Anti-Social Americans

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show, on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. On yesterday's show, we had a beyond your bubbles segment with the co-host of the left/right podcast Counter Points, Ryan Grim and Emily Jashinsky, who describe themselves respectively as supporters of Bernie Sanders and of JD Vance. It was very evocative, for many of you, with listeners writing us text messages from all kinds of perspectives. Here's just a taste.

One person wrote, "Brian, please make a show like this every week. We need more conversations like this," and someone else, "I don't agree with your conservative guest, but I'm so glad that she's here." Then we had ones like these, "Having a conversation reaching and across the aisle is nice, but I don't see the point when Republicans will never cooperate in compromise." Another one, "This podcast reminds me of Hannity and Colmes,-" an old show, "-in that the guy on the supposed left is always the one to fold and give the weak argument."

Then one other person asked, "Have Emily and Ryan considered giving online classes on how to talk with each other across the aisle?" There are those, but one last one that I'm going to paraphrase, because it expired before I could take a screenshot, but the gist was, "You have to have a certain amount of comfort and privilege to indulge in calm discourse across the aisle. If people are trying to take away your rights, you don't have the luxury of being so nice."

Like I say, the segment yesterday was very evocative and elicited very diverse thoughts and feelings. It's interesting, and it may be different from the past, that even having diverse points of view on the same platform can be a controversial act. Now we'll talk about one reason that that might be. Maybe you've seen Derek Thompson's latest piece in The Atlantic. It's called The Antisocial Century: How Americans Spending More Time Alone is Changing Our Personalities, Our Politics, and Even Our Relationship to Reality.

He writes that self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America. One whole section of the article is called This is Your Politics on Solitude. We'll start there and then discuss other aspects of the essay, and also frame this up as part of our 100 Years of 100 Things series, thing number 57, 100 years of social and Antisocial America. Derek Thompson is an Atlantic Magazine staff writer and author of their Work in Progress newsletter.

He is also the author of the books Hitmakers and On Work: Money, Meaning, Identity. He's the host of the podcast Plain English. He was last on this show last April, for his article on what Austin can teach New York City about housing, and in 2022 for his article about looking to sleep patterns of past centuries as a cure for insomnia. He argued that that doesn't work. Derek Thompson is perpetually curious about all kinds of things, for today, it's our antisocial century.

Derek, we always appreciate that you share your research and your curiosity with us. Welcome back to WNYC.

Derek Thompson: It's an absolute honor to be here. Thank you for that introduction, and thank you also for reminding me that I've been on the hunt for an insomnia cure now for years. I am still on that hunt for an insomnia cure, still waking up at 3:00 AM sometimes, in the morning. It's wonderful to be back, and I'm really grateful to be able to talk about this piece, which I thought was so interesting to work on.

Brian Lehrer: Would you set this up for us by talking first about the last century, the 20th century? Your article calls that the social century, especially before 1970. What defined that era as a social century for you?

Derek Thompson: Well, I'm in deep debt to the sociologist Robert Putnam, who wrote a famous book called Bowling Alone, which documented how in the first half of the 20th century, America really was the social nation. We had long had a reputation, going back to Alexis de Tocqueville, for being a country that just loved to hang out and form associations and start new things, new companies, new clubs.

That really came to a head in the first half of the 20th century. You saw marriage rates increase. You saw fertility increase. You saw the rate of joining clubs, unions, different kinds of leagues, like bowling leagues, all rise, rise, rise, as if on the back of the same wave. Something happened around the 1960s, the 1970s, that crashed that wave, and there's several theories about what it was.

Putnam believes that there was a moral revolution that bent us from collectivism toward individualism, which I would love to talk about because I think individualism is one of the most important meta trends of the last 50 or 500 years. Also, to me, I think you saw the emergence of two technologies that allowed us to privatize our lives. The first was the car, which allowed us to drive away from people.

The second was the television, which allowed us to plant ourselves on the couch in front of a big screen and not be around other people outside the house. That, I think, set us up for the antisocial century.

Brian Lehrer: We'll get to those, television and the car, and other technologies that have moved us toward voluntary isolation. Let me stay in the social century part with you first, and ask you to talk about the politics of that, because you have at least one explicit political contribution. FDR's New Deal making America's branch library system the envy of the world. Why libraries, and is there a bigger political context to that?

