This may not be shared by other people, but my two cents.
I personally don't like inviting people to my house (or going to other people's houses) because I already spend a good chunk of my day indoors (I work from home). Whenever possible, I prefer to meet outside.
I remember when i was young going out on vacations with school friends and their parents for several days. Also similar to weekends at country houses. The trend was that a couple of parents liked to host the get togethers and didn’t mind 10 adults and 20 children of different ages running around the place
Not sure the kind of size you are talking about but you might be overestimating how much space it takes. My current rental has a back yard about the size of a single car garage and I’ve been able to host a ~50 person bbq with a mix of people standing inside and out.
What a bummer. We have friends, family, and our friends’ families over all the time. 1-2 days a week. Now part of that is obviously we are fortunate to have the space and (barely) the time for it. Still, I want to encourage those who can to make the effort to use their home as a social hub. It’s incredibly gratifying. We get a lot of joy out of sharing our home with others. Eventually it’s really not that much work - I honestly find it’s easier/more relaxing than going elsewhere sometimes.
Plus when you have kids it’s a lot more convenient than trying to wrangle them at the end of a fun time lol
Can't speak about the USA but here in south of Spain houses tend to be small, weather good and eating outside relatively affordable so people are used to meet outside.
Most of our gatherings are actually at the beach because for most it is just a short walk from home and there are shops very close that sell super cold beers and drinks so you don't even have to carry a huge cooler.
That’s great. Wish I had a good beach nearby. Closes is about an hour but the water really isn’t fit for swimming anymore since about 10-15 years ago. We have to go three hours to get anywhere reasonable
I’ve been there myself - but your actual friends don’t care.
Try easing into it - go on a late afternoon sunset picnic (ironically also on the list) - a blanket, cheese, crackers, cured meat and wine and a portable speaker. Everyone is happy and it’s super cheap, the outdoors is your living room and a couple hours before sunset never disappoints (though depending on where you are the weather might be a challenge).
Feel like part of the issue is everyone’s self imposed neurosis about not intruding on others. My wife insists on not ever asking to come over to someone’s house - she only wants to be explicitly invited. We invite people over to our place when we can but this leads to us basically never visiting any of our friends because they aren’t the planning type.
Article says "The share of adults who say they regularly have friends over has declined 70 percent since 1975", but this may not be an accurate comparison:
Until 1985, the survey included only married households.
Doesn't that seems like a more accurate measurement? what's the percentage of adults who check "yes" for "friends i'm hoping to hook up with" versus those that say "oooh, you mean actual friends"?
Does it? It means different types of socialising a lot of the time, but couples often merges friend groups and I could definitely see a case for some subset of those friend groups ending up meeting up more regularly. I don't know. It'd be interesting to see data broken down by relationship status.
Putnam acknowledged that women have historically been the keepers of the family social calendar, planning the birthday parties and neighborhood potlucks. For any number of reasons, women seem to do better than men at making and keeping adult friendships and making plans with other families. But in the 1950s and 1960s, tens of millions of women traded their unpaid household management jobs for salaried jobs, and the family social calendar frayed, as men failed to pick up the slack.
Being stay at home parent is super lonely experience, basically the most lonely occupation you can have. In most jobs, you meet people and you do talk to people without trying to. Fairly often, they are unavoidable whether you want it or not. If you are at home with a kid, you are truly absolutely alone, unless you organize something. Every other guy here on HN complains about Covid being lonely, but it was less lonely and socially easier situation than being stay at home parent.
So, alternative framing is that women stopped organizing these as their need do organize them went down. And men did not had that need in the first place, so it did not changed from their point of view.
And simultaneously, it ceased to be acceptable to be the kind of dad who spends multiple evenings a week with buddies, not really spending time with his kids.
When I met my wife, I discovered very quickly that she had savant-level hosting skills. She is an amazing cook, she prioritizes space to dine in our home (we made sure to have a dining table in our NYC apartment) and she thinks carefully about the experience of her guests. It's a quality that I benefit greatly from, and I'm grateful to her for it.
Blame the screens. Screens are blackholes that suck up your time, attention, awareness and senses.
Screens are evil. They wake up the dead past as if it's alive and happening now. It became so much the norm, that people are afraid to face the real world, real people, real talking. "Dinner party? OMG, real people with real faces that force us to talk to them? Noway sir".
Screens disconnected people from real world, from each other. I was trying a VR headset the other days and immediately threw it away, as it shut off my visual and audio senses completely.
People are downvoting because the tone is a bit harsh but he has a point.
While TV has been a thing for a long time, content was limited, and more importantly curated. You couldn't manage your own playlists/subscriptions and almost infinite content on subjects that interest you.
Video games were mostly for kids.
There were no social media feeds optimize to monopolize your attention and make you doomscroll.
Hey even having a TV/widescreen at home has a direct impact on couples sex life...which magically reactivate when the light goes out.
The internet is wonderful for many things but nobody can denies it has an impact on our in person social life.
I remember a college teacher who had 9 siblings humorously answering the question of "how did your parents managed to do it" with "simple: they didn't have a TV set back then".
TVs had already affected our lives tremendously, computers and the internet just went nuts with it.
I agree with you general sentiment but how did you end up in a situation where you feel this way but also wanted to try a VR headset but then also decided to throw it away immediately after trying it seemingly surprised by what the experience was.
Spoken like someone with no friends or relatives that live far away. Screens can also be extremely connecting. They are a tool and as such value neutral. Is it evil that I can have a weekly video-call with family members on another continent when the alternative would be...simply no contact at all, super expensive phone calls or letters. I don't think so.
I think even with family and friends that live far away, screens are often an excuse as well. Well sorry we aren't going to be able to visit gas is just too much, we can FaceTime instead! And I think it's ignoring the bigger problem, is perhaps you talk to your family members once a week, but do you have your community around you that you talk and do things with 'off screen'? Its easy on the internet to say you do, but the reality is most people would rather doomscroll than be bothered with trying to know their neighbor.
It is what you make of it. It gives and takes, heat and light, waves for waves, words for words. It lets time stay alive as bits, as long as they don’t rot. In exchange, it suck up your real world time. To use it is to used by it.
We need a new way to use it safely for us and the world writ large.
It's not only the screen. It's everything about late Capitalism. The families are more atomized. There are less families and kids. Big dinners are usually for big families. It takes a lot of skills and practices to prepare a big dinner for 10-12 people quickly.
I have a friend who is married and have 3 kids. His wife is a SAHM. She didn't know anything about cooking before they got married back in 2011, and nowadays she could easily throw a party for 10-12 people with only half of day of preparation (excluding shopping) -- and that's 10 Chinese dishes she had to cook, not BBQ stuffs. That's crazy for us. I can't imagine how much time it would take us to prepare even 5 dishes.
It takes practices. She having 3 kids definitely "helps" with the practice. Nowadays people don't get to practice these things. It's like a myth to us.
I think it's kinda impossible for a two-worker family unless you are really into this kind of stuffs. Otherwise taking care of work and kids is already way too much for us.
Middle aged European here. I still regularly go to parties (dinner and otherwise) and I notice that there are two kinds of people: people who throw parties, and people who don't. This sounds like a truism, but what I mean is: there are people who regularly throw a party and people who never do it.
I am solidly in the first category. I throw dinner parties, birthday parties, drinking parties, dance parties, midsummer parties, midwinter parties, game parties, etc. Yes, it costs time and money and is a lot of work. But what people (probably the ones that never bother) tend to forget is how unbelievably gratifying it is to get a bunch of people together, to feed them and to make them talk, laugh, dance, etc. Afterwards you are tired but also grateful and socially energized in a way that feels fundamental to my existence.
It varies a lot depending on people and personality type. What's energizing to you is very exhausting and unfun to others. Extraversion / introversion basically. I don't like having many people over. 3 or 4 people who I know well is optimal for me.
Making a large party could be "type 2 fun" sometimes, ie exhausting and not very fun at the time, but satisfying to look back on as a kind of hard challenge I managed to accomplish, like climbing a cold mountain or so. But few are enough of those.
Even that is a challenge of finding the mental energy to pick the date , see that everyone can come, picking some activity (or if you're hosting - make sure with your wife that the date is fine. What about your kids - you wanna put them in bed before?) etc etc. Some of it is probably no big deal but my brain is making it look big, perhaps because I lean introvert as well. It's so much easier to just think about the idea and say 'naaa fuck it' and open Youtube instead.
Helps if your friends are uncomplicated. We just chat, drink beer, make or order pizza, cook or bake something else, talk about work and family, sit in the sun, maybe play cards or just listen to music, talk about stories at recent events like concerts, rehash old stories, or updates about other friends, etc. There is no need to make a big deal about any of this.
But this is not a networking or new-friend-making style of party of course. Not even really a party, but fits "inviting people over for dinner".
I think a big problem is that people see this also as a thing where efficiency and productivity is important and they plan complicated activities etc. Similarly to how kids don't get much free time to just play and relax, adults also try to organize activities for themselves when just being together is often enough and the rest follows naturally.
It's so much easier to just think about the idea and say 'naaa fuck it' and open Youtube instead.
I think this gets at the heart of the concern—it’s always easier to find something else distracting to do, but what’s the real cost? I don’t really know how to measure that, other than to say that American society and culture are doing particularly poorly right now.
This is something that has been going for generations and centuries. We are less and less dependent on people near us and more dependent on father-away large-scale systems. Same with extended families, neighborhood communities, etc.
