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.
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.
I personally find that I’m often extroverted and sometimes introverted. I think it’s less helpful to think of this as a static character attribute and more of a mood. I think the parent is pointing to the idea that by labeling something this may reinforce it such that introverts become more introverted by finding validation in books like Quiet, for better or worse. It’s a part of an interesting discussion that doesn’t seem to get talked about much at the very least.
I like the definition of extrovert and introvert that says that extroverts are regain their energy by being in group whereas introverts regains there by being alone. According to that, I'm an introvert, I need my alone time so that I can recenter myself and recover my energy. I do feel drained when being in events with a lot of people.
But, that doesn't stop the fact that I do like people, I like organizing parties (or rather I don't particularly like the organizing but I like the result of having organized parties and having close friends) at my place and regularly invite friends. It's just that after that I'm exhausted and I need some alone time to recover. So being an introvert doesn't imply that you shouldn't make effort to reach out to people or that you won't enjoy being with others. It just means that having some alone time is necessary to recover.
Sure, but it all depends on whether it's causing you problems or not. There are different ways to life to one's satisfaction. If you're having problems, you should change things up and push through discomfort and friction or just try things. But if you found a balance that works, then it's fine if that involves being alone a lot and just occasionally meeting people. Depends also on phase of life. In college freshman year you probably want to force yourself to go out regardless of how you feel, to establish some contacts and friends. Once you have a circle, it's fine to just live the way you enjoy it actually.
I'm an introvert. I occasionally love going to a big conference/event, including regularly speaking at them. I find it incredibly fun, and incredibly exhausting. It's fun and rewarding enough to do anyway despite being exhausting. I know other people who find it energizing.
There are people whose feelings about it vary, but there are also people whose feelings about it are consistent but they do it anyway, and that sometimes gets mistaken for variability.
You're making the mistake of supposing that since you are often extroverted you assume that many or even most people must be similar, just on a gradient. This is quite an extroverted think to think, so I believe you :)
I'm here to tell you that you are most certainly wrong on this point. People exist that view this kind of thinking as so bafflingly alien that they can't understand how someone would think it.
Social interactions require enormous expenditure of energy for me. They are not pleasant or energizing, they are rituals that must be accomplished to help me blend into a world that is not designed for me. I am most assuredly not being convinced of this by books I have read.
This is such a clear headed comment, so many people use this introvert trait as an excuse for not making any effort to reach out even to dear friends, to not step out of their own comfort, and to not take any risk.
I believe that all we have in the world are our relationships, maybe hermits are content in their way of life because they never could truly socialize but I don't know about them being fully happy.
What we call shyness to me could be understood as a lack of social intelligence mixed with little self-confidence, both of which you can gain by being out-reaching and taking risks. Not to put the blame on anyone of course because it does take real hard work for "introverts". But again, it is to big a deal to be an oversight and not try to be better in your own way.
I don't know if it is clear headed. It disregards scientific consensus on introversion / extraversion being a real thing, and it also speaks against the actual experience of many people. Furthermore, you conflate introverts with hermits.
A lot of introverts actually like contact with other people. They often prefer smaller groups and a certain connection, they are more picky. And need some time alone afterwards.
But that doesn't mean they are hermits.
I used to think I like parties. That I have to like it. That something was wrong with me for not liking it. Now I know it is ok to not have fun at a party, and prefer a walk with a good friend or my wife. I am much happier this way.
As someone who had many years of depression, I know social isolation too. And it is just not the same.
That said, I admit it can at the same thing also be true that people cop out of a healthy way to stretch their boundaries or even expend just a little effort by mistakenly labeling themselves as introvert. Such misuse of the label doesn't mean it doesn't refer to a real thing and a real experience.
> lack of social intelligence mixed with little self-confidence, both of which you can gain by being out-reaching and taking risks.
I live this. Even today, I have to make myself be social, I have to practice (my first job as a waiter was the best thing to happen to me).
The human engagement muscle atrophies when you indulge "introversion" (for all definitions and causes), and our age of infinite individual delights has tipped the tradeoff towards "alone and easy". I wish the sensitivity toward and acceptance of "neurodivergent" had more recognition that the way humans have been doing things for the last 15000 years might have had some value.
