They had teams of real people that they had to work with and trust along with their horses and the cows themselves.
Even homesteaders would typically pull together for building, digging, playing, dancing, harvesting and more. The west was colonized by people with active social lives working together and depending on each other.
Yeah, the modern idea of the frontiersman as a rugged individualist who answered to no law but God in his heart and the gun at his hip is a fantasy, like the noble knight or honorable samurai. Actual cowboys weren't nomads because their fierce independent spirit couldn't be tamed by society and its rules, but because their job was moving herds of cattle from place to place and of course they didn't do it alone.
And many of them weren't even white - "buckaroo" is a corruption of the Spanish vaquero. But you wouldn't know any of that from any American cowboy movie or tv show.
I spend so much of my time intentionally trying to cultivate community. In some respects, it is the over-arching theme of my adult life. I find community is very hard to come by so if I have to be the one to make it, so be it. I pay a pretty penny to be a member of a coworking space so I don't spend my workday alone. Three times per week I go to regularly-scheduled events (a game night, running club, and roller-skating night). I'm every week I try to coordinate events between friends that I have made through these groups. I've learned to be an even planner, match maker, (second rate) therapist, baby sitter, and referee. I definitely spend more mental cycles on my friends than I do on work.
The amount of work that I needed to put in was enormous. It was hard and scary at first. I was a wall-flower. Inviting people I don't know well to do something fun is not a skill that I was born with (quite the opposite). But with all this effort put in, I am finding that after multiple years of effort the value is starting to really pay dividends.
I guess the over-all point that I am making is that the American Dream is that you can live how you want, so if you want community, make that your Dream and go do it. Looking back, I really feel like I am an entrepreneur of friendship, and I think that at the end of my life I am not going to regret it.
Do you ever struggle with giving more time to specific friendships/relationships you want to cultivate more, at the expense of others?
I find when I focus on a group, usually it also comes at the expense of focus on the individuals, and the people feel less close. Unless I put a lot of focus on the group over time, then I usually get to know the individuals depthful enough, but not as deep if I had spent that time with just two or three of them instead.
The best part about introducing your friends to each other is that then they can hang out with each other without you having to do anything at all! I definitely have some close friends I expect to see multiple times per week. Others I'm perfectly happy to see once per month. Others who have moved away and I won't see until I visit their city.
Friends and community are not a zero-sum game. The more interconnected and inter-dependent people are, the more likely that everyone is going to have deep and meaningful relationships.
I used to feel much more like you when I was regularly hanging out with friends almost exclusively 1:1. I thought I was doing that because I was introverted, but realistically I was doing it because I had social anxiety. Looking back, hanging mostly 1:1 made me feel like my friends were more distant because there were so many people I didn't see for months that I always felt like I didn't really know my friends.
Interesting, I can see how interconnectedness could make everything feel deeper. Experiences would be a shorter distance for everyone in the community. It echos something I've discussed with my therapist I think as well.
I feel similarly though. Social anxiety (though I understand it more now) and hanging out exclusively 1:1. Part of it is maybe I don't put a lot of time towards friends (my best friend I see once a month, the most I will see someone is maybe twice a week) and code a lot instead. Part of it is my friends just end up pretty far flung (one online, the others in person but in a 2 hour radius). I do feel like I know most of my friends well though, even when I don't talk for months. Catching up is fun.
Sometimes I'm happy with it, other times I wish to make more friends but realize it would end up destabilizing what I already have to some extent. Communities feel nice because the don't feel like a particularly "sticky" investment, and the ratio of people to time is greater, but I get less satisfaction from it initially and it takes time to build (I think, hypothesis not well tested).
Greatest decision I ever made was getting a remote gig, leaving the big city, and moving to a small town. There is enough going on here to keep busy, and everyone knows eachother.
Would never dream of raising my kids somewhere like SF. If you want community, go somewhere it's valued. Everyone in the big city is a transient, only there to make money and find love before it's time to head for the suburbs.
> Everyone in the big city is a transient, only there to make money and find love before it's time to head for the suburbs.
I might be taking this bit of hyperbole(?) too literally, but while this might be a common trajectory for young professionals, it obviously doesn't cover everyone.
This works unless you can't find a large enough group of people that share your goals, values, etc. Those are the people that end up staying in cities regardless, and there are plenty of active communities for those folks.
I live in a mid-sized US city and it’s hell. Seven years in, my friend group is small - but present - and there are very few activities I enjoy. It is a sleepy kind of place. Community here forms in small pockets of people who have known each other their entire lives and are not welcoming to newcomers. I have eyed a move to SF and when I last traveled there my Airbnb host commented, “this is where you come to find community.”
If a smaller town works for you then great, but for most people it’s quite the opposite, or people would not have consistently migrated to cities over the last century. There are real drawbacks to the population density but it affords so many more opportunities for…everything.
The biggest issue is that community doesn’t always find you wherever you are. You can be outgoing, well liked, and so forth but sometimes wherever you live just isn’t going to work. We have a finite lifespan - so we can’t try every sized city and multiples of each.
My experience of living in small towns (100-20,000) was miserable. Extremely racist, homophobic, xenophobic, conservative, and so forth. Could I find a small town where that’s not an issue? Maybe but they tend to be this way. If you’re already someone who doesn’t fit into most crowds - you’re not always gonna find a welcoming scene in a small town.
My experience of big cities has also not been perfect either and I’ve lived in a few. (500k-8m) But the drawbacks of small towns are mostly gone. They’re replaced with other issues like insane competition on every front. (You’re always competing for someone’s attention and time - regardless of who they are) Cities segregate heavily even if they act like melting pots. The truth is - very little intermixing happens relative to how it should theoretically be. The upside of cities though is that there are likely more pockets of people to find a community to belong to. The downside is that it brings a lot of tribalism and exclusionary behavior. (Thus the segregation)
Overall, the USA sucks. It lacks community because we’ve decided to embrace late stage capitalism and the American identity is centered around getting fucked by the feds and capitalists. It’s no surprise that rich slave owners were writing the original rules the country would be founded on - when viewing how things are now.
Experiences certainly differ! My family recently moved away from a small town, back to the heart of a big coastal city, in part because we were all lonely there; everyone in town may know each other, but the culture there was uncomfortably different from ours, and it was difficult to make friends. We fit in much better in a big cosmopolitan city, and there's so much more to do here - both for us and for our eleven-year old - that it's easier to find ways of spending time with people.
Cities have traditionally been about two things: opportunities and freedom. For many the freedom is more important of the two. It means the freedom to be anonymous, the freedom to choose your own community, and the freedom to live your own life.
