Modern world is great and if someone asks me, in what historical period would I like to live, it would be either now or the future.
There are some changes we made to our societies tough, that make some stuff more difficult. Where I notice it most are family, friendships and local communities.
In the past, it was really important to have a close relationship with your family. There was no social security or universal health care. So if you were in trouble, your family was really important.
Your friends and extended community was an extension of this. They were important when you needed to do something bigger than a family could do. Like pick a large field in one day. Or renovate your house. They helped you and you helped them. That is how it worked even few decades ago and still works in rural areas in western world.
But in a modern world, a lot of the stuff is no longer necessary. You can pay a company to renovate your house. You can pay a doctor, even a caregiver, to take care of you.
Of course, sometimes you can’t, and then you can realize, that you are missing your family, friends and community.
Why is it so hard to keep these relationships in a modern world? I think it is exactly because we do not have these common goals of family budget and staying alive. Of helping your neighbor because you know you will need their help in the future.
Without a common goal and needs there is not much forcing us to overcome our differences and work together. And so we fragment as a society into small and separate worlds.
The closest thing we can often get to community is work. There we often have common goals, we need to help each other, and we know we will need help of our colleagues in the future. But rarely this transfers beyond the job.
That is why artificial communities around sport, a place a hobby, are so important nowadays. They give us what we lost at least to some extent.