The few interactions that I've had with homeless people gave me an impression that the thing they needed the most was human interaction. They'd be thankful if they received a meal, but they'd start talking in a way that made me think that what they needed the most was for someone to listen to them or some human interaction. It didn't seem like many people would ever stick around for more than a few seconds.

I'm talking about a very small sample size here, but still.

"I used to think that the worst thing in life was to end up alone. It's not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel alone." - Robin Williams

One study found that lonely people also engage in more imaginary conversations than those who don't consider themselves lonely. Perhaps ending up talking to oneself out loud is somehow related?

https://psychnewsdaily.com/lonely-people-have-a-unique-brain...

Language is so tied to our sense of connection and belonging

That is surreal! Like one step away from “The Sixth Sense” movie

I'm a state that resonates a lot with what you wrote, thank you for that. Checking out your bio I found out you have a very interesting blog, I really liked "Unexpected Benefits of Being Vulnerable on the Internet" as it's something that I often wonder about, how we condition ourselves to say things we believe will be accepted (and to receive upvotes) instead of what we truly feel, leaving our true self behind.

Thank you for sharing something so personal and honest. Your story highlights how loneliness isn’t just about physical isolation

Aaron's right, you have a cool blog. His account here is so over censored.

[dead]

Justin Bieber, Ellen DeGeneres, Kim Kardashian, Barack Obama, and Mark Zuckerberg

The celebs in the test. I'm not sure I could say anything meaningful about Bieber other than he's a pop star from Canada. Similar for Kardashian - Instagram influencer with lots of cosmetic surgery and makeup. Is the test expecting me to know other details beyond the completely inane and superficial?

It would be even worse if they tested on athletes. I haven't watched any of the big US sports in decades. NFL, NBA, MLB - no clue. I guess I could answer a few questions about World Tour cyclists, but that's not likely to be on a test outside of Belgium or Italy.

My kids grew up with no TV and no Internet until they were 12 or so. When they applied at a Microsoft-area private school one question asked what celebrity they like and why. They knew of none and didn’t even know the word celebrity.

All this stuff can very much lead to depression, and there seems to plenty of evidence that depression changes the brain

There's a reason emotional security is 3rd on the Maslow Hierarchy, after food and physical security

Probably written by a lonely person. It expresses things in unusual ways and has repetition that is not typical when compared to articles written by non-lonely people.

Exactly. It looks like it was written by a very bad LLM. It keeps repeating the title over and over again.

[dead]

> I suspect almost everyone has some secret disagreements with their in-group

This is assuming they have anyone close enough to even call them an in-group

I think there has been an over-emphasis on individuality and a strong resistance to conformity that has been instilled in a lot of people, which has led to a lot of those people cutting ties with anyone that has even minor disagreements with them

They are forever in search of their perfect friend group that doesn't exist, made up of only people who agree with them about every single thing

It's quite amazing how many people call themselves "free thinkers" to mean they have unique ideas, yet those ideas usually align with a huge percentage of the population.

Yeah I think this is the end result of defining people more by their group membership than who they are as individuals.

Is it just me, or does it feel like a significant proportion of psychological research nowadays comes to "no-brainer' conclusions? I find myself more often looking at an article and thinking, "Well, duh."

This is a genuine question. It may just be an environmental shift. Since I used to be deep in the field, I had access to any scientific journal I could think of and the latest research studies. Now I'm mainly seeing pop culture psychology. Has it always been this way?

Could mean the opposite of what you might think. I imagine the mean perception of Zuck is weirdo, Bieber is 'no clue, I'm not a teen girl' and so on.

Faces look ugly when you're alone.

> the physical aspect isn't convincing unless the socially isolated person is lying around in bed doing drugs and eating unhealthy food all day. In that case instead of loneliness, we should blame drug abuse.

It's important to remember that "linked to" does not mean "causes"

You are saying "we should blame the drug abuse and not the loneliness" but "linked to" doesn't imply blame at all already

Just guessing here, but if you're depressed you're much less likely to take your health seriously. It's also much easier to abuse drug when you're lonely - look at drug use among the homeless.

Certainly, if I took away your friends and family I would expect your health to decline.

Depression and anxiety cause elevated cortisol levels which cause all kinds of physically measurable issues.

What a weird thing to take offense to.

Also yes, if there's a consensus on something, thinking different to said consensus would be unusual because it's not the usual. There are no value judgements in this article, so really interpreting this in any other way other than the literal sense makes you come off as defensive.

More to the article itself, I wonder which comes first, the unusual thoughts, or the loneliness?

I can say from direct anecdotal experience that being excluded leads to being even more excluded in the future unless an outside force intervenes. Social skills, speech, belief in the ability to be understood by others are things that need honing and proofing by experience. The less you have of them, the less meaningful opportunities to improve them you get.

Why? They're all undeniably celebrities, and I guess the point was to have a spread of source of celebrity?

Why not? They are all celebrities. Celebrity status is not really correlated to the actual work they do [although some work requires some notoriety]. Gordon Ramsey's a restaurant owner and chef but he's also been on reality TV. Malala became internationally famous for being the target of an assassination plot, not her years of advocacy for women's education beforehand.