Small towns come with a default community, because everyone knows everyone. It's great if you fit in, and terrible if you don't. Many people move to cities primarily to escape that community.
And to some extent that freedom and opportunity scales with the size of the city.
I don't think I've ever felt as liberated as I did while living in Tokyo, where everybody is a number and if you want to check out for a bit and steer clear of your usual circles, it's easy to do so. At the same time though, for practically anything I could possibly imagine wanting to do, there were people I could seek out to do it with.
Counterpoint: grew up in a small town and now have kids in SF. Moved to the small town before kindergarten and always felt like an outsider there - other kids knew each other because their parents went to school together and my parents invested 0 in socializing me when I was little.
In SF, if you seek it there is a strong parent community that feels like the other side of the fence to me - welcoming and inclusive. Everyone has different styles of parenting but we converge on keeping kids safe and supporting their play. The groups are far more diverse ethnically, economically and even politically here and I think that is healthy exposure for kids.
Yes, a few families move out each year but my son has a group of kids he has hung out with since he was 3 (8 now). The kids all go to different schools but as I have learned from people who grew up in SF, kids tend to make cross school connections and friendships pollinate across schools so high school parties can turn into big group hangs.
All this may be easier and more stable in the burbs, but the community/village mindset does exist in SF if you seek it. It's not that there isn't crime and some troubled kids here, but there are some incredible benefits to the city as well.
This may be specific to SF as we have an insanely low kid % in SF (like 5% vs. 14% most other cities).
You’re not alone so hang in there cause I feel like there’s a wave of others coming!
We need a way to coordinate local mutual aid groups that isn’t just some backwater forum but doesnt just default to a corporate slack or something. I guess Mastodon would be good here?
Love your response to this :) came to the same conclusion. I do think friendships are getting "faster" and community "easier" to build - hopefully the next wave of friendships can be made faster & with fewer mental cycles.
This comment reminded me of how quickly children can become friends. It's funny what we can do when we come to the table without any expectation of one another.
Its not just children. If you travel by yourself you often make friends who 7 days later are your "best friends", just like children.
We just need a way to foster those situations in real life.
The biggest issue I find with things like meetup.com initially there can be alot of talk about meetup, oh how often do you do this, bit weird isn't it, bonding over the mild awkwardness of the situation.
After that you form genuine friendships but then can't be bothered with those conversations anymore and either duck out of the group with your friends or become cliquey within the group.
The people who are always there and enthusiastically meeting new people every single week for years I always find a little odd and struggle to form a genuine deep connection with, because they're doing the surface level stuff on auto pilot and you have to regularly do it too if you're going to spend alot of time with them (because they're doing it with others even if not you).
It's an interesting situation to navigate and I understand why some struggle or don't bother.
Kudos to you for doing it - it's all the more important now that so many of us are WFH.
I took my past social life for granted - one that was built for over a decade and when going into office was normal.
It's been hard to make new friends - after moving to a new city and remote working.
I have not tried as hard as you did, but I am inspired by your post!
I think this is a brilliant and healthy way to look at how to build meaning in modern American life. I came to a similar conclusion a few years back - it’s hard work, but so is everything else worth doing. I’m not particularly good at it though, but hey, always good to have some areas of self-improvement.
This felt like reading my own words. It has been and continues to be an enormous amount of effort to try to foster that sort of community, but truly nothing else I have invested into in my life- save my relationship with my partner- has been worth even a _fraction_ of what my community building efforts have been worth.
The American dream has always been about bringing the family unit up with you as you ascend, because for most of this nation's history, it was impossible to achieve any real success without the help of family members around the home.
That was correct once - but now living with your family is an extremely rare decision. The "cool" thing to do is to move out when you're 18 and occasionally visit your family before moving them into a snazzy retirement home. Co-living is hardly ever portrayed in pop-culture outside of immigrant families where it's usually played up for laughs.
As a gay person that will probably not end up having a traditional 'family unit' in my lifetime, I question whether or not the family is enough to stave off lonliness. I see a lot of nuclear families that spend what I think is a toxic amount of time with each other. To be able to thrive we need to be a part of a larger community, not just codependent on a spouse. Even worse is when I see people hanging all of their hopes and happiness on a child. When a mother says that their child is their best friend, I don't know if I should worry more for the mother or the child.
The modern version of the American dream is an extremely toxic ideology. It promotes such an extreme version of individualism that it's threatening to tear apart all the social safety nets still existent in the US while also glorifying excessive wealth hoarding.
It is absolutely bonkers that we've gotten to the point where cheating on your taxes can be viewed as a virtue.
It appears that way when the richest people in the country are able to avoid them and bribe politicians to use the working class tax dollars to bail them out every time their risky behavior causes problems. When it’s actually used to properly fund public services we spend less money for better services at the end of the day.
It probably started with shareholder value when companies they declared that their only responsibility is to make as much money as possible. This ideology is very appealing to sociopaths so now they dominate.
I suggest that the 'modern toxic version of the American Dream' is defined mostly by people who want to define it as toxic. So you could say that maybe Zuckerburg represents that, which would make it kind of toxic, but I don't think most Americans would ever think he represents the dream. Though I suppose there are fewer visible local community members who are representative of it as role models.
As someone born in the mid-eighties I'd like to say that your statement probably was pretty accurate in the 70s or 80s - but that by the 90s, and especially by the tech bubble, it went fully mainstream. This cultural identity was definitely embraced and promoted by people for selfish reasons, being able to keep people separated and distrustful prevents union formation and social programs... however it was my impression growing up on the east coast that it's the common opinion now.
We're not getting this message from Marlboro ads or magazine articles alone - your boss, your coworkers, your friends - a decent number of these folks will reinforce the message.
I would not characterize protesting taxes due to unfair tax policy the same as cheating taxes to lower how much you contribute to society relative to how much you take.
Extreme individualism does not explain in any way high taxes and redistribution (benefits, food stamps, high tax returns to low income families). Extreme individualism would be low taxes and zero social benefits.
Loneliness and individualism are not the same. Loneliness has other causes, like eroding the idea of family, court system that punishes marriage (at 50% divorce rate), promiscuity (most apps like Tinder are used for non-committal flings), the gender wars (a lot of gas was poured in the last 10 years on that fire), unrealistic expectations of people from partners, moral decay reducing trust in friends, etc.
US taxes are actually currently extremely low - in the 90's the top marginal tax rate dipped below 50% for the first time in five decades and now it's gotten all the way down to 37%[1]. That's just for income and a lot of wealthy individuals end up paying the majority of their taxes as capital gains but the other change that's harder to quantify is that our tax code has slowly become a swiss cheese mess of loopholes and exemptions that drastically lowered the effective tax rate.
