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October 28, 2026 at 09:15AM
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Engaging with Nature

 


I live in New York City. The "Concrete Jungle," some call it.

There's an LCD Soundsystem lyric that I often think about: "New York, I love you, but you're bringing me down."

For all that's great about New York, one of its obvious down sides is that it's largely divorced from nature. 

The city can often feel cold and drab. 

Lack of greenery, it turns out, is bad for us. 

According to a new study in The Lancet, engaging with nature can actually help combat feelings of loneliness. 

Conducted in Barcelona, the study found that nature-based social prescribing (NBSP) "alleviated loneliness among 18+ vulnerable participants in urban areas at M3 by an average of 10.5 percent and these reductions increased through M12 by an average of 16.8 percent." 

This, from the Foundation for Social Connection:
When linked with nature-based programs, social prescribing can promote nature contact to foster restorative and social benefits. Group-based activities that include natural elements have been found to cultivate connection and belonging, and increased program length is correlated to increased benefits.
I live in a studio apartment in Brooklyn, though. I'm not really familiar with nature-based anything over here. 

We've got some beautiful parks. That's true. But largely insufficient.  

I found a cheat code, however, in the world of fish tanks. 

I have three nano tanks around my apartment: a 5-gallon, 6-gallon, and 10-gallon. 

These are my little slices of nature. 

I propagate freshwater plants, breed fish, and cultivate self-sustaining ecosystems. 

Every morning, I make a pot of coffee, sit on my couch, and watch as my rasboras swim in a tight school, and my guppies pick on hair algae. 

In this video, aquarist Corvus Oscen talks about the aquarium hobby as something that allows you to escape the "sadness of a cubicle." 

It makes sense: we weren't meant for a world of DoorDash and Excel spreadsheets; we were meant for rootedness, place, and communion with nature. 

Wendell Berry once wrote that "the ancient, sacred bond between land and people has been broken."

Too many on the coasts have become rootless city-dwellers. And that's just no way to live. 

My advice, not that I'm any kind of expert: if you're like me and you live far from nature, introduce a slice of it into your living quarters. 

Make your apartment verdant with house plants, aquariums, terrariums, and the like. 

Watch this music producer. He works with computers and hardware all day. But he's made it a point to ensconce himself in plants and foliage. 
Legowelt producing music

These things take upkeep, of course, but it's less than you think. 

Touch grass, and if there is none, import it.

Fish tank in my parent's apartment.

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October 24, 2026 at 10:05PM
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Study: Americans Still in Need of Connection

 


Findings from the latest Social Connection in America™ survey don't exactly inspire much optimism. 

They more or less confirmed what we already know to be true: Americans are devoid of adequate social connection. 








According to the survey, "four in ten Americans report moderate to severe loneliness."

That's significant. And very troubling. 

And virtual connection - whether it be Zoom or FaceTime calls - doesn't cut it. 

I wrote a bit about the inferiority of virtual connection for RealClear Books & Culture last year (see here). While better than nothing, IRL human connection remains inimitable. 

Another, sadly, unsurprising finding: "57% of Americans do not belong to clubs or organizations."

I can already hear Robert Putnam, 26 years after the publication of Bowling Alone, saying "I told you so."

As I said, this survey just reinforces what we all see around us. Take the train, for instance, and you'll see the zombified masses tethered to screens. There is no effort to connect to our fellow community members. 

Work has become transactional, with little emphasis on the importance of shooting the breeze by the water cooler. 

Rather, the emphasis is on efficiency and productivity. Working on Excel sheets until your fingers feel numb and your eyes are red is productive; chatting with colleagues is not. 

What if we've become too productive? Too obsessed with work? Too preoccupied with self-improvement?

Perhaps we'd be better off if we learned to slow down. Leisure mustn't continue to be looked down upon as wasted time. 

This study, for example, finds that "doing the things you enjoy can be good for your health."

So, the jury's in: Loneliness is bad for you. Leisure is good for you. 

Americans, thus, must make an effort to slow down, embrace leisure, and reorient their mindsets away from workaholism and towards quality time with quality people. 

Perhaps this is something that Europeans understand better than we do...

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October 14, 2026 at 04:41PM
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Gen Zzz

 

By Frank Filocomo

Gen Z is becoming "the nihilistic generation."

Many Zoomers - particularly Zoomer men - feel as though they'll never be able to own a home or provide for a family on one income like their parents did. 

Memes like this are all over social media:


To be sure, many of the memes that utilize this format are actually quite funny. But there's no denying that they're profoundly sad, too. They strike a nerve, an indisputable truth. 

29-year-olds in Brooklyn, where I live, are not home or landowners; they rent studio apartments they can barely afford. Some just rent rooms at $1,000/month. 

Cats have supplanted kids. Don't get me wrong, I love cats, but this is a negative development. 

Out birthrate in the U.S. is below replacement. 

What's more, it feels like the life has been sucked out of Zoomers. 