Derek Thompson: Well, the New Deal was truly extraordinary. It wasn't just a host of new bureaucracies and alphabet soup agencies. It was a transformation of the way that government saw its relationship to the civic good. It built on years of a progressive movement, in the late 19th and early 20th century, where you saw lowercase L liberals totally reconceive of the role of government as being something that was activist, muscular, and about building things in the physical world.

As you said, we built not just the Tennessee Valley Act and rural electrification, we built libraries, we built union clubs, and we built beautiful community centers for people to spend time in. I don't think that it's a coincidence that the social century was also the century when government saw its responsibility as building places for people to spend time outside of their homes or their work, so-called third places, which is a term of art that some people use in the 21st century. It was not used 100 years ago.

Truly, this golden age of building third places was the 1930s, the 1940s, and 1950s. I think that had a lot to do with the fact-- let's say it this way, it both reflected a moral code of the time that people should spend time together, but it also drove that moral code, because it gave people places to spend time together.

Brian Lehrer: Some of what started to change after 1970, before we get into television and the car, as technologies that drove individualism. Some of it was cultural liberation. I don't know that you deal with this so much in the article, but with 1970s feminism, women were breaking free of the bonds of the old gender roles more than before. The young adult baby boomers were rejecting what they experienced as the stifling rules of their parents, religious institutions, and other things too.

The nuclear family and generational autonomy, if I can call it that, were replacing multi-generational households. I'm not sure any of those things made people any less social. Maybe a more recentered community life around different groupings of people. I wonder if you make a case around any of that.

Derek Thompson: God, I think you're so astute to point that out. I'd be remiss to not say that I'm the co author of a forthcoming book with The New York Times' Ezra Klein, which comes out in March. That book is called Abundance. It traces where American politics has gone wrong in the last 50, years and how it can go right in the next generation. This is a thread of the book that you've just put your finger on. Something happened 50 years ago that's more significant than just one metric or one trend.

I believe it was the change of what the Cambridge historian Gary Gerstle calls a political order. Gerstle defines political order as a set of beliefs and policies that the parties, i.e. Democrats and Republicans, agree to underneath the headline fights and debates they have at any given moment. There was a way in which both Republicans and Democrats, between the 1930s and 1970s, somewhat agreed that we should build things to bring Americans together.

Remember, Dwight Eisenhower was a Republican President of the United States for eight years. He talked about expanding social insurance. He wanted to build the Interstate Highway Act, which had its problems, but also knit many rural areas together. In many ways, he extended the themes of the New Deal that were brought into view by Roosevelt number one, Teddy, the Progressive, and Roosevelt number two, FDR. What happened in the 1960s and 1970s? Well, a lot of things. Let's sum it up this way.

There was a revolution in individualism and it brought us many wonderful things, because it brought us feminism, it brought us environmentalism, and it brought us the Civil Rights Act, and it forced us to consider the marginalized among us as full-throated individuals, as they deserve to be recognized, but the individualist revolution of the 1960s and 1970s also came with a host of negative side effects. It's harder to build houses now in many dense cities like New York or San Francisco.

This is what we talked about last time, about a year ago. Individuals can sue the state or sue developers to stop the development of affordable housing. It's harder to build solar panels, solar plants, even nuclear plants, or clean energy, because it is easier, using the environmental rules that we passed in the 1970s, to sue, to stop, so in many ways, at the legal level, the cultural level, and at the political level, we become a much more individualist nation.

We are living today with both the fruits of and the negative side effects of that dramatic revolution in individualism 50 years ago, to bring it finally back to my article, because I really wanted to go on that diatribe, I do agree that one way we see individualism running rampant, running amok, is that people are taking advantage of the conveniences afforded to them by the economy, to spend more and more time at home and by themselves.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Let me add a point to that timeline you were just giving us, of FDR through Eisenhower, and then into the 60s, because then we get Reagan in the 80s, who has a backlash to a lot of what we were just talking about. What's his solution? It's individualism, because those social programs were seen as communist by him.

Derek Thompson: That's absolutely right. To Gary Gerstle's point, political orders are not created by one party or another. They are co-constructed by parties. Who was the president who said that government cannot fix America's problems, deregulated the airlines, and deregulated the trucking industries? It wasn't Ronald Reagan. It was Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s, who, responding to the geopolitical and domestic crises of America, was already beginning to walk Americans toward the individualist revolution for which Ronald Reagan was the ultimate torchbearer.

