A few years ago, I was landing in San Diego for a couple days’ visit. As my plane was touching down, I thought that I could have called my friend Mike* to pick me up from the airport. That would have allowed us to catch up, since we hadn’t seen each other for a while. He’s a busy guy, and I would be busy for most of the trip, so the ride from the airport and a possible lunch would have been a great opportunity to spend some time together, catch up, and reminisce about the past.

Instead, I rented a car, as usual. Because Mike was busy, I didn’t want to impose. Also, since I could afford a rental, I didn’t have to impose.

That’s when it occurred to me that our prosperity/affluence, coupled with the modern lifestyle, could be a cause of societal isolation/alienation. If I didn’t have enough money to rent the car, I would have bitten the bullet and called one of my friends to pick me up from the airport. Economic circumstances would have forced my friends and me to override the demands of our busy schedules and spend some time together.

This observation applies to much more than just picking up people from the airport. There are many activities that due to our prosperity, which increases our self-sufficiency, we end up doing by ourselves or paying people to do, instead of getting our friends to help us with. For example, from the big stuff like help with moving, painting our home/apartment, and renovations, to the small stuff like driving us to the store or picking us up from the airport.

When we are young and have less money, the above are the sorts of things that we ask our friends for help with. As we get more affluent, we slowly reduce the number of cases in which we ask for help and at some point just do everything by ourselves or pay someone to do them for us.

Because our society is overall affluent, it’s expected and likely a sign of maturity that we eventually stop bugging our friends for help with these various issues. But I’m not so sure if the end result is that great for social cohesion or personal well-being.

In the book “Bowling Alone” Robert Putnam argues that Americans have become more disconnected from their families, neighbors, and communities. The book lists several reasons for this, but perhaps one of the contributing factors is the simple fact that American society has become more prosperous than it was in the middle of the twentieth century.

If we look at less-prosperous societies, we see more interdependence and usually stronger bonds between friends. Within the US, if we look at the past, there was for example the phenomenon of barn raising which was “an event during which community men come together to assemble a barn for one or more of its households”. Today, you just hire a contractor to do the job for you, thus missing out on the bonding experience. Also, within the US of today, the young are a less-prosperous group within the larger society, and there again we see more interdependence than among older people. This may partially explain the disparity between the size of the social circle of young people versus the much smaller social circle of older people.

Some caveats are in order.

First, the above observations don’t apply to very social people who call up people anyway, no matter their level of prosperity or self-sufficiency. It does however apply to large swaths of society who, in the absence of that extra nudge that comes from interdependence, are not as social.

Second, being interdependent is not all roses. There are lots of conflicts that arise when you are dependent on others. It’s possible though, that we have evolved to emotionally handle the conflicts that arise from social interdependence, which has been around for millennia, and are not as prepared to handle the issues that arise from social insulation/isolation, which is a very recent phenomenon.

Also, it can be argued that it’s better to be able to choose who you spend your free time with based on who you are most compatible with, and not based on who you are dependent on to get things done. Maybe, but (a) empirically, people don’t have as many close friends now (I am of course not counting 400 “friends” on Facebook as close friends), and (b) going through tough experiences has been shown to produce bonds that are much stronger than the bonds with “fair-weather friends”.

Given the above, how should society go about increasing social cohesion and improving friendship bonds? It’s not yet clear. Nobody (except groups like the Amish) would recommend reducing our level of prosperity to achieve this. We need new institutions, social norms, and cultural values to achieve these goals. It will take time for society to solve the problematic side effects of the relatively new phenomenon of wide-spread prosperity.

Originally posted March 18, 2012

Original responses: