novum.substack.com
Fewer friends, relationships on the decline, delayed adulthood, trust at an all-time low, and many diseases of despair. The prognosis is not great.
In 2000, political scientist Robert Putnam published his book Bowling Alone to much acclaim and was first comprehensive look at the decline of social activities in the United States. Now, however, all those same trends have fallen off a cliff. This particular piece looks at sociability trends across various metrics—friendships, relationships, life milestones, trust, and so on—and gives a bird's eye view of the social state of things in 2022.
A piece that I wrote that really picked up on HackerNews recently with over 300+ comments. Some excellent comments there, I suggest reading it over.
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Notes -
I disagree. People with friends don't have thirty different messaging conversations active at once.
Rather, what I see is that it's made people boring and unpleasant to bother interacting with in real life. Ever since COVID, every time I try interacting with people, I walk away genuinely disgusted. Tried going to a bonfire mid-summer; The hosts were old friends, they also invited a bunch of the midwestern mid-20-somethings they knew.
The mid-20-somethings barely engaged with the hosts and formed their own little closed circle, like they'd used their invitation as a pretext to annex territory. They randomly played music from a car sound system (songs would start and stop abruptly, volume would change, all suggestions were ignored). They called eachother "White" a lot, loudly, with the same tone small children shout "Cooties," and despite the gathering being 100% white. One of them tried engaging in conversation with me, but it was to solemnly and intensely say that Alex Jones was finally facing justice, which I didn't care about. I actually found out that two of them lived in my hometown, and asked them what it was like living there as a younger person. The dude talked about how the conservatives were in X bar and the liberals in Y, which was not the question that I asked. Then he saw his girlfriend was talking to another dude, and went over to do some Mate Guarding. Another one assumed I was a communist because I was wearing a black denim jacket and tried talking to me about communism. No women there who weren't with a boyfriend.
I'm not uncharismatic. I run RPGs and spent years in Sales, I can command people's attention and draw stuff out of them. But I couldn't bring myself to want to engage with this group at anything beyond arm's length.
I've also seen people constantly and derogatorily throw around the term "White" for no apparent reason despite being white themselves. Current topics are often brought up, and they're discussed with the smallest amount of nuance and often though an extremely progressive lens that literally everyone else in the group is also assumed to hold. I remember an extremely surreal experience where I made a very anodyne comment about preferring the look of American suburbs to their cities (a topic I was not responsible for initially bringing up) and someone in the conversation told me I should never say that again and went on a straight up tirade about how the suburbs were filled with racists and xenophobes who just don't like difference.
There is simply no ability to speak about topics in a universal way - every conversation resembles this extremely charged, self-affirming circlejerk among themselves. And unfortunately, this behaviour exists in abundance among my peers.
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