The American Dream convinces people loneliness is normal
english.elpais.com
english.elpais.com
The amount of work that I needed to put in was enormous. It was hard and scary at first. I was a wall-flower. Inviting people I don't know well to do something fun is not a skill that I was born with (quite the opposite). But with all this effort put in, I am finding that after multiple years of effort the value is starting to really pay dividends.
I guess the over-all point that I am making is that the American Dream is that you can live how you want, so if you want community, make that your Dream and go do it. Looking back, I really feel like I am an entrepreneur of friendship, and I think that at the end of my life I am not going to regret it.
I find when I focus on a group, usually it also comes at the expense of focus on the individuals, and the people feel less close. Unless I put a lot of focus on the group over time, then I usually get to know the individuals depthful enough, but not as deep if I had spent that time with just two or three of them instead.
Friends and community are not a zero-sum game. The more interconnected and inter-dependent people are, the more likely that everyone is going to have deep and meaningful relationships.
I used to feel much more like you when I was regularly hanging out with friends almost exclusively 1:1. I thought I was doing that because I was introverted, but realistically I was doing it because I had social anxiety. Looking back, hanging mostly 1:1 made me feel like my friends were more distant because there were so many people I didn't see for months that I always felt like I didn't really know my friends.
I feel similarly though. Social anxiety (though I understand it more now) and hanging out exclusively 1:1. Part of it is maybe I don't put a lot of time towards friends (my best friend I see once a month, the most I will see someone is maybe twice a week) and code a lot instead. Part of it is my friends just end up pretty far flung (one online, the others in person but in a 2 hour radius). I do feel like I know most of my friends well though, even when I don't talk for months. Catching up is fun.
Sometimes I'm happy with it, other times I wish to make more friends but realize it would end up destabilizing what I already have to some extent. Communities feel nice because the don't feel like a particularly "sticky" investment, and the ratio of people to time is greater, but I get less satisfaction from it initially and it takes time to build (I think, hypothesis not well tested).
Would never dream of raising my kids somewhere like SF. If you want community, go somewhere it's valued. Everyone in the big city is a transient, only there to make money and find love before it's time to head for the suburbs.
I might be taking this bit of hyperbole(?) too literally, but while this might be a common trajectory for young professionals, it obviously doesn't cover everyone.
If a smaller town works for you then great, but for most people it’s quite the opposite, or people would not have consistently migrated to cities over the last century. There are real drawbacks to the population density but it affords so many more opportunities for…everything.
My experience of living in small towns (100-20,000) was miserable. Extremely racist, homophobic, xenophobic, conservative, and so forth. Could I find a small town where that’s not an issue? Maybe but they tend to be this way. If you’re already someone who doesn’t fit into most crowds - you’re not always gonna find a welcoming scene in a small town.
My experience of big cities has also not been perfect either and I’ve lived in a few. (500k-8m) But the drawbacks of small towns are mostly gone. They’re replaced with other issues like insane competition on every front. (You’re always competing for someone’s attention and time - regardless of who they are) Cities segregate heavily even if they act like melting pots. The truth is - very little intermixing happens relative to how it should theoretically be. The upside of cities though is that there are likely more pockets of people to find a community to belong to. The downside is that it brings a lot of tribalism and exclusionary behavior. (Thus the segregation)
Overall, the USA sucks. It lacks community because we’ve decided to embrace late stage capitalism and the American identity is centered around getting fucked by the feds and capitalists. It’s no surprise that rich slave owners were writing the original rules the country would be founded on - when viewing how things are now.
Definitely stealing this!
Small towns come with a default community, because everyone knows everyone. It's great if you fit in, and terrible if you don't. Many people move to cities primarily to escape that community.
I don't think I've ever felt as liberated as I did while living in Tokyo, where everybody is a number and if you want to check out for a bit and steer clear of your usual circles, it's easy to do so. At the same time though, for practically anything I could possibly imagine wanting to do, there were people I could seek out to do it with.
