One month to the day of the 2024 presidential election, The New York Times reported on a new analysis of how Americans spend their time. The average American spends more and more of the day at home: one hour and 39 minutes more in 2022 than in 2003. For each additional hour spent at home, part of this hour was spent with family, i.e. 7 .4 minutes. Most of it, 21 minutes, was spent alone.

Clearly, due to the coronavirus pandemic, time spent at home has increased in 2020. Part of this stay-at-home impulse may well be the stubborn persistence of habits formed during the early days of lockdown isolation. But this trend is more than just a pandemic hangover. For years before COVID-19 struck, time spent alone had increased as time spent socializing decreased. However solitude And solitude are not the same, this decline in social ties was accompanied by a rise in loneliness so pronounced that the surgeon general described it as ” epidemic.

And now this: the re-election to the highest office in the land of Donald Trump, a man who has attacked the very idea of ​​a communitarian, democratic form of government and who has indicated that he aspires to change the United States towards autocracy…carof course, meaning “self”, and autocracy being the concentration of power for and within oneself. Self versus others is one of Trump’s defining principles. During his first term as president, he used a position intended for public service to get rich. He vowed to use it this time to take revenge on your enemies And-“within two seconds” of his inauguration – to fire the special prosecutor charged with overseeing the criminal cases against him.

However, the self over others, or at least the self Before others, has long been an important aspect of American culture—not always on a Trumpian level, sure, but individualism, for better and worse, shapes both the structure of society and our personal lives. And it will surely shape Americans’ response to the election: for the winners, perhaps, self-congratulation; for the losers, the risk of letting despair lead them into deeper and more dangerous isolation. On election day, the Times published an article on voters’ plans to manage stress. Two separate people in this story said they deliberately avoided social settings. Extending this strategy over the next four years would be a mistake.

Read: Don’t give up on America

In 1831, French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville traveled to the United States. He observed and analyzed its population and culture, and published his thoughts in a massive two-volume report titled Democracy in America. Alongside his praise for the country’s stated value of equality – which he wrote “has all the characteristics of a divine decree”– he warned of the individualism he saw as embedded in American society and the isolation it could cause. “Each man is forever thrown upon himself,” he writes, “and he risks locking himself up in the solitude of his own heart. »

More than a century and a half later, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Lifea sociological work written by five scholars, explicitly followed in Tocqueville’s footsteps, examining how individualism affects institutions and personal relationships in the United States. Published in 1985, it reads today as extremely prescient. The authors feared that the danger described by Tocqueville had already been realized. “It seems to us,” they write, “that it is individualism, and not equality, as Tocqueville thought, which has inexorably run through our history. We fear that this individualism has become cancerous…that it threatens the survival of freedom itself.

According to Tocqueville, American individualism was tempered by Americans’ propensity to form associations and participate in civic life. “These, he argued, moderated the isolating tendencies of private ambition on the one hand and limited the despotic tendencies of government on the other,” the authors of Habits of the heart wrote. But American associational life began to empty out beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, as people were less and less likely to attend a club, league, church, or other community organization (a shift that Robert Putnam noted documented in his 2000 book, Play alone). Since the late 1970s, trust in large-scale institutions such as organized religion, the labor movement, the media, and the U.S. government has also declined; in 2023, Gallup said “historically low”.

A few months ago I spoke with Ann Swidler, one of the authors of Habits of the heart. “We obviously haven’t been able to move things in the direction we might have hoped,” she told me. “I would say all the horrible things we were worried about have gotten worse.” Americans spend noticeably more time cooped up in the solitude of their homes, and perhaps also in the solitude of their own hearts.

It might be difficult to imagine the revival of many civic associations – ones that could be beneficial both to democracy and to our relationships – given that a majority of Americans just voted for a man who has few interest or respect for institutions beyond what he can. do for him. If autocracy is indeed the direction the country is heading, Tocqueville’s prediction about our relationship is not positive. As he wrote in The Ancien Régime and the Revolution, his book on the French Revolution:

If individualism is, as the authors of Habits of the heart As “the first language in which Americans tend to think about their lives” writes, it makes sense that people would turn to their native language in times of upheaval. In the days following the 2016 elections, for example, search for the term self-care enriched. Taking care of yourself of course takes different forms, even if in the dominant culture, self-care is commonly used to mean self-care, by oneself. Self-soothing, alone. (We can see in this echo Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-sufficiency”: “Nothing can bring you peace except yourself. “)

But taking care of yourself doesn’t always have to lead to isolation. Among activists and in the helping professions, self-care is often talked about as a way to restore people so they don’t burn out and can continue their altruistic work. Some in these circles criticize the emphasis on self-care as distracting from the need for institutional support. But the overall conception shows at least an understanding of both types of care as having a symbiotic relationship: Take care of yourself so you can present yourself to others.

Read: Focus on the things that matter

Additionally, caring for others East a form of self-care. Research shows that doing things for others leads to greater well-being than trying to make yourself happy or please yourself yourself. That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for peace, isolation, or a little treat. But it’s about challenging the cultural message that going to bed alone is the most appropriate response to difficult feelings.

Under an administration for which (to paraphrase my colleague Adam Serwer) crueltyThe point is not to worry, it’s up to people to take care of each other on small and large scales. This task is made more difficult not only by the cultural pressure that pushes Americans to rely only on themselves, but also by the slow and steady atrophy of the muscles of unity. “American individualism is opposed to more adult virtues, such as attentiveness and generativity, not to mention wisdom,” say the authors of Habits of the heart wrote. The opposite, I hope, is also true: care and generativity – working to contribute to a collective future – are the way forward to resist hyper-individualism and isolation.

Even if withdrawal into oneself constitutes a general trend, it is of course not the only evolution underway. As isolating as the pandemic-related containment measures were, these years saw the increase of support groups determined to care for the vulnerable, whether the government does or not. During the first Trump administration, mass protests broke out; people fought for women’s rights and an end to racist police brutality. People always show up for each other calm and daily ways too. Creating networks of support and engagement could provide a small buffer against the effects of an elected president’s self-serving policies while preventing people from drifting further apart.

Americans’ abilities to connect and pay attention are not lost. But they are rusty. And we will all need these skills if we are to find a way to turn inward rather than inward. I’m not even talking about overcoming political polarization or trying to build bridges with strangers who voted differently than you. These are tasks that people won’t be equipped to do if they struggle to introduce themselves to the loved ones already in their lives. For now, trying to reverse decades-long isolationist inertia is challenge enough. It’s already a challenge to resist what has become a cultural trend toward withdrawal, while also enduring the stress of an election that has left many people exhausted and deeply afraid for the future. How will we proceed over the next four years? Not alone. How are we going to proceed over the next week, hour, minute? Not alone.

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