I think of this all the time. What is the relationship between value and relationships? And what is the value of such a relationship?
It seems to me that every relationship is value oriented, even ones we consider absolutely perfect and pure.
Take for instance a mother's undying love for her newborn. She values that newborn for a few reasons. She sees herself in it. She sees pure innocence in it that needs to be protected and nourished. She sees all the potential good (i.e. value) this little child may one day bring to society. She sees her own personal fulfillment in the act of bringing this to fruition, which brings her joy, even amidst all the sacrifices she may have to make for it.
Is any of this selfish or bad? Does it in any way devalue her relationship to the child?
Extrapolate this to other relationships. A perfect friendship, where two people meet together regularly to find out about each other's recent activities, and encourage each other in life's difficulties, and foster one another's growth and good. They each care about the other, ask how the other is doing and what they're thinking and feeling, offer each other consolation, comfort, and help in times of distress or difficulty. Each gets this from the other, mutually beneficial. One may offer it exclusively at one time, the other reciprocates later, not out of obligation, but gratitude and personal desire.
This niche will get smaller over time. The key hurdle right now is that most "AI" is just LLMs. People currently prefer to go to a website or open a dedicated application for AI inference. As better integrations with other workflows are made and people see them, the resistance will weaken.
Microsoft shoving LLMs into literally everything, including Notepad, is what people are currently hating, because it isn't quite ready.
Well you know, probably everyone is constantly swallowing some of their own dead skin cells. Nobody's perfect. So I'm not going to feel too guilty when I cheat and buy a human-balogna sandwich every now and then, especially if they're free range.
Yeah, the phrase "significant quantities of" is really throwing the whole comment for an unfortunate loop. Maybe "I choose not to steal any vehicles" or "I choose not to commit fraud" and work up from _there_ instead of somehow trying to faux-normalize cannibalism. Very strange indeed.
> aims to remove: Most AI features, Copilot, Shopping features, ...
I grew up on DOS, and my first browser was IE3. My first tech book as a kid was for HTML[1], and I was in absolute awe at what you could make with all the tags, especially interactive form controls.
I remember Firefox being revolutionary for simply having tabs. Every time a new Visual Basic (starting with DOS) release came out, I was excited at the new standardized UI controls we had available.
I remember when Tweetie for iPhone OS came out and invented pull-down refresh that literally every app and mobile OS uses now.
Are those days permanently gone? The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing?
[1] Can someone help me find this book? I've been looking for years. It used the Mosaic browser.
I feel like wishing for UI innovation is using the Monkey's paw. My web experience feels far too innovative and not enough consistent. I go to the Internet to read and do business not explore the labyrinth of concepts UI designers feel I should want. Take me back to standards, shortcuts, and consistency.
Yes! I don't want a car with an "innovative" way of steering. I don't want a huge amount of creativity to go into how my light switches work. I don't want shoes that "reinvent" walking for me (whatever the marketing tagline might say).
Some stuff has been solved. A massive number of annoyances in my daily life are due to people un-solving problems with more or less standardized solutions due to perverse economic incentives.
I think there's a ton of innovation remaining regarding steering and light switches.
You're right that it's not going to be better designs, but paradigm shifts.
We still don't know what it means to provide input to a mostly self-driving car. It hasn't been solved and people continue to complain about attention fatigue and anxiety. Is the driving position really optimal for that either? Are accident fatalities reduced if the driver is sitting somewhere else?
Light switches may be reliable and never go away, but we have many well established everyday examples of automatic lights: door switches, motion sensing, proximity sensing, etc. You never think about it and that's the point.
The thing why this was only a research project and never came into mass production was regulatory stuff, IIRC?
(most EU countries require, still until today, a "physical connection between steering wheel and wheels" in their trafic regulation)
This was a few years before Sweden joined the EU, but yes, I think the lack of a physical connection was one of the main problems.
From what I've read the test drivers also thought the car was too difficult to drive, with the joystick being too reactive. I wonder how much of that could be solved today with modern software and stability control tech.
I can't find it now, but I do remember a similar prototype with mechanical wires (not electrical) that was supposed to solve the regulatory requirements. That joystick looked more like a cyclic control from a helicopter.
