The Rise Of The Solitaries

Should this concern us, or no?

We live in a weird time where virtually any news headline can spin out — “go viral” — as being indicative that society is teetering on the edge of a cliff, and because we’re all so busy with our various day-to-day bullshit, i.e. Netflix, pointless tasks at work, functional alcoholism, and Costco, we can’t stop and determine whether X-topic or Y-topic is actually relevant. People like to discuss demographic trends in vague, obscure details — mostly because a lot of people don’t know how to correctly analyze data — and so sometimes at a dinner table or a wine mixer, you’ll hear some incorrectly-cited stat on “the youths” or “the fertility” or whatever. This article from The Hill is a good thing to grab for social conversational fodder.

The basic premise of that article is that about 30% of American households are just a single person, which seems to be a record high. If you read further in the article, you’ll learn that it’s only about 13% of peak earning age adults, which is probably a mix of divorced dads, people who never married, and emergent incels. So it’s not as bad as you want to believe, but still: