Americans Are Still ‘Bowling Alone’

A mericans are spending less time together and more in isolation. One in five now report experiencing loneliness daily; one in six say they have no close friends. These sobering statistics underline a strong sense of disconnectedness that we share but is difficult to define.

More than a quarter century ago, Robert Putnam defined that sense of isolation. He argued in his landmark book Bowling Alone that Americans had become shockingly isolated, offering a trove of data to back up a feeling shared by many: Something had gone badly wrong with America’s community ties. It was an arresting insight, and Putnam was hailed as a de Tocqueville of his generation. His book sold hundreds of thousands of copies. He was invited to meet with President Bill Clinton at Camp David and Prime Minister Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street. Above all, he launched a heated debate on the causes of community decline.

Putnam’s great success was in naming a major social problem. In the years that followed, the phrase “bowling alone” became shorthand for the experience of modern-day loneliness. He certainly had critics, but these tended to focus on the edges of his analysis, whether certain clubs had declined and to what extent. The cultural shift he described was incontrovertible.

A lot has changed in the last 25 years, but one thing has not: Americans still feel separated from one another. If anything, we’re even more balkanized.

Putnam wrote before the takeoff of social media and before the smartphone, which has contributed to the replacement of in-person connections with less meaningful digital ones. He wrote long before the Covid-19 pandemic, during which loneliness rates soared to new heights. So why hasn’t the curve bent back toward connection? Ironically, one weakness of Putnam’s method may have been a consequence of his descriptive triumph: While Bowling Alone succeeded in elevating the problem to wide recognition, data alone could not identify the cultural shifts that preceded the decline.

That’s not to say that his book didn’t spark efforts to turn the tide. But these largely failed because they assumed an end goal, more rather than less connection, separate from the true reasons community institutions flourish or fail. The reality is that the decline in American community institutions lies downstream from a loss of the very function of community in our lives.

Sociologist Robert Nisbet pointed this out in his 1953 book The Quest for Community, which showed that growing political centralization, paired with individual atomization, was a powerful driver of community degradation. This was counterintuitive: Aren’t individualism and centralization fundamentally at odds? Nisbet, however, saw the way the two reinforce each other. It is easier for the state to govern individuals than diverse civic institutions that can accrue their own power. In turn, as individuals come to rely on a centralized government, they don’t need other institutions to the same degree. Add to that the accelerant of technology, which has sped the decline — especially since Putnam wrote — by supplanting deeper community networks with shallower byte-and-pixel interactions.

A history of American community could be mapped across these cultural and technological shifts. An extraordinary number of new clubs were formed between 1870 and 1920 — fully half of the largest clubs created over 200 years, according to research by a team from Harvard University. But that burst of activity was closely followed by the New Deal and intense government centralization. In time, as government supports such as Social Security, workers’ compensation, and unemployment insurance took over roles previously filled by community groups, the institution-formation engine stalled.

Consider the Knights of Columbus, which was founded in 1882 in part to provide a social safety net at a time when working-class Catholics desperately needed some type of social insurance. The group was created to solve a very specific function for members, and although that underlying function has been replaced, the group has not significantly changed its core activities. The result has been a steep decline.

The same thing has happened to myriad social and religious groups that Putnam’s lonely bowler might once have belonged to. Instead of addressing intrinsic aspects of life, they became luxury goods. They still offered belonging, cohesion, and psychological well-being, but that wasn’t enough to counterbalance the pull of individualism.

There are, of course, groups around the country that buck the trend. Jonathan Saunders pastors Redeemer Detroit, a burgeoning church startup in downtown Detroit. He described engendering a strong sense of “why” at the conservative Presbyterian congregation. Why do they gather on Sunday? For worship, and this sense of purpose in turn spills out to service and commitment to their neighborhood. Over ten years, Redeemer Detroit has grown to an average Sunday attendance of 275. “If you’re in Detroit” and starting a new church, Saunders shared, “you’re putting all your chips on the table.”

But why does one organization bloom while another shrivels? Clubs, associations, and churches that are growing share a common element: They present a solution to an actual problem and deliver it in a way that no other group can. To envision a revival of community groups, we must examine the work that they are doing.

A completely different example: Membership in running clubs has jumped 25 percent nationwide between 2019 and 2024 according to survey data from Running USA. These groups provide community, but they also provide exercise for time-strapped, sedentary office workers, solving a real problem in their lives. The clear purpose helps them overcome the collective action problem and helps forge long-term bonds among members.

Multiplying the number of groups like these will require both local and national contributions. At a local level, philanthropists and community builders should invest in those groups that are engaging real people rather than those that promise connection for their own sake. Long-term institutional health will come from building things of intrinsic value, not merely those which are propped up by federal dollars. On the federal and state level, however, we should do less. If centralized solutions could fix the problem of American disconnection, they would have done it already.

In a recent interview reflecting on his career, Robert Putnam didn’t focus on his accolades, but rather what he had not accomplished. “I’ve been working for most of my adult life to try to build a better, more productive, more equal, more connected community in America,” he said, “and now I’m 83 and looking back, and it’s been a total failure.” But that’s too harsh. Putnam laid the foundation. Because he defined the problem so well, this generation has a place to build — it’s just a matter of building the right things.