Having played enough video games that use joysticks for steering I don't want to drive a real car with a joystick. Crashing in Mario kart or Grand theft Auto because I sneezed is fine but not in real life.
> Yes! I don't want a car with an "innovative" way of steering.
You might, but you'll never really know.
I mean, steering wheels themselves were once novel inventions. Before those there was "tillers" (a rod with handle essentially)[0], and before those: reigns, to pull the front in the direction you want.
I highly doubt there's a steering input device so superior to the current wheel shape that it's worth throwing out the existing standard. Yes, at one point how steering should work (or how you should navigate the Web) was uncertain, but eventually everyone settled on something that worked well enough that it was no longer worthwhile to mess with it.
Although, one thought I had is that there's nothing wrong with experimenting with non-standard interfaces as long as you still have the option to still just buy, say, a Toyota with a standard steering wheel instead of 3D Moebius Steering or whatever. The problem is when the biggest manufacturers keep forcing changes by top-down worldwide fiat, forcing customers to either grin and bear it or quit driving (or using the Web) entirely.
I sympathise with the frustration, but I think the issue isn't innovation itself: it's that we've lost the ability to distinguish between solving actual problems and just making things different.
Take mobile interfaces. When touchscreens arrived, we genuinely needed new patterns. A mouse pointer paradigm on a 3.5" screen with fat fingers simply doesn't work. Swipe gestures, pull-down menus, bottom navigation—these emerged because the constraints demanded it, not because someone thought "wouldn't it be novel if..."
The problem now is that innovation has become cargo-culted. Companies innovate because they think they should, not because they've identified a genuine problem. Every app wants its own navigation paradigm, its own gesture language, its own idea of where the back button lives. That's not innovation, that's just noise.
However, I'd have to push back on the car analogy: steering wheels were an innovation over tillers, and a crucial one. Tillers gave you poor mechanical advantage and required constant two-handed attention. The steering wheel solved real problems: better control, one-handed operation, more space for passengers. It succeeded because it was genuinely better, and then it standardised because there was no reason to keep experimenting.
The web needs more of that approach: innovate when there's a genuine problem, then standardise when you've found something that works. The issue isn't innovation, it's the perverse incentive to differentiate for its own sake.
Leaving aside the externalities of constantly breaking everyone's workflow and potentially introducing disastrous bugs, there's an opportunity cost to innovating where there isn’t a clear need. Google and others are wasting massive resources endlessly tweaking browsers and the Web because that's all they know how to do, their users are locked in and without recourse, and they don't feel threatened by any competitors or upstarts. I would argue the web and smartphones and similar tech are boring now but because the market is controlled by only a few huge companies, the tech hasn't been allowed to become low-margin, standardized cookie-cutter commodities. Instead these attempts to make this old boring tech seem exciting is getting to the point where it's sad and comical.
You need to be careful here, because we have a real tendency to get stuck in local maxima with technology. For instance, the QWERTY keyboard layout exists to prevent typewriter keys from jamming, but we're stuck with it because it's the "standardized solution" and you can't really buy a non-QWERTY keyboard without getting into the enthusiast market.
I do agree changing things for the sake of change isn't a good thing, but we should also be afraid of being stuck in a rut
I agree with you, but I'm completely aware that the point you're making is the same point that's causing the problem.
"Stuck in a rut" is a matter of perspective. A good marketer can make even the most established best practice be perceived as a "rut", that's the first step of selling someone something: convince them they have a problem.
It's easy to get a non-QWERTY keyboard. I'm typing on a split orthlinear one now. I'm sure we agree it would not be productive for society if 99% of regular QWERTY keyboards deviated a little in search of that new innovation that will turn their company into the next Xerox or Hoover or Google. People need some stability to learn how to make the most of new features.
Technology evolves in cycles, there's a boom of innovation and mass adoption which inevitably levels out with stabilisation and maturity. It's probably time for browser vendors to accept it's time to transition into stability and maturity. The cost of not doing that is things like adblockers, noscript, justthebrowser etc will gain popularity and remove any anti-consumer innovations they try. Maybe they'll get to a position where they realise their "innovative" features are being disable by so many users that it makes sense to shift dev spending to maintenance and improvement of existing features, instead of "innovation".