The causes of loneliness in particular are more hard to trace - culture definitely drive a fair amount of that but we're also dealing with far more isolating technological factors - I don't feel particularly qualified to comment on that portion so I'll just leave it at that.
US taxes used to be zero most of the existence of US. Compared to most countries, US taxes are high. California has total taxes higher than a few European countries, so when we talk about high taxes this is the context(perspective) for me.
As for loneliness, my generation and part of the world (Eastern Europe) does not encounter it. I see it in the newer generations, for example people around 20 years old are extremely lonely even here compared to my generation or my parents' generation, but the decline started with my parents, it was fairly small in mine and jumped dramatically in the past 10 years. Looking at the causes, I found the list that I enumerated earlier.
Can you please not post in the ideological flamewar style? It leads to lower-quality threads and we're trying to avoid that. We want curious conversation here.
Maybe unpopular opinion but these types of articles exist to make people more dissatisfied and distract them from going after what they need.
A couple PhDs don't know what you need. They can tell you to focus on friendships, but you'd probably work less, and they don't know what your life would be like if you had less money and for example couldn't afford a car, or if you became disconnected from your work friends.
In general if you have a strong work ethic at something, even if it's working toward the American Dream, you're probably doing exactly what you need to be doing. The solution isn't to get distracted by lifestyle articles and try to go foraging for friends in a cliche way, the solution is to get better at what you're working on. Sometimes that means finding a new path that fills the same void, but you're going to have a hard time until that void is filled.
Usually you'll find friendships fall into place when your life is in order and has clearer direction because you find like-minded people.
While I am not a fan of American Exceptionalism, I think this article is more informed by the usual European prejudiced tropes about America than by reality, at least in the parallels between the traditions of rugged individualism from the Old West and the present epidemics of loneliness.
The old Cowboy was based on self-reliance, he was not a loner because he couldn't connect with people, but because his adventures lead him far beyond the spacial confines of society. He was a master of his element but felt at peace and integrated with nature.
The modern loneliness is born out of o alienation, learned hopelessness, lack of concrete agency on one's life, and extreme subjection of the individual to an all-encompassing (some could say even totalitarian) social-economic-cultural system that gives him no other choice than being a loner. Where the cowboy choose to be left alone when he wanted, the modern loner just can't find a place to be him/herself in modern society. It is the tragedy of utter powerlessness.
And it is kind of ironic that this comes from El Pais, because for all the external appearance of happiness and permanent joy that seems to characterize spain for a tourist, Spanish society is also extremely atomized, and behind the facade of an easy life, most upper and middle-class Spaniards I've met there seemed to live a very artificial lifes devoid of any long term meaning or sense of transcendence.
All the American exceptionalism and associated lone hero image was fine and dandy till the west was winning in the global stage.The urban culture got imposed on every other country of the world and in this model of development it was expected people to go as far as needed from their homes and roots in search of prosperity. It was in a way encouraged for decades and at least two to four generations of these countries grew up embracing this urban nuclear family culture and discarding their own culture of joint families and close ties. Now when the western civilization is on the back foot suddenly we are finding new love for community and close social ties. I am sure tomorrow if we find new riches in the mines of Mars and Saturn , the philosophy of the lone warrior will again be encouraged to recruit a new batch of lonesome spacemen for their decade long journeys to these planets.
Nah. Gravity is a real drag. The asteroid belts have it all for almost zero g's, almost like someone already dug it out of the ground and threw it into space. And robots can just tug those around to your nearest habitat/spaceport/planet.
As an American married to a Spaniard who has lived in and spent considerable time in Spain… I’m not sure I totally agree with that take but it does resonate. White collar working life in Spain is a greater slog than people would expect based on a visit or expectations based on general European values. We live in Boston now and are deeply appreciative of both our opportunities and quality of life.
I disagree; I do think the "old cowboy" trope is closely related to today's loneliness epidemic and disagree with the notion that modern loneliness is rooted on the "lack of concrete agency on one's life".
Source: me. The trope of the hero, the power of will and life as a personal and individual journey is widespread in American culture and its cultural exports (Hollywood, music, etc). Also very widespread, the idea of personal sacrifice to achieve something greater than oneself, and linking masculinity with self-determination, ruggedness, independence and self-made success.
All of these, IMO, are related to the lone cowboy trope. The old lone cowboy is still today considered "sexy". Loneliness is still considered masculine; if you picture a "chad", they're not living with roommates, much less with their parents— they have with their own ability been able to amass economic success to rent a one bedroom and live alone.
I'm from a country where it's not the norm that people move to another city for college, or leave their parent's home at 18. I went to study to the USA, where it was either assumed, or the goal. Of course you're moving out at 18, and trying to land at a college considering as top priority your story of personal challenge and protagonist-style achievement. A last priority tends to be being close to family. Many try to avoid it.
Same work-wise. You go where the best career prospects are, or where you think it'd be "cool" to live. Often, further down the list of priorities is being close to your family, or sticking with your friends.
I'd call this the opposite to "lacking agency on one's life". It's the opposite, you're told you've got complete agency of your life, and if you let others influence it away from maximizing your "success", you're wasting it for the sake of others. I do agree with the idea that this is "extreme subjection of the individual to an all-encompassing social-economic-cultural system" though— one that whose idealization of individualism gave us the lone cowboy trope, and in turn feeds off it.
> I'd call this the opposite to "lacking agency on one's life".
It's not though, is it? Given that we in the United States need to earn money for everything rather than have meaningful social welfare programs means that our agency is simply "earn the most amount of money so maybe you can have a few years of peace in your 80s." which I think is the opposite of meaningful agency of one's own life.
In order to have meaningful agency I'd imagine you'd need to have your basic needs met before you move on. So, be born wealthy and you can have all the agency you like in the US. Everyone else gets the illusion of agency.
a guy who's spending a lot of time alone subjected to harsh climate, dangerous animals who is forced to be self-reliant when it comes to mental or physical ailments or crime will either break or become an adventurer.
i think it might be argued that your idea of what an adventurer has to look like is coined by hollywood such that it has to be a guy who does all sorts of crazy things - which a simple historic cowboy didn't do of course - while otoh this mundane life of a cowboy was by all means pretty adventurous at least by today's standards and that on a daily basis.
"the contours of American society — that emphasis on individualism, that spreading out with impunity over a vast, sometimes outsized landscape"
I hate to be boring enough to ask for citations, but this is a case where we really need them. It reads like something written by a non-American.
