However, dealing with people is difficult and inconvenient, so when you have money you decide to leave your family and isolate yourself from other people's problems as much as possible. You perhaps gain more peace, privacy and free time, but it's harder to notice what you're losing.
I'm not going to dredge up the numbers now, but in the 60s in America, I think it's probably safe to say a lot more siblings lived in the same room, a lot more people lived in small independent farms working alongside many family members, etc. etc. People were closer together because they had to be. People in cities didn't have to be quite so adjacent, but perhaps they were closer because it was normal in society to be closer.
Speculation on my part, but it probably wouldn't be hard to find those numbers and back up the argument...
I know very wealthy people that keep very closed ties to their families and friends. It's true that finding real friends gets harder, but the isolation tends to be caused by a deeper cultural norm.
E.g. in Latin America the family is given a much higher importance than in the States or Europe. It is not rare to see young adults living with their parents even if they can easily afford a place of their own. Even those that live on their own tend to meet their families in a regular basis.
In the end it's all about prioritizing what is important in your life and in every society there seems to be a common list shared by it's inhabitants, if you end up in a place that values more independence than relations, maybe its time to start swimming against the current in that regard.
That is, cultural norms affect people, but basic necessity also affect cultural norms. Just like your values inform what you do, but what you do also changes your values.
You're right in that we must make greater efforts to swim against the current, but so many of us must in adulthood develop tools to foster community and connection. That's hard to do, especially when you're vulnerable, there's trial-and-error involved and you don't really have a good model for what you "should" be doing.
It may be as you say that in the past interactions were fostered mainly as a side product of the necessity to cooperate and interact with others. However as we develop and become for independent thanks to prosperity and technology we must not get rid of interaction for they are an end in itself.
The issue or even taboo is the lack of importance that is given to the interactions with others just for its own sake. Maybe we will move on from this need and become more self reliant, however in the short term it seems that we are having a hard time adapting, especially with the increase of suicides and drug use in younger generations. -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21650584
I'm brazilian. I have a sister who is married to an american, and they live in the U.S. He always jokes how my sister talks to our mother in Brazil 10x more than he talks to his, yet his mother lives 15 minutes away.
This is purely anecdotal evidence for your point but I'll mention it anyways.
When I was growing up, I lived on a dead end street, in a blue collar part of town. The houses were so close together, as a kid I could almost straddle between them and touch both houses. I knew every kid and their parents names, could recite every address on my block. The kids were constantly out playing sports games of all kinds, in every season. We made up games, went to the park and played baseball together. We had summer block parties and biked to the local pool to swim and chase girls. Everybody knew everybody else. We all helped each other out when things got tight. The few elderly people we had in our neighborhood got their driveways and sidewalks shoveled by us younger kids. We collected firewood for their fireplaces, we kept watch on their houses.My extended family all lived within a few blocks so I was always close with my cousins as well. I look back now and feel like it was pure Americana. When you think of the American Dream, this was the textbook definition of it.
Then in 1996, everything changed. My dad landed a new job, was suddenly making way more money than he used to. My sister went off to college and we moved to the other "wealthier" side of town. Bigger house, pool in the backyard, in a sea of larger homes. I was an only child, started high school and you know what? I didn't know anybody in my neighborhood. To this day, I couldn't tell you the names of the people who lived on either side of our house. No more sports in the streets, no more BMX racing down at the trails at the park by my house. No more hanging with the kids who would just congregate in their yards until we had enough kids to do something fun. After that first year, I struggled to make friends and for the first time in some 17 seventeen years, I actually felt alone and isolated. It lasted for at least another year when I was a junior in HS, I finally found some friends who like to skateboard, snowboard, mountain bike and play sports like I did and things got better.
But I agree, when we were living in a blue collar town? Everything felt close and you had a tight knit community. When we moved? I just felt alone and isolated. My neighbors treated us the same way. They stayed in their house and we stayed in ours. Doing better off financially was good, but I lost a lot on the way.
Also a simpler example of your above point, Christmas gifts: they are helpful gestures of goodwill when you're broke and strapped for necessities, but sort of meaningless tokens of ritual when everyone has everything they need already.
I would agree given a lot of the European communities are smaller in size (think "villages" instead of "cities") so there are in closer proximity and share more resources. They often share more bloodlines and have genealogical ties many generations deeper. My father came from Norway and his family is like 15 generations deep. Here in the US? His family ties are only three or four generations deep.
Is that real? Even today instead of 150 years ago? What's the regional variation on that?
Also, my church has food distribution channels and warehouses so nobody is going hungry.
These anecdotes also ignore numerous other parameters. For example, households are much smaller today than before. So looking at "median household income" understates increases in income for the middle. Without adjusting for decreased household size, inflation-adjusted household income went up 16% from 1970-2010. Adjusting for household size, it went up 34%.
Likewise, people are more likely to be single parents, etc., today, which impacts economic prosperity. From 1971 to 2011, married people with a spouse present did well: https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2.... The percentage of such adults who are low income stayed flat at about 21-22%. But the percentage that qualify as upper income grew from 14% to 25%. For those who have never been married, the opposite happened. Low income rates went from 22% to 34%, and upper income rates stayed flat at 16-18%.
Here's probably a more interesting statistic. Women's labor force participation rate hit current levels around 1990-1995, when I was a kid. Since then, the median inflation-adjusted income for a married couple with two people working has increased more than 20%, from under $90,000 to over $110,000: https://fee.org/media/30584/census3.png?width=600&height=409....
And thus studies find societies with less inequality are generally happier : ).
