Comment by legitster
5 days ago
This has actually been a trend since the 1960s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
The simple answer is media. First television, then internet, then smartphones.
People used to actively seek the company of others - if for no other reason than out of boredom. Entertainment and parasocial relationships have filled that hole.
Another reason I might posit is declining birth rates and an aging population. Entire neighborhoods used to be filled with young families of roughly the same age. Now on any given city block in the US, there may only be 1 or 2 houses that have kids of any age in them. Smaller concentration of kids -> thinner market for playdates and sleepovers -> less interactions between families.
> Entertainment and parasocial relationships have filled that hole.
I would also add the suburbanization of American society. A neat little home in a neat little sub-division with a neat little patch of grass. You can sit on your grass in your own little kingdom, and be completely unbothered by the world around you.
It turns out, being completely unbothered is also unchallenging, and challenge drives us. And being alone and bored is enabled by television and scrolling.
Honestly, I view the suburbs as the worst of both worlds (urban and rural), with few benefits.
BTW: As an aside, this is why i think the suburbs-class loves tesla self driving so much. The one downside is the long monotony of transitting to the place where people gather to do your work. I'm not against self driving cars, but they enable suburban self-imposed isolation.
When I rented an apartment in central part of large city for 2 years, I literally haven’t never seen people from 2 other apartments on same floor as me and maybe had one chat with last one. I rent house in suburbs, at nice cul de sac, I know names of neighbors in 2 houses and had chats with 2 more. So your mileage may vary A LOT. Although large city offers many more chances to randomly step up. Reaching literal center of city and it’s life in 30 minutes on subway is much different from reaching another burbs on car.
Yeah the point of apartments is not to socialize with the neighbors specifically, it's more that the increased density gets you walkability and density.
It's much more appealing to get to the street and walk when you have 4 cafes, a theater, two libraries and a gym in a 10 minute radius than when you just get to walk next to lawns for an hour.
And there's a point to be made for the added friction of a small home. The more self sufficient your house is the harder it is to convince yourself to get out.
A lot of people are assuming that the main people you would be interacting with in a city are your neighbors. There are many more positive interactions you'd have, outside.
People often don't socialize with their neighbors in a big city because it's nice to have a place where you aren't expected to socialize.
Sometimes I don't want to have a conversation with my neighbor who I really don't have anything in common with except they live next door.
In a big city you can find people that are exactly your tribe or explore a new one.
Thats wild to me. When I lived in an apartment I couldn’t get out the door without having the crazy cat lady telling me her new smoking spot the cameras couldn’t see (she wanted to smoke on the rooftop). It was a riot, that place had some characters.
The suburbs were soul sucking to me, the people were largely insufferable. I knew my neighbors, but hated them because 90% of our conversations were some form of “I noticed your grass wasn’t cut this week” or “your cans sat on the curb until the morning”. There were some good ones, but like me they mostly hid in their back yard to avoid the Karen’s.
Taking care of the lawn, etc, you will definitely meet your neighbors.
I’m from Germany so I can’t comment on the exact dynamics of American suburbia but I grew up in a medium to small town in a single family House and we were regularly in contact with the neighbors. Eventually I moved out into the next big city and in the apartment complex that I moved into it’s completely anonymous and no contact between neighbors except the occasional head nod.
I live in a suburb by a major city in the US, and know so many neighbors. The sense of community is really strong. I help my neighbors remove snow and take their trash out as they are old.
I feel like some people are just making assumptions or are extremely introverted.
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This has largely been my experience as well but in the US. However, a new couple moved in next door to my apartment. We’ve done happy hour with them and I share the fruits of my cooking/baking adventures. Stop and chat when we are not in a hurry. For whatever reason we’ve not gotten to be much closer than friendly neighbors. Could be the woes of young professionals in their 30s without kids but the effort definitely feels greater than at other points of life.
Interesting experience I supposed. Mine is the exact opposite. Neighbors in the suburbs are a community , whereas in the city, it’s common for neighbors to remain strangers.
I've had far easier experience joining my neighborhood community in a city as many of my neighbors are literally walking around. My last 2 suburban neighborhood communities were on Facebook and the groups were less "lets get coffee" and more "that car that drove by is suspicious". One of my old neighbors in a city occasionally had a TV and cooler set up outside for people to drop by to watch baseball.
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That's not a universal truth. I grew up in the suburbs and I've lived in a city for my whole adult life. I feel a MUCH stronger sense of community in the city. I know so many of my neighbors that it's hard to leave my house without running into somebody I know.
It's funny that as a child in the suburbs I had maybe 10 neighbors within a half mile and we only knew 2 of them. I never saw them. There were no sidewalks and people didn't walk around.
