Is the Future Solitary?

From time to time the folks in the news media point out the fact that more people are living alone than before in some fashion or another--or at least, not with a partner (for instance, that more adults of this or that age category are living with their parents instead). In line with its long-established ideological tendency it does not consider the matter very deeply or critically, but it does point it out, and even what it means for individual isolation and its consequences. After all, in a society where for a great many reasons extended family is a faint presence (Edward Luttwak was to comment that "Americans are . . . as poor in their family connections as Afghans or Sudanese are in money"), work is unlikely to provide much in the way of relationships (because it is insecure and tenuous, because organized labor and its associations are so much weaker in the U.S. than elsewhere, because everyone commutes to the job from so far away, etc. ), and the sense of community generally has always been fragile (decades ago a sociologist could observe that we are "bowling alone"), the nuclear family has been critical to any kind of social connectedness. Moving out, setting up a household alone or with another person, and ultimately marrying and starting a family, for all its imperfections (divorce rates are high, even when people don't divorce they become alienated from one another, children move away and don't call, etc.), is pretty much the only thing that provides people with significant social connections for any length of time. (It is even critical to the non-familial connections, because of the prospect of association with other married couples, and parents, and their connections, in a way less accessible to single persons.)

But that, of course, has its economic requirements, especially if one means to do so on the at least "quasi-middle class" terms people have come to expect--and it has become much harder for most to meet those requirements, with the young taking a particularly hard hit.

Most obviously there is the increasingly crushing cost of living relative to income for the majority as college degrees cost more and deliver less, and the burden of student debt and the cost of housing both particularly notorious in the list of problems particularly making life hard for the young, with this going even for those who do as they are told and go for STEM instead of the humanities (as, contrary to the whining of some, more and more have been doing ).

One reflection of the hard times would seem to be that, even with American cities as unwalkable as ever and as ill-provisioned as ever with public transport (even New York's subway system is crumbling), they drive less, which in much of the country means an enormous restriction of their personal mobility, to the point of significantly diminishing any prospect of a social life (and certainly any dating opportunities).

And of course the pandemic has not helped. The media, again in line with its prejudices, lavishes its attention on the "anti-lockdown" and "anti-vaccine" groups and completely ignores the other end of the spectrum here, those who think government has not done enough, that individuals are not doing enough, to control the pandemic--and who as the pandemic keeps raging have changed their habits, perhaps especially to the extent that their particular living standard makes them more vulnerable. (Someone who lives in an apartment building with its narrow hallways and shared utilities, someone who cannot or does not drive and has to ride public transport instead, has had to work much harder to keep themselves safe, if so inclined.) Meanwhile, even those totally indifferent to the problem have seen the escalating price of essentials reduce "real," inflation-adjusted wages as, once more, the price of housing in particular exploded.

Yet alongside all these very material factors which it is scarcely possible to deny (though not for lack of trying on the part of an ever-downward-punching media ever-sneering about "millennials" and out-of-touch billionaires mouthing off about young people's supposed passion for "avocado toast") there are subtler issues. There is, for instance, what it means to not be doing well economically and the ways in which this gets in the way of any attempt to "have a life" materially, but psychologically, in a very unequal, very hierarchical society where the conformist endlessly insist that the world is one big "meritocracy," and on that basis accord themselves carte blanche to be brutal to those who are not doing well. People get what they "deserve," it insists--and those who do not have enough don't deserve more, with no one having to be nice about it, and indeed free to be as nasty about it as possible to the "loser" and the "failure" --while accusing any of these who would object at all to such treatment of having an unwarranted sense of "entitlement," and telling them that any emotional distress they are suffering is nothing more than "self-pity." Enough in itself to make them want to keep to themselves, societies' inequities hit people especially hard in the "mating market," "the marriage market," which in a very important sense live up to the implication of the word "market" with all its brutal connotations--enough so that those whose experiences have been unpleasant can get very impatient indeed of the hypocrisies one is obliged to respect when raising the subject, the supposedly reassuring banalities that can only seem insultingly patronizing to anyone past a certain not-very-great age.

The result is that while marrying and having a family may be the principal alternative to aloneness--but society's pressure on people to do so is not what it once was in an atomized, anonymous urban world, and those who (often as a result of much painful experience) expect to not do well in the market, to not find someone they want to be with, or who really wants to be with them (let alone someone they want to be with who also wants to be with them, and both thinking they might want that for life), find it easier to resist the pressure; to, as Al Bundy would have us do, "Just Say No." And indeed, even were life to get somewhat better for many--the economic and other stresses to be alleviated--I suspect that we would still see more people than before "bowling alone," and in general living alone. Because even if being alone may be the first choice of only a very few, in anything like the situation we have now many more will find that it hurts less than being with others.