Are you sure that majority of grandparents generation in United States lived in close knit rural villages where having two friends surely means you are ostracized?
Grandparents generation lived through world war, end of great migration of blacks, were adult through civil rights fights and had TV. American men went over the sea and even Easter European existing close knit village were destroyed by fighting, hunger, repressions, just to be later disrupt by communism.
Nope. Which is why I haven't said that. But even in cities, people did move less then, and did rely on their neighbors more, due to poverty if nothing else.
As it happens, one set of my grandparents lived on a farm with no neighbors within something like four miles; the other, in a few small farming villages with maybe 32 people.
My grandparents on both sides lived in shack-house farms, far from any villages or towns or whatnot. This was after the family moved to Canada. They had large families (6+ kids), which was also common, and I suspect it was hard to be lonely surrounded closely by so many brothers and sisters and daughters and sons.
Grandparents generation lived through world war, end of great migration of blacks, were adult through civil rights fights and had TV. American men went over the sea and even Easter European existing close knit village were destroyed by fighting, hunger, repressions, just to be later disrupt by communism.