It’s interesting to go back to TV shows and movies from even the 1980s and 1990s and see how much bigger people’s social networks were. Like people would have regularly scheduled bridge nights with neighbors and shit like that.
Signed: someone who lived in the 1990 and is living now. Someone who watched shows back then and now. Let me tell you, they are not like a real life at all.
To be fair, those are TV shows and movies...not real life.
I'm saying that using TV and movies as a reference for what real life was like in those times (or any time) may not be the best idea.
Now obviously it is explained in universe (it is a rent controlled flat of Monica’s grandma), and the explanation out of universe is clear too (easier to produce the show on a spacious set, and looks better too). But it would kinda mislead you if you take it to show how a chef and waiter realistically used to live in the 90s of NYC.
Every afternoon my grandma played parchís (a Spanish board game) with her neighbors and my aunts. During the winter they instead would knit together.
If not, then being able to more doesn't matter, other than perhaps insinuating that it's everyone's fault for not going.
Maybe "accidental" meetups were more common back then, it came to you rather than the other way around.
It is a regular occurrence on the neighbor text thread for someone to say they are getting a settlers of Catan or ticket to ride game going. I played euchre with my neighbors last week (though admittedly it isn’t regularly scheduled).
My son plays chess with his grandfather and cousins weekly via the internet and my parents have a weekly pinochle game the same way.
I’m a member of a disc golf league that plays weekly and there is a bowling league three nights a week near me. Some friends have a weekly d&d game.
I’m having trouble thinking how any of this is different than it used to be other than some of it is available to people who are far away from each other via the internet.
What region do you live in, out of curiosity?
It's good to feed into people's agency but it's bad to rely upon it.
People in the past weren't more socially connected because they had more ironclad determination to be more socially connected.
The reality is that there are lot of external factors that mediate the formation and maintenance of communities like the one you have built: physical proximity, the built environment and what activities it supports, availability of less "fruitful"/social pastimes, etc.
People are struggling with this now because these external factors have changed dramatically over the last few decades. A few exceptions here and there (and there are plenty!) does not actually stand up against a well-documented epidemic of loneliness. There is simply no evidence for the implicit claim that this trend is due to people being born with less determination to be socially connected.
There is plenty of evidence that we have built our cities (and especially suburbs) to be socially atomizing, our culture has shifted toward extreme individualism (which, unsurprisingly, atomizes), our media is now hyper-personalized which atomizes our perception of the entire world, we have significantly degraded important social institutions (nothing has filled the vacuum of religion), we increasingly prevent our children from going outside and building their own social networks, we change jobs with increasing frequency, we physically move locations with increasing frequency, so on and so forth.
I’m certainly not arguing that people were more determined to be social in the past and that lonely people should just bootstrap up a community, but people met their neighbors in the past the same way you meet them now, when someone moves in you introduce yourself and invite them over for an activity.
If someone wants to go to church there is certainly nothing stopping them, I’m not religious but my brother is a pastor in a very well attended church.
Sports seem to be more popular than ever!
And Americans are moving less than ever not more.
https://www.rubyhome.com/blog/moving-stats/#:~:text=Current%....
Regarding loneliness, here's a great study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36618547/
...and all these things happened because of profit motives.
My personal pet theory is the explosion of homework and the reduction of opportunities for kids to play together is making people awkward which makes it harder to make new connections.
I'm not sure how to put this respectfully but I think you guys involved in this conversation here are all just extremely out of touch with real problems people have on a day-to-day basis.