America's loneliness epidemic: A systemic risk to organizations
Think a lot of people coming to US are immigrants.<p>And some also come from countries where they had much tighter community and shared life. But they choose US because it allows for more individualistic freedom and upsides (as you don&#x27;t have a socialist government who eats into your income&#x2F;wealth through taxes in order to equalise the whole society), so people feel more rewarded here.<p>Constitution guarantees strong property rights here and your land can&#x27;t be taken away from you for &quot;social good&quot; like in most European countries.<p>Obviously, with this in place there is no reason for an invidual to share his resources like land with any other person, because in his mind, it&#x27;s his hardworking which got him those nice things and now no one but him as any right over them. This over time creates more loneliness as people don&#x27;t really see benefit of dealing with you. If I share my ranch with my neighbors, obviously, they&#x27;ll want to maintain good relationship with me but what if I don&#x27;t even let them roam around it? Or shoot their dog if it tries to trespass? Now you see the problem?<p>This system optimizes for greater individual gain but come with some side effects like loneliness as you live in a very competitive society, it gets hard to trust others. If you become way richer than your neighbor because your company did good, you might no longer want to make your neighbor part of your life because they can no longer relate to your problems and wonder that even tho this person have lot of money, how come this person isn&#x27;t happy?<p>As I understand those who are in US feel everyone must work to support themselves and government should not support anyone through tax revenue for them to sit at home and watch Netflix or play Xbox etc...<p>They always had a choice between going back to home and living in a tightly knit society but they choose America only because the upsides are greater here and it attracts those who optimize for individual interest like individual freedom&#x2F;wealth etc...<p>Many of my American colleges do not understand why I was working for 30K euros a year back in Europe when I could easily get 100K job here in states.<p>Pace of life is also quite fast in US. Now I don&#x27;t mean that Americans walk 10x faster to work but that due to the large size of the market, if your product takes off - you can become very rich over a year or month and your life changes completely. Very few places have this ability to support entrepreneurs, sure in a third world country like India, if you become a celebrity, it might take a year to become very rich but what if you are an entrepreneur simply creating products in your garage or coding from a coffee shop? Nearly impossible and unheard of.<p>I&#x27;ve lived in Europe, US and currently living in India (as wife is from India) and there is growing dissent in middle class here because government have been  put lots of taxes on middle class and offering lots of benefit to poor people as a result middle class people don&#x27;t feel justified in paying taxes and try various loopholes and under table tricks.<p>It makes sense if you think India is large and size of poor population is large compared to the middle class who are getting taxed left and right. If you give them a chance, most will just love US and strong property rights US has.<p>If you want to test this, simply ask people to cast their votes in a ballot. Do you feel like you are not getting benefits for the taxes you pay? If you only allow middle class in India to vote, you&#x27;ll see a lot of them somewhere around 90% in non metro cities gonna vote, &quot;yes&quot;. Only people in big city might feel differently as they really get some benefits like better transformer, 24&#x2F;7 power and clean water etc...<p>Even the villages are slowly getting empty and parents complain that the kids are not able to come to their place even on key celebrations like Diwali ( which is huge over here)<p>Only difference is there is no party in India which supports individualistic views like we&#x27;ve in US.