Neoliberal individualism erodes relational bonds: How market logic reshapes intimacy and community across societies
Original framing: “We're becoming more individualistic and it's affecting our love lives” — New Scientist
The rise of individualism is not a cultural inevitability but a product of 18th-century Enlightenment rationalism, 19th-century industrial capitalism, and 20th-century neoliberalism, which redefined the self as a consumer and worker first. Historical parallels abound: the enclosure movements in England displaced communities into wage labour, while 20th-century suburbanisation in the U.S. isolated nuclear families from broader kin networks. The 1980s shift to financial capitalism further commodified relationships, turning care into a service industry (e.g., nannies, therapists) and love into a marketable experience.
The decline in relational intimacy is not a cultural anomaly but a structural outcome of neoliberal capitalism, which has systematically dismantled the social infrastructure that once sustained collective care.
Colonialism’s legacy of forced individualism, combined with financialisation and digital commodification, has turned relationships into market transactions, disproportionately burdening marginalised groups who are already excluded from the 'self-care' economy. Indigenous worldviews and communal traditions offer proven alternatives, but their resurgence requires land rematriation, reparations, and economic democracy to reverse centuries of dispossession. The solution lies not in nostalgia for a mythical past but in building new systems—care infrastructures, digital commons, and cooperative economies—that prioritise interdependence over extraction. This demands a shift from individualism as an ideology to relationality as a design principle, where love is not a private luxury but a public good.