what about conventions?

Its Capitalism, isn't it?

No time = no social life

Being trans isn't an experiment or a hobby, it's who you are.

My friend, I can tell you that the gun is very much not metaphorical. If you find yourself on the other side of society's constant messaging and actions towards trans people, without friends, you're dead.

why not? it would increase GDP if people have more money to spend.

Maybe it's who you are? But it's not necessary that way for everyone.

Lots of people experiment with sexual/gender identity in lots of different ways. Who are you to tell them who or what they are?

people's identity changes over time too.

A one time encounter is different than seeing someone regularly. Also poor.

I also got into volleyball due to Haikyuu and it's been great even as a grown up learning the sport

Meetup.com was always free for attendees, the organizers pay the fees

so the issue isn't your hobbies, it's being poor that prevents you from going outside and meeting IRL.

which is the conclusion of the article.

what i took from this is that there is an over all loneliness problem, its effecting struggling people because not having time or money makes that harder.

but what i also took from that was, men were specially ridiculed for being lonely, they were told to get over it, as it’s their own fault. and that was before this article. this article is along the same vein of men should get over being in the spot light of as the main victim of loneliness? unnecessary roughness, and putting blame unnecessarily.

TLDR: Poor people are lonelier.

Good read.

If I had the money, I don't think frequenting conventions would make me less lonely. You got to spend hours traveling to the city to meet other travelers. I'm thinking meeting like minded people where I live, with physicality and frequency.

A stranger you meet a few times at a distant convention might as well be a internet rando on the other side of the world. It's not a regular occurrence like running into your neighbor or co worked when touching grass.

If hot singles were in my area, we wouldn't have the means or RNG circumstances of finding each other.

men improve their mental health by doing things, not by talking about feelings.

What a stunningly obtuse and thought terminating belief.

Don't you generalize for me or anyone else, and how dare you do it in the name of supposedly caring about the people you are generalizing wholistically for.

You are part of the toxic problem.

Please stop vomiting all over this thread with your generalizations about what "men" and "women" do, I am sorry you are stuck in a very gendered environment but what you are doing is perpetuating and reinforcing those structures by continually invoking them as if they were axioms of reality, you are making the problem worse by insisting on opposite gender qualities to the ones that you are recoiling against, and in that sense your position is potentially equally as toxic.*

Reject the need to define what it means to be a "man" or a "women", reject the need to violently force the entire spectrum of humanity into a narrow set of identities, binary or otherwise.

men being poor is their own fault.

especially according to the NYTimes elites.

why not just be born into a nice upper middle class family and go to college with zero debt and become a successful reporter have a decade of unpaid internships like they did?

silly working-class men, get your shit together.

i'm confused now, the issue is there are no hot single weebs in your area?

are you a hot single weeb? as far as i can tell those people mostly stream on twitch and find their community there and some of them make a lot of money doing it.

yeah, please prove my point by telling me how wrong and stupid i am.

and tell me how i can only 'fix' my toxicity by going to talk therapy and how that will somehow magically make my life better. or do i fix it by being a socialist, or an ally, or whatever other convenient political term that serves as your basis of gender genuflection?

meanwhile what has made my life better... is going out into the world and doing things and ignoring a lot of the 'talk about your feelings' mantra bullshit.

should we also talk about the therapy-industrial complex and it's use as a method of class warfare? oh no, sorry that's just me being stupid and toxic right... it can't be the case that the upper classes basically dehumanize people with words like 'toxic' because they don't have access to to 500/hr therapists like they do.

only person who is trying to terminate thoughts here is you, maybe because thoughts make you uncomfortable? so you need to call people who share thoughts that you don't like names to try and make them go away and stop the bad feelings in your head? maybe you could go to therapy and tell your therapist how some random person on the internet hurt you today because they said something you don't like!

Please take a step away from the internet for a bit, you are not a healthy presence here.

and tell me how i can only 'fix' my toxicity by going to talk therapy and how that will somehow magically make my life better. or do i fix it by being a socialist, or an ally, or whatever other convenient political term that serves as your basis of gender genuflection?

I never said anything of the sort, when I say reject placing people into narrow categories I am not saying that what you say you need is not what you say you need, I am saying our needs our individual and esoteric...and I am saying you are an asshole for extrapolating from your misery to "all men" or whatever the hell other generalizations you are making.

I am a man, you have NO idea what I need, do not speak for me when you speak for yourself.

Neiche indoor hobbies + small town with nothing going on = not a lot of people with those interest, and they probably go outside a rarely as I do.

