Smart Phones!
I think it’s more than smartphones. People stopped interacting communally even when I was a kid. When I was very young in the 80s I remember going to block parties and picnics with neighbors. Then by the 90s that stopped, now nobody even talks to their neighbors at all. Smartphones seemed to just put whatever is going on in overdrive. We simply do not live in a high trust, friendly society anymore, and I don’t know how we could even fix it at this point.
People used to have friends.
People used to have communities.
Now people have “networks” through smart phones and Facebook. It’s not the same. I know people with 500 “friends” and they’ve never met any of them.
People are lonely and they don’t even know they’re lonely.