> For instance, the QWERTY keyboard layout exists to prevent typewriter keys from jamming, but we're stuck with it because it's the "standardized solution" and you can't really buy a non-QWERTY keyboard without getting into the enthusiast market.
So, we are "stuck" with something that apparently seems to work fine for most people, and when it doesn't there is an option to also use something else?
If you mean the default German keyboard layout then, yes, putting backslashes, braces and brackets behind AtlGr makes it sub-optimal in my book. Thankfully what's printed on the keys is not that important so you too can have a QWERRTY keyboard if you want.
As someone that makes my own keyboard firmware, 100% agree. For most people, typing speed isn't a bottleneck. There is a whole community of people that type faster than 250wpm on custom, chording-enabled keyboards. The tradeoff is that it takes years to relearn how to type. Its the same as being a stenographer at that point. Its not worth it for most people.
Even if there was a new layout that did suddenly allow everyone to type twice as fast, what would we get with that? Maybe twice as many social media posts, but nothing actually useful.
One don't need to be a scientist to take a look at own hands and fingers, to see that they are not crooked to the left. Ortholinear keyboard would be objectively better, even with the same keymap like QWERTY, but we don't produce those for masses for a variety of reasons. Same with many other ideas.
If I recall correctly, QWERTY was designed to minimize jamming. The myth is that it was designed to slow people down.
Whether it does slow people down, as a side effect, is not as well established since, as another person pointed out, typing speed isn't the bottleneck for most people. Learning the layout and figuring out what to write is. On top of that, most of the claims for faster layouts come from marketing materials. It doesn't mean they are wrong, but there is a vested interest.
If there was a demonstrably much faster input method for most users, I suspect it would have been adopted long ago.
The labyrinth of ways to interact with the temporal path between pages is a cluster. History, bookmark, tab, window,, tab groups.
There are many different reasons to have a tab, bookmark, or history entry. They dont all mean the same thing. Even something as simple as comparison shopping could have a completely different workflow of sorting and bucketing the results, including marking items as leading candidate, candidate, no, no but. Contextualizing why I am leaving something open vs closing it is information ONLY stored in my head, that would be useful to have stored elsewhere.
Think about when you use the back button vs the close tab button. What does the difference between those two concepts mean to you? When do you choose to open a new tab vs click? There is much to be explored and innovated. People have tried radical redesigns, havent seen anything stick , yet.
We had that ability in Firefox, through XUL. Then it was removed. Tree Style Tab addon doesn't work properly to this day because of this.
We had that ability in Chrome, through Chrome Apps. You could make a browser app, load pages in webviews, with the whole browser frame customizable. Then it was removed.
We had an ability to make a new innovative browser, until Google infested all the standartization committees, and increased complexity of standards on a daily basis for well over a decade. Now they monetize their effort on making Chrome by removing adblockers and enforcing their own ads, knowing full well that even keeping a fork that supports manifest v2 is infeasible for a free open-source project.
There is no way forward with the web we have right now. No innovation will happen anymore.
If you expect the browser to help you manage your various workflows beyond generic containers (tabs, tab groups), then you become tied into the browser's way of doing things. Are you sure you want that?
I'm not saying your hopes are bad, exactly. I'm interested in what such workflows might look like. Maybe there _is_ a good UX for a web shopping assistant. I have an inkling you could cobble something interesting together quite fast with an agentic browser and a note-taking webapp. But I do worry that such a app will become yet another way for its owner to surveil their users in some of the more accurate and intimate areas of their lives. Careful what you wish for, I reckon.
In the meantime, what's so hard about curating a Notepad/Notes/Obsidian/Org mode file, or Trello/Notion board to help you manage your projects?
It definitely feels like it is gone. Of course I'm largely talking about the applications that I use, e.g. MS Word which is still using the searchless 1980s character map and has a crazy esoteric add-on installation process. It's hilariously bad when we consider the half-screen UI which obscures a considerable amount of the ribbon.