You're right. Since I'm an introvert myself, I enjoy organizing events and inviting people over, because as the host, I always have a reason to change locations and get some “space” when the socializing becomes too much for me.
This is true as well. If you are otherwise not very social, being the organizer gives you a clear role and clearer expectations and tasks and reasons for people to start talking to you and vice versa. I find this helpful, as unstructured social environments are harder for me.
That certainly makes sense at an individual level, but it seems implausible as an explanation of the dramatic shift over the past decades from TFA, unless basic character traits have shifted dramatically over the past decades as well.
I wonder if the cultural existence of the 'introvert vs extrovert' idea has reinforced this to a degree. I'm too young to know, but I doubt this was a discussion in the 80s. I'm also not too sure it's a good thing. I've seen introversion used as an excuse to hermit; extroversion as the sole reason to use drugs.
We put limits on ourselves psychologically in all sorts of ways, and we follow the ones we believe. There's a study that showed people who believe willpower is finite have finite willpower. I thought "well obviously, if you had finite willpower you'd know because you'd run out". Maybe we do just think too much?
If I don't feel like running and I go running, about two thirds of the time I feel like running after a few K. It's the same socially. The goal of introspection shouldn't be to freeze in a minute now.
It seems pretty obvious to me that this also existed in older times. It's a pretty well established and reproducible big five trait. There were always people who were lone wolf types, not necessarily hermits but people who like to be alone.
Ask your parents, it was certainly a thing in the 80s too. Even if I think about my grandparents, they didn't constantly have others over. My grandfather was a chill village guy who liked to spend time alone, working in the garden, working in his shed etc. But there were more regular externally forced events, like big weddings, gathering for a pig slaughter, coming together to renovate the house etc.
What changes is the tradeoff threshold.
Now, being alone is more attractive to more people than before. Some liked being alone even in the times when it just meant books or doing some loner hobby like gardening or woodworking or whatnot. But with Netflix and YouTube the tradeoff shifts. Also as people get more flaky, socialization is even mharder, making people more flaky.
So introverts existed before but today mild introverts may act more introvert-like, who earlier would have preferred to err more on the extravert side.
As an introvert who grew up in a radically extroverted household, forcing oneself to be an extrovert all the time can be psychologically damaging over time.
Imagine if you didn’t feel like running, and you made yourself do it, and after a few K you were like “this sucks, I wish I’d stayed home” and you finish your run and you didn’t enjoy it at all. But people keep telling you how great it is so you keep doing it and you keep hating it and after a while you eventually decide that running is not for you.
Would that be a reasonable conclusion? Or should we conclude that this is a psychological limit and we just need to stop thinking so much?
I do think it’s possible to move between categories though. I used to have potlucks and house parties every month in my twenties, but now a decade later I just don’t really have much interest in the idea.
It might just be a rationalization, but the way I justify it is that as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized more what actually matters to me, and being a party host / spending time at parties doesn’t fit that category. I’d rather spend my time doing something else.
It might just be a rationalization, but the way I justify it is that as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized more what actually matters to me, and being a party host / spending time at parties doesn’t fit that category. I’d rather spend my time doing something else.
Well it's happening to the vast majority of people all at once, I don't think it's age, at least not only that. I haven't read the whole article yet perhaps he offers ideas on why this is happening but I'm guessing - better alternatives (Netflix), increased individualism etc. Society has changed a lot.
Fair point, although I do think it’s fairly typical generally for people to become less social as they get older, find a partner, get more serious about their career, etc. with the trends aside.
I am not sure that's 100% the case. Sure as children and even through college it's easy to make friends, but as we get older, we certainly are exposed to more people and more opportunities if we choose so.
I think the major problem though is due to the way the world is rapidly shifting, and people's utter mental exhaustion, it's easier to sit and do nothing and become a mindless drone to 'the boob tube' or rather your phone than it is to be with your community.
This isn't something new, it's just becoming more evident, especially as there are less and less communities.
Just think about it, you likely live in some sort of apartment, town house, or suburban area, and how well do you know your neighbors? One apartment/house over, two, three? Or maybe just a friendly nod when you pass, but nothing more.
But what people (probably the ones that never bother) tend to forget is how unbelievably gratifying it is to get a bunch of people together, to feed them and to make them talk, laugh, dance, etc.
Nope. Its a bunch of work and stress and thoroughly beaten by a dull night in. If I want to bring people together, I'll pay for it to be done - e.g. a restaurant.
It depends who you invite. I organized a lot of parties in my youth with some that escalated and that burned me a bit. Now I am very reluctant to organize something and have not done so in a while, but when I do and it works, it is amazing. Helping bringing people together. Connecting, having a good time and people feel grateful for it.
Now with the great late summer, it would be a great time for something like this again, but I just did not felt the energy, but also am a bit sad now to not just make something happen.
This is my experience exactly. We used to host a monthly board gaming party before we moved and it was very energizing and exhausting at the same time.
After the two kids the games disappeared and it just became a normal party where we could talk and such and a playdate for the our and the other parents kids.
We will probably do it again when we settle into a new home at least I hope.
I'd get more energy from sitting alone in a dark room than by throwing a - or attending a - party...
That doesn't mean I don't enjoy attending (never throwing) parties on occasion, but it's exhausting to me. Whenever I come home from a social occasion I need time to recover.
but it's exhausting to me. Whenever I come home from a social occasion I need time to recover.
Going to the gym is exhausting, running a marathon is exhausting, spending a day weeding your garden or laying a new carpet could be exhausting.
Usually people feel great afterwards because of the experience and despite it being hard work and taking time to recover from. Parties etc. can be the same.
They can for some, but to be very clear, I don't. I feel mentally drained in a way I absolutely do not enjoy. The experience can be fun during, but the net benefit to me is low enough, and for many types of socialising it's firmly in the negative, that I restrict myself very much in terms of what socialising I consider worthwhile.
As I said, it's very much down to your personality - most of the time I'd rather spend time in peace and quiet alone or with my wife or son (and I need some of that time to be entirely alone)
That's fine, but it's weird to comment as if this is a default position. Usually people like that are no longer invited to a parties, and that's that. It's not a big deal.
This is true on some level, and what you describe has been called type 2 fun. But for plenty of people, partying and socializing is really type 1 fun, they find it enjoyable the way some of us find working on programming or other nerd things intrinsically rewarding in the moment, which they may see as unfun but potentially good for you long term.
My point is, yes, sometimes it's good to just ignore the discomfort and push through, but we should also know that it's not how everyone feels about it. Some people actually willingly go down into a crowded basement club with loud music and not just as some kind of tough challenge to survive and shape your character to have tbuilt tolerance for that harsh environment,but they find it enjoyable, no matter how baffling it seems to the rest of us. I don't know proportions, but these people exist. Of course plenty of people are somewhere in the middle range, where they enjoy some aspects while hating the rest, and the thing they enjoy about loud clubs is likely about prospects getting laid and similar stuff.
This. It’s also why I started celebrating my birthday and throwing a party. I am not doing it for me, I am an introvert and it is a lot of work, but I am doing it for my guests who have a great time.
(For perfectionists: people always have a good time when there’s some food and drinks and other people. Everything else, even music, is really optional.)
My wife is an extrovert and I'm an introvert. We are also the party throwers. If we didn't throw parties I don't think our extended family on her side would ever see each other. But even as an introvert, I feel very grateful and energized after hosting people at our home.
I love hosting, especially because I have invested a lot in my cooking skills. However, now inviting someone over means hosting an entire family and my job has evolved into cleaning, doing dishes, and prepping food, while everyone else is having the time of their life (we don't have a large space). Just not so enjoyable, so we have slowly stopped doing them and others rarely host them as well. An alternative is that we now do dinner picnics at the park, way more easier and no one is stuck doing hosting work.
A simple solution to that is to distribute the chores. For larger parties I always ensure I have help. Many people actually like contributing to a party in non-material ways by doing prep work or some cooking, doing the dishes, selecting the music, etc.
You don’t need a big house to throw a party. After divorce I decided to relive my teenage years and thrown many parties in a 40m2 apartment. You can easily fit 30 or more people in.
Home ownership rates are higher than they were in 1975 though and the number of people living in single family homes is close to what it was in 1975 (a little lower but the same as it was in 1955).
Do the vast majority of people have more space for entertaining than in 1975.
It really doesn’t take massive skill to invite your friends over. It doesn’t have to be this huge production.
And as for time, the average person finds time for hours of short form video and other useless tasks. Which is actually the real problem, social media has sucked up everyone’s time and attention to the point people don’t socialise anymore.
I really didn't like reading your comment, but I can't argue much against it...
All I can say is the consequences of a degrading mental/social health are harder to grasp than a hangover or, for the lack of a better smoking example, lung cancer.
Still I'm also puzzled by the amount of people, even in my own social circle, that "just want to wind down after work" (read: completely fry their brain)
I see this as a manifestation of the loss of teaching effective communication skills. This takes a moment to explain, so please slow down and consider this: before the cultural revolutions of the 1960's, general education included more emphasis on communications conflicts and resolutions of them. For example, every school had a debate team, and the various forms and rules of debate were common knowledge. Yes, this is true. Debate and watching people skilled at argumentative discussion used to be a popular form of entertainment. Then, during the cultural revolution of the 1960s, the best or the "stars of debate" all sided with the youth culture and not the establishment. That then triggered the removal of debate from educations, from entertainment, and from public life. Now, decades later we have the situation that groups of adults cannot form without conflicts and arguments that drive the community creation aspects away. We have created a culture that cannot communicate, because we have stopped teaching basic oral conflict negotiation of any form.
