In a recent documentary exploring his work, Harvard professor Robert Putnam describes the experience of standing on the national mall for John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inauguration. As Kennedy intoned the iconic phrase “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” Putnam felt it was “like a trumpet sounding reveille” to a new generation of American dynamism. In the film, Putnam reflects during the twilight of his life and realizes that “it was not reveille, but taps.”
The early 1960s, Putnam discovered, were the high-water mark for American social trust, which has declined precipitously in the years since. He first announced his findings of diminishing social capital in his landmark 2000 book, Bowling Alone. As people pulled back from clubs and associations, their trust in others and in society’s institutions eroded. Despite hopes that technologies like the smartphone or social media would rebuild social capital, the opposite has happened. We are awash in technologies that promise connection while fostering isolation. In 2023, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a public health advisory noting that the mortality impact of “being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and even greater than that associated with obesity and physical inactivity.” Life expectancy actually contracted in recent years, in part due to the rise of isolation and so-called “deaths of despair.”