The UX is also awful.
But I think this is a compounding problem that spans generations of applications. Consider the page convention — a great deal of the writing content we typically publish, at a societal level, will be digital-only so why are we still defaulting to paper document formats? Why is it so fucking hard to set a picture in?
And it's that kind of ossification and familiar demand that reinforces the continuum that we see, I think. And when a company does get creative and sees some breakthrough success it is constrained to nascency before it gets swallowed by conglomerate interests and strangled.
And Google's alternative ecosystem has all of these parallels. It's crazy to see these monolithic companies floundering like this. That's what I don't understand.
Kinda yeah, kinda no. Big-thinking drastic UI experiences are usually shit. But small, thoughtful touches made with care can still make a big difference between a website that just delivers the data you need and one that's pleasant to interact with.
There's a similar amateurs-do-too-much effect with typography and design. I studied typography for four semesters in college, as well as creative writing. The best lessons I learned were:
In writing, show, don't tell.
In typography, use the type to clarify the text - the typography itself should be transparent and only lead to greater immersion, never take the reader out of the text.
Good UI follows those same principles. Good UX is the UI you don't notice.
> invented pull-down refresh that literally every app and mobile OS uses now
I'm forced to use WhatsApp for a local group, and for some reason, when in the group chat, when I pull up to ensure that I see the latest message, that stupid app opens an audio-recording thingy at the bottom as if I wanted to send an audio note to the group.
Who designed that? Has that person been fired?
Also, I wish that on Windows "windows" weren't able to provide their own chrome and remove the title bar. Add some things to it yes, but fully replace it? No thank you.
This is a somewhat recent new "feature" to force group calls, even if they're accidental. It's not what most people I know want, and there is no way to disable it for a group, just as there is no way to disable audio messages anywhere. WhatsApp is made to the lowest common denominator, UX is secondary to market share.
You don't use an IM service, because a subset of its users are "wackos"? I've used Telegram for many years now, and aside from the occasional "hot singles in your area" type spam, I've never been bothered by anyone.
Well, the subset feels like the majority. Which does not mean that they are socially a majority, just on those platforms. Telegram and X has been taken over by them, IN GERMANY. I don't know how it is in other countries, maybe it's more civilized there.
The actual reason why I use an IM is the HOA, as I said. Else I do not have and do not need an IM, except for my ejabberd server + Conversations clients so that devices can send me status updates, like "backup completed successfully".
> Are those days permanently gone? The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing?
I think "yes" and "a bit", in that order. The early days of the web and mobile, where everything was new, are gone. In those days, there was no established pattern for standard UX. Designers had to innovate.
It makes sense that we have a lot less innovation now. There's probably room for a lot more than we see, but not for the level that was there in the early days of the web.
Only speaking for myself, but I have "front end exhaustion". Text based sites like this are the only ones I spend any time on anymore.
There's no reason to "learn" a UI or use shortcuts on most sites, because they change everything around every few months.
I see people reminiscing about tabs in firefox, well today a majority of the top websites don't even allow you to open links in new tabs! The links aren't even real links anymore, and everything's a webapp. ( and by top websites, I mean social media, not the top sites used by the HN crowd. Sites like YT, FB, IG, and TT ).
I try to interact with the "UI" of websites as little as possible these days. I use RSS readers for as much as possible. Any time I get a popup on any site, I get mad. I don't care about news updates, software updates, or offers. Anything that pops up at me, or moves around before I can click it, looks like a scam to me. Even if it's "legitimate". The modern web feels like an arcade game that's trying to waste my time.
> Can someone help me find this book? I've been looking for years. It used the Mosaic browser.
Would it happen to be HTML Manual of Style: Clear, Concise Reference for Hypertext Markup Language by Larry Aronson? [1]
From the description:
> This book introduces HTML, the program language used to create World-Wide Web "pages", so that users of Mosaic and other Web browsers can access data. Forty to 50 new "pages" are being added to the WWW every day and this will be the first book out on the subject.
Forty to fifty new "pages" per day! </Dr. Evil air quotes>
Eventually we reach some kind of local maximum for UI/UX. So much of these things are a function of the relative immaturity of the platforms. They're all also pretty low hanging fruit.
