Privacy is a big part of comfort.

Many if not most of us can now choose historically unprecedented levels of comfort and privacy - not *needing* to see anyone on any given day.

Any social interaction is a luxury.

Isolation is a revealed preference, but it’s also something that could not be arranged in ancestral environments.

The luxury of alone time was rare and precious, and it makes sense that it’s baked into us as a preference, because of its low energy requirements.

But like our preference for sweets, it was reined in by the simple fact that there was no refined sugar or ubiquitous honey available.

It made sense to have the calories when you could get them, like it made sense to have the alone time - when you could get it.

Now being social moved from the default setting to being optional, and guess what, we’re not that good at it.

Without being forced to be together, initiating socialization in a alone-by-default setting is awkward, stunted. And it’s getting harder by the day.

Social skills are like language, you may have an intuition for the basics, but after that, repetition and practice do the rest.

There is also a sense in which a chosen interaction has inherently less social friction than a serendipitous one. And -> less practice value.

Don’t know what the solution is, but to me, loneliness is a problem much like obesity, where people are presented with the path of least resistance.

The future must contain paths of conscious resistance if we want to make it.