it takes time to forge social bonds between people especially these days as everyone is so closed off and guarded.
This is probably a controversial take, and may only be a thing that is cared about by me; but I do honestly think that people over-valuing their individuality is a contributing factor to this. If you are an atomized autonomous subject, and you see that as a good thing, then ultimately anybody trying to engage with you without your prior permission (even if that engagement is fundamentally trivial) is to some degree or another, suspect. After all if you form social relationships with other people then they might come to expect things from you, which we understand to be an impingement on our freedom these days.
This may be true to some degree, but I think it's probably more that we have been trained by experience to not expect material reciprocation from others by society that we look at any offer of such as suspicious. I know that as I have slowly gained more deep adult friendships I find myself more willing to risk extending myself in a tangible way to other people. I personally try and avoid hypotheses that center cultural or ideological change, not that they cant be real thing, only that it is inherently centering a thing that cant really be quantified. Like how do you quantify "cultural individuality" you can quantify something like "number of reciprocal relationships" among a cohort of people, and for what I have seen for American society that number is quite low.
I will admit that I don't know as though I have the answers to all this, and a lot of my pontifications are probably built in large parts around motivated reasoning & :brainworms:.
Even so, I think that there's a potentiality that what you're saying about the simple fact of being more socially connected causing you to be more pro-social in how you engage with others, and what I'm saying about how the way we think about ourselves as persons could effect our willingness to even engage with others on a social basis; I think that in some ways there's a potentiality that these could be mutually reinforcing phenomena.
Admittedly I don't want to overcommit to anything though, unless it ends up being wrong.
This is probably a controversial take, and may only be a thing that is cared about by me; but I do honestly think that people over-valuing their individuality is a contributing factor to this. If you are an atomized autonomous subject, and you see that as a good thing, then ultimately anybody trying to engage with you without your prior permission (even if that engagement is fundamentally trivial) is to some degree or another, suspect. After all if you form social relationships with other people then they might come to expect things from you, which we understand to be an impingement on our freedom these days.
This may be true to some degree, but I think it's probably more that we have been trained by experience to not expect material reciprocation from others by society that we look at any offer of such as suspicious. I know that as I have slowly gained more deep adult friendships I find myself more willing to risk extending myself in a tangible way to other people. I personally try and avoid hypotheses that center cultural or ideological change, not that they cant be real thing, only that it is inherently centering a thing that cant really be quantified. Like how do you quantify "cultural individuality" you can quantify something like "number of reciprocal relationships" among a cohort of people, and for what I have seen for American society that number is quite low.
I will admit that I don't know as though I have the answers to all this, and a lot of my pontifications are probably built in large parts around motivated reasoning & :brainworms:.
Even so, I think that there's a potentiality that what you're saying about the simple fact of being more socially connected causing you to be more pro-social in how you engage with others, and what I'm saying about how the way we think about ourselves as persons could effect our willingness to even engage with others on a social basis; I think that in some ways there's a potentiality that these could be mutually reinforcing phenomena.
Admittedly I don't want to overcommit to anything though, unless it ends up being wrong.