> Is it really a problem that families aren’t together?

if you care about the epidemic of loneliness, the negative medical consequences of social isolation, and the demographic sustainability of developed countries, yes.

Research shows having a roommate is enough to combat feelings of loneliness.

Marriage in and of itself isn’t shown to automatically increase happiness; most folks reported having maintained their baseline mood after the wedding

Maybe this is just old definitions needing to be updated, but “family” in the traditional mom-dad-kids all visit grandma and the like, isn’t essential to the species.

Socializing is, but not the traditional structures

>Is it really a problem that families aren’t together?

Apparently yes. But it's one of those issues modern culture has blinders on.

http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/scientists-think-loneliness-is-...

https://hbr.org/cover-story/2017/09/work-and-the-loneliness-...

http://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-42031799/why-an-e...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/01/29/17...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/26/us/opioid-crisis-public-h...

https://www.amazon.com/Haven-Heartless-World-Norton-Paperbac...

Random, mostly substance-free articles is hardly convincing evidence that this is a problem. Notably, none of the crappy articles mention whether this "problem" is even new.

Blinders help even less. And whether the problem is "new" or a few decades old is really irrelevant.

There's some trend to have huge issues, felt and experienced by tens of millions, studied by tons of different groups, admitted by experts, pointed at by tons of different statistics, etc, and people wanting to have some definitive "this is the final 100% statistical proof with n confidence" on it, or else it doesn't exist.

It's more lalala hands in the ears denial than actual science. Same thing for the environmental change deniers.

See the difference there is that you don't need shallow feel-bad articles about climate change. There's hard science there; it's incontrovertible.

In contrast, neurotically wringing our figurative hands about imagined problems like the link between vaccines and autism, the link between video games and school shootings, or disintegration of traditional values in modern times; all without hard science backing it up; will continue to fail to convince all but the most blinded.

And whether the problem is "new" or a few decades old is really irrelevant.

Why should we think it's not tens of thousands of years old?

>Why should we think it's not tens of thousands of years old?

Because we weren't born yesterday, and we now how it was in the 80s and 70s, compared to the 60s and 50s and 40s...

https://goo.gl/images/JBJk2D

You have to be joking. Rates of divorce? Would it even have been possible to pick an issue with more confounding factors?