Again, look at Bill Clinton and the way that he talked about the role of government, where he said that the era of big government was over, and that welfare in our age was never going to be the same. He was, in many ways-- the same way that Dwight Eisenhower extended the legacy of FDR, he extended the legacy of Ronald Reagan, to a certain extent, by seeing that government's role was to pull back so that the American individual could flourish without being hovered over by the state.

What we're talking about here, the trends the last 50 years are very, very big. Yes, Ronald Reagan played an enormous role in bursting neoliberalism into American life, but that revolution was co-created and co-supported by Democrats in many, many ways. You see that in the fact that it's not just Republicans, just Democrats, just white people, or just Black people today that are spending more time alone than ever.

It is literally every demographic group for which the Bureau of Labor Statistics has data. This is truly a national revolution in individualism and in aloneness.

Brian Lehrer: Derek Thompson, staff writer from The Atlantic, is our guest. His new article is The Antisocial Century: How Americans Spending More Time Alone is Changing Our Personalities, Our Politics, and Even Our Relationship to Reality. In a little while, folks, I'm going to ask a specific caller question about this, but in the meantime, if you want to get in on any piece of what Derek's been describing so far, feel free. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text.

Now, let me set you up to what I think you've been really trying to center for the last 10 minutes or so. This technology element. Really, so many of our 100 years segments have turned out to be about how industrial-age technology changed us as individuals, and as a country. You cite cars allowing moves to the suburbs and televisions drawing us to more time at home on the couch.

One of the things that you mentioned is TV sets being added to our bedrooms, not just our living rooms, in the 70s, 80s and 90s. How does that make us antisocial at a community level?

Derek Thompson: Well, it pulls us out of communities. No one watches television in the middle of a town square. I guess theoretically, you could pull out your phone and watch CBS on your phone in a town square, but that doesn't make you a particularly social participant in that area. As you said, television absolutely transformed this country in ways that, before I did this research, I didn't fully grok, in the 1970s.

Here's two statistics that are just, to me, absolutely mind-blowing. In 1970, 6% of 6th graders had a TV set in their bedroom. In 1999, it was 77%. Unbelievable. Time diaries from the 1990s show that husbands and wives spent almost four times as many hours watching television together as they spent talking to each other in a given week. Just sit with that fact for a second. From a time-use perspective, marriage is four times more watching television together in silence than it is talking.

That is an extraordinary thing to recognize, if you feel like, with this one life to live, ideally, you would want to spend it with someone that you love and that you are making a deep connection with. These screens are so powerful. The fact that television, and then smartphones, in the 21st century, so colonized our attention, I think speaks to something very deep. Americans added about six hours of leisure time every week, between the 1960s and the early 2000s. We could have done anything with that time.

We could have learned a new language. We could have played pickup basketball. We could have read more books. We could have read more classics. Instead, we spent basically all of that extra time watching television. It was as if Mr. Farnsworth himself invented a machine that tapped into this latent aspect of human nature, whereby we are looking forward essentially toward being audience members above all. At the end of the day, what we want to do is turn off and let stories wash over us as we sit on the couch.

I love television. My sister works at Netflix. I love movies. I love watching things at home, but, as with all things, the dosage matters. Enjoying television or enjoying ordering food into the home once in a while, there is nothing wrong with that, but these decisions, scaled over a lifetime and scaled across a country, have brought us to a point where, as I've now said for the thousandth time, and I'll say for another thousand times, we simply never spent this much time in our homes and alone.

Brian Lehrer: It's funny, I actually think, reinforcing your point, that there's now a kind of nostalgia for watching television together as a family, as something that's togetherness, as opposed to isolation. I'm thinking of the intro to The Simpsons, and I think that show started in the 90s, where they're all coming from their different places, the parents and the kids, and what do they all do?

They come home, they run home, they plop down on the couch and start watching television, and they don't talk to each other. That's the critique that you're giving us. Now, I think in the phones era, where we get even more isolated individuals within the families, on their different screens, there's a certain nostalgia, even for, "Remember when we all sat in the living room together and watched television?"

Derek Thompson: It's extraordinary. I had not quite thought about it that way, but the idea that we are now nostalgic for a time not so long ago, when we sat in silence shoulder to shoulder and watched a screen watch the same stream of images and sound together, rather than fragment into our own images and screens, it makes you wonder, in 20 years, what will we be nostalgic for, in this era? I think these trends build on each other.

