Often when I hear about the older generation of my family, who immigrated and lived in Brooklyn for years before moving to the "burbs", I think they had good intentions but didn't do any favors for the subsequent generations.
My parents grew up and stones throw away from grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins - a lot even lived in multi family, multi generational homes. When my mom had kids she had a support system that included people from 3 different generations, all willing to lend a hand. Their social lives revolved around interacting with all different family members, and get together were happening almost daily just because of the inherent (lack of) distance between them all.
Now, we all live in the burbs, with long distances between each other. The grandparents see the kids a few times a year and we all have to make concrete plans to have get togethers. Interacting with most extended family is reserved for weddings or funerals and the lack of true support systems takes it toll on all of us.
I could possibly be romanticizing the past, but when compared to the current lifestyle, I truly believe it wasn't for the best.
Most everyone I knew growing up doesn't live where we grew up anymore. They're scattered everywhere. Much of my family that used to live there has moved on too.
I was one of the last to officially leave (around 25) and there wasn't much left in my "hometown" for me when I left, because few people I knew were still nearby anyway.
To be clear, I'm not talking about rural Kansas. That's a story from suburban New Jersey, about an hour outside of NYC.
Another good example is programming side projects. How many people are looking to make money on their side project? Rather then just help people? Or how many people only have side projects because they feel like they have to in order to stay competitive in the job market? Probably the vast majority.
We've developed a culture where we fetishize productivity and always making money. People now feel guilty if they're not busy or productive all the time.
People have forgotten the quality of Slack:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius#Conspi...
Yes big cities can be alienating. That's why I opted out.
Fighting loneliness requires active effort. You are not going to care one bit if you bought that extra widget or got an extra story in on your sprint later in life. Put time into what matters: people.
It's such a hack premise, but this actually happened to me - my mother used to work in a nursing home, and required all of her kids to volunteer there when they were old enough (12 to 21 if you still lived at home). My job, as the rambunctious ADHD youth was to give 'wheelchair rides'. Which was where I would push the elderly around the grounds looking at trees and what-not, and just generally being an audience while they talked.
The one thing that literally everyone I gave a ride to, when the topic inevitably turned to death (it always did, old people are so straight up about it) - the absolute only topic that everyone hit on was that they regretted doing 'x' instead of spending time with 'person y'.
I gave wheelchair rides to poor people - who regretted not spending more time with their kids because they were busy working or whatever.
I gave wheelchair rides to rich people - who regretted not spending more time with their kids because they were busy working or whatever.
And that made me into the 'I will work only 40 if that's what is required of me' beast that I am today. In my area of the US, we have a very 1950's 'work until you can't anymore' sort of mentality; the kind where work defines you.
I have left several positions in my career because they refused to understand that my time at home with family and friends is more important than my time at work, and that my time is so much more important to me than any financial incentive they could offer past my base salary.
(Some went to another country, we haven't heard much of them - distance can still be a barrier and culture in Western Europe is different.)
Nearly any attempt paint American Culture with broad strokes is going to fail.. but using absolute terms like you're doing here A) is wildly inaccurate, and B) negatively portrays a pretty neutral personal ideology. I value individualism for the same reasons I devalue conformity -- I generally want to be left to my own devices to do pretty much whatever I want.
This trope about detrementally fetishizing rugged individualism, which is unbelievably common and doesn't seem to ever be subject to a skeptical eye, is a subtle dig at people who want what I want: To be left alone and to be free.
Also nobody does it all alone, with the possible exception of some rare frontiersman who chops down trees and builds his own house in some wilderness. People want to be left alone, but still use the benefits of society that suit them. People aren't as independent as they imagine but want to feel as such. I live amongst people who happily use services and comforts and infrastructure, but take every opportunity to attack the communal systems that create them as evil and have some idea it should be hundreds of millions of individuals doing what they want how they want.
I seriously doubt it.
