Americans are facing a “crisis of connection,” according to a 2025 survey from the American Psychological Association. The numbers are stark. Fifty-four percent of U.S. adults say they feel isolated from others; fully half say they feel left out; half also say they lack companionship.

Gen Z feels this acutely. The Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki has found that while they desire connection, young adults are increasingly reticent to interact with one another in a polarized world, and they’re paying the price. Young adults are now less happy than middle-aged and older adults. Sixty-four percent of respondents to the above survey listed “being financially stable/secure” as their top goal for the future, while only 17 percent chose “finding community.”

It’s obvious that Gen Z is unhappy. The usual culprits—doomscrolling, political polarization, digital distraction—are real and documented. But there is something far deeper at work here than technology or politics alone. What has happened to us that seeking community—deep-rooted connection with those around us—has become such a low priority? And what are the implications of this loss of the civic bonds that once tied us together?

Gen Z’s crisis of connection is ultimately a crisis of authority; Gen Z is lonely because the institutions that once provided structure, meaning, and belonging—the church, the family, local civic associations—have been weakened or outright abandoned. What remains is the isolated individual on one side and the distant, ever-expanding impersonal state on the other, with little in between.

This crisis is pressing—the fate of future generations relies on handling it properly—but it is not surprising, or new. Fifty years ago, Robert Nisbet, a sociologist predicted exactly this moment. Understanding what’s really happening to Gen Z—and what can be done about it—requires learning what Nisbet saw coming and why his warnings matter more now than ever.

The Dissolution of Mediating Institutions

In his most notable work, The Quest for Community, Nisbet described the severing of the bond between the individual and the community; he also diagnosed the growth of individual autonomy and reliance on the expanding state. Nisbet’s framework was counterintuitive, but helpful: To think of the rise of totalitarianism as the annihilation of the individual is far too reductionistic, he said. Instead, totalitarianism would first dissolve the “social relationships within which individuality develops.” The state wasn’t on a warpath against individuals; it was on a warpath against the communities and social fabric that stood between the individual and centralized power. Nisbet saw the sources of this ailment in “the cherished individual of the nineteenth century” and the “myth of the all-benign State in the twentieth.” What Nisbet called “mediating institutions”—local civic organizations, churches, fraternal orders, neighborhood associations—have no place in these myths.

Of course, individuals can try to stand against it, but Nisbet viewed the individual as powerless “apart from the reinforcement of associative tradition.” For Gen Z, this dissolution is in an advanced state. They’ve grown up in the “individualist age”—an age ruled by what each person wants regardless of the impact on the community. This individualist age is best defined by Carl Trueman, who in turn draws from Philip Rieff and Charles Taylor. For Trueman this age of “expressive individualism” is one in which “each of us finds our meaning by giving expression to our own feelings and desires.”

The authority of the individual has replaced “old authorities” that guided previous generations. Church attendance among young adults plummeted during the time of Nisbet’s writing and has since plateaued. Stable family structures are increasingly rare, with broken homes and mass fatherlessness. Even political communities are fracturing from within, as young people no longer find them suitable for their individual causes.

As is almost always the case, when a strong authority disappears, a stronger power will try to take its place. What are these strong powers for Gen Z? On one side, the radical autonomy promised by digital life: Gen Z never knew a time before smartphones, social media, video games, and Netflix. Too many have fallen for the idea that to indulge in these things represents true freedom. On the other side stands the expanding state. Gen Z also never knew a time before digital IDs, facial recognition software, and what Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism.” They were promised that by breaking from traditional authority and allowing these digital powers into their lives that they would find freedom.

Nisbet foresaw the rise of both of these forces. As traditional communities shrank, the state grew, ostensibly to protect individual autonomy and rights. This created what Nisbet called a “new and higher freedom.” But this freedom is a false promise. Without the texture of real community—without membership, allegiance, in-person connection, and the discipline that comes from being accountable to others—Gen Z has been left isolated and adrift. The very autonomy they were promised has imprisoned them. In other words, Gen Z has inherited, according to Nisbet, “social anarchy and moral chaos.”

Authority Versus Power

Nisbet made a crucial distinction that helps explain Gen Z’s current crisis. He—like Hannah Arendt—sought to define and distinguish the relationship between authority and power. Authority, in Nisbet’s framework, is legitimate, rooted in function, and arises organically from communities that serve real human needs. Robert Putnam, in his 2000 book Bowling Alone, refers to this social capital as the invisible scaffolding that upholds society. Young people would be formed by this authority through a parent, a pastor, a coach, or a mentor, each giving structure and meaning to life.

Nisbet warns that when authority is depleted, people “will tolerate almost anything but the threatened loss of authority in the social order; the authority of law, of custom, of convention.” It isn’t hard to see this playing out in real time today. Many now disregard social order entirely or treat it as the skeletal remains of an oppressive system that must be dismantled. They ignore, and even openly oppose, immigration laws despite their role in protecting lives. They dismiss customs—even patriotic staples—as offensive. Women are subject to men participating, and even often injuring them in, sporting events. Churches are no longer respected as constitutionally protected—and are even invaded.