I think people also forget (or don’t even know) that before mobile phones you’d often walk over to someone’s house just to knock on the door to find out if they were in or see what they were doing.
So allied to the lack of dinner parties, there’s fewer reasons to even go to someone’s house any more, you can just text them… or not even bother and check their socials to see what impression of a life they’re presenting today.
I think people also forget (or don’t even know) that before mobile phones you’d often walk over to someone’s house just to knock on the door to find out if they were in or see what they were doing.
If you’re the person who is out, then you don’t have a landline to call. Or then have to make the decision while out to go and find a payphone and have correct change and put in money to make a call to see if the person is in, while the clock is frantically ticking on the call.
Like if you’re equidistant between your house and your friends house, it is also simpler to walk to theirs and find them rather than walk home, call them, check they’re in, and then walk to theirs anyway.
Also if you weren’t the person who paid the phone bill, it was often presented to you as a more parsimonious solution to use your feet rather than the telephone.
Another example is if you made a plan to meet somewhere at a specific time and the person didn’t turn up. You would have no clue about where they were or what happened even if you found a payphone and called their house and it rang out. You were still s.o.l. for the rest of the day so dealt with it.
If you’re the person who is out, then you don’t have a landline to call. Or then have to make the decision while out to go and find a payphone and have correct change and put in money to make a call to see if the person is in, while the clock is frantically ticking on the call.
You seem to be completely changing the situation. In this comment, you're talking about wanting to visit someone at home, whereas in your original comment, you're talking about not wanting to visit someone at home: "there’s fewer reasons to even go to someone’s house any more, you can just text them… or not even bother and check their socials to see what impression of a life they’re presenting today."
In other words, the mobile phone is a replacement for a home visit rather than a means for a home visit.
It's true that mobile phones can make it easier than landlines to find out if someone is home, but if that's how people were using mobile phones, then you would expect more home visits, or at least more successful home visits.
Also if you weren’t the person who paid the phone bill, it was often presented to you as a more parsimonious solution to use your feet rather than the telephone.
I don't understand this point. Long-distance calls were frequently billed per call, but of course walking is not a replacement for those. Local calls were typically unlimited for a fixed monthly rate.
We did, and yet people did still often just come over unannounced, to the point that it that the unannounced visit - which was common enough to be believable, but not always welcome - was a frequent plot point in various media.
It was common during my childhood for us to always have something in the cupboard - like a cake or biscuits or chocolate - that we could offer in case someone just dropped by.
It's been decades since I've cared about having anything ready for a possible surprise visitor, as while before I'd feel rude if I didn't have anything, now I'd feel they were rude for not checking in advance as now they rarely have an excuse for not doing so.
We did, and yet people did still often just come over unannounced, to the point that it that the unannounced visit - which was common enough to be believable, but not always welcome
The question is, what exactly is the relevance of mobile vs. non-mobile phones?
I think it really depends on the walking distance. If someone is your neighbor, there's not a lot of effort saved from calling or texting first.
Going back to the OP, these are two very different things: "you can just text them… or not even bother and check their socials to see what impression of a life they’re presenting today."
As far as one-to-one communication is concerned, a landland call is just as good as a mobile call or a text. But social media addiction is an entirely different matter. That's not even about announced vs. unannounced visits but rather about living in the real world vs. living in a virtual world.
I really do not think debate team modeled healthy communication. It is mostly about debating as a sport, basically coming up with a sleazy twist argument on the position you do not even believe in. If anything, it makes you greatly prepared to be keyboard warrior of the bad-faith argument kind and teaches you to enjoy it.
I did enjoyed debate team activities btw. The above is what I eventually realized later.
I went to a school with a debate team in the 2000s, and there were organized national tournaments all the time. And watching social media debaters is still a popular niche past time?
Maybe it's declined since the 50s in favor of football or so on but I'd like to see the numbers.
Swede here, I used to host a lot of dinners and parties.
But then i realized that it was mostly me who hosted them and the few times i got invited there was an agreement that guest chip in on the costs or that it was a potluck kind of thing.
Made me regret spending all that time and money on the parties i hosted.
Sounds unfortunate but I don't think there's anything to regret, you spent time and money no one else was spending but you still (hopefully) created positive experiences in return.
What do you regret exactly? I have found that friendships are rarely balanced in that sense. Sometimes you spend more (effort, worry, money) but it's also for your own benefit.
Families (mine included) are just too busy. Working, commuting, homework, trying to get some exercise in. Any spare time I try to spend it with my children.
I always look at happiness in terms of pillars, social, family, work, spiritual.
Work somehow has taken over everything. It seems culturally engrained.
I know social media is a factor but while we all fall down the rabbit hole occasionally, it doesn't stop anyone organising a get together.
This is very cultural. In Spain essentially no one throws dinner parties in the US style. It's rare to invite social acquaintances to one's home. These things are done - but mainly with family. Part of this is cultural and part reflects that homes are too small to fit many people. Most socializing is done outside, at a bar, cafe, restaurant, park, etc.
Agreed. Dinner parties with family are the norm. Its almost impossible to host with friends due to the size of families and lack of space. We have found that having picnics in the park is a nice middle ground for everything.
I'm surprised at this being correlated w/ intensive parenting. Modern parents ARE tired and parenting a lot. That's why on the weekends we invite our friends with kids over and the kids run around and entertain each other so we can have some "Just talk to adults" time with the other parents, maybe watch the NFL games. Even when we take turns hosting, we easily get over the 12x a year mark through this.
Yeah, I found this weird. Maybe it's some over-obsessive American thing? Random, no-reason sleepovers, or BBQ-style sunday gatherings, and other "just get together and eat so children can play" activities are fairly common among parents with small kids.
It's certainly not like I remember it in the 80s, but still happens a lot, and my uninformed take is: "community" in the US was never that cohesive, it only took so much to make it fall apart.
Another challenge to hosting dinner parites today is that everybody is on a special diet, count calories, on ozempic because they need to be healthier or have a athletic goal only few people 30 years ago had.
This makes it even more difficult to host because of everybody's needs and regimes they dont buckle on.
I'm not sure how big a deal that really is in a broad sense.
My friend circle in our old city included both Falstaffian omnivores and vegans, and we entertained often. It's not hard to ensure there's food available for folks on a more restrictive diet, and even my friends with UCI racing licenses generally ate like normal people at social events.
Mileage varies, obviously.
(I will say, however, that after having made a vegan "bolognese" once, I have no need to do so again. It was much more effort than the already time-consuming genuine article.)
To me, the most obvious explanation is that people used to be able to buy houses a lot more easily than before. My wife and I were lucky that we were able to afford one, and because of that I have my friends over a couple times a year to hang out and have dinner (I would do it more often, but we're in a remote part of the city that isn't great to drive in). When we were in an apartment, we didn't even have a dining room or enough seats for anyone other than on the couch.
Crucially too, people do not know _how_ to host anymore either, treat guests. A host needs a certain self effacing attentivess.
host also needs to provide an abundance too, there always should be too much food, too muxh drink, more time to stay.
There are a few theories mentioned as to why this is happening, but not this one: throwing dinner parties takes time, and women‘s participation in the workforce has grown steadily.
There are less women with free time on their hands and the need to mingle with people they wouldn’t otherwise encounter, because they’re at home most of the time.
Humanity's revealed preferences are really, really strong here.
As basically every country on Earth gets richer, two things happen in survey results.
One is that as people get richer they spend more time apart. Household sizes get smaller, the number of social interactions per week goes down, etc.
You'll also see that as countries get richer people say that they report feeling less lonely. Loneliness is less of an issue for the rich countries who live more apart. The correlation between this and GDP is comical. As you get to poorer countries, like clockwork, people report being lonelier in surveys.
The evidence suggests that as people get more choice they decide to see people less and they also feel happier for it and less lonely. So I don't think there's a problem here.
I think the problem is that self-reported scores of loneliness go down, but a lot of the data suggests that our increasing solitude and isolation isn’t good for us, whether we feel lonely or not.
As others have mentioned, the decline started long before social media and the Internet. When I was a child, in the 70s, my parents often had other families and couples over for dinner, and we often attended small dinner parties, too.
As an introvert, I absolutely loathed these gatherings and was frustrated by how powerless I was in avoiding them.
Recently, I have been reading over my mother's old letters she wrote to her parents at that time, in which she described the effort and social anxiety that went with this tradition. It was not something my parents enjoyed, but rather an obligation they felt they had to uphold. Someone invites you over, then that goes into an unspoken balance sheet, and you are required to reciprocate. She often spoke of "owing" dinner to people. I don't think she enjoyed it at all, though there were a few couples I can remember who were good friends of theirs, and those meetups were always a pleasure to listen in on. The rest were simply a drag.
I should note that their life in the 70s (in a middle-class college town) was not some idyllic paradise without the Internet, either. Everyone was constantly falling ill with colds or flu, and days were spent running dreary errands to shop for boring things that we now can get with a click. The rotary-dial telephone that hung in the kitchen was the heartbeat of the house, since replaced by Facebook and smartphones. My parents were always busy and exhausted.
