Over the last 50 years, while society has been growing more and more prosperous and individualistic, our social connections have been dissolving. Emily Esfahni Smith from The Atlantic describes the price for our social disconnection:

We volunteer less. We entertain guests at our homes less often. We are getting married less. We are having fewer children. And we have fewer and fewer close friends with whom we'd share the intimate details of our lives. We are denying our social nature, and paying a price for it. Over the same period of time that social isolation has increased, our levels of happiness have gone down, while rates of suicide and depression have multiplied.