Once upon a time, it was fairly rare to find someone that was living by themselves in America. But now that has completely changed. Americans are getting married later in life, couples are having fewer children, divorce is rampant, and millions of broken families litter our national landscape.
As a result, the traditional family unit in the United States is weaker than it has ever been before. And that is extremely unfortunate, because the family is a fundamental support system in any society. Without strong families, no society is going to thrive for long.
I knew that the percentage of single person households was rising, but this week I was stunned to learn that it has now reached almost 30 percent in the United States…
Nearly 30 percent of American households comprise a single person, a record high.
Scholars say living alone is not a trend so much as a transformation: Across much of the world, large numbers of people are living alone for the first time in recorded history.
This greatly contributes to the epidemics of loneliness and depression that we are witnessing. Humans were designed to love and be loved, but today so many of us feel so isolated. But it wasn’t always this way. In fact, only 8 percent of all households in the U.S. were made up of a single person in 1940…
The U.S. Census shows that “solitaries” made up 8 percent of all households in 1940. The share of solo households doubled to 18 percent in 1970 and more than tripled, to an estimated 29 percent, by 2022.
This is another instance where the trend is not our friend, and we are being told that there are a lot of reasons why we have seen such a dramatic shift…
The solo-living movement intersects with several other societal trends. Americans are marrying later, if at all. The nation is aging. The national birthrate is falling. People are living longer — or they were, until the pandemic arrived.
More than anything, perhaps, the rise of single-person households is about women entering the workforce and achieving economic self-sufficiency.
In previous generations, multi-person households were often an economic necessity.
And it sucks