Everybody might prefer, in the abstract, a world of dinner parties, neighborhood friendships, and spontaneous gatherings. But on any given Wednesday at 7:45pm., it is easier to look at a screen than to host a party; easier to listen to a podcast while doing yoga than to plan a gathering. This is not so much an individual failure as a coordination failure. Modernity has shifted leisure from activities that require coordination with other people toward activities that can be consumed without the permission or participation of others. Compared to TikTok, a dinner party is a terrible leisure technology.
This extra coordination “friction” is the killer. The lesson is, if you want more dinner parties you have to reduce the extra coordination “friction” to a minimum.
I think we also need to increase the friction of social media. But yeah, I used to live in the same apartment building as two friends so “hosting a dinner party” was as complex and sending a DM at 4pm to arrange something after work.
I would do this multiple times a week because it was so easy and required minimal coordination.
2. Wages have stagnated for decades, unless you're in that magical IT job.
3. It's now a 2 wage earner setup to afford rent or mortgage. And smaller and less hostable residences.
4. The lower your income, the worse your schedule for planning anything. Same with friends.
5. Self-entertainment is a lot cheaper.
Basically, capitalism has squeezed out being able to afford parties, and the time commitment away from "hustling".
Even with 1995-ish, we had Married with Children, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, and Friends. All these show apartments or houses that a single worker could afford, and fund house/apartment parties. And this is a single person paying for housing.
Sure, those are fictions for TV, but it also shows just how normal and common it was, that low/middle income folks had lots of options and good amount of time. That's just no longer true for most Americans.
When you noticed you were relying on evidence from fiction, instead of verbally acknowledging that that was what you were doing, you should've stopped relying on the "evidence".
It might make sense every now and them to rely on fiction for evidence in domains where it is very hard to obtain any data at all, but in this particular, there is plenty of hard data of what US workers used to earn, what they earn now, what houses and food used to cost and what they cost now.
(I expect that the hard data will fail to support your belief that things have gotten significantly harder economically for the average person.)
Middle-aged, in the US. From my perspective, a lot of the change is due to overbooked children. My wife and I have a group of ~5 couples that we used to get together with regularly. Before any kids, it was ad-hoc, often out somewhere (dinner, bar, whatever). When the first couple had an infant, that changed to pot-lucks at their house (easy to put the kid down for the night). But now that 3 of the couples have kids, 2 of which are in middle-school, it's almost impossible to get the gang together - one of the kids always has some practice or another event. We still get tougher in smaller groups, but less frequently.
This is counter to when I was a kid - it was rare that I had a scheduled sports event on a Friday or Saturday evening. During the day, sure. But 6pm+ on Friday? Basically never. But that seems to be common now. Travel sports, so lots of weekends totally away, or specialized coaching at odd hours, or just a 3rd activity to pad that college application. It's crazy. I honestly have no idea how kids have any fun today (and I say that as somebody who played 2 varsity sports, one instrument, and was an Eagle Scout - but through middle school, I still had plenty of time for just hanging out - it was common to ride my bike for hours on a Sunday - into town, get an ice cream, across the river into DC, and back).
I had a slightly older Mexican neighbor who would go out of his way to invite everyone in the apartment complex to watch pay per view fights and cook.
He was actually from Mexico, I suspect from a culture that values community much more. I don’t know Hispanic culture that well, but I’ve also gotten this vibe from former partners.
Long long ago when my black family first moved to California they made sure to co locate in the same area. This was partially due to the realities of segregation, but it also made making dinner for your nephew much easier.
Now the community is obsolete. Replaced by insta validation loops.
More recent data suggests that teenage loneliness might have ticked back up to where it was in the 1980s, and the evidence here is mixed overall, depending on which data sets and cohorts you look at. We don’t yet have enough data to be sure which way the effects go on average, but we do have enough to be sure that those effects are neither large nor universal.
It’s just too much work for big dinners. How is that possible for a family of two workers to prepare a big dinner once for maybe 8-10 people once for a while? If I had the time I’d rather spend on sleeping or something else.
There are probably people who are good at this and love to do this, but I think there are fewer and fewer families who are into big dinners.
Dinners don’t necessarily have to be big though. My wife hosts friends over all the time but usually it’s still small intimate affairs, like average 1-2 people (and their kids if they have any) - don’t need to invite everyone at once. Maybe it’s more normal here in Japan to do small groups - when my American friends come visit they always come in giant groups and it makes everything logistically challenging (which my wife also complains about, alongside the fact that it’s impossible to have a deep conversation when 12 people are in the room).
Plus they also don’t have to be polished. Don’t bother cleaning up the house and order a pizza, and everyone will still have a good time. Or just go out to a restaurant and not worry about any of that.
Not US, under 40. The depiction of dinner parties makes me think not much was lost.
What I gleam from TV shows is: The wife invited people over to brag about her husband's recent promotion or her children's achievements. Once over, they gossiped about a perceived fault in the other family (did you see the son's long hair? I heard he smokes weed!
Sounds like a suburban nightmare. There surely are other socializing events that were more beneficial; like a weekly bowling club meeting.
Another reason is nowadays with all the variety of dietary restrictions in vogue, it’s much harder for a host to prepare a meal everyone can share. Potlucks or a bland collection of help-yourself dishes (which often are nothing more than an odd collection of appetizers) is standard fare.
I’m fortunate to have friends in their 60s and 70s where I can still enjoy the traditional dinner experience.
Just imagine that your family and a friend's family are going to camping today. You tell the other guy, hey, tomorrow morning we are going to prepare a big breakfast for everyone. If you don't mind spending an extra 5 minutes diverting into our driveway (mine is 5 mins away from the freeway), you can have a full breakfast before we go camping. The other guy says Yes that's perfect, and the next morning the whole family roll in, smelling sausage, bacon and fried eggs.
Damn that's something I'd like to do once I get rid of my hemmorhoids.
I moved from a rich city social life to a lonely suburban one (I have regrets, there are complicating factors). I met a fellow dad who mentioned a book as we started chatting and I was excited (someone who reads!).
As we talked about this very isolation problem he told me about his neighbors who kept inviting him over and offering to watch the kids for him and how he thought it was just weird and couldn’t trust them. It broke my heart — I could just imagine the neighbors trying to be good to their community and that very behavior is met with distrust.
(I read half the book he mentioned and asked him about it the next time I saw him. Turns out he hadn’t read the book, just heard about it on a podcast. My quest to meet someone who reads continues.)
In my twenties I made spaghetti every Saturday night. This started as throwing some Ragu in a pot and adding some spices, and eventually morphed into crushing my own tomatoes and cooking over most of the day. I did this every week over years. A varied group of friends came to eat each week -- no plan, no notice, just come over if you have nothing else going on. It's how I met my wife -- I never would have had the courage to ask her out on a real date, but "I make spaghetti for my friends every Saturday, you should come over," was easier. It's been years and I don't often make spaghetti anymore.
How is the author of this piece going to cite a graph that shows an extreme increase in time spent at home that begins in 2020 and not mention COVID? We had social media in the 2010s. COVID made spending time outdoors/around other people an actual physical danger for over a year, and the psychological effects of that are lingering. Does anyone remember that one political cartoon where the guy is walking down the street, and everyone around him just looks like a virus particle? I think a lot of people consciously or subconsciously still see the world that way. If you don’t believe, reflect on how you would feel about attending a crowded indoor gathering in 2010 vs now, or how much unease you would feel if someone at the table next to you started coughing.
May I suggest a thing my wife and I started doing a couple years ago: the monthly brunch.
First Sunday of the month or whatever, we send out a reminder text, we provide coffee and a little food, people bring way more food than we can eat, and we invite everyone we know, from our different social circles. No pressure.
It’s a moderate amount of work, but it’s very gratifying to bring people together. People have made good friends at our brunch that they hang out with all the time now. It’s been interesting to see how hungry people are for social interaction, some people have driven or taken the subway more than an hour to come. People bring their kids or babies if they have them, age range is from 20s to 60s, it’s very chill.
It’s also a great “next step” when I meet someone I’d like to be friends with: “hey, my wife and I do a monthly brunch, it’s really low-key, you should come!”
For the record, I’m an introvert, but I can tell this is really good for me.
This may not be shared by other people, but my two cents.
I personally don't like inviting people to my house (or going to other people's houses) because I already spend a good chunk of my day indoors (I work from home). Whenever possible, I prefer to meet outside.
When I was growing up, a good deal of these sorts of parties involved backyards, barbecues, and swimming pools. Rarely did we spend time indoors.
This might explain the decline then, as with the price of housing going up less people can afford a place that has a backyard (let alone a pool!)
I remember when i was young going out on vacations with school friends and their parents for several days. Also similar to weekends at country houses. The trend was that a couple of parents liked to host the get togethers and didn’t mind 10 adults and 20 children of different ages running around the place
None of my friends have a backyard big enough to host a BBQ
Not sure the kind of size you are talking about but you might be overestimating how much space it takes. My current rental has a back yard about the size of a single car garage and I’ve been able to host a ~50 person bbq with a mix of people standing inside and out.
What a bummer. We have friends, family, and our friends’ families over all the time. 1-2 days a week. Now part of that is obviously we are fortunate to have the space and (barely) the time for it. Still, I want to encourage those who can to make the effort to use their home as a social hub. It’s incredibly gratifying. We get a lot of joy out of sharing our home with others. Eventually it’s really not that much work - I honestly find it’s easier/more relaxing than going elsewhere sometimes.