It is very common. There are lines of research on dealing with the shortcomings of using mturk this way.

e.g. https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...

Meanwhile I don’t listen to anyone on that list except for Charli XCX because I arrived at her music from a rave/hyperpop background and then became a stan with her last album Crash in 2022.

I was tired of BRAT though about 2 weeks after release because I listened to the teasers so much… then it blew up and even attached itself to VP Harris…

There are many cultures. You’re on HN, so my guess is you’re connected with today’s hacker culture. I’ve heard of 6 of those names, but can’t name any song from any of them. It just means I have my own interests.

Maybe if you're young (20s, early 30s)?

I recognize 8/10 as well, but like you, can't name actual songs from most.

Same would have been true if I was tested in the mid-90s (HS and college). Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, Backstreet Boys - I know the names, but can't think of the names of songs. I'd test better on alt/grunge rock of the era - STP, Nirvana, REM, etc.

And I don't think I'm particularly lonely - I happily married, have a few office friends, and see normal friends regularly. I'm not as social as I was in my 20s, but I assume that's normal.

These artists are definitely popular, but I doubt they are the most popular. The list doesn't fully match up with the most streamed artists list on Spotify, for example.

I’m 4/10 on that one as far as name recognition. Similar to you, I can only could think of one song from lady Gaga. Eminem is the only one which multiple songs come to mind, not that I could name them.

I grew up on 90’s and early 2000’s college radio, and am now a Doom/psychedelic rock kind of guy, and spend a good amount of time and money curating what I love.

I am disconnected from pop culture. It has repeatedly failed to deliver what I enjoy, and typically comes bundled with advertisements so I have no reason to pay attention to it.

Charli XCX is a standard-issue pop singer. She's a brunette. She's probably best known for doing the singing bits on "Fancy", the only Iggy Azalea song you know (if you know any at all).

> Does that make me very disconnected with today's culture?

Just disconnected with pop culture. I only know 6 of the names on that list and can only name Brain Damage by Eminem off the top of my head. I don't know what Taylor Swift sounds like though I have probably heard a few of her songs in my day to day without noticing. Just don't worry about it and do what makes you happy.

I don’t listen to 8/10 of these musicians, but I’ve heard of all of them except for Karol G. So yeah; I’d say you are very disconnected.

Same result here, never heard about karol G and Charli XCX but to be fair, I find most modern pop music to be very manufactured and boring. People like Max Martin can create a lot of hits but it makes the music rather uninteresting.

Just listened to Brat from Charli XCX and yeah, not missing much.

I feel that when it comes to Music, being in sync with pop music is more of a generation thing.

On the other hand, I wouldn't describe myself as lonely... I'm not super social (I've worked remotely for 13 years because I don't particularly like working in an office) but I do meet up with friends 2 times a week (used to be more but with a kid at home, there's less time).

Something that's been talked about every so often is that there aren't representative (generational) pop icons for the past few generations (probably from millenials onwards).

One theory from Japan, that I still remember and think is most likely, is that the democratization of entertainment since the 80s and especially from the 90s onwards with the invention of the internet has eliminated the very concept of pop culture.

Back in ye olde days a person's choices for entertainment were fairly limited, basically a small regional selection. People in the same locale ended up consuming the same entertainment and thus gravitated towards forming similar tastes and directing their fervor on that small selection of entertainment.

Entire generations identify with icons of their time like Gary Cooper, Gregory Peck, Marilyn Monroe, Ingrid Bergman, Elvis Presley, and so on. Entire generations sang "the song of their people" so to speak.

Today, though? Everyone can access any entertainment they want from anytime anywhere. The entertainment consumed by one person is very likely completely different from that consumed by a person right next to him; entertainment has been democratized. There is no longer a "song of our people" because everyone has a "song of me", there are no longer generational icons because everyone has their own icon.

The intense political push from the Left to make any form of social cohesion and loyalty undesirable also hasn't helped. The dismantling and removal of tradition, religion, and nationalism/patriotism from society means there can't be a "song of the people" from outside of entertainment either.

So no, I don't think you're disconnected with today's culture. Rather, today's culture doesn't value social cohesion and unity as much as it does freedom and power. Everyone has their own icon and song, everyone is their own generation.

Indeed, I struggle to even imagine what "use unusual language when describing well-known celebrities" even means! Maybe like using "musician" rather than "artist" or some other combination?

edit: Ok, I've read through the paper, and still have no idea. Apparently the responses to questions were compared as semantic vectors using cosine similarity in Google’s Universal Sentence Encoder space. Or something lol.

Very unsurprising but perhaps still valid research that needs to be done to be known. A better conclusion might have been: increasing socialisation increases homogeneity of language use.

[dead]

well, it didn't say their descriptions were WRONG, just different. The insinuation is that highly social people were informed by what their peers think and say, so their descriptions will likely mirror other socially connected people. The lonely people would just have to come up with it on their own.

