I just skimmed the article and it all resonates with my experience as an immigrant in the US but I'm also going to point out that the way cities are built in the US plays a huge role in isolating people. In most american cities the spaces to aggregate without having to pay money (let's say a restaurant) are scarce or even absent. There's no benches on the side of the streets, because we fear that someone could sit on it and NOT SPEND MONEY at a nearby business (the horror!).
We build houses far, far away from stores and places of work, so everyone needs to drive to those places in their own motorized isolation box.
We built profoundly inhuman places to live, and the result is that nobody is happy and we're all dying of all kinds of preventable diseases.
I think this model of society has largely failed, and people in western countries are now struggling to figure out where do we go from here, a question we will probably not answer in my lifetime.
I'm not so sure about city planning being a large factor.
European cities are very different but we face similar problems. We have parks, you don't need to travel far (I grew up in a large city, now live in a small one right next to it, and have never had a car and never needed one) to get places, most people live in multi-family-homes and overly long commutes are the exception, not the rule.
I do agree with your last sentence though, and maybe it's the individualism that expresses itself more strongly in US cities because they are much younger, and more purpose built.
This has been on my mind for a while and it really bothers me. Everyone I know lives 10-20km away and the only time we meet up is at the pub where we spend a huge amount of money. There are very few public spaces in the city and they are all loud and unpleasant to be in due to the car traffic.
I honestly think the invention of cars is to blame for the loneliness issues. All the other things like social media are just background noise compared to the invention that made it very incontinent to just casually meet other people.
We build houses far, far away from stores and places of work, so everyone needs to drive to those places in their own motorized isolation box.
We built profoundly inhuman places to live, and the result is that nobody is happy and we're all dying of all kinds of preventable diseases.
I think this model of society has largely failed, and people in western countries are now struggling to figure out where do we go from here, a question we will probably not answer in my lifetime.