I get what you are saying but this is a very narrow and uninformed view American life. Americans don't spend all their time in cars for god's sake. The digital age aside, there is and has been plenty of socialization at home, in neighborhoods, at church, and at the grocery store.
There is little socialization at home - when's the last time (outside Christmas and Turkey Day) most families hosted a large gathering?
Hypermobility in the service of jobs has broken a lot of that cohesion. You usually don't live next door to your parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts any more. This gets worse the more urban the area is - rural areas still have some of that cohesion.
Neighborhood socialization? Not in any apartment complex I've ever seen. Walk down the floor, eyes straight, avoid even basic salutations. It's slightly better in suburbia, but not much.
In the grocery store? Have you been to a large grocery store? It's not socialization just because there's a lot of people. What meaningful interactions are there in a grocery store?
This leaves church. And as it turns out, that's not everybody's cup of tea.
American's may not spend all their time in the car. They do spend exorbitant amounts of time in their care. They do have much less opportunity to socially engage than most Europeans experience. What social experience there is often needs large quantities of alcohol - and while I haven't seen any studies on the subject, I'm still holding the belief that at least a good chunk of that is due to needing to deal with the anxiety of an extremely uncommon situation.
As I said above, many of these factors are somewhat lesser in more rural communities, but they experience a large flight of the younger demographic towards cities, curtailing cross-generational interaction.
And that's not just an "uninformed view". I've spent several decades inside and outside the US, and seen a few cultures in the process - and that view holds. But let's dismiss that as anecdote, too, and look at actual data, time spent visiting friends per day[1]. The US is way down that list.
It's very likely car culture is far from the only reason for that, but the US is a country that seems fairly isolating.
> when's the last time (outside Christmas and Turkey Day) most families hosted a large gathering?
Very very often. Maybe every month? And large neighborhood get togethers at least every week. Perhaps you are overly generalizing from your experiences. Large families/neighborhoods that meet regularly are not a foreign concept in the US. Although HN probably caters to the sort of people who do not go to these things.
> There is little socialization at home - when's the last time (outside Christmas and Turkey Day) most families hosted a large gathering?
Can you support this assertion as a blanket statement? I don't see much evidence of this in my own personal experience. I grant that it may be the case in certain areas and groups, but across the board? I'm not seeing it.
"Neighborhood socialization? Not in any apartment complex I've ever seen. Walk down the floor, eyes straight, avoid even basic salutations."
I recently moved into an apartment in manhattan, and I know my neighbours, and smile to them and they smile to me. One even let me borrow their toolbox.
No, it’s probably just a result of local variation. Some buildings or low-density neighbourhoods are super friendly, some buildings or low-density neighbourhoods are unfriendly. There’s a lot of reasons going on, it’s dependent on individuals.
In super-friendly neighbourhoods I’ve found it’s often one person who’s doing all the work to keep everyone connected.
Not OP, it was a bit of caricature I believe. But there are stark differences he also mentioned - many times in US I couldn't walk to a store, unless walking on the road and risking getting hit / stopped by police. Some shops I wanted to visit simply didn't have pedestrian access at all. Or stuff like the need to walk 45 minutes in a big U shape to store that is 1km away. Replace store with any other destination.
This reflects a bit different reality in US. You might not even see it anymore, but for many Europeans its a bit shocking when first encountered.
It's disorienting when I visit family back in Texas each year after living in Germany for the past 15, and especially now that I've given up our second car because I realize I wasn't driving enough for it to make sense, it really irritates me that I have to have a rental car the whole time I'm visiting.
Since I'm a respectable-looking, middle-aged white lady, I just get stopped and politely asked if I need a ride or to borrow their phone when I'm walking between shopping centers. It's not as universally pleasant for people who do not look like me. My sister-in-law thinks I'm nuts for wanting to walk a couple hundred yards to the other side of a large shopping center rather than get back in the car and drive there.
What you are describing has only been my experience in suburbia. Major cities are a lot more walkable as far as getting to a grocery store or convenience shop or whatever. I'm currently in Chicago and the entire city has a grid layout, no weird U shaped routes anywhere and every street has a sidewalk for pedestrians.
> What you are describing has only been my experience in suburbia. Major cities are a lot more walkable as far as getting to a grocery store or convenience shop or whatever.
The problem of course, is that almost all American cities outside of a small handful are effectively a tiny downtown core surrounded by what amounts to suburbs. Only a few cities such as NYC, Boston, Chicago, etc. really qualify as "city living" in the sense you write above - being able to quickly and easily take care of your day to day needs within the neighborhood and thus resulting in a wildly different lifestyle/culture than the suburbs.
I've lived in a number of places, Chicago is where I currently call home. The lifestyle of living 2 miles from downtown Chicago vs. the Chicago suburbs is a night and day difference. Living 2 miles from downtown in Minneapolis is effectively no different than living 30 miles out in the exurbs, even with sidewalks and grid layouts.
As I get older I see "suburbs" to be a lifestyle more than a description of urban density. While not perfect, my quick rule of thumb is that if the average person requires a car to effectively participate in society - it's a suburb, not a city.
The more time I spend living in European cities really drives this point home to me. Sprawl has totally, completely, and irreversibly changed American culture for better or worse in very deep and subtle ways.
