J.D. Vance And The Fears Of Nonexistent Isolation

Yesterday, I was in a Discord call with some friends — with the call hitting a maximum of about eight or so people. I mention this because, while in that call, I saw an article from The Huffington Post talking about how Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance thinks pornography should be regulated to stop “isolation.”

The article discusses comments Vance made as reported in an 8/3/2021 article of the Catholic magazine Crisis. In the article, Vance told writer Jessica Kramer the following:

I think the combination of porn, abortion have basically created a really lonely, isolated generation that isn’t getting married, they’re not having families, and they’re actually not even totally sure how to interact with each other.

If this is the trend that Vance sees in the world, then he and I must be looking at very different data. I see a world where online friends are talked to more often than even the closest real life friend could have previously ever hope to be, a world where open relationships and polyamory are becoming more mainstream than ever before, and a world where the average person feels like they must communicate with people in different parts of the world or else feel left out. Some social critics — one of them being myself — have actually argued that we are not isolated enough, and that children…