regarding phone calls: in my friend group about 75% of the time we will call each other to make plans. We are all between 19 - 21 years old. It is so much easier to give someone a call, see whats going on, see if they want to do something and then go hang out. In the time where we organize plans by text, it will take at least 30 minutes, if not an hour as opposed to two 30-60 second phone calls.

I think it's interesting to consider is how guys deployed in the military make friends. Yeah, or the kids in military families - "Army Brats." I have a very good friend who's Dad worked as a mining engineer - they lived on a project for maybe one year and then moved on to the next project. He talks about starting up friendships, but, for obvious reasons, he didn't maintain them over time. Of course he did have a lot of brothers and sisters, so maybe that figures into the equation. Interesting topic.

There is a term for what you described as people not feeling like their work is meaningful (even though it sure is, if there was no necessity, it wouldn't exist) and lacking purpose due to todays highy specialised society and labour structure. It's called organic solidarity and was introduced in Emile Durkheim's (one of the fathers of sociology) work The Division of Labour. And if you somehow find yourself wishing you knew more about his ideas, it's worth researching his concept regarding what he calls "anomie" too, it gives a lot of insight into how society restricts out desires to make them practically achievable.

Fresh haircut guys haha

Martin your hair looks great!

Great points for a deep dive into possible causes and solutions for loneliness within our generation. Agree with Thomas' theory of people feeling like they're not needed and lacking meaning in their lives as insight into increasing rates of depression and social isolation. Social media and a growing dependency on technology is also playing a role as well. Social media has "connected" us but not really. And in mostly shallow ways on the big networks.... we might even reaching what economists call the Law of Diminishing Returns for social media usage. Martin made an important point also of human beings not being adapted to tech that we've invented for ourselves yet. Smartphones and social media aren't eviI per se but it's making many feeling like they're "missing out" (FOMO) and need to chase after things & goals, which are sadly sometimes turn out to be empty goals, thinking it will give them some sort of meaning instead of finding or making meaning in their lives (i.e. social connections & close relationships) BTW, great haircuts guys! Martin's new hairstyle looks amazing

This was an interesting podcast. My 2 cents, shaped as a novel: 1. I really believe that social media / interactions on Internet can't replace real life interaction. I read pretty often than seeing people in reality will engage your brain in different ways, and it makes sens: you will have a body language, the ton of the voice, a lot of things which is much more than "raw language communication", if it makes sens. But here the thing: we don't really realize it. When we speak with people, speaking means putting sens in a bunch of words to be understandable. We are way less conscious about everything else which makes a real life conversation. That's why we think, naively, than communicating on Internet is very similar, even if it's not. Social Media doesn't help either, and, I'm sorry, your show is a great example: the setup is meant to be a conversation between friends: Thomas, Martin and me, the viewer. Even if I can't even speak, I have the illusion I have a social interaction. Don't take it wrongly: I like this show, but everybody should be aware that Internet doesn't have the depth of a real social interaction. 2. Depression is a complex subject, of course, but here's my catch: human civilization were made because of shared belief about a world we didn't understand. Because the universe is hostile, we had to get together and create strong belief, dogma, ceremony, to bound ourselves together very strongly. Nowadays, because we did a lot of scientific / technological discoveries, we think that we are the best of the species on Earth and we know everything about our immediate environment. The universe is not that hostile anymore for somebody who works and can eat correctly. We don't need these system of belief as strongly as before to explain the thunder, the earthquake and the wind. Add the fact that our entire society is turned to the outside of our internal world into materialism (for a lot of reasons) and totally blind to the fact that money can be an addiction, and you end up with less strong social bound, an impression that there is nothing outside of our discovery (the belief there is nothing after death won't push us to bound together because... we basically explain death in a weird way, with this "nothing" we can't really imagine), an impression that we are lost in the universe, that what we do don't matter, that only purchasing more money, more goods will bring something everybody call happiness without defining it for ourselves. In short, we are disconnected from any strong personal philosophy, we don't share it with anybody anymore because we don't have it at the first place, we lack values and goals because we believe strongly in the "nothing" except what we already explains, and we don't need other humans anymore to reassure us and to survive... a weird time we are living in. Oh, and speaking about money addiction, I wrote all of that just before I saw the "money addiction" part of this video. Damn, I should have wait till the end before writing all of that. I'm confused now, do we really speak all together? The real problem to me is not that money will slow down, it's that we will die. We try to hide it so strongly, we don't even think about it anymore. We don't know when we will die, and when we will, we won't take our money anywhere. We will think about our life and all this time wasted purchasing... some wind. To be clear, I have the same problem, but I strongly belief that being more aware of death is a real changer. I generalize a lot here, but it's my very chaotically explained impression.

nice haircut martin

I understand the listeners' perspectives on potentially distancing friends who aren't generally "productive" or "ambitious". It's hard to have a mutually beneficial friendship when one of you is doing so much, and the other is content with life as is, but it can be so rewarding and balancing all the same. If you match some of your core values, friendships tend to be rewarding regardless in the difference in life circumstance, especially since less "productive" friends tend to actually have time to hang out. Also, I'm interested in language! Although it can be cool talking to friends who have hobbies you aren't terribly interested in, bc you end up learning something new and getting closer to the other person by listening to them. Great podcast guys!

Change your routine in life and try things that take you out of a comfort zone.... face that fear and loneliness goes away

nice hair martin

I have friends that text me to ask if they can call me. If I'm busy - it'll go to voice mail.

Sounds like white sheep leather is were you should go for a Captain America cosplay.

I think that you don’t have to change your beard that much if you cosplay as the tony stark in civil war.