In most of American history, people lived close to their families. Certainly in smaller towns, they did. Once there were big cities, it became more common for someone to move away from the family and go to one, but that certainly had nothing whatever to do with "spreading out with impunity over a vast, sometimes outsized landscape." People who "spread out" to the frontier nearly always brought a spouse with them, and often kids as well.
Recently, there certainly has been an increase in one-person households:
I am not an American and I don't see things about the American Ethos the same way the author does. Most foreigners who have lived in the USA are far more forgiving of the American society. No, it takes an east coast intelectual born in america to be so critical of American Society.
And mind you, if you look at my history here you'll see lots of comments critical of American and especially its foreign policy. But this kind of stereotyping is basically wrong.
As someone who was born in Latin America, I always find those stereotypes about America funny.
If anything, Americans can't fucking leave you alone for God's sake. They need to smile at you in the street, give you good morning, invite you to their churches, and bring you a pie after you move to the neighborhood.
Ok, this is more of a suburban experience. But this is also quintessential America.
I don't agree with the premises of the article. For me, it is just someone trying to flag the usual ideological banner against individualism by linking it to a real problem.
That's probably a "only non-white person for several blocks" experience, if I had to guess. Behind that "wont leave you alone" is often a sort of racial fetishism or, less sinisterly, a wish to meet new and different people
Not really likely. I came from German and Italian Alpine ancestry. If anything, I am probably more white than many of my former white American neighbors.
The 'American Dream' was that you could have a property/house (small!), maybe a one car, maybe some 'fancy' things like a diswhasher, and probably do that while only one parent was working, and your rights would be protected, you'd have political stability and participatory democracy, rule of law, a sense of national identity, and probably an 'ok retirement' - and you'd be able to do that in your 'community'.
It’s a classic example of a fundamental American tall tale — that of a nation built on notions of individualism, a male-dominated story filled with loners and “rugged individualists” who suck it up, do what needs to be done, ride off into the sunset and like it that way.
I don't know where they got the idea that Americans "like it that way". American music is full of heart breaking tales of lonesomeness, "so lonesome you could die". Google "lyrics lonesome" turns up "about 7,470,000 results"
This has more to do with how vast and rural America is (Europe is 3.5x more densely populated, more homogeneous), in addition to multiculturalism, which isn't inherently bad, but we're seeing discrete populations work themselves into enclaves. Add in the average American spending 5 hours and 24 minutes on their mobile device each day (article says Americans spend 20 mins daily with friends on average ... I think its very safe to say the phone took some of that time away), coupled with divisive media and rampant hedonism, we're gonna get alot more of this. Yes - Americans have an independent streak, but this American Dream/cowboy take is naïve at best.
I am going through something right now mentally as a middle aged man and being alone every day starting at 8:30am and only coming home to the same 3 people (who i love unconditionally) is kind of driving me mad. My professional life prior to covid had me weaving the halls of an office I knew and many of the people there were very special to me. To have none of that these days leaves my mind to be pre-occupied by things hard to escape. I'm ready for a change but I don't know if that involves going back to a 9 to 5 with a commute. I really like the top post on here about creating community and understanding its an investment. I hope others benefit from this as well.
Often in threads about loneliness, especially Ask HN threads about how to connect with people, there are some extremely terse replies to the effect of "Get married; have a family." And while I support doing that 100%, it is not the trivial solution for loneliness or lack of community. Connection to a world outside your house is an extremely important thing.
I struggle with this too. Returning to the office and all that involves (commute, schedule inflexibility) isn't ideal, so I hope that I can keep WFH but find the community aspect with more intentional effort there. But I miss the ease of just getting that from the office environment.
Society is driving loneliness. Look at the demands of school (and after school activities for that college app) and work. Everyone is so busy that it's hard to schedule anything once you have a job, house, family, etc. You need two incomes now, so that's that's a big drain on time when the schedules don't match up.
I agree, though I wouldn't call it society. I'd call it "economy and policy".
The USA has no safety nets. Getting sick could mean going bankrupt if you don't have a job with healthcare. With rents as high as they are in big cities, not having a job quickly drains your bank account. As you said, you need two incomes now.
If you have a family, you might live in the suburbs which makes things worse. Suburbs can often be loneliness machines. Everyone is so spread-out, there's nothing to do except going to someone else's house, and you have to drive to get anywhere.
I don't want people in my house. I want to meet them at a café, a bar, or a restaurant, casually. "Hey, this thing happened at work, let's chat about it over some drinks" shouldn't involve picking whose house we're meeting at, or driving, or a $XX 20 minute + 10 min wait-time Uber, and another one back.
The American cowboy-hero isn't about the hero being lonely. It as about heroes leaving. Wandering strangers, be them cowboys or Superman, sweep in to fix problems and then go away. They do not integrate into the societies they help. They do not take anything from the people they help. They are therefore not a sociological threat to those they help. American society is very segmented, particularly in the mythic world of "small towns" so idolized in fiction. Outsiders are welcome, just not welcome to stay. The American dream is about stability and property rights. Strangers are a threat. They need to leave at the end of the story.
I would blame that motif mostly on the nature of episodic storytelling - books, comics, radio plays, television,etc, than something fundamental about American culture. It's necessary to move the character from one place to the next to tell fully encapsulated stories that can easily be serialized out of order.
And thematically, it doesn't even apply to Superman or many superhero stories (maybe the Hulk.) Superman lives in Metropolis. Batman lives in Gotham. Spider Man is a quintessentially New York hero, he's a landmark. These heroes are all part of their specific communities.
> I would blame that motif mostly on the nature of episodic storytelling - books, comics, radio plays, television,etc, than something fundamental about American culture
I'd argue that American culture (and culture worldwide) is actually for almost a hundred years mostly formed by movies and movie tropes.
> These heroes are all part of their specific communities.
None of those heroes are a part of those communities you mention. Only their public personas are. Then they disguise and become those heroes.
That concept of staying at the end of the movie would in this regard translate to a hero unveiling his identity and still be the hero. Never happens.
Also OP is specifically writing about the _cowboy_-hero. Which is anyway a different category than the super hero. What they have in common though is the loneliness that OP also talks about. Superheros also always complain about that and their urges to reveal who they "really" are.
> Outsiders are welcome, just not welcome to stay.
Very insightful.
> They need to leave at the end of the story.
If the hero would stay he would no longer be a hero. Movies are about dreams. Men watch cowboy movies because they want to be like cowboys. They don't want to watch a heroic cowboy turning into a devoted husband.
Maybe some abstract philosophy from the 19th century isn't the reason that, all of a sudden, people are more lonely and depressed.
