Loneliness is a serious public-health problem
It&#x27;s my opinion America&#x27;s social fabric has been thoroughly destroyed by it&#x27;s relentless commercial focus, and it will take at least a few more decades before Americans will rediscover the need to connect with each other.<p>I have been going to the same coffee shop for 13 years. It is one of the only coffee shops in Atlanta that has comfortable chairs and couches that one is happy to spend hours socializing in. Almost every single other coffee shop in the city has succumbed to the frigid tyranny of aluminum and plywood. If you spend significant amounts of time at one of these &quot;coffee shops,&quot; your only companionship is likely to be your laptop.<p>Its bars are a little better, but in general our country has turned our traditional watering holes from places where you could go to find a social group, to places where you must bring your social group with you if you are to have any kind of interesting fun at all. It&#x27;s becoming difficult to find bars with an active social scene of regulars which doesn&#x27;t feel obnoxiously cliquish. Americans, even when they are social, often fail spectacularly to be inclusive.<p>The only place left where you can go to reliably dispel your loneliness anymore is church. Sadly, even if you&#x27;re religious, the atmosphere can feel oppressive. My mom all but gave up her quest to find a church where she could fit in with, and she is not a picky lady in this regard.<p>If you were to trace all three of these phenomenon down to a single underlying source, it&#x27;s consumerism. If Americans aren&#x27;t immediately getting what they want in any given situation, they leave and go back to their ivory tower &#x2F; nest that they&#x27;ve constructed out of well-meaning, but myopic products &#x2F; services that leave Americans feeling catered to, but not fulfilled. We don&#x27;t want to sit and painstakingly build friendships any more. We want friendship-in-a-box. And our &#x27;third places&#x27; have increasingly surrendered to those wishes.