In fact, in our typical suburban boredom, sometimes we'd sneak around our neighbor's properties to see if we could learn who they were. We were pretending to be spies. One time we discovered that our closest neighbors had goats and we were blown away. I never did meet the people living in those suburban houses in the 10 years we lived in that house.
Another problem with the suburbs is car-dependency. When you're in a car you're not interacting in a positive way with other people. In the best case scenario you're just isolating yourself and in the worst case scenario you're angry and frustrated at other people on the road.
This stands in stark contrast to my car-free life. Every time I go out of the house to travel somewhere, I run into people I know. I say hi to strangers. I nod to pedestrians crossing the street. I have a brief conversation with somebody on the bus. I didn't expect that traveling by transit or bike would have such a positive impact on my well-being.
Knowing what I know now, it's not possible for me to go back to a suburban car-dependent life. It would be a major step backwards
This sounds less like "mass transit culture" and more like extroversion.
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My grandparents lived in what was then rural Pennsylvania.
Everyone had a part of their house that was essentially a bar and they would have house parties all the time.
So I don't think it's sub-urbanization per se.
I grew up in suburban Wisconsin. The at-home bar was and is common there too.
People don't throw parties with them nearly as much any more because throwing a party with an at-home bar in a suburban house essentially requires drunk driving. We've gotten much more strict about since 1980 for very good reason.
Happy hours are still relatively common in cities because you can get home without driving.
On a larger scale I think it's _a_ factor, but not the only factor.
It's partly a numbers game. There are definitely amicable cul-de-sacs but if you are in an apartment complex there's 100x more "neighbors" you could interact with.
Suburbs also come with the tradeoff of driving, at least in America. It's a lot easier to socialize when you can put on some flip flops and walk to a friend's place or an event than it is to drive.
It can be hit or miss in either case, and there's socioeconomic and cultural forces that make real world interactions more scarce. If more of my income goes to rent and inflation is too high why would I burn through money on going out when I can stay home and watch a show or be on my phone
When I lived in the suburbs I knew all my neighbors. You’d just naturally run into people around the neighborhood.
Once I moved to the city I didn’t know my neighbors. People kept to themselves or the turnover was high.
My experience is literally the exact opposite. Suburbs were lifeless, soulless places and the city is where my social life got measurably better. There's no way I can ever go back to the suburbs now
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So many of my neighbors never go out side except to get in their car.
> I would also add the suburbanization of American society. A neat little home in a neat little sub-division with a neat little patch of grass. You can sit on your grass in your own little kingdom, and be completely unbothered by the world around you.
What are you talking man? Atomic family from 50s with their suburb is literally the utopia for American and whatnot family. Kids running around in droves, BBQ with neighbors, helping around with a house, etc. Good luck having that in New York rat cages.
It’s interesting that you think the opposite of the suburbs is high rises (I assume that’s what you mean by rat cages).
The reality is that prewar housing in cities in the US was still frequently single family housing. The Chicago Bungalow is an obvious example.
The difference was in how close they were to each other and how much of the infrastructure was given to cars.
I’m not sure I buy that there is some tidy explanation about suburbanization leading to the decline in social interaction but if you think everyone describing city living is describing midtown manhattan you’ve got to myopic view of what urban housing means.
This is true of suburbs as well fwiw. There are lots of walkable suburbs with common community space and not a McMansion or big box shop to be seen.
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I live in a city similar to NYC (but not quite as dense) and IMO it's far better for kids than the suburbs.
I grew up in the suburbs and it was a miserable experience. If I wanted to go anywhere I had to ask an adult to drive me. There were no sidewalks. Nearest friend's house was a mile away, and my parents were understandably afraid of letting us go there alone. It was a 100% car-dependent suburb. Everything was so spread out. Nobody wanted to live on a main road with cars, so there were endless dead-ends and culs-de-sac so everybody can have their own little traffic-free neighborhood
One time I literally WALKED SIX MILES to the mall because I was just so bored. I literally spent about half a day just walking on streets with cars going 40+ miles per hour with no shoulder. What's worse is that I had to go behind my parents back to do it because who wants their kid walking next to F-150s going 40 miles an hour?
I thought things would get better once I could drive. Things improved a little bit, but it's hard to afford a car + insurance + gas at 17 years old. The car was a huge drain on my limited resources. I was so eager to get rid of it
Once I discovered the "rat cages" you're deriding, life became a whole lot better for me. I refuse to raise my kids in the suburbs. Kids deserve better than that.
> Atomic family from 50s with their suburb is literally the utopia for American and whatnot family
Where did that "utopia" ideal come from?