This X post is instructive:

Sure, this anonymous X user doesn't bother backing up any of these claims, but the general thesis is accurate. That is, Gen Z is "Generation House Cat."  

Generation House Cat doesn't drink, have sex, participate in social events, or read.

They prefer comfort. And, don't get me wrong, I get the appeal. 

Comfort, however, isn't conducive to human growth. On the contrary, it stunts growth. 

But how do Zoomers snap out of this fog?

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September 27, 2026 at 01:42PM
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September 26, 2026 at 03:30PM
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September 25, 2026 at 01:11PM
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The West's Friendship Epidemic


By Frank Filocomo

Some unfortunate - albeit, unsurprising - news from our friends across the pond:

A new report released by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) paints an inauspicious picture for young people in England.  

Commenting on the report for The Guardian, Denis Campbell writes:

The number of young people with no close friends has risen fivefold since 2014 as a result of growing up in a “bleak world” dominated by austerity, the pandemic and social media.

Not only do Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha have fewer friends than in years prior, they're also increasingly discontent with their preexisting friendships:

From the article:

Young people’s relationships also appeared less strong than before. The proportion of 14- and 15-year-olds who were completely or very happy with their friendships fell from 86% to 76% between the periods 2012-14 and 2023-25.

To say these are troubling findings would be a grave understatement.

The loneliness epidemic - in England, the US, and elsewhere - ought to be seen, not as a mere inconvenience or troubling development - but as a national public health emergency.

Invariably, a widespread decline in friendship connotes a weakening of a country's social capital and thus an atrophying of the all-important social muscle that enables us to work together, network, and better our communities and, by extension, nations. 

How times have changed.

When I was a teenager in the 2010s, the UK-based show Skins was all the rage.

The show depicted a rather libertine picture of British youth.

Just about every episode involved sex, recreational drug use, out-of-control parties, and general mischief. 

While one might come away from the show thinking that English youth are recalcitrant, uninhibited, and impish, they certainly wouldn't think that they were bereft of close friends. 

If anything, the characters in Skins were surrounded by an unusual number of friends, albeit not always of the best moral standing.

Skins UK cast
There's no question that the recreational drug use and unprotected casual sex portrayed in Skins is inadvisable - we all already know this - but, hell, at least they were outside, touching grass, and interacting with each other without the interference of now-ubiquitous screens.

Less is not always more.

We've all heard that Americans are drinking and smoking less.

What's more, the teenage birth rate in the US continues to fall.

To be sure, these are all positive developments. 

In some ways, though, the decline in drinking, smoking, and teen pregnancies indicates a different problem: timidity, trepidation, and a dearth in IRL socialization. 

Today, young people spend more time inside, looking at screens. Forget about the prospect of approaching a woman at a bar; that potentially awkward social interaction has been remedied by dating apps!

And, while we likely don't have data on this, I'm sure young people are staying out past their curfews less.

We've taken a generation of mischievous youngsters and have made them into house cats.

What we lost. 

In 2018, author of Free-Range Kids Lenore Skenazy came to speak at my college. 

Skenazy, for those who don't know, wrote a very provocative article called "Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone," which is, you guessed it, about the time she let her 9-year-old son take the subway unsupervised and without a cell phone. All he had was $20 and a subway map. 

When Skenazy came to speak to my class at St. Francis College, I thought she was crazy. 

I still think she is, but now I see the merit in her argument.

Safetyism, of the sort that Jon Haidt and Greg Lukianoff write about in The Coddling of the American Mind, has created a culture wherein comfort is the ultimate virtue and discomfort is the thing to be avoided at all costs.

Thus, we have inadvertently created a generation of puritans who don't drink, smoke, have sex, approach women, or have fun at all. 

What's needed is not a resurgence of libertinism, but of fun, play, and adventure. 

Friends will be made along the way. 

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America's Spiritual Sickness

It's officially been a year since conservative activist and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was murdered in cold blood. 

Just the day before Kirk was taken from us, on September 9th, 2025, I moderated a conversation between my friends, who have spent nearly half a century in a politically-mixed marriage.

Rick (conservative) and Jeanne (liberal) show us the path forward. Jeanne spoke to how, when she was on chemo therapy, her conservative, National Review-reading neighbor did her laundry and groceries for her while she received treatment.

Just one day after that conversation, Charlie was shot and killed.

You'd think that, in the aftermath of Kirk's assassination, everyone, no matter their ideological persuasion, would come together and unequivocally condemn political violence.

Not so.

While millions mourned, a shocking amount of asocial, chronically-online Leftists took to Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms to mock Kirk's death.

One year later, and they're still at it, posting dances, memes, and other vulgar content celebrating Kirk's murder.

I'll spare you the pictures and videos. 

What's More, the newly unveiled Kirk statue in Phoenix was just vandalized with red paint. 

These people are sick, and if you know people like this, who cheer on political violence, I'd urge you to disassociate yourself from them.