Plus when you have kids it’s a lot more convenient than trying to wrangle them at the end of a fun time lol
Can't speak about the USA but here in south of Spain houses tend to be small, weather good and eating outside relatively affordable so people are used to meet outside.
Most of our gatherings are actually at the beach because for most it is just a short walk from home and there are shops very close that sell super cold beers and drinks so you don't even have to carry a huge cooler.
That’s great. Wish I had a good beach nearby. Closes is about an hour but the water really isn’t fit for swimming anymore since about 10-15 years ago. We have to go three hours to get anywhere reasonable
I get caught in the comparison game, the thief of joy.
I don’t want ask my rich well off friends around cause of my humble existence.
I’ve been there myself - but your actual friends don’t care.
Try easing into it - go on a late afternoon sunset picnic (ironically also on the list) - a blanket, cheese, crackers, cured meat and wine and a portable speaker. Everyone is happy and it’s super cheap, the outdoors is your living room and a couple hours before sunset never disappoints (though depending on where you are the weather might be a challenge).
Feel like part of the issue is everyone’s self imposed neurosis about not intruding on others. My wife insists on not ever asking to come over to someone’s house - she only wants to be explicitly invited. We invite people over to our place when we can but this leads to us basically never visiting any of our friends because they aren’t the planning type.
Article says "The share of adults who say they regularly have friends over has declined 70 percent since 1975", but this may not be an accurate comparison:
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDB_Needham_Life_Style_Surveys
Doesn't that seems like a more accurate measurement? what's the percentage of adults who check "yes" for "friends i'm hoping to hook up with" versus those that say "oooh, you mean actual friends"?
Someone is projecting.
A percentage of people going to say "Yes" and not mean the same thing as I mean when I say that.
That's all I'm saying.
Does it? It means different types of socialising a lot of the time, but couples often merges friend groups and I could definitely see a case for some subset of those friend groups ending up meeting up more regularly. I don't know. It'd be interesting to see data broken down by relationship status.
Being stay at home parent is super lonely experience, basically the most lonely occupation you can have. In most jobs, you meet people and you do talk to people without trying to. Fairly often, they are unavoidable whether you want it or not. If you are at home with a kid, you are truly absolutely alone, unless you organize something. Every other guy here on HN complains about Covid being lonely, but it was less lonely and socially easier situation than being stay at home parent.
So, alternative framing is that women stopped organizing these as their need do organize them went down. And men did not had that need in the first place, so it did not changed from their point of view.
And simultaneously, it ceased to be acceptable to be the kind of dad who spends multiple evenings a week with buddies, not really spending time with his kids.
There are parks, splash pads, playgrounds—plenty of places where parents naturally gather without needing to be organized.
You meet other parents at those and then organize play dates or social events I would think, though?
When I met my wife, I discovered very quickly that she had savant-level hosting skills. She is an amazing cook, she prioritizes space to dine in our home (we made sure to have a dining table in our NYC apartment) and she thinks carefully about the experience of her guests. It's a quality that I benefit greatly from, and I'm grateful to her for it.
Just want to chime in that I have had the same experience and am similarly appreciative!
Blame the screens. Screens are blackholes that suck up your time, attention, awareness and senses.
Screens are evil. They wake up the dead past as if it's alive and happening now. It became so much the norm, that people are afraid to face the real world, real people, real talking. "Dinner party? OMG, real people with real faces that force us to talk to them? Noway sir".
Screens disconnected people from real world, from each other. I was trying a VR headset the other days and immediately threw it away, as it shut off my visual and audio senses completely.
People are downvoting because the tone is a bit harsh but he has a point.
While TV has been a thing for a long time, content was limited, and more importantly curated. You couldn't manage your own playlists/subscriptions and almost infinite content on subjects that interest you.
Video games were mostly for kids.
There were no social media feeds optimize to monopolize your attention and make you doomscroll.
Hey even having a TV/widescreen at home has a direct impact on couples sex life...which magically reactivate when the light goes out.
The internet is wonderful for many things but nobody can denies it has an impact on our in person social life.
I remember a college teacher who had 9 siblings humorously answering the question of "how did your parents managed to do it" with "simple: they didn't have a TV set back then".
TVs had already affected our lives tremendously, computers and the internet just went nuts with it.
I would say that TV is the same in concept, just to a different degree.
Why, then, do you look at the speck in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the log in your own eye?
I agree with you general sentiment but how did you end up in a situation where you feel this way but also wanted to try a VR headset but then also decided to throw it away immediately after trying it seemingly surprised by what the experience was.
He might have started feeling that way only after trying the VR headset.
My hunch is they have an agenda and is willing to lie to spice up the story.
If they are not a clanker.
Spoken like someone with no friends or relatives that live far away. Screens can also be extremely connecting. They are a tool and as such value neutral. Is it evil that I can have a weekly video-call with family members on another continent when the alternative would be...simply no contact at all, super expensive phone calls or letters. I don't think so.
I think even with family and friends that live far away, screens are often an excuse as well. Well sorry we aren't going to be able to visit gas is just too much, we can FaceTime instead! And I think it's ignoring the bigger problem, is perhaps you talk to your family members once a week, but do you have your community around you that you talk and do things with 'off screen'? Its easy on the internet to say you do, but the reality is most people would rather doomscroll than be bothered with trying to know their neighbor.
Or, it's because no one can afford spaces to host company:
https://fortune.com/2026/06/22/1-in-3-young-adults-living-wi...
It is what you make of it. It gives and takes, heat and light, waves for waves, words for words. It lets time stay alive as bits, as long as they don’t rot. In exchange, it suck up your real world time. To use it is to used by it.
We need a new way to use it safely for us and the world writ large.
It's not only the screen. It's everything about late Capitalism. The families are more atomized. There are less families and kids. Big dinners are usually for big families. It takes a lot of skills and practices to prepare a big dinner for 10-12 people quickly.
I have a friend who is married and have 3 kids. His wife is a SAHM. She didn't know anything about cooking before they got married back in 2011, and nowadays she could easily throw a party for 10-12 people with only half of day of preparation (excluding shopping) -- and that's 10 Chinese dishes she had to cook, not BBQ stuffs. That's crazy for us. I can't imagine how much time it would take us to prepare even 5 dishes.
It takes practices. She having 3 kids definitely "helps" with the practice. Nowadays people don't get to practice these things. It's like a myth to us.
I think it's kinda impossible for a two-worker family unless you are really into this kind of stuffs. Otherwise taking care of work and kids is already way too much for us.
In my experience, most people are overworked, stressed and exhausted.
I don't find it surprising at all that social activities have been declining. It sounds like normal mammal behavior in fact.
Middle aged European here. I still regularly go to parties (dinner and otherwise) and I notice that there are two kinds of people: people who throw parties, and people who don't. This sounds like a truism, but what I mean is: there are people who regularly throw a party and people who never do it.
I am solidly in the first category. I throw dinner parties, birthday parties, drinking parties, dance parties, midsummer parties, midwinter parties, game parties, etc. Yes, it costs time and money and is a lot of work. But what people (probably the ones that never bother) tend to forget is how unbelievably gratifying it is to get a bunch of people together, to feed them and to make them talk, laugh, dance, etc. Afterwards you are tired but also grateful and socially energized in a way that feels fundamental to my existence.
It varies a lot depending on people and personality type. What's energizing to you is very exhausting and unfun to others. Extraversion / introversion basically. I don't like having many people over. 3 or 4 people who I know well is optimal for me.
Making a large party could be "type 2 fun" sometimes, ie exhausting and not very fun at the time, but satisfying to look back on as a kind of hard challenge I managed to accomplish, like climbing a cold mountain or so. But few are enough of those.
Even that is a challenge of finding the mental energy to pick the date , see that everyone can come, picking some activity (or if you're hosting - make sure with your wife that the date is fine. What about your kids - you wanna put them in bed before?) etc etc. Some of it is probably no big deal but my brain is making it look big, perhaps because I lean introvert as well. It's so much easier to just think about the idea and say 'naaa fuck it' and open Youtube instead.
Helps if your friends are uncomplicated. We just chat, drink beer, make or order pizza, cook or bake something else, talk about work and family, sit in the sun, maybe play cards or just listen to music, talk about stories at recent events like concerts, rehash old stories, or updates about other friends, etc. There is no need to make a big deal about any of this.
But this is not a networking or new-friend-making style of party of course. Not even really a party, but fits "inviting people over for dinner".
I think a big problem is that people see this also as a thing where efficiency and productivity is important and they plan complicated activities etc. Similarly to how kids don't get much free time to just play and relax, adults also try to organize activities for themselves when just being together is often enough and the rest follows naturally.
I think this gets at the heart of the concern—it’s always easier to find something else distracting to do, but what’s the real cost? I don’t really know how to measure that, other than to say that American society and culture are doing particularly poorly right now.
This is something that has been going for generations and centuries. We are less and less dependent on people near us and more dependent on father-away large-scale systems. Same with extended families, neighborhood communities, etc.
100%
You can say naaa fuck it and open Youtube when your friends are over, as well as putting your kids to bed when they're there. It's fine!
You're right. Since I'm an introvert myself, I enjoy organizing events and inviting people over, because as the host, I always have a reason to change locations and get some “space” when the socializing becomes too much for me.
This is true as well. If you are otherwise not very social, being the organizer gives you a clear role and clearer expectations and tasks and reasons for people to start talking to you and vice versa. I find this helpful, as unstructured social environments are harder for me.