At least since the agricultural revolution (settling happened at various times depending on region, but we are talking thousands of years, up to 12k) up until a couple of hundred years ago most people lived in small communities of a few hundred people, where their great-great-grandparents also lived, huge extended family networks, regular festivities and behaviors tied to and strongly prescribed by farming work seasons and religious customs, semi-arranged marriages, job/land inherited from father to son.
There is nothing "natural" about living in some cramped city, meeting strangers all the time, trying to build connections and everybody leaving within 3-5 years to hundreds of miles away, navigating relationships online, working for big corporations with no stable coworkers, having to mingle with strangers all the time whose reputation, past etc you know nothing of etc.
We previously were more accepting, eg, if you read the accounts of various socialites trying to include shy, reclusive, or eccentric friends in high society, you see real effort and concern to include them despite the difference in behavior.
We dropped all that social connection/obligation and associated support it provided for various people when we stopped doing things that historic way.
Talking about a thing to virtue signal is not the same as doing a thing.
It might be clear headed in tone but the argument is fundamentally absurd.
People are different. People have different preferences. Everyone’s mind works in different ways. Any argument that can be summed up as “you’re just no trying hard enough” is fundamentally unsound, unhealthy, unhelpful and entirely disrespectful.
I'm not sure, I think there is value in pushing through friction regardless of if you are introverted or not. One thing that is common to all humans is that loneliness correlates strongly with lack of satisfaction in life and being less healthy.
Before we talked as much about introversion and extroversion, people felt more obligated to do certain social events that they can more easily reject nowadays. That does mean it was uncomfortable and they had to push through friction because it's draining for introverts to do social events but being there also helped with making group of friends and staving loneliness. I do think this change in mores is one of the factors that contributes to the so called loneliness epidemics nowadays.
I'm not too sure about that. Personally I feel like for myself it's tied up with self esteem. I have confidence in my skills, just never when there's strangers watching. Also to maintain the world state in your head and avoid stepping on toes etc.
I can feel my heart rate go up. Sometimes when asking or answering questions in the lecture hall I start quivering. Just the thought of standing up, preparing my question and follow ups can cause this.
You may be right in that it's an excuse. But at the same time there's this disgusting physical reaction and yes it's easier to give in than to stand up.
It's easier to interact with loved ones and close friends because you know they know you and won't judge if you say something wrong etc. But not so for any other interaction.
Once I realized my introversion was psychological and mutable, not some fixed aspect of my personality, it changed my life.
We tend to anchor ourselves to labels. Lots of introverts I meet limit themselves in life needlessly because "I'm an introvert!" I see my old self in them.
I see my old self in what you’re saying. I used to be extremely extroverted, spending nearly all my free time socializing, but now I find much more life satisfaction as an introvert. I derive a lasting sense of pleasure and peace from the things I build, especially physical things, while social interactions only created at best a fleeting sense of satisfaction. I also have much more time for reading, contemplation, and enjoying nature.
I get more than enough social time from my partner and a small handful of friends that I see on occasion. I lived quite a full social life, with a huge variety of people and activities, yet surprisingly I don’t find it all that memorable or important in retrospect. It’s a similar feeling to looking back on one of my former careers.
Good on you. But this doesn’t apply to everyone. Hell, I’d even be willing to bet that your case is extremely niche.
Introversion can be a byproduct of so many different things that saying “it’s just a label” is not only absurd by itself, but utterly disrespectful too. It can be a choice too, sure, but that’s not the case for quite a lot of people.
I personally avoid to think about my self with labels about what "immutable" things "I am". Like "he is tall", "he has Z skin color", "he has 9 fingers", "he has brain type X", "he is thin", etc.
I do care about what values, passions and friends I have, and I have tried to find a set that is consistent.
I do not mind if someone tells me "I am an introvert", even if I do not find it extremely interesting. But if he says "I am introvert and will be unhappy all my life because I can't change that", I can't avoid thinking that he is focusing on something that does not help.
> 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.
That doesn't mean it didn't exist then, it means it either wasn't socially acceptable or wasn't understood (or both) then. See also the graphs of left-handedness over time, which were basically flat at the actual level of left-handedness except for a big dip during the century or so when left-handed people were commonly forced to hide it and use their right hands.
