Voluntary Confinement: Has America Changed its Culture?
/By Don Varyu
Oct 2024
e honest, didn’t you feel cramped, frustrated and a little nuts being cooped up all those months during COVID? Were you clawing at the walls to get outside—toget back to being normal?
Well, that’s understandable—but it may also be that, in the wake of that whole mess, we American found out we might want a new “normal,” one that adopted some of the isolation forced by the pandemic. Maybe being cooped up is kind of what we wanted.
That probably sounds odd (at least). If people are so happy at home, why are the airports mobbed? National Park visits are at an alltime high. Why aren’t the roads empty?
Well, today most evidence points to the conclusion that Americans now are much more comfortable staying at home. We have changed. I’m saying America is pretty much hunkered down…enjoying the convenience that technology has bought us…and satisfied with a new state of voluntary confinement.
know, you may be shaking your head: “no, no way--that’s not me! I’m just as active as ever!” Well, I get it. You see yourself and you life just as active as five years ago. And I believe you.
But most people will also admit that, in the wider world, we can’t ignore the reality our eyes display. Many places are far less crowded…almost downright empty. (I recently walked into my neighborhood drug store on a weekday afternoon—you know, the kind with ten aisles, various products, a full pharmacy, etc. I was the only customer in the place.) Blocks of downtowns feel like ghost towns. It can somehow seem like the country as a whole is recoiling from itself.
Well, which is real? A nation that’s still “go-get-em”…or one that says, “I just want to go home?”
tructurally, I’m going to lay out my argument in three chapters. I’ll deal with the first one here, and the others in a followup article next issue. Here’s the rundown:
Living inside and outside the front door;
Living in our own minds; and,
Living inside our own identities.
And I’m not going to ask you to just believe me on ths, because why should you? Instead, I went out to see if we could understand what the data are telling us.
And the revealed numbers are important because if we aim to make progress in the distinct areas of environment, governance, Wall Stret, opportunity, fairness, relationships and self-actualization, it’s essential to understand the cultural atmosphere that overlays all of the above. Maybe we could adapt to hitting a moving target—but not if we don’t agree on the target in the first place.
CHAPTER ONE: LIVING IN THE WORLD
Many things that used to take us outside the front door don’t need to anymore. Of course, there are clear reasons for this. But on the whole, those with the ability are more than willing to pay for convenience. Why go out for something--including a job-- when that something can just come to us?
Remote work. If the COVID era was responsible for altering our social structure, then remote work is the main reason. It’s changed so many ;things—in ways that we’ve quickly come to take for granted. In 2018, less than 6% of all U.S. workers did so remotely. That number skyrocketed to 42% by 2020 for obvious reasons. But anyone who predicted it would ever go back to pre-pandemic levels was mistaken. Today, at least 66% of all workers do so remotely, at least part of the time. And 68% say they’d never want to be in a workplace again. Only 5% say they’re in the office full-time (althought Amazon and others are out to raise that). The world now runs on hybrid jobs.
Fingertip shopping. Yes, you can blame Amazon for many things and swear never to use it again. But the overall impact of online shopping is right in front of us in those strangely empty stores, and shuttered malls. According to CapitalOne Shopping, in the late 80’s there were 25,000 malls in America. Today there are 1,170. (Some of the vacancies were leveled; others are repurposed—hello, pickleball!)
And since the start of the pandemic, almost a quarter of all physical retail stores have closed.
More than half of Americans say they prefer shopping online. Total sales from e-commerce are expected to grow to more than a third of all retail revenues in 2025…and DIT research says by 2040, 95% of all purchases will be made online.
Food delivery. The pandemic may be over, but the preference that food be delivered to our door is not. It might arrive in the form of prepared meals from restaurants…meal kits to pop in the microwave or frying pan…or just your regular grocery list odered online.
Counting from 2021 through 2025 estimates, the total number of mobile deliveries will have doubled. More than a quarter of Americans will have single meals delivered in 2025. More than 22% will have groceries delivered. Statista says demand for all forms of delivered food will grow 29% annually at least through 2028.
