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The reduction of volunteer organizations started long before COVID: "Bowling Alone" was written in 2000, and documents much of the same changes.

The trend has been resistant to any particular link to localized economic ups or downs. Characterizing the 2023-2025 era (at least in the US) as "a time of scarcity" is divorced from any sort of factual reality; there is no quantitative data to support this idea and it seems to mostly be based on social media vibes (hence the oft-commented "vibecession").

One could make a much stronger argument exactly to the opposite: wealthier societies tend to become more individualistic and separated, people choose to live on their own if possible, and in bigger places; large companies have such attractive economics and pay people so much more than small companies do that it is difficult for small organizations to compete for talent.

There are different kinds of scarcity. I remember a time when people would "charge what it's worth" instead of "what they could get". Decency imposed self-restraint on those who were in a position to take advantage of a buyer. It was also the tail-end of the American era of employer-employee loyalty that went both ways. Those who famously violated those norms were looked down on, not admired. The American medical industry has been most visibly effected by this cultural shift, but it's everywhere. Scarcity isn't always about the availability of material goods. By that measure, we're doing better than ever!

Were you born pre-industrial revolution?

There's a line in one of my kids' Bluey books that says "Do you want to win, or do you want the game to continue? Because sometimes you can't have both."

I feel like that's sorta where we are in America. In the glory days of the 50s-70s, people wanted the game to continue - they were willing to sacrifice a little bit of winning for the sake of keeping the system intact. Then starting in the 80s, people gradually started sacrificing the game for the win, doing things that they knew would eventually lead to the collapse of everything so that they could come out on top. This is corrosive. Once it starts becoming apparent, everybody will start sacrificing the system as a whole for their own personal gain, because the system is dead anyway.

I think we're right on the brink of everyone realizing that the system is now dead, and bad things will likely come of it.

I like this framing. There is an analogy with industrialization and pollution, in that the side-effects of industrial production can be safely ignored, unless those effects are cumulative. Social norms function in the same way. There is little harm in a professor kindly giving a passing grade to one undeserving student; when this becomes common, the cumulative effect undermines the value of a college education itself.

Perhaps a more mathematical framing looks to game theory, a la John Nash. In the prisoner's dilemma two equilibrium exist, the "good one" where the prisoners cooperate, and the "bad one" where they both defect. Good and bad is determined by summing the outcome value for both prisoners. Social norms help stay in the "good" equilibrium despite the occasional defection. Once the defectors learn how personally profitable it is to defect, it becomes common practice, the norm changes, and the society as a whole has switched from one equilibrium to the other, and society is, overall, much worse off. The path from good to bad equilibrium is incremental, cumulative, just like pollution. It's less clear to me what the incremental, cumulative path is going the opposite direction.

Game theory is exactly it. A bunch of simulations have shown that in a repeated prisoner's dilemma, the optimal strategy is tit-for-tat, sometimes adding forgiveness. The fact that you will play again incentivizes players to cooperate. But as soon as the game becomes finite (i.e. you can see the end in sight), the optimal strategy becomes "defect", because your opponent also has the same incentives and whoever defects first gets the payoff.

Incidentally this also points to the path from a bad to good equilibrium. You have to throw away the big system and start with a system small enough that the participants will interact repeatedly. This rebuilds trust. Then you have to defend that system from outside influences, or at least carefully control them so they play by the same rules as existing participants. The act of defending your local community also builds trust - arguably [1] post-WW2 U.S. social cohesion was actually generated by the experience of defeating the Axis powers and then getting enmeshed in the Cold War. Finally you can gradually expand the system through carefully controlled immigration and naturalization.

Unfortunately, this probably means that the Internet, globalization, and likely large states like the US/China/Russia are all toast. And as Terence Tao's post here points out, large organizations are usually more efficient than small organizations. That means that as large organizations have outcompeted small organizations, the transition as those large organizations themselves become dysfunctional and disintegrate is going to be wrenching. We're going to lose access to several material conveniences that we take for granted.

[1] https://www.paulgraham.com/re.html

It's interesting to wonder about why norms degrade at scale. Intuition tells me it's because stink-eye doesn't scale. Defectors in a small org pay a price external to the game, aka "reputational damage". But members of large organizations rarely suffer this, because they are strangers, and because "they are just doing their job". A half-formed thought, but perhaps it's half-useful.

When you are the 900 pound gorilla, "reputational damage" is no longer an effective check against bad behavior. This is the exact motivation for the trust-busting movement in the early 20th century. Now the US has regressed and we are in another gilded age.

