And yet, the way we live now seems destined to cause more and more people to feel like lonely outliers. Workplaces are actually becoming more segregated by race.8 Residential income segregation is also on the rise,9 which means neighborhoods are increasingly all-rich or all-poor. Wealthy people tend to socialize more with self-selected friends than with their neighbors, further pruning their social circles to people who match them perfectly.10 Nearly a quarter of Americans now say they seldom or never interact with someone from a different political party, and nearly a third rarely interact with someone who has a different sexual orientation.11 Crossing any of these rigid identity boundaries can feel very anxiety provoking, indeed.

This feeling of estrangement can be especially pronounced for people who didn’t grow up around the “rules” of elite jobs and social circles. For example, the sociologist Daniel Laurison examined one television-production firm where there was a “studied informality” to the style of dress. “People were wearing sneakers and all kinds of casual, fashionable clothes,” Laurison told The Atlantic. “There was a sort of ‘right’ way to do it and a ‘wrong’ way to do it.” One man, who was black and from a working-class background, didn’t quite match the aesthetic, opting for tracksuits instead of the more acceptable hip hoodies. Eventually, the man left.12 Everything from how to dress to whether it’s okay to swear in the office can keep people barred from unfamiliar worlds.

America has also grown profoundly politically polarized—so much so that actual political partisans are writing books about how we need to put an end to all the partisanship. A person’s political party now says more about them than simply who they voted for. Democrats, as the political scientists Shanto Iyengar and Masha Krupenkin13 write, have become “the party of non-Whites, women, city dwellers, the young, and ‘highbrow’ culture.” Meanwhile, “the Republican electorate consists disproportionately of older White males, evangelicals, southerners, and people more interested in NASCAR than the NBA.” These crystallized identities cause fault lines to deepen and foster us-versus-them thinking. It’s now common for people to ask me what my political affiliation is before they agree to talk with me for a story. Being the only Republican in a liberal workplace or social circle—or vice versa—would feel especially awkward these days.

At the same time, it is becoming more important to get along well with other people. Since 1980, jobs requiring lots of social interaction increased by 12 percentage points as a share of the overall labor force,14 and high-paying jobs increasingly require social skills. As the researcher David Deming writes, “employers routinely list teamwork, collaboration and oral communication skills as among the most valuable yet hard-to-find qualities of workers.” Conjuring an image of a frustrated office worker trying and failing to get a robot to fist-bump him, Deming writes that this is because “social interaction has—at least so far—proven difficult to automate.”