Personal solutions to systemic problems are not solutions. Yours is great advice for the few people able to take it to heart, find the motivation, and succeed, but you cannot solve societal problems at any kind of scale this way.
Just like you aren’t in traffic, you are traffic, you aren’t part of the society, you are society.
Every idea like “let’s have icecream socials at..” started as one person’s pipe dream which they then acted on and executed. No one is coming to rescue us. There’s no secret hand guiding humankind.
You definitely can’t solve loneliness for society but you can solve loneliness for your immediate circle by organising activities and that’s already a huge improvement.
In contrast, sitting back and saying this needs to be solved at a higher level does nothing at all.
the parent's comment was what I have been thinking about though... The advice to not be the traffic is kind of just like saying "just try harder"...
I am thinking of a chain of causality like:
People do not plan things, or they flake on events because they're tired. Theyre tired because theyre working too many hours and are obese. They work/obese because because they consume too much. They consume too much because we're a spiritually empty society. (Just to put up an initial draft hypothesis).
I'm thinking if we can solve some of the nodes closer to the root we can have a higher impact than just burning ourselves out trying to deal with the leaf nodes.
I was thinking consume more like conspicuous consumption for clout. There's been lifestyle inflation, i believe due to social media, compared to times when society was more social. I'm running of general feelings here though, not specific datasets.
Somethings that come to mind: Expensive smart phones, fast fashion clothing spend, travel, tattoos, car feature creep leading to price increases and more loans taken, sq foot per person in housing, Food as an identity statement (more foreign/imported/, more protein are two trends I believe are true).
