Many stay-at-home moms (including my mom) seemed to enjoy her visit. She and my mom talked a lot, sometimes for hours (I still can't figure out how she completed her job when she spent so much time with one person). They chatted about recent events, like the daughter of the fisherman gave birth, the great-grandpa of the liquor shop died of cancer, a newly opened restaurant in the nearest town sucked, and sometimes shared even personal struggles or family matters. It really helped a lot of people combat mental struggles caused by the isolation of being traditional stay-at-home wives in a super rural area. The only downside was anything you shared with her would be spread in the entire village before dawn.
(I mention this so more people can know the list exists, and hopefully email us more nominations)
Have you thought about sourcing these by looking at the most favorited comments per week?
It's a better service than FB or Instagram that depress because people only show their good sides there... As you said, she was an essential part of the community ;-)
Sadly it's not only that. Social networks are "half-duplex" where you most likely to broadcast or consume at a time. it's not a true dialog. it made FOMO a thing. and worse, it's not only used for showing good, But it's being used to make complicated world events into bite-size good/bad dividing humanity instead of embracing and considering the complexity.
Surprisingly enough, I just looked the scheme up for this comment, and it's still active:
- https://yakult.com.sg/yakult-lady-agent/
- https://sg.news.yahoo.com/memory-makers-singapores-first-yak...
The Yahoo article could help explain some of the economics behind it.
Typical markup in the USA is 100% from wholesaler to retail. Running brick and mortar is very expensive. So if Walgreens were selling this, the wholesale price would be $1.25. I think it reasonable to expect the Yakult Ladies are pulling in the same $1.25 per package that walgreens gets.
The key, I think, is "Most of them are self-employed". Its a gig economy idea. You have to eat. If you're walking home from the store anyway (or kids school or on the way home from work or whatever), you may as well deliver packages for $1.25 each on the way home. You're walking home anyway, you may as well make free money on the walk.
It also mentions that it was done to drive sales.
Edit: yep, appears Yakult has just kicked off an ad campaign putting Yakult Ladies front and center [0]
Maybe the solution should not be sought in trying to increase social connections but in eliminating our need for social contact. This dependence on other humans has always felt like a flaw to me.
Note that I'm not saying that human contact is bad, just that our pathological dependency on it is.
I think it's a totally legitimate thing to ponder and on most internet forums you'd just be ridiculed for it. OP even qualified it by saying they don't have anything against human connection per se.
> Every time I read an article about people trying to solve the 'loneliness epidemic' I can't help but wonder if we're not trying to solve the wrong problem.
But then I realized we differed on what the root problem/solution were.
What economic/social forces are making it so that the elderly get their emotional needs met through gig workers instead of their own families?
Another point the article doesn't mention is the emotional toll this likely has on the workers. Having once worked a role where I regularly helped the elderly and got to know the same individuals over some years, it was a constant churn of disappointment when they'd inevitably die.
you're reading the title wrong, they aren't "trying to solve the loneliness epidemic," they are trying to sell yogurt at a profit. In so doing, their sales force is ameliorating some of the loneliness their clients feel as a side effect. You could say that they are monetizing loneliness if that's the reason people are buying their products, for the visits and not for the yogurt.
Life is what you make of it, whether you’re a robot or a human.
wild take.
Hannah Arendt explicitly notes that the true aim of totalitarian ideologies is not merely to change political structures, but to achieve "the transformation of human nature itself". When regimes seek total domination over a population, human spontaneity and the unpredictable nature of our social relationships become the greatest obstacles.
To achieve total control, these systems attempt to fabricate a new kind of human species. Arendt observes that concentration camps functioned literally as "laboratories" to test these changes in human nature. The objective was to eliminate human spontaneity and transform the human personality into a mere "thing," reducing individuals to a predictable "bundle of reactions". Arendt compares the success of this psychological rewiring to Pavlov’s dog, noting that conditioning a creature to abandon its natural, spontaneous instincts creates a "perverted animal".
James C. Scott traces a similar impulse in "high-modernist" ideology, which champions the "mastery of nature (including human nature)" through the rational, scientific design of social order. This kind of extreme social engineering requires stripping people of their distinctive personalities, histories, and organic community ties, treating them instead as abstract, interchangeable "generic subjects".
