Family Skills
Jun. 8th, 2026 01:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmith1950s Marriage Family Nostalgia
A majority of Americans believe our country’s culture and way of life have “mostly changed for the worse” since the 1950s, according to the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2025 American Values Survey. That includes 55% of white people, 53% of Black people and 57% of Latinos.
Well, it's had a lot of ups and downs. Some things have changed for the better, others for the worse -- and indeed, some of the improvements led to disasters in other areas. I would say it has peaked, as we are now losing some hard-fought gains but we haven't gotten back things we lost from earlier.
For many, the problem lies in the collapse of the marriage system of that decade, when the majority of women married before they turned 21, only 6% of men and women reached age 35 without having married, and divorce rates fell to a postwar low of 9.2 divorces per 1,000 married women.
Humans are troop animals. It's not good when lots of people live alone. There have always been introverts and the occasional hermit, but living alone is hard and makes most people unhappy. So a network of stable relationships is a good thing. Making those healthy, happy relationships is work. What we have now is a lot of people scattered around in ones and twos. They have plenty of relationship freedom, but the result is less relationships and mostly unhappy people. That's a change, but it's not necessarily an improvement.
The solution, according to the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” blueprint for family policy, is to incentivize early marriage and childbearing (for heterosexual partners only) and abolish no-fault divorce.
Cutting out no-fault divorce -- and let's not forget, also abortion -- will discourage people from marrying in the first place. You can't beat them into it. You have to make the marriage deal worth taking or they just won't do it. A lot of countries are learning this the hard way.
That said, it's most effective if people reproduce during their peak fertility span. Society is pushing women past that, and the results are unfortunate. Aside from infertility issues, having children later means you have less time together before the parents die, and the children will be younger when that happens. There's also less chance of seeing grandchildren, let alone great-grandchildren. It's one of several factors undermining the extended family, which is not great for people's happiness or stability.
I’ve spent much of my career as a historian criticizing any idealization of 1950s marriages. Domestic violence and child abuse were much more common then than today. It was perfectly legal for a man to forcibly rape his wife. And depression among homemakers was so widespread that by the end of the decade, physicians had labeled it the “housewife’s syndrome.”
Some marriages have always been unhappy, but not all of them. I think people threw the baby out with the bathwater and decided to bail out of relationships that might have been fixable. And then a lot of people just decided not to bother with permanent relationships at all. The results have not made people happier on average; they are just miserable for a different set of reasons. A majority of people now feel lonely, which is bad for both physical and mental health. America's birthrate is well below replacement; this is not a gentle decline but a steep drop, and people are not prepared for its changes. Some other countries are outright plummeting which is even worse. Less humans means less pressure on planetary resources, but they're not making a graceful transition.
The fact is, we’re doing “family” better than we used to. Domestic violence rates have continued to fall since the 1970s. Husbands do much more housework and hands-on child care than they used to, and both parents spend more time interacting with their children.
Those are improvements, but they are limited. Not all families enjoy those benefits. There are fewer people getting married at all. Marriages are less stable than they used to be, which is hard on the kids, which contributes to the decline of marriage as they neither learn good family skills growing up nor want to risk having a divorce themselves. And smaller families beget smaller families, which cuts out whole swaths of relatives that people often don't have anymore.
But one reason divorce rates have fallen so much is that people who have not yet achieved the economic security and personal stability they believe marriage requires are far less likely to “give marriage a shot” than in the past. And they have good reason for caution.
As challenging as marriage is, being single is difficult and expensive. You have to do everything yourself; there is no backup if you get sick or injured. You have to buy everything; you don't have anyone to share with. Some people manage to splice together a found-family for those purposes, or live in community, but most don't. Being alone makes most people unhappy. A bad marriage is worse than being single, but being single is for most people nowhere near as good as a happy marriage. There's nothing wrong with being single per se, and some people love it; but few humans are really happy living alone. We have somewhat reduced the tendency to trap people in unhappy marriages -- although that still happens too -- but we have greatly increased the number of unhappy singles. That's not solving a problem, it's just exchanging for a different set of problems. And the current set is going to wreck society if people don't figure out a solution, because the entire system is built on the premise of growth. That falling birthrate is going to screw everything.
Between 1949 and 1969, every economic expansion saw at least two-thirds of income growth go to the bottom 90% of the population. If those postwar wage trends had continued, two Rand economists recently estimated, by 2018 the bottom 90% of the population would have been earning 67% more than they actually were. Instead, between 1975 and 2018, it was the top 10% who made big gains, taking in $47 trillion more than they would have if postwar wage trends had continued.
