tax incentives
For anyone unfamiliar, Australia has a system called negative gearing. In the mid-2010s the then Labor party proposed scrapping it and lost the election. It really is the third rail of Australian politics. This is a shame because it needs to be scrapped.
It allows you to deduct losses on property against your ordinary income. So if you have a mortgage payment of $3000/month but only earn $2000/month in rent then your income is reduced by $1000/month. That's waht drives a lot of small investors to essentially speculate on property.
The US actually has a better system than this, which is that if you earn over a certain income level, you cannot deduct passive losses (like the above situation) against ordinary income. That would be better but still not enough.
So many upper income Australians essentially end up just hoarding property. They'll call it "investment properties" but really it's speculation. Historically, property was treated as an income producing asset, not a speculative capitals gains asset.
Oh and capital gains on non-primary residences should be like 70%. If you want to stop rampant speculation, that's how you do it.
> Tangent: how should we approach changing the housing mix in a city like Perth where 95% of new homes are large four-bedroom detached houses?
Perth like every Australian city is an urban planning disaster. It's just endless sprawl up and down the coast and inland to the hills. A generation or two ago it was a quarter acre block. Those days are long gone unless you're wealthy or you're 50km+ from the city (less if you go east).
So it's a car-dependent soulless hellhole. I say this as someone who knows Perth well. So even now if you build higher-density housing along transit routes, as they're doing, you still need a car (or 4) to go anywhere but work. And high land values make infrastructure projects incredibly expensive. Like imagine trying to build the Perth to Mandurah train line now instead of 30+ years ago when it was actually built. I guess they could utilize the Freeway they already had but what about the fremantle or Midland lines?
What you should do as you build out is reserve space for future infrastructure. AFAIK no Australian city, especially Perth, has never done. So Guildford Road or Great Eastern Highway should really be a freeway. Same with Albany Highway.
In 2024 Western Australia did really relax ADU (granny flat) development rules. The rules used to be really strict. Now you can basically always build one with normal building approval if you meet the minimum lot size requirements (generally 450sqm, sometimes as low as 350sqm, depending on the council).
Single family home zoning is really cancer to any decently sized city.
Anyway, the truth is, I'm not sure it can be fixed now. Big infrastructure projects are prohibitively expensive even with tools like eminent domain. We need to look at why it's so expensive to build apartments.
I think the only thing you can do now is for the government to become a significant suplier of housing to increase supply and stabilize rents.
Good points, thoughtfully made. As a resident of Perth, I (largely) endorse that description.
So much of the wealth of our middle- and upper-class is dependent on property ownership and rent-seeking, it's depressing. That population essentially needs to vote against their own self-interest to help improve housing affordability, so it's hard to see that ever happening. The best I could foresee is a government forecasting a stepped reduction of relevant tax benefits over time (e.g. in three years negative gearing gets reduced by half, then half again the following year, etc.) and then future governments honouring that commitment. As you pointed out though, it's a surefire way for any Australian political party to shoot themselves in the face.
I sometimes wonder how strong the demand needs to get for more-affordable housing before the market responds enough to matter. State and local govt could likely have a role in unlocking infill developments and increasing the allowed densities, but I'm not plugged into the planning system. I also strongly agree that state government should be more proactive as a housing supplier (in conjunction with private industry).
Lots of the issues would be "solved" by adequate supply of new dwelling units (which is a way of driving the prices down). There's really no other way of solving the "X people lived here, now 1.4X do, but dwelling units have only increased 1.2 times."
In the past this effect was localized and when housing prices went insane, it was usually in a city, or a region, not a whole country. And high prices would encourage development in the cheaper areas, and people would move "out there".
On the face of it, this initiative seems like solid nutritional advice. On the other hand, I'm a little dismayed to see animal protein sources given equal billing to vegetable and fruit on their new pyramid, and whole grains placed right at the bottom (below butter!) It's my understanding that people in the developed world already over-consume animal proteins to a large degree.
On the other hand: it's not like anyone ever followed the old food pyramid either. I'm now over here waiting with baited breath for the US federal govt to introduce some kind of regulation around the amount of additional sugar, salt and fats in processed food sold in the US (which makes up a large proportion of what people are eating right now).
The food landscape is complex and multi-factorial. I hope that they follow up with other initiatives to improve nutrition at a population level, like regulation and nutrition programs.
Working fully remote during the COVID times taught me one thing quite well: that I am nowhere near the introvert I thought I was. Turns out that I really missed hanging out with friends in the same location (albeit a bit less often than some other people).
These days I treat active IRL socialisation similar to other health-promoting activities such as physical exercise. Even when it feels like a chore, it has a benefit. It's worth maintaining that practice, too; socialising in person is a skill like any other, which you can get better at.
Maintaining a good social circle is a bit like maintaining a garden. It rewards consistent low-level effort over a long period.
The best non-fiction book I read in 2025 was "The Fabric of Civilization" by Virginia Postrel. It was completely fascinating, and made a good argument that the production of cloth/textiles might by one on the most import core developments that allowed modern, organised society to arise.
This author writes in ESL better than 99% of the people I've worked with in an English-native country, including myself. It's fascinating to read just how much more emphasis good-quality written English seems to have in Kenya than it does here in Australia (at least in the public education system where I have experience). I suppose that it's understandable, given that it gates access to higher-level education opportunities.
I don't really understand the aversion some people have to the use of LLMs to generate or refine written communication. It seems trigger the "that's cheating!" outrage impulse.
I don't think the author mentioned that English is their second language. English is an official language of Kenya, and there's a reasonable chance it's the author's home language.
I wanted to chime in to say: this is me, I do/have done this, and am also seeking to change this behaviour. It has never once occurred to me to try using spaced repetition for something like this, so thank you to putting the suggestion into my brain! I intend to put this into action as soon as I'm able to.
If you already have a friendship circle, start being the one to propose meetups (cafe, pub, picnic, hike, etc.) If you don't, it's harder - join a social sporting league, group fitness class, dance class, DnD group, anything where people have to talk with each other. When you arrive, turn your phone off for the interval. It might take a couple of goes to find something that sticks or the right environment.
I think that the real trick of "solving" the loneliness epidemic is that it isn't spread evenly. Everyone has their own individual level of opportunity for social interaction, so the solution is hyper-local and individualised. There's no one size fits all solution.
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