The less I engage with America's consumerist mass media society, the less lonely I feel. I felt more lonely when I watched TV, listened to the news, read the paper, scrolled through social media. Everywhere there was a reminder of the life I'm not living, stuff I don't have, other people's lives I'm not a part of, and of course, impending doom.
I disconnected from all of that and moved to the woods. 2 years later, I've never felt less lonely. I am so constantly busy with gardening, composting, cooking, chores, repairs, building things, fishing, hiking, paddling, that I barely have time to watch a show or check my phone. I feel no existential angst, no FOMO. It never crosses my mind that there's something I'm missing out on. I'm busier than I've ever been.
Where others might think about politics, buying a new car, which restaurant to go out to, trying to cancel their gym membership, trying to find someone to go on a date with, or who's party they weren't invited to, my biggest concern is the weather. When it's going to rain, what temperature it is, how much sun there is. I guess mice is another big one; trying to figure out how they're getting into the heating ducts, or how to keep them out of my car. And snails; they're devouring my seedlings. So, weather and pests.
I don't really know what loneliness is now. I can always open a window and listen to the birds, watch them go about their lives. I can even engage with them, feeing them, building them a home, calling them. I can dig up my garden bed to plant something new and see all the activity going on underneath. I can check out the plants and make sure they're healthy. Life is everywhere, and I can engage with all of it, any time.
If I had to engage with humanity all the time, yeah, I'd probably get lonely and depressed. But like those who moved out into the wildnerness of the Old West, I have the luxury of not having to be constantly reminded of humanity. "out of sight, out of mind" is true enlightenment.
This is a strange article. It reads like propaganda designed to demoralize and denigrate.
"“Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it ... throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”"
&
"In the age before democracy, for better and for worse, “People weren’t lonely. They were tied up in a web of connections. And in many countries that’s more true than it was in the United States,” says Colin Woodard, director of the Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy. "
Now Colin is another author, but just a bit of googling and I'm pretty sure the Associated Press is misusing his words - note Colin actually said in this completely contextless quote "more true than it was in the United States". So apparently the dreaded disease of "democracy" (or wait, I thought it was the "American Dream") had not prevented "communities" in USA. Heck, calling UTAH and the "community" of Mormons, among a large number of such communities in the dreaded US of A. Anyway, maybe someone should ping Colin and ask him: did you really say that Democracy aka "the American Dream" was a cause of breaking of community in the US?
So, dear reader, please note that "American Dream" == "democracy", And that "dream" (abhorant to 'un-lonely' "Old World aristocracies") is the cause of your modern malaise. (Much more correlated with economic regime than political regime, imo.)
Now the question presents itself: Just how did these misguided Americans with their "dream" of "democracy" make it from 19th to 21st century? Apparently we were caught in the spell of "a premise based on myths" and simply didn't realize we got it so wrong! Thank you AP and Ted for clearing this up for us.
Alienation & loneliness are symptoms of modernity, not "individualism". Representative democracy actually promotes creation of elective communities -- note how the designated binary teams of "red" and "blue" factions in US cling to one another .. -- whereas "Old World aristocracies" were communities of blood and soil.
I don't think the AP has gone fascist, I think they've gone leftist. This author appears to hate this fictional America they've invented in their mind, something lots of leftists do because they can't stand capitalism having a longevity beyond what their desired system of economic governance could ever achieve. So now it's the next best thing to take it down anyway they can, or steal the resources of America in the hopes of establishing their ideal world.
It's fascinating to study these people exert so much combined effort for complete failure. By now you'd expect some of these foolish people to give it up, but they keep writing fan fiction in the hopes of getting enough people to listen to them that they'll "revolt" as they claim.
One of these days we're going to wake up and realize that the defining characteristic of American society, economy, and politics is toxic individualism. And having named the monster, we can begin addressing it.
Adopting a toxically individualist stance has made some people rich and powerful, however, and they will do anything to maintain this false consciousness.
The ultimate problem is a pervasive lack of meaning in today’s society. The cowboys of the past lived to fulfill a larger purpose: freedom, community service & prosperity, and unity with God.
Today, the wells of purpose have dried up. Economic prosperity feels out of reach for many, social media has turbocharged narcissism, corporations have reduced service workers to automatons, we’ve spent decades ignoring the importance of the family unit and telling people religion is stupid without at least giving them an alternative.
Solitude: A Return to the Self, by Anthony Storr was a good read, but it's been over 15 years, so maybe worth a revisit. I am sociable, but I don't do much socializing. Rollerskating and motorcycles have punctuated my life with social groups and a sense of doing things with a group. I engage with people, but only if it's right there; I don't plan or reach out much. Fortunately, I have older kids, and I have some younger ones too that add all the socialization I could ever want. Family has been the key throughout my life. I do love my solitutude and reading and hiking and looking at stars though. Growing up in Brooklyn in the 60s/70s with street gangs and violence made me stay with my small group of tight friends. I've lived and worked all over the world, but I've never felt compelled to plan, attend, or create anything beyond the day-to-day life and the new MC club I am a member of (and skydiving with my older son for the third time!). Doing stuff.
The American Dream doesn't convince people that loneliness is normal. Social media did that. While I appreciate social media, as it allows me to stay connected to my friends around the world. It doesn't help much with friends locally.
Every culture seems to mythologize a key part of its history and it becomes core to its culture and identity. For the US, its a combination of the American Revolution but, but importantly (IMHO), the Wild West and homesteading by which the US colonized West. It anti-establishment. The American Revolution spirit is part of that mythology. The article mentions this with the "rugged individualist" but doesn't really capture how pervasive that is.
So many (most?) Americans want a "homestead". It's why it's illegal to build anything but single-family homes ("SFHs") in the vast majority of the country. The automobile was about the worst thing to happen here because it enabled this suburban expansion.
Mixed-use and higher density living fell by the wayside. People live in their SFH bubbles. The car allows you to travel in a bubble, ignorant of, oblivious to and disconnected from the world around you. Living in a city forces you to deal with people in a way most Americans don't have to and don't want to. That interaction leads to empathy and that lack of empathy is such a huge problem today.
While I'm a big fan of remote work wherever possible, I think it'll actually make this worse because a bunch of people who are forced to deal with other people will be able to move to 15 acres in the middle of Tennessee and never have to deal with anyone outside of their family ever again.
We have no so-called "third places" in this environment. Society is utterly car dependent, which is particularly bad for the elderly, poor, disabled and children as being unable to drive is severely limiting.
If that wasn't bad enough, we're making this worse by making housing a commodity. Successive governments seek to make sure housing prices only go up to the point where increasingly more people simply cannot afford a roof over their heads. Thus begins a cycle of living in their cars before finally losing their cars and becoming truly homeless. It is unbelievably shortsighted and cruel.
