The Problem With America Is Bigger Than Smartphones

and a free sample from my new book

Jonathan Haidt’s brave call to ban smartphone (i.e., phone-based social media) use until the age of 16 is not a bad idea, but it reinforces a perennial social policy problem in America: seeing technology as the creator of problems (and the site of the solution) when, in most cases, technology only amplifies existing cultural problems or trends. If we ban smartphones, I’m confident that teens will simply return to their laptops to do the same thing that we, the elders, let them do.

Many people forget that America had a large teen suicide spike in the 1980s, long before the internet. And the problem actually got going in the libertine 1970s, long before the personal computer. I remember the 1980s suicide spike as it hit my own high school. Back then, the topic of suicide was like cancer was in my mother’s generation - you mentioned it in a hushed whisper and didn’t really discuss it.

Source: Will Rinehart analysis of CDC data from The Exformation Newsletter, Feb. 19, 2024 article

1970-1991 was an era of recession spikes, ever-cheaper booze, and rapidly accelerating divorce in the United States. The rise of social media (more than smartphones) no doubt has a lot to do with the recent spike in teen suicide (by flooding immature young adults with ‘stranger comments’ in a largely unaccountable interactional medium). But it’s clear from Rinehart’s chart that the internet was not required to produce a spike in teen suicide. Basic instability in the nuclear family combined with the weakening of the extended family is more than enough.

The original spike in teen angst and suicide owes itself to a largely un-managed intensification in our individualistic way of life - our preference for extreme adult and parental autonomy. This drove the modern divorce surge in an era with very patriarchal, asymmetrical relationships wearing a thin veil of love.

While women are now able to escape abusive marriages (legally, if not psychologically), many others, like one of my late Aunts, can just leave a husband who ‘bores them.’ And vice versa. The ‘boredom of stability’ - what a post-1970 cultural concept. And the rest of us have to deal with the consequences of people who think like this. It’s the individual’s right to enter/exit any relationship in any way they want without fear of long-term obligation. Social obligation itself has become a dirty word in America. So limiting. So confining. So annoying.

If you’re nodding your head, regardless of your age, the following is the final Table of Contents and Introduction to my new book, in which I synthesize a lifetime of reading, thinking, and research about the problems inherent in American-style individualism and its emphasis on radical autonomy. A robust sense of humor is required to grapple with this topic because tragedy and comedy are essentially twins.

In a way, my book is a great companion piece to Johann Hari’s excellent, highly readable best-seller - Lost Connections. I synthesize how our dominant ideology of high autonomy operates in every major domain of everyday life to undermine and weaken social connection. I’m very lucky that he saw fit to read and endorse my book as well.

OUR WORST STRENGTH TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments  

Preface  

Introduction  

PART ONE – How to Make a Hyper-Individualist Society in Seven Easy Steps  

1.     Unlock The Variables of Lifestyle Choice   

2.     Silence The Elders

3.     Make Privacy Sacred 

4.     Make the Individual Responsible for Their Problems

5.     Reward Productive Anti-Social Behavior  

6.     Distract Ourselves with Personalized Entertainment 

7.     Anchor Our Minds to the Next New Thing   

PART TWO – How it Became Awkward at Work  

8.     Recovering From My Career Fantasy  

9.     Work-Life Dustups 

10.  The Great College Divide 

11.  Career Zig Zag 

PART THREE – How We Got Lost in the American Funhouse  

12.  Why I Suck at Parties 

13.  American Rumspringa and the Risk of Self-Implosion   

14.  How Youth Culture Fractured Fun in Two   

15.  Modern Recreational Worlds  

16.  Consuming Media Trumps Group Fun  

PART FOUR – How We Came to Eat Whatever, Whenever  

17.  My Feb. 8, 2000, Panic Attack at Cub Foods   

18.  The Erosion of Meal Ritual and the Rise of Obesity   

19.  The Oddly Social Origin of Food Sensitivities 

20.  Aspirational Diets  

21.  Potluck America  

PART FIVE – How We Turned Friends into Interactive Entertainment Devices  

22.  My Biggest Failure in India  

23.  Friends as Entertainment  

24.  The Fake Business Friend  

25.  Sexual Partners as Best Friends  

26.  How Pets Edged Out Our Friends  

PART SIX – How We Atomized the American Family  

27.  I’m Named After a Very Disappointing Man 

28.  The Cultural Triumph of the Romantic Couple 

29.  The Shriveled Family Tree in America 

30.  From Parents to Coaches  

31.  The Social Impact of Declining Gender Diversity at Home  

PART SEVEN – The Future of Individualism in America  

32.  American Individualism: A Diagnosis 

33.  Growth and the Weakening of Community 

34.  The Rights-Enabled Consumer is in Social Retreat

35.  Emerging Signs of Possible Integration 

EPILOGUE  – What Can We Do to Get Out of Our Own Way 

INTRODUCTION

When I was coming of age in the early 1990s, everything in the adult life of most young Americans was their individual choice to make. For these substantial life decisions – a sexual partner, career, recreational activities, etc. – there were no traditional or rigidly enforced rules to follow. You avoided the patterns of your elders and primarily looked to your peers (and to the media) for clues as to what to do. Moreover, for most Americans in this era, family stayed out of the way until things went south or you invited them in to help. Parents tended to hang back and give their kids loads of privacy. Not providing this privacy was one primary source of parental estrangement. And finally, the scope of permissible lifestyle choices was unprecedented for an urban American. While many coasted forward under traditional rules for some aspects of life, many did not.

