US friendship is in freefall – shredding bonds and cutting lives short

--I cut a misinterpretation here.--

> We’ve long pondered why the marriage rate, and the corresponding birth rate, has plummeted in America. Answers often focus on financial stressors: Young Americans can’t afford a home like their parents could at their age, some speculate; others blame limited parental leave or poor day-care options.

> Perhaps — but the corresponding slump in close friendships doesn’t add up. People can still afford to make friends, can’t they?

Again, this is some ivory tower kind of nonsense. Of course if you can't afford to host people (no space), if you can't bond with other parents because you cannot be a parent, if you can't afford to leave your kids (with daycare or a carer) to socialize, how the hell are you supposed to invest the time in close friendships? And also, not being able to afford to invest in friendship makes total sense to affect the working class.

This article is a bunch of illogical slop.

Not surprised. Every relationship in America is transactional. Work is cut throat especially at stacked ranking companies. This country is basically a social Darwinian hellhole. Friendships here seem try and extract the most value from others. I have an incredibly close circle of friends thankfully.

The article may be a bunch of slop but there is something deeply cultural in the US that is contributing to this. Not being able to afford things or social media or pretty much anything that gets the blame for the “loneliness pandemic” isn’t unique to the US.

My personal experience has been that the same individualistic culture that allows people to do whatever they want and become whoever they want, that yields great results in a lot of aspects of life, also results in weaker relationships with others. At some point prioritizing oneself over everything else starts taking a toll on relationships. Do you really stop seeing a friend because they can’t afford to go places? Or do you stop seeing them because you are not willing to change your wants and not meet them somewhere that they can afford to go?

It's bad writing. But in between your first two quotes, you clipped out a paragraph that ends with this:

> Americans with college degrees experienced a similar but less steep drop.

They are saying the same thing as you on that point.

>A nation that lacks interpersonal relationships is a lower-trust society, more prone to crime and unrest.

That seems to unfortunately track. No bonds, less to lose by lashing out. A Mexican idiom comes to mind:

El Que Tranza, No Avanza ("he who doesn't cheat, doesn't get ahead")

So when you dehumanize your fellow man, life is just a rat race and you don't care who you step over to succeed. Not really a nation make.

>The reasons aren’t clear, but it may be that colleges have become more of a social experience than an educational one over the last few decades

Well I guess that's the part that reminds me this is still the NY post. It's an odd conclusion to come to when they report that friendships merely declined less than Hgih School students, not remained steady. It's not surprising that an environment of young adults with newfound freedom would form closer bonds than those on high school forced together with a rigid 5 class schedule that has much less control. College students can schedule entire days off, or no morning classes, skip a class with minumum fuss. That means more potential time to socialize outside of the weekends or 4-7pm on weekends.

>Last year one study found a full 25% of young adults “believe that AI has the potential to replace real-life romantic relationships.”

Well that's just depressing. Are a significant portion of the population really going to try to replace human bonds with AI too? We were supposed to reject the notion of Her (2018) and realize the human element can't be automated. Not follow it like a blueprint.