How changing families, delayed marriage, urbanisation, migration, ageing and the search for autonomy are reshaping everyday life There was a time when living alone was generally treated as an exception. A person might live alone because they had been widowed, separated from a spouse, sent away for work or education, or otherwise found themselves outside the ordinary family household. In many societies, the household was expected to contain several generations at once - parents, children, siblings and grandparents under the same roof. That arrangement has not disappeared, but it is no longer the only familiar model. Across much of the world, households are becoming smaller, and a growing number of people are living completely on their own. People are marrying later, having fewer children, moving farther from their families for education and employment, divorcing or separating, remaining single for longer, and leaving the parental home to establish an independent life. Taken to...
Honestly, yes. You can still think without Google. But if we’re being completely honest, the more interesting question is what Google has done to the way we think. It hasn’t made human thinking disappear or anything dramatic like that. We still think, argue, imagine, remember, judge, and make terrible decisions. The difference is that we now have this giant external memory system sitting in our pockets almost all the time. It is searchable, ridiculously fast, and usually much more patient than we are. Research on transactive memory, cognitive offloading, and internet use suggests something pretty interesting: people don’t necessarily just “forget more” because they use Google. Instead, they can become better at remembering where information can be found than remembering the information itself. And honestly, that makes sense. Why spend ten minutes trying to remember something when you can type three words and get an answer in two seconds? The problem is that this convenience chang...