{"id":84529,"date":"2019-08-09T17:00:33","date_gmt":"2019-08-09T21:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=84529"},"modified":"2019-08-10T08:28:09","modified_gmt":"2019-08-10T12:28:09","slug":"the-week-the-crisis-of-american-loneliness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=84529","title":{"rendered":"(The Week) The crisis of American loneliness"},"content":{"rendered":"

“You maniacs. You blew it up.<\/a>” How else should we respond to a story<\/a>about how the most relentlessly communicative generation in the history of the world feels all alone?<\/p>\n

According to a recent YouGov survey, some 30 percent of American millennials say that they are “lonely.” More than 20 percent report that they have no friends; a quarter claim to have no close ones. Many even insist that they have no “acquaintances,” which should, one hopes, be impossible. But I wonder. For even younger people, in so-called “Generation Z,” the figures<\/a> are even bleaker.<\/p>\n

We can make facile jokes about avocado toast and baristas with degrees in cultural studies who spend more time on Instagram than they do in real-life conversations with non-customers. There may be a bit of truth in these caricatures. But I’m not sure we should find them amusing.<\/p>\n

“We don’t quite know why this is happening,” a psychologist who has studied the problem of loneliness in Germany tells Vox<\/em><\/a>. Of course she doesn’t. Even pretending to would violate roughly 7,500 norms of her profession. Thankfully the rest of us have eyes and ears and mouths.<\/p>\n

Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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One in five people my age say they have “no friends.” How did this happen? https:\/\/t.co\/BC8HBEHzpm<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Matthew Walther (@matthewwalther) August 7, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n