In SF, if you seek it there is a strong parent community that feels like the other side of the fence to me - welcoming and inclusive. Everyone has different styles of parenting but we converge on keeping kids safe and supporting their play. The groups are far more diverse ethnically, economically and even politically here and I think that is healthy exposure for kids.
Yes, a few families move out each year but my son has a group of kids he has hung out with since he was 3 (8 now). The kids all go to different schools but as I have learned from people who grew up in SF, kids tend to make cross school connections and friendships pollinate across schools so high school parties can turn into big group hangs.
All this may be easier and more stable in the burbs, but the community/village mindset does exist in SF if you seek it. It's not that there isn't crime and some troubled kids here, but there are some incredible benefits to the city as well.
This may be specific to SF as we have an insanely low kid % in SF (like 5% vs. 14% most other cities).
We need a way to coordinate local mutual aid groups that isn’t just some backwater forum but doesnt just default to a corporate slack or something. I guess Mastodon would be good here?
We just need a way to foster those situations in real life.
The biggest issue I find with things like meetup.com initially there can be alot of talk about meetup, oh how often do you do this, bit weird isn't it, bonding over the mild awkwardness of the situation.
After that you form genuine friendships but then can't be bothered with those conversations anymore and either duck out of the group with your friends or become cliquey within the group.
The people who are always there and enthusiastically meeting new people every single week for years I always find a little odd and struggle to form a genuine deep connection with, because they're doing the surface level stuff on auto pilot and you have to regularly do it too if you're going to spend alot of time with them (because they're doing it with others even if not you).
It's an interesting situation to navigate and I understand why some struggle or don't bother.
It's been hard to make new friends - after moving to a new city and remote working.
I have not tried as hard as you did, but I am inspired by your post!
love that for u. where do i invest?
The old Cowboy was based on self-reliance, he was not a loner because he couldn't connect with people, but because his adventures lead him far beyond the spacial confines of society. He was a master of his element but felt at peace and integrated with nature.
The modern loneliness is born out of o alienation, learned hopelessness, lack of concrete agency on one's life, and extreme subjection of the individual to an all-encompassing (some could say even totalitarian) social-economic-cultural system that gives him no other choice than being a loner. Where the cowboy choose to be left alone when he wanted, the modern loner just can't find a place to be him/herself in modern society. It is the tragedy of utter powerlessness.
And it is kind of ironic that this comes from El Pais, because for all the external appearance of happiness and permanent joy that seems to characterize spain for a tourist, Spanish society is also extremely atomized, and behind the facade of an easy life, most upper and middle-class Spaniards I've met there seemed to live a very artificial lifes devoid of any long term meaning or sense of transcendence.
Source: me. The trope of the hero, the power of will and life as a personal and individual journey is widespread in American culture and its cultural exports (Hollywood, music, etc). Also very widespread, the idea of personal sacrifice to achieve something greater than oneself, and linking masculinity with self-determination, ruggedness, independence and self-made success.
All of these, IMO, are related to the lone cowboy trope. The old lone cowboy is still today considered "sexy". Loneliness is still considered masculine; if you picture a "chad", they're not living with roommates, much less with their parents— they have with their own ability been able to amass economic success to rent a one bedroom and live alone.
I'm from a country where it's not the norm that people move to another city for college, or leave their parent's home at 18. I went to study to the USA, where it was either assumed, or the goal. Of course you're moving out at 18, and trying to land at a college considering as top priority your story of personal challenge and protagonist-style achievement. A last priority tends to be being close to family. Many try to avoid it.
Same work-wise. You go where the best career prospects are, or where you think it'd be "cool" to live. Often, further down the list of priorities is being close to your family, or sticking with your friends.
I'd call this the opposite to "lacking agency on one's life". It's the opposite, you're told you've got complete agency of your life, and if you let others influence it away from maximizing your "success", you're wasting it for the sake of others. I do agree with the idea that this is "extreme subjection of the individual to an all-encompassing social-economic-cultural system" though— one that whose idealization of individualism gave us the lone cowboy trope, and in turn feeds off it.
