James' World 2

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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. …

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