The headline is erroneous and flame worthy. There is without question an issue with loneliness in the world (not just the USl but it has nothing to do with what is actually labeled the"American Dream" (the ability to put in effort and succeed). There are plenty of people who spend time alone without being lonely.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 97.7 ms ] threadThey had teams of real people that they had to work with and trust along with their horses and the cows themselves.
Even homesteaders would typically pull together for building, digging, playing, dancing, harvesting and more. The west was colonized by people with active social lives working together and depending on each other.
And many of them weren't even white - "buckaroo" is a corruption of the Spanish vaquero. But you wouldn't know any of that from any American cowboy movie or tv show.
The amount of work that I needed to put in was enormous. It was hard and scary at first. I was a wall-flower. Inviting people I don't know well to do something fun is not a skill that I was born with (quite the opposite). But with all this effort put in, I am finding that after multiple years of effort the value is starting to really pay dividends.
I guess the over-all point that I am making is that the American Dream is that you can live how you want, so if you want community, make that your Dream and go do it. Looking back, I really feel like I am an entrepreneur of friendship, and I think that at the end of my life I am not going to regret it.
I find when I focus on a group, usually it also comes at the expense of focus on the individuals, and the people feel less close. Unless I put a lot of focus on the group over time, then I usually get to know the individuals depthful enough, but not as deep if I had spent that time with just two or three of them instead.
Friends and community are not a zero-sum game. The more interconnected and inter-dependent people are, the more likely that everyone is going to have deep and meaningful relationships.
I used to feel much more like you when I was regularly hanging out with friends almost exclusively 1:1. I thought I was doing that because I was introverted, but realistically I was doing it because I had social anxiety. Looking back, hanging mostly 1:1 made me feel like my friends were more distant because there were so many people I didn't see for months that I always felt like I didn't really know my friends.
I feel similarly though. Social anxiety (though I understand it more now) and hanging out exclusively 1:1. Part of it is maybe I don't put a lot of time towards friends (my best friend I see once a month, the most I will see someone is maybe twice a week) and code a lot instead. Part of it is my friends just end up pretty far flung (one online, the others in person but in a 2 hour radius). I do feel like I know most of my friends well though, even when I don't talk for months. Catching up is fun.
Sometimes I'm happy with it, other times I wish to make more friends but realize it would end up destabilizing what I already have to some extent. Communities feel nice because the don't feel like a particularly "sticky" investment, and the ratio of people to time is greater, but I get less satisfaction from it initially and it takes time to build (I think, hypothesis not well tested).
Would never dream of raising my kids somewhere like SF. If you want community, go somewhere it's valued. Everyone in the big city is a transient, only there to make money and find love before it's time to head for the suburbs.
I might be taking this bit of hyperbole(?) too literally, but while this might be a common trajectory for young professionals, it obviously doesn't cover everyone.
If a smaller town works for you then great, but for most people it’s quite the opposite, or people would not have consistently migrated to cities over the last century. There are real drawbacks to the population density but it affords so many more opportunities for…everything.
My experience of living in small towns (100-20,000) was miserable. Extremely racist, homophobic, xenophobic, conservative, and so forth. Could I find a small town where that’s not an issue? Maybe but they tend to be this way. If you’re already someone who doesn’t fit into most crowds - you’re not always gonna find a welcoming scene in a small town.
My experience of big cities has also not been perfect either and I’ve lived in a few. (500k-8m) But the drawbacks of small towns are mostly gone. They’re replaced with other issues like insane competition on every front. (You’re always competing for someone’s attention and time - regardless of who they are) Cities segregate heavily even if they act like melting pots. The truth is - very little intermixing happens relative to how it should theoretically be. The upside of cities though is that there are likely more pockets of people to find a community to belong to. The downside is that it brings a lot of tribalism and exclusionary behavior. (Thus the segregation)
Overall, the USA sucks. It lacks community because we’ve decided to embrace late stage capitalism and the American identity is centered around getting fucked by the feds and capitalists. It’s no surprise that rich slave owners were writing the original rules the country would be founded on - when viewing how things are now.
Definitely stealing this!
Small towns come with a default community, because everyone knows everyone. It's great if you fit in, and terrible if you don't. Many people move to cities primarily to escape that community.
I don't think I've ever felt as liberated as I did while living in Tokyo, where everybody is a number and if you want to check out for a bit and steer clear of your usual circles, it's easy to do so. At the same time though, for practically anything I could possibly imagine wanting to do, there were people I could seek out to do it with.
In SF, if you seek it there is a strong parent community that feels like the other side of the fence to me - welcoming and inclusive. Everyone has different styles of parenting but we converge on keeping kids safe and supporting their play. The groups are far more diverse ethnically, economically and even politically here and I think that is healthy exposure for kids.
Yes, a few families move out each year but my son has a group of kids he has hung out with since he was 3 (8 now). The kids all go to different schools but as I have learned from people who grew up in SF, kids tend to make cross school connections and friendships pollinate across schools so high school parties can turn into big group hangs.
All this may be easier and more stable in the burbs, but the community/village mindset does exist in SF if you seek it. It's not that there isn't crime and some troubled kids here, but there are some incredible benefits to the city as well.
This may be specific to SF as we have an insanely low kid % in SF (like 5% vs. 14% most other cities).
We need a way to coordinate local mutual aid groups that isn’t just some backwater forum but doesnt just default to a corporate slack or something. I guess Mastodon would be good here?
We just need a way to foster those situations in real life.
The biggest issue I find with things like meetup.com initially there can be alot of talk about meetup, oh how often do you do this, bit weird isn't it, bonding over the mild awkwardness of the situation.
After that you form genuine friendships but then can't be bothered with those conversations anymore and either duck out of the group with your friends or become cliquey within the group.
The people who are always there and enthusiastically meeting new people every single week for years I always find a little odd and struggle to form a genuine deep connection with, because they're doing the surface level stuff on auto pilot and you have to regularly do it too if you're going to spend alot of time with them (because they're doing it with others even if not you).
It's an interesting situation to navigate and I understand why some struggle or don't bother.
It's been hard to make new friends - after moving to a new city and remote working.
I have not tried as hard as you did, but I am inspired by your post!
love that for u. where do i invest?
The American dream has always been about bringing the family unit up with you as you ascend, because for most of this nation's history, it was impossible to achieve any real success without the help of family members around the home.
It is absolutely bonkers that we've gotten to the point where cheating on your taxes can be viewed as a virtue.
We're not getting this message from Marlboro ads or magazine articles alone - your boss, your coworkers, your friends - a decent number of these folks will reinforce the message.