It's not though, is it? Given that we in the United States need to earn money for everything rather than have meaningful social welfare programs means that our agency is simply "earn the most amount of money so maybe you can have a few years of peace in your 80s." which I think is the opposite of meaningful agency of one's own life.
A real cowboy was just a guy whose job was managing cattle and moving it around as needed, not an adventurer.
i think it might be argued that your idea of what an adventurer has to look like is coined by hollywood such that it has to be a guy who does all sorts of crazy things - which a simple historic cowboy didn't do of course - while otoh this mundane life of a cowboy was by all means pretty adventurous at least by today's standards and that on a daily basis.
I hate to be boring enough to ask for citations, but this is a case where we really need them. It reads like something written by a non-American.
In most of American history, people lived close to their families. Certainly in smaller towns, they did. Once there were big cities, it became more common for someone to move away from the family and go to one, but that certainly had nothing whatever to do with "spreading out with impunity over a vast, sometimes outsized landscape." People who "spread out" to the frontier nearly always brought a spouse with them, and often kids as well.
Recently, there certainly has been an increase in one-person households:
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2019/comm/one-...
but even in 1969, it was only 16.9%. I would bet that in the time of The Searchers it was way, way less.
And mind you, if you look at my history here you'll see lots of comments critical of American and especially its foreign policy. But this kind of stereotyping is basically wrong.
They had teams of real people that they had to work with and trust along with their horses and the cows themselves.
Even homesteaders would typically pull together for building, digging, playing, dancing, harvesting and more. The west was colonized by people with active social lives working together and depending on each other.
And many of them weren't even white - "buckaroo" is a corruption of the Spanish vaquero. But you wouldn't know any of that from any American cowboy movie or tv show.
So don't escape them. Go to therapy and work out why going home to your family is driving you crazy. (Hint: it's not a lack of office banter)
And thematically, it doesn't even apply to Superman or many superhero stories (maybe the Hulk.) Superman lives in Metropolis. Batman lives in Gotham. Spider Man is a quintessentially New York hero, he's a landmark. These heroes are all part of their specific communities.
I'd argue that American culture (and culture worldwide) is actually for almost a hundred years mostly formed by movies and movie tropes.
> These heroes are all part of their specific communities.
None of those heroes are a part of those communities you mention. Only their public personas are. Then they disguise and become those heroes.
That concept of staying at the end of the movie would in this regard translate to a hero unveiling his identity and still be the hero. Never happens.
Also OP is specifically writing about the _cowboy_-hero. Which is anyway a different category than the super hero. What they have in common though is the loneliness that OP also talks about. Superheros also always complain about that and their urges to reveal who they "really" are.
Very insightful.
> They need to leave at the end of the story.
If the hero would stay he would no longer be a hero. Movies are about dreams. Men watch cowboy movies because they want to be like cowboys. They don't want to watch a heroic cowboy turning into a devoted husband.
A couple PhDs don't know what you need. They can tell you to focus on friendships, but you'd probably work less, and they don't know what your life would be like if you had less money and for example couldn't afford a car, or if you became disconnected from your work friends.
In general if you have a strong work ethic at something, even if it's working toward the American Dream, you're probably doing exactly what you need to be doing. The solution isn't to get distracted by lifestyle articles and try to go foraging for friends in a cliche way, the solution is to get better at what you're working on. Sometimes that means finding a new path that fills the same void, but you're going to have a hard time until that void is filled.
Usually you'll find friendships fall into place when your life is in order and has clearer direction because you find like-minded people.
So many (most?) Americans want a "homestead". It's why it's illegal to build anything but single-family homes ("SFHs") in the vast majority of the country. The automobile was about the worst thing to happen here because it enabled this suburban expansion.
Mixed-use and higher density living fell by the wayside. People live in their SFH bubbles. The car allows you to travel in a bubble, ignorant of, oblivious to and disconnected from the world around you. Living in a city forces you to deal with people in a way most Americans don't have to and don't want to. That interaction leads to empathy and that lack of empathy is such a huge problem today.
