Something is very wrong

by Devon Morris

May 7 2025

Something has gone very, very wrong.

I recently read three books: The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam, and The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. These books were published in 1961, 2000, and 2025 and deal with urban planning, membership organizations, and social media, respectively. At first glance, they seem unrelated. But that I read them, and in that order, was not a coincidence. I thought these works would help me drill down on an idea rolling around in my head: that community, as we came to know it for thousands of years, has been destroyed in the same way you fall in love: slowly, and then all at once.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities is Jane Jacobs’ famous treatise on developing dense, vibrant, mixed-use neighborhoods. That I founded Walkable Volusia almost a year ago and had not read this book was a point of personal embarrassment; it’s required reading for urbanists. Jacobs makes a compelling case for building cities around what people need. She advocates for interspersing residences, workplaces, and recreation on small blocks with frequent streets, replete with buildings new and old, and in close proximity to one another. These are the conditions that ensure a lively city. But what makes the book great is that it’s not entirely about zoning and infrastructure.

Jacobs paints a vivid image of a robust community engaged in a continuous, symbiotic, semi-anonymous relationship with itself. Neighbors look after each other and mind the children. Old men sit on stoops, drink beer, and talk about the weather. Storekeepers are local sages who also hang on to your spare key. The streets are safer, cleaner, and more entertaining than they otherwise would be.

Suburbs do not — and cannot — replicate this dance. After World War II, for a variety of reasons ranging from racism to economics, people started living further and further away from each other in sprawling, single-family developments. All available evidence indicates this has been a total disaster for community: people have never been more isolated from each other, physically and socially. People’s distrust in each other has never been higher. The fear of crime has basically no relationship at all with actual rates of crime. The neighborhood street, once the center of action, sits empty. To get to anything interesting, you have to drive, and most people drive alone. People are, indisputably, less happy and more stressed than they otherwise would be.

In Bowling Alone, Putnam describes a steep decline in the membership of service, political, and recreational clubs beginning in the 1960s. What he calls the Great Civic Generation — those who came of age prior to World War II — fueled a membership boom in organizations like Kiwanis, school PTAs, political committees, and churches. For whatever reason — and Putnam has several theories — they do not pass these traits on to the Baby Boomers. As the name suggests, people really do start bowling alone: while the rate at which people bowl is virtually unchanged in the latter half of the 20th century, membership in bowling leagues drops off.

A straight line can be drawn between this retreat from public life and increased levels of distrust amongst neighbors and a plummeting of civic engagement. People become content sitting at home and watching television instead of hosting guests, running a meeting, or volunteering with a campaign. Community trust is not important just because it makes you feel warm and fuzzy; trusting communities have stronger economies. Trust makes you less likely to do something stupid or harmful. Untrusting communities, then, are weak and dangerous.

Unsurprisingly, these effects are worst in the suburbs. Because suburbs are a resource leach on the rest of society, everyone pays for it.

In The Anxious Generation, Haidt presents overwhelming evidence showing that the rise of social media has had a dramatic and almost-completely-negative effect on the well-being of children. Beginning in the 2010s with the wide availability of smartphones, social media platforms, and high-speed internet, mental illness among children (particularly girls) skyrockets. Children become significantly more likely to be anxious and depressed, have eating disorders, and attempt suicide. They don’t play outside, don’t have as many friends, and enter adulthood much more fragile and incompetent than their parents. Their educational outcomes are worse, and they exhibit more behavioral problems.

Again, suburbs worsen these effects. Sprawl and car-dependence make it difficult and dangerous for kids to be independent and interact with each other in the real world. You can’t go anywhere if Mom can’t drive you, and your friend group can’t learn to govern itself if Mom is always there.

It is hard to come away from these books without feeling sick to your stomach about all that we have lost. We are less flourishing than our great-grandparents were 80 years ago. All our technological and cultural advancements have not prevented that decline. As a progressive, you are trained not to fall for the allure of nostalgia; indeed, things were certainly worse in many ways for the marginalized in the idealized decades past.

But I have found myself becoming something of a traditionalist in recent months. I moved to a walkable downtown where I have quickly become a regular (Abbey Bar knows when I walk in that I want a Narragansett.) When I go out to dinner or to a bar, I will often bring along a prepaid flip-phone instead of my iPhone and find myself engaging more with my partner or even strangers. I have grown the membership of Walkable Volusia by doing concerted outreach to people I wouldn’t otherwise meet, bringing them into the fold, and getting them to city meetings. I know my neighbors and invite them over, and they invite us over too. In short, I have been trying to create a community that more closely resembles that of my great-grandparents but without all the prejudice.

We should all be really concerned about what the alternative is: the anti-community.

In an anti-community, we don’t know our neighbors. We keep our kids from playing outside. We interact more with screens than with each other. We don’t volunteer or have dinner parties or run for office. We befriend and fall in love with AI chatbots instead of people. And, inevitably, we are sadder, more isolated, and more prone to killing ourselves. Our communities decline for lack of care. We are all worse off.

A year ago, I would not have taken this warning seriously. It seems dramatic to predict rapid societal decline. Certainly I am not the first in history to do so. But let me say this emphatically: the decline has already happened, and it can get much worse.

Blaise Pascal said, “There is a God-shaped hole in the heart of every man.” I believe, in a secular sense, that he was right. We yearn for meaning, for community, for love. We are finding it less and less. People, me included, have been feeling unsettled in a hard-to-define way for quite some time. I now think the reason is pretty clear: we are increasingly alone.

There are dozens of prescriptions for this. For starters, we should prioritize building vibrant, walkable communities. We should reconnect with our civic and service roots by joining clubs and churches. We should rethink work culture and give ourselves more time to engage with friends, family, and the occasional stranger. We should absolutely ban cell phones in schools and enforce age restrictions on social media, so our kids don’t grow up worse than we already have.

Some of these things require government, but many of them just require you and me to decide that we don’t want to live this way anymore. We can decide to open the front door and reintroduce ourselves to each other. We need to do it today.