On a regular basis choices accumulate right into a life.
That is an version of The Surprise Reader, a e-newsletter wherein our editors advocate a set of tales to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Enroll right here to get it each Saturday morning.
In The Atlantic’s newest cowl story, my colleague Derek Thompson explores how Individuals turned anti-social. Many younger individuals are actively selecting the solitary life, spending time at dwelling in entrance of screens as an alternative of out with different folks, he explains. In a dialog with my colleague Lora Kelley, he famous that this type of isolation is the results of selections that add up: “The anti-social century is about accretion,” he mentioned. “It’s about many small choices that we make minute to minute and hour to hour in our life, main to an enormous nationwide development of steadily rising total aloneness.”
These selections may appear minor, however they matter: To name a good friend, or scroll on Instagram? To go to church, the weekly soccer recreation, or e book membership—or sleep in and scroll once more? At the moment’s e-newsletter rounds up tales on the actions that carry us collectively, and those that preserve us aside.
On Hanging Out
The Anti-Social Century
By Derek Thompson
Individuals at the moment are spending extra time alone than ever. It’s altering our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to actuality.
Individuals Have to Celebration Extra
By Ellen Cushing
We’re not doing it as a lot as we used to. You will be the change we want.
The Friendship Paradox
By Olga Khazan
All of us need extra time with our buddies, however we’re spending extra time alone.
Nonetheless Curious?
- The loss of life of the eating room: “The housing disaster—and the arbitrary rules that gas it—is killing off locations to eat whether or not we prefer it or not, designing loneliness into American flooring plans,” M. Nolan Grey wrote final yr.
- How America obtained imply: Individuals not develop up studying how one can be first rate to at least one one other, David Brooks argued in 2023.
Different Diversions
P.S.
I just lately requested readers to share a photograph of one thing that sparks their sense of awe on the earth. Mark Bernstein, 75, from Wellfleet, Massachusetts, despatched this picture of “a storm over Blackfish Creek, Cape Cod.”
I’ll proceed to characteristic your responses within the coming weeks.
— Isabel