While I'm a big fan of remote work wherever possible, I think it'll actually make this worse because a bunch of people who are forced to deal with other people will be able to move to 15 acres in the middle of Tennessee and never have to deal with anyone outside of their family ever again.
We have no so-called "third places" in this environment. Society is utterly car dependent, which is particularly bad for the elderly, poor, disabled and children as being unable to drive is severely limiting.
If that wasn't bad enough, we're making this worse by making housing a commodity. Successive governments seek to make sure housing prices only go up to the point where increasingly more people simply cannot afford a roof over their heads. Thus begins a cycle of living in their cars before finally losing their cars and becoming truly homeless. It is unbelievably shortsighted and cruel.
The less I engage with America's consumerist mass media society, the less lonely I feel. I felt more lonely when I watched TV, listened to the news, read the paper, scrolled through social media. Everywhere there was a reminder of the life I'm not living, stuff I don't have, other people's lives I'm not a part of, and of course, impending doom.
I disconnected from all of that and moved to the woods. 2 years later, I've never felt less lonely. I am so constantly busy with gardening, composting, cooking, chores, repairs, building things, fishing, hiking, paddling, that I barely have time to watch a show or check my phone. I feel no existential angst, no FOMO. It never crosses my mind that there's something I'm missing out on. I'm busier than I've ever been.
Where others might think about politics, buying a new car, which restaurant to go out to, trying to cancel their gym membership, trying to find someone to go on a date with, or who's party they weren't invited to, my biggest concern is the weather. When it's going to rain, what temperature it is, how much sun there is. I guess mice is another big one; trying to figure out how they're getting into the heating ducts, or how to keep them out of my car. And snails; they're devouring my seedlings. So, weather and pests.
I don't really know what loneliness is now. I can always open a window and listen to the birds, watch them go about their lives. I can even engage with them, feeing them, building them a home, calling them. I can dig up my garden bed to plant something new and see all the activity going on underneath. I can check out the plants and make sure they're healthy. Life is everywhere, and I can engage with all of it, any time.
If I had to engage with humanity all the time, yeah, I'd probably get lonely and depressed. But like those who moved out into the wildnerness of the Old West, I have the luxury of not having to be constantly reminded of humanity. "out of sight, out of mind" is true enlightenment.
Today, the wells of purpose have dried up. Economic prosperity feels out of reach for many, social media has turbocharged narcissism, corporations have reduced service workers to automatons, we’ve spent decades ignoring the importance of the family unit and telling people religion is stupid without at least giving them an alternative.
People aren’t lonely, they’re purposeless.
I don't know where they got the idea that Americans "like it that way". American music is full of heart breaking tales of lonesomeness, "so lonesome you could die". Google "lyrics lonesome" turns up "about 7,470,000 results"
America is very sick, and it's not the result of John Wayne movies.
Adopting a toxically individualist stance has made some people rich and powerful, however, and they will do anything to maintain this false consciousness.
The USA has no safety nets. Getting sick could mean going bankrupt if you don't have a job with healthcare. With rents as high as they are in big cities, not having a job quickly drains your bank account. As you said, you need two incomes now.
If you have a family, you might live in the suburbs which makes things worse. Suburbs can often be loneliness machines. Everyone is so spread-out, there's nothing to do except going to someone else's house, and you have to drive to get anywhere.
I don't want people in my house. I want to meet them at a café, a bar, or a restaurant, casually. "Hey, this thing happened at work, let's chat about it over some drinks" shouldn't involve picking whose house we're meeting at, or driving, or a $XX 20 minute + 10 min wait-time Uber, and another one back.
Is there really a difference? In any first world country, society seems to be driven by this, regardless of the safety nets.
"Everyone is so spread-out, there's nothing to do except going to someone else's house, and you have to drive to get anywhere."
This is highly variable. I've lived on suburbs were there were thing to do. It wasn't that spread out, so I could bike places.
