The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness
As convert of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day saints I can attest to this.<p>&#x27;Mormon&#x27; families do everything together, I&#x27;m amazed weekly at this 14ish years in.<p>Take dinner. Dinner for me growing up, until my father died just before I turned 13, would be my mother in one room - me in another - my father in a third eating dinner while we did our own things.<p>In jr and sr high school most Fridays it was &quot;here&#x27;s pizza money, I&#x27;ll be back Sunday afternoon&quot; (I&#x27;m not faulting my mother here, she&#x27;d call and check and was 10-15 minutes away in traffic, I was fine with her being gone so my friends and I didn&#x27;t have to censor ourselves not that we&#x27;d be home other than to sleep anyway once one of us had a license) yet even back then you&#x27;d have never seen something like that with an LDS family. You&#x27;d have them eating most or all of their meals together, studying scripture together, doing activities together.<p>Even when kids grow up and marry they still, unless they move quite far away, often do things with their parents and siblings and it isn&#x27;t uncommon to see those that have moved a state or two away to regularly drive home for long weekends, holidays, vacations etc.<p>These types are generally extremely happy and pleasant and will bend over backwards to help even strangers. Sure there is depression in the community but if you take them as a whole it&#x27;s Ned Flanders and a bunch of my generation that doesn&#x27;t have a strong family bond are an army of Eeyores.<p>Even if you just look at social media, for most it is &quot;look at me, look at what I did, look at how cool I want you to think I am, give me your approval, give me your likes, give me your commons, comment and click to subscribe!&quot; but with most LDS it is &quot;here are a few family photos, I&#x27;m so proud of my distant relation&#x2F;friend for doing thing&#x2F;everyone congratulate THEM, we got a new used couch would anyone like our old one, it&#x27;d be great for a young couple?, we will be at so and so park playing a pickup game if anyone would like to bring their families and come join us&quot;.<p>They stress family, and appear genuinely happy more oft than not.<p>For me and my friends, family were people you were related to my blood and had to tolerate until you could go out on your own. A lot of my friends have unhealthy relationships and regularly seek therapy, I and my friends carefully curate our online presences to try and show our best not our normal, we sit around staring at Netflix or Hulu thinking &quot;man, this sucks, I&#x27;m lonely, is it time to die yet, ugh I want to go get food but I don&#x27;t want to eat alone... forget it I&#x27;ll just order in&quot;.<p>When a family invites me over for FHE or dinner or to an activity, I genuinely don&#x27;t want to go because it feels so foreign and I&#x27;m afraid I&#x27;ll seem like more of a freak than I am. I&#x27;m so lonely that I&#x27;m afraid of being in social settings because I simply don&#x27;t know what normal family dynamic is like and it just feels so alien. People  have inside jokes with family members, they have fun stories and memories, they talk to their family...<p>My father&#x27;s father was in the hospital on life support and no one told us, I found out when a friend that worked there noticed I hadn&#x27;t visited and violated law by even talking to me about it and without them I&#x27;d have not even known. After his funeral a few weeks later I asked his brother some genealogy questions... he didn&#x27;t even know his mother&#x27;s maiden name or either of his grandmothers first names despite having known them for decades until their deaths... a few years later he died and neither of his adult children told us, I tried calling him one day to catch up and the number was disconnected and I found his obit. He lived 3~ miles from me. After my father&#x27;s death, his father would only come to visit at Christmas despite living about 15 BLOCKS away and one of my father&#x27;s brothers lived even closer and never came at all, I&#x27;ve seen him exactly twice since my father&#x27;s funeral 21 years ago... worse, he had a diabetic episode a few years ago and laid on his floor for several days until a co-worker went to his house concerned that he hadn&#x27;t come to work and his daughter had no idea he was even flippin&#x27; diabetic! It is no surprise to me most of my family, on both sides, had substance abuse problems and varying levels of depression, now they&#x27;re nearly all dead.<p>My mother&#x27;s mother went on life support and my mother&#x27;s sisters took her off and never even told my mom she went on. This happened over a couple of days. My mother started receiving facebook messages from cousins and second cousins &quot;so sorry for your loss&quot;... this is how she found out her mother was dead... AFTER the funeral.  Then in the same calendar year they repeated it when her father passed! Can you imagine that, you&#x27;re in your 60&#x27;s and your parents die and your sisters try and hide it from you, two different times mom barely got out of bed for weeks each time. Crying, depressed, feeling wholly abandoned. All because her side of the family was as dysfunctional as my father&#x27;s.<p>When I tell this to my fellow members of the Church the look at me in horror, like I&#x27;m an alien that just landed on their lawn and ate one of their children and asked for a coke to wash them down because they value family and while they also have bad moments in life they are on average far far happier than me and my non-member friends.