That shift is behind a lot of problems, from affordable housing to falling birthrate to people deciding that employment is more bother than it's worth for the stingy wages offered.
The costs of a family’s most important sources of security — homes, college education and medical care — have risen faster than average wages. The same is true for the kind of “treats” that people associate with a satisfying family life — for example, a family outing at the ballpark or an amusement park.
If people struggle to afford basic needs, they are poor; and by this standard, most of America is now poor. That creates a lot of instability. When even simple rewards are out of reach for most people, they tend to start feeling like life is a shitshow and why bother working if they aren't getting stability and a little fun out of it. Or they decide to get their reward somewhere society would rather they didn't, like playing video games or doing drugs. If you want people to work, there has to be a sufficient payoff.
These “premiums” are not just the little perks that have always come with wealth — luxuries that we might envy, but which take nothing away from our own experiences. They come at a cost to the rest of us. It doesn’t hurt my family’s enjoyment of Disneyland if we can afford only one visit a year and other families can go as often as they wish. But when other families can afford to pay between $300 and $499 for Lightning Lane Premier Passes that allow them to bypass lines any time they like, that lengthens everybody else’s wait time.
That kind of shit is what leads to class warfare of the guillotine kind. Any student of history can tell you that. The gap can only get so wide before the people on the bottom -- who always outnumber the top -- start tearing things apart.
Contrary to contemporary nostalgia brokers, the main threat to family life and social solidarity today isn’t the fact that couples who can’t get along can obtain a no-fault divorce. It’s not that women and girls have access to birth control and the fallback of abortion when needed. Nor is it that same-sex couples can now formalize their commitments the same way that different-sex couples do and can access alternative ways to have children.
True, but we do have a situation where society is literally coming apart at the seams as relationships drift apart. That's a problem. Now, same-sex couples marrying and having kids? That's great. Those are families. Polycules? Also families. Huzzah. But a lot of people seem to lack the interest, the family skills, or both required to sustain a household of 2+ people. That needs fixing.
We need to address the underlying sources of pain and resentment: the reversal of the economic equalization of the 1950s and 1960s, the shredding of the social and medical safety net, the assault on hard-won protections for workers and consumers, and the extent to which middle- and lower-income families have been saddled with so many of the stressful inconveniences that are the flip side of the privileges accorded the rich.
True. But that alone won't rebuilt the connections that people have lost or thrown away. The family is the basic building block of human cultures. Without that, people don't seem to be very good at sticking together and helping each other. And a bunch of individuals doesn't add up to a functional culture. We made some improvements by addressing past problems. But the stuff we replaced it with is ... not working out very well. We need to do some more work, while we still can.
A majority of Americans believe our country’s culture and way of life have “mostly changed for the worse” since the 1950s, according to the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2025 American Values Survey. That includes 55% of white people, 53% of Black people and 57% of Latinos.
Well, it's had a lot of ups and downs. Some things have changed for the better, others for the worse -- and indeed, some of the improvements led to disasters in other areas. I would say it has peaked, as we are now losing some hard-fought gains but we haven't gotten back things we lost from earlier.
For many, the problem lies in the collapse of the marriage system of that decade, when the majority of women married before they turned 21, only 6% of men and women reached age 35 without having married, and divorce rates fell to a postwar low of 9.2 divorces per 1,000 married women.
Humans are troop animals. It's not good when lots of people live alone. There have always been introverts and the occasional hermit, but living alone is hard and makes most people unhappy. So a network of stable relationships is a good thing. Making those healthy, happy relationships is work. What we have now is a lot of people scattered around in ones and twos. They have plenty of relationship freedom, but the result is less relationships and mostly unhappy people. That's a change, but it's not necessarily an improvement.
The solution, according to the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” blueprint for family policy, is to incentivize early marriage and childbearing (for heterosexual partners only) and abolish no-fault divorce.
Cutting out no-fault divorce -- and let's not forget, also abortion -- will discourage people from marrying in the first place. You can't beat them into it. You have to make the marriage deal worth taking or they just won't do it. A lot of countries are learning this the hard way.
That said, it's most effective if people reproduce during their peak fertility span. Society is pushing women past that, and the results are unfortunate. Aside from infertility issues, having children later means you have less time together before the parents die, and the children will be younger when that happens. There's also less chance of seeing grandchildren, let alone great-grandchildren. It's one of several factors undermining the extended family, which is not great for people's happiness or stability.
