{"id":3261,"date":"2023-01-03T07:05:20","date_gmt":"2023-01-03T13:05:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=3261"},"modified":"2023-03-15T02:51:37","modified_gmt":"2023-03-15T07:51:37","slug":"is-america-suffering-a-social-recession","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=3261","title":{"rendered":"Is America suffering a \u2018social recession\u2019?<\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ever since a notorious chart showing that\u00a0fewer people are having sex than ever before\u00a0first made the rounds, there\u2019s been increased interest in the state of America\u2019s social health. Polling has demonstrated a marked decline in all spheres of social life, including close friendships, intimate relationships, trust, labor participation and community involvement. The continuing shift has been called the \u201cfriendship recession\u201d or the \u201csocial recession\u201d \u2013 and, although it will take years before this is clearly established, it was almost certainly worsened by the pandemic.
\nThe decline comes alongside a documented rise in mental illness, diseases of despair and poor health more generally. In August 2022, the CDC announced that US life expectancy had\u00a0fallen\u00a0to where it was in 1996. Contrast this to western Europe, where life expectancy has\u00a0largely rebounded\u00a0to pre-pandemic numbers. Even before the pandemic, the years 2015-2017 saw the\u00a0longest sustained decline\u00a0in US life expectancy since 1915-18, when the US was grappling with the 1918 flu and the first world war.
\nThe topic has directly or indirectly produced a whole genre of commentary from many different perspectives. Many of them touch on the fact that the internet is not being built with pro-social ends in mind. Increasingly monopolized across a few key entities, online life and its data have become the most sought-after commodity. The everyday person\u2019s attention has thus become the scarcest resource to be extracted. Other perspectives, often on the left, stress economic precarity and the decline of public spaces as causes of our rising anomie.
\nSome of these same criticisms have been adopted by the\u00a0new right, who additionally indict the culture at large for undermining traditions of sociality, be it gender norms or the family. Believing it disproportionately affects men, this position has produced many lifestylist spinoffs: Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), trad-life nostalgia, inceldom, masculinist groups and hustle culture with a focus on \u201cbeating the rat race\u201d. All of these subcultures are symptoms of the social recession in some way, for better or worse.<\/p>\n

Theguardian<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ever since a notorious chart showing that\u00a0fewer people are having sex than ever before\u00a0first made the rounds, there\u2019s been increased interest in the state of America\u2019s social health. Polling has demonstrated a marked decline in all spheres of social life, including close friendships, intimate relationships, trust, labor participation and community involvement. The continuing shift has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":3262,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[3406,1664,1256,3405,3404,3407,1198],"class_list":["post-3261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-social-decline","tag-cdc","tag-health","tag-lifespan","tag-pandemics","tag-sociology","tag-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3261"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3261\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7590,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3261\/revisions\/7590"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}