The Epidemic of Loneliness; Gee, Thanks Feminism! By Mrs Vera West

Here is yet another one to add to our social disintegration pile, the epidemic of loneliness. People, especially men, not having female partners for example, poisoned by feminism. There is no doubt that our world is vastly inferior to any society of the past, because even with vast material goods, life becomes pointless when every spiritual thing of value has been destroyed. That is why, as covered in another article, 9 out of 10 young Britons, for example, see their life as meaningless.

https://www.city-journal.org/decline-of-family-loneliness-epidemic

“Americans are suffering from a bad case of loneliness. The number of people in the United States living alone has gone through the studio-apartment roof. A study released by the insurance company Cigna last spring made headlines with its announcement: “Only around half of Americans say they have meaningful, daily face-to-face social interactions.” Loneliness, public-health experts tell us, is killing as many people as obesity and smoking. It’s not much comfort that Americans are not, well, alone in this. Germans are lonely, the bon vivant French are lonely, and even the Scandinavians—the happiest people in the world, according to the UN’s World Happiness Report—are lonely, too. British prime minister Theresa May recently appointed a “Minister of Loneliness.”

The hard evidence for a loneliness epidemic admittedly has some issues. How is loneliness different from depression? How much do living alone and loneliness overlap? Do social scientists know how to compare today’s misery with that in, say, the mid-twentieth century, a period that produced prominent books like The Lonely Crowd? Certainly, some voguish explanations for the crisis should raise skepticism: among the recent suspects are favorite villains like social media, technology, discrimination, genetic bad luck, and neoliberalism.

Still, the loneliness thesis taps into a widespread intuition of something true and real and grave. Foundering social trust, collapsing heartland communities, an opioid epidemic, and rising numbers of “deaths of despair” suggest a profound, collective discontent. It’s worth mapping out one major cause that is simultaneously so obvious and so uncomfortable that loneliness observers tend to mention it only in passing. I’m talking, of course, about family breakdown. At this point, the consequences of family volatility are an evergreen topic when it comes to children; this remains the subject of countless papers and conferences. Now, we should take account of how deeply the changes in family life of the past 50-odd years are intertwined with the flagging well-being of so many adults and communities.

Scholars sometimes refer to the domestic earthquake that first rumbled through wealthy countries like the U.S. in the mid-twentieth century as the Second Demographic Transition. (The first transition occurred around the time of the Industrial Revolution, as the high death and birth rates that had been humanity’s default condition since the Neanderthals declined dramatically, leading to rapid population growth.) Mostly associated with the Belgian demographer Ron Lesthaeghe, the SDT (the unfortunately evocative acronym) is a useful framework for understanding the dramatic rupture between the Ozzie and Harriet and Sex and the City eras.

The SDT began emerging in the West after World War II. As societies became richer and goods cheaper and more plentiful, people no longer had to rely on traditional families to afford basic needs like food and shelter. They could look up the Maslovian ladder toward “post-material” goods: self-fulfillment, exotic and erotic experiences, expressive work, education. Values changed to facilitate these goals. People in wealthy countries became more antiauthoritarian, more critical of traditional rules and roles, and more dedicated to individual expression and choice. With the help of the birth-control pill, “non-conventional household formation” (divorce, remarriage, cohabitation, and single parenthood) went from uncommon—for some, even shameful—to mundane. Lesthaeghe predicted that low fertility would also be part of the SDT package, as families grew less central. And low fertility, he suggested, would have thorny repercussions for nation-states: he was one of the first to guess that developed countries would turn to immigrants to restock their aging populations, as native-born young adults found more fulfilling things to do than clean up after babies or cook dinner for sullen adolescents.

The disruption of family life caused by the SDT in the U.S. has been rehearsed thousands of times, including by this writer, but the numbers still startle. In 1950, 20 percent of marriages ended in divorce; today, it’s approximately 40 percent. Four in ten American children are now born to unmarried mothers, up from about 5 percent in 1960. In 1970, 84 percent of U.S. children spent their entire childhoods living with both bio-parents. Today, only half can expect to do the same.

Lesthaeghe was prophetic about what would happen to fertility in wealthy countries. In the U.S., the percentage of childless women doubled between 1970 and the mid-2000s; today, 14 percent of U.S. women past their childbearing years have never given birth. That actually makes us more fertile than some other developed countries. In Germany, nearly a quarter of women end up childless. The U.S. number might more closely resemble the German figure if it weren’t for our high levels of immigration, most of it from poor countries that haven’t yet embraced the change in attitudes. In 2015, in six U.S. states, more than 30 percent of births were to foreign-born women.

Postwar baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, were Generation Zero for the Second Demographic Transition in the United States. Now shuffling their way into their sixties and seventies, older boomers give a glimpse of the long-term downside of the post-SDT culture. If we had to pick just one word to describe it, “lonely” would do. In widely quoted research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ashton M. Verdery and Rachel Margolis uncovered a recent surge in the number of “kinless” older adults. Lower fertility translates into fewer siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins, whether for hospital visits or emergency contacts.

A jump in the number of never-married and divorced adults is also part of the kinlessness story. Boomers were the first generation to divorce in large numbers, and they continue to split up even as they amble into their golden years, giving rise to the phenomenon known as “gray divorce.” The divorce rate has doubled for people over 50 since 1990. In 2017 Senate testimony, Robert Putnam, author of the 2000 milestone Bowling Alone and the national prophet of social-capital decline, cautioned that for all these reasons, boomers will face a more lonesome old age than their Greatest Generation parents. “[R]oughly 12 percent fewer of the mid-boomer birth cohort of 1955 will be living with spouses when they reach age 65 than was true of the birth cohort of 1930,” he observed. Those boomers will also have 36 percent fewer children than the earlier cohort.

Divorce has frayed ties between boomers and the children that they do have. Divorced fathers tend to stay close to their children in the months and years immediately following separation, but for various reasons they often drift away over time. And the younger the child at the time of the breakup, the less likely it is that fathers will continue to be involved. “Waiting till the kids have moved out,” as the gray-divorce boomlet suggests that lots of couples are doing, is not as strong protection from a kin deficit as one might expect. Gray divorce damages parents’ relationships with their adult children, too.

Divorce didn’t turn boomers off to marriage entirely; a substantial number plunged in again. But instead of replacing defunct relationships, remarriage further fragmented family ties. For one thing, when parents remarry, it often brings jealousies, bad chemistry, and resentments into their relationships with their children. That’s especially true when a parent starts a second family with a new spouse. Given the overscheduling of contemporary childhood, not to mention the emotions provoked by ex-spouses, it’s inevitable that fathers who remarry or whose ex-wives remarry become an afterthought to, or an irritating intrusion into, their children’s daily family routines.”

The destruction of the family, to suit feminist ideology and the goals of the globalist elites of the New World Order, is sufficient to bring down civilisation, without any other issue intervening.