"The Disconnect" gives a sloppy discussion while reviewing Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone by Eric Klinenberg. First the writer hazards that "Few things are less welcome today than protracted solitude". Whoa--what about people with kids they can't afford, or medical bills from ailing children and spouses? Wrecked and loveless marriages, and stifling alimony and child support payments? Or even smaller, more subtle miseries, like silent, nightly dinners with children you can't relate to, who hate and resent you? Are those things more welcome than protracted solitude? What about never being alone? How is that liked?
Next, the article poses the question: "as a rule, do people live alone because they want to or because they have to?" Subsequent passages suggest aloneness is usually a choice: (1) "Things changed when she made the decision to buy an apartment, committing to a future alone." (2) "Some people remain single out of a disinclination to settle." But the idea that aloneness is a a choice is casually abandoned in the next section, wherein the piece's most interesting part is revealed:
In a landmark study, “Bowling Alone” (2000), the Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam noted a puzzling three-decade decline in what he called “social capital”: the networks of support and reciprocity that bind people together and help things get done collectively. His work considered the waning of everything from P.T.A. enrollment to dinner parties and card games, but the core of his argument was declining civic participation. Between 1973 and 1994, the number of people who held a leadership role in any local organization fell by more than half. Newspaper readership among people under thirty-five dropped during a similar period, as did voting rates. Why? Putnam pointed to cultural shifts among the post-Second World War generation; the privatization of leisure (for example, TV); and, to a smaller extent, the growth of a commuting culture and the time constraints of two-career, or single-parent, family life. “Older strands of social connection were being abraded—even destroyed—by technological and economic and social change,” he wrote.
That last sentence is key, where the emphasis should fall on economic changes--changes so huge we can only begin to appreciate them. For starters, economic changes now mean people move around more, spend less time in one city or neighborhood, work several, maybe dozens of jobs in their lifetimes rather than one or two, and that unions have been dissolved, and on and on: all this, just for starters, is related to economic change. But this significant nugget, contained in a single paragraph, goes painfully unexplored by the author, who sums up the aforementioned study, saying, "Putnam, in other words, saw public institutions as a casualty of the same forces of individuation driving modern aloneness."
So now the rise in aloneness is driven by larger forces, and is no longer a choice. The original question, do people live alone because they want to or because they have to?, is now sort-of rhetorical. From here the article briefly, un-insightfully discusses online social interaction, confusing the original topic, aloneness, with something else--loneliness. But then the author pretty much dismisses the entire conversation by saying, "The truth is that lonely people at home typically contact friends, loiter in bookstores, work in cafés, take on roommates, open OKCupid profiles, or dance Tecktonik at a rave."
Oh, ok. Then what the hell are we talking about?