That's how I'd like to sum up this analysis of the technological wave. I think cars allowed us to privatize our lives. I think television allowed us to privatize our leisure. I think smartphones ultimately privatize our attention. In a world where our lives, our leisure, and our attention are fully privatized, what time left is there for other people?

Brian Lehrer: I think the critique of the impact that phones are having on us is the part of this that our listeners know best, and most strongly believe. That takes us to the section of your article called This Is Your Politics on Solitude. You start that section with the counterintuitive observation that today, many of our bonds are actually getting stronger. Want to take us there?

Derek Thompson: Yes. I love this observation, and it was not mine. This comes from Mark Dunkelman, who's a brilliant researcher and writer at Brown University, and he made this beautiful point that, the second I heard it, I knew it would end up in the piece. He said, "The irony of our phones is that they don't destroy our social interactions. In many cases, they make some of them stronger."

He said, "I'm in a constant state of unbroken conversation with my wife throughout the day, in a way that we could have never been 40 years ago. When my daughter orders a-" What did he say? "-a Butterfinger at CVS, I get a notification on my credit card app." There's ways in which our relationships with the inner ring of family are stronger than ever. At the same time, I think there's an outer ring of socializing that's stronger than ever, too.

If you're a Cincinnati Bengals football fan in New York City, you can follow along with other Bengals football fans around the country in a way that you couldn't 40 years ago. If I'm interested in some esoteric composer or artist in the world, I can connect with people across the country. If I'm the parent of a child with special needs, I can connect with people on Facebook. Our ability to find groups on the Internet is powerful, and you can think of this as that outer ring of tribe, people with whom you share affinities.

If the inner ring of family is stronger and the outer ring of tribe is stronger, what about the middle ring? The middle ring is what Mark Dunkelman calls the village. These are the people we live around. These are our neighbors. We don't know them the same way that we used to. We don't say hi to them. We don't spend time with them. We don't have them over for dinner. This is not just someone talking out of nothing. We statistically know that people have 30% fewer dinner parties than they did just 20 years ago.

What happens when we don't know our neighbors? Well, here's a theory. I think families teach us love, and I think tribes teach us ideology. I think the village, the middle ring, teaches us tolerance. You have to tolerate people you're not related to, and who disagree with you, when you meet them in the real world, when you talk to them at PTAs, or when you hang out with them in a bowling alley. These are the interactions that teach us that people we disagree with have our values too.

They love our children. They want to live long and healthy lives. They're worried about their aging relatives. In the absence of being able to see the village as full-blooded human beings, we have a politics of grotesqueries. Donald Trump is, in many ways, a kind of all-tribe, no-village avatar of American politics. I think that if we knew each other more in the physical world, we wouldn't need to rely on all-tribe, no-village avatars of politics to guide us.

Brian Lehrer: Donald Trump, you say, is all-tribe, no-village, but on the other side of that, one line from your article that The Atlantic broke out for large type is, "Social disconnection helps explain progressive stubborn inability to understand Donald Trump's appeal." Would you elaborate on that?

Derek Thompson: Sure. I will absolutely say that I don't think any sentence in this article was more hatefully quoted more than this one. Let me try to defend it. What we know for a fact is that Americans spend more time alone. We also know for a fact that Donald Trump has now run in three consecutive presidential elections, and garnered more or roughly 200 million total votes. Yet, many progressives I know and see say they don't understand the phenomenon of Donald Trump.

I think that liberals like me have to ask ourselves, if we don't understand the appeal of a man who has now gotten 200 million votes from our fellow Americans, is it possibly because we haven't tried enough to understand people in the physical world who like him, that we haven't talked to them? Now, sometimes you could say, well, it's not our responsibility to talk to them. It's not our responsibility to justify their beliefs. Maybe so, but look, even in the district of Brooklyn, one third of people voted for Donald Trump in 2024.

How could you not, if you're spending lots of time in the world, talking to people, normally, come across people who disagree with you about politics, and understand their points of view as sometimes emerging from similar values, of love, of family. Let me be really clear here. I do not think that the phenomenon I call the antisocial century is somehow the most important problem with liberalism or is uniquely responsible for the triumph of Donald Trump in modern politics.

I do think that liberals and progressives would understand this phenomenon better if they spent more time talking to people they disagreed with in the physical world, rather than, as we all do these days, surrounding ourselves in echo chambers where our online communications are defined by extremism and out-group animosity. We would learn more by talking to people in the real world.

