The Choices That Create Isolation
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
In The Atlantic’s latest cover story, my colleague Derek Thompson explores how Americans turned anti-social. Many young people are actively choosing the solitary life, spending time at home in front of screens instead of out with other people, he explains. In a conversation with my colleague Lora Kelley, he noted that this sort of isolation is the result of choices that add up: “The anti-social century is about accretion,” he said. “It’s about many small decisions that we make minute to minute and hour to hour in our life, leading to a massive national trend of steadily rising overall aloneness.”
Those choices might seem minor, but they matter: To call a friend, or scroll on Instagram? To go to church, the weekly soccer game, or book club—or sleep in and scroll again? Today’s newsletter rounds up stories on the activities that bring us together, and the ones that keep us apart.
On Hanging Out
The Anti-Social Century
By Derek Thompson
Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality.
Americans Need to Party More
By Ellen Cushing
We’re not doing it as much as we used to. You can be the change we need.
The Friendship Paradox
By Olga Khazan
We all want more time with our friends, but we’re spending more time alone.
Still Curious?
- The death of the dining room: “The housing crisis—and the arbitrary regulations that fuel it—is killing off places to eat whether we like it or not, designing loneliness into American floor plans,” M. Nolan Gray wrote last year.
- How America got mean: People no longer grow up learning how to be decent to one another, David Brooks argued in 2023.
Other Diversions
- Watch—and rewatch—this 215-minute film.
- The agony of texting with men
- What to read when the odds are against you
P.S.
I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. Mark Bernstein, 75, from Wellfleet, Massachusetts, sent this photo of “a storm over Blackfish Creek, Cape Cod.”
I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.
— Isabel