It's the Friday evening of a long work week. Maybe you sit down on the couch and start to scroll on social media. A friend texts you to cancel the dinner you planned, and a part of you is relieved, happy even. Now you can stay home and order in.
Journalist Derek Thompson says this turn toward isolation can't entirely be blamed on COVID-19. "We are now in the midst of an anti-social century," he says.
In his most recent article for The Atlantic, Thompson writes that the trend toward isolation has been driven by technology. Cars, he says, "privatized people's lives" in the second half of the 20th century, by allowing them to move from dense cities into more sprawling suburbs. Televisions, meanwhile, "privatized our leisure" by keeping us indoors. More recently, Thompson says, smartphones came along, to further silo us.
"Smartphones make our alone time feel more crowded than it used to be, at the same time that our smartphones make crowds feel more lonely than they used to be," he says. "When you're at a party, it's easier than ever, arguably, to take out your phone, look into your palm, and suddenly, from an experiential standpoint, you're not at a party at all."
In 2023, Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy issued a report about America's "epidemic of loneliness and isolation." But Thompson makes a distinction between the two.
"If loneliness is an instinct to be around people, I would argue that [the] kind of social isolation that we're seeing is the opposite of loneliness, choosing to be alone," he says. "We're choosing to spend more and more time with ourselves, more and more time, year after year, without feeling that special, important biological cue to be around other people. And that, I think, is something to be quite worried about."
Interview highlights
On the need for communal spaces
Between the early 1900s and 1950, we built a ton of what the sociologist Eric Klinenberg calls "social infrastructure." We built library branches and community centers and public pools, and we built places for people to spend time outside of their home and their work. In the last 50, 70 years, we haven't built nearly as much of this stuff. … "Third space," or "third place" ... it's not your home and ... it's not your work. And so it's a place that you choose to be with people you're not related to and you're not financially obligated to be around. ... These places build community. …
The social infrastructure is dilapidated compared to where it was 50 or 70 years ago. There's been very little ingenuity spent on building out the external world of social infrastructure, whereas there's been an enormous amount of ingenuity spent on making our phones more compelling for us to spend time alone in our couches.
On the power of brief human interactions
People, even introverts, are made much happier by these brief encounters in their lives with people on a train or the clerks in the store that we're visiting. And what I think is really profound about that mistake that we're making is that, yes, maybe it's just a 15-minute conversation with someone on a train, or maybe it's just a 10-minute conversation with someone in a store. And all that's improving is just a little experience of that little 10 minutes. Well, life is just one 10-minute experience after another. That's all it is. The way you see your minutes is the way you live your decades. And I think that it's really important to remember that, like these little social experiments that we do, these little bits of socializing that we experience, they can be really beautiful. They can really beautifully transform our experience that day and people around us. So I do think you don't want to underrate the power of these small little gestures.
On "donating our dopamine" to our phones
We pull out our phones and we're on TikTok or Instagram, or we're on Twitter and we're flipping, flipping, flipping with our thumbs. And while externally it looks like nothing is happening internally, the dopamine is flowing and we are just thinking, my God, we're feeling outrage, we're feeling excitement, we're feeling humor, we're feeling all sorts of things. We put our phone away and our dopamine levels fall and we feel kind of exhausted by that, which was supposed to be our leisure time. ...
One way to summarize what I think is happening here is that we are donating our dopamine to our phones rather than reserving our dopamine for our friends. And as a result, we find ourselves in this uncanny space where we simultaneously have more time to ourselves but are made so exhausted by that alone leisure time that we're pulling back from opportunities to be truly social.
On how being anti-social has changed our politics
I think that we are socially isolating ourselves from our neighbors, especially when our neighbors disagree with us. We're not used to talking to people outside of our family that we disagree with. And this has consequences on both sides. On the Republican side, I think it's led to the popularization of candidates like Donald Trump, who essentially are a kind of "all tribe, no village" avatar. He thrives in outgroup animosity. He thrives in alienating the outsider and making it seem like politics. And America itself is just a constant "us versus them" struggle. So I think that the antisocial century has clearly fed the Trump phenomenon. …
At the same time, I think the progressives should look themselves in the mirror and reckon with the fact that Donald Trump has now won more than 200 million votes in the last three elections. [He's] the most significant politician of this age of American politics. And yet many progressives … still don't understand Donald Trump. They still don't understand the MAGA movement. And my response to that particular notion is this: If you don't understand a movement that has received 200 million votes in the last nine years, perhaps it's you who've made yourself a stranger in your own land, by not talking to one of the tens of millions of profound Donald Trump supporters who live in America and more to the point, within your neighborhood, to understand where their values come from. You don't have to agree with their politics. In fact, I would expect you to violently disagree with their politics. But getting along with and understanding people with whom we disagree is what a strong village is all about.
On what to do about it
Fortunately, this is a disease with a known cure that also happens to be a free cure. … You leave your house, you hang out with people, you invite more people to your house in order to have dinner parties, which have also declined tremendously in the last 20 years. This is an easy problem to solve on the surface. … I do recognize there's a collective action problem here to solve. But I also think it's really important not to overcomplicate this by suggesting that it requires some enormous cultural shifts. I think that our little decisions, the little minute-to-minute decisions that we make about spending time with other people, these decisions can scale.
Monique Nazareth and Anna Bauman produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
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