> Good luck having that in New York rat cages
Yeah, that isn't good either. That's poverty. Do you think poverty doesn't exist in the suburbs?
It can't possibly be something in the middle! All or nothing.
I live in a suburb and I know and talk to my neighbors way more than any of my coworkers who live in the city do.
It's common of Internet discourse to reduce an extremely wide range of experiences down to either the one you personally had or a stereotype. Suburbs are kind of like that. You can see it in the existing responses, with some people saying they experienced tremendous community in a suburb but not in a city and some saying the opposite.
The truth is there is no archetype of an "American suburb." They can be wildly different from each other. I grew up in Whittier, a suburb of Los Angeles, famous for car culture. You can find videos today all over the place of lowriders on hydraulics cruising Whittier Blvd. It's referenced in rap songs from the 90s. But you could also walk or ride a bike. Whittier Blvd itself is two lanes each way for much of its length and is the biggest street in the city. I lived two blocks from this street and walked places all the time. I knew all my neighbors. Kids played in the streets. We walked to parks and played there, too. Whittier even has a really nice wilderness park thanks to Turnbull Canyon, where you're not really remote but you can feel that way. In high school when we were assigned to read Walden Pond and produce similar journals, I found isolated creekbeds where you couldn't hear or see anything except the woods and kept a paper journal I wrote in.
On the other hand, my sisters have moved out to Murrieta, CA and are raising their children there. It's a radically different experience. My wife asked if we could walk to a convenience store when we first visited and my sister was almost laughing at us. It's miles away, some streets have no sidewalks, the streets are a hundred feet wide with 50 mph+ speed limits. It's also hot as hell because it's out in the desert.
Both suburbs, even both in Southern California, but very different experiences with very different communities.
Hacker News talks past each other a lot by not acknowledging this and reducing everything down to "suburbs" or "American" and assuming that kind of shorthand has a clear, universal meaning.
Even television and media consumption in general are not the automatic atomizers they're being characterized as. Aside from the old watercooler monoculture of having something to talk about when everyone watched the same five primetime shows, for sports fans and especially when pay-per-view first took off, gathering at one person's house to collectively watch together was almost ubiqitous. That's not even considering cinema in theaters, which were always a group event. I grew up with that. We almost never watched anything alone in the 80s. If people are now primarily watching video media on their phones from their beds while alone, that is a lot different than how we grew up 40 years ago. Reading was more characteristic of alone-time media consumption.
My whole life, my mom would talk about how much she hated the suburbs, how she lived in a Chicago suburb and it was a miserable experience, she would never do it again, etc., all the while praising the time that she lived in Tiburon.
I finally went and visited the house where she had rented in Tiburon (it was just a block from the Paradise Loop path, a pleasant bike ride from SF), and I was like, "Mom, Tiburon is totally a suburb." And her response was "Oh, well your sisters could walk to school and I could walk to the grocery store, so it didn't feel like a suburb to me."
Yes, its the suburbs, but it's because of the car-dependency -- not as much the single family detached homes.
Are you kidding? Suburbs used to have thriving social circles around churches, golf clubs, schools, etc. Trust can be easier too because of greater cultural uniformity.
This hating on suburbs has got to stop. It's fine if you don't like it, but I have way more friends in suburbia than I ever had in the faceless city where people just walked right on past out of fear.
I don’t think being unbothered is unchallenging/stagnating? You can have solo hobbies that push you. I hate suburbs and car-based societies as much as the next person, but being left alone doesn’t feel like the underlying problem.
The urban lifestyle is also to blame when it demands a lot of time for work and commute, leaving the individual with little time for self improvement and free time. It deteriorates the third place by not allowing time to dedicate to it.
These however are all effects of a larger mentality of hyper-individualism and hyper-productivity, symptoms of late-stage capitalism.
> The urban lifestyle is also to blame when it demands a lot of time for work and commute,
ironically, urban commutes are substantially shorter on average
> leaving the individual with little time for self improvement and free time. It deteriorates the third place by not allowing time to dedicate to it.
what? there's so many urban third places.
My cultural anthropology professor used to study remote villages in Nepal. Once he told the class a story about this one village where a group of people used to socialize each night, with each family taking turns hosting dinner at their home.
Then one family got a TV, and they stopped rotating because everyone wanted to spend the evening watching TV at that one family's house.
Then the other families got TVs, and they stopped the socializing tradition altogether, preferring to watch TV at home.
Media in general is probably the real answer. We lack boredom at home. Earlier you were bored, so you signed up for sports, went on cheap trips, camping, pretty much anything to get out. Talking to older people 60 - 70+, some of them spent three or four days at the clubhouse of their chosen sport, they where constantly out of the house, because that's were you weren't bored.
