“In the ten short years between 1985 and 1994”17 alone, he wrote, “active involvement in community organizations … fell by 45 percent.” In just a decade—the years of my teens, when I was becoming depressed—across the Western world, we stopped banding together at a massive rate, and found ourselves shut away in our own homes instead. We dropped out of community and turned inward, Robert explained when I spoke with him. These trends have been happening since the 1930s, but they hugely accelerated during my lifetime.