Meeting people online is fun but just make you wish you knew IRL relatable people you could casually encounter in day today life. Most my friends don't really care about anime and there eyes bleed if I start talking tech.

sure, but you're not really lonely, it's that your socialization isn't living up to your ideal of what it should be?

lol, right anyone who disagrees with you is unhealthy... that's not at all a toxic way to view the world.

you are the thing you hate man, and yeah self-loathing people tend to view the world in bizarre miserable absolutes and think everyone else also thinks that way.

i never placed anyone in any narrow category dude, you simple interpret my words that way because that's how you view the world.

I never said all men, you said that. Again, you misinterpret me and distort what I say into some hyperbolic extreme, because I don't know, probably that's how you view the world, as hyperbole. and then you double down with the personal attacks, using the word 'toxic' and the dismissal and starts saying how I'm the problem because what, I don't subscribe your your personal narrow vision of man behavior?

I'm not talking about you. The fact you take random internet comments and find them personally offensive because they don't cater to your references is you being entitled and egotistical. You are not the center of the universe, even if you wish you were. Other people exist outside of you, even if that upsets you. And you can't control them... the horror!

This is a really good point. It seems that people have been conditioned to think that free experiences and spaces are inferior to expensive ones.

No.

Are you trans or something? It's cool if you don't want to exist in a gender binary, but like 99% of the world's population does everyday and doesn't have much of a choice in the matter. Only about 1% of the entire world's population identifies as trans or something other than man or woman.

I'm sorry if the reality of other people existing upsets you. But that's a you problem. You can live on whatever spectrum you want, but your desire to not live on that spectrum changes nothing about how other people live their lives.

There should be a study where you randomly sample people in every US city and ask them where they would go to casually meet new people if they their monetary budget was 0 USD, 20 USD, or 100 USD and if their time budget was 30 minutes, 2 hours, or 4 hours.

you are supposed to socialize with people of your same economic level.

Didn't Japan have some success in breaking up socioeconomic hierarchies in schools by forcing everyone to wear the same uniforms and take on the same cleaning responsibilities no matter who your parents were? It would be amazing if public schools and secondary educational institutions enforced similar constraints inhibiting social stratification that otherwise limits the candidate pool for leaders to close relatives of the ultra wealthy.

I mean there are options for sure. Every city typically has free events, lower cost events, and expensive events. Those typically aren't a great way to meet new people so much as do them with existing people you know.

But the issue in my experience is that people socially sort themselves out of those categories. Like, people with any money would rather sit around feeling bad they don't have more, than go to a event that costs 0 USD and associate with other 'poor people.

The proverbial Marx quote. Nobody wants to part of a club that would allow them to be a member. A lot of people implicit reject those that would accept them as not being desirable enough and forever change those who reject them because that rejection makes their acceptance desirable.

Anyway, it also just takes effort to find those events and spaces and the events are often once or twice a month... they aren't ubiquitous and everyday the way restaurants and bars are. And for most people restaurants and bars were the way to socialize for cheap, but well, they aren't cheap anymore.

If I want to go out and grab a cheap dinner with someone it's going to start at $30-50 dollars today. 5 years ago it was half that. and 10 years ago it was like 1/3 of that. I remember spending like $15 for a dinner and a beer in 2016.

Always has been, always will

They don't actually care about GDP, no billionaire does what they do for GDP.

Yeah, but Japanese society also insanely hierarchical, sexist, and racist.

They also have a 6 day workweek with 10-12 hour days.

So do the Koreans. And both societies have worse structural issues with mental health and dating/birth dates than usa/western ones do.

Sure, during the school day the socioeconomic stuff is blurred, but so are a lot of USA schools and colleges. I had no clue many of my college friends were millionaires or billionaires while I was there. It only became clear after we graduated and I got a starting job at 30K and their starting job was 300K.

The school environment is only ever a vacation from the stratification. Nepotism always wins.

Yeah, it seems like we've reached a point in society that mocking men for any reason is just seen as acceptable, and if a man doesn't like that or complains about it then people just double down on him harder. How is that any different from the traditional "be a man, suck it up, don't be so emotional" mentality?

This article was pretty good, but it could have done so without starting off by dismissing the common reality of loneliness that a lot of men seem to experience. I for one, as an isolated and lonely man, feel like I'm being gaslit when people badger me about how there's "no loneliness epidemic" and it must be all my fault.

Maybe women experience loneliness too, but at least they get to talk about their problems and nobody verbally abuse them over it. And anybody who would give them shit for that anyway is likely a crazy right-wing fascist, and who cares what they think? But men who talk about their feelings get bludgeoned by the right-wing crazies for being too "weak" or whatever, and they get bludgeoned by everyone else because berating men seems to be the cool thing to do or whatever.

But we just can't talk about it. And even articles that are dedicated to loneliness frame it as "there's not really a male loneliness epidemic... but wait look there's a loneliness epidemic that many men just incidentally happen to suffer from."