Brian Lehrer: Well, would you say it works the other way too? Conservatives' isolation from more progressive or diverse Americans in their communities leave them with a stubborn inability of their own to understand why diversity programs, immigration, and respect for trans and non-binary people, for examples, are all good and necessary for a fair, just, and healthy America?

Derek Thompson: Not only do I agree with what you just said and what you're suggesting, I would go even further. Here's a piece of reporting that didn't make it into the final article, but has sort of haunted me since its publication. The sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild recently wrote a book called Stolen Valor, where she talked to people in rural Kentucky about their politics.

She told me in an email interview that when she visited some of these mobile homes, the largest piece of furniture in these mobile homes was a television set, and many of these people were absolutely consumed, in 2024 and late 2023, by the narrative that migrant hordes, uncontrolled migration into the US, was the most important issue facing their community. If you look at the US census, the part of the United States with the least amount of immigrants are places like rural Kentucky.

Here are people living in towns with almost no immigrants, who say that the most important issue facing America is immigrants. This is the end of all politics is local. This is all politics is focal. All politics is the focus on national news narratives. No matter where you live, every local issue feels local to you. You have people now, I'm sure, in rural Ohio, who feel like the heirs of Los Angeles are the heirs of the national Democratic Party.

You have people in rural Kentucky who feel like Biden's immigration policy is the most important issue facing their own practically immigrant-free community. This is what happens when we take ourselves out of the world and put ourselves in screen-land. Screen becomes greater than village.

Brian Lehrer: We have a number of callers who want to make one version or another of a point that the isolationism, the voluntary isolation and individualism is, to a large degree, a backlash to civil rights. I'm going to let Uchenna, in Warren County, in New Jersey, make the case for a few people who are calling in to make a similar point. Uchenna, you're on wnyc. Thank you very much for calling.

Uchenna: Thank you. A, great to be on. I love your guest. I read his stuff all the time, but I do want to make the point. He explicitly even calls it out in the 60s, but a lot of this fundamentally is a backlash to civil rights, because back then, a lot of the South had public transportation systems that were the rival of the North. They had bus systems, they had great water, they had great public pools, and as a backlash to civil rights, these public centers, they were closed.

It's why the South has things like vouchers, privatization, a lot more than up north. It's why they, for example, would say, "Hey, if we can't share with the minorities, we'll have to shut it down at all." Before you say I'm in an echo chamber, I'm a Black person in probably the most Republican county that borders New York City, not counting Staten Island, of course, so I understand these people. I'm right now traveling from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, some of the more-- the red parts.

I work in Allentown, one of the parts that flipped red. I understand voters from both sides. I have to work with them and I talk with them. I'm just saying a lot of this isolationism, of the fundamental backlash to the civil rights movement, is all. If we don't acknowledge that point, it just seems, mysteriously, that the TV made us all isolated, which I do agree with, but I feel it's an incomplete theory. That's what I want to say. I still love your stuff, and I don't want to be one of those jerks on Twitter, X, or Blue Sky that misquotes you.

Brian Lehrer: Uchenna, thank you. Thank you very much. Let me get one more in here. I know you got to go in a couple of minutes. Mark, in West Orange, you're on WNYC, and you're going to disagree with at least part of this. Mark, I'm going to ask you to do it in 30 seconds. Hi.

Mark: Privatization is good. It allows us freedom to choose. The key between good and evil, and bad, and different approaches is basically choice. We are in a capitalist society and we are all given tools. We choose how to use those tools. The real problem is that we have a huge population and everyone wants to make a lot of money, because it costs a lot of money to live in the United States.

Brian Lehrer: Mark, I'm going to leave it there, and let Derek react to you and the previous caller. Derek?

Derek Thompson: These are absolutely fabulous comments, and there's no way I can do them just as quickly, but I'm going to try. First, I absolutely agree that, I think as I said at one point in the piece, but I could have expanded on this point, that the antisocial century is as much about changes to our inner world, that is our relationship to screens, as the outer world, that is our relationship to transportation, to infrastructure, to everything that the caller was saying.

I absolutely appreciate the point that there's maybe another 8,000 words that I could have written, illuminating and enumerating all the various ways that the reaction to the Civil Rights Act, and the reaction, frankly, to the Great Society program and the New Deal program, the reaction to that entire political order, set the stage for, created the conditions for the antisocial century. The second thing I'd say is that I agree that privatization allows us to choose, but I don't think we know what we're choosing.

