This is one of the downsides of losing our religion (REM has entered the chat). Churches used to provide a community for people to combat loneliness. We've replaced this sense of community with... well, nothing really.
Not just losing religion, but losing every source of shared purpose that people have historically relied upon. Religion is bad. Having kids is increasingly looked down upon. People are losing any and all sense of professional duty.
Having kids is a neutral life choice, so I don't want to say one thing or another there. But, to any potential parents out there: please don't have kids because you're lonely. Its not a healthy context for a child to grow up as a partial remedy for their parents' problems.
If it is just a case of people losing their religion, then people would be substituting their time with secular communal activities like bowling leagues or freemasonry. Instead everyone just became a shut in. I believe the real reasons run much deeper
They have very much done that with Marvel characters and Twitch streamers. Relationship with a personal god is only the most parasocial relationship, but there are many flavors of this. I have noticed that among many peoples with regular access to TV and the internet, small talk often veers toward the consumption of popular culture and various impressions and opinions about those consumption products.
Religion is a mythic lens through which to view reality, a framework of archetypes to superimpose on a chaotic world, to make it feel more comprehensible, and thus safer. For many they can reach a sense of safety by communing with others about the recognizable values and behaviors of their favorite fictional characters.
Now you don't even have to know the people you're talking to, because you can assemble in pseudonymous fanbase forums to find that community. You see it in everything from K-pop Twitter to Star Wars reddit.
No, they are not. But to the lonely, it's all they have access to, so they make do. It results in a self-reinforcing loop.
To me, the difference between the two is analogous to the difference between fluorescent light and sunlight.
This is a thread about social sickness, and I think the conflation here identified is close to the root of our problems, likely compounded by the sedentarity and lack of sunlight that comes with the consumption-based lifestyle.
That being said, what alternatives does anyone have nowadays? If you're a mile deep into a subdivision and you haven't yet earned your driver's license, good luck getting any meaningful socialization outside of video games, chat servers, and comments sections. This creates patterns of behavior in early life and adolescence that ossify into your default lifestyle habits into your old age. By now enough longitudinal studies have been done to know "your personality develops when you're a teenager" is a reasonable heuristic for understanding the inertia of the problem.
The author of the Sound of Silence described this eerie society well:
...
And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
In tenement halls"
And whispered in the sounds of silence
'The Third Place' is an interesting theory related to this stuff. Can certainly see how the decline of the third place fits in with a lot of the comments here.