There is a sickness in America today. One of the asocial variety. This sickness causes you to write love letters to Luigi Mangione, support child-murderers like Lindsay Clancy, and produce satire about the assassination of a father of two children.

These people are sick and need healing.

Some things can't be fixed at the ballot box. 

What plagues us today is spiritual.

Let us hope and pray for better days to come.

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Wendell Berry, RIP

By Frank Filocomo

Over the last week or so, my social media feeds have been inundated with tributes to the late, great Wendell Berry, who passed away at the age of 92 on August 31st. 

I only really got into Berry a year or so ago. 

He was, by all means, a great man of letters.

A Southern agrarian and communitarian at heart, Berry taught us that life wasn't just about expediency, efficiency, and bigness. Rather, his writings centered around home, rootedness, neighborliness, and good husbandry.

He despised the fast-paced industrialized life of Northern cities. 

A cosmopolitan life, to Berry, was one devoid of meaning.

Born and raised on his family farm in Kentucky, Berry understood that place, people, and nature, above all, were what gave one meaning and purpose. 

The migration of peoples from a rooted life in the agrarian South to a hyper-industrialized and impersonal life of a Northerner corroded the soul. 

I read and loved The Unsettling of America, The Need to Be Whole, and a few of Berry's essays, including his famous Luddite lament: Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer.

A Jewish-Italian from Brooklyn, Berry let me into a world that I knew nothing about. 

What did I know about the cultivation of land or the importance of animal husbandry?

I've spent my life in the "concrete jungle," moving around from one Brooklyn apartment to the next.

No connection to the soil or anything like that.

But still, Berry's prose resonated with me in a deep and profound way. 

Why?

Well, because, I firmly believe that, within all of us, there is a visceral need for belonging, place, and communion with others. 

Atomistic living is not good for us. On some deep level, we all understand this.

Berry gave words and a voice to what we all already knew to be true.

In his words, "to be whole and free, we must be at home."

Berry is, once again, at home.

RIP.

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September 2, 2026 at 09:49PM
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August 31, 2026 at 09:51PM
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'I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that'

 

For all the usefulness of AI, it can never replicate the inimitable qualities of humanness. 
AI scares the crap out of me.

HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was the first "AI" I can remember seeing depicted in a movie. Though, when I saw it as a kid in the 2010s, AI stood for Adobe Illustrator, not Artificial Intelligence. 

HAL, in other words, was AI before we knew what AI was. 

You don't need to see the movie in full to appreciate the creepiness of this scene:


For all the usefulness of AI, it can never replicate the inimitable qualities of humanness. 

AI spits things back at you; it does not have feeling or original thought. 

While a handy tool, it is not a replacement for real life social connection. 

Some, however, while knowing full well that AI is not a being with a soul, confide in AI chatbots.

In a recent episode of The Frank Forum podcast, I told my co-host Troy Olson about the tragic case of Sewell Setzer, a 14-year-old boy who, dealing with depression, fell in love with his AI chatbot and subsequently took his own life. 

Below is a screen grab from Sewell's correspondence with the AI chatbot. Sewell used the moniker "Daenero," while his chatbot's name, "Daenerys Targaryen," was apparently a Game of Thrones reference.


The chatbot encourages Sewell to "come home." Sadly, we know what that means. 

Sewell's story will likely not be the last of its kind. 

Gen Z, better than any other generation, understands the dangers of AI. In fact, a new report from Pew finds that "younger adults are largely pessimistic that chatbots can help people who use them for social and mental health support."

From Pew Survey on Aug. 25 2026

According to the survey:
About half of adults under 30 (49%) say chatbots do more to hurt people who use them for loneliness, and 41% say the same for depression. Far fewer say chatbots do more to help people with loneliness and depression (23% each).

Still, younger adults are "more likely than older adults to say they use chatbots for emotional support."

So, while it's good that Gen Z understands the dangers of relying too much on AI for emotional support, it's troubling that they still find themselves doing so.

It's kind of like a chain smoker that knows that smoking causes lung cancer, but still puffs away regardless. 

Young people need to curtail their AI use. Totally eliminating AI use isn't practical. It's ubiquitous now. But it can be scaled back.

My advice: Do what the students at my former high school Edward R. Murrow did. Form a luddite club. You don't need to trade in your smart phone for a dumb phone, but you can take steps to limit screen time. 

Marco Canora, chef and owner of the Manhattan restaurant Hearth, has placed boxes on each of the tables, encouraging diners to put their phones inside for the duration of their meal. 

That's smart thinking. 

And those with depression or feelings of loneliness should, aside from leaning on their friends, seek professional help. 

AI, in excess, is not good for you. 

It is not human. It does not get you, nor does it know anything. It cannot help you because it is an it. 

People help people. 

The subtitle of Sherry Turkle's book Alone Together is Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.

Well, we should expect more from each other. A lot more. 

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Read my latest in @GivingReview ! https://t.co/UHGd1htrPx — Frank Filocomo (@FilocomoFrank) Oct 28, 2026 October 28, 2026 at 09:...