https://theweek.com/articles/857296/crisis-american-loneliness
We should investigate language first. One of the most interesting
phrases I come across whenever I talk with city-dwelling professionals
my own age is “work friends.” The qualifier is there presumably because
our coworkers, the people with whom many of us spend the majority of our
time, are just interchangeable units — warm bodies who are good for a
joke in front of the Keurig or a few drinks at the monthly office happy
hour, but not the kind of people who help you move into your new
apartment or know who your parents are. A bizarre process of
auto-sorting seems to preclude the possibility of these relationships
becoming anything else. No wonder we pretend pets are people.
But it would be a mistake to pretend that a phenomenon as pervasive
as this one is restricted to unmarried urbanites. There cannot be many
Americans lonelier in their way than, for example, stay-at-home mothers
in rural and suburban America. Here too we see euphemisms. My wife talks
about “mom friends,” random women she and others like her meet at
chance encounters in parks or libraries or coffee shops — any place
where women might go with their children during the day, clinging to one
another for sympathy, encouragement, advice, a hug, all the things
sisters and mothers-in-law and neighbors provided in a bygone era of
community. But at least parents and children have one another at home.
We've become a nation of eZombies, this is what the Libs would call Mission Accomplished.
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