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America
We’ve become accustomed to instantaneous answers and moment-to-moment connectedness. But the digital revolution that is making it possible was unthinkable just fifty years ago.
We’re the richest, most comfortable, most connected people in human history. And yet . . . In the midst of extraordinary prosperity, we’re also living through a crisis. Our communities are collapsing, and people are feeling more isolated, adrift, and purposeless than ever before.
Two years ago, 63,632 people died of overdoses. That’s 11,000 more than the previous year, and it’s more than the number of Americans killed during the entire twenty-year Vietnam War. It’s almost twice the number killed in automobile accidents annually, which had been the leading American killer for decades. In 2016, there were 45,000 suicides, a thirty-year high—and the sobering climb shows no signs of abating: the percentage of young people hospitalized for suicidal thoughts and actions has doubled over the past decade.
We’re killing ourselves, both on purpose and accidentally. These aren’t deaths from famine, or poverty, or war. We’re literally dying of despair.
data about how we’re having less sex and making fewer babies—both of which are, across history, signs of ...
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The same technology that has liberated us from so much inconvenience and drudgery has also unmoored us from the things that anchor our identities. The
As reams of research now show, we’re richer and better-informed and more connected—and unhappier and more isolated and less fulfilled.
hadn’t yelled, but I’d been rude to a guy for a simple mistake. I needed to apologize to him. This stranger wasn’t my problem. My problems were the stacks of bills and the confused kids and the uncertainty. My wife might die. I felt lonely and powerless. I didn’t mean to get upset—but here, finally, was a problem I could fix. I could get my name on the dang list. I could get something to go my way. For a few seconds, I had the relief of a scapegoat, someone I could blame.
But I notice, too, that constituents are rarely just interested in solutions; they’re also interested in assigning blame.
The assumption now isn’t just that folks are incompetent but that they are evil.
outburst. In urban combat training, there is a well-documented tendency to shift our focus from a distant but important target to a less important but closer target. If you’re being attacked and your threat is fifty yards away, but a closer target pops up, you’ll turn your attention to the new target—even if it’s less of a threat.
seems clear that in America today, we’re facing problems that feel too big for us, so we’re lashing out at each other, often over less important matters.
It’s easier to shriek at the people on the other side of the street. It’s comforting to be able to pin the problems on the freaks in the pink hats or the weirdos carrying the pro-life signs. At least our contempt unites us with other Americans who think like we do. At least we are not like them.
“parallel playing” with their own phone or iPad—“alone together,”
Has social media “friendship” changed our understanding of, and attention to, real-life friendship? Do the bigger houses we live in today—more than three times as large as sixty years ago, on average—offer us comfort but also generate isolation?
Most Americans just don’t have community cohesion like we used to. We don’t feel that we’re connected to our neighbors in any meaningful ways. We don’t feel like we’re part of something bigger.
No longer are parents keeping an eye out on the roving bands of kids, making sure they aren’t up to no good. No longer is the town packing the stands for the game.
We can’t fix this with new legislation. We don’t need a new program, a new department, one more election.
was still only the consequence of deeper problems, not their cause.
now. Getting rid of political strife would be like whitening the yellowed teeth of a smoker. It would simply erase one characteristic of a toxic situation, camouflaging problems that go much deeper.
What we need are new habits of mind and heart. We need new practices of neighborliness. We need to get our hands dirty replenishing the soil that nourishes rooted, purposeful lives. But how?
People walked away from political conversations without thinking ill of each other, because that kind of talk happened in the context of actual relationships centered around local things that were a lot more important.
But then he struck on something surprising: At a glance, three of the ten neighborhoods with the lowest number of heat-related deaths, Klinenberg found, looked demographically just like the neighborhoods with the highest number—predominantly poor, violent, and African-American. Race and poverty could not fully account for who died and who survived.
The crucial variable, Klinenberg discovered, was social relationships.
In neighborhoods that fared well during the heat wave, residents “knew who was alone, who was old, and who was sick,” and took it upon themselves to do “wellness checks.” They “encouraged neighbors to knock on each other’s doors—not because the heat...
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They died alone because they lived alone. In the final analysis, the difference between life and death, Klinenberg’s Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago concluded, was connections—or what he labeled “social infrastructure.” Isolation turned something dangerous into something deadly.2
the American Heart Association says that death-by-heartbreak is in fact quite real. In “broken heart syndrome” (technical name: Takotsubo cardiomyopathy), rejection or loss causes stress hormones to flood the body, mimicking the effects of a heart attack.
Scientists are now showing that loneliness affects the brains and bodies of millions of people, in measurable and alarming ways.
So it comes as no surprise that lonely people get sick more often, take longer to recover from illness, and are at higher risk of heart attacks.
emotional stress causes us to age faster—and
Studies suggest that one lonely day exacts roughly the same toll on the body as smoking an entire pack of cigarettes.4
“Positive social relationships are second only to genetics in predicting health and longevity in humans.”
men, unlike women, tend to stop forming friendships once they begin careers or marry—for most men, by their early thirties—which makes them particularly susceptible to disruptions in their social networks later in life.
For most men, marriage and children constitute their chief points-of-entry in adult life into any broad community, and their sources of social support atrophy quickly when those vanish.
According to psychologists, loneliness is not merely isolation or an individual’s “perception of being alone and isolated,” but rather the “inability to find meaning in one’s life.”
much of what is called “depression” might actually be chronic loneliness.
“Most of our patients were more comfortable saying they were depressed than saying they were lonely” (their emphasis).
self-diagnosed depression. But most of the time, my conclusion is that their challenge is lack of community and healthy relationships.
Lots of Americans do, indeed, suffer from depression, and breakthroughs in psychotherapy methods and pharmacology have changed lives—and surely saved many. My purpose here is simply to relate what many mental-health professionals have observed: that sometimes what patients think is depression is actually a response to deep-seated loneliness.
Americans consume almost all the world’s hydrocodone (99%) and most of its oxycodone (81%).
People were doing various things—but they weren’t doing them together.
“it is hard to believe that the generational decline in social connectedness and the [associated] generational increase in suicide, depression, and malaise are unrelated.”12
From bridge clubs to alumni groups and veterans’ associations, memberships were aging and nobody was joining. Between 1975 and 1995, membership in social clubs and community organizations such as the PTA, Kiwanis, and Rotary plummeted. Same with labor union membership and regular church attendance. (Recently, overall participation in youth sports leagues has dropped as well.)
Locally organized churches declined, with more anonymous, commuter megachurches absorbing their members.
People stopped having friends over for dinner.
with access to cheaper televisions and more square footage, families started sequestering themselves in different parts of the house to watch television separately.
These trends in declining family life coincided with a broader erosion of trust in nearly every American institution—altogether,
The proportion that agreed that ‘most people can be trusted,’ for example, rose from an already high 66 percent during and after World War II to a peak of 77 percent in 1964.” (Today, Pew Research puts that number closer to 30 percent, and confidence in the trustworthiness of government and government officials is somewhere in the teens, on average.)
“Social capital” has to do with the valuable role of human connections and relationships. Putnam defines it as “the connections among individuals—social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them.” Social capital is nurtured by communities with thick bonds of trust.