I think all modern rich cultures have this. Sweden certainly does. As everyone gets rich enough to get your own house, you end up lonely, as you're no longer naturally interacting with others, since you don't need to.
It can be even problematic to stay in the same city, especially if it's a small city with few opportunities. People tend to migrate for education... And stay where they left.
America is also _big_, which I think also contributes here. It isn't unusual for family members to move away within America but be far enough that frequent face-to-face interaction isn't possible.
Also, isn't loneliness also a major issue in other cultures, like Scandinavian or Japanese cultures?
Andrew Yang has even made that part of his policy platform.
If someone is interested in doing something, they find a way. The trick is to find the people that are actually interested in being part of your life.
https://edition-m.cnn.com/2016/05/24/health/cry-it-out-sleep...
Cities are also atomized, but not to this extent. They're vibrant, booming, the schools are fine/good, and in my opinion, far worth the cut to house size.
I think not finding things in common with young people isn't abnormal. My childhood was miserable partly BECAUSE of the sameness of it all. I find the suburban vanilla Stepford ways soul-killing. I had no exposure to culture. The internet didn't exist yet. I was ignorant and brainwashed in many ways. I felt out of place and like I was a freak because I didn't believe what I was told was "correct". The city was "bad" and "city folk" were "bad". The family and people in those places still have the same narrow beliefs and I am still "wrong". The people I know that grew up in multicultural cities had so much richer experiences and opportunities to grow and explore their beliefs and ideas without their parents ideologies infecting them as much.
One of the things I find ironic about "experience seeking" is how often people go to places like India or China to have "rich experiences." But people from those places generally would relate much more easily to people like your parents. Circling back to the topic at hand--people in my home country of Bangladesh, where there is a rigid social order and strict indoctrination of children, may suffer from many things, but loneliness is not one of them.
Again, I can't help but notice the irony of your assertion. What is the virtue in not being xenophobic against Bangladeshis, if you're going to condemn the way they structure their communities and raise their children?
I’m from rural East Texas and would agree with that statement 100%.
This probably sounds like a throwaway comment, but it's not; there are big cities that are more friendly and less friendly to kids. An advantage of places like Chicago is that the trendy areas are shared between people with families and single people, where in New York the family-friendly neighborhoods are specialized, like Park Slope.
Personally, I find cities to be excessively busy and annoying, full of folks I generally don't want to be around socially. But I'm an introvert, who enjoys being away from the crowds. I personally find suburbs to be a bit too crowded, if I'm honest.
I don't need a big house - I just need big personal space; I prefer my small 1000sq ft house, but I wish it was in the middle of a few acres.
I’m finding modern life requires tribal flexibility
I grew up in a suburb and it was not at all isolating. We had close communities and nearby family. I was friends with kids on my block and had freedom to explore and be independent. I would say technology is what is driving people to isolation.
Edit:
For reference, this [1] was the "big city" to me growing up.
I do not think an average person would be able to live like this. It takes a certain type of driven, focused personality who can dive into their work or hobbies and be happy with their head below water for a while without seeing anyone. I suspect Aristotle and Nietzsche both had these qualities.
American life is atomized and consistently getting more so. For anyone who sits around and thinks about why people are the way they are here I highly encourage you to consider that people are alone. Alone in life, alone at their apartment, alone when they struggle, alone when they die. It's to the point where we regard married couples that live a 20 minute drive from anything as not being alone when they really are.
Most adults I know have a relationship with their immediate family that I would regard as acquaintanceship.
Part of this is culture (Americans fetishize a sort of "rugged individualism" where you alone can solve every problem you're faced with or else it's not a real problem) and part of it is civil engineering. You need a car to live nearly everywhere, there's almost no public transit infrastructure, etc.
EDIT: Since this is popular I wanna surface something that people have been saying: it definitely doesn't require being far away physically from others to feel alone. I live in Manhattan and big cities can be extremely alienating depending on the person.