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.
Introversion is a learned behavior of comfort. Extroversion is a learned behavior of comfort. "Damage" is going outside your comfort zone. Everyone can damage their comfort zone. The brain and body is a chemical soup refined from a combination of your DNA and your environment (what you feed it and are exposed to). The question is, in a society of freedom and free will, if your environment forces you into a behavior you're unhappy with, is that truly damaging?
This is such an arrogant thing to say and completely untrue.
> The question is, in a society of freedom and free will, if your environment forces you into a behavior you're unhappy with, is that truly damaging?
Being forced to conform to a set pattern of social behaviour/enjoyment is thoroughly damaging to your psychological health. It baffles me that anyone would think not.
Humans have a great capacity to convince ourselves of anything, it's the beauty of language! For every decision you want to make, you can always find one quote or idiom supporting it, and another against it. Yes we have to learn from the lessons of history yet every time "it's different this time"!
From my memory of the 80’s, the introverts dealt with the stress of dealing with so many people for so long by quietly getting drunk enough to talk to people.
I think the concept has some value, but like most behavioral labels they’ve become so loosely defined and abused that they barely mean anything any more.
I can’t count how many people have chatted my ear off and bounced around the office, engaging other people in spontaneous enthusiastic conversation every day, only later to have them claim they’re introverted. The colloquial usage has expanded to encompass anyone who some times feels like staying home and watching Netflix instead of going out on Friday night. In other words, everyone.
I agree that it also becomes an excuse. I’ve had friends who really enjoy socializing and going to social events and also lament social isolation and loneliness, but being an “introvert” becomes the driving factor in their decision making about what to do on weekends or after work. You can see how much they enjoy social events when they’re basically obligated to attend (weddings, special event parties, immense peer pressure from friends trying to get them out of the house) but when left to their own decisions they’ll decide to stay home and be lazy 10 out of 10 times with “I’m an introvert” as the excuse. I’m excluding people with conditions like social anxiety disorder from this description, before anyone comments with whatabouts.
It gets really bad when they reach their 30s and 40s and they wonder why their friends have stopped sending invites to things (because they never accept) and they complain that dating is impossibly difficult (because they only leave the house for work)
Honestly if this doesn’t sound a “the fuck am I saying?” alarm in your head I don’t know what to tell ya.
This isn’t a recent phenomenon. People have different social tendencies. People have always had different social tendencies. And this is way before you even factor in things like neurodivergence possibly tilting one towards preferring isolation or more intimate/lone activities.
It boggles the mind that anyone would think the introversion/extraversion dichotomy a product of modern times.
It’s a little odd how everyone is misreading this comment.
They are not saying that introverted and extroverted characteristics did not exist in people, they are saying that people did not run around proclaiming their introverted or extroverted status in the same way they do today and they didn’t use it to rationalize behaviour to the same extent.
This is never a popular take but I think you completely nailed it. Anytime I see someone who has framed their world through the extrovert/introvert lens it's always done as justification for antisocial behavior. Lots of buzz phrases like "needing to recharge your batteries" while never admitting that socializing itself is a skill that needs practice to improve at so it doesn't feel like as much work.
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?
Introversion means "finding company tiring". It doesn't mean you don't enjoy company. Most (but not all) introverts find company to be pleasurable for a limited period of time.
> 3 or 4 people who I know well is optimal for me.
Then invite 3 or 4 people over. That's much more than what most people do. Sounds like the optimal party size to me.
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.
I think you're spot on about it being type 1/type 2: people have stopped doing a lot of type 2 fun activities, because they have many more type 1 fun activities and because it's no longer socially obligatory to have type 2 fun.
If you do type 2 fun often enough, the level of anxiety drops. Imagine hosting a game night once: you have to ensure all your friends can attend, you agonize over the snacks, over picking the right games to play.
But if you power through and establish a tradition or join an existing one, it becomes simple, e.g.: every Thursday at 7pm you meet for a game of whatever you've been playing last week and a new game the host picked, the host brews tea, the guests bring whatever snacks they want. At the end of the session, you choose which game to play next week: the old one or the new one.
> 3 or 4 people who I know well is optimal for me.
