It isn't a culture thing in my experience and it has nothing to do with religion as another user suggested. You can see the same in China where many people are not religious. Or Cuba, people are extremely social there. In the latter case it's by lack of choice. When you have no proper internet access, no money, nothing to watch on TV and nowhere to go for entertainment apart from the town square and your friend's places, it's a no-brainer. So I guess that would be one way to create that experience.
As for China I already see it changing with increasing development. Families are't as big anymore, younger folks all move to the cities for work. The old ones stay behind and are increasingly lonelier. Kids are lonelier too than they used to be. They become less social which increases loneliness of course. It's a vicious cycle.
My idea without having done too much research into it would be encouraging and incentivizing people to return to the villages. It's possible for anyone who can work remotely and those jobs are increasing so it's increasingly viable. Maybe without understanding it, I think many of the lonely people are uprooted. They have nowhere they belong. They just exist but they aren't part of any community.
Btw, this loneliness is also dangerous in another sense because those are the exact targets terror groups and other extremists look for to radicalize online. It's hard to do that with someone with a happy life and good friends they see on a daily basis.
I'm going to be quite honest, but I do believe what holds together the countries I mentioned is their faith, which is Hinduism and Buddhism respectively. And both of these faiths are not widely accepted in the West, but not for reasons most people think. It's a way of life, and requires immense structure to have the support of the citizens who actually live in the said country. And for most of Southeast Asia, it works. It is as clear as the sky above can be.
But as someone already mentioned, what is happening here in the West is definitely making its way in the East towards the new generation. It's phones, it's flashy clothing, materialism. I definitely saw a lot of that too, and many parents I spoke to (which was quite a few over the years) - everyone said the same thing, they're frustrated that the children are going in a direction that bears no fruit for the mind.
I’m not sure if it’s the specific faith that matters. Much of the sense of community being discussed was provided in the West by Christian churches until recently.
Just requires a shared belief and value system of some sort compatible with building communities.
I think this atomization, as well as a lot of other things that are distinctive about the West, came about at least partly through Christianity. For example, consider the "unprecedented inner loneliness" that Weber found in Calvinism.
I had the same exact experience while travelling through Southeast Asia for several months a few years ago.
I came to the same conclusions you did, and I'm glad you were able to condense it in such a way.
It frustrated me though, to see that their youth were losing their old ways though. Of course it came with some benefits, but I saw them everywhere staring at their phone screens and could only feel nostalgic.
I had a similar experience growing up in East Germany, and there it definitely wasn't "faith".
Part of it at least - not sure if I'm qualified to fully analyze it (I'm not) - is how equal we really were. Yes that includes the "rulers". If you look at the house the head of the GDR lived in for decades in the closed-off area for the ruling elites, called Wandlitz, it was nothing special at all. The first journalist who when the wall fell got to report from Wandlitz, a regular GDR citizen, was unimpressed and "not jealous", in his own words. Any craftsman could do better, even in the GDR (I know because my grandfather was one and our house looked better than that of Honecker).
(Yes I know they shot people at the border. That has nothing to do with my point though. - The last time I pointed out that GDR elite at least did not behave like e.g. Ceaușescu in Romania or Putin now and did not try to get rich but actually believed in their mission, somebody complained, but that they used deadly force of arms and surveillance to achieve it does not negate that.)
When the wall came down I was in the middle of the three-year education after the initial mandatory ten years, preparation to study, and we found a partner class of equal level in Bavaria and visited one another even before official reunification. We saw a completely different culture there. Some kids drove a BMW they got for birthday, others had little, there was very little cohesion in their class while ours was a wonderful group. Mind you - my class had an extreme variety of people from all over the GDR because we learned a very popular profession. We had a classmate whose parents were diplomats who lived in Western Europe and all over the world and could travel freely, we had children of workers, and of people high or low in some hierarchy, a grand mix. It did not matter! We were all as one and material differences just did not matter at all, they were tiny to begin with, compared to the vast differences (from our PoV) even among the middle class in the West.
For us too visiting others without any preparations was daily normality. Of course, in the GDR we didn't even have phones at home for many people. My own mother had the chance to get a phone because she was important enough in her job, but she didn't want one to avoid getting called at home... so yeah, you just showed up at someone's home and it was normal.
We also didn't have significant existential pressures. Sure, what education and job exactly you wanted took some effort, but it wasn't even remotely as big a deal to get and to keep one, and to find a home, as it is now.
Yes quality and diversity of stuff you can buy and do is many levels above what we could do now, we wanted the wall gone and reunification for a reason. Also, our environment was in a terrible state, West German did a gigantic and remarkable job cleaning it all up. So, when I say what I did above, I certainly don't vote for reinstating that system, but maybe there is something to learn. It's much more stressful now, and it's hard to say why that is and why we couldn't have at least a look at that part of living in the East.
I also remember quite a few community projects. Lots of people simply got together and did stuff. For example, building a wonderful, amazing and today impossible (too unsafe!) playground, two small valleys with a hundred meters each of various wooden forts and many installations like wooden trains. Or they build several hundred garages together, my father went there too. Or, my grandfather simply spontaneously built a stone wall to support some sandstone wall - on a public stretch of the mountain road. No money was ever involved, nobody got paid. Companies/factories in the area donated machines and materials (I mean, they were people-owned and not private anyway) - serving the people was part of their mission to begin with. All the big companies had to produce some consumer goods too in addition to their normal portfolio, because the GDR was severely lacking those. So, much was born of necessity, but it still had some good parts, the cooperation for example.