When human beings are placed in environments designed to severely restrict their organic social interactions and enforce rigid functional control, they suffer. Such environments foster a kind of "institutional neurosis" characterized by apathy, withdrawal, and a loss of initiative.
Paulo Freire similarly observes that the drive to completely control people—to "in-animate" them and transform them from living beings into inanimate "things"—is the essence of oppression. He argues that attempting to turn men and women into "automatons" directly negates our fundamental "ontological vocation to be more fully human".
If we were to successfully "rewire" ourselves to no longer need others, we would be executing the very project that authoritarian regimes have historically attempted through terror and indoctrination.
Our "flawed" social dependency and spontaneous need for one another are exactly what guarantee our freedom. To engineer that vulnerability out of the human psyche would not solve the problem of loneliness; it would simply reduce us to isolated, predictable mechanisms, destroying our humanity in the process.
Either way, editing away the need for social connections from humans seems to be quite a long way from our current level of technology, so it's not really worth considering as something that can actually be done. There's a philosophical discussion worth having despite that though.
Just think of all the value we could add.
I think this need for social interaction is harmful. We did see this in action during the COVID pandemic. So many people who weren’t able to abide by a short lockdown. Lives were lost due to our pathological need for social interaction.
Imagine how many communicable deceases we could eliminate by simply having a 3 month lockdown every other year.
My 2 cents - mountains and nature and activities in them are always beautiful, as in it doesn't get boring or mundane, not for anybody I know. Working out on oneself, experiencing various adventures, backpacking around the world, sports, adrenaline/risky activities that make you feel alive, seeing cultures and history and food... those are done for oneself and they are absolutely 100% fulfilling that no career could ever deliver.
Saying above as one such person, and also father of 2 amazing kids (and a pretty decent wife to complement) whom I love more than anything. But I don't live for them despite doing various hard sacrifices for them, I live for me and do those things for me, to be happy, content, recharged, better father and husband and when looking back at my life being fine with various choices made.
But it's a good question. My answer is social contact sharpens our mind. Without it, we would be stupider. And God knows we're stupid enough as it is without degrading our intellectual faculties further.
At a basic level, loners will get hunted down by tribes because they are easy prey and because their behavior can be misconstrued or spun by grifters as nefarious because they are different.
I am one such person, and there are others. I consider it a personality strength, although of course it comes with side effects. Minority but not tiny.
This sadly is the default zeitgeist within Liberalism as a political philosophy - which is why elites across the world treat humans as cannon fodder. They'd sell them a "dream" and destroy them and communities they're part of in order to create cheap labourers and needy consumers.Once that has passed, they'll throw them under the bus.
Once our overlords get AI/Robots to work for them, we'll quickly see mass-eugenics (positive & negative) programs instituted across the world.
As Dugin et.al note, this is infact the central flaw in modernity - which was moderated occasionally by nationalism, fascism and communism - but ultimately all within the same broad loci.
By contrast, many humans can't even understand the thrust of an argument and so discussion is wasted on them. There's nothing more frustrating than making an argument of some meaning and having someone misunderstand it entirely. Avoiding that requires some degree of rhetorical skill and communication and a sufficiently receptive audience. I have no problem talking to my friends like this, but there is a time-subject-partner matching problem. I want to discuss Analects 13.18 now, and my friend who can give me context is putting his son to sleep[0]. So I talk to Opus 4.6 and DeepSeek about what I think it is and I get quite far in understanding why my (seemingly novel) interpretation is unlikely to be correct.
So machines are very useful in discussion and so on. However, I don't think they serve much of a purpose in assuaging loneliness. The reality of life is that it is most successful when it can organize into larger blocks: the cell, the organ, the body, the community, the state. And so I think our eusocial nature is strongly adaptive[1]. Perhaps with sufficiently advanced AI, a single person could exert sufficient power. Nothing in theory stopping that but I have other opposition to that (monocultures are non-adaptive, etc.). So removing our dependence on social connections will probably weaken us.
So given that that is the case, I think people over-prescribe solutions in a way that is razor-targeted to themselves[2]. As someone who is not lonely and quite socially fulfilled, I find that a lot of these prescriptions turn out to come from some other axioms which I feel are unnecessary. For instance, one trend is "why do they have to get their needs met from delivery man?" and I think that's silly. When I was a child, we kids "had a relationship with" or "had some of our needs met" by the school guard in that he was a civic ally of ours. He was usually opposed to our actions tactically but ultimately aligned. Our final exams in India are very important and one day one of my classmates, who was particularly scatterbrained, was late for one and he took him to the exam hall on his bike.
