I’ve wondered how much of Fox News taking over the older demographic is just simple loneliness. I’ve often seen old people in the grocery store so starved for human contact that they have inappropriate or overly-long conversations with swamped retail workers. People like that will reach out to and react to anything that seems to provide them a hold and even makes an effort to explain their predicament and that alleviates their extreme isolation.
Work is one of the key sources of friendship and community. Think of your own relationships; surely many of your closest friendships — perhaps even your relationship with your spouse — started in the workplace.
This is one of the reasons I have a huge problem with most of left’s bogus “protection from harm” boss-coddling causing workplace relationships (platonic and non-) to become verboten.
There’s a lot to disagree with and a lot this article ignores, being penned by someone from the AEI — but it’s more right than wrong, and loneliness is an enormous problem that is only getting worse as we retreat behind screens and algorithms.