When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s

by John Ganz

Other factors were recognized as well. The author Louise Bernikow traveled across the United States and interviewed three hundred people to write Alone in America: The Search for Companionship. Speaking to U.S. News and World Report in 1986, she painted a grievous picture of the country, a nation of loners, desiring connections but unable to find them. “Loneliness permeates the culture. Look at the ads. New York Telephone says: ‘Don’t be lonely, pick up the phone.’ AT&T’s recent ad campaign urged people to ‘reach out and touch someone.’” Bernikow identified “large social, economic changes behind the spread of loneliness: the decline of the social movements of the 1960s, the ease of divorce, the end of lifetime employment with one company and the rise of mergers and acquisitions and layoffs.” A decline in values and the new economic principles of the ’80s boom seemed to be equally to blame: “American life has become privatized. People are wrapped up in selfish, individual pursuits of material goods. We’re not often encouraged to value people.”