Why Are More Americans Lonely Today?

[Politico]

This has nothing to do with race. How about people get off twitter and talk to humans. Works wonders.

 

[Brawd]

When I was a boy back in the 40s and 50s we lived in a six family tenement in South Brooklyn. Television was an infant medium and very few people had one of the huge, expensive boxes with the round, 9" black & white screens. And although my father had a telephone in his locksmith shop it wasn't until the mid 1950s that we had one in our apartment and we regarded it as a luxury.

Local forms of entertainment were the Wednesday and Friday night dances in Prospect Park and the handball and basketball courts on Third Street. The local movie theaters cost forty cents for two main features, a newsreel, coming attractions, and a cartoon or two. That plus a few interesting radio programs were the only artificial, technological diversions from relatively simple communal life and the human interactions it fostered.

Weather permitting, a very common pastime were nightly gatherings in back yards, on front stoops, on street corners, and on rooftops in summer. People knew each other and they needed each other.

A book was published in the late 1950s called, Escape From Freedom, by Dr. Erich Fromm. I didn't discover it until the late 1960s when it was required reading in a Sociology curriculum. In it, Dr. Fromm examines the emergence of the American Middle Class, its cohesion throughout the 40s and 50s, and he predicts with amazing accuracy the development of enhanced mechanization, and of practical and entertainment technologies, and the effect these developments would have on the social order. And the word he assigns to his vision of the then imminent future is alienation.

And here we are.

Another very interesting book is, Nineteen Eighty Four.

Escape from Freedom sounds like a good book to read, I am going to see if they have it on kindle