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 understand the feeling, what worked for me was "you know what, fuck it, I will just plan it more loosely, let's see what goes wrong or who is unhappy".
Most of the times, everybody is happy even if things are not perfectly planned, and then they thank me for the "effort" (which was minimal, and sometimes can introduce confusions, as I need to adjust the date or the style as more constraints become evident).
I sometimes think it's a problem of my education of engineering as well, because I want everything planned well, think of all exceptional cases, etc.
> 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. But I think it's more than just about being an introvert or extrovert.
In the past, boredome created a reason for most people to visit someone, play cards, host friends, or go somewhere.
At present, more and more people (introverts and extroverts) are already turning to social media, streaming, gaming, YouTube, and any other online platforms as these offer modern, instant, unlimited entertainment with almost no coordination or planning.
Even introverts need social connection (perhaps more so) - research here [1]. Introverts are people who feel they have used energy when interacting socially, rather than gaining energy from social interaction. It's not shyness or anti-social traits.
It will feel like more of a chore for introverts, but it's like a chore you need to do even if it feels bad in the moment, like doing laundry or exercising.
And worse for introverts - people who never invite other people eventually stop getting invited themselves, so to maintain social connection requires introverts to sometimes be the driver of the event.
I think of my wife and myself as extroverts and we do have a very large social circle. Still we don’t host as often as we wanted, maybe once every two months. One of the reasons is it can get very expensive. The last party we threw was a Sunday brunch for about 15 adults and a handful of kids, and we spent over $500 just in pastries. People still bring stuff but we don’t expect them to. Dinner can get even more expensive particularly if you cook meat dishes these days. Then all the time it takes which also translates into money. To host a dinner party it takes me part of the week shopping and the entire weekend cooking and organizing. So most times is better just to call a couple of friends and go out to a restaurant.
$25 a person just in pastries is pretty astounding. I think I could make it happen with the most expensive bakery (which is imo not the best in town but close to it) and eating little else. So hats off, that’s impressive. Hope they were enjoyed, great pastries are really a delight.
Eh, in this economy I think it's fine to request contribution, either material or monetary. Also once every two months or so is pretty decent, cheers to you
Depends what you do. I enjoyn hosting big parties because I spend a lot of time cooking for them, which I love doing and everyone appreciates. Then I have the opportunity to interact as much as I want.
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.
Character traits, technology, leisure time, have all changed.
It's not either or, it's all of the above: individuals do what feels good and if you're a great party thrower because it energizes you, you'll probably spread that influence some. And then possibly, the group reinforces itself by continuing to throw and attend parties.
At the same time, leisure time has changed: women work more, dads spend more time with kids, and the home offers a lot more easy entertainment that fits in with modern schedules. There seems to be less opportunities for parties with newer generations.
But of course, society seems to shun the party thrower because we're all busy. And so if nobody shows and the party thrower burns out, there's no influence spread. People dislike parties more and the idea reinforces again.
A mix of any of the above goes into our decisions about how to spend time.
I used to believe in this dichotomy but not anymore. I've seen ppl go from shutin to extroverts after they have kids. So called introverts never learn how to enjoy socialization so it drains them.
I dont know where it started but we've turned this whole introvert/extrovert stuff into some sort of immutable characteristic.
I wonder if intro/extra-version is less explanatory than the people-who-enjoy-doing-things-on-vacation vs people-who-enjoy-doing-nothing-on-vacation divide. I'm an introvert who loves throwing parties because I can perform hosting chores if I feel awkward (prep food, do dishes, refill drinks, introduce people).
That said, hiking up a mountain sounds like a great vacation to me, in a type 1 and 2 way. Active recreation is my gratifying form of recreation (balanced of course with some down time after), but I know this sounds like hell to a lot of people. I'm not sure we have a word for this divide as a culture.
Introversion is a skill issue. People who aren’t extroverts are just not as good at socialising, so they find it difficult and tiring, but they could get better and then it would be easy.
> 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.
As someone who has (and occasionally still does) throw parties, I totally do not relate. It's just tiring. I don't have time to mingle with the guests.
I prefer small, simple invitations. Ideally 2 families. Simple food. Not a lot of ceremony. Get together and talk (or play games, or whatever).
