I have thought a lot about this, and I think one large cause is low- and zero- effort interactions. Anything that requires constant effort eventually dies out. If someone has to initiate, pick up the phone and text you and invite you out, one of you is going to eventually stop doing that. We used to have lots of low- and zero- effort interactions. You saw people at church, at family events, you run into them around town, at the bar, etc. As the article says: in the past people participated more in clubs and organizations, sports leagues and volunteered more. Young people have replaced alcohol and bars with weed and abstinence. Now even when people do see each other, the friction is far higher. It's hard to strike up a conversation with someone on a phone, or with earbuds in. Polarization has made it so that every issue is life or death (because many things truly are [1]) and so now it is only acceptable to talk to the correct portion of society. The worst things in the world are constantly livestreamed to our faces in 4K, from the news to social media to the Citizen app, so now you know that the public is insane and you'd be insane to talk to them. In 2005 the news might feature the 95th percentile bad shit because that's the best they could find, but now we all have 4K cameras on us all the time, so on social media you can find the 99.999th percentile bad shit. In a world of eight billion unique humans, that microscopic sliver of the bell curve is a horrifying place.
I come to HN for insightful comments, and of course there is one in the 335 posted here: that socializing is no longer necessary for survival. In 2025 your crises are for your therapist and your financial issues are for a fintech and you move house with Dolly and your career is for LinkedIn and your Ikea assembly is for Angi. In 2001 nearly everyone would use their friends or family for those things; in 2025 you don't need them.
And so we are left with a world where you don't strike up a conversation anymore; it's too hard and too dangerous and too risky. You don't go to church (too problematic) or the bar (bad for you.) You don't hit on people (there's Tinder.) You don't go to the store (Amazon) and if you do go to a restaurant you don't talk to anyone (pickup.) You don't see your friends and family; you don't need them to move (use an app) or put together a sofa (use an app) or talk about your feelings (go to therapy.) As it turns out, you can replace love and touch and hugs and hate and bus conversations and bank tellers and racist neighbors and unprotected sex and and and and all of the things in all of the people with one little screen just a few inches square.
Technology is destroying our society and our lives.
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[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43357719
