As of 2026, anything you could ever want is clicks away. Food can be delivered rather than retrieved, items can be ordered remotely, and one can access books or music online rather than in person. All of this is in the name of a frictionless consumption experience. People will naturally choose the path of least resistance and new technology allows businesses to offer paths to consumption with less resistance. Why wouldn’t anyone use it?
On a completely unrelated note, American adults right now are the loneliest they’ve been.
There are many other variables that affect how lonely people tend to be. Americans also lack third spaces, work more hours, and mostly live in atomized communities. All four of these factors are bad enough, but they also feed into each other in a cycle. Americans that work many hours consequently lack time to utilize their scarce third spaces afterwards. To get to them, they’d use a car that eliminates the chance of social interaction whilst in transit. Instead of that hassle, it’s more likely that they drive home to their single-unit house or apartment and order food, rather than going to a restaurant because it would be a lot of energy that they don’t have — aforementioned longer hours. This is a very simple and in some ways flawed allegory, but it hopefully gets the point across: these factors viciously compound into widespread solitude, especially post-pandemic.
Why would American loneliness be institutionalized in and of itself, and not a peripheral consequence of some other more cemented practice? At one point the case was the latter, but sometime in between the initial adoption of “friction-reducing” consumption technology and its cementation during the pandemic was when the shift was truly made. What constitutes the institutionalization of loneliness is the fact that it’s built into how Americans are “supposed” to behave under ideal conditions: on an average day, according to the simplified illustration written above, instead of choosing to spend time within their community, an American is probably more solitary. That change in behavior is brought about not by one monolith, some governmental or corporate institution in the primary sense of the word, but rather its softer definition as a deeply embedded practice. Lonely and antisocial behavior is becoming more and more deeply embedded within America every day. Most aspire to climb the ladder of social mobility, resulting in passive societal competition eroding what sense of cohesion is left after everything else. In short, it’s embedded in our core values by this point.
Our infrastructure is hostile to it and our economy doesn’t reward it, which is exactly why community is more important now than ever. In conclusion, cherishing it would be very exquisite and also cool. You don’t have to though, I’m not your dad or anything like that.