The Solitude of American Life

American culture actively drives people towards social isolation through aspects such as social media, materialism, and work or academic culture.

The United States has built itself up on a culture of money and appearances that has grown more exacerbated over many years since the country was founded. Aspects of the country that were built to serve money still weigh us down, two major factors being slavery and modern infrastructure. These are systems that were used, and are still used, that use people up in order to generate capital. A culture like this is not one that cares for the common person, and as such it is easy for the common person to fall through the cracks and become isolated from others.

Social media is a good example of something widespread in this system that can easily worsen people's mental health. People may use social media as a way to try to simulate social interaction, but it is very easy for social media to cause depressive feelings through its superficial and instant gratification, as well as through its users largely seeing the best parts of other's lives.

Many studies have looked into the effects of social media and findings show how extensively it affects both teenagers and young adults, two demographics with enormous user bases. The growth of social media sites in recent years has shown a correlating increase in depressive episodes among these age groups.

Without an outside presence to intervene, it is not unlikely that situations like this will continue to deteriorate, at times ending in suicide.

As this implies, it is important for people to be able to help others in such situations. Thinking on a larger scale, this pandemic of loneliness is not the source of a problem, but more accurately a symptom.

In order to start to curb the amount of loneliness present in American society and culture, American society and culture will need to change to better help these people. Implementing better healthcare is an easy step that will allow people to more easily get help for general health problems that may hamper daily life and also have access to mental health resources to help rehabilitate those already caught in the throes of isolation.

Beginning to break down the taboos surrounding mental health would also be a great help. One aspect of this that I have noticed that people overlook is treating therapy as if it were a cure-all; therapy is most certainly helpful in most cases, but mental health improvement needs to go beyond a block in a schedule.

The coronavirus has hampered many people this year and has caused further complications for those already in unfortunate positions. My hope is that, coming out of this, many people have been able to reflect and more people will realize what is important and what needs to be changed from what we took for granted before, socially and societally.