"I don't want people in my house."
Perhaps this is part of the problem.
"shouldn't involve picking whose house we're meeting at, or driving, or a $XX 20 minute + 10 min wait-time Uber,"
I think you may be confusing rural for suburb. 20 minutes to get to a bar/cafe/restaurant is not a typical suburban experience.
You're talking about the sociological concept of the "third place" [0] -- not home and not work, but a hangout elsewhere.
The American dream has always been about bringing the family unit up with you as you ascend, because for most of this nation's history, it was impossible to achieve any real success without the help of family members around the home.
You might underestimate how different Europeans feel from each other.
Consider neighboring states California, Oregon, Nevada vs. France, Germany, Spain.
https://apnews.com/article/loneliness-lonely-alone-surgeon-g...
Actual author:
https://www.google.com/search?q=TED+ANTHONY
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This is a strange article. It reads like propaganda designed to demoralize and denigrate.
"“Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it ... throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”"
&
"In the age before democracy, for better and for worse, “People weren’t lonely. They were tied up in a web of connections. And in many countries that’s more true than it was in the United States,” says Colin Woodard, director of the Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Woodard
Now Colin is another author, but just a bit of googling and I'm pretty sure the Associated Press is misusing his words - note Colin actually said in this completely contextless quote "more true than it was in the United States". So apparently the dreaded disease of "democracy" (or wait, I thought it was the "American Dream") had not prevented "communities" in USA. Heck, calling UTAH and the "community" of Mormons, among a large number of such communities in the dreaded US of A. Anyway, maybe someone should ping Colin and ask him: did you really say that Democracy aka "the American Dream" was a cause of breaking of community in the US?
So, dear reader, please note that "American Dream" == "democracy", And that "dream" (abhorant to 'un-lonely' "Old World aristocracies") is the cause of your modern malaise. (Much more correlated with economic regime than political regime, imo.)
Now the question presents itself: Just how did these misguided Americans with their "dream" of "democracy" make it from 19th to 21st century? Apparently we were caught in the spell of "a premise based on myths" and simply didn't realize we got it so wrong! Thank you AP and Ted for clearing this up for us.
Alienation & loneliness are symptoms of modernity, not "individualism". Representative democracy actually promotes creation of elective communities -- note how the designated binary teams of "red" and "blue" factions in US cling to one another .. -- whereas "Old World aristocracies" were communities of blood and soil.
Has AP gone fascist or something?
It's fascinating to study these people exert so much combined effort for complete failure. By now you'd expect some of these foolish people to give it up, but they keep writing fan fiction in the hopes of getting enough people to listen to them that they'll "revolt" as they claim.
> in the hopes of getting enough people to listen to them that they'll "revolt" as they claim.
Like, ever. Not even in January.
It is absolutely bonkers that we've gotten to the point where cheating on your taxes can be viewed as a virtue.
We're not getting this message from Marlboro ads or magazine articles alone - your boss, your coworkers, your friends - a decent number of these folks will reinforce the message.
The slogan was, "No taxation without representation."
Loneliness and individualism are not the same. Loneliness has other causes, like eroding the idea of family, court system that punishes marriage (at 50% divorce rate), promiscuity (most apps like Tinder are used for non-committal flings), the gender wars (a lot of gas was poured in the last 10 years on that fire), unrealistic expectations of people from partners, moral decay reducing trust in friends, etc.
The causes of loneliness in particular are more hard to trace - culture definitely drive a fair amount of that but we're also dealing with far more isolating technological factors - I don't feel particularly qualified to comment on that portion so I'll just leave it at that.
1. https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/60868250060...
As for loneliness, my generation and part of the world (Eastern Europe) does not encounter it. I see it in the newer generations, for example people around 20 years old are extremely lonely even here compared to my generation or my parents' generation, but the decline started with my parents, it was fairly small in mine and jumped dramatically in the past 10 years. Looking at the causes, I found the list that I enumerated earlier.