I’ve spent much of my career as a historian criticizing any idealization of 1950s marriages. Domestic violence and child abuse were much more common then than today. It was perfectly legal for a man to forcibly rape his wife. And depression among homemakers was so widespread that by the end of the decade, physicians had labeled it the “housewife’s syndrome.”
Some marriages have always been unhappy, but not all of them. I think people threw the baby out with the bathwater and decided to bail out of relationships that might have been fixable. And then a lot of people just decided not to bother with permanent relationships at all. The results have not made people happier on average; they are just miserable for a different set of reasons. A majority of people now feel lonely, which is bad for both physical and mental health. America's birthrate is well below replacement; this is not a gentle decline but a steep drop, and people are not prepared for its changes. Some other countries are outright plummeting which is even worse. Less humans means less pressure on planetary resources, but they're not making a graceful transition.
The fact is, we’re doing “family” better than we used to. Domestic violence rates have continued to fall since the 1970s. Husbands do much more housework and hands-on child care than they used to, and both parents spend more time interacting with their children.
Those are improvements, but they are limited. Not all families enjoy those benefits. There are fewer people getting married at all. Marriages are less stable than they used to be, which is hard on the kids, which contributes to the decline of marriage as they neither learn good family skills growing up nor want to risk having a divorce themselves. And smaller families beget smaller families, which cuts out whole swaths of relatives that people often don't have anymore.
But one reason divorce rates have fallen so much is that people who have not yet achieved the economic security and personal stability they believe marriage requires are far less likely to “give marriage a shot” than in the past. And they have good reason for caution.
As challenging as marriage is, being single is difficult and expensive. You have to do everything yourself; there is no backup if you get sick or injured. You have to buy everything; you don't have anyone to share with. Some people manage to splice together a found-family for those purposes, or live in community, but most don't. Being alone makes most people unhappy. A bad marriage is worse than being single, but being single is for most people nowhere near as good as a happy marriage. There's nothing wrong with being single per se, and some people love it; but few humans are really happy living alone. We have somewhat reduced the tendency to trap people in unhappy marriages -- although that still happens too -- but we have greatly increased the number of unhappy singles. That's not solving a problem, it's just exchanging for a different set of problems. And the current set is going to wreck society if people don't figure out a solution, because the entire system is built on the premise of growth. That falling birthrate is going to screw everything.
Between 1949 and 1969, every economic expansion saw at least two-thirds of income growth go to the bottom 90% of the population. If those postwar wage trends had continued, two Rand economists recently estimated, by 2018 the bottom 90% of the population would have been earning 67% more than they actually were. Instead, between 1975 and 2018, it was the top 10% who made big gains, taking in $47 trillion more than they would have if postwar wage trends had continued.
That shift is behind a lot of problems, from affordable housing to falling birthrate to people deciding that employment is more bother than it's worth for the stingy wages offered.
The costs of a family’s most important sources of security — homes, college education and medical care — have risen faster than average wages. The same is true for the kind of “treats” that people associate with a satisfying family life — for example, a family outing at the ballpark or an amusement park.
If people struggle to afford basic needs, they are poor; and by this standard, most of America is now poor. That creates a lot of instability. When even simple rewards are out of reach for most people, they tend to start feeling like life is a shitshow and why bother working if they aren't getting stability and a little fun out of it. Or they decide to get their reward somewhere society would rather they didn't, like playing video games or doing drugs. If you want people to work, there has to be a sufficient payoff.
These “premiums” are not just the little perks that have always come with wealth — luxuries that we might envy, but which take nothing away from our own experiences. They come at a cost to the rest of us. It doesn’t hurt my family’s enjoyment of Disneyland if we can afford only one visit a year and other families can go as often as they wish. But when other families can afford to pay between $300 and $499 for Lightning Lane Premier Passes that allow them to bypass lines any time they like, that lengthens everybody else’s wait time.
That kind of shit is what leads to class warfare of the guillotine kind. Any student of history can tell you that. The gap can only get so wide before the people on the bottom -- who always outnumber the top -- start tearing things apart.
Contrary to contemporary nostalgia brokers, the main threat to family life and social solidarity today isn’t the fact that couples who can’t get along can obtain a no-fault divorce. It’s not that women and girls have access to birth control and the fallback of abortion when needed. Nor is it that same-sex couples can now formalize their commitments the same way that different-sex couples do and can access alternative ways to have children.