I don't think we recognize that we've collectively chosen this amount of social isolation. The social theorist Marshall McLuhan, once said, "Every augmentation is also an amputation." I think we chose to augment our entertainment without recognizing what kind of social life we were amputating.

Brian Lehrer: Then for my last question, following up on that, in our last one minute before you're going to go be a community-oriented dad and pick up your kids, I understand, you've told a 100 Years story, but where do the last five years fit in? We're right at the five-year mark of the start of the pandemic, did it supercharge a trend that was already 50 years old? I'm hearing people say, well, even though I'm allowed to go out again like I did in 2019, so many of my friends are not.

Derek Thompson: There's no question that the pandemic accelerated these trends. I want to be clear. The pandemic did not invent these trends, they are almost a century old, but they did accelerate it. Some pandemic trends are winding down. There was a murder spike in 2021, and it's come down. There was a traffic fatality spike in 2022, and that's come down. Some of the pandemic phenomena are winding down, and some of them are not.

Americans, according to the Federal Reserve, spent more time alone in 2023 than they did in 2021, when the vaccines were being rolled out. This is not a phenomenon that, to my mind, is going away.

Brian Lehrer: Derek Thompson, from The Atlantic. His article is called The Antisocial Century. Derek, thank you so much. Go get those daughters.

Derek Thompson: [chuckles] My pleasure. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: The subtitle, How Americans Spending More Time Alone Is Changing Our Personalities, Our Politics, and Even Our Relationship to Reality. Listeners, for the last 15 minutes of the show, let's keep talking about this, and in the context of our 100 Years series, here's an oral history question for you. How is your social life different from that of your parents or grandparents? How is your children's social life, or we might call it community life, different from yours? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, an oral history question.

How is your social or community life different from that of your parents or grandparents? How is your children's social or community life different from yours? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text, and to the thesis of Derek Thompson's article, are you voluntarily spending more time alone than your parents or grandparents did? If so, why? This may be different for women and for men. The article, we didn't get to this part with him-- If we had a little more time, we would have.

The article says men, especially young single men, are increasing their alone time more than other groups. Is that true for you? You think, "Oh, young single men, don't they want to go out a lot and meet young single women, if they're gay, other young single men?" Apparently not. If that rings true to you about yourself or someone you know, call and tell us that story. Since we're doing this voluntarily, this isolation, do you agree or disagree with Derek's thesis that this is a destructive pattern?

212-433-WNYC, but basically, I'm asking an oral history question here, for this last little stretch. How is your social or community life different from that of your parents or grandparents? How is your children's social or community life different from yours, in the context of 100 Years of 100 Things number 57, the self-isolation century. 212-433-9692. We'll take your calls and texts right after this.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer, on WNYC. And now to your post-Derek Thompson's appearance calls with an oral history question. How is your social life or community life different from that of your parents or grandparents? How is your children's social or community life, no matter what age you are or they are, different from yours? Chris in Weehawken, you're on WNYC. Hi, Chris.

Chris: Hi, Brian. Good to talk to you. My parents socialized, like a lot of folks in the 50s and 60s, at community centers like churches and fraternal organizations. Back in November, I took a page from their book and I joined the Elks Lodge, the local Elks Lodge. I did it for a very specific reason, because of what Derek talks about in his article in The Atlantic. There aren't really places for people to gather in real life, or we're not gathering in real life anymore.

Just to meet face to face, to have that dialogue, and to set those levels of tolerance that you don't otherwise get in online discourse. It really surprised me that I would do something like that. Getting out and getting involved with a fraternal organization, which I've heard membership is actually on the rise after many years, when people didn't join fraternal organizations, has been a real eye-opener for me.

Brian Lehrer: Chris, thank you. Thank you very much. Good start to this. Laurie, in Queens, you're on WNYC. Hi, Laurie.

Laurie: Hi. My grandfather immigrated as an adolescent from Belarus just prior to the beginning of the 20th century. He was from a very large family. He played musical instruments. He played the flute, the mandolin, and the recorder. Living in Brooklyn, there were so many different amateur orchestras, quartets, quintets, you could join anything and play music with other people. Then people came to your performances, and in their house, they had a piano. My aunts and uncles all learned how to play the piano.

