It seems to me that the institution of family gatherings has been on the way out for a long time in America, and as so often happens, people tend to mistake the last stages of a thing dying for when it started dying, because it is in the last stages of it dying that its death becomes undeniable. In this case, I would trace the beginnings of when family gatherings started dying to when it became considered acceptable for them to be unpleasant.

In my experience, the particular form of unpleasantness which was common was complaining about whatever people saw on the news recently. When I was young, I mistook the order of cause and effect and thought that the news was ruining family gatherings. While it certainly didn’t help—news made its money by trying to make people anxious—people would rant about whatever the news led them to conclude was the problem of the minute not because they were overwhelmed and couldn’t help themselves, but because the people at whom they were ranting didn’t matter to them.

If you want to get really technical, I suspect that they thought that everyone agreed with them because it didn’t occur to them anyone might not be a mind-slave of the news since they themselves never questioned it, and so they thought that a five minute hate would be a nice group bonding exercise. But it’s instructive to notice where they don’t make this mistake: with strangers. With strangers, they care about how the other people might feel, whereas at family gatherings it just doesn’t matter enough to think about.

To be sure, part of it is a sense that family is stuck with one, and so one doesn’t need to be careful. But even that is quite telling, because it clearly doesn’t contain any consideration that one has a responsibility to the family to make their time at the family gathering pleasant. Conversation is an art form that requires skill and effort. I’m not sure when American society decided that family wasn’t worth that time and effort, but it feels to me like it happened a long time ago.