True, but we do have a situation where society is literally coming apart at the seams as relationships drift apart. That's a problem. Now, same-sex couples marrying and having kids? That's great. Those are families. Polycules? Also families. Huzzah. But a lot of people seem to lack the interest, the family skills, or both required to sustain a household of 2+ people. That needs fixing.
We need to address the underlying sources of pain and resentment: the reversal of the economic equalization of the 1950s and 1960s, the shredding of the social and medical safety net, the assault on hard-won protections for workers and consumers, and the extent to which middle- and lower-income families have been saddled with so many of the stressful inconveniences that are the flip side of the privileges accorded the rich.
True. But that alone won't rebuilt the connections that people have lost or thrown away. The family is the basic building block of human cultures. Without that, people don't seem to be very good at sticking together and helping each other. And a bunch of individuals doesn't add up to a functional culture. We made some improvements by addressing past problems. But the stuff we replaced it with is ... not working out very well. We need to do some more work, while we still can.
Replacement
Date: 2026-06-08 02:53 pm (UTC)It failed. It is STILL failing.
In Russia, fifty-odd years earlier, the Revolution turned into bureaucracy that the Byzantines would have respected, again, with the same efforts to replace the 'old' with 'new' and 'better'.
It failed. The results of those systemic, widespread, and ranged from pecadillos to catastrophes. They are still causing knock-on problems.
Families have problems. Families can be bad for their members. Religious organizations can be dangerous to their members or to outsiders.
BUT, the best way to make a sturdy, HONEST society, is to use the law to protect individuals from predation in any form, including familial, sectarian, or institutional. Improving protections allows people to live as they prefer without endangering or exploiting other members of our society.
Our society is undergoing the kind of turmoil which led to both the October Revolution and the Maoist one, but it's not a one-to-one comparison. My grandkids will be talking about the mistakes made in this decade, the next, and the one after.
Re: Replacement
Date: 2026-06-08 04:58 pm (UTC)It failed. It is STILL failing.<<
Yep. When you try to make big, fast changes then you tend to make big, fast mistakes that are difficult to fix, even if some of your ideas were good ones.
China also ran the One Child Policy for several decades before realizing that was a mistake. I was little when it started, but I still spotted two major problems within a minute of reading the article: 1) female infanticide and 2) the 4-2-1 problem. Nobody believed me, but one is a straightforward derivation from the culture and the other is math so simple that even I could grasp it.
Eventually, China realized its mistake and lifted the policy. There was a brief small upsurge of births and then it dropped back to where it was. Some years later, the government began to realize that it was really screwed if things kept going in the same direction, so it started a bunch of pronatalist policies. But it was too late; the damage was already done. The women of childbearing age had grown up in a context where one child was the norm, everything was geared for that, and most of them either wanted one or none at all.
By this point, China has resorted to nagging and begging, and presumably will move on to brute force eventually. They've spent a ton of money trying to convince young people to have more children, with minimal effect. Honestly, I think it would be more effective to spend the same amount of money on hiring women to have and raise children. It'd still be expensive, but at least they'd have a guaranteed return.
>>In Russia, fifty-odd years earlier, the Revolution turned into bureaucracy that the Byzantines would have respected, again, with the same efforts to replace the 'old' with 'new' and 'better'.<<
One reason for the failure is that bureaucracy is slow and clumsy, while individuals can be fast and agile. Bureaucracy is usually designed to limit access to resources, whereas healthy relationships aim to support each other as needed. Intentional neighboring highlights the advantages of relationships over bureaucracy.
We see the same thing in America where mass-produced services are less useful and enjoyable than trading favors with friends or family. The services are rising, though, because fewer people have friends and family to rely on, so more are stuck with inferior services -- or nothing at all, if they can't convince the important people that their needs are "valid."
Families have problems. Families can be bad for their members. Religious organizations can be dangerous to their members or to outsiders.
That's true. I think it's better to address problems and seek solutions than to dismantle or discard the family framework. There are better options than unhealthy families, but there are NOT better options than healthy families.
>>BUT, the best way to make a sturdy, HONEST society, is to use the law to protect individuals from predation in any form, including familial, sectarian, or institutional. Improving protections allows people to live as they prefer without endangering or exploiting other members of our society.<<
Agreed. One big problem today is that the government is stripping away protections.
>>Our society is undergoing the kind of turmoil which led to both the October Revolution and the Maoist one, but it's not a one-to-one comparison. My grandkids will be talking about the mistakes made in this decade, the next, and the one after.<<
Yyyyeah. It's easy to see that the situation is a powderkeg, is unsustainable, and will require radical changes. While it is possible to achieve that peacefully, most societies do not and instead erupt into violence. The patterns are predictable. It's the details that vary -- you can't always see what the changes will be, other than very general changes out of necessity.