Communal boredom is where a lot of our creativity comes from.
"playdates" is in itself a tell. That didn't used to be a thing. Kids would just... go out and find their friends and play. No parental scheduling or coordination required.
We use this term when little kids aren't old enough to just go out and find their friends and play. E.g., 2-5 year olds definitely aren't going to be let to go wander around the street.
When families had 3+ kids on average the younger kids would go with the older kids. Now you’re looking at <2 kids on average that doesn’t work.
Yes the post's title calls to mind that 'Bowling Alone' was already detailing loss of cohesion nearly 30 years ago.
People are alienated, y'all.
People form communities when they have shared stressors that they work together to manage, but what remnants of that lifestyle remain today is little more than a skeuomorphic throwback to more vulnerable times.
Everything about modern life is designed so you do not have to directly depend on anyone for anything. You can instead be entirely dependent on a series of distant and unaccountable corporations to get through the day.
my 94 yo gpa is calling his homies ALL DAY LONG. ill see my best friends between once a week to once a month and texting comes and goes. if i got a phone call i assume its an emergency
> First television, then internet, then smartphones
i like vr so i sometimes wonder if itll catch on and if were in the "we know one or two people with a tv" era of the early 40s. theres certainly seems to be a financial incentive since it seems like tvs and phones have gone about as far as we can take them. its also certainly seems like a another leap down the isolation path as well
luckily i think most people reject vr bc it sucks to wear something on your face
edit: grammar (still bad but better)
Older people grew up socializing constantly so they can just start talking to strangers like they've known each other for years, especially if they are from the same town.
I volunteered at an old folks home from age 10-16 or so, this was back in early/mid 90s - before the Internet stole my attention - and the old people were of the Greatest Generation cohort (maybe some of the oldest from 1800s). I really enjoyed those talks and have always liked talking with old people since. I can sit with any of them and just talk for hours but rarely ever do this with younger/my aged people. They just chit chat about everything and silence is never awkward, they could talk about anything from the weather to big social/political issues with an open mind. Unfortunately, I fear this is ending soon as this latest generation of old people is kind of vile and not really seeking positive conversation (wild generalization but it's my experience). Instead they tend to want to tell you how to live, what to believe, who to vote for, etc. and then judge/ridicule you when you don't comply or voice a differing opinion.
FWIW, I also think it's largely because boomer's collectively lost their minds and started acting out when their parent/grandparent generation was gone. It's like they didn't want to disappoint them so were acting on good behavior, but now their true colors show.
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When my dad does this it’s mortifying
When I do it though it’s very cool and fun!
Of course I don’t call women “girl” or try to order in languages I don’t speak
Someone commented once about the Trader Joe’s people always flirting with everyone, and a) that’s probably true but b) is just being nice to random people these days so intimate and invasive that it’s equivalent to getting hit on? That would explain people cringing
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> my 94 yo GPA is calling his homies ALL DAY LONG
Our modern day equivalent is being on HN or Reddit all day long
It's a negative feedback loop too. There used to be people out doing things so when folks got bored they'd go find them.
Now entertainment and social media sort of fill that gap (not really) but enough that there's less people out. Less people out mean it's less entertaining, so less people go out etc.
Incredibly pedantic, but I think that's describing a positive feedback loop where the previous result amplifies the next result further.
And when you do find people out, they're wearing headphones and/or their nose is in a screen, and if you try to talk to them they look startled and annoyed like how dare you speak to me in a public place. The culture is just gone.
Everything happened so quickly too. All it took was a couple of decades.
Putnam did followup work investigating the causes.
https://www.puttingourdifferencestowork.com/pdf/j.1467-9477....
I think the media influence went far beyond just pacifying or entertaining.
The relentless satire is what really did it. It was all written by some of the smartest yet depraved and depressed people who found a home in comedy. What did we think was going to happen?
Satire is all well and good, but what are we doing when we no longer take anything seriously anymore? Social media, but particularly reddit, continues to be an echo chamber for these mentally castrated and bitter people who couldn't challenge the comedy with a life that was actually any better than what was being mocked.
No longer take anything too seriously anymore?
That was a very 90s 'thing'. Today people, especially young people, are exceedingly lacking in levity. Everything is serious.
I've heard that everything is nihilistic. Things are funny when you're life's good. Things are serious when your life's not good but following them will to make it good. Things are nihilistic when your life's not good but gambling has a chance of making it good and that's the best option you see.
