[0] free to play
From African village model to the nuclear family is a massive step, made possible by the nation state. Arguably this impoverishes community/extended family life. The most extreme form can regularly be read in the news: somebody found dead in their home, undetected for weeks or months.
But not even that is enough. Even within the scope of the nuclear family are we further individualizing. Each partner in the couple is to be fully economically independent from the other. Note that I'm not suggesting any traditional angle here, I'm purely talking about individualism in general. Even within our very own family, we no longer dare to rely on each other, to be dependent on each other.
If I were to pick a cliche busy urban family, they have very few shared moments. They may not even eat together. They relax on their own individual device, often in separate rooms. And we outsource care for both our young and the old.
We drifted far from our roots.
We seem to function best at tribal scale. Jokes aside, most family units are functional.
Family scales well. Large-enough families invite dysfunction jokes, but they have a shared genetic interest. You can always coerce or compel family to do things like share resources or settle disputes against their own self-interest.
More than a few families together become a community, and this is where the problems start.
We look to colonizing space as the solution to overpopulation and resource depletion. Space is not a forgiving environment.
When water is running low or other critical challenges arise, a colony bound by blood will figure that shit out quicker than the space equivalent of your HOA.
Huh?
It's more about bypassing the politics normally associated with these sorts of situational negotiations-- a failsafe against one (or more) persons holding the rest of the colony hostage.
It is a paternalistic foil to malingering and selfishness.
Technology has enabled governments to grow massively, and law and order and prosperity removed the natural forces that kept communities together. Why put up with any communal norms you don't agree with when the community doesn't provide any additional safety or stability.
The strongest forces that once stood up to governments and markets are no longer relevant, in the West at least. Religion and tribalism are viewed as relics of the past, while the modern individual is naked and unarmed in the face of behemoth governments larger than the largest empires in human history.
I see it in the overreach of law enforcement because they correctly assume they're dealing with isolated individuals. In tribal societies, the tribe itself can stand up to the law. A person in such a society wouldn't be worried about being beaten by police because his family would beat the police.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hajnal_line
There is a lot of evidence that high rates of living with parents south of Hajnal line is largely about sociocultural practices instead of economic conditions, and it goes back centuries, see eg. Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future, by Kevin MacDonald.