It was my grandparents' generation who started a lot of today's problems, but in their defense, when they did so they were unable to grasp many of the bad outcomes. It was my parents' generation, the hippies, who identified a lot of the problems and were supposed to fix them. If people had listened to the hippies, the world would be a much better place. But the hippies never quite achieved critical mass. They made some great improvements, but not enough for the cultural overhaul needed. Then things started backsliding and we began to lose the hard-won gains. Young people today often feel frustrated and demoralized by the scope of problems, especially things like climate change where it is the young who will bear the penalties for choices made by people who will have died before the penalties arrive. Gods know, we tried to fix the mess, but there were never enough of us.
(no subject)
Date: 2026-06-08 03:49 pm (UTC)I believe that a sex-slave/breeding-slave is perfectly justified in killing her owner(s), or anyone who supports them. And it's only a venial sin if she creates collateral damage by poisoning the rest of his family as well, even any children he sired on her, in the course of her domestic duties.
I hope America doesn't reach that abyss of heritage values. But if it does, I hope every woman who dislikes her assigned fate chooses to take a large, male escort with her to Hell.
---
This reaction affects my ability to think rationally about the desirability of living in groups, particularly groups formed when the participants are still learning the difference between what makes them, individually, happy, and what society claims will make everyone, or at least everyone of their sex/class/age happy.
I remember not being sure that e.g. child rearing wouldn't suit me. I'd hate to be stuck in a marriage I'd taken on during that period of uncertainty.
There's a reason lots of 50s wives were on tranquilizers, Prozac not yet having been invented. It reduced the number of even worse reactions to decisions made in haste and later repented. Others, such as my own mother, choose alcohol instead.
The 50s may have been a great time to be a man, or the child of a suburban housewife. What little of it I saw (late 50s/early 60s) rather sucked, particularly in retrospect.
--
But I've derailed myself again with memories, and the certainty that I'd rather never again see another human face to face, than live with someone who acted towards me as a 50s husband expected to act towards his wife.
I'm reasonably happy living with a single housemate, and a thin-by-most-standards social life. If society must throw its thumb on the scales, I'd prefer it continue to bias things in favor of people with my tastes, or at least allow us satisfactory choices, then bias it in favor of male comfort, breeding efficiency, and the desires of whatever females honestly prefer a traditional (sic) relationship - for themselves, not just for hypothetical others.
--
But it would be nice if a single income could support several people - without requiring the breadwinnner to be in or near the 1%. But of course back in the 50s, housework was still somewhat more productive than even now - the housewife contributed to the family's resources in ways now substituted by money. And even then, in poor families all adults worked - at least when work could be found. Only the middle class and the top of the working class had full time housewives.
And more connections might be good, though I doubt I have the extraversion needed to maintain them.
And of course it's sad if people who want more connections can no longer maintain them, or can't afford to develop them in the first place, because of work and other societal values.
Are Europeans, with their greater leisure, in quite the same hole as folks in the USA? They aren't breeding up a storm, which doubtless upsets heritage foundation types. But are they more connected and perhaps happier, on average?
(no subject)
Date: 2026-06-08 04:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2026-06-08 10:51 pm (UTC)Thoughts
Date: 2026-06-09 01:13 am (UTC)Yeah, a lot of folks are. It's gotten bad enough that it's harder to ignore nowadays.
>> I'm intentionally running my life in a way that prioritizes community and it can be done, <<
That's good.
I make some efforts, like visiting street fairs and other community events. It's nice to go places where people still talk to each other. Last time we were at the Otto Center, we enjoyed the buffet they were offering -- and a couple different guys sitting near us at the table just struck up random conversations with us. Same at the greenhouse this spring, people would start talking about plants. But we do live out in the country, so every encounter with people is part of a planned trip, even if the interactions are spontaneous.
>> but I agree it's harder--the social scaffolding isn't there in the way it used to be, I think.<<
It really isn't. The local county fair used to be big and busy, but has shrunk to the point they can't even fill all the days anymore, so they do partial days, which is annoying. It'd be a better event if they just made it 2-3 days instead of trying for a week. As much as I feel nostalgia for it, there are other better fairs in nearby counties. Effingham has a totally brilliant space, with an actual food court where restaurants can rent a slot, and picnic tables, all under a roof.