Restaurants. Consider this: 63% of all U.S. adults have worked in a restaurant at some point in their lives. Which means we don’t just like eating out, we understand how restaurants are run. And right now, they’re harder to run than any time in living memory. Food costs are up for them, just like for us; labor costs are up. Help is hard to find. So consequently, their prices also have jumped. Which leads to an unsurprising bottom line: the American Restaurant Association says prior to the pandemic, there were more than a million restaurants in the U.S. Today, there are less than 750,000.
However, in that same period, the total number of fast foot and fast casual locations (McDonalds, sandwich shops, etc.) held steady—meaning they are growing as a percentage of all restaurants.
In-home entertainment. In 2018, pre-COVID, Americans spent $23 billion on home entertainment, even though there were lots of options away from home. Of course, that number more than doubled during the pandemic, when it was almost impossible to find anyplace to go.
It was only logical for things to cool down once the world opened up—but that didn’t happen. In 2023, in-home entertainment spending jumped another 20%. Apparently, the lure of the home big screen, surround sound and the recliner has taken hold. Not surprising when the remote in your hand activates streaming channels to get you to almost anything you want. Doesn’t it seem quaint to remember 16-screen multiplexes?
Education
Do you think education is important? Well, it turns out a surging number of people disagree with you. There are several ways of looking at this:
Sending kids to school. Before the pandemic, educators were concerned because 15% of all public-school kids were “chronically absent” (meaning an average of a day off every other week—or more.) Today it’s at 25%. Parents are more lenient, “just giving them a day off when they need it.” Not coincidentally, average test scores for all kids are plummeting. And a high absentee rate indicates less chance of graduating from high school. Those lower test scores are also directly correlated to not entering college, being sentenced to jail, and developing diabetes.
Going to College. In 2018, 69% of high school graduates entered college. In 2023, that fell to 61%. Higher ed is ridiculously expensive, and unnecessarily so. But see if the schools care. (Harvard has more than $50 billion in the bank, and five others have more than $20 billion.) The exorbitant annual costs push students to disciplines with the apparent best chances of making more money after grauation. Which is ironic, since professions like tech, finance, law and medicine seem among the most vulnerable to replacement by artificial intelligence.
Home schooling.Youngsters being educated at home are growing at a very high rate, now representing between five and seven percent of all students. But the rate of learning for these kids is worse than any other sector: public, private, religious or charter.
Home-schooled kids are, by definition, barely connected to any physical building, but also disconnected from other students. Socialization issues aside, they are also less likely to continue on to college.
Religious organizations
According to Gallup, in 1992, 70% of Americans reported belonging to a church or synagogue. Today that number is 46%.
There is also less cohesion among the religious. In 2000, 86% of Americans identified as Christian. Today, that number is 68%.
Among Gen Z’ers (born since 1996), over half report no religious belief or connection at all.
Home alone?
The New York Times reports that inside city limits in San Francisco, Seattle, New York and a handful of other cities, 40% or more of all dwelling units are occupied by a single human.
Romance
More than half of Americans aged 18-30 say they’ve dated someone they met via an online dating site or app. Across all ages, that totals 60 million digital connections.
When you don’t have a common office or worksite…no after-work happy hours…no church or bar or shopping mall or movie theatre or college “mixer” to find someone, what’s the next best option?
There’s no way to judge this, but it clearly changes the dynamics of “attraction” …and the definition of “love at first sight.”
In conclusion, in this chapter I’ve dealth with the tangible: how we as humans choose to exist in the physical world.
Next issue I’ll move to the temporal, the working of our minds. That will include data on how we think, and how we choose to gather information to create our beliefs. And then, how those beliefs coalesce to form our identity—perhaps the base currency of post-pandemic age.
And I’ll also address some of the logical countergruments to my thesis. In short, are we or are we not choosing voluntary confinement?