In some ways, this is happening at the moment with AI and LLMs. The tools available, how we prompt them, etc are all "UI/UX innovation" if you believe these things have a use.
If we have a huge platform shift in the future (LLMs, AR/VR, ???), we may start from zero and go through "inventing tabs" again until that platform becomes maximally optimised.
> The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing?
There is more than enough of it. Now it is, of course, AI agents. Before that, Material Design was quite innovative. Interestingly, with the raise of search engines and later LLMs, we are getting back to the command line! It is not the scary black window where you type magic incantations, it is a less scary text field where you type in natural language, but fundamentally, it works like a command line.
It is a good thing? For me, it is a mixed bag, I miss traditional desktop UIs (pre-Windows 8), but I like search-based UIs on the Desktop, an I am not a fan of AI agents: too slow an unpredictable, and that's before privacy considerations. When it is not killing performance, I find Material Design to be pretty good on mobile, but terrible on the desktop. That there is innovation doesn't mean it is all good.
Are those days permanently gone? The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing?
I agree mostly with your sentiment. But I still think there is still some work being done. For example the Arc and Zen Browsers. I never used Arc because it is closed source. But it sure looked beautiful. And Zen I tested, but it seemed laggy. I think I might give it another go to see if some of the performance issues have been fixed.
Fun fact: Opera had a tab functionality before Firefox. In fact a little-known browser called InternetWorks from the 90s is thought to be the first that had them.
I was an Opera user. They were the innovators in the browser space back in the day. Eventually it just felt too bloated, and sadly now they are essentially another Chromium fork.
> Are those days permanently gone? The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing?
No. You just need to look outside of desktop computing, and computing in general.
For example, I'm getting into CAD and 3d printing. Learning it reminds me of when my father learned to program in the late '80s, or when my grandfather telling me about how he got his Model A up to 50 mph.
Remember: Desktop computers and the web are ultimately tools for a purpose, and that purpose isn't always "nerd toy." We (the nerds) need to find and invent our toys every generation or so.
Yes. When coming from DOS, all the UI/UX that could have been created has been created. What we have now is a loop of tries to refresh the existing but it's hard, mainly because it's now everywhere and it has reached maturity.
As an example, the "X" to close and the left arrow for back won't be replaced before a long time, just like we still have a floppy to represent save.
Cars have tried to refresh their ui/UX but they failed and are now reverting back to knobs and buttons.
It seems that VisionOS is a place where innovation could come but it's not really a success.
Moreover, designers keep trying to justify their own jobs by changing fully functional interfaces, and then claiming post-hoc that the new UIs are better because they are better.
Designers decided that scrollbars that shrink to super-thin columns when not in use were better. Maybe... but often it results in shrunken scrollbars that require extra work to accurately hover over and expand.
Designers decided that gray text on gray backgrounds were easier to read, and there was even a study to "prove" it... which resulted in idiots picking poor contrast choices of gray-on-gray, without understanding the limits on this idea.
I will say that the current push for accessibility is forcing some of these "innovations" back onto the junk heap where they belong. I was annoyed the first time an accessibility review complained about the contrast of my color choices on a form once... but once I got over my ego, I have to admit they were right; the higher-contrast colors are easier to read.
Honestly, I could endlessly vehemently express my frustration to any designer that find this "cool".
/* rant /
Those designer never had to scroll to a long, long scrollable section of a page to reach the end and sadly discover that the "end" button doesn't work, because of course the browser goes to the end of the page, not the end of the scrollable section.
And of course, the scrollbar is 2 pixels wide (I took a screenshot to measure it) and it's only visible if I put my mouse in the section.
And of course, it's right next to the scrollbar that the dev decided to put the Action Icons for each item in the scrollable section.
1 Pixel left, open the popup to delete the item, 1 pixel right, scrollbar.
And of course, if I increase the zoom on my browser, everything grows, except the scrollbar.
I can have icons the size of my fist on a 27" screen but those scrollbar stay thinner than an uncooked spaghetti.