That certainly makes sense at an individual level, but it seems implausible as an explanation of the dramatic shift over the past decades from TFA, unless basic character traits have shifted dramatically over the past decades as well.
I wonder if the cultural existence of the 'introvert vs extrovert' idea has reinforced this to a degree. I'm too young to know, but I doubt this was a discussion in the 80s. I'm also not too sure it's a good thing. I've seen introversion used as an excuse to hermit; extroversion as the sole reason to use drugs.
We put limits on ourselves psychologically in all sorts of ways, and we follow the ones we believe. There's a study that showed people who believe willpower is finite have finite willpower. I thought "well obviously, if you had finite willpower you'd know because you'd run out". Maybe we do just think too much?
If I don't feel like running and I go running, about two thirds of the time I feel like running after a few K. It's the same socially. The goal of introspection shouldn't be to freeze in a minute now.
It seems pretty obvious to me that this also existed in older times. It's a pretty well established and reproducible big five trait. There were always people who were lone wolf types, not necessarily hermits but people who like to be alone.
Ask your parents, it was certainly a thing in the 80s too. Even if I think about my grandparents, they didn't constantly have others over. My grandfather was a chill village guy who liked to spend time alone, working in the garden, working in his shed etc. But there were more regular externally forced events, like big weddings, gathering for a pig slaughter, coming together to renovate the house etc.
What changes is the tradeoff threshold.
Now, being alone is more attractive to more people than before. Some liked being alone even in the times when it just meant books or doing some loner hobby like gardening or woodworking or whatnot. But with Netflix and YouTube the tradeoff shifts. Also as people get more flaky, socialization is even mharder, making people more flaky.
So introverts existed before but today mild introverts may act more introvert-like, who earlier would have preferred to err more on the extravert side.
As an introvert who grew up in a radically extroverted household, forcing oneself to be an extrovert all the time can be psychologically damaging over time.
It's also a source of chronic fatigue.
Imagine if you didn’t feel like running, and you made yourself do it, and after a few K you were like “this sucks, I wish I’d stayed home” and you finish your run and you didn’t enjoy it at all. But people keep telling you how great it is so you keep doing it and you keep hating it and after a while you eventually decide that running is not for you.
Would that be a reasonable conclusion? Or should we conclude that this is a psychological limit and we just need to stop thinking so much?
I do think it’s possible to move between categories though. I used to have potlucks and house parties every month in my twenties, but now a decade later I just don’t really have much interest in the idea.
It might just be a rationalization, but the way I justify it is that as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized more what actually matters to me, and being a party host / spending time at parties doesn’t fit that category. I’d rather spend my time doing something else.
Well it's happening to the vast majority of people all at once, I don't think it's age, at least not only that. I haven't read the whole article yet perhaps he offers ideas on why this is happening but I'm guessing - better alternatives (Netflix), increased individualism etc. Society has changed a lot.
Fair point, although I do think it’s fairly typical generally for people to become less social as they get older, find a partner, get more serious about their career, etc. with the trends aside.
I am not sure that's 100% the case. Sure as children and even through college it's easy to make friends, but as we get older, we certainly are exposed to more people and more opportunities if we choose so.
I think the major problem though is due to the way the world is rapidly shifting, and people's utter mental exhaustion, it's easier to sit and do nothing and become a mindless drone to 'the boob tube' or rather your phone than it is to be with your community.
This isn't something new, it's just becoming more evident, especially as there are less and less communities.
Just think about it, you likely live in some sort of apartment, town house, or suburban area, and how well do you know your neighbors? One apartment/house over, two, three? Or maybe just a friendly nod when you pass, but nothing more.
Nope. Its a bunch of work and stress and thoroughly beaten by a dull night in. If I want to bring people together, I'll pay for it to be done - e.g. a restaurant.
It depends who you invite. I organized a lot of parties in my youth with some that escalated and that burned me a bit. Now I am very reluctant to organize something and have not done so in a while, but when I do and it works, it is amazing. Helping bringing people together. Connecting, having a good time and people feel grateful for it.
Now with the great late summer, it would be a great time for something like this again, but I just did not felt the energy, but also am a bit sad now to not just make something happen.
This is my experience exactly. We used to host a monthly board gaming party before we moved and it was very energizing and exhausting at the same time.
After the two kids the games disappeared and it just became a normal party where we could talk and such and a playdate for the our and the other parents kids.
We will probably do it again when we settle into a new home at least I hope.
I'd get more energy from sitting alone in a dark room than by throwing a - or attending a - party...
That doesn't mean I don't enjoy attending (never throwing) parties on occasion, but it's exhausting to me. Whenever I come home from a social occasion I need time to recover.
It's very much down to different personalities.
Going to the gym is exhausting, running a marathon is exhausting, spending a day weeding your garden or laying a new carpet could be exhausting.
Usually people feel great afterwards because of the experience and despite it being hard work and taking time to recover from. Parties etc. can be the same.
They can for some, but to be very clear, I don't. I feel mentally drained in a way I absolutely do not enjoy. The experience can be fun during, but the net benefit to me is low enough, and for many types of socialising it's firmly in the negative, that I restrict myself very much in terms of what socialising I consider worthwhile.
As I said, it's very much down to your personality - most of the time I'd rather spend time in peace and quiet alone or with my wife or son (and I need some of that time to be entirely alone)
That's fine, but it's weird to comment as if this is a default position. Usually people like that are no longer invited to a parties, and that's that. It's not a big deal.
This is true on some level, and what you describe has been called type 2 fun. But for plenty of people, partying and socializing is really type 1 fun, they find it enjoyable the way some of us find working on programming or other nerd things intrinsically rewarding in the moment, which they may see as unfun but potentially good for you long term.
My point is, yes, sometimes it's good to just ignore the discomfort and push through, but we should also know that it's not how everyone feels about it. Some people actually willingly go down into a crowded basement club with loud music and not just as some kind of tough challenge to survive and shape your character to have tbuilt tolerance for that harsh environment,but they find it enjoyable, no matter how baffling it seems to the rest of us. I don't know proportions, but these people exist. Of course plenty of people are somewhere in the middle range, where they enjoy some aspects while hating the rest, and the thing they enjoy about loud clubs is likely about prospects getting laid and similar stuff.
This. It’s also why I started celebrating my birthday and throwing a party. I am not doing it for me, I am an introvert and it is a lot of work, but I am doing it for my guests who have a great time.
(For perfectionists: people always have a good time when there’s some food and drinks and other people. Everything else, even music, is really optional.)
My wife is an extrovert and I'm an introvert. We are also the party throwers. If we didn't throw parties I don't think our extended family on her side would ever see each other. But even as an introvert, I feel very grateful and energized after hosting people at our home.
I love hosting, especially because I have invested a lot in my cooking skills. However, now inviting someone over means hosting an entire family and my job has evolved into cleaning, doing dishes, and prepping food, while everyone else is having the time of their life (we don't have a large space). Just not so enjoyable, so we have slowly stopped doing them and others rarely host them as well. An alternative is that we now do dinner picnics at the park, way more easier and no one is stuck doing hosting work.
A simple solution to that is to distribute the chores. For larger parties I always ensure I have help. Many people actually like contributing to a party in non-material ways by doing prep work or some cooking, doing the dishes, selecting the music, etc.
Maybe it helps that 50 years ago people could actually afford to buy things like big houses where to throw parties at.
You don’t need a big house to throw a party. After divorce I decided to relive my teenage years and thrown many parties in a 40m2 apartment. You can easily fit 30 or more people in.
Take a look at this graph https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/housing1.png?...
Says nothing about affordability
Home ownership rates are higher than they were in 1975 though and the number of people living in single family homes is close to what it was in 1975 (a little lower but the same as it was in 1955).
Do the vast majority of people have more space for entertaining than in 1975.
Housing prices also more than doubled in real terms in the period of that graph https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/QUSR628BIS
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49892107
Personally feels insane that people find this surprising or puzzling.
You wouldn't be surprised if everyone was smoking and smoking rate was going up massively and then we had a surge of people getting cancer.
This is obviously because of social media or other algorithmic applications. It literally herds people.
It couldn't be more obvious how unhealthy it is, yet there is no demand for it to get outlawed and there won't be any time soon. It is pretty sad.
If you think about the second/third order effects that it will have, it is massively worse than alcohol/drugs.
That doesn't explain the declines before that. It requires a lot of domestic skills and time to host a good party.
and energy which a lot of people in my social groups always seem too exhausted for
yeah the time is a big one, in a double career household who is doing all the prep work?
It really doesn’t take massive skill to invite your friends over. It doesn’t have to be this huge production.
And as for time, the average person finds time for hours of short form video and other useless tasks. Which is actually the real problem, social media has sucked up everyone’s time and attention to the point people don’t socialise anymore.
Who finds this surprising or puzzling? I do not see this sentiment in the article or in the comments here.
I really didn't like reading your comment, but I can't argue much against it...
All I can say is the consequences of a degrading mental/social health are harder to grasp than a hangover or, for the lack of a better smoking example, lung cancer.
Still I'm also puzzled by the amount of people, even in my own social circle, that "just want to wind down after work" (read: completely fry their brain)
Social Media brought a decline between 1975 and 1995? It surely plays a role (at least as a confounder), but can't be the sole cause.
this predates social media significantly, aligns more with both partners in married couples working
and why wouldn't it? we went from 40 hours of one person being able to support a household, now it's more assumed to be 80 hours from two people
our time has been stolen from us
productivity has increased, but so have working hours, people in the workforce, commuting time, etc
Not American.
