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I mean we have suicide statistics.

People are literally killing themselves.

Edit: I reached comment limit, but I want to respond to the "correlation/causation" response:

I get what you are saying from pure statistics, but the basic premise is that "loneliness" ... don't get me started on how you define that aside from the usual bullshit social sciences survey crap ... isn't a problem.

But is it a stretch to take this sentence:

"modern life, struggles with meaning, increased competition, mental health issues, stubbornness against seeking help, access to deadly weapons/knowledge"

isn't all basically saying "loneliness"?

And by people killing themselves, I mean men, because also this article is possibly/probably doing the almost-all-female psychology male blindness thing.

Humans are social creatures and need social interaction and connection, but men aren't social connection developers, especially in the Land of the Stoic Cowboy.

Loneliness the concept is IMO deeply semantically intertwined with loss of meaning, economic disenfranchisement, maintenance of sanity, feeling trust in society to get help, paranoia/clinging to weapons for surrogate psychological defense.

The scary thing is that the suicide rate increase in old men has basically stabilized, instead suicide growth is in YOUNG MEN, which are critical to the demographic / GDP / economic performance of the US, especially if we are entering a period of deglobalization and increased nearshore manufacturing.

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somesortofthing 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Depends on the time horizon you choose. If you look at US stats, we're only 1.5 suicides per 100000 people above a previous post-WWII peak in the early 80s. Suicide rates in the first half of the 20th century were downright apocalyptic by modern standards, sometimes reaching 22 per 100000 before sharply declining post-WWII. If you want to look outside the US, Japan used to(~2000-~2010) hover at ~20 suicides per 100000, compared to our current all-time high of 14.

The increase is significant, but I wouldn't call it definitive proof of an urgent crisis.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/suicide

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/t...

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benreesman 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If you roll in deaths from substance abuse (particularly opioids) and other “deaths of despair” the figures are a bit more striking. Zoom in on one a few gigantic demographic blocks and they become more striking still.

One would hope that people are feeling less desperate today than a period of time that includes two world wars and a Great Depression, that’s a really low bar for what many claim is a great time to be alive.

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RGamma 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Clear-cut suicide is incredibly difficult to pull off psychologically and represents the tip of the iceberg. Look at depression, addiction, overdose, homelessness, extremism.

It's supposedly the greatest time to be alive (as opposed to war times), but an increasing proportion of people are voting against that with their lives. And the damage of that accrues in those left behind, in families and communities.

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AnimalMuppet 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't think "all-time" means what you think it means...

	▲	somesortofthing 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's fair. It's more of a post-WWII peak. I've edited the post.

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thephyber 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Correlation, not causation. The logic you used is the reason the SpuriousCorrelations website exists.

Palo Alto (adjacent to Sanford University) was host to clusters of suicides that appeared epidemiological and were studied by national researchers. [1] The pressures of modern life, struggles with meaning, increased competition, mental health issues, stubbornness against seeking help, access to deadly weapons/knowledge, etc. are all confounding issues.

[1] https://stanforddaily.com/2016/07/21/cdc-releases-preliminar...

	▲	pessimizer 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Correlation, not causation. The logic you used is the reason the SpuriousCorrelations website exists. To declare that a correlation is spurious with no evidence is far worse than saying that a correlation might indicate a relationship. Even saying something is a confounding issue implies there's a relationship to be confounded (not that Palo Alto is typical of anywhere.) And "the pressures of modern life," "struggles with meaning," generic "mental health issues," and "stubbornness against seeking help?" Are those supposed to be unrelated to loneliness, too? Is access to "deadly knowledge" a real or new problem?