In our towns, villages and suburbs, they are now such a common sight as to be mundane: boarded-up pubs, awaiting conversion to some new use or forlornly falling into dereliction. The current rate of closure is put at 18 a week. In rural areas, shuttered hostelries represent something particularly tragic: with churches reduced to silent visitor attractions and shops long since gone, they embody the demise of precious local assets in places where maintaining community life is an ongoing struggle.

Blame for the demise of pubs tends to focus on the 2007 smoking ban, impossible business rates and beer duty, the ocean of cheap alcohol sold by the big supermarkets, and younger people’s dwindling interest in booze and its associated rituals. Even if it ignores the ways in which many pubs have changed, the enduring idea that they are essentially male environments must also be part of any explanation. But there is also a clear sense of something every bit as fundamental: the decline of shared spaces, and the way we seem to be splintering into ever-smaller social niches. Many local businesses and institutions that depend on attracting a wide range of people are fading away. Worse still, the local and national politicians who might intervene often seem either not to care or to be making a bad situation even worse.

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Pubs are not the only example. In 2005, the UK was reckoned to have 3,144 nightclubs, a figure which had fallen to 1,733 a decade later (in the London borough of Hackney, the Labour council has come up with an infantilising new policy whereby new premises will be up against a “core” assumption that bars and clubs should shut by 11pm on weekdays and midnight at weekends). The music industry lobby group UK Music reckons that, since 2008, we have lost 35% of our music venues. In many cities it feels like every available building will sooner or later be turned into luxury flats, a byword for turning inward and setting oneself apart.

If our era has a pre-eminent gathering space, in both its chain and independent forms, it is surely the modern cafe – where most people seem to be hunched over their laptops, transfixed by their phones, or huddled with friends and oblivious to everyone else. This is the opposite of the places where the best kind of chaotic, unexpected experiences can happen and you might end up falling into conversations with complete strangers.

As well as the stripping-back of some of the most essential public services, one of the key effects of 10 years of austerity has been the crushing of countless other shared spaces: drop-in centres, libraries, Sure Starts. Perhaps the most overlooked casualties have been the hundreds of youth centres and clubs that have closed since 2010. More than 600 such facilities in Britain have shut over the last six years, with the loss of 139,000 youth places and 3,650 staff. In our major cities, anxiety about this organised neglect is focused on gangs and knife crime. In quieter parts of the country people’s worries are more basic – as in Gywnedd, north Wales, where recent plans to close all 39 of the county’s youth clubs were greeted with the unanswerable argument that “young people will have nowhere but the streets to socialise with each other in the evenings”.

Places emphasising affordability and appeal across income groups and generations are ​​viewed more snobbishly than ever

In the Cheshire suburb where I grew up, I depended on such places, which offered the same social mixture as our local comprehensive school only without maths, history and geography getting in the way. Bands were formed; relationships came and went; naifs like me learned vital life-skills such as how to play pool properly and the correct use of swear words. Naturally enough, there were fights, acts of vandalism, illicit drunkenness and more, but the saint-like youth workers – at the club I went to most often, they were from the local Methodist church – knew what they were doing was important, and bravely persevered. This was where I found out not just who I was, but that people were often completely unlike whatever outward stereotype they presented.

On one hand cuts; on the other, deep cultural changes that are pushing us even further apart. Among some middle-class people there has long been a cringe about anything that smacks of cultural universalism, but this prejudice now seems to be defining an ever-greater swath of our culture. Most obviously, the 20th-century model of egalitarian consumerism (summed up by what Andy Warhol said about America’s greatest export: “A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking”) is now something to be sneered at rather than aspired to, not least when it comes to the places where we eat and drink. From Wetherspoons to McDonald’s, places that emphasise affordability and an appeal that runs across income groups and generations are viewed more snobbishly than ever. Better, it seems, to be an habitué of a bespoke cafe bar with the correct selection of craft beer, halloumi and chips for the kids. The downside of hipster culture, perhaps, is that it combines its love of quality with elitism and exclusion.

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All this affects the most basic facet of how we interact with others: our mating rituals. If these things used to at least partly happen in the random cacophony of the pub and club, the new world is surely symbolised by internet dating. In many ways, this is a good thing. It has been massively liberating for the LGBTQ community, and research suggests it also increases the likelihood of people pairing beyond their own ethnic group. But there are also downsides, typified by the kind of dating sites whose proposition is so sniffy as to be almost self-parodic (witness Ivory Towers, an online service that claims to have ensured “thousands of postgrads from Oxbridge and beyond have found love, friendship and marriage”). It is not hard to see where this kind of social filtering leads. As a recent article in the Economist put it: “Assortative mating, the process whereby people with similar education levels and incomes pair up, already shoulders some of the blame for income inequality. Online dating may make the effect more pronounced: education levels are displayed prominently on dating profiles in a way they would never be offline.”

This much we know: with social mobility having stalled and deep class and regional inequalities intensifying a sense of a country hopelessly divided, we need to think not just about the economic forces that have pushed everything in that direction, but the way the same separation plays out every minute of our ordinary lives. In the Britain of 2018, one question for the kind of people who have probably never set foot in their local boozer has become a cliche: do you know anyone who voted leave? Soon enough, it may be superseded by an even more alarming one: do you know anyone who isn’t exactly like you?

• John Harris is a Guardian columnist.