Example of past generation seriousness: investing - put all your money in housing or the stock market and you'll get rich and comfortable. Example of current generation nihilism: everyone wanting to be an influencer. Some people will become successful and some more will get by but most will fail at that, by the mathematics of it. Or literal gambling as in the rise of Kalshi - if your life's crap with $0 or $1k but wouldn't be crap with $100k, why not put it all on 100x odds? Or something like looksmaxxing: will doing xyz to your jawline somehow result in success? Probably not, but it might and you weren't going to be successful otherwise anyway.
GP is wrong anyway, comedy's always been about saying what everyone is secretly thinking.
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It’s not quite that simple, though. Various studies show that people are feeling increasingly lonely. It is not so much that media replace social activities, but rather that they tend to simply inhibit them.
Yeah, I don't think the age disparity is talked about enough. Admitedly I'm in this weird "youngest millenial" bracket where, growing up, I was always much older than my parent's friend's kids. But even in general with young adult life: once you leave college, everyone around you feels "older".
There's maybe 1-2 other people around your age at work, unless you actively chose the massive internship to employment pipeline of MAANG, Big 4, or your industry equivalent that was still actively training employees. Not really for me; my first gig was pretty young, but going to a large corporation for much higher pay: it was a satellite office with 2-3 other people my age than a bunch of seasoned veterans.
Neighborhoods are the same way too. Even today, I can make small talk with my neighbors. But they are some 15+ years ahead of life with two young kids. Different vibe from a single dude in his 30's.
It's not just smartphones - it's any connected device. Before the pandemic, I'd arrange Peloton rides with my friends and colleagues with bikes, and we'd ride "together" from our houses, high-fiving as we went. I'd meet up with college friends in other cities on Xbox or PlayStation from the luxury of my couch. Social moved, but made us sedentary at the same time.
It feels strange to assign all the blame to media, like theoretically it should be a number of factors, but that's what I got from reading Bowling Alone (fwiw I read the 1995 essay and not the 2000 book).
Even on the TFR point, the birth rate in 1976 in USA was 1.74, 2025 it was 1.6. So it's not like a China situation where it went from over 3 to less than 1 in 50 years.
> The simple answer is media. First television, then internet, then smartphones.
It probably began with cave painting. Once Grog discovered cave art he realized that he didn’t actually like his fellow tribesmen all that much.
I think Bowling Alone did a great job of describing the phenomena. I don't think it did a great job of explaining why it was happening.
It doesn't, for example, cover the privatization of public spaces, it doesn't mention mass white flight from cities to suburban sprawl due to people wanting to preserve apartheid, nor does it cover the rise in wealth inequality or the weakening of labor laws or the obliteration of pedestrian friendly infrastructure.
Instead, it pins it all on 'television' which, sure, but there's a reason why people gravitate towards entertainment that is served to them much more cheaply per-hour than not. It's a little like saying the problem with small pox is that the boils are painful, not the underlying virus systematically destroying your body.
In my personal experience in community organizing, the main pain points people have are 1) that they have day jobs that exhaust them, 2) the traffic sucks and they don't want to drive to our meetings, or 3) they need to pick up a second shift or another job to cover their basic needs. And even to those points, it's hard to get a public space where you can regularly meet that doesn't charge a lot of money, to provide food/refreshment, to maintain an ongoing potluck which requires a lot of coordination especially when it comes to preferences/dietary restrictions, etc. It's almost never out of a lack of interest. People desperately want community but there are so many barriers in place.
> It doesn't, for example, cover the privatization of public spaces, it doesn't mention mass white flight from cities to suburban sprawl due to people wanting to preserve apartheid
That's because, contrary to the way it's often depicted, the 20th century was overwhelmingly a flight from rural areas to cities. Suburbs were an outgrowth of that, but the reality is that rural areas were hollowed out the most. (Also, community engagement in rural areas with lots of sprawl was even higher than in cities).
> that they have day jobs that exhaust them
The median adult is spending 5+ hours on their phone a day. This is what is exhausting people. Everyone is essentially working a second job that involves lots of reading and attention and social engagement. It's a parasitic draw on our lives.
> they need to pick up a second shift or another job to cover their basic needs.
Maybe that's true for some people, but the data usually shows that income and free time is inversely related to community time. Poorer people are making more time for friends and family.
I can see what you're trying to do - reframe this problem as another outgrowth of class struggle. But it doesn't really explain the reality. A steelworker in the 1920s coming off of a 10-hour shift would still find the time and energy to go out dancing. A software engineer in 2026 is going to get off of work at 5pm and watch 3.4 more hours of screen time in a day.
> I can see what you're trying to do - reframe this problem as another outgrowth of class struggle. But it doesn't really explain the reality. A steelworker in the 1920s coming off of a 10-hour shift would still find the time and energy to go out dancing.