> "... in the short term, other things being equal, more diversity in a community is associated with less trust both among and within ethnic groups. Putnam describes people of all races, sex, socioeconomic statuses, and ages as "hunkering down", avoiding engagement with their local community as diversity increases. Although limited to American data, his findings run counter the contact hypothesis which proposes that distrust declines as members of different ethnic groups interact, and conflict theory which suggests that while distrust among ethnic groups rises with diversity, distrust within ethnic groups should decrease. Putnam found that even when controlling for income inequality and crime rates, two factors which conflict theory states should be prime causal factors in declining inter-ethnic group trust, more diversity is still associated with less communal trust. Further, he found that low communal trust is associated with the same consequences as low social capital. Putnam says, however, that "in the long run immigration and diversity are likely to have important cultural, economic, fiscal, and developmental benefits."
It's no secret that the racial demographics in the US have seen significant change over the last generation. According to his research, this transformative time will lead to exactly what you're describing, but he conjectures that it will be worth it in the long run.
Not very appealing to the current zeitgeist, or to Putnam himself, but it's the continuation of the 'Bowling Alone' research you mentioned.
> "Putnam denied allegations he was arguing against diversity in society and contended that his paper had been "twisted" to make a case against race-conscious admissions to universities. He asserted that his "extensive research and experience confirm the substantial benefits of diversity, including racial and ethnic diversity, to our society."
I could imagine diversity of religion with no economic incentives to standardise (as would be caused by general poverty) would lead to an element of fracturing in the community. Even without migration, rising trends towards atheism might have the same effect over the long term. It isn't obvious what is symptom and cause in all this though.
Edit: doing a quick look around, this article using the American Time Use Survey shows a small increase in socialization for people who live in cities, but only a couple of minutes a day. https://www.citylab.com/life/2019/10/american-time-use-surve...
Could there have been an upwards blip in civic participation caused by, say, the shared experience of WW2, with everything since then representing a reversion to ordinary behaviour?
The millennials in my cohort, I imagine across the country, were raised by their schooling to be race and culture blind, in a well meaning attempt to encourage cohesiveness. This education did not erase the actual differences that drive different cultures apart, it only made most of us blind to them, which I think makes it more difficult to overcome subtle cultural barriers because it takes time for, especially "suburban white kids", to be aware of and mitigate the soft social friction that comes from cultural clash.
Even the simple decline in people who identify their neighbour as a friend can be explained by a lack of women living and socializing in the neighbourhood during the daytime. The increased use of paid childcare would similarly reduce the amount of children living and playing in the neighbourhood during the day.
Overall, this would contribute to the feeling that the suburbs are ghost towns during the day, and families arriving home from school/work would rush inside to eat dinner before chauffeuring the kids to all of their extracurriculars.
Maybe. But I'll counter with my own anecdote. I raised my daughter as a single working dad. No mother in the home at all. And yet, I got in plenty of volunteering and socializing anyway.
My dad spent most of his time on the road, as a travelling salesman. I did spend more time with him as life went on, however. My dad never volunteered though, and all of his social connections were former high school friends that he saw once or twice a year.
My dad did a heroic job, too. I’ll always be grateful for him raising me. I still wish I had had a mom at home though, like most of my friends did.
However, when you shift the majority of connections to those made through the workplace, you end up with just a bunch of connections running roughly parallel to each other. Not so much a fabric as a pile of string.
Probably many flaws to this analogy, but that is basically the idea of "third places". That you need somewhere where people interact based on something different from what they do for a living or who their direct family members are.
A lot of the mothers were. Actually we only had 6 teachers, for 6 classes/grades. No other personel ( one of the teachers was the 'head' ).
I’m not saying we need to move backwards. But we do need to find a new way forward. Perhaps the concept of full time work needs to change the most.
This. We're at a point where many jobs could be done in 15-20 hours a week, but we require everyone to punch in and out like it's a factory.
I live in flyover country, and work in higher education. I have exempt staff. Some weeks they have 2 hours worth of work, some weeks they have 70. But, because the cultural norm is that you can't be productive unless you're filling seats from 8-5, they waste 38 hours some weeks, and don't meet the requirements of the extra 30 others.
It's just outrageous, and I don't understand it. This is 2020. It's the real future now. Let's grow up as a society.
I'm questioning if we're paid according to how productive we are. The more steps there are between you and revenue the less likely this seems to be true.
Because you aren't really paid based on hard results in large companies, the 8 hours becomes more about posturing than actually delivering the results.
I'm open to other ideas. I desperately want to work 20 hours a week instead of 40. I'm trying to better understand why we're stuck at 40.
Public healthcare (as a baseline for any luxury private care to beat).
Public vacation / family leave (pooling the liability, seniority, and policies in to a common system).
In this way the funding for these benefits becomes taxes and their distribution disconnected from the employment at any particular business, as well as from the business paying any particular employee.
I'm not affiliated but I'd love to see more postings here. https://30hourjobs.com/
I think others would echo that sentiment.
The trend of declining participation in religious organizations, civic organizations (like the League of Women Voters), fraternal societies (like the Elks or Masons), volunteer associations, labor unions, and sports leagues has been happening since at least the 1970s. Surveys of Americans have found a consistent decline in the number of self-reported close friends since as far back as the 1980s. Same for those who reported being friends with their neighbors. Indicators of social capital like the percent of people who donate blood have been falling since the 1970s.
The point is increasing levels of isolation and misanthropy is a manifestation of a broader trend towards declining social capital. And that trend has been ongoing for probably 50 years. Social media may have accelerated it, but I don't think it would have anywhere near the same impact if Facebook was introduced to the American society of 1960.