https://www.salon.com/2022/11/06/why-are-so-many-young-people-are-having-less-and-fewer-friendships/

[F]ar-right figures [...] have painted this phenomenon as a crisis of masculinity (even though under-35 women seem to having equally little sex).

Nearly 60 years ago, C. Wright Mills encouraged that we understand this kind of aggregated social data not as the result of personal failings, but as public issues that can be explained by looking to larger historical and structural relationships. When we look at other data points like the graph below, we find that it is not merely sexual relationships that are on the decline, but also friendships. This, from a sociological standpoint, reveals that there is something larger going on here. Untangling it means we must look at the at the larger economic, cultural, and political changes.

[A] bleak outlook brought on by economic conditions, changing social norms as a result of new communications technologies, and just simply feeling as though one doesn't have enough time to invest in their personal relationships. Thus, if we really do see this as a serious issue, then we need to make changes at a variety of levels.

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    It really does, though. It's just capitalism. You offshored all your industry to increase profits? Great, all the working class neighborhoods are gone, and with them the bowling clubs, the social clubs, the dive bars, the family restaurants, the family friendly events in the parks, the amateur theater group, the men's choir, the baseball league, the boy scouts, all the things that relied on people living in one place their entire lives and having steady income.

    Now everyone's poor and scattered to the winds, people have to move every two or three years chasing work or fleeing rent increases.

    Suburban sprawl and NIMBYs and YIMBYs and foreign landlords and investment bank landlords all make it worse by forcing more sprawl and making cities too expensive for working class people.

    It's all just capitalism. Turning people in to interchangeable cogs in the vast capitalist machine destroys the things that make them human, and after forty years of that in the US things have started to completely unravel. All the bits of culture and society that survived offshoring and inflation and wage suppression can't keep it together anymore. There's not enough disposable income, there's not enough stability to build community or meet your neighbors.