A couple of generations ago in
Not only would they bowl
together, but they were in leagues together. I can still remember seeing my
grandfather and uncle polishing up their bowling balls, putting on that team
jersey and heading out during the week. Bowling leagues were a thing back then.
In the years between 1980 and
1993, people stopped doing that. League membership dropped 40 percent in that
short period, although bowling itself remained popular.
What’s this got to do with
anything?
A man named Robert Putnam
decided to explore this phenomenon and wrote about the decline of social
belonging in America
He explored a number of
reasons for this decline in what he called "social capital." Busier lives,
changing workplaces, and longer commutes all played a role. Watching television
decreased social capital a great deal. And that was back when there were like
12 channels.
According to Putnam, one of
the side effects of the decline in social capital is less social involvement,
including lower voter turnout, fewer people volunteering and attending church
services and communities losing their sense of shared purpose and belonging.
Putnam published his book in
the year 2000, now a whole generation ago and prior to the stratospheric rise
in social media as a means of communication, Netflix as a ticket to almost
unlimited entertainment, and Tinder as a means to a quick hook-up.
His finding that our tendency
to lose ourselves in television seems even more intense these days. You used to
have to wait to see what would happen on your favorite show until the next
week. Now you can watch the whole season in a day.
And some might argue that
social media might help us stay connected, but does it really? I suspect a true
scan of an average person’s ‘friend” list on any of the major sites would
reveal they don’t get together with most of the people on that list.
And sure you can grab a date
on Tinder pretty quickly if you’re a semi-good looking person.
But I’ve had far too many
people in my office with broken hearts and much worse things than that as a
result of fleeting sexual relationships, to know that’s also not a great fix a
lot of the time.
The result is we are in many
ways still feeling disconnected. If you want to see how bizarre this really
looks, go out to any restaurant and watch a group of friends getting together.
My guess is half of them will be on their phones as opposed to being fully
present with the people they are ACTUALLY there to spend time with.
I can’t help but feel
our lack of connection also has a cost. All the kids I grew up with hung out
together until the street lights came on at dark. We knew every family on the
block (although some were sworn enemies). Getting us inside was actually a
chore. For many parents now, getting kids OUTSIDE is the chore. And this isn’t
simply an American phenomenon either. In the UK
I don’t think a sense of
community is something that you lose overnight. The fact that families don’t
sit down together for dinner nearly as often seems to be one place that it
starts. And in the secondary circle beyond family, we aren’t keeping those
community relationships together either. One-third of Americans have now never
met their next-door neighbors. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2015/08/why-wont-you-be-my-neighbor/401762/
Every time there’s a school
shooting in America
I can’t help but think some
of our problems are related to the lack of community and connection. A sense of
belonging is a powerful need in humans, and when we don’t find that in the traditional sense, we
sometimes look for this belonging in dangerous places such as gangs, online hate
groups, and in the company of other angry people.
Societies don’t lose their
way all at once, but one can’t help but wonder where it is we are evolving when
we don’t prioritize our time to make families and communities a little
stronger. This is the glue that keeps the village running smoothly.
“It takes a village” is
becoming, “it takes a suburb of individual internet stations.”
I wish we would think a
little more about what this might cost.