I don't think there's any reason to proscribe that social interactions should be within one's own immediate sphere. Our apartment building in San Francisco has social interactions that I think are normal in a civil society[3] - for the most part I interact there with strangers. Some I have helped or been helped by without ever having seen their faces. I think there is a joy I get from my direct family, and then my extended family and friends, and my communities, and my society, and as someone whose life is fairly joyful I'd say that looking around, (and with apologies to Tolstoy), "Happy people are all alike; each unhappy person is unhappy in their own way".
0: He did respond in the morning and it was very helpful. Turns out I misread the relationship Shen Zhuliang and Confucius had.
1: In fact, I'm of the opinion that pro-sociality is probably The Adaptive Trait. I recently picked up Darwin's Cathedral and am approximately 3 pages in and I already feel a kindred spirit behind that book.
2: Can we help it? Almost everyone has heard an expert or professor go "I believe that X is the most important thing that everyone should learn" and X always happens to be what they're studying - well obviously they believe that, otherwise they wouldn't be studying it.
3: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-10-09/Community
https://youtu.be/IiU3Nk16BLQ?t=664
I know my neck of the woods has a not-for-profit called Meals on Wheels that does something similar.
So these mobile supermarkets are as convenient as it gets.
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If you want healthy bacteria, eat some yoghurt.
These are all interesting to me. But of late, I've honed in on the challenge faced by those who are transitioning from one stage of life or circumstance to another. While working and raising a family, work-related activities such as Toastmasters and family-related ones like church or scouts or athletics, may drive participation in groups. But moving from that through a divorce or RIF or retirement may end previous activities and leave a person with no idea what to do next.
HN’s interest in this article is so “thing vs Japanese thing”
It does. These kind of small scale food delivery services exist both in charitable and commercial form across North America and Europe. I know several "Meals on Wheels" workers who are basically half-timing as social service workers.
This is the stereotypical weekly "bucolic Japanese neighborhood social life" story that does actually exist in every place.
So there is a US equivalent, but it would have been interesting to read about them too.
I thought it was well established that interacting with an actual human was generally preferred to whatever we have to use now.
The automation exists to save money on labour, not to make our lives more convenient
I’m not well travelled but, Canada just feels like home of course, and Italy didn’t feel strange in the slightest.
Japan was like being transported to a different world.
Guatemala was as well but, getting picked up by a bodyguard at the airport and driving past slums on the way to a gated community of mansions left a sour taste that still lingers.
> a network of women delivering probiotic milk drinks has become a vital source of routine, connection and care.
So, yoghurt deliveries will fix the loneliness problem in Japan? Seriously? Are the people at BBC drunk?
You only need to watch some youtube videos to realise that what BBC writes, is narrating things very oddly. Yoghurt deliveries will NOT fix the issue of isolated people. Japan's culture is also very unique, but this is still a somewhat more global issue; South Korea is in a somewhat comparable situation, for instance. A lot of this ties into work culture, too; in Japan even more than in South Korea.
My long term prediction is that we we'll be taking curator-like roles much more seriously due to automation, as having human in the loop is not only needed for debugging automation issues but maintaining healthy society loops as well.
This is not a new argument either. Since the inception of cities we know that connection is being lost in extreme efficiency. Ladies delivering yogurt is just trading efficiency for connection.
They don't eat yogurt or dairy in general.
They eat less dairy, but hardly none. I have heard people say that a scoop of ice cream or a glass of milk each day is not a problem, but more can be. Intolerance also seems to increase with age, so younger people can consume more dairy.
A 1975 study in Japan puts intolerance (unable to drink 200ml of milk comfortably) at 19% of the population. I would suspect that massive exposure over the past 50 years has lowered that percentage significantly.
Most yogurt cultures reduces lactose content of the milk base during fermentation. Some cultures like the one Yakult uses supports increased lactose digestion in humans. At the same time lactose intolerance is not binary but a spectrum.
Case in video: Chinese and milk tea
Lactose intolerance is not absolute.
