Don't forget that in the US we also have built our towns and cities to be isolating. Most don't walk home from work, pop into their local bar/coffee shop/park to see their neighbors and then finish their walk home. We get in our car alone, drive home where then going out means getting back in a car, and stopping on the way home means figuring out drivers and parking and meetups.

We lost our third places and now we wonder why we don't know our neighborhood as well

“OK, now let’s have some fun. Let’s talk about sex. Let’s talk about women. Freud said he didn’t know what women wanted. I know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to. What do they want to talk about? They want to talk about everything.

What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish people wouldn’t get so mad at them.

Why are so many people getting divorced today? It’s because most of us don’t have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The groom got a lot more pals to tell dumb jokes to.

A few Americans, but very few, still have extended families. The Navahos. The Kennedys.

But most of us, if we get married nowadays, are just one more person for the other person. The groom gets one more pal, but it’s a woman. The woman gets one more person to talk to about everything, but it’s a man.

When a couple has an argument, they may think it’s about money or power or sex, or how to raise the kids, or whatever. What they’re really saying to each other, though, without realizing it, is this: “You are not enough people!”

I met a man in Nigeria one time, an Ibo who has six hundred relatives he knew quite well. His wife had just had a baby, the best possible news in any extended family.

They were going to take it to meet all its relatives, Ibos of all ages and sizes and shapes. It would even meet other babies, cousins not much older than it was. Everybody who was big enough and steady enough was going to get to hold it, cuddle it, gurgle to it, and say how pretty it was, or handsome.

Wouldn't you have loved to be that baby?”

― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian

I've found makerspaces to be a secular alternative. The makerspace has to specifically foster community, though. There's quite a few that are just techbros with a clique that you ain't in.

Covid also killed a lot of the social aspects of my makerspace, and it's been hard to build it back.

I think that it's more that we've commoditized all aspects of community, and at the same time have stopped offering any sense of financial opportunities to young people.

Social groups are now built around expensive hobbies or membership subscriptions. There aren't even really any free spaces for people to organize around. Even the alt right groups preying on lonely people are usually just trying to sell supplements or merch.

It’s not loneliness, it’s rugged individualism! It’s not anti-union/anti-community propaganda to keep the masses weak; I mean have you seen union dues?! /s

But don’t worry, those same people who say shit like that are so desperate for community that they’ll never leave their hometown except for when their local far-right militia chapter goes out to harrass a protest or attack their country’s government for having a fair election.

I dislike religion, but you're not wrong. Interacting with one another putting on friendly faces and performing kindness and fellowship until for some it becomes real.

For all the fakery and frauds, without that dance it's so much harder to find the people we really connect with.