The Anti-Social Century

The breakdown of community and public engagement was detailed decades back by Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart (1985). I read when I was a younger professor, and it crept into my classrooms and conversations. Then Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000) confirmed, extended, and expanded the work of Bellah. The verdict was in: Americans were decreasingly engaged in the public sector.

Photo by Bonnie Kittle on Unsplash

Social media, at some level, drew Americans into public engagement. The pandemic, however, has done its damage. In a February essay in The Atlantic by Derek Thompson, “The Anti-Social Century,” Thompson describes a restaurant in which the traffic is for takeouts, so much so the owner had to post a sign on the bar “Bar Seating Closed” so he could make room for the packages awaiting their pick-upper. Thompson’s commentary then observes, “In the past few decades, the sector has shifted from tables to takeaway, a process that accelerated through the pandemic and continued even as the health emergency abated. In 2023, 74 percent of all restaurant traffic came from “off premises” customers—that is, from takeout and delivery—up from 61 percent before COVID, according to the National Restaurant Association.” During Covid Kris and I ordered out from our local favorite restaurants quite often. The restaurant workers began to recognize my voice when I called in the order, and we soon recognized those who trotted from restaurant to our car to deliver our package of food. The Picnic Basket and Milwalky Taco were our top two choices.

Of a necessity Covid forced restaurants to establish side hustles in both takeout and in hiring delivery workers. Covid reshaped America’s social life. As Thompson writes, “The flip side of less dining out is more eating alone. The share of U.S. adults having dinner or drinks with friends on any given night has declined by more than 30 percent in the past 20 years.” Home has become a sanctuary more than it had been, and people feel less safe. OpenTable claims dining alone has increased nearly 30% in the last two years. “Alone” for Thompson means a person is the only one in the room, or with one’s spouse, with a plate of food, a phone, or a computer.

Thompson turns, no surprise here, to home entertainment systems. Kris and I recently went to the theater to watch Wicked. When I booked online I couldn’t tell if the theater was full or totally empty, which may reveal how often I book tickets at a theater. Anyway, it was totally empty when I booked. There were about a dozen in the theater when we watched that fantastic musical. (By the way, I’m not sure I have ever seen the ending of the original The Wizard of Oz, and here’s why: it was a Sunday evening TV show, and about the time it got intense we got dressed up and headed out to our Baptist church’s Sunday evening service. Which at times was just about as intense.) Here’s Thompson’s insight: “Today, the typical American adult buys about three movie tickets a year—and watches almost 19 hours of television, the equivalent of roughly eight movies, on a weekly basis. In entertainment, as in dining, modernity has transformed a ritual of togetherness into an experience of homebound reclusion and even solitude.”

Not all people want to go out to lunch and/or dinner weekly with someone or with others; not all people want to watch a movie at the local theater weekly or even monthly; some have always preferred a quite home life. But, the times, they are achangin’. Bellah first and then Putnam saw it before most.

Symptoms, these are. “Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data, going back to 1965. Between that year and the end of the 20th century, in-person socializing slowly declined. From 2003 to 2023, it plunged by more than 20 percent, according to the American Time Use Survey, an annual study conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.” Covid expanded time alone, time at home, but post-Covid has not decreased that number. It has increased it.

“Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America.” Hence, the title of Thompson’s essay. Loneliness, studies conclude, is not so much the issue as is solitude. Feeling lonely expresses an ache for society; solitudinal happiness reveals the absence of society. “The real problem here, the nature of America’s social crisis, is that most Americans don’t seem to be reacting to the biological cue to spend more time with other people.” When Covid ended loneliness, as measured, decreased significantly. Alone rose slightly.

Here's the big idea: “Over the past few months, I’ve spoken with psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, and technologists about America’s anti-social streak. Although the particulars of these conversations differed, a theme emerged: The individual preference for solitude, scaled up across society and exercised repeatedly over time, is rewiring America’s civic and psychic identity. And the consequences are far-reaching—for our happiness, our communities, our politics, and even our understanding of reality.”

1900-1960 was Social America. Since then, drip by drip, the social life has decreased. Cars, better roads, TVs, and now social media and online entertainment centers instigate the trend. Especially among the youth. “The share of boys and girls who say they meet up with friends almost daily outside school hours has declined by nearly 50 percent since the early 1990s, with the sharpest downturn occurring in the 2010s.” Summarizing a new study by Jonathan Haidt, Thompson writes, “Our lengthy childhood might be evolution’s way of scheduling an extended apprenticeship in social learning through play. The best kind of play is physical, outdoors, with other kids, and unsupervised, allowing children to press the limits of their abilities while figuring out how to manage conflict and tolerate pain. But now young people’s attention is funneled into devices that take them out of their body, denying them the physical-world education they need.”

I close this Substack down with a few more quotations from Thompson:

“In a healthy world, people who spend lots of time alone would feel that ancient biological cue: I’m alone and sad; I should make some plans. But we live in a sideways world, where easy home entertainment, oversharing online, and stunted social skills spark a strangely popular response: I’m alone, anxious, and exhausted; thank God my plans were canceled.”

“All of this time alone, at home, on the phone, is not just affecting us as individuals. It’s making society weaker, meaner, and more delusional.”

“Home-based, phone-based culture has arguably solidified our closest and most distant connections, the inner ring of family and best friends (bound by blood and intimacy) and the outer ring of tribe (linked by shared affinities). But it’s wreaking havoc on the middle ring of “familiar but not intimate” relationships with the people who live around us, which Dunkelman calls the village. “These are your neighbors, the people in your town,” he said. We used to know them well; now we don’t.”

“The village is our best arena for practicing productive disagreement and compromise—in other words, democracy. So it’s no surprise that the erosion of the village has coincided with the emergence of a grotesque style of politics, in which every election feels like an existential quest to vanquish an intramural enemy.”

“A night alone away from a crying baby is one thing. A decade or more of chronic social disconnection is something else entirely. And people who spend more time alone, year after year, become meaningfully less happy.”

“Despite a consumer economy that seems optimized for introverted behavior, we would have happier days, years, and lives if we resisted the undertow of the convenience curse—if we talked with more strangers, belonged to more groups, and left the house for more activities.”