With all the political infighting and societal changes happening, it is a wonder that we are able to remain social creatures anymore.
We evolved to find safety and meaning in small, tight-knit groups, but those groups used to share the same sources of information, the same neighborhood, the same assumptions about how the world worked. Today, the information environment has shattered. Two people in the same house can live in two completely different news cycles, two different moral vocabularies, two different timelines of what is urgent. It is not that people have become less social, it is that the common ground that made social life effortless has become much harder to find and maintain.
Nowhere is that shift clearer than between parents and adult children. It used to be that the older generation handed down a world that looked mostly like the one they inherited. Now an adult child has come of age in an economy, a technology, and a culture that is fundamentally different from the one their parents navigated. Questions that once had settled answers — about work, marriage, gender, faith, what constitutes success, what you owe your community — are now open questions again. When parents offer advice from lived experience, it can sound like a judgment. When adult children set boundaries around new values, it can sound like a rejection. Both sides often want the same thing — respect and continuity — but they are speaking from different maps.
That is why the holiday table has become a task challenge. A task, not just a meal. You have to manage dietary restrictions, travel logistics, and political tripwires. You have to decide in advance what topics are allowed, what jokes will land, who needs to be seated next to whom to keep the peace. The table was once the place where family differences were suspended. Now it is the place where every difference in the outside world walks in the front door and sits down. Many families handle it by avoiding hard talk altogether, which keeps the peace for an evening but can make the gathering feel thin and performative.
And yet we keep showing up. That may be the most hopeful evidence that we are still social creatures. We do not gather because it is easy; we gather because we need to. The challenge now is not to win the argument at the table, but to relearn the older skills of being social: listening without preparing a rebuttal, letting someone be partly right, separating a person’s worth from their vote or their feed, and remembering that a shared history is a rarer and more durable thing than a shared headline.
