It was a high school math class group assignment where I first noticed how independent my classmates were. That was my first impression of the American dream and the individualism associated with United States culture during my first year living here.
Prior to that class, I saw individualism positively, as a way of not getting into other people’s business. Now, I see it to be a culture that was pushed by the capitalist system, encouraging selfishness, isolation and a transactional society that separates individuals from communities.
When I moved to the U.S. from Afghanistan in 2019, I found myself lost. I expected more freedom of choice with culture in America from watching Hollywood movies and friends’ experiences in the U.S., specifically regarding hospitality culture compared to the Middle East. I was never expecting it to be this much of a culture shock.
One-third of Americans feel lonely on a weekly basis, according to the American Psychiatric Association. Individualism isolates our society, as freedom and self-reliance have been pushed to the point where people develop self-serving mindsets. Individualism damages community organizing, leaving people less connected compared to past generations. Most of it comes from distractions of social media or a capitalist system that keeps people busy with daily life responsibilities. Their priority becomes surviving instead of working towards collective values, becoming less supportive of their communities as a result.
“People were in anti-colonial movements around the world and social movements here in the United States, and they were losing political power and profits. They reacted by creating this philosophy of neoliberalism that changed the structure of our society to benefit them,” said Cesar Che Rodriguez, associate professor of Ethnic Studies. “An aspect of that project was also a cultural transformation. It really gets encouraged and amplified through the rise of neoliberalism because it encourages everyone to view themselves as individual consumers and accumulators.”
Yasmin Ali, a third-year race and resistance studies major, was born and raised in Southern California. Ali comes from a Moroccan and Mexican immigrant family that centralizes a community-based way of living. While Ali’s family has tried to focus on the collective values that ground them, they have also assimilated towards individualism culture in the U.S., losing a sense of connection to their culture as a result.
“All along my education, it was really obvious to me that individualism was the most important thing in school. My experience was that you really had to be looking out for yourself, you really weren’t trying to uplift other people,” Ali said. “As much as I didn’t like the individualism culture in the U.S., it’s been incredibly difficult for me to resist adapting to it. A lot of social values in my daily life were based on individualism, which forced me to stifle my familial values of collectivism.”
Foundations of individualism and self-reliance have become normalized in America and pushed from a young age, starting within schools and media. After almost seven years of living in the U.S., I came to the conclusion that America’s social systems seem to reward individualism because, at the end of the day, society directly or indirectly tells me that it’s you against the world and nothing else matters. I learned that the hard way in my first years of immigrating to the US. I saw how isolated we have become: ghosting on the day of a planned hangout is normalized, while seen as disrespectful back in my home country. I think friendships in America are way colder in comparison to the social values of many other countries.
Rodriguez mentioned that individualism has made society in the U.S. incredibly transactional. In Afghanistan, we treated neighbors like family. Despite living in the same residence in the U.S. for multiple years, we barely knew our other neighbors and were unable to interact with them because of constant, daily schedules. Lorenia Colorado, a third-year sociology major, has a Mexican heritage. While visiting them, Colorado noted the abundance of community spirit and collectivism she felt there.
“In Mexico, people that you meet are friendly, which I admire so much about my Mexican culture,” Colorado said. “I feel a sense of community loss when I leave. There have been times when I met and spoke to someone, and then the next day, they’ll act like you don’t exist, like the interaction never happened.”
The rise of social media platforms has been a major factor in the increase of individualism culture. Recently, a California jury found Instagram and YouTube liable for designing for addiction and deliberately causing harm. Addiction to social media causes more isolation, preventing people from getting out there in the outside world and socializing. In 2020, Netflix published a documentary called The Social Dilemma, where multiple ex-social platform employees discussed how there wasn’t anyone working on making it less addictive, how harmful social media is and how everything users do is being monitored, their own psychology used against them.
Social media addiction in the U.S. has been on another level compared to what I experienced in Afghanistan. My first impression was in high school, when there was an incident between students; everyone had their phone out to record and prioritized seeing it through the screen.
In the past year of commuting by BART to San Francisco State University, I have seen the train packed with barely anyone talking to each other. There have been times when I have taken the initiative to start socializing. That’s where I found out that most people are open to having conversations if you start talking to them.
“A lot of people got angry at Bart workers for their strike in 2013. In a previous generation, people would have stood in solidarity with the BART workers and said, ‘I’m going to respect the strike and not ride BART.’” Rodriguez said. “I understand that people have bills to pay, but everybody is thinking as individual accumulators and consumers, not as members of a working class and community. This is a buy-and-conquer strategy, which is meant to prevent and break solidarity.”
A society that is unfamiliar with empathy is not what our people need right now. The capitalist class of the country has created a major amount of distractions, from cheap labor to social media addiction, encouraging society towards individualism and self-reliance. Today, society needs to move forward towards collectivism and empathy.
Since I transferred in 2024 to SFSU, I have been involved in the Afghan Student Association, the Iranian Student Association’s leadership and attended meetings of the General Union of Palestinian Students and the Muslim Student Association. In the last three years, I have participated in the Afghan American Community Organization’s annual conference which empowers the Afghan American community.
The first year that I participated in the Afghan American Community Organization’s conference in 2023, it was a unique feeling of belonging that I had been looking for in the years of living in the US, which made me participate in the next two years as well. I was able to gain more knowledge on Afghan Americans and solidarity with other communities. Getting involved in community organizing, showing up for each other in solidarity and a sense of empathy, is a way to start and get away from isolating and individualism and have a stronger voice in society.
