Things fall apart

The bulk of Bowling Alone traces the decline of American social capital through a web of contributing factors, looking for the largest culprits. Putnam identifies these as generational change, pressures of time and money, television, and sprawl. Each of these are key explanations, but they don’t capture the full complexity of this decline.

the companies do little to encourage accountability, institution building, or integration with existing community structures

Without spaces that cultivate belonging and a shared sense of purpose, why do we expect anything other than high rates of loneliness, polarization, and attacks on our Capital building?

the hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which groups do not. It is about resources—which caste is seen as worthy of them and which are not, who gets to acquire and control them, and who does not. It is about respect, authority, and assumptions of competence—who is accorded these and who i... See more

in a 1978 paper, sociologist Elise Boulding argued that society was suffering from a type of “temporal exhaustion in which...one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imaging the future.” And, little time left to reflect upon and understand the past.

In 1995, Alan Ehrenhalt wrote a book on three Chicago neighborhoods called The Lost City , observing:

In the 1950s they [residents] considered the streets to be their home, an extension of their property, whereas today [1995] the streets are, for many people, an alien place. A block is not really a community in this neighborhood anymore. Only a hou

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five forms of oppression: 1) Exploitation; 2) Marginalization; 3) Powerlessness; 4) Cultural Dominance; 5) Violence.

as Bob Putnam lays out in Bowling Alone, participation in parent-teacher organizations has dropped from more than 12 million in 1964 to about 7 million. Despite decades of increased urban migration bringing us more physically proximate to each other, we don’t know each other better — instead, our reported feelings of loneliness have shockingly doub... See more

Jean Twenge argues that technological change is the largest single driver of generational differences, in her book, Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents―and What They Mean for America's Future. Putnam and Twenge both point to the “individualizing” or “atomizing” effect of new technologies of conv... See more