As a single young adult American, even today, the number of lifestyle options you are faced with is the most intense of your entire lifetime. Much of your life is on manual and little on autopilot – except grooming, sleeping, and chores. Your daily habits are not nearly as fixed as they may become when you’re older. You’re open and discovery-oriented. This openness is most true if you’ve left your hometown for education or work. New social networks. New beginnings. Opportunity, we passively learn, is exciting and enthralling. Yet, it’s also nerve-racking for many of us, not just those with Asperger’s or other interactional challenges.

The early twenties in America are like a national version of Amish Rumspringa, without the puritanical objective of adult baptism. In the language of cultural anthropology, it is all liminality, all “betwixt and between.”^[1] In the language of American business, your twenties are all “upside.” 

America’s historically unprecedented gift to its citizens – social freedom from tradition, from the constraints of monarchs, dictators and elders – is not limited to young adults. It’s why we attract immigrants constantly. It’s also why middle-aged people suddenly reinvent themselves and shock their friends and family. You’re going to sail to Polynesia with your dog? What??

There is so little traditional constraint on American lifestyle choices that most adults can determine all of the following and usually do it without the socially mandatory consent of anyone:

·      Sexual partner(s)

·      Spouses

·      Career (how many, how many at one time)

·      Friends (how many and how shallow)

·      Food and drink

·      How to be religious (or not to be)

·      What volunteering to do

·      What to do for fun (media, socializing, relaxation, doom scrolling)

·      Communication patterns: who in the family to ignore, frequency of speaking with family, frequency of visiting family

·      Where we shop

·      Where we live and for how long we do

·      Personal hobbies

Just for some concrete perspective, if you exclude the average time Americans spend in direct human care activities (1 hr.) and household chores (1.95 hrs.), the list above basically covers 80 percent of the average American’s waking hours.^[2]

This list is daily life in modern America. And most of it is subject to our individual choices with minimal pushback from society. Yes, there is still a massive amount of social influence, signaling, and coordination common to human societies, but without the social enforcers (strict elders, matriarchs, and village-like supervision) common to conservative societies across time. Noticeably absent are the received mandates and the choice constraints of “tradition.” Instead, culture influences us primarily through media, peer networks, and consumption, locking us into the next new trend. There’s a conscious sense that we’re always in flux and that the rates of social and technological change are accelerating.^[3]

The enormous scope of lifestyle choice is at the root of much of the overwhelm and anxiety young people today face. I call it “imaginative overwhelm.” This choice might not matter if we couldn’t so easily perceive the options or stumble on new ones randomly all the time; if college campuses, the media, and our social networks didn’t constantly present us with other options. It might not matter either if we encountered all these choices suddenly later in life. It would become academic or curious.

It’s the anxiety of super-abundant lifestyle choices without many of the hierarchical ordering principles common to premodern societies. Choice without much structure. We are let loose with no clear ritual process to get us to some clear end state. Some of us crash and burn. Badly.

It signals a national Rumspringa with no real end. Certainly not in baptism.

When I first heard about Amish Rumspringa in graduate school, I was having dinner with an Amish refugee graduate student in the International House at the University of Chicago. He had no intention of returning to Ohio. He had failed the test of faith. In Rumspringa, Amish youth are permitted to ‘go crazy’ and take autonomy to its extreme. This period takes place during the late teens, immediately prior to adult baptism, which, in the Anabaptist faith – is a deliberate, adult choice. Some kids never return from Rumspringa.

In that University of Chicago dining hall, I discovered an Amish life stage that drowns young people in the ocean of free will and lifestyle choice without any scope or rules in order to test their commitment to the Amish Order. Most Amish kids quickly realize the value of all that structure and return to take their baptism.^[4]

For most Americans, though, there is no mandated path like this. There may be echoes of what your parents did or glimpses of what your peers are doing. But the life paths are now many, and no one’s permission is needed to take any of them. Yes, there may be backlash, but not from people who can stop you.

As I got older, I increasingly found the society around me to be mostly a disabling force. When I discovered my neurological challenge in my mid-30s, I tried hard to knowingly adapt better. Slowly, I realized that my emotional volatility and poor stress management found daily triggers in modern social life, especially its emphasis on self-control and self-reliance. I also saw those external forces creating anxiety for me also deeply affected others with neurotypical brains.