In the book "The Logic of Collective Action" that's recognized as one of the reasons for why large organizations are unable to produce public goods without setting up some separate, selective incentives for the individuals. When society is composed of mostly large organizations, nothing can be done without either forcing people to do it (government) or using money as an incentive (corporations). In small groups it's possible for the group to act in the best interest of everyone (produce public good) without having any other incentives for the individual, and a part of the reason is the effect on reputation for non-participants.

Maybe this transition to large groups means that it's harder to produce public goods, since producing them now always requires setting up a separate system of incentives, which is hard and can be gamed.

I think this is what you're saying but in different words - larger scale makes people more anonymous which purely benefits selfish behavior (or specifically those who naturally employ it whenever possible).

And by stink-eye people who did this a long time ago I'm sure were just gotten rid of because there are many types of people (though individually rare) the only way to deal with them is to not deal with them.

My personal belief is society is far too naive of extreme selfish personalities and they have infested every aspect of modern society and are actively making others more selfish.

Thank you for your half formed thought :)

This is exactly the main lesson of Finite and Infinite Games. There are finite games, in which the goal is to win, and there are infinite games, in which the goal is to continue playing the game. Using this framing, one can account for quite a large amount of long-term, large-scale problems as breakdowns wherein some participants choose to play formerly infinite games as finite ones, thus crushing their competition but destroying the game itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_and_Infinite_Games

I’d imagine the death of volunteering and civic life has a lot to do with two income households becoming the default. A family that works forty or fifty hours a week has a lot more time to give than one that works eighty to one hundred (don’t forget commuting!)

Additionally, children are expected and virtually required to be supervised 24/7 for the first 14-ish years. Kicking kids out to play like Just William while Mrs Brown goes to the Women's Institute all afternoon is now called neglect and child abuse.

True, part of why we left the US to raise our kids

Part of it was older kids looking after younger ones which just isn't a thing anymore as far as I can tell.

You have to have at least two kids for that, and with a big enough age difference for it to work.

And if it goes wrong you can get prosecuted for that and/or dragged through public infamy. In fact even if it doesn't go wrong you can probably still be reported for it.

Which is presumably a very good thing for child safety, but obviously there are these downstream effects.

Another similar thought was the theory that car seat laws act to cap more families at two children because with three, you can't legally fit both parents and the children into a normal car.

It’s doable with a few specialist car seats but not convenient.

Maybe we should bring back 3 row vehicles. I loved the rear facing back seats in my Volvo wagon

I was thinking more all the kids in the neighborhood. At least that's how it was for me growing up :)

Also the elderly further amplified by the fact that those elderly were younger.

It’s telling that in one generation 13 year olds went from being babysitters to needing them.

> Kicking kids out to play

There's cars everywhere, cities are optimised for them. There's nowhere to kick the kids out to play without the risk of them being run over by a car.

This is why we moved to https://youtu.be/r-TuGAHR78w , where we kick our kids out to play routinely. Sadly it’s the last bastion of sanity in a carbrained world

Not only that but also farmland is heavily industrialised. It's not Farmer Jenkins on a horse or a 1800cc Ferguson tractor any more.

I spent 4 years during and after covid looking for volunteer opportunities. People just weren't using anything. I'll agree with you that many of these groups may be dysfunctional. They seemed to want money (the ones I talked to) not actual people.

Freemasons: what do they even do? I just know a few secretive fat white guys who belong. They're serious about it. They don't talk about it. Why would I join? I have no idea what they do. Not obviously recruiting in my area.

Boy/Girl scouts: I wasn't able to have a kid and so couldn't volunteer here or sports. It's kinda creepy to do so without a kid. Not obviously recruiting in my area.

YMCA/YWCA: this seems like a straight up company these days. Do they even take volunteers? I don't see any recruiting for it.

Kids who code / other code bootcamps: sent multiple emails. All I got back was marketing asking for donations if I even got that. They did like 2 events a year.

I do volunteer EMS/Fire/Ski Patrol... That requires actual training. Groups were obviously recruiting once I had the skills. They need people to help run large events / medical.

I guess the biggest one is "church". But to get into that requires accepting (or pretending to accept, I suppose) the horizontal memetic transfer of the specific denomination.

I go to church every Sunday despite having zero belief in Jesus or God as they describe him. The sermons are socially relevant and thought-provoking, the congregation is caring and fun with cool social events, and the good that they're doing in our community is inspiring.

I encourage HNers to try it! Just mentally replace "God" with "Nature" and "Jesus" with "Me" in every line and you have a good framework for self-reflection and appreciation of the natural world.

Assuming that you belong to something akin to traditional religion, do you not feel that you’re participating in bad faith (pun mostly not intended)?

Others who attend church presumably assume that you share the stated beliefs?

I can say, as a Christian, that I'm not bothered by it. The church is as much for doubters as it is the true believers (and many of us will be both at different seasons of our lives).

