Resist the Drift

One of the more interesting stories I read this week wasn’t about politics or AI or the Middle East or the latest social media outrage cycle.

It was about young people going to church.

According to a recent Wall Street Journal piece, churches in New York City are suddenly seeing a surge of Gen Z attendance. Not out of obligation. Not because their parents dragged them there. Because they’re looking for something.

Community. Stability. Meaning. Actual human interaction. One church even created a “Pizza to Pews” gathering before Sunday Mass to accommodate the crowds.

For all our talk about hyperconnectivity, it turns out people are still hungry for belonging. Maybe starving for it. Or at least looking for a good slice.

That story stayed with me while sitting in a jacuzzi at my local health club this week. It’s one of those places that hums all day. People coming and going, classes cycling through, the quiet choreography of modern routine.

After a swim, I’ve gotten into the habit of sitting in the jacuzzi for ten minutes. Nothing special. Just a small ritual before heading to the showers. It’s a fairly intimate space. Half a dozen people, maybe. Close enough that, not long ago, it would have been impossible not to acknowledge each other. A nod. A comment about the water. Something.

But every time I sit there, it’s the same scene. Silence. Not the relaxed, companionable kind. Something different than that. More detached. Most people are staring at their phones. Watching videos. Scrolling. Headphones in, or not—it doesn’t really matter. Everyone is somewhere else.

Six people, sitting shoulder to shoulder in a pool of hot water, and not a single word exchanged. Ten years ago, this would have felt strange. Maybe even rude. Now it barely registers.

Nothing happened. No rule changed. No one decided this is how it should be. But something shifted.

We can tell ourselves a simple story about moments like this. That comfort and technology have made us passive. Distracted. Increasingly detached from the people around us and more absorbed in our digital worlds. Like we are becoming characters from the Wall-E movie.

There’s some truth in that. But it still feels incomplete. Because this isn’t just about distraction. It’s about drift. We didn’t just get more comfortable.

We lost some of our anchors.

A long stretch of stability could do that. When survival isn’t the question, identity becomes more optional. The things that used to bind us, like place, routine, shared experience, or even mild social obligation, start to loosen. And then something like TikTok or X comes along, and finishes the job.

Social media didn’t create the drift. It completed it. It gave us somewhere else to go. Not just away from boredom but away from each other. We traded neighbors for narratives. Shared space for curated feeds. Participation for performance.

Online, belonging is frictionless. You don’t have to show up. You don’t have to listen. You don’t have to negotiate difference or sit in awkward silence or make small talk with a stranger in a jacuzzi.

In real life, belonging asks something of you. And more and more, we’re opting out of that trade.

Now, to be fair, people are still searching for connection. Maybe more than ever. They’re dating through apps. Joining online groups. Finding communities built around every imaginable interest or identity. Some of those relationships are real, meaningful, even life-changing.

But they function differently from the kinds of communities many of us grew up with. They’re more curated. More optional. More easily exited. Less tied to place, repetition, or obligation.

Historically, community meant dealing with people you didn’t fully choose—neighbors, congregants, parents on the sidelines, the guy next to you in the synagogue lobby or at the local pub. That friction wasn’t always pleasant. But it was, in some way, binding.

I was reading an essay recently by Alana Newhouse of Tablet Magazine called “Zionism for Everyone” that pushed this idea a lot further than I expected. She’s not writing about jacuzzis. She’s writing about nations. About what holds societies together and what happens when those bonds weaken.

Her argument, in simple terms, is that much of the West has spent the last few decades loosening the ties that once bound people to particular communities, traditions, and places—in favor of a more fluid world built around mobility, individual choice, digital connection, and global systems that treat human beings as increasingly interchangeable.

And in doing so, we didn’t become more cohesive. We became less anchored. Less certain of who we are. Less connected to where we are. Less willing to define, let alone defend, what binds us together.

I’m not sure I go as far as she does. Some of her conclusions feel overstated. Some of her targets a little too easy. But she’s putting her finger on something real. Because when you zoom out from the politics, from the headlines, from the arguments, and just look at how we live day to day, you can feel it.

The drift.

And it’s not just a feeling. The numbers tell the same story. Church and synagogue membership—once central to building and nurturing local community—has been declining for decades, according to Pew Research Center. Civic groups that once stitched together everyday life—Rotary, Lions, the PTA—have quietly emptied out, a trend political scientist Robert Putnam documented years ago in Bowling Alone, and that has only accelerated since.

At the same time, loneliness has surged. The US Surgeon General now calls it an epidemic. Roughly half of American adults report experiencing it regularly. More people than ever say they have no close friends at all.

And it’s not just adults. The same pattern shows up earlier in life. Youth organizations that once anchored childhood such as scouting, 4-H, the kinds of groups that mixed local roots with a sense of being part of something larger, have seen steep declines in participation over the past few decades.

The Boy Scouts of America had more than four million members in the 1970s. Today, it’s closer to one. Girl Scouts of the USA membership has been cut roughly in half from its peak. These weren’t just extracurriculars. They were places where kids learned how to show up, work together, and belong to something bigger than themselves.

It shows up in less formal ways too. Kids aren’t hanging out the way they used to. Not in the loose, unstructured, show-up-and-see-who’s-around way that defined childhood for generations. Gone are the pick up street hockey games, endless hours of whiffle ball in the neighbor’s backyard, pond hockey and the long unscheduled afternoons that once taught kids how to exist together.

Turns out the jacuzzi isn’t the problem. It’s a symptom. Six people sitting together in silence, each absorbed in their own feed, isn’t a crisis. It’s not the fall of Western civilization. But it is a small, almost perfect illustration of something that’s changed.

Not because those people dislike each other. Not because they disagree. But because nothing in that moment is asking them to be part of something shared. No expectation. No obligation. No pull. Just the option to disengage. And we’re taking it.

This Friday, I’ll sit in tiny classroom chairs at my grandchildren’s Jewish day school for Grandparents Day. There will probably be off-key singing. Maybe we’ll read them a book. There will surely be grandparents taking too many pictures and teachers trying to keep things moving.

It will be a little chaotic. And completely wonderful. Because underneath all of it is something increasingly rare: multiple generations, in the same room, participating in something together.

Not consuming. Participating. Showing up.

Maybe that’s part of what Alana Newhouse was really getting at in her essay about Israel and Jewish particularism. Not simply nationalism in the political sense, but the preservation of practices and obligations that continue to bind people to one another across generations.

Jewish life, at its best, still insists on this. Shabbat dinners. Summer camp. Sitting shiva. Holiday tables. Schools filled with grandparents on a Friday morning.

The quiet insistence that community is not just something you believe in. It’s something you practice. And maybe that’s why these traditions feel more important to me lately.

Not because they’re old. Not because I’m old.

But because they still resist the drift.

Have a great weekend everyone. Resist the drift! And remember, as usual, let’s be careful out there.

Brad out.

This week’s Cultural Coda:

There’s a moment in the movie, Avalon, when a family gathering begins without everyone present, and an older relative reacts as if something sacred has been broken.

On the surface, it’s about a Thanksgiving turkey. But it’s really about the fear that once the rituals stop mattering, the people eventually drift too.