I doubt that steelworkers around 1920 typically went out dancing after their shifts. Back then, there was a lack of radios or sound systems, and live music was likely reserved for more upscale establishments. The average worker would more likely have gone to a beer hall or pub to have a drink with his mates.
I haven’t been able to quickly find any statistics for the U.S. that go back that far, but in Germany, around 67% of 18- to 25-year-olds were still consuming alcohol regularly in 1973, whereas that figure had dropped to about 28% by 2023. I’m not suggesting that this trend is inherently negative, but there is, at the very least, a correlation with a decline in social activities.
Nobody's commented on your most important point: "city" does not equate to "community involvement." Suburban people statistically volunteer more and join groups more than rural or urban people, and rural people are more likely to meet in person with their groups than suburban or urban people [0].
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/09/28/how-urban...
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> The median adult is spending 5+ hours on their phone a day. This is what is exhausting people.
When I am tired from work, I spend more time on phone after. And less time doing other more engaging activities. When I had easy workday, I am more likely to do something else.
> Poorer people are making more time for friends and family.
This is what I found: "the social interactions of those from lower-income households tend to revolve around family members and neighbors" and "richer people spend more with their self-selected friends".
This would confirm exactly what OP wrote - people who do socialize do it with people nearby.
> I can see what you're trying to do - reframe this problem as another outgrowth of class struggle.
They are referring to what they see as they do their community organizing. You dismiss it all, because none of that should theoretically matter.
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>the 20th century was overwhelmingly a flight from rural areas to cities
You're talking about an entirely different phenomena. The move from rural areas to cities and exurbs happened in the 50s/60s with cheap mortgage rates, WWII-provisioned education, and large sweeping social services being enacted. White flight is a phenomena that started in the mid-60s to 80s that specifically coincided with integration.
>The median adult is spending 5+ hours on their phone a day. This is what is exhausting people
There's much to be said about the behavioral manipulation and dark patterns in apps and devices, sure. But I don't think television inherently was employing Skinner-boxes to get people to watch and that's what I was specifically speaking to. Regardless, that dark pattern of it is class struggle related if that's the direction you want to frame it (I see it more as just MBA-brained corporate sociopathy) because it seeks to extract capital from its users while externalizing all negatives onto the users themselves.
>Maybe that's true for some people, but the data usually shows that income and free time is inversely related to community time. Poorer people are making more time for friends and family.
Obviously. And this is clearly related to the fact that the more impoverished you are, the more you need to pool resources to survive. The pain points I illuminated are for individuals who are still showing up to community organizing work and much of what we do in these spaces is effectively providing enough mutual aid for them to survive.
> A steelworker in the 1920s coming off of a 10-hour shift would still find the time and energy to go out dancing.
You have proof of this? That they wouldn't just go home and get shitfaced or otherwise incapacitated? All steelworkers, per capita, were going out dancing regularly? And even so, this wasn't because they were economically incentivized by the rise of labor unions to be in community with others, building power and fighting for better rights? The 30 years of post-Reagan neoliberal expanisionism has effectively neutered unions - and that's something that wasn't covered either by Putnam.
I suspect another thing largely missed by Putnam was the rise of online social spaces. Connecting with friends via the phone, on Discord, in video game spaces - that's community. It's just different from the community envisioned by people in more elderly generations. The fact that you're even commenting on HackerNews is effectively proof against Putnam's claims.
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Was the flight out of the cities to "preserve apartheid" or did many people simply want the suburban lifestyle with a yard and bigger house?
I don't thin racism was the dominant factor for people moving out of the cities. Today the suburb I'm in is packed with immigrants.
Regardless, I don't think you're being very charitable.
This has been written about broadly by social historians. This book, in particular, is illuminating: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691133867/wh...
Some other links:
https://news.iu.edu/live/news/24906-research-ties-persistenc...
https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2021/10/white-flight...
https://psmag.com/news/ghosts-of-white-people-past-witnessin...
There's also this rather infamous quote by one of the most powerful Republican strategists in the 80s, Lee Atwater: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater#:~:text=Later%20in...
I won't quote it here but it's very telling.
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In places like Detroit racism was very much the primary reason in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s at least. Some of it was just personal racism, pure and simple. See "blockbusting" techniques used by realtors who would hire a black mother to walk down the street with a baby carriage to give the impetus for white people to sell quickly and cheaply. Or a black family moving into a house, the white neighbors trying to push them out via lawsuit for breaking a racially restrictive covenant, then losing so that all the white people left the neighborhood (e.g. read about Orsel and Minnie McGhee in Detroit, I was the primary author of the National Register nomination for their house).
