It will only get worse but a few thoughts:

1) The most plausible future isn’t a single big catastrophe that motivates us all to get our act together and form tribes. The most plausible future is the present…. a series of smaller catastrophes that endlessly roll on and never by themselves feel big enough to make drastic changes and so no one does.

2) There is no way to solve this on the macro level. Every solution will be small, and involve individuals and small groups behaving differently, deciding before the catastrophe to make their lives more social and community centered.

3) It’s incumbent upon those of us with social resources to expand them, to put more into them and to ask more out of them. For example, I’ve seen many married couples the last few years say “I feel like I got the last chopper out of ‘Nam.” Maybe you did, and so don’t just pat yourself on the back and call it a day. Escaping the various kinds of social ‘Nams” that afflict our age gives you and me a responsibility to build social structures that others who come after us can then have a least a chance of benefiting from.

I’ve said more than a few times that if you’re father, you may feel like you don’t have time to invest in friendships. But your friends are your kid’s future network. It’s part of providing now. And it will only be more so in the future.