I remember what it was like before tabs, when there was that Multi Document Interface (something like that) instead, so you had the main parent window but then each page was its own window within it that you could resize, minimise, maximise…
MDI was rightfully seen as a complete failure, but there was also SDI, where each open thing is a separate window. I don't know how we got from MDI in office apps being completely terrible, to MDI in browsers being the accepted norm.
Tabbed MDI is effectively just a better interface to SDI (for most situations)
Actual MDI applications feel so dated. It made more sense when there wasn't a unified task bar kinda thing (which when you think of it, is kinda like tabs as well)
Actual MDI was so much worse than browser tabs, unrelated tabs can be merged into the same window or split apart into their own, instead of floating on top of an awkward background.
The question is why aren't they a feature of the window manager instead of the application. We should be able to have windows with tabs from different applications.
Well websites and documents are not the same thing so it makes sense that a paradigm that works for one doesn't necessarily work for the other. I do find web-based document editors very annoying to use when they are in the same window as other tabs - at least web browser MDIs allow you do effortlessly separate tabs into a new window these days.
Good example because Liquid Glass is obviously preparing for the next paradigm shift in computing which will actually require/open up a lot of innovation on the UI front again.
Apple has the unfortunate burden of needing to shepherd millions of developers over to this new paradigm (AR) before it really exists, and so is shoving Liquid Glass onto devices that don't really benefit from it.
But in practice people are generally not happy about lots of new experimentation going on. By definition, most of the results suck. In retrospect we get to stand in awe of those that survived the evolutionary battle and say "wow browser tabs" and "wow pull to refresh" and forget the millions of other bad ideas that we tried.
> Good example because Liquid Glass is obviously preparing for the next paradigm shift in computing which will actually require/open up a lot of innovation on the UI front again.
Bruh, I just want to be able to read the text on my phone.
Yeah: most experiments fail and even the ones that ultimately succeed have rough edges.
That's my point about people swooning about the days of UI experimentation. There's a reason we don't do it once we figure out good solutions to problems (experimentation is hard and mostly bad).
Vista/Aero 2.0 was purely for aesthetics. Liquid Glass is obviously to enable UIs overlaid on top of uncontrolled content (i.e. camera input from the real world, or be used through fully transparent displays).
Apple really has to bite the bullet somehow here if they want to get everyone over to what they see as the next computing paradigm.
Much like transparent glass tablets in sci Fi movies, this looks pretty cool but I think makes text hard to read and gets old immediately. Is it really a compelling new paradigm?
I think if I had a really improved version of Apple vision I would still want non transparent windows that are clean and easy to read, not floating holograms with glass like distortion?
All important questions to answer and problems to solve.
It would be interesting if someone had a way to throw a couple hundreds thousand designers and developers into an environment where they have to find solutions so we could get a head start before the relevant hardware goes fully mass-market...
I already have a physical keyboard! So what will a touchscreen do for me?
Turns out that interaction shift actually enabled a lot.
IMO any individual (like you or I) are unlikely to immediately conjure up every possible high-value idea that AR makes possible.
Not saying those ideas necessarily exist (though I suspect they do), just that your lack of imagination isn't evidence against them existing and being discoverable in the next 10-20 years.
I went through the same (or at least very similar) experience. I loved that.
New apps were announced in blogs, and people downloaded them to try them out. I remember downloading Opera, using it for a few days or weeks, and then going back to Firefox.
> Are those days permanently gone? The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing?
I don't think these are permanently gone, but the corporations failed us, and also the "not for profit" fakers such as Mozilla.
We need a new web - one developed by the people, for the people. Whenever corporations jump in, they try to skew things to their favour, which almost always means in disfavour of the people.
Can we stop innovating on UI for existing problems?
The standard affordances for most well-known problems are long settled. Unless you're solving an entirely new class of problem, maybe you don't need to reinvent a large number of wheels, again. We're all tired of the triangular wheels coming out.
Which makes it funny that the request for UI innovation is prefixed with a quote that amounts to "but what if browsers were permanently frozen ca. 2012?". Mind, I can sympathize with some of the thoughts behind the request, even if I disagree - but you can't ask for a stop in new features & problem classes to be accompanied by continued UI innovation.