One big thing I feel contributing to this is a lack of time.
And the more strange unusual thing, many folks basically have "school nights", they don't do anything because they're going to work the next day.
Perhaps work becoming more mentally intensive makes this more difficult.
I wonder if another factor is how many people move around the country.
For families with kids, forming deep friendships as an adult can be a logistical challenge.
Many people have no current relationship with friends they made in college or high school
Money. In the 70s, a single income family could afford to host. Who has money for that these days?
I see this as a manifestation of the loss of teaching effective communication skills. This takes a moment to explain, so please slow down and consider this: before the cultural revolutions of the 1960's, general education included more emphasis on communications conflicts and resolutions of them. For example, every school had a debate team, and the various forms and rules of debate were common knowledge. Yes, this is true. Debate and watching people skilled at argumentative discussion used to be a popular form of entertainment. Then, during the cultural revolution of the 1960s, the best or the "stars of debate" all sided with the youth culture and not the establishment. That then triggered the removal of debate from educations, from entertainment, and from public life. Now, decades later we have the situation that groups of adults cannot form without conflicts and arguments that drive the community creation aspects away. We have created a culture that cannot communicate, because we have stopped teaching basic oral conflict negotiation of any form.
I think people also forget (or don’t even know) that before mobile phones you’d often walk over to someone’s house just to knock on the door to find out if they were in or see what they were doing.
So allied to the lack of dinner parties, there’s fewer reasons to even go to someone’s house any more, you can just text them… or not even bother and check their socials to see what impression of a life they’re presenting today.
Um, we had phones before mobile phones.
I know.
So please explain the relevance of mobile phones.
Where I lived, suburban United States, landlines were ubiquitous, and we used them all the time.
If you’re at home, you can answer the landline.
If you’re the person who is out, then you don’t have a landline to call. Or then have to make the decision while out to go and find a payphone and have correct change and put in money to make a call to see if the person is in, while the clock is frantically ticking on the call.
Like if you’re equidistant between your house and your friends house, it is also simpler to walk to theirs and find them rather than walk home, call them, check they’re in, and then walk to theirs anyway.
Also if you weren’t the person who paid the phone bill, it was often presented to you as a more parsimonious solution to use your feet rather than the telephone.
Another example is if you made a plan to meet somewhere at a specific time and the person didn’t turn up. You would have no clue about where they were or what happened even if you found a payphone and called their house and it rang out. You were still s.o.l. for the rest of the day so dealt with it.
You seem to be completely changing the situation. In this comment, you're talking about wanting to visit someone at home, whereas in your original comment, you're talking about not wanting to visit someone at home: "there’s fewer reasons to even go to someone’s house any more, you can just text them… or not even bother and check their socials to see what impression of a life they’re presenting today."
In other words, the mobile phone is a replacement for a home visit rather than a means for a home visit.
It's true that mobile phones can make it easier than landlines to find out if someone is home, but if that's how people were using mobile phones, then you would expect more home visits, or at least more successful home visits.
I don't understand this point. Long-distance calls were frequently billed per call, but of course walking is not a replacement for those. Local calls were typically unlimited for a fixed monthly rate.
We did, and yet people did still often just come over unannounced, to the point that it that the unannounced visit - which was common enough to be believable, but not always welcome - was a frequent plot point in various media.
It was common during my childhood for us to always have something in the cupboard - like a cake or biscuits or chocolate - that we could offer in case someone just dropped by.
It's been decades since I've cared about having anything ready for a possible surprise visitor, as while before I'd feel rude if I didn't have anything, now I'd feel they were rude for not checking in advance as now they rarely have an excuse for not doing so.
The question is, what exactly is the relevance of mobile vs. non-mobile phones?
I think it really depends on the walking distance. If someone is your neighbor, there's not a lot of effort saved from calling or texting first.
Going back to the OP, these are two very different things: "you can just text them… or not even bother and check their socials to see what impression of a life they’re presenting today."
As far as one-to-one communication is concerned, a landland call is just as good as a mobile call or a text. But social media addiction is an entirely different matter. That's not even about announced vs. unannounced visits but rather about living in the real world vs. living in a virtual world.
I'm not sure that citing fiction is useful.
I really do not think debate team modeled healthy communication. It is mostly about debating as a sport, basically coming up with a sleazy twist argument on the position you do not even believe in. If anything, it makes you greatly prepared to be keyboard warrior of the bad-faith argument kind and teaches you to enjoy it.
I did enjoyed debate team activities btw. The above is what I eventually realized later.
I went to a school with a debate team in the 2000s, and there were organized national tournaments all the time. And watching social media debaters is still a popular niche past time?
Maybe it's declined since the 50s in favor of football or so on but I'd like to see the numbers.
Swede here, I used to host a lot of dinners and parties.
But then i realized that it was mostly me who hosted them and the few times i got invited there was an agreement that guest chip in on the costs or that it was a potluck kind of thing.
Made me regret spending all that time and money on the parties i hosted.
Sounds unfortunate but I don't think there's anything to regret, you spent time and money no one else was spending but you still (hopefully) created positive experiences in return.
What do you regret exactly? I have found that friendships are rarely balanced in that sense. Sometimes you spend more (effort, worry, money) but it's also for your own benefit.
Families (mine included) are just too busy. Working, commuting, homework, trying to get some exercise in. Any spare time I try to spend it with my children.
I always look at happiness in terms of pillars, social, family, work, spiritual. Work somehow has taken over everything. It seems culturally engrained.
I know social media is a factor but while we all fall down the rabbit hole occasionally, it doesn't stop anyone organising a get together.
This is very cultural. In Spain essentially no one throws dinner parties in the US style. It's rare to invite social acquaintances to one's home. These things are done - but mainly with family. Part of this is cultural and part reflects that homes are too small to fit many people. Most socializing is done outside, at a bar, cafe, restaurant, park, etc.
Same here in Japan
Agreed. Dinner parties with family are the norm. Its almost impossible to host with friends due to the size of families and lack of space. We have found that having picnics in the park is a nice middle ground for everything.
That's because you don't eat dinner until 10pm
I'm surprised at this being correlated w/ intensive parenting. Modern parents ARE tired and parenting a lot. That's why on the weekends we invite our friends with kids over and the kids run around and entertain each other so we can have some "Just talk to adults" time with the other parents, maybe watch the NFL games. Even when we take turns hosting, we easily get over the 12x a year mark through this.
Yeah, I found this weird. Maybe it's some over-obsessive American thing? Random, no-reason sleepovers, or BBQ-style sunday gatherings, and other "just get together and eat so children can play" activities are fairly common among parents with small kids.
It's certainly not like I remember it in the 80s, but still happens a lot, and my uninformed take is: "community" in the US was never that cohesive, it only took so much to make it fall apart.
Another challenge to hosting dinner parites today is that everybody is on a special diet, count calories, on ozempic because they need to be healthier or have a athletic goal only few people 30 years ago had.
This makes it even more difficult to host because of everybody's needs and regimes they dont buckle on.
I'm not sure how big a deal that really is in a broad sense.
My friend circle in our old city included both Falstaffian omnivores and vegans, and we entertained often. It's not hard to ensure there's food available for folks on a more restrictive diet, and even my friends with UCI racing licenses generally ate like normal people at social events.
Mileage varies, obviously.
(I will say, however, that after having made a vegan "bolognese" once, I have no need to do so again. It was much more effort than the already time-consuming genuine article.)
This is really true, people used to have to figure what was a dietary preference vs a dietary requirement.
I was just planning a dinner party a while ago and the Venn diagram of what foods I could make was truly vexing.
I will move heaven and earth and scrub pots and pans for someone with Celiac, but working around people’s mere preferences is irritating.
prior generations would just eat around it or suck it up.
To me, the most obvious explanation is that people used to be able to buy houses a lot more easily than before. My wife and I were lucky that we were able to afford one, and because of that I have my friends over a couple times a year to hang out and have dinner (I would do it more often, but we're in a remote part of the city that isn't great to drive in). When we were in an apartment, we didn't even have a dining room or enough seats for anyone other than on the couch.
The percentage of Americans who own their own homes has gone up 1% since 1970 so that isn’t it.
Yeah right, 80 year olds hosting dinner parties.
1. More women work
2. More remote communication
3. Fewer friends through church
4. Fewer friends through kid’s school
5. Kids have more homework and more structure activity than they used to.
6. Less need for entertainment
Crucially too, people do not know _how_ to host anymore either, treat guests. A host needs a certain self effacing attentivess. host also needs to provide an abundance too, there always should be too much food, too muxh drink, more time to stay.
There are a few theories mentioned as to why this is happening, but not this one: throwing dinner parties takes time, and women‘s participation in the workforce has grown steadily.
There are less women with free time on their hands and the need to mingle with people they wouldn’t otherwise encounter, because they’re at home most of the time.
Humanity's revealed preferences are really, really strong here.
As basically every country on Earth gets richer, two things happen in survey results.
One is that as people get richer they spend more time apart. Household sizes get smaller, the number of social interactions per week goes down, etc.
You'll also see that as countries get richer people say that they report feeling less lonely. Loneliness is less of an issue for the rich countries who live more apart. The correlation between this and GDP is comical. As you get to poorer countries, like clockwork, people report being lonelier in surveys.