Everybody sang, the family celebrations, all came together for everybody's birthday, and all of these things. Then here I am, 68, and my children do not live near me. One lives in Chile. I'm divorced. I live alone. There's just this-- I do belong to things, but they're things I have to pay for. I have to pay to take classes. There isn't this wealth of free-- I belong to book clubs, too, but it isn't the same thing as what was available during my grandfather's time, or my mother's, for that matter.

Brian Lehrer: Would you want to go back to that, though, or would it be too stifling, too insular, in that kind of small town, "Oh, everybody knows everybody's business about everything, I can't stand it," kind of way?

Laurie: It wasn't a small town. It was Brooklyn, [chuckles] not a small town.

Brian Lehrer: [laughs] Fair enough.

Laurie: Also, the thing is, at that time, there-- a lot of things have been cut from our school system. There is no more music, where you actually learn an instrument, in schools. My sisters and I grew up in-- High schools had-- you learned to play an instrument. You learned to play it in junior high school.

Brian Lehrer: Right, the band and the orchestra were there. I was in those, but I don't know if that doesn't exist anymore. Laurie, thank you for all of that. Carrie, in Union City, you're on WNYC. Hi, Carrie.

Carrie: Hi there. How are you today?

Brian Lehrer: Good. What you got?

Carrie: Oh, I was calling about my parents, actually. I grew up in a pretty small town in a rural part of Maryland. My parents lived there for-- my mother still lives there. My father just passed away in October. My parents' social life and social circle is unbelievable. My mother immigrated here when she was three. My father's American, but they-- There was over 220 people at my father's funeral.

I was telling the screener that since my father's passing, my mother's friends have rallied around her in a way that's-- They've always been extremely social and extremely active, and ever since my father passed on October 29, there has not been one day where my mother has not had a friend take her out to lunch, make her dinner, go to pick her up to go do something, take her shopping. It is absolutely an unbelievable thing to watch.

I am 53, I'm divorced, and I barely do anything. I feel like I have some very close friends, but most of my friends are in different states.

Brian Lehrer: Do you consider, like the last caller, making an effort, going out to book clubs or finding those, or the caller before that, I think he joined the Elks. Are you kind of, to the point of Derek's article, saying, "Well, I'm complaining about this, in a way, but I'm choosing to self-isolate?"

Carrie: Yes, I wouldn't say I'm a self-isolator, necessarily. I think that my social outlet is work, oftentimes. Then I do solitary activities like roller skating, learning how to play drums, and things like that. I just have very unique interests that a lot of my, let's say, closer girlfriends or guy friends don't really have. I've learned how to do things alone and be okay with that, and be sort of autonomous.

It's not that I'm not doing things, I just tend to do them alone. Whereas when I look at my parents and even when I was married, I felt like my parents were always out doing something. They just were never sitting still. Now that my mother is suddenly single, it's such a testament to the community that they have built.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, Carrie, thank you. Thank you very much. Suzanne, in Pound Ridge, you're on WNYC. Hi, Suzanne.

Suzanne: Hi. I was just thinking, when you asked the question about my parents and my children. I'm 61 years old, like some of your callers before, I grew up in-- my parents were immigrants to Brooklyn, and we moved to Pound Ridge, South Salem, and Northern Westchester. I think we were sort of part of a trend. Their life was much more social. They'd talk about playing ball on the stoop and hanging out in neighborhoods.

And I remember, actually, my mom being very lonely when my dad and my mom moved up here for "a better life." It really was a much more isolated life, that we were spread out. I agree with all the factors that were brought up before, but I'm just wondering if this is one more.

Brian Lehrer: Suzanne, thank you very much. We're just going to leave it as that, wondering, and we're going to get one more in here. Mark, in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Mark.

Mark: Hi, Brian. I just wanted to speak to a specific experience, my college experience. I'm Gen Z, and most of my college happened online in the pandemic, and not by choice. I think that that's a very specific group of people, only from the past four or five years, who-- our educational experience has been so radically different from both kids who are going to college now, and adults, like my parents. I think that [unintelligible 00:44:51] social isolation--

Brian Lehrer: [crosstalk] Have you all flocked back, now that you can, or got into that mode of being more isolated, that was formed in the pandemic? We have 10 seconds.

Mark: My career trajectory basically completely changed because I wasn't able to talk to other people in my generation face-to-face.

Brian Lehrer: Mark, thank you for your call. Thanks to all of you, for your calls on a really interesting topic. Thanks again to Derek Thompson for making us think the way that he did in his piece in The Atlantic. Have a great weekend, everyone, and stay tuned for Alison.

 

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