Power, by contrast, tends to be “wielded by organized and violent forces” and operates through coercion rather than consent. Nisbet comments that power is often “the antidote to boredom in society.” Authority is often inherited from the past—customs, beliefs, traditions—while power is a mistaken attempt at taking justice into one’s own hands. As authority diminishes, it creates a vacuum that is often filled by mere power.

“The human mind cannot support moral chaos for very long,” Nisbet wrote. Gen Z has bought into the lie that to be free they don’t need the church, stable families, inherited wisdom, or community standards. But in that vacuum, they face raw power at every turn: algorithmic manipulation that exploits their attention, corporate surveillance that monetizes their data, political movements that demand absolute allegiance, online mobs that enforce ideological conformity through public shaming. They’ve traded the “good authority” of functional communities for the capricious power of systems that see them as users, consumers, and political actors rather than whole persons embedded in relationships.

The family provides the clearest example of Nisbet’s principle. The function of the family is multifaceted: to produce and raise children, to serve as the basic cell of society, to provide the structure within which individuals learn to navigate the world. In other words, the family is where authority is instilled in the individual. When that structure is intact, it exercises authority—not through force, but through the natural bond between parent and child and the stability of belonging and corrective justice. When it’s broken—through fatherlessness, abuse, or abandonment—children don’t experience freedom. They experience chaos.

Gen Z has grown up in an era of mass family dissolution. Is it any wonder they’re susceptible to the appeals of power—whether that’s the algorithmic power of TikTok, the ideological power of political extremism, or the institutional power of the surveillance state?

Freedom Requires Worthy Values

Nisbet understood something about freedom that too many have has forgotten: “Genuine freedom” is rooted “in positive acts of dedication to ends and values. Freedom presupposes the autonomous existence of values that men wish to be free to follow and live up to.” This apparent paradox cuts to the heart of Gen Z’s unhappiness. They have unprecedented individual autonomy—they can be whoever they want, believe whatever they want, live however they want. But they have lost the dedication to ends and values. Freedom without something worth being free for is just drift.

When more than half of young adults prize financial security over finding community, they may not be so much expressing a preference for the former as revealing their lack of the latter. They may be banking on the one concrete thing they know—money—in a world where everything else feels uncertain.

Nisbet drew from Edmund Burke in expressing why this trend is troubling for civil society: “Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.” Real freedom requires self-discipline. And self-discipline requires values, which require communities that embody and transmit those values. Civil society, Nisbet wrote, “is a tissue of authorities”—a web of overlapping memberships, allegiances, and obligations that give shape to our lives and substance to our choices.

Gen Z has been denied this kind of authority. They’ve been told that freedom means the absence of constraint, that authenticity means following your feelings, that community is optional and can be found online. The results speak for themselves.

Nisbet understood that societies cannot sustain themselves without the mediating institutions that connect individuals to larger purposes and to each other. Gen Z is the loneliest, most anxious, most depressed, and most angry generation in modern history. And because of this they’re also the most vulnerable to authoritarian appeals. This is apparent from a 2023 study conducted on anti-white sentiments. The study sought to see how people would react to Adolf Hitler quotes, but instead of “Jewish” they substituted the term “white.” The results were astounding. Of 428 college graduates or students, most agreement among the students was with the anti-white statements. Authoritarian appeals were welcomed as long as they target the right group of people.

Not only are members of Gen Z led to despise people groups based on skin color, but they’re also the most spiritually lost. These two points may well be connected. As Nisbet noted “man’s alienation from man must lead in time to man’s alienation from God.” Religious “nones” nearly doubled from 16 percent in 2007 to 31 percent today. Gen Z is the least religious generation in American history. A generation cut off from both community and transcendence is a generation in profound spiritual crisis.

Rebuilding the Tissue of Authority

The solution isn’t to return to some imagined past or to simply scold Gen Z about their phone usage. It’s to take Nisbet seriously about what human beings actually need. We need to rebuild the local institutions that connect individuals to communities and communities to transcendent purposes. This means strengthening families through concrete support for marriage, parenthood, and multi-generational connection. It means revitalizing local institutions: churches, civic associations, fraternal organizations, neighborhood groups, all of which create face-to-face bonds and shared responsibility. It means creating spaces where authority can function properly—where young people can encounter mentors, submit to discipline, learn through apprenticeship, and discover that freedom comes through commitment rather than the absence of it. For Gen Z specifically, this means offering an alternative to the false choice between radical autonomy and state dependency. It means showing them that real community—the kind that makes demands on you, that requires you to show up, that gives you responsibilities as well as rights—is actually what they’re hungering for when they report feeling lonely and isolated.

Nisbet understood that authority and freedom aren’t opposites. But instead that true, lasting freedom comes from belonging to communities that are worth belonging to, submitting to authorities that actually serve human flourishing, and dedicating oneself to values that transcend one’s individual desires. Gen Z’s crisis won’t be solved by limiting screen time (though that’s a start) or even different policies. It will only be solved when we learn from Nisbet’s insight that we are not isolated individuals but social beings, and rebuild the tissue of authority that has sustained human life for centuries.

This piece was previously published at Modern Age.