Quakers don't demand a belief in the supernatural

> Freemasons: what do they even do? ... Not obviously recruiting in my area.

I'm not a mason, but their motto is "to be one, ask one". You won't see them recruiting, you have to inquire.

The neat thing is that it it doesn't actually take much money to start up a new small organization if you want to. You can accomplish a remarkable amount with relatively little money.

Some friends and I just started a tool library in Central Oregon: https://cotool.org/

There some quite generous community donations of tools (not money) to get started. Startup costs were small, and now a couple weeks after opening we have dozens of members.

It scales nicely because we can just buy more or less new tools. It's very impactful to some people, and once started there's very little recurring expenses.

Your tool library sounds fantastic! Congratulations on your success.

That said, although starting a new organization may not take much money, it does take a lot of wisdom and social capital. I would say that you succeeded at something quite difficult.

When I've sought out volunteer activities in the past, it was usually when my social and personal life were on shaky grounds. In particular, when I was in no shape to start something new the way you did.

I've often heard volunteering recommended as an antidote for loneliness, but as grogenaut observed, this advice can sometimes be tricky to follow in practice.

I used to work for the YMCA as a camp counselor, and also volunteered a few weeks of my time before every summer to get the camp ready. Every volunteer I met was either an employee or former employee, very ocassionally someone who was a camper when they were a kid or a parent of a current camper. The trick is that many of us actually believed in the mission and so were willing to do that, and regarding the camp in particular it came with a community that everyone who stayed loved and wanted to contribute to.

Of course there's a fine line between this attitude and being exploited by your employer for free labor. In this case I think it helped that everyone knew it wasn't a career for most of us. You work for a few summers in college and then you graduate and if you want to stay a part of the community you continue volunteering from time to time.

I am a Catholic, there are lots of Catholic charities around me that offer volunteering; but; the OP talks about big organisations and you cannot really go bigger than Catholic Church so, eh maybe they are right

People's time is conserved, so a couple of questions: 1. What percentage of decline can be attributed to social media purely as a time sink? 2. What percentage of decline can be attributed to increased political polarization encroaching/claiming/colonizing formerly and nominally neutral spaces?

One remarkable counter example in my neck of the woods is the Orthodox Church, which has done extraordinarily well since covid, picking up tons of converts. Of course, people themselves are conserved, too. That growth has come at the expense of protestant churches which in my reckoning sorta stopped being churches during covid. I'd estimate 1/3 of my local congregation is non-Greek converts who seemingly have no intention of learning the language (services regularly run 1.5 to 2 hours, largely in koine Greek)!

> I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good, small organizations are born

Historically at least I think we can find many examples of the opposite, though perhaps these examples I can think are less around social activities and more around aiding business and society.

Many small organizations appeared due to hard times creating real problems that were solved by no one, and they had to step into the void. In the Prairies of Canada where times were very hard farmers and labourers created coop organizations to spread the risk around and help out each other.

For example not too far from me there's a Ukrainian old folks home which is associated with the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians. At one point pre WW2 prior to there being any sort of medicare this organization was a critical part of the social safety net for new Canadians and there would have been branches all across Canada.

After WW2 it was banned during the red scare but even after that when legalized again became much less relevant because its need in society has diminished as genuine social safety nets were created. Now it appears to focus on teaching Ukrainian dance.

> And then when times are bad, small organizations are the first to die, because they lack the economies of scale and financial reserves that allow them to weather a contraction.

Not sure it is bad times which drives this. Plenty of examples in human history of the tendency of humans to form small local support groups when times get tough.

Volunteerism has been on a massive decline my entire life, good decades and bad decades. There is some other force in our current social order which is tearing it apart.

I worry that theres a cyclical nature to it all. When society has smaller organizations, people saw what community organizing looked like, and folks were far more likely to have a hand being leaders simply by virtue of there being so many businesses when they were smaller and more distributed.

What terrifies me is a pocket thesis I have that the local leadership—the local activating & bringing people to a purpose— vanishing is a symptom or symptoms directly coupled to Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century. Capital swallowing up all the wealth & managing the world from the top down means there are way less people with Buck Stops Here responsibility, and that they tend to be in much loftier offices, far more remote and detached from the loved experiences of the business. Capital manages the world from afar now, exacts it's wants and desires via a very long arm of the invisible hand, and it doesn't involve us, doesn't involve humanity anymore.

We humanity don't see the world working before us, and are thrown into the world without much chance to carve a meaningful space out for ourselves. It's all very efficient and the scale of capital enables great things, but it deprived us of the human effort of stumbling through, deprives us of ingenuity's energizing reward of seeing things around us change and improve, seeing people connect through and around our actions. Society at a distance isn't social media & it's parasocial relationships: it's the new megacongolmerated world that left us Bowling Alone in 2000.

