Communities and large families with lots of kids running around have given place to individuals, apartments, TVs, smartphones, perhaps a treadmill, and an eventual companion. Marriages in Brazil now last an average of 14 years, while it once was “till death do us part”. Is social tissue breaking down? Well, women who were once tied to strict maternal identity are also finding new spaces to flourish.

I worked many years in different African countries with a rich social environment, meaning neighborhoods with kids, grandparents, aunts and uncles, lots of noise and running around, and zero privacy, but also lots of laughter. It was alive. And the streets were a place to socialize. In my childhood in São Paulo, Brazil, I remember my mother would get hoarse from screaming to get us out of the street for lunch. The world was ours to explore, and to identify what you had to run after or run away from. Jonathan Haidt mentions in The Anxious Generation: how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness1 the social fragility of overprotected kids refuging themselves in their smartphones, with little free roaming or social interaction learning. But it is not only a problem for kids. Social life has been impoverished, and deeply changed, for everyone.

In football matches, we see thousands of people screaming and chanting, pushing themselves around, an explosion of conviviality, the happiness found in yelling recommendations for the referee’s mother. On TV, where the match is watched by kids who can hear the crowd chanting aggressive or foul songs in the background, the TV commentator paraphrases them for the sake of their innocence. Well, the explosion in the stadium is liberating, but just a couple of hours every few weeks. As a kid, I did not watch matches, we played them. And shouted and cursed healthily. Is this just nostalgia for the past? We do have a loss of conviviality, and virtual conviviality is just not the same thing. A central transformation is the family structure. It certainly differs according to country or community, but overall, this key element of social organization has changed.

I take here the American example in the figure below: between 1960 and 2023, what was the American way-of-life paragon, a couple with kids (if possible, with a TV, car, lawn, and barbecue) was reduced from 44.2% of households to 17.9%. Politicians still keep referring to families as the sacred fundament of society, and so do the church pastors, but they had better have a second look. In fact, people living alone accounted for 13.1% of households in 1960, whereas presently it rises to 29.0%. This is a deep fracture of society. If we add married couples with no kids, this means “58.4% of American households now consist of married or single adults without children”, as commented in the graph. We also have unmarried partners and single parents. The key issue is not only the loss of the streets and community conviviality, and the obsession with smartphones but also the isolated household.

image host Source: Visual Capitalist – November 2024 - US Households

The erosion of the traditional family has obvious impacts on the new generation: lonely children with working parents, never having free roaming space, individual choices, permanently being told what to do and how to behave, whether in school or the different supplements in specialized lessons, or early-time analysts. In the remaining free time, they are glued to their smartphone, trying to get as many “likes” as possible, anxious about negative responses or criticism. And they get all the pornography they like: the smartphone is not a physical neighborhood. Haidt writes extensively on how this has created the Anxious Generation. For kids, it is not grandpa’s lap and curious questioning about the past anymore. Max Fisher, in The Chaos Machine2, explains how there is no free roaming on the internet; it is based on attention-maximizing algorithms. Skipping through the TV movie channels, practically all of them alert me to content: sex, drugs, violence. It draws more attention, so this is what Hollywood feeds us. It is the attention industry, its costs are in the prices we pay when shopping.

However, from another point of view, the intergeneration collaborative link is broken. In traditional families, for thousands of years, having children meant that when the parents were older and no longer fit for work, the kids turned adults would take care of them. Thus, the balance between the productive adult age and both the dependent children and elders was ensured in a solidarity intergeneration chain. What happens when we have the childless adult majority as we saw above?

In the Nordic countries, through the support of public social policies, decent nursing homes, and free health care for the aging population, what the families used to provide is now guaranteed on a wider scale. In the small nuclear family apartments, there is no room for grandparents, but at least there is public support. In countries like the US, but particularly in Brazil, for old people, there is dwindling family support and little social policy. And private nursing homes are dramatically overpriced and ill-managed. Profit-maximizing networks are not an adequate management option, to say the least. And the anxiety about our future as older people is already felt in the middle-age time of life. Do we need this?

