I'm actually not advocating for a reduction in the size of government bodies and I'm a bit frustrated about it. I'm not advocating anything about the size of government bodies (though naturally I have my feelings.) I'm confused why people seem to be intuiting this. I'm in fact doubly frustrated because I feel that people seem to be injecting modern political points into something that I feel predates many of our modern problems. My point is: the social problems of disenfranchisement that come from large organizations are a property of their size. They may differ in that they're volunteer…
I've been thinking about this due to a renewed local interest in Bowling Alone[1]. Besides the main identified contributors of personalized media, suburbanization, real estate prices, and the increase of dual-income households, I've started to suspect that government-funding of organizations has also had a significant impact. In the past, organizations had to raise funds from their communities. As government grants for organizations increased, the cost floor was raised on all organizations (i.e. fundraising, rents, salaries, etc.), and led to the professionalization of what was previously…
I agree that I don't think its security. But I do think its worth looking again at the time aspect. per "bowling alone" we have pretty good signs that this decline has been ongoing since the 1980s. I'm reasonably sure that the 455 minutes per day per capita global media consumption has something to do with it. From TV to the internet, you don't need friends when the friendly person on screen has such exciting adventures. I think something like only turning on the internet and TV for like a single hour each morning and evening would do so much for society, like you wouldn't believe. Not just…
The reduction of volunteer organizations started long before COVID: "Bowling Alone" was written in 2000, and documents much of the same changes. The trend has been resistant to any particular link to localized economic ups or downs. Characterizing the 2023-2025 era (at least in the US) as "a time of scarcity" is divorced from any sort of factual reality; there is no quantitative data to support this idea and it seems to mostly be based on social media vibes (hence the oft-commented "vibecession"). One could make a much stronger argument exactly to the opposite: wealthier societies tend to…
I would concur. It's my observation from 20 years of watching and participating - the volunteers are the retired, the wealthy, the underemployed, and the stay at home parent. "Normal" working people are not volunteering and handling the complexity of doing these things, they are at their work. I can only imagine that prior generations had the working parent participate through the free time freed up by the stay at home parent. It suggests to me that there is a long running flaw. I believe Bowling Alone pegs the inflection point in the late 50s or early 60s, ('57?) and the substantative…
This is all a very valid set of concerns; not quite a new one, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone (2000), but definitely a Thing. > The mad rush to as quickly abolish religious practices in mainstream U.S. culture without any form of societal replacement is puzzling to me. People need to acknowledge how much the downside of this kind of closeness was conformism, enforced by shunning (or worse) the noncompliant. A lot of religious communities have coped incredibly badly with the sexual revolution of the 20th century; if the only foray of your church into politics is against…
This whole discussion, both in the article and in the comments, comes from a perspective that the only options are doing something that pays, and sitting around doing nothing. And sadly that may be the case, but it doesn't have to be that way. The United States today suffers from a severe lack of social connectedness (see Bowling Alone, etc) that could easily be improved by paying unemployed people, including the disabled, to do activities as simple as: hang out with old people who live alone, read a book to a group of little kids. PLAY with little kids. Help someone in poor health walk…
Eh. Depends on which part. I definitely have fallen into doomscrolling on occasion, but I have reasons to believe our society is less stable than it was. This has good and bad aspects - the 'stability' offered was in many ways the stability of a less rich way of living (think people without plumbing or with dirt floors), but at the same time the lack of security is a major stressor and that's not good for your mental health any more than material deprivation is. There's also that I am a disabled American and we're generally not in great spots. As an American, your ability to have things like…
Social media and sensationalized news is definitely not helping. But I think the bigger issue is lack of community and close social bonds. Americans have significantly fewer close friends than previous generations[1]. They're much less likely to know their next-door neighbors[2]. Church attendance (which has traditionally been a major source of social capital) is way down, especially among young people[3]. Membership in civic organizations like the Masons and League of Women Voters has virtually disappeared among young people[4]. Adult sports leagues have sharply declining participation[5].…
So here we are on Mastodon. There are three columns. One is an ad for the site, one is an ad for Mastodon, and the one in the middle has some content. The article is part 1 of 5, because there's some severe limit on article length. The rest of the article is comments in small type. There are no examples. Is this LLM output? And larger organizations have begun to imperfectly step in the void formed by the absence of small communities, providing synthetic social or emotional goods that are, roughly speaking, to more authentic such products as highly processed "junk" food is to more…