MBA-ification of our professional lives erodes the social animal. The less social animal, lacking experience, does not build social and business organizations around themselves. The social environment degraded further, the center cannot hold, we are moored less and less to purpose and each other.

I mostly agree, but is it cyclical? There doesn't seem to be any force pushing back against this social atomization.

Piketty describes at length & with enormous evidence that Capital is cyclically heading one way, but while important & a core cycle turning up the heat on humanity-slowly-boiling-in-the-pot that wasn't really my gist here, which is about how the memetics of human connection and organization replicate (or not).

I see the cycle as one of: corporatism depriving us of organizational experience (power instead trickling top down from often far off far above offices), weakening organizational muscle & maturation of human agency. Resulting in people who don't have the experience to make & run orgs, leaving less orgs, which cuts off the remaining opportunities to participate & organize.

More simply: the less organizing opportunities we have the less people do organize which results in less opportunities still. Contrapositively perhaps, to organize is to non-zero sum grow & developer human agency.

Don't agree - just as an example, the poorest Irish immigrants in NYC were part of Tammany Hall wards. I think technology has reduced the need for economic/political actors to organize via hyper-local blocks.

Agreed. Why ask the local carpenter, or librarian how to do something when it can be Googled or find a YouTube video of it? Communities gathered to solve problems they couldn't solve alone.

We still can't solve them alone (we need big tech), and big tech is preferred because its lower friction. Ex: calling an Uber is often lower friction than asking a friend to pickup your groceries when your car is broken.

> Our kids' co-op preschool went out of business last year

The fact that schools can go "out of business" is incredible. The more I get in contact with everything American, the more left I lean.

Preschool is just daycare with structure, so it costs more. Optional, privately owned. Nice to do 2-3 days a week for young kids to give them more social and learning opportunites. But it’s not public school, it’s usually just a small locally owned business.

And this was a co-op preschool, which is a special variety of private preschool (usually non-profit) where the parents are usually involved in classes with the kids and much of the maintenance of the school itself is handled through volunteerism of member families.

My wife served as treasurer for the penultimate year, saw the writing on the wall, and then turned the position over to someone else to actually wind down the school. The model just doesn't work where we live: it requires a large number of single-income families so that one parent can be full-time involved in the kids' upbringing, and housing prices are such that single-income families cannot afford homes in the area. As a result, their market just evaporated. People just can't do it anymore.

>> I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good

By almost any metric, life in western society is better than ever, you cannot say now times are not good.

From my perspective one of the main reason is the modern internet: people are glued to screens instead of participation in local community.

Why bother to go somewhere if you have everything in your pocket and also on the enormously big tv screen in your room?

> By almost any metric, life in western society is better than ever, you cannot say now times are not good.

Is there a metric for community-oriented participation? It touches exactly on your point, people aren't doing communal things because screens and the internet exist, wouldn't that impact a metric of "good life"?

I feel there are a lot of focus on economy metrics: consumption (prices, assortment of products, etc.), wages, employment but social metrics are lacking. How can we quantify other aspects of life that aren't immediately (or by proxy) measured on economics ones?

There was a wave of less formal topic based community groups when Meetup launched, but COVID + Meetup buyout & price hikes has led to most of them shutting down.

> I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good, small organizations are born, growing out of people's spare time and sense of security in the future. After all, by definition organizations start small. And then when times are bad, small organizations are the first to die, because they lack the economies of scale and financial reserves that allow them to weather a contraction.

I think the biggest flowering of organizations both small and large happened in the post-WWII period. In the US sure that was a very hopeful time. But many of the other belligerents were reduced to rubble and Germany and Japan were occupied by foreign powers. Yet organizations did still sprout in this period of, what we modern people would probably think as, utter despondency. I think there's more to it than just time and security.

I agree that I don't think its security. But I do think its worth looking again at the time aspect. per "bowling alone" we have pretty good signs that this decline has been ongoing since the 1980s. I'm reasonably sure that the 455 minutes per day per capita global media consumption has something to do with it. From TV to the internet, you don't need friends when the friendly person on screen has such exciting adventures.

I think something like only turning on the internet and TV for like a single hour each morning and evening would do so much for society, like you wouldn't believe. Not just encouraging better engagement outside of those times, but also causing you to demand better of the hour you do get, avoiding mindless slop.

Have you ever taken a proper break from all media? Like tv, internet, phones, heck even books. You find yourself suddenly with amazing amounts of time. Some people describe being catastrophically bored but for me I just find that all those little tasks that rack up that seem like too much effort suddenly become approachable and you can check off like 6 and still have time for relaxing in some grass and just kinda chatting with passers by. I really think its that simple.