The racist pressure to move was also a structural issue supported by the Federal government. Redlining meant you couldn't get loans to buy houses in certain neighborhoods, and those neighborhoods were exactly where black people lived. Literal walls could be constructed between two similar communities of different races so that the white side could be higher rated and have better access to loans (e.g., the Birwood Wall in Detroit). A ton has been written about the topic, I can't really do it justice, but the idea that people just wanted a bigger house was not the case. A lot of Detroit actually consisted of single-family homes with yards anyhow, so it was literally white people leaving a house for a very similar one.
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What they're describing is well documented, but my understanding is that the reality is a blend of what you're describing and what they're describing.
To this day there's significant social pressure to not acknowledge how much racism and racial division played a role in them growth of suburbs in the US, but ultimately it's the documented history which is revealed to those who research the topic.
In many cases individual families were not overtly racist but they were caught up in the economic effects created by racist dynamics and felt they had no choice to go along. If property prices in your neighborhood are decreasing, because neighbors are leaving, and you have the means would you not feel compelled to leave to somewhere with rising property values? Real estate firms intentionally tried to create waves of fear to get people to rush to move, selling low, and then profiting on selling to newer Black families.
It was common for suburbs to have deed restrictions limiting areas by race, and for a while federal housing guidelines would not underwrite developments that did not racially segregate.
At the same time there were massive amounts of state & federal funding pouring into suburbs and highly disruptive unpopular overhauls occurring in cities while cities were also losing tax revenue. For people with the option the future of good living seemed like it was in the suburbs independent of segregation, but part of what fueled the frenzy was the racial segregation.
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People also moved to suburbs in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK.
Cars enabled people to have free standing houses and work became decentralised, which was also due to cars.
Many people prefer to live in a free standing house.
In many American cities it definitely was about race. If you look at cities like Chicago you can still see today the effects of decades of overtly racist policies that have shaped the demographic layout of the city today.
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For some time every new form of isolation had limits causing people to keep finding friends. Early on, one family or shop had a TV set, so people flocked there. Video games were made to play 2 or 4 in the same room. Near free tech and networking was an inflection point.
> Now on any given city block in the US, there may only be 1 or 2 houses that have kids of any age in them.
Thats why we plan to move to the burbs. Lots of ethnic enclaves where kids go around the neighborhood on their own and play.
My controversial idea for urban planning: age and demographic based zoning.
There is lots of urban planning in the US that is poorly optimized. Walkable neighborhoods close to parks and schools are often filled with retirees, whereas young families are often crowded into newer neighborhoods at the edge of town with little infrastructure nearby.
You wouldn't even have to do much pressure to move the needle. Cities are already putting in millions of dollars to place their parks and schools, and etc. Offer tax incentives that encourage young families to move into family areas, singles into single areas, and retirees into retiree areas.
It sounds kind of crazy, but we more or less do this for student areas around colleges.
I don’t have a direct response to your zoning idea but have observed in European cities there seems to be less age segregation.
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People are cynical about your idea, but it's not like it has never been done in society. There are in fact apartment complexes that focus on elderly demographics. Retirement homes are just that. What's a school but a bastion for a bunch of kids of similar age to socialize together (and should a random adult wander onto it, there'd be a lockdown).
Urban planning around these situations would be nice. But the very least we could do is build more third places that tries to attract that last middle demographic to come together; that mid 20's to 40's adults too old for college campuses but too young (and not on social security funds) for older gatherings. That's sort of what some bars can be, but a wide open space with less pressure to spend $15 on a "cheap" beer would be nice.
Why not just make the new neighborhoods walkable with green space too?
People stay in the same house their whole lives though. Your young family zone is going to be a retiree zone in 30 years and that’s where the schools and parks will be then. Can’t realistically ask people to uproot and move 3 or 4 times in their life, that’s a very expensive proposition.
we already have it, it's called the Villages.
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You should read actual studies on what you're suggesting rather than investing in "controversial takes" that are categorically wrong.
Ethnic enclaves?
Yes like a suburban housing unit dominated by a particular ethic group.
I've read a study that stated that the average US adult socializes 90 minutes per week, down from 4+ hours in the 90s, and 16+ in the 60s.
> The simple answer is media. First television, then internet, then smartphones.
And, as is often the case, the simple answer is incomplete/oversimplified. Because there are cultures which have absorbed those technologies while remaining much more social than Western cultures. And they are ones that are less individualistic and stress more of a group, family or clan mentality.
