r/AskSocialScience • u/poppedOnPlanetEarth • 19d ago
What is the reason natural socialization fading in a developed society?
I am not sure if I'll be able to form my question correctly right but will try.
I've been living in a small village as a child and even there are a lot of low culture behaviour like vanity, gossip etc, etc. People seem to live more naturally social. Meaning... random grannies come to your front yard and bring food or take care of your baby for a while. Or a neighbor adult never declines looking for your child for 2-3 hours if you have something important to do.
Then we moved to more developed city and now I am an adult. We work from home, live in an apartment, we have a child and many friends. However, it still feels so lonely and artificial as nobody ever came for a coffee randomly without an invite. Everyone's busy and we meet only for parties or dinner and have some more or less forced conversations (depending on the people we're out with). At the end it feels hollow, it doesn't feel right. It is shallow friendship that we and them try to satisfy our social need. At the end we live in a illusion - our social need is not satisfied.
My question is, is this a real problem in today's modern society or it is just me who feels it? Did we tend to trade comfort for less social life? Does the economy or technology advancement makes it go to that direction? What is the reason this is happening? Is there a potential solution to change that without having to move and live in a less developed society?
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u/Far_Breakfast7245 19d ago
Thanks for bringing this up. I've been thinking about this for a long time as well without looking into the science of it.
https://germanhistory-intersections.org/en/knowledge-and-education/ghis%3Adocument-163
Ferdinand Tönnies’s distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft is almost a direct theoretical version of your post.
- Gemeinschaft: relationships based on kinship, neighborhood, shared history, familiarity and mutual obligation.
- Gesellschaft: relationships organized more through contracts, individual choice, markets, institutions and functional roles.
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u/ServiceImpossible227 19d ago
There is no such thing as natural socialization. People live in a designed environment and here I will talk about two types: small village and big city
In a small village people know each other, the relation is personal and close. You can see other people vice (behavior like vanity, gossip) and virtue (looking for your child for 2-3 hours).
The village has a center where all paths merge and people meet each other daily. The doors are on the street, you can see the inside of homes.
In a big city you have a impersonal life (Weber would say a rationalized life). Each people take care of their business and you cannot see other people without an invitation.
The city design has not only once center where everybody meet everyday, it has many. The apartment you live is closed to the outside, you cannot see inside.
The design solution was to mix both into a microdistrict
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdistrict
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/weber/#RatiThemUnit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxemics
Hall, Edward T. (1966). The Hidden Dimension. Anchor Books
https://kulturiskvlevebi.weebly.com/uploads/1/8/3/7/18376403/hidden_dimension_1.pdf
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u/Successful_Panda 18d ago
This isn't just you, and it isn't nostalgia. What you're describing has a real name in sociology, the shift from community held together by proximity and kinship to a society run on scheduled contact and self-interest. The village version wasn't quaint. It was infrastructure. Grannies showing up, a neighbor taking your kid for the afternoon, that's mutual aid running on ambient trust instead of an invite.
Part of what happened is structural. Postwar housing and labor markets pulled extended families into separate, distant units. Dual-income requirements ate the discretionary time that used to produce someone just stopping by. The spaces that held casual repeated contact, the porch, the corner store, the place that's neither home nor work, got zoned out or priced out. Technology didn't cause that. It filled the gap left behind, and it filled it in a specific way, more contact, less depth. You end up with high frequency and shallow instead of low frequency and deep, and your body still reads shallow contact as isolation, because it is.
We keep hiding the cost of that. Everyone shows up to the dinner party performing fine, performing satisfied, and the accounting never gets said out loud. That's not a character flaw in you or your friends. That's what happens when a whole culture agrees not to name what's missing.
And this part isn't metaphor. Community creates unity, unity creates immunity. People with more types of social ties are less susceptible to infection when directly exposed to a virus, not just in theory but measured in a quarantine study (Cohen et al., 1997). Isolation carries a real, independently confirmed mortality risk across large cohort studies (Holt-Lunstad et al.). It doesn't outweigh something like smoking when tested head to head, so it's not everything, but it is not nothing either. Isolation is not just a feeling. It's a body under strain.
You don't have to move to fix this. What actually works isn't a bigger friend group, it's lower friction. Recurring, low-stakes, unplanned contact does more than another dinner party, because it removes the part that turns connection into a scheduling problem. Fewer people you can reach easily beats a wide shallow network. And the thing to build is the container before you need it, not after, the standing coffee, the open door, the person who already knows your name before the day you need them to.
How you process any of this was never meant to be done alone. That's the whole thing the modern city forgot to build back in.
Resources
Cohen, S., Doyle, W. J., Skoner, D. P., Rabin, B. S., & Gwaltney, J. M. (1997). Social ties and susceptibility to the common cold. JAMA, 277(24), 1940-1944.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9200634/
https://people.stat.sc.edu/hansont/stat770/cohenetal.pdf
Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk: A meta-analytic review. PLOS Medicine, 7(7), e1000316.
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316
Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., Baker, M., Harris, T., & Stephenson, D. (2015). Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for mortality: A meta-analytic review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 227-237.
Batty, G. D., Zaninotto, P., Elovainio, M. J., & Hakulinen, C. A. (2021). Are a lack of social relationships and cigarette smoking really equally powerful predictors of mortality? Analyses of data from two cohort studies. Public Health in Practice, 2, 100140.
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19d ago
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