Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal

by Ben Sasse

We’re hyperconnected, and we’re disconnected.

between 1985 and 2004, Americans reported that the number of people they discussed “important matters” with dropped, on average, from three to two.

The average American has gone from more than three to fewer than two intimate, flesh-and-blood actual friends over the last three decades.

the number of Americans who count no friends at all—no one in whom they confide about important matters, no one with whom they share life’s joys and burdens—has soared.

many Americans no longer believe that hard work is enough to climb the ladder of success. From these various data, he concludes that “the American Dream [is] in crisis.”

Of births to women with a high school diploma or less, 20 percent were out of wedlock in the 1970s; today, it is just shy of 70 percent.

higher percentage of college-educated women are having kids outside of marriage today than forty years ago, but the rate remains under 10 percent of births to this group of mothers.

The affluent third recovers, endures some bumps, then stabilizes—and in some cases starts to improve—up to the present. By contrast, the bottom two-thirds suffer some initial bumps, followed by a much broader and continuing spike of unhealthiness. Whether the subject is out-of-wedlock births, fatherlessness, obesity rates, “financial worry,” “neighborhood trust”—name the metric—the same basic pattern holds: in each case, things are going relatively well for the top one-third—but heading into disastrous territory for everyone else.

“How many of you have a parent who graduated from college?” That’s invariably around 99 percent of his audience. Hands shoot up. “Okay,” he says. “When I say ‘rich,’ I’m talking about you.”

the difference between rich and poor is no longer determined by wages or property as much as by education—and then by social network.

College-educated parents are more likely to read to their children, more likely to drive them to extracurricular activities, and more likely to encourage them to pursue higher education than parents who aren’t college educated.

becoming rare to see intermarriage between college-educated and non-college-educated people. This is new and odd. But, then, this declining intermarriage is really just an echo of the fact that college-educated and non-college-educated people mix socially less and less today.

The top one-third has thick social networks. Children in generally stable families not only have an inner ring of support, made up of family and close friends; they also have access to an outer ring of “friends of friends,” tutors, mental-health professionals, and

Life is smoother and safer when you have some shoulder to work with. If you do, a bad decision, an error in judgment, or a moral lapse means merely that you have a learning opportunity. If you don’t, the same mistake means hitting the wall or going over the cliff.

Finish high school. Get a job. (Any job. Because working leads to more working, which leads to better jobs.) Get married before having children.

Critics of the Success Sequence, who target it as oversimple, are right to observe that there are many reasons people end up poor—for example, economic structures, government policy, racism, institutional failures, and more. These critics worry that cultural and behavioral choices can be emphasized to the point that economics and public policy are neglected altogether.

legislating requires not just political maneuvering but also, and more importantly, a common understanding of what overarching challenges we face and what specific problems we are working to tackle;

You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts”;

absurdity of thinking that poverty can be tackled without addressing family brokenness.

The right answer is that both culture and economics matter; this shouldn’t be this contentious.

If we are going to make any lasting difference in the lives of our neighbors struggling in poverty—or wrestling with loneliness—we must tell the truth about the irreplaceable role of family. The most important shoulder in life is a parent’s.

We don’t need to agree on every complex moral issue to begin a discussion.

American neighborhoods are now more fragmented and less unified, and we can ignore potential disagreements about precisely why this should trouble us morally.

acknowledge: If you follow the Success Sequence, you won’t be poor. But if you fail to follow the Success Sequence, it’s 50/50 that you (and your kids) will be poor. That’s what the data teaches, plain and simple. If you finish high school, get a job, and get married before having children—in that order—you have only about a 3 percent statistical chance of ending up poor. By contrast, life is really, really hard for most folks who forgo these basics. Admitting this has nothing to do with “liberal” or “conservative” perspectives. It’s just the reality, backed up by a mountain of research.

2016 was the tenth consecutive year that 40 percent of American children of all races were born outside of marriage.

We’ve described the Success Sequence as “simple,” but that shouldn’t be confused with “easy.”

there is considerably less socioeconomic mixing.

Not only do Americans no longer know their neighbors, but in many cases they simply don’t know many people who aren’t like them.

Fewer people know people across c...

We sort ourselves out geographically in ways that ensure we rarely rub shoulders with people outside our social class.

“Kids from more privileged backgrounds are savvier about how to climb the ladder of opportunity.” An 18- or 19-year-old from a low-income background, with little social capital, walks onto a college campus at a profound disadvantage.

short, there’s a massive quantity of data to support Americans’ well-documented, growing worries that who gets ahead in America now has less to do with how hard you work than simply with who you know.

Every human being wants to be happy.

Social scientists have identified four primary drivers of human happiness, which we can put in the form of four questions: Do you have family you love, and who love you? Do you have friends you trust and confide in? Do you have work that matters—callings that benefit your neighbors? Do you have a worldview that can make sense of suffering and death?

People long to find ways to express their unique skills and talents, to provide for themselves, and to serve people around them. But the unprecedented changes that are beginning to roil the global economy are making that more difficult than ever before.

We’re all prone to misjudge the size of a problem, for a variety of reasons: maybe it’s politically polarizing, or maybe it affects us personally. We need to step back and carefully assess.

in the case of big changes, it’s rarely true that they’re uniformly good or uniformly bad; they’re good, and bad, and neutral all at once, and it’s important to be able to disentangle the predictable and unpredictable elements.

Emotional intelligence, communication skills, and creative problem-solving will be increasingly demanded.

Thoughtful analysis will require distinguishing and naming both the good and the bad. And

genuine wisdom will require not just acknowledging the disruption of our ways of making a living, but also of our ways of thinking about ourselves, our identities, and our places in the world.

A powerful entity with no name is unnerving. By contrast, naming something gives us a handle on it.

identity and meaning, purpose and place. Work, after all, isn’t merely about providing for one’s family. It is certainly that, but it is also about having a sense of purpose, a means of serving one’s neighbors, a place to fit in.

We need to be needed. This is true in love, it is true in friendship—and it turns out that it is true in work. People need a vocation.

“Work is about more than making a living, as vital as that is. It’s fundamental to human dignity, to our sense of self-worth as useful, independent, free people.”

their happiness will depend largely on whether they can answer what he calls the “Monday morning and Friday evening questions”: On Friday evening, are there family and friends waiting for you to show up—people with whom you’ve shared many years and meaningful experiences who yearn to spend time with you? And on Monday morning, do you have important work to do? This isn’t about whether you make lots of money, but rather: Is there something important that a neighbor needs me to do?

Work is where we create value with our lives and lift up our own souls. Work, properly understood, is the sacred practice of offering up our talents for the service of others.”

That means that the strong, long-lasting relationships—the years of coworking—that characterized previous generations are not being created by more recent generations.

now more open to sliding from opportunity to opportunity, using social media to keep “in touch” with people across the country or across the world.

the downsides is less overlap of people from the different spheres of our lives.

As jobs last a shorter time, and become less connected to tangible communities, we can hardly be surprised that people are feeling more detached and rootless.