That is, as my art teacher used to say, "intellectual wankery in the disguise of creativity".
Except in the early days of smartphone, people pushed back against pull-to-refresh[0][1][2]. Android devs were confused why it was a thing. It's a design with zero discoverability - how do you know what would happen when you pull down? Perhaps the app would show a search bar. Or pinned posts if it's a forum board. Or ask you to review the app? How do you know pulling down is a gesture at all?
The only reason pull-to-refresh got accepted is that it came so early that the UX of smartphone app wasn't well established. Before pull-to-search or pull-to-whatever had a chance.
> nihilistically
It's quite nihilistic to think history doesn't exist and things were born as they are currently.
I'm extremely skeptical of financial solutions to this problem.
One of the most fundamental reasons for my own personal loneliness is that, in many of the connections I've made, they simply do not feel sincere, genuine, authentic, and simply because the other person clearly has a different motivation for "caring" about me than actually caring about me.
For example, the churchgoers I've met have always felt like they were only spending time with me to get me to become a member of their church. They were eager to throw money at me if I lost my job, or offer to help me move, but never wanted to get coffee outside church hours.
Therapists are another example, obviously financially incentivized to talk to me. There are definitely some who care simply because it's part of their personality, but that still says nothing about me and any connection they have with me.
And I shared a story elsewhere here of a priest who I had literally just met minutes before, and who actually went in for a hug the moment I mentioned having a hard time with something, as if this random hug from a complete stranger meant anything other than him following a virtue signalling script.
No, I am convinced that the solution must be free, it must be volunteers doing it without anyone knowing about it, without the belief that they're earning brownie points from God or gaining a potential member of some organization, and without getting paid or rewarded for it, except for the reward of having a new and worthwhile friendship with the lonely person.
It's a little like being invited to things out of pity, by people who know that you don't have any friends and struggle socially: It's nice, and I do feel their kindness from the gesture. But in the end, I only feel more isolated. I want people to hang out because they enjoy it, not out of charity. The social connection just isn't there, there's no sense of belonging, quite the opposite.
From my perspective and the people I'm trying to reach out to, they basically need someone to help them see that they are cared about and valued, someone to ask them how their day is over coffee with no strings attached, and not because they're trying to earn brownie points with God, or trying to increase their internal virtue signal, but because they genuinely care about the other person.
Your #1 is great for after this connection with another human being has been made. Your #2 is why it hasn't been made yet. I'm trying to find solutions for the middle, to solve #2 for random strangers on the street, in order to get them both able and motivated to do #1. Those strangers are people who sit alone at home, all day, every day, and you only see them on the way to the grocery store and back.
I'm glad you got the help you needed to bootstrap your ability to find and form meaningful relationships. If only there was a reproducible way to help countless others get past that initial hump, and begin the same process. I believe it must be possible somehow.
I've been trying my surveys in Chicago as a first step. I need to do more, though, somehow. Now that I'm known as the "sign guy" by many people who pass me by every time I'm there, I think I can get more creative than surveys, and try signs that are more interactive to reach out to those people. I've been brainstorming throughout this thread on a few different ways to do this. If you or anyone has concrete ideas, I'd be very glad to hear it.
The “#1.5,” is that we have often developed “loneliness-inducing habits,” that need to be broken. We don’t necessarily have any real “issues,” other than we’ve just gotten used to “hanging out with ourselves.”
Breaking habits isn’t easy. It’s nearly impossible, if we have a compulsive disorder, but, then, we’d be #2.
The key to anything is willingness. If we don’t actually want to do something, then it ain’t happening.
But there’s a hell of a lot more #2, than folks are willing to admit.
But the other part of loneliness is feeling like (or knowing that) nobody cares what you think or feel or have to say.
I've been (accidentally) helping people with my surveys for a few months now. It brings a sense of joy when someone comes up to me and tells me that my presence has helped them or that they look forward to my surveys. But it also increases the loneliness that I feel, because none of them care about me or what I think or how I feel. None of them have ever asked.
