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 -
If you could wave a magic wand to establish some collective norm to improve this situation, what would you do?
Because socializing is (obviously) social, it's easy to imagine that individual interventions will be non- or counter-productive. For example, maybe you think that people lack social ties because they move around so often, and we'd all have better social lives if we all stayed in the towns we grew up in. But if I alone did that, my social life will be even worse than usual because everyone I could've been friends with has moved away.
I suspect there's something about the way we're using technology that makes social life worse for everyone, effectively polluting the social commons. The problem is that we don't know how that's happening. It's like we see the thinning ozone layer, we agree that it's bad, but we don't know that CFCs are causing it.
Because this technology is so new, our cultural evolution hasn't caught up. (Maybe this is what OP's description means by "our transitional period"). At some point someone will figure this out, perhaps by accident. But we're not just genes mutating at random; intentional thought and experimentation have their place as well.
Unironically, as I say this as a pretty unobservant/lapsed Catholic, make everyone go to church. Alternatively, some substitute secular social club that theoretically fulfils a similar socializing role, but realistically this doesn't work, no matter how much atheists believe they can construct secular equivalents of the social role the religion plays.
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