The evidence suggests that as people get more choice they decide to see people less and they also feel happier for it and less lonely. So I don't think there's a problem here.
Do you have data for this? This contradicts common sense and every datapoint I’ve seen so far that isolation is a rapidly rising issue.
I think the problem is that self-reported scores of loneliness go down, but a lot of the data suggests that our increasing solitude and isolation isn’t good for us, whether we feel lonely or not.
Good article on this a few days ago that I’ve been thinking about a lot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49812533
As others have mentioned, the decline started long before social media and the Internet. When I was a child, in the 70s, my parents often had other families and couples over for dinner, and we often attended small dinner parties, too.
As an introvert, I absolutely loathed these gatherings and was frustrated by how powerless I was in avoiding them.
Recently, I have been reading over my mother's old letters she wrote to her parents at that time, in which she described the effort and social anxiety that went with this tradition. It was not something my parents enjoyed, but rather an obligation they felt they had to uphold. Someone invites you over, then that goes into an unspoken balance sheet, and you are required to reciprocate. She often spoke of "owing" dinner to people. I don't think she enjoyed it at all, though there were a few couples I can remember who were good friends of theirs, and those meetups were always a pleasure to listen in on. The rest were simply a drag.
I should note that their life in the 70s (in a middle-class college town) was not some idyllic paradise without the Internet, either. Everyone was constantly falling ill with colds or flu, and days were spent running dreary errands to shop for boring things that we now can get with a click. The rotary-dial telephone that hung in the kitchen was the heartbeat of the house, since replaced by Facebook and smartphones. My parents were always busy and exhausted.
This extra coordination “friction” is the killer. The lesson is, if you want more dinner parties you have to reduce the extra coordination “friction” to a minimum.
I think we also need to increase the friction of social media. But yeah, I used to live in the same apartment building as two friends so “hosting a dinner party” was as complex and sending a DM at 4pm to arrange something after work.
I would do this multiple times a week because it was so easy and required minimal coordination.
My guesses:
1. Everything costs more. A lot more.
2. Wages have stagnated for decades, unless you're in that magical IT job.
3. It's now a 2 wage earner setup to afford rent or mortgage. And smaller and less hostable residences.
4. The lower your income, the worse your schedule for planning anything. Same with friends.
5. Self-entertainment is a lot cheaper.
Basically, capitalism has squeezed out being able to afford parties, and the time commitment away from "hustling".
Even with 1995-ish, we had Married with Children, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, and Friends. All these show apartments or houses that a single worker could afford, and fund house/apartment parties. And this is a single person paying for housing.
Sure, those are fictions for TV, but it also shows just how normal and common it was, that low/middle income folks had lots of options and good amount of time. That's just no longer true for most Americans.
When you noticed you were relying on evidence from fiction, instead of verbally acknowledging that that was what you were doing, you should've stopped relying on the "evidence".
It might make sense every now and them to rely on fiction for evidence in domains where it is very hard to obtain any data at all, but in this particular, there is plenty of hard data of what US workers used to earn, what they earn now, what houses and food used to cost and what they cost now.
(I expect that the hard data will fail to support your belief that things have gotten significantly harder economically for the average person.)
Middle-aged, in the US. From my perspective, a lot of the change is due to overbooked children. My wife and I have a group of ~5 couples that we used to get together with regularly. Before any kids, it was ad-hoc, often out somewhere (dinner, bar, whatever). When the first couple had an infant, that changed to pot-lucks at their house (easy to put the kid down for the night). But now that 3 of the couples have kids, 2 of which are in middle-school, it's almost impossible to get the gang together - one of the kids always has some practice or another event. We still get tougher in smaller groups, but less frequently.
This is counter to when I was a kid - it was rare that I had a scheduled sports event on a Friday or Saturday evening. During the day, sure. But 6pm+ on Friday? Basically never. But that seems to be common now. Travel sports, so lots of weekends totally away, or specialized coaching at odd hours, or just a 3rd activity to pad that college application. It's crazy. I honestly have no idea how kids have any fun today (and I say that as somebody who played 2 varsity sports, one instrument, and was an Eagle Scout - but through middle school, I still had plenty of time for just hanging out - it was common to ride my bike for hours on a Sunday - into town, get an ice cream, across the river into DC, and back).
I had a slightly older Mexican neighbor who would go out of his way to invite everyone in the apartment complex to watch pay per view fights and cook.
He was actually from Mexico, I suspect from a culture that values community much more. I don’t know Hispanic culture that well, but I’ve also gotten this vibe from former partners.
Long long ago when my black family first moved to California they made sure to co locate in the same area. This was partially due to the realities of segregation, but it also made making dinner for your nephew much easier.
Now the community is obsolete. Replaced by insta validation loops.
This reminded me of the insurance company TV ad:
https://www.ispot.tv/ad/S7KX/geico-cancelled-plans
For a slightly different take, the great Experimental History blog wrote about this (in a way...) too:
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/there-is-no-epidemic-...
It’s just too much work for big dinners. How is that possible for a family of two workers to prepare a big dinner once for maybe 8-10 people once for a while? If I had the time I’d rather spend on sleeping or something else.
There are probably people who are good at this and love to do this, but I think there are fewer and fewer families who are into big dinners.
Dinners don’t necessarily have to be big though. My wife hosts friends over all the time but usually it’s still small intimate affairs, like average 1-2 people (and their kids if they have any) - don’t need to invite everyone at once. Maybe it’s more normal here in Japan to do small groups - when my American friends come visit they always come in giant groups and it makes everything logistically challenging (which my wife also complains about, alongside the fact that it’s impossible to have a deep conversation when 12 people are in the room).
Plus they also don’t have to be polished. Don’t bother cleaning up the house and order a pizza, and everyone will still have a good time. Or just go out to a restaurant and not worry about any of that.
Not US, under 40. The depiction of dinner parties makes me think not much was lost.
What I gleam from TV shows is: The wife invited people over to brag about her husband's recent promotion or her children's achievements. Once over, they gossiped about a perceived fault in the other family (did you see the son's long hair? I heard he smokes weed!
Sounds like a suburban nightmare. There surely are other socializing events that were more beneficial; like a weekly bowling club meeting.
Another reason is nowadays with all the variety of dietary restrictions in vogue, it’s much harder for a host to prepare a meal everyone can share. Potlucks or a bland collection of help-yourself dishes (which often are nothing more than an odd collection of appetizers) is standard fare.
I’m fortunate to have friends in their 60s and 70s where I can still enjoy the traditional dinner experience.
I actually love and fancy about big breakfasts.
Just imagine that your family and a friend's family are going to camping today. You tell the other guy, hey, tomorrow morning we are going to prepare a big breakfast for everyone. If you don't mind spending an extra 5 minutes diverting into our driveway (mine is 5 mins away from the freeway), you can have a full breakfast before we go camping. The other guy says Yes that's perfect, and the next morning the whole family roll in, smelling sausage, bacon and fried eggs.
Damn that's something I'd like to do once I get rid of my hemmorhoids.
I moved from a rich city social life to a lonely suburban one (I have regrets, there are complicating factors). I met a fellow dad who mentioned a book as we started chatting and I was excited (someone who reads!).
As we talked about this very isolation problem he told me about his neighbors who kept inviting him over and offering to watch the kids for him and how he thought it was just weird and couldn’t trust them. It broke my heart — I could just imagine the neighbors trying to be good to their community and that very behavior is met with distrust.
(I read half the book he mentioned and asked him about it the next time I saw him. Turns out he hadn’t read the book, just heard about it on a podcast. My quest to meet someone who reads continues.)
In my twenties I made spaghetti every Saturday night. This started as throwing some Ragu in a pot and adding some spices, and eventually morphed into crushing my own tomatoes and cooking over most of the day. I did this every week over years. A varied group of friends came to eat each week -- no plan, no notice, just come over if you have nothing else going on. It's how I met my wife -- I never would have had the courage to ask her out on a real date, but "I make spaghetti for my friends every Saturday, you should come over," was easier. It's been years and I don't often make spaghetti anymore.
How is the author of this piece going to cite a graph that shows an extreme increase in time spent at home that begins in 2020 and not mention COVID? We had social media in the 2010s. COVID made spending time outdoors/around other people an actual physical danger for over a year, and the psychological effects of that are lingering. Does anyone remember that one political cartoon where the guy is walking down the street, and everyone around him just looks like a virus particle? I think a lot of people consciously or subconsciously still see the world that way. If you don’t believe, reflect on how you would feel about attending a crowded indoor gathering in 2010 vs now, or how much unease you would feel if someone at the table next to you started coughing.
May I suggest a thing my wife and I started doing a couple years ago: the monthly brunch.
First Sunday of the month or whatever, we send out a reminder text, we provide coffee and a little food, people bring way more food than we can eat, and we invite everyone we know, from our different social circles. No pressure.
It’s a moderate amount of work, but it’s very gratifying to bring people together. People have made good friends at our brunch that they hang out with all the time now. It’s been interesting to see how hungry people are for social interaction, some people have driven or taken the subway more than an hour to come. People bring their kids or babies if they have them, age range is from 20s to 60s, it’s very chill.
It’s also a great “next step” when I meet someone I’d like to be friends with: “hey, my wife and I do a monthly brunch, it’s really low-key, you should come!”
For the record, I’m an introvert, but I can tell this is really good for me.