Just when you thought we had more than enough reasons to feel bad about ourselves, along comes a major, multiyear sociological survey to tell us that we Americans don’t have enough friends.
I’m not just talking about acquaintances. I mean a real confidant–a pal, a running buddy, a girlfriend, a wingman, etc.
Almost 1 in 4 Americans has no one to confide in, according to a widely reported study published June 23 in the American Sociological Review by researchers at Duke University and the University of Arizona.
The study is based on face-to-face interviews of 1,467 people conducted in 2004, compared with a similar number of interviews conducted in 1985. Among those who say they do have close friends, the study says the average number of confidants has dropped since 1984 to two from three.
Americans’ social contacts are focusing less on neighbors and more “on the very strong bonds of the nuclear family,” said Lynn Smith-Lovin, a Duke University sociology professor and the survey’s lead author.
Some of us could see this coming as the past decade’s Internet tsunami rolled in. Six years ago, the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society reported that Internet use was causing social isolation. “The more hours people use the Internet, the less time they spend in contact with real human beings,” according to the institute.
Well, as the young folks say, duh! It is a paradox of our Electronic Age that the more we Americans are connected to the world, the less we seem to personally connect with each other. Want a friend? Google up his blog. The Techno Age produces ties that are wider, even global, but weaker.
Yet, long before we logged in to the new Web Age, the old networks of American communities were fraying. Since at least the mid-1960s, Harvard University professor Robert Putnam argued in his 2000 book “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community,” membership has plummeted in PTAs, unions, clubs and, in accordance with his title, bowling leagues. Putnam also reported long-term declines in civic participation, including charity and blood donations and drops as sharp as 60 percent in dinner parties, civic meetings, family suppers and picnics.
Before that, there were classics like David Riesman’s 1950 book, “The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character,” which described the alienating conformity of the new post-war workplace as craftsmen were replaced by organization men. I don’t know what he would have made of today’s fiercely individualistic techno-entrepreneurs, but he did provide a generation of college students with such thought-provoking pickup lines as, “Are you inner-directed or other-directed?”
But it is easier to come up with possible reasons for increasing social detachment than to figure out how much of a problem it is. We know that social fragmentation and indifference to one another can lead to rising crime, failing kids and nastier polarized politics. They may also pose health threats. “Well-connected people live longer, happier lives,” writes Putnam, responding in a recent Time magazine essay to the Duke study, “even if they have to forgo a new Lexus to spend time with friends.”
Yet, this new social detachment appears to have come as a result of our hardwired American pursuit of what we want. We Americans are a restless people who take pride in our autonomy and self-reliance.
Rugged individualism, rampant consumerism and restless pursuit of upward mobility and self-reinvention are enduring themes of America’s cultural life. But so are themes of home, community and shared security. We can hear them richly mined by sellers of various products and politics: “Like a Good Neighbor,” “You’re in Good Hands,” “An Army of One,” “Ownership Society, ” “Opportunity Society,” “It’s Your Money,” “Family Values,” “It Takes a Village.”
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Our cultural longings flip-flop between individualism and attachment, between Donald Trump and Martha Stewart’s restless hustle and Lake Wobegon’s mythical stability, “where the men are strong, the women are good-looking and all of the children are above average.”
Leave it to Americans to come up with the megachurch, where we can stroll in and decide precisely how much we want to be involved in a new community or stay semi-anonymous in the crowd, just you and me, God.
We want it all.
Can we have it? Politicians and pitchmen for various products would have us think so. A balanced life calls upon us to separate the hype from reality and make good choices as we figure out who our true friends are.
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