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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
More options
Context Copy link