There are more trends of social-links erosion. The working space was an essential area of conviviality. We have all seen the traditional rice fields in Asia, with lines of women chanting while jointly taking care of the sprouts. In the industrial environment, large groups of workers felt they had common challenges, organized in unions, felt bound in similar struggles, and had lots of contacts. In the present environment dominated by technology and algorithms, what was the working-class spirit of solidarity has lost much of its strength; it’s everyone out for themselves. It is different in so many work environments, of course, but overall, the feeling that you are collaborating for something useful, building a future for yourself but also contributing to a common collaborative task, has lost much strength. The social fragmentation of the workspace, particularly with isolated work on computers, is deepening. The rotten competition-based working environment in so many corporations that adopted the Jack Welch3 system is characteristic.

With the spreading feeling of loneliness or isolation in different households, cities, or working environments, many people seek refuge in the multiple local churches where — as opposed to the traditional catholic quiet spiritual concentration in big buildings — they can dance, sing, shout, be told how they should lead their lives, how they will become rich if God helps them, and meanwhile, they contribute financially to the life of so many pastors. Rather than a question of divinity, it is about human warmth. They can feel they belong to a social group, that there is a meaning after all. But it certainly is far from a community solidary feeling of building our future together, rather a temporary dressing. It navigates so well on the general stress, that we presently have billionaire pastors.

An important factor is that urban organization is much more centered on traffic fluidity than on generating spaces of conviviality. A city like Toronto presents lots of green public spaces, with bowl games for the elderly and school swimming pools open to the community. I have seen painted footprints on the sidewalks in Italian towns, protected spaces for kids to walk safely, getting a feeling it is their city, that they are home in the public spaces too. In Lausanne, the mayor trained students to take care of the elderly in their neighborhood, with a small salary and in their free time, instead of relying on more nursing homes. It contributes to local solidarity and friendships.

In Brazil, we organized a pontos de cultura[culture points] network, with public support for youths who wanted to create artistic activities. Thousands sprung up, and online interaction helped stimulate creativity instead of relying on passive online global social media. In an experience in the São Paulo neighborhood called Casa Verde (with 86,000 residents) we created a local collaborative network that stimulates interactions within the community, small businesses, and cultural activities. The examples abound, people are discovering that instead of fighting for “likes” in the global social media, you can create local collaborative networks that reinforce community interaction. Community-based organizations have a huge space to flourish.

The situations in this fragmented environment are extremely diversified; for example, gated communities, isolated luxury spaces with strict rules and absurd feelings of belonging to elites. In poor districts, the situations are radically different, and inequality has become an essential cause of economic and cultural divide, rife with tensions and violence. Studies on Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, by Bruno Manso — A Fé e o Fuzil [Faith and Guns] — show how in the absence of healthy conviviality, a destructive social environment has been created, joining illegal militias, the police, drug trafficking gangs, neo-Pentecostal churches, and populist politics to form an oppressive social environment4.

This is not about the trends being good or bad, but about understanding the depth of structural change and taking advantage of new opportunities. We are all connected on the internet, and this new connectivity opens creative collaboration capacities. For women in particular, opportunities have grown much beyond motherhood, and the change in family structure seen above is certainly linked to contraception technology, but also from overall social structure change. Sociability can be rebuilt in new ways, through urban policies, reduction of working hours, and expansion of cultural activities, among others. It also means that we reorient the overall logic of our economies, from rent maximizing for the top of the economic pyramid to collaborative initiatives centered on households, communities, intelligent use of online connectivity, as well as a richer cultural life. This is not about GDP growth but about quality of life and social well-being.

With what we nowadays produce and the technologies we have, it is not a question of not having the means, but a question of social and political reorganization. Repeating that the business of business is business, absolving economic interests from social and environmental consequences, the macho refusal of social welfare as a “nanny state” — all this is just plain stupid5. Enhancing the pleasure of living for everyone, that’s what it is about.

Notes

1 Jonathan Haidt – The anxious generation – Penguin Press, 2024
2 Max Fisher – The Chaos Machine: the inside story of how social media rewired our minds and our world – Back Bay Books, 2023. 3 David Gelles – The Man who Broke Capitalism: how Jack Welch gutted the heartland and crushed the soul of corporate America – and how to undo his legacy – Simon & Schuster, New York, 2022
4 Bruno Manso – A Fé e o Fuzil – Todavia, São Paulo, 2023 – See also A República das Milícias - 2022
5 L. Dowbor – Digital Revolution, Ethics Press, Cambridge, 2024