Like, people can talk about issues that women face and everyone's like "yas, preach." But when people talk about issues men face everyone becomes dismissive and it's either "everyone has those problems" or "women have those problems too." But, well, men always get left out of those conversations. So why can't we have our own?

It's like, women's spaces are totally fine and normal. But if a space is designated for men then suddenly there's a moral outrage about the exclusion of women.

I'm tired, boss...

Yeah, the self-reporting was a glaring issue I noticed as well. Like "less men than women report feeling lonely." No shit, are we all just going to pretend that the previous paragraph didn't just mention how men are more reluctant to open up about their feelings?

And don't blame men as individuals for their reluctance. That's socially conditioned and enforced, just like so many social expectations that people complain about women facing and being forced to conform to.

Brace yourself for downvotes, but this comment rings true. I don't agree with all of your takes by far, but this one is fire.

I'm wondering how many more hundreds of years it will take before men can be humanized and seen as people and have a place within so-called "egalitarian" society.

The answer to injustice isn't to reverse the playing cards, and as long as people act like it is we'll be in this endless battle between different demographic groups. Hold individuals responsible for their part in the injustice, but blaming an entire group of people is the definition of prejudice.

Most people live in cities and they're not all rich. Playing volleyball is basically free. Go for a hike, join a book club.

I have made a ton of friends through various organizing as well and that's free and we all have something instantly in common.

Well fuck

Apparently not because he asked me to give it my credit card and 7 day free trial with no way pass it.

Just checked and while they have gated some features behind plus free tier is still there. Use the site instead of the app

That's the thing. I did. We are all lower middle class households. It's just that as an immigrants from a poorer country I don't have an inhertit wealth sitting around in the family. actually it's the opposite, members of your extended family expect you to send them money since you're making 10x their monthly income. My friend pays zero rent since his wife has inherited her grandmother's 4 room apartment. I will have to spend the next 15 years paying of my 2 room apartment that is almost half my monthly income in lian payments. My friends pick up new expensive hobbies like Warhammer 40k. I don't have 200 bucks to dish out for some figurines. That's almost my entire monthly gas budget.

When we still used to hang out the topics devolved into them talking about installing an air conditioner for their apartment, putting solar panels on the roof, getting an ebike for 7 grand. And all I could contribute was that I've recently gotten a new keycaps for my keyboard of Amazon for 30 bucks and I changed the oil in my car myself.

It's things like those that make you feel disconnected even from your close friends.

It is kind of offputting how it's phrased as "We make fun of men for being lonely, right? I mean, look at them. PFFFHAHAHAHAHA! But it might be an actual problem because it effects women too."

Must've left your /s behind. The public is gonna riot

The males who went to business school are not lonely.

Why are women doing their part to make this a reality?

How come there nobody is talking about this?

if GDP goes to zero, then no company makes any revenue anymore -> all the stock value goes to zero.

Interesting article thanks for sharing, so many good pull quotes I think one that stood out for me would be:

Whenever society shifts and the hierarchy wobbles, we become anxious about the type of man who sits at the top of it—out of actual apprehension, morbid curiosity, and a fear of the backlash.

not only that they are expected to be on thier own by 18, or when they finished college. while women can stay indefinitely as long as they arnt mooching. when men are allowed to stay home in thier 20s, or longer they are often seen negatively more than a women doing it, providing they arnt moouching. ridicule often comes from family members, or siblings that were lucky in living on thier own, often with resentment or contempt.

or labeling the men not acheiving higher paying career/jobs.

well, "the poors" literally voted for one, still has broad support ffs seems unlikely they'd call for the guillotine.

As long as brown skinned people are treated badly and trans teens can't olay basketball they're happy, no matter how shitty he makes their lives.

GDP is a descriptor of an economy. If it goes to 0, it means there are no companies or groups producing anything of value. Not the other way around.

If we need more fun, social events for poor people to take part in, that sounds like a great way to start!

I'm just too tired after work. When coworkers had a get-together after work recently for us to hang out with a former coworker, I got too tired after only an hour and left. It was fun, I like the people, I just spend so much energy at work that I have nothing left over when the work day ends. Then the weekend comes and it's my one chance to actually rest, so I don't want to go anywhere or do anything that isn't related to keeping life going (like doing laundry, prepping meals, etc.)

Just three days ago I made a comment here on Lemmy:

"If I didn’t spend that energy every day to work, I’d have more of it for fun things in my time off. But the way things are, I only get two days of the week to not have to put that effort in, to recharge my social battery. I cherish those days."

This article is spot-on. Poverty doesn't just mean "everything that costs money is out of reach," but also, "we spend so much effort trying to afford life, we don't have the energy to actually live it."