So this takes a step back from the political stage, but I hope everyone caught this article in the Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
It doesn't come as much of a surprise, really. The American credo of individualism has been around far longer than I have. But articles like this make me wonder if, at some point, our society has taken a wrong turn, and if we have, what we can do to fix it.
The most depressing thought that I've had on this topic is that many of the potential causes for social isolation seem bulletproof: television, suburbia, video games (perhaps a sacred cow in our generation, but I maintain they're problematic...), even the idea of success which causes so many young people to work obscene hours in the name of the green god.
A central question in this issue is happiness- what it takes to be happy. If you're like me, the answer is simple- happiness comes from enjoying your own life and from making life better in a larger community. People cannot really be happy unless they have social connections, because a) at some level we all realize that we're in this together, and whatever I do has an effect on the entire world, and b) humans evolved as a social animals- it's just that simple.
Ideally, our government and our culture would be creating opportunities for the citizenry to be happy, but they're definitely not concerned with making us more social. You could argue that social contacts must not be necessary for happiness, since most Americans still report themselves being happy; I would raise another point, that people often claim that they are happy even when they're not, because they have tried to create a rationale for their lives and to admit that they're not happy is to admit failure.
And it's not necessarily any one group's fault- a lot of the contributing factors to social isolation have evolved somewhat naturally. Suburbia has risen naturally as cities have become overcrowded, leading to long commutes and a breakdown of community connectedness. The popularity of television and video games could either be a cause or an affect of this isolationism, but it's hard to debate that they end up creating a lot of alone time that might otherwise be spent. And lets face it, a lot of time and money gets spent trying to make us watch more of it. It's hard to resist (24 marathon? Cancel my appointments!), but it's also hard to debate that television's prominence in our lives creates much more alone time than need exist. There is more geographical movement today than really ever before- one in four Americans move every year (I should have a source for that, I know, but it was in an article I've read- if someone disputes that claim, I'll try to dig it up), which in a way is good, because it allows more job flexibility, but is bad because of the difficulty in setting up new social webs. It's hard to recreate the social webs that we develop in high school, then in college, then in our first jobs... gradually you realize that many of the people around you already have their own networks and are not really interested in expanding them, and the social framework you have to work in gets limited to bad office Christmas parties and awkward blind dates set up by people you barely know.
I've heard a lot of older people become skeptical about online social networks- facebook and myspace, really. I don't think that these are the problem- I think that they're a symptom. We've become so starved for social interaction that we've turned to computers to give it to us. Now, facebook and myspace do have their uses- I keep mine basically like an address book, so that I can get ahold of people, but if you find interactions on computer networks (or chatrooms, either) satisfying, I'm not sure that you've experienced the real thing. On a side note, I don't mean to be disparaging the Daily Kos community- on this site and others I've found a great source of solidarity; since none of my close friends share my political beliefs, I find it comforting to know that there are others out there like me.
I'll admit that I don't know what to do about this social problem. I can work on my own situation, and I actually do have a great network of friends, but with our societal situation it gets harder and harder to keep them. I think a lot of young people today feel somewhat down, but feel guilty admitting that they're somewhat depressed- after all, this is America, the home of the prosperous, and we're rich and we all should be happy enough with that. Studies have shown that past a certain point, money doesn't make people happier (and that point is lower than you might think- really once you've reached the middle class level, money's marginal utility shrinks dramatically)- we need something else to make us happy, and it's becoming harder to get. Thoreau said that most men live lives of quiet desperation. Was he right? What can we do about it, if he was?
The only solution I have?
More pic-a-nics.
Who's down?