The slogan was, "No taxation without representation."
Loneliness and individualism are not the same. Loneliness has other causes, like eroding the idea of family, court system that punishes marriage (at 50% divorce rate), promiscuity (most apps like Tinder are used for non-committal flings), the gender wars (a lot of gas was poured in the last 10 years on that fire), unrealistic expectations of people from partners, moral decay reducing trust in friends, etc.
The causes of loneliness in particular are more hard to trace - culture definitely drive a fair amount of that but we're also dealing with far more isolating technological factors - I don't feel particularly qualified to comment on that portion so I'll just leave it at that.
1. https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/60868250060...
As for loneliness, my generation and part of the world (Eastern Europe) does not encounter it. I see it in the newer generations, for example people around 20 years old are extremely lonely even here compared to my generation or my parents' generation, but the decline started with my parents, it was fairly small in mine and jumped dramatically in the past 10 years. Looking at the causes, I found the list that I enumerated earlier.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
A couple PhDs don't know what you need. They can tell you to focus on friendships, but you'd probably work less, and they don't know what your life would be like if you had less money and for example couldn't afford a car, or if you became disconnected from your work friends.
In general if you have a strong work ethic at something, even if it's working toward the American Dream, you're probably doing exactly what you need to be doing. The solution isn't to get distracted by lifestyle articles and try to go foraging for friends in a cliche way, the solution is to get better at what you're working on. Sometimes that means finding a new path that fills the same void, but you're going to have a hard time until that void is filled.
Usually you'll find friendships fall into place when your life is in order and has clearer direction because you find like-minded people.
The old Cowboy was based on self-reliance, he was not a loner because he couldn't connect with people, but because his adventures lead him far beyond the spacial confines of society. He was a master of his element but felt at peace and integrated with nature.
The modern loneliness is born out of o alienation, learned hopelessness, lack of concrete agency on one's life, and extreme subjection of the individual to an all-encompassing (some could say even totalitarian) social-economic-cultural system that gives him no other choice than being a loner. Where the cowboy choose to be left alone when he wanted, the modern loner just can't find a place to be him/herself in modern society. It is the tragedy of utter powerlessness.
And it is kind of ironic that this comes from El Pais, because for all the external appearance of happiness and permanent joy that seems to characterize spain for a tourist, Spanish society is also extremely atomized, and behind the facade of an easy life, most upper and middle-class Spaniards I've met there seemed to live a very artificial lifes devoid of any long term meaning or sense of transcendence.
Source: me. The trope of the hero, the power of will and life as a personal and individual journey is widespread in American culture and its cultural exports (Hollywood, music, etc). Also very widespread, the idea of personal sacrifice to achieve something greater than oneself, and linking masculinity with self-determination, ruggedness, independence and self-made success.
All of these, IMO, are related to the lone cowboy trope. The old lone cowboy is still today considered "sexy". Loneliness is still considered masculine; if you picture a "chad", they're not living with roommates, much less with their parents— they have with their own ability been able to amass economic success to rent a one bedroom and live alone.
I'm from a country where it's not the norm that people move to another city for college, or leave their parent's home at 18. I went to study to the USA, where it was either assumed, or the goal. Of course you're moving out at 18, and trying to land at a college considering as top priority your story of personal challenge and protagonist-style achievement. A last priority tends to be being close to family. Many try to avoid it.
Same work-wise. You go where the best career prospects are, or where you think it'd be "cool" to live. Often, further down the list of priorities is being close to your family, or sticking with your friends.
I'd call this the opposite to "lacking agency on one's life". It's the opposite, you're told you've got complete agency of your life, and if you let others influence it away from maximizing your "success", you're wasting it for the sake of others. I do agree with the idea that this is "extreme subjection of the individual to an all-encompassing social-economic-cultural system" though— one that whose idealization of individualism gave us the lone cowboy trope, and in turn feeds off it.
It's not though, is it? Given that we in the United States need to earn money for everything rather than have meaningful social welfare programs means that our agency is simply "earn the most amount of money so maybe you can have a few years of peace in your 80s." which I think is the opposite of meaningful agency of one's own life.
A real cowboy was just a guy whose job was managing cattle and moving it around as needed, not an adventurer.
i think it might be argued that your idea of what an adventurer has to look like is coined by hollywood such that it has to be a guy who does all sorts of crazy things - which a simple historic cowboy didn't do of course - while otoh this mundane life of a cowboy was by all means pretty adventurous at least by today's standards and that on a daily basis.
I hate to be boring enough to ask for citations, but this is a case where we really need them. It reads like something written by a non-American.
In most of American history, people lived close to their families. Certainly in smaller towns, they did. Once there were big cities, it became more common for someone to move away from the family and go to one, but that certainly had nothing whatever to do with "spreading out with impunity over a vast, sometimes outsized landscape." People who "spread out" to the frontier nearly always brought a spouse with them, and often kids as well.
Recently, there certainly has been an increase in one-person households:
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2019/comm/one-...
but even in 1969, it was only 16.9%. I would bet that in the time of The Searchers it was way, way less.
And mind you, if you look at my history here you'll see lots of comments critical of American and especially its foreign policy. But this kind of stereotyping is basically wrong.
I don't know where they got the idea that Americans "like it that way". American music is full of heart breaking tales of lonesomeness, "so lonesome you could die". Google "lyrics lonesome" turns up "about 7,470,000 results"
You might underestimate how different Europeans feel from each other.
Consider neighboring states California, Oregon, Nevada vs. France, Germany, Spain.
So don't escape them. Go to therapy and work out why going home to your family is driving you crazy. (Hint: it's not a lack of office banter)
The USA has no safety nets. Getting sick could mean going bankrupt if you don't have a job with healthcare. With rents as high as they are in big cities, not having a job quickly drains your bank account. As you said, you need two incomes now.
If you have a family, you might live in the suburbs which makes things worse. Suburbs can often be loneliness machines. Everyone is so spread-out, there's nothing to do except going to someone else's house, and you have to drive to get anywhere.
I don't want people in my house. I want to meet them at a café, a bar, or a restaurant, casually. "Hey, this thing happened at work, let's chat about it over some drinks" shouldn't involve picking whose house we're meeting at, or driving, or a $XX 20 minute + 10 min wait-time Uber, and another one back.
Is there really a difference? In any first world country, society seems to be driven by this, regardless of the safety nets.
"Everyone is so spread-out, there's nothing to do except going to someone else's house, and you have to drive to get anywhere."
This is highly variable. I've lived on suburbs were there were thing to do. It wasn't that spread out, so I could bike places.
"I don't want people in my house."
