Once upon a time, it was fairly rare to find someone that was living by themselves in America. But now that has completely changed. Americans are getting married later in life, couples are having fewer children, divorce is rampant, and millions of broken families litter our national landscape.
As a result, the traditional family unit in the United States is weaker than it has ever been before. And that is extremely unfortunate, because the family is a fundamental support system in any society. Without strong families, no society is going to thrive for long.
I knew that the percentage of single person households was rising, but this week I was stunned to learn that it has now reached almost 30 percent in the United States…
Nearly 30 percent of American households comprise a single person, a record high.
Scholars say living alone is not a trend so much as a transformation: Across much of the world, large numbers of people are living alone for the first time in recorded history.
This greatly contributes to the epidemics of loneliness and depression that we are witnessing. Humans were designed to love and be loved, but today so many of us feel so isolated. But it wasn’t always this way. In fact, only 8 percent of all households in the U.S. were made up of a single person in 1940…
The U.S. Census shows that “solitaries” made up 8 percent of all households in 1940. The share of solo households doubled to 18 percent in 1970 and more than tripled, to an estimated 29 percent, by 2022.
This is another instance where the trend is not our friend, and we are being told that there are a lot of reasons why we have seen such a dramatic shift…
The solo-living movement intersects with several other societal trends. Americans are marrying later, if at all. The nation is aging. The national birthrate is falling. People are living longer — or they were, until the pandemic arrived.
More than anything, perhaps, the rise of single-person households is about women entering the workforce and achieving economic self-sufficiency.
In previous generations, multi-person households were often an economic necessity.
But thanks to the affluence that we have enjoyed in recent decades, more Americans now have the option of living alone.
And it shouldn’t surprise any of us that single person households are particularly common in some of our largest cities…
Living alone is much more common in large cities. Singles now make up more than 40% of households in Atlanta, Seattle, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Denver, according to a paper by the British historian Keith Snell. Half of Manhattan apartments are one-person residences.
Ultimately, what we are witnessing comes down to a fundamental shift in our culture more than anything else.
Previous generations of Americans valued family much more highly than we do, and we value ourselves much more highly than they did.
In other words, we have become exceedingly selfish.
For example, just consider the reasons why one female author says that living alone can be “a dream come true”…
According to Bella DePaulo, author of the upcoming book “Single at Heart”: “Living alone can be a dream come true. You get to curate your own life. You decide when to go to sleep and when to get up, what and when to eat, what to watch or to listen to for entertainment, and how warm or cool your place will be.”
Having some time to yourself can be nice for a few hours.
But how empty are you going to feel after you have nobody to share your life with year after year?
In addition to training our young people to be selfish, we have also trained them to think of children as “burdens” that should be avoided if you want to enjoy life.
Earlier today, I came across an article about a man that had a vasectomy at 34 years of age just so that he and his wife can be free to do whatever they want…
A young couple are child-free so they can be ‘selfish’, take naps and go on holiday whenever they want – and are so sure they don’t want kids they use extreme birth control.
Indi, 25, and her husband Heraldo Uribe, 34, are intentionally child-free and consider themselves as DINKS – which stands for ‘dual income no kids’.
I am sure that might be fun for a while. But they will never get to see their kids grow up. And they will never have grandchildren. And there will never be any family reunions when they get older. And there won’t be anyone to take care of them when they are near the end of their lives.
On a broader level, how are we going to maintain our Social Security system now that our birth rate has been way below replacement level for many years?
We aren’t even producing enough babies to replace ourselves, and so there simply is not going to be enough people paying into the system to support our rapidly aging population.
Thankfully, some young people are waking up and realizing that marriage and family should be a priority.
In fact, one woman is actually offering $5,000 if you can find the right man for her to marry…
In a viral video, which has so far amassed over 556,000 views, she revealed that she had previously made this deal with her friends, and her boss, but was now ready to open it up to the ‘general public.’
She said: ‘So the offer is if you introduce me to my husband and I marry him, I will give you $5,000 dollars.
‘I don’t have to stay married to him for long, I can get divorced from him in 20 years, it doesn’t matter, but if you introduce to me a man that I walk down the aisle and get married to, I will give you $5,000.’
Of course she isn’t going to marry just anyone.
She has some pretty stringent requirements for her future spouse, and that includes being at least six feet tall…
She noted that she wanted her future husband to be between the ages of 27 and 40, like sports, be a good communicator, be at least six-foot, and have good wit, banter, and the ability to poke fun at her.
The 34-year-old also noted that she doesn’t want the man she marries to do any drugs, adding that she has no preference on where they live or what their political or religious stances are.
I will never understand why so many women have a height requirement.
Love can often arrive in an unexpected package.
And we all need to remember that marriage and family are absolutely critical to the overall success of our society.
Unfortunately, more Americans than ever are rejecting traditional values, and so we are steamrolling down a road that doesn’t lead anywhere good. Living to please ourselves may seem gratifying for a while, but in the end it leads to great emptiness. On the other hand, loving others often involves great sacrifice, but in the end it can lead to great fulfillment.
Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Article cross-posted from The Economic Collapse Blog.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
