With every passing year, I become more convinced that Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone might be the most important nonfiction work of all time, and I so dearly wish it wasn’t dreadfully dull to read.
I’ll give you the Cliff’s Notes.
Every passing decade since 1960, Americans have become less and less socially connected. Fewer people join clubs, become active in their community, or hang out regularly with friends and neighbors with each passing year. Bowling is used as one example: we shifted from a majority of bowlers bowling in clubs, to mostly bowling alone (thus, the title), over the course of about 30 years.
After analyzing the data in a few different ways, Putnam found something interesting about the nature of this isolating trend. Individual people, over the course of their lives, were not becoming less socially connected over time. Rather, generations of well-connected people were “aging out” (dying) and getting replaced with a generational cohort that was a little bit less social. Then, that generation was replaced with one even less social than that. So on, and so forth.
I think that analysis is crucial to understanding why the loneliness epidemic is so hard to crack despite everybody appearing to want things to be different. You’re not talking about people who knew how to live in a well-connected world, and stopped. That would be easier; just a matter of reinvigorating an existing skill set. Instead, we’re dealing with a generational cohort who has never known what rich social capital means. We’re trying to solve this crisis by asking people, often children, to speak a language they never learned.
Putnam spends most of the book searching for the root cause of this slow deterioration of social trust and cohesion, and frustratingly never comes up with one single clear answer. I can’t speak for all of society, but I have a decade of lived experience as a parent that gives me a few ideas.
I had started working on this post years ago, and find myself turning back to it in times like these. Over time, it morphed into something too big for one sitting. I want to do more than complain, to contribute something beyond adding another voice screaming into the void. I want to construct a series of lessons to be learned from individual experiences when viewed as part of these larger trends. Having done so, I’ll circle back, pulling the lessons together and hoping the pieces complete some soft of puzzle.
I do not know if this is going to amount to anything coherent or actionable, but there’s no such thing as a failed experiment.
I invite you to come along with me. I do appreciate it. It’s lonely out here.
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