Generation Uncoupled: America's New Gender Divide and the Crisis of Human Connection

Even as more people outfit their homes with surveillance technology, ironically, Americans hold their neighbors in high regard. A recent report from the Survey Center on American Life found that 72 percent of Americans maintain some level of trust in their neighbors, a stark contrast to the just 30 percent of Americans who said they trusted others more broadly, according to last year’s World Happiness Report. These findings suggest people feel like they belong in their communities, even if they don’t regularly interact with their neighbors, Daniel Cox, the director of the Survey Center on American Life and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told Vox.

So, if we generally believe the people who surround us can be trusted, then who exactly are the cameras for?

Americans tend to consider their homes as their own domain that they alone are responsible for protecting. Instead of relying on communal support (Can I give you a spare key in case I ever get locked out? Do you need me to water your plants while you’re out of town? You’d let me know if you saw someone stealing my package, right?) we lean into individualistic forms of protection like personal security cameras. What this signals to the wider community is that, absent a camera, people cannot be trusted to not steal each other’s packages. And, sure, the camera maybe deters a few people from petty theft, but at what cost?

Loneliness is a chronic state of mind for 1 in 10 American adults, according to the Social Connection in America report published at the end of 2025. Two years earlier, the surgeon general considered the same issue so pressing there was a government-sponsored report. “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation” showed that time spent alone by Americans rose from 285 minutes per day in 2003 to 333 minutes in 2020 – or an entire extra day every month.

And it has tangible outcomes: The World Health Organization reports that 1 in 6 people worldwide is affected by loneliness, with significant impacts on health and well-being. Loneliness is linked to an estimated 100 deaths every hour – more than 871,000 deaths annually.

It’s a trend that’s more pressing when taken in the longer term. In the 1990s, the Friends decade, just 3% of American men and 2% of women said they had no close friends at all. In 2021, that number had risen to 15% of men and 10% of women, per the Survey Center on American Life. Feelings of isolation have quintupled in 30 years.

A new niche of companies, community builders and coaches are stepping into the void. Call it the connection economy. But even as these businesses meet a deep human need, their struggles to become scalable businesses show the challenges in making money out of making those connections.

“Men are struggling,” Glass tells CNN. Some lack positive leaders, she says. Others get canceled too quickly, she believes. Employment opportunities are drying up for many, and others learn from an early age not to talk about their feelings.

To her, it all adds up to one thing: Throughout the country and across all age groups, “men are having a hard time.”

There is plenty of evidence Glass could point to. A Gallup study last year found that one in four young American men felt lonely the previous day. Around one in six men say they have no close friends, the Survey Center on American Life (a part of the American Enterprise Institute) found in 2021, five times more than three decades earlier. American men are less likely than women to be diagnosed with depression, but four times more likely to die by suicide – a disparity that, researchers say, indicates many are suffering in silence.

And now, Glass’s camps have a new challenge. The intoxicating pull of the manosphere – the hyper-online community led by men who tout misogynistic definitions of manliness – has given Glass a boisterous brigade of rivals. Vulnerability is out; after a few post-#MeToo years in the wilderness, the alpha male is back. With a vengeance.

…I saw a new set of data from the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute that the authors titled “Strangers Next Door.” The percentage of Americans who talk to their neighbors at least a few times a week has declined for all age groups since 2012, but it’s declined more aggressively among Americans ages 18 to 29. Many of the young adults in that group are the children of people who were children and teenagers in the early ’80s. Additionally, only 49 percent of respondents of all ages “are comfortable with having a neighbor watch their child for a few hours in an emergency.”

It makes sense that if you’re not really talking to your neighbors, you wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving your kids with them. And while a set of Reagan-era public service announcements isn’t the only reason behind Americans’ distrust of one another, these ads played a role in a culture of fear and parental judgment that has only grown over time, with social media amplifying many horrible things that have happened to children (and also false claims about horrible things that never actually happened to children). In 2023, the journalist Melinda Wenner Moyer pointed out that TV networks continued to spread misleading statistics about missing children and stranger danger, just as in 1985.