This book is my personal and professional attempt to understand the experience of individualism in a society that has taken lifestyle choice to its logical extreme at the same time that social change has accelerated faster than any time before in recorded human history. 

The questions driving this book are:

1.    What is it like to live like an individualist in America?  

2.    How does it work?  

3.    What long-term consequences does it create for American society?  

4.    Where in our everyday lives has individualism been a boon? Or a setup for trauma?

5.    How does rapid social change make individualism adaptive or maladaptive?

6.    And, finally, what really are the hidden discontents of America’s national ideology?

To make this productive, I conducted extensive national research among older Americans (now aged forty-seven to seventy-six) in 2022 and 2023.^[5] Why not research everyone? Because older Americans have had enough life experience to say something meaningful about their life choices and the consequences of those choices in a rapidly changing world.  

Specifically, I focused on older Americans’ experiences of major life decisions (e.g., career changes, marital issues, family cohesion, dietary changes, recovery from trauma, etc.). How individualistic were these decisions? What were the consequences of making nontraditional lifestyle choices? And how have older Americans adapted to social changes impacting them during their lifetimes (such as the rapid rise in female employment and increasing job insecurity)?  

This book is not a comprehensive summary of research findings. It is not a scholarly monograph. Playing by those rules would severely limit the audience and the impact of my work. Instead, I want to take the reader on a journey that (a) first makes individualism weird; (b) then explores how individualistic behavior panned out for real folks, including me, and finally; (c) urges us to take a more critical approach to heeding the call of individualistic impulses.

My goal is not to call for a return to some imagined past utopia that never existed. And I won’t be outlining some perfect society we should quickly build. My purpose is to get us to question how we live and the broader social forces that individualism feeds on and supports. I want to help curious readers detach from a common belief in the inevitability, and the inevitable preferability, of a highly individualistic society. Things didn’t have to turn out this way. Something was lost. Some things were gained.  

This book is unique because no one to my knowledge has taken the individual’s perspective and listened to how she navigated a distinctive culture of extreme lifestyle choice that spread quickly in the 1960s and 1970s.  

Only once we recognize how adaptive or maladaptive individualism has been in everyday life do we have the power of real social awareness that affords us the wisdom to make collective change.

Now, let’s see what happened . . . !

Praise for Our Worst Strength -

"Moving, thoughtful and mind-expanding."
— JOHANN HARI, NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLING AUTHOR OF LOST CONNECTIONS AND CHASING THE SCREAM

"An astute examination of loneliness and isolation that sheds light, finds humor, and provides hope."
— KIRKUS REVIEWS RECOMMENDED BOOK

". . . an invaluable book for understanding the hidden costs of American individualism."
— ROB HENDERSON, USA TODAY BEST-SELLING AUTHOR OF TROUBLED: A MEMOIR OF FOSTER CARE, FAMILY AND SOCIAL CLASS

"A moving portrait of the loneliness embedded in everyday American life and a powerful warning to younger generations to course correct."
— JENNIFER BREHENY WALLACE, NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF NEVER ENOUGH: WHEN ACHIEVEMENT CULTURE BECOMES TOXIC—AND WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT

"James F. Richardson's Our Worst Strength is a comprehensive and highly entertaining examination of the impact of our unprecedented explosion of lifestyle choices. With humor and care, Dr. Richardson thoughtfully charts the rapid change in social circumstances and attitudes that are contributing to our widespread sense of disconnection. This book is essential reading for anyone looking to better understand the pervasive influence of individualism in modern culture."
— ANNA GOLDFARB, CALLED THE "NEW YORK TIMES' FRIENDSHIP CORRESPONDENT" AND AUTHOR OF MODERN FRIENDSHIP: HOW TO NURTURE OUR MOST VALUED CONNECTIONS

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[1] The classic work on ritual was written by Victor Turner – cf. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (New York: Penguin Press, Pelican Imprint 1969). Available in a new Kindle edition.

[2] "American Time Use Survey, 2021." BLS.gov., my analysis.

[3] Rosa Hartmut, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, trans. Jonathan Trejo-Mathuys (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). Originally published as Beschleunigung: Die Veränderung in der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2005).

[4] Only 15 percent of Rumspringa participants leave the community, according to recent research. See McConnell, David L., "Leaving Amish" in The Handbook of Leaving Religion, edited by David G. Bromley and Lewis F. Carter, vol. 18 of Brill Handbooks on Contemporary Religion (Schöningh: Brill 2019), 154–163. PDF here: https://bit.ly/3bDbAjt. See my Substack essay on the Amish if you desire more info (this content is behind a paywall).

[5] See appendix B for the full research design I employed to fuel this book’s content.