NYT is largely trash, but David Brooks is one of the voices that goes down somewhat acceptably.

Here's an oddly personal-ish take that turns into America's collapsing, uh, everything:

I’ve composed this little homage to love because Americans seem to be having less of it. Think of the things people most commonly love — their spouse, kids, friends, God, nation and community. Now look at the social trends. Marriage rates hover near record lows, and the share of 40-year-olds who have never been married is at record highs. Americans are having fewer kids. Americans have fewer friends than before and spend less time with the friends they have. Church and synagogue attendance rates have been falling for decades.

This is not, to paraphrase Tucker Carlson, a healthy society.

Maybe it'll just be erased out of the gene pool...?

I was transformed by my time in college classrooms, but that love affair might still have been the most important educational experience of my youth. It taught me that there are emotions more joyous and more painful than I ever knew existed. It taught me what it’s like when the self gets decentered and things most precious to you are in another. I even learned a few things about the complex art of being close to another.

You might call this the Great Detachment. Look at what’s happening, for example, to high school dating. The evidence clearly shows that fewer young people are getting the kind of profound education I got at the end of high school. The share of 12th graders who said they have dated fell from about 85 percent in the 1980s to less than 50 percent in the early 2020s.

It's a crisis of males, masculinity, of education and of god-knows what else:

some of the causes of the romantic recession are social and economic. Over the past four decades, the share of people in a relationship has fallen over twice as fast among people without a college degree compared with those who have one. Roughly half of the men under 40 who never went to college are romantically unattached.

we’re seeing a systematic weakening of the loving bonds that hold society together — for community, for nation, for friends and on and on.

"What’s going on?""What’s going on?"

I dunno, either. Fiat ruins everything, @jimmysong says.

Anxious people are naturally slow to invite more vulnerability into their lives. The crusade for maximum individual freedom seemed liberatory back at Woodstock, but over the past half-century, we’ve taken it to its logical conclusion, and it has produced what the journalist Derek Thompson calls the antisocial century.

I particularly like this survey result: NOT only is this an unhealthy society, it's also one that doesn't fit together:

An NBC News poll asked young people to name the life goals that were important to their personal definition of success. Defying old stereotypes, young men were more likely to prioritize family goals like getting married and having kids than young women. The contrast between young men who voted for Donald Trump and young women who voted for Kamala Harris was especially stark. For men 18 to 29 who voted for Trump, the most important life goal was having children. The fourth-most-important life goal for these male Trump voters was being married. For women in that age cohort who voted for Harris, by contrast, being married came in 11th on their list of important life goals, third from the bottom. Having kids came in 12th, second from the bottom. (Becoming famous was the least important life goal for both groups.)

finally: pick a devotion to something, cherish someone/some purpose deeply (#1401093)

your love for these things [God, spouse, kids, community etc] will constitute fires in the heart, producing great vitality, full engagement, an increase in personal force. It is one of the weird paradoxes of life that the constraints you choose are the ones that set you free.

full essay here: https://archive.md/JrdBO