I know there's a tendency to dismiss groupthink as negative and wrong and bad, and for huge amounts of people that's true, but for small social groups it's often a sign that you've all become familiar with each other, experienced the same things and are just similar in general, and in terms of selecting for safety, these are all markers of who you will likely feel safest with.

there's a hypothesis that singing and instrument usage like drums came about as a way for a community to show cohesiveness and immediately find out who strangers are. By the time you've learned their songs you're not a stranger anymore, but if you can't sing or talk like they do, you're very likely a stranger to be wary of. Makes a lot of societal evolutionary sense.

I was a standup comedian in the 1980s and was occasionally asked why “my people” were so funny, and it’s odd because there are a lot of things that are funny about us, but not the real answer to this one. We had to be, for thousands of years, or we died. If we had humorless dumb ones (and we do, but not as many, again, because of what happened to them, as well as quite a number of our best) they didn’t do as well.

I was also a clinical psychologist for a few years, and could say more on this, but some other time.

Jewish humor, gay humor, autistic humor… they’re all more similar than they are different. You learn, from atypical experience, to see everything one degree off and you have a story that people will listen to and eventually they might even like you. You see things three degrees off and you shut up so no one else knows. You get six degrees off and even you don’t know, but everyone else does.

Lonely people are weird because there's no social feedback loop, a lot of teachings are "self-taught" (for example how not to be an asshole), and even in engineering there's a "different" way self-taught engineers think

For a lot people this lack of a feedback loop started as children. In the worst cases, where there's child hood abuse and neglect, any seeking out of positive feedbacks either goes unheard or punished

The feedback loop reinforces itself in the short-term because being lonely and staying in the "hell you know" is better than dealing with the social failure, which might "prove" you don't belong in society and it will never change

Breaking the negative feedback loop is the hardest thing to do especially being born into it

Lonely people are also weird because they are lonely (and don't get the calibration from human interaction).

> And also, remember when a researcher says "loneliness" they mean "self-reported loneliness," I know a lot of people with very little companionship who might insist they are a 0 out of 10 on the loneliness scale.

That seems reasonable. Lonliness is a subjective phenomenon. There are people who don't interact as much as other people but feel content about it and aren't lonely. There are people who are desperate for interaction and get a lot but who are never satisfied. I can't imagine any other way to measure this than by asking.

All of what you mentioned looks like a possible contributing factor, but this one stood out to me:

> Or perhaps people who are less lonely are generally more knowledgeable/well-informed about these individuals.

I'd go as far as saying, people who are less lonely are more interested in those individuals in the first place. Celebrities are social objects. There's nothing inherently interesting in life or personality of any specific celebrity - what makes them interesting is that other people know about them too, so discussing them is a way to bond with others, have fun, etc. Lonely people do less of that, so they have less of a motivation to care about celebrities in the first place.

Lonliness is also correlated with depression which i think would be pretty bad for creativity. Maybe there is a fine line.

You can hijack your longing for love and companionship sure.

Seems logical. If you're into medieval re-enactments, you'll have a much harder time connecting with people than being into the NFL. It'll be a blast once you find that group, but you're finding a needle in a haystack.

It's a bit why there's common advice (that I'm ambivalent on) in "if you're lonely, get a dog". Not just for the social factor, but because dogs are an almost universally loved pet and instant icebreaker for other pet owners or pet lovers. that first step to socialization is harder than ever.

only if you aren't keen to share them with your friends.

if you watch an obscure show or movie or read a rare book, most people will be eager to share it with their friends, and their friends will be eager to learn about it. It's not the preferences or experiences that make you lonely, it's whether you trust your friends enough to share them.

truly, nothing is more fun than finding a cool movie and then showing your pals, who then also love it. That's the best!

Exactly. To highlight: the point of social objects like celebrities is to bond over them with other people. Obviously, lonely people do less of that.

I agree with this interpretation. Plus, I don't think it generalizes that well. In my stomping grounds, there are three circles of trust where people tend to talk about different things:

- Outer circle: the weather, dead relatives (yes, dead relatives!) and "expensive vs cheap" but without actual figures.

- Middle circle: what to eat, where to travel.

- Inner intimacy circle (people who are okay sharing a bed): money with actual figures. But you may not discuss the salary.

Celebrities don't show up in any of the circles, because one needs a measure of lightheartedness and humor to deal with that topic and use it on gossip about somebody else... which is a combination not everybody can or want to manage...not sure if that's a good or a bad thing, but it is what it is.

I don't think the article says that, does it?

Oversocialization.

> Chronic loneliness is linked to mental health issues like depression and anxiety, as well as physical health problems, including weakened immunity, cardiovascular disease, and an increased risk of mortality. Lonely individuals tend to experience lower self-esteem, heightened sensitivity to social rejection, and difficulty forming or maintaining relationships. They may also perceive social interactions more negatively, creating a cycle that reinforces their isolation. In older adults, loneliness is particularly concerning, as it is strongly associated with cognitive decline and dementia. In children and adolescents, it can hinder social development and academic performance.

I think they are trying to learn more about it to see if there is something that can be done in cases where there are negative outcomes. Not where someone is alone and happy.