A “relationship recession” is plaguing the world. The Economist reports that 41% of women and 50% of men between the ages of 23 and 34 were single in 2023—double the rate from 50 years ago. The overall share of young people living alone has risen in 26 out of the 30 richest countries, amounting to 100 million more singles than in 2017.
Alongside the dearth of romantic relationships, there’s also “friendship recession.” People have fewer friends and spend less time with them than in the past. Since 1990, the percentage of US adults who report having no close friends has quadrupled to 12%. For decades, Americans spent about 6.5 hours a week with friends. But from 2014 to 2019, it fell to just four hours a week.
Young people used to find partners through their friends and wider social circles. Now, they turn to dating apps and Discord servers, which are impersonal and have extreme distorting effects. “Third spaces,” places other than home and work where people can socialize, are in decline. Coffee shops and bars, parks, community centers, and social clubs are defunded or go out of business.
Often, it’s prohibitively expensive for young people to go out to such establishments. Every aspect of our lives has been commodified. You have to pay to play, and if you can’t, you’re left out in the social cold.
As Marx famously wrote:
The less you eat, drink, and buy books; the less you go to the theater, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save—the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour—your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being.
More and more, people go to work in the morning; straight back home after work; scroll on social media; go to bed; rinse and repeat the next day. The few precious hours we spend outside our jobs become less and less fulfilling. At work, our time belongs to the bosses. We have no control over the products of our labor, which are owned by the capitalists.
The true culprit of our estrangement is capitalism itself. This is why we fight for socialism.
When workers run society and control our own destinies, when all of our basic necessities are met, it will be far easier to connect with one another. Genuine human relations will flourish, and chronic depression, isolation, and loneliness will be a thing of the past.