What we generally know: in the U.S. at least, there’s a sharp decline in religion. Religion definitely isn’t for everyone, but it’s a way of social organization and community building, for sure. By some measure, 75% of American adults don’t really know any of their neighbors. Many white-collar jobs have been working from home, or periodically to often from home, for close to two years now — and service/retail/hospitality/etc. jobs that had to be in-person? Those people are now quitting in droves. There’s also a belief and some research to say that the American notion of family is in decline, with David Brooks arguing during early COVID that “the nuclear family was a mistake.” We also know that Americans, despite generally-OK quality of life comparative to the rest of the world, are largely a bunch of nervous wrecks. And finally, perhaps, we know that social isolation is on the rise — it was before COVID, and it certainly is since COVID. COVID, if anything, made us more insular.
If you look above, then, a number of different institutions and social constructs that kinda “held together” American lives for 50+ years, if not longer, many are in decline.
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