It also was much easier to make friends when you went somewhere. I know my parents - certainly not especially gifted in how-to-connect but quite ordinary - easily made friends and even met them later and invited them to visit us at home, and they did, in various vacations. Not just in the GDR, even in Hungary, another East Bloc country, where we went on vacation a few times. It wasn't just once, it was quite a regular occurrence, be it neighbors old and new, or people you just met. For the children it was so easy I don't even need to bother to describe it.
> I'm going to be quite honest, but I do believe what holds together the countries I mentioned is their faith, which is Hinduism and Buddhism respectively
Can you elaborate on how Hinduism makes it better?
"A world gained for Technology is lost for Liberty" (Jean-Marie Straub, France Against the Robots).
"Loneliness without God is sheer madness. At least our ravings end in him, and thus we cure our mind and soul. God is a sort of lightning rod. For God is a good conductor of sorrows and disillusions" (Emil Cioran, Tears and Saints).
America in earlier times was much more community oriented while still being capitalist. But maybe that was tempered by having stronger labor organizations, civic clubs, churches, etc.
It's a wealth thing. You can observe the development live in countries with economies catching up to the more developed countries. The richer societies get in monetary terms the lonelier people get socially. And then depression rises fast.
Note that interestingly this does not affect the elites and mega wealthy as much as regular folks whose more traditional and social lifestyles are disrupted by all the development. The standard pattern would be moving from their rural places where everyone knows each other to a bigger city - in search of riches. Work an office job, live in a concrete box, have fewer spare time, don't really know the neighbors. Work more to pay off the mortgage, because those city properties are expensive. Work more to catch up with rising inflation and prices. Work, work, work...
In the end, yes they might be able to afford a car and iphones and a giant TV and holidays abroad. But all at a cost.
No it's more just an American thing. Greater focus on individualism plus nuclear families being the norm as opposed to multigenerational households.
It's made worse by the fact most households cannot afford expenses without both parents working, so children are naturally being left alone more than previous generations.
Children arw definitely not more alone then before. They are way more supervised then before.
It used to be normal for 6 years old or younger to go to school, Shor or play outside unsupervised. And in poor families both parents frequently needed to work while kids were without adult supervision. Middle and upper class women were stay at home, but their kids could roam around without parents. The helicopter parenting as expectation came in only lately.
"Supervised" does not mean "interacting with someone else", it usually means they're locked in a room with an adult. That adult does not have to be engaging them.
> And in poor families both parents frequently needed to work while kids were without adult supervision.
There may be less strictly "poor" families now than there were before, but there are way less families that can afford hiring a nanny or similar.
That holds for past too. If anything, expectations on parent actively playing with kids, actively teaching them or doing enriching activities are higher. The do spend less time with friends , but it is not because parents are less engaged with them.
The concept of play date is new. Parents were not organizing kids social lives. The need to drive somewhere to even have a chance on meeting someone is new. They used to bike to meet friends or do what they want. There and many changes like that. I am not saying everything is bad. Kids commit less crimes, gets into serious trouble less often. They get pregnant less, they drink less, they smoke and take drugs less. They are safer and are involved in less accidents. They finish the school more often.
All that is good. But it is simply not true that parents would actively engage with kids less all in all.
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My point here is that kids and teenagers are not lonely because parents don't engage with them. They are lonely because peers don't engage with them. Fairly often they just don't live nearby. Or it is not accepted for kids to go visit them without adult having to tag along. Then they become teenagers and people act shocked they ... continue existing the way they have been raised.
There's this saying, "It takes a village to raise a child." I'd say
> The concept of play date
and
> expectations on parent actively playing with kids, actively teaching them or doing enriching activities are higher
are the result of the erosion of such 'villages'. As you imply the way kids hung out in the past was way more ad-hoc and unrestricted by things like travel time. I think ultimately that was because there was a mindset that people didn't have back then, namely one of perfect planning of all outcomes in regards to raising a kid. I think that too is a symptom of not having villages - how do you plan around 20 different near/family members interacting with your kid? You just kind of accepted that "grandma knows best", "auntie knows words", "Jack will be a good influence", etc.
Basically I'd agree that parents might interact more with their kids, with the caveat that it's due to a decrease in engagement overall.
Lol k I'm not going to debate you on this. It wasn't always the case that both parents worked full time outside the house but you can believe whatever you want.
I think we can say that it's not inherent to capitalism, since there are plenty of capitalist countries without the same issues. It seems to be more about the balance that is struck between capitalist efficiency and social wellbeing. The US is heavy on the efficiency and economic output side of the spectrum. That comes with many benefits, but also major drawbacks.
I think it is. It is a tradeoff of capitalism. Capitalism creates competition, and breeds a certain level of mistrust. It demands hyper-individualism. That's the slant of the system, by design. The only solution, as you mentioned, is periodic tempering. And thus the pendulum swings.