The issue with fertility rates is similar/correlated. Most of the developed world is seeing rates far below replacement, but some cultures are far more resistant to the influences of technology than others. Many developed countries have tried to address their low birth rates from a policy standpoint, essentially paying people a small percentage of what it costs to raise a child to incentivize parenthood. But I’d argue it’s far more important to address their low birth rate as a cultural issue, which is basically a semi-narcissistic focus on maximizing our own lives rather than doing what’s best for our (for lack of a better word) tribe. Because the less individualistic a society is, the less it’s struggling with these problems.
I’d posit that a lot of this has to do with the decline of religiosity in Western cultures. Religion was where a lot of people got their group cohesion and sense of an importance of something greater than self. And while I’m no fan of religion, we’ve removed it without replacing it with something else that serves the same function. We’re going to have to find that something or these sorts of trends will only continue.
I don’t think it’s as simple as that. It seems like people are increasingly exhausted and disillusioned with life.
What you seem to be implying is people are lazy and choosing TikTok over real relationships. But I also think people choose TikTok because it’s low effort and they don’t have much gas left in the tank.
> It seems like people are increasingly exhausted and disillusioned with life.
Is life today bleaker or harder than it was during the Great Depression? People still made time for each other.
What if it is the media that is making people exhausted and disillusioned? Not the other way around.
It’s bleaker because everyone knows a lot more. People back in the day were for lack of a better word- naive. They had no idea what others were doing outside of their neighborhood and what was in the newspapers. There are incredible, chronic hidden pressures in the world now even if you individually disengage from social media and the like.
I’m not arguing that today is the worst time to ever exist in the history of humanity.
I’m arguing there are legitimate reasons why people are exhausted and disillusioned with the current state of the world.
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In the Great Depression there was community and hope. People could band together, form unions or political movements.
Today, computers allow for mass dystopian control. Cameras and algorithms everywhere with no chance of appealing to an actual human.
There are multiple kinds of suffering, and even if more people have sufficient nutrition and health than in the great depression, it's much harder to see hope for the future today.
> It seems like people are increasingly exhausted and disillusioned with life.
The interesting part is what causes what. Are people exhausted and disillusioned because they aren't experience life the same way as previously, or aren't they having these experiences because they are exhausted and disillusioned.
This might be controversial, and I'm not saying it has to be the case, but I believe at least part of it is due to lack of sunlight / outside movement (vs all day in office, car, train, home with stuffy air and sometimes not even openable windows) and nutrition (too much processed and fortified food, not enough protein for many people).
I'm trying to focus on both in my life, and I have become much happier as a result.
>seems like people are increasingly exhausted and disillusioned with life.
Counterpoint, people are TOLD and CONVINCED that they are exhausted and that life is way harder than it is.
Capitalism loves someone who is "too busy" to make stuff or avoid buying stuff.
Our lives are all about reducing friction and making everything easier.
Relative to 20-30 years ago we are so lucky and privileged. It's nuts how the victim mindset has spread.
I've lived all over the place and one thing I've seem priliferate is this mindset of "I'm a victim, doing this is too hard, so I just won't for X and Y reasons" while folks order Uber eats.
The baseline for what is acceptable has dropped so, so far. And I'm sure people will reply saying I just don't get it. Lol.
20-30 years ago was 1996-2006. Granted, I was younger back then, but in my mind this post Cold War, young Internet, pre-smartphone age was the best of times. Since then life got easier in some ways, harder in others. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about today, but how do you think we're so much better off now?
I think people are actually increasingly exhausted and disillusioned with life, but that increase is basically entirely due to spending hours doomscrolling and similar behavior.
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I don't need people to tell me. My rent and paycheck are a very convincing argument in and of themselves.
>I've lived all over the place and one thing I've seem priliferate is this mindset of "I'm a victim, doing this is too hard, so I just won't for X and Y reasons" while folks order Uber eats.
There's a lot I can do by myself. But at the end of the day, someone choosing not to ghost me for a hangout or take the time to get together regularly is a 2-way street. Even pre-pandemic, it's been said people are flakier than ever.
There are systematic reasons to explain this, but on a micro level: "just work harder" is not a solution to friendship.
One could argue that both parents having to work is much more difficult than when one person could support a household. Houses, healthcare and education are objectively much more expensive as well. It's not "victim mindset", it's literal exhaustion because everything is much more expensive. There's also no way to retire vs pensions and other baby boomer offramps.
Life has become increasingly expensive. Safety nets that used to be there, aren’t anymore. We’re surrounded by enshittification. Social divides, and antagonism between social groups are high.
Your contempt for humanity is blinding you to real issues people face every day. Yes, some things have gotten better over the years, but some things have gotten a lot worse.