Well, except for a couple friends I've made, who clearly do care now, and have shown it in a few ways, but we just haven't had an opportunity yet to have coffee or some other interaction where they can show more directly that they care about me, by asking me about how I feel, etc. But those are the exception.
I suppose, that's what I'm after. Not just personally for myself, but what I'm trying to help solve for other people: to help them get to a point where others actually do care about them, and they have opportunities to show it, such as asking how their day was over coffee. For countless people who are just like me, I think this is all they need to not feel lonely anymore. So that's my goal.
And I don't think volunteering is the answer, but I think it can be a start for some of them, a way to meet people. But just as good a way to meet people as saying hi to the person at the next self checkout kisk or the bus stop. The problem for most people is that they don't say hi. Maybe they're convinced, like I am, that nobody would ever want them to, that they would only be a burdensome bother to others, and therefore should always stay silent.
I suppose this is what I'm trying to solve. How to convince others that this isn't true, as one person standing outside holding a sign.
> 3. Decreased American tolerance for and ability to handle awkwardness, and there's always going to be some awkwardness in social interactions.
I wonder how much of this is due to our ever increasing sense of obligation to be "performing" all the time. Maybe increased by the perpetual presence of social media and the habits and mindset that both creating and consuming for it creates.
I thought that originally, but I actually think it's more experiential/exposure-side.
Hypothesis: modern society (especially apps) has decreased the amount of realtime, face-to-face social interactions at all stages of life, which has eventually manifested into a decreased average (there are still some social people!) capability to deal with social awkwardness. And consequently less comfort/appetite for putting oneself in situations where it might happen.
I don’t think it’s this. I’ve lived in NYC recently and people there don’t have tolerance for shit behaviors either and you’re surrounded by people all the time.
It’s due to people having higher standards than before and being bifurcated on every issue. There is deep polarization and tribalism within American culture.
Everyone consumes different content and there’s very little homogeneity within our culture. Like… Americans are more diverse than ever in terms of their thoughts and behaviors. They genuinely have little in common compared to many other cultures.
I'll buy that, especially in NYC-like urban environments where frequency of exposure is definitely not the issue. Suburbs and rural may be different.
Part of the increased diversity is unavoidable due to technological changes eroding previous touchpoints. E.g. limited broadcast TV becoming cable becoming streaming.
But there does seem to be an increasing dearth of the logical tonic: discussion-facilitating diverse spaces. Places where people of different opinions can mingle, there are strong social norms around mutually productive conversation (and enforcement to discourage / weed out poison apples?), and that are open to new people.
I see young people facetiming each other all the time, maybe a little too much. It definitely fills the same role as audio calls used to. But I just text. I remember when texting started to become a thing, and I was very much looking forward to the absolute convenience of being able to read and respond whatever I had time, and not have to deal with a phone call. I wonder if that was common in my generation (millenials), and I wonder if we call/facetime significantly less and text more than other generations.
Texting is for sure more convenient but you lose the "watercooler" effect, you're not going to text them "how's your mom doing?" when inviting them over for D&D via text
huh, as a 50something saying yes to a text message is absolutely a firm commitment. if anything, is firmer than doing it over voice, because now you have both put something in writing.
It seems to me that every relationship is value oriented, even ones we consider absolutely perfect and pure.
Take for instance a mother's undying love for her newborn. She values that newborn for a few reasons. She sees herself in it. She sees pure innocence in it that needs to be protected and nourished. She sees all the potential good (i.e. value) this little child may one day bring to society. She sees her own personal fulfillment in the act of bringing this to fruition, which brings her joy, even amidst all the sacrifices she may have to make for it.
Is any of this selfish or bad? Does it in any way devalue her relationship to the child?
Extrapolate this to other relationships. A perfect friendship, where two people meet together regularly to find out about each other's recent activities, and encourage each other in life's difficulties, and foster one another's growth and good. They each care about the other, ask how the other is doing and what they're thinking and feeling, offer each other consolation, comfort, and help in times of distress or difficulty. Each gets this from the other, mutually beneficial. One may offer it exclusively at one time, the other reciprocates later, not out of obligation, but gratitude and personal desire.
Is this wrong? Is this selfish? Is this bad?
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