Perhaps this is part of the problem.
"shouldn't involve picking whose house we're meeting at, or driving, or a $XX 20 minute + 10 min wait-time Uber,"
I think you may be confusing rural for suburb. 20 minutes to get to a bar/cafe/restaurant is not a typical suburban experience.
You're talking about the sociological concept of the "third place" [0] -- not home and not work, but a hangout elsewhere.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place
And thematically, it doesn't even apply to Superman or many superhero stories (maybe the Hulk.) Superman lives in Metropolis. Batman lives in Gotham. Spider Man is a quintessentially New York hero, he's a landmark. These heroes are all part of their specific communities.
I'd argue that American culture (and culture worldwide) is actually for almost a hundred years mostly formed by movies and movie tropes.
> These heroes are all part of their specific communities.
None of those heroes are a part of those communities you mention. Only their public personas are. Then they disguise and become those heroes.
That concept of staying at the end of the movie would in this regard translate to a hero unveiling his identity and still be the hero. Never happens.
Also OP is specifically writing about the _cowboy_-hero. Which is anyway a different category than the super hero. What they have in common though is the loneliness that OP also talks about. Superheros also always complain about that and their urges to reveal who they "really" are.
Very insightful.
> They need to leave at the end of the story.
If the hero would stay he would no longer be a hero. Movies are about dreams. Men watch cowboy movies because they want to be like cowboys. They don't want to watch a heroic cowboy turning into a devoted husband.
The less I engage with America's consumerist mass media society, the less lonely I feel. I felt more lonely when I watched TV, listened to the news, read the paper, scrolled through social media. Everywhere there was a reminder of the life I'm not living, stuff I don't have, other people's lives I'm not a part of, and of course, impending doom.
I disconnected from all of that and moved to the woods. 2 years later, I've never felt less lonely. I am so constantly busy with gardening, composting, cooking, chores, repairs, building things, fishing, hiking, paddling, that I barely have time to watch a show or check my phone. I feel no existential angst, no FOMO. It never crosses my mind that there's something I'm missing out on. I'm busier than I've ever been.
Where others might think about politics, buying a new car, which restaurant to go out to, trying to cancel their gym membership, trying to find someone to go on a date with, or who's party they weren't invited to, my biggest concern is the weather. When it's going to rain, what temperature it is, how much sun there is. I guess mice is another big one; trying to figure out how they're getting into the heating ducts, or how to keep them out of my car. And snails; they're devouring my seedlings. So, weather and pests.
I don't really know what loneliness is now. I can always open a window and listen to the birds, watch them go about their lives. I can even engage with them, feeing them, building them a home, calling them. I can dig up my garden bed to plant something new and see all the activity going on underneath. I can check out the plants and make sure they're healthy. Life is everywhere, and I can engage with all of it, any time.
If I had to engage with humanity all the time, yeah, I'd probably get lonely and depressed. But like those who moved out into the wildnerness of the Old West, I have the luxury of not having to be constantly reminded of humanity. "out of sight, out of mind" is true enlightenment.
https://apnews.com/article/loneliness-lonely-alone-surgeon-g...
Actual author:
https://www.google.com/search?q=TED+ANTHONY
-
This is a strange article. It reads like propaganda designed to demoralize and denigrate.
"“Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it ... throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”"
&
"In the age before democracy, for better and for worse, “People weren’t lonely. They were tied up in a web of connections. And in many countries that’s more true than it was in the United States,” says Colin Woodard, director of the Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Woodard
Now Colin is another author, but just a bit of googling and I'm pretty sure the Associated Press is misusing his words - note Colin actually said in this completely contextless quote "more true than it was in the United States". So apparently the dreaded disease of "democracy" (or wait, I thought it was the "American Dream") had not prevented "communities" in USA. Heck, calling UTAH and the "community" of Mormons, among a large number of such communities in the dreaded US of A. Anyway, maybe someone should ping Colin and ask him: did you really say that Democracy aka "the American Dream" was a cause of breaking of community in the US?
So, dear reader, please note that "American Dream" == "democracy", And that "dream" (abhorant to 'un-lonely' "Old World aristocracies") is the cause of your modern malaise. (Much more correlated with economic regime than political regime, imo.)
Now the question presents itself: Just how did these misguided Americans with their "dream" of "democracy" make it from 19th to 21st century? Apparently we were caught in the spell of "a premise based on myths" and simply didn't realize we got it so wrong! Thank you AP and Ted for clearing this up for us.
Alienation & loneliness are symptoms of modernity, not "individualism". Representative democracy actually promotes creation of elective communities -- note how the designated binary teams of "red" and "blue" factions in US cling to one another .. -- whereas "Old World aristocracies" were communities of blood and soil.
Has AP gone fascist or something?
It's fascinating to study these people exert so much combined effort for complete failure. By now you'd expect some of these foolish people to give it up, but they keep writing fan fiction in the hopes of getting enough people to listen to them that they'll "revolt" as they claim.
> in the hopes of getting enough people to listen to them that they'll "revolt" as they claim.
Like, ever. Not even in January.
Adopting a toxically individualist stance has made some people rich and powerful, however, and they will do anything to maintain this false consciousness.
Today, the wells of purpose have dried up. Economic prosperity feels out of reach for many, social media has turbocharged narcissism, corporations have reduced service workers to automatons, we’ve spent decades ignoring the importance of the family unit and telling people religion is stupid without at least giving them an alternative.
People aren’t lonely, they’re purposeless.
So many (most?) Americans want a "homestead". It's why it's illegal to build anything but single-family homes ("SFHs") in the vast majority of the country. The automobile was about the worst thing to happen here because it enabled this suburban expansion.
Mixed-use and higher density living fell by the wayside. People live in their SFH bubbles. The car allows you to travel in a bubble, ignorant of, oblivious to and disconnected from the world around you. Living in a city forces you to deal with people in a way most Americans don't have to and don't want to. That interaction leads to empathy and that lack of empathy is such a huge problem today.
While I'm a big fan of remote work wherever possible, I think it'll actually make this worse because a bunch of people who are forced to deal with other people will be able to move to 15 acres in the middle of Tennessee and never have to deal with anyone outside of their family ever again.
We have no so-called "third places" in this environment. Society is utterly car dependent, which is particularly bad for the elderly, poor, disabled and children as being unable to drive is severely limiting.
If that wasn't bad enough, we're making this worse by making housing a commodity. Successive governments seek to make sure housing prices only go up to the point where increasingly more people simply cannot afford a roof over their heads. Thus begins a cycle of living in their cars before finally losing their cars and becoming truly homeless. It is unbelievably shortsighted and cruel.