>> (I also think that common interest has replaced common space, to an extent; some of my groups I travel a fair distance to hang with, only one is based right in my neighborhood.) <<
Also true. There is less common space, what's called a "third place" nowadays, where people can gather that isn't home or work / school. Enough that the surviving examples stand out. Greenup has a town hall that they use for events, right across from a dance hall. Marshall has a pavilion on the courthouse lawn where the town band plays, and they just close streets to traffic to make space for booths. One thing that really stands out about some of the towns we frequent is how welcoming they feel, even though we don't live there or know many people. But we do see some of the same vendors at different events, so that's nice.
Thoughts
Date: 2026-06-08 11:24 pm (UTC)That's true.
>> Dances, <<
I've noticed that mainstream America is one of the few cultures that doesn't dance much anymore. That's an issue because dancing seems to be a universal human pastime, like music. But so much of modern society has turned arts and sports from things that everybody does into things that most people only watch others do. This is bad for personal development, health, social bonding, and society in general.
>> bowling alleys, roller rinks, <<
I think these are mostly casualties of monetization and lack of time. As people became more obsessed with money, it wasn't enough for a local business to turn a little profit; people wanted more and more. That avid hunt for money made people cut corners, which made businesses less fun to visit, which eventually caused many to close. At the same time, people now work harder but see less benefit for their efforts. So they have less time and energy left for anything outside of work -- family, friends, hobbies, neighborhood activities, etc. This is especially true given that many people must now work multiple jobs just to scrape by. It is a miserable existence.
>> organizations like the Shriners, etc.
Of course, a lot of those organizations were mainly men back then.<<
Fraternal secret organizations were aimed at men. As long as they were for socializing rather than business, this was fine; the issue of discrimination came up because they were mixing business into off-duty hours in ways that shut out women workers, which was not okay. The social separation was fine because women had their own organizations from craft clubs to parent-teacher organizations to charities where men rarely or never went. And there were mixed groups too, for people who preferred that option.
>> The community-outreach and bonding opportunities were stronger then, for good or ill. <<
Very true. Also important is that people felt more community spirit, which has dwindled greatly for various reasons. Among those:
* Many people used to work the same job their whole career. That fostered a good pension, close ties among workers and also customers, and society. Nowadays people are expected to switch not only jobs but whole careers on demand. This is a very serious problem, because ONE instance of involuntary job loss causes a PERMANENT reduction in connection with community. And it's not a small loss, it's a whopping 35%.
* Similarly, more people stayed in the same neighborhood or at least town over the long term. They move around more. That makes it much harder to form and maintain relationships both personally and within a community. Even if you don't move, the other people you know are likely to move away and lose touch. This discourages not only friendships but also customer loyalty and community engagement, since people have less expectation of getting back the energy they put into people or places.
* People don't feel the same way about society as they used to, because society does not currently take good care of its citizens. When people receive care and support, it builds goodwill. They want to give back when they can. When they are mistreated or ignored, it builds resentment. They grab whatever they can for themselves, because they've learned that nobody cares about them.
All of that is ruinous to a healthy society.
>> We've sort of internalized our entertainments, <<
It's nice to have that as an option but for most people it is not healthy as the only thing.
>> church attendance has fallen off a cliff,<<
That's not good, because spirituality and communal religious practices are ubiquitous in humanity. Plenty of societies have tried to stomp out religion, but that never works for long. It always respawns. Interestingly, similar patterns reappear over and over independently. What gets lost is the details. The vast majority of people seem to crave communal interaction with the numinous. It helps them make sense of a challenging world, weather hardships, and reinforce community bonds. The loss of church or other spiritual group has removed one of the main supports for hard times -- right when we need it most.
>> so larger social bonds are falling apart.<<
Yeah. Society is coming apart at the seams, because so many of the frameworks that once held it together have been damaged, dismantled, or abandoned. That's a problem.
On the bright side, it is a problem with a lot of obvious solutions that people could apply. That won't fix everything but would go a long way toward improvement. Looking around, I can see which towns and other organizations are putting in the work. I've seen churches with a long list of roles that members can do, and with a cogent analysis of what people need to stick with a church. I've seen towns that play up their resources -- they have a calendar of events, they have at least one venue which is well known as a place for public activities, and so on. Most colleges now use a searchable database for their student clubs; I haven't seen a town doing that yet, but it would be a great way to boost interest in any kind of organization. We have a lot of tools available, if people choose to use them.
(no subject)
Date: 2026-06-08 07:58 pm (UTC)