Similarly, I've drastically reduced going to bigger parties - at least with some hosts. These are people I like and want to spend time with, but they only throw large parties, and I get virtually no time with them at the party - they're too busy.
What I'm finding is that - as you noticed - people tend to want to be all or nothing. I'm having trouble finding people like me. I want to socialize, but not this way.
When I read the article, I immediately thought of several reasons he hadn't listed. Too tired to go into detail, but some of them are: Marriage and what was previously a 2 body problem became a 4 body problem (4 being the lower bound). Dual income with kids - we barely get enough time with the kids, and throwing a big party means neglecting them much, much more. Several other factors. This really is death by a thousand cuts.
I agree about the two groups. I spent years trying to invite some friends to our home for dinner, but we always had "scheduling conflicts." Then one time I suggested going out to a restaurant, and we immediately scheduled it and did it that weekend. I finally figured out that they didn't want to come to our home because they thought that then they would have to recipricate and invite us over, which they didn't want to do.
What I would do is to invite people to a restaurant for a reciprocation to their invitation of us to their home. We would honestly acknowledge that we don’t know how to cook well and don’t plan to improve that before the universe dies.
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.
Same situation for me - my wife is an extrovert's extrovert, and I am on the introvert side. However, I'm the one who organizes and hosts a quarterly cocktail party. It's a lot work - after every one of these parties I tell myself "I'm not doing those anymore". But I've received so much positive feedback from the attendees that I end up doing it again. It ultimately is very satisfying and worth the effort for me.
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.
Totally agree with this. People are usually pretty eager to help out (particularly the introverts - this can give them a momentary break from socializing, while alos making them feel included).
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.
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.
> 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.
The funny thing is that I used to go clubbing regularly because to me that was not about socialising per se. I'd be happy to go alone into an anonymous mass of people and just dance and switch off. I'd still need time to recover, but not nearly as much as with a group of people I'm expected to talk to.
That's universally held for me in other contexts as well. E.g. I can speak in front of thousands - and have - and not stress out at all. They're a non-descript mass at that point. I'm just talking, not conversing. But if any of them try to corner me to talk to me afterward? That is exhausting.
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)
Call me introvert or not, before doing the exercise I feel a little resistance to do it, but after - feel very energized. For parties: it's diametrically different - feel big boost of dopamine before party, but after - I feel some regrets, so I'm just trying to not think about later.
I don't feel regrets per se, but I do certainly need to recover, while after exercise I feel good. Regular exercise usually makes me more likely to exercise more, while with social functions that's not viable for me.
Only a specific subset of people enjoy running a marathon. Hell, as it is a fixed length (and not a fixed duration), it is even worse if you are not at the top of fitness and VO2max: how many people would enjoy running for 6+ hours?
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.)
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 don't know that I agree. My dad used to be pretty solitary when he was younger, but now that he's retired, he's constantly socializing and has built a large network of friends (which is really good for his mental health).
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.
1. People work more. In particular, the shift to dual-income households means that women, who traditionally planned most parties before, no longer have time.
2. the shift to "lots of kids, sparse parenting" to "few kids, lots of investment" becomes another time sink focusing families inwards on themselves instead of outwards on the wider community
3. People just have less friends. especially so for a) single b) non college-degree and c) lower-income people. Probably due to #1 and the whole dating app epidemic no one has had a serious conversation about yet.
4. And yes, as you alluded to, it is "more fun to be alone" in the modern day. Less incentive to go out if you don't "feel" lonely nor bored.
I guess I could have just quoted the provided summary, but where's the fun in that?
>In sum: The death of the host is the story of lonely unmarried people and harried married dual-earner households; anxious parents spending more time with their children and less time with friends; and the typical home becoming such a riot of diverting comfort that people no longer have to invite human beings to interrupt their boredom.
Is that it though, parents with no time? Do single people with no kids socialize more than parents once they are past high school and college? Im not so sure.
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 wonder if increasing rates of two income families has changed the tradeoffs.
My partner and I basically stopped having people over to dinner after our first kid was born. We want to, but it’s difficult to make the time to prepare the house for hosting, assemble a meal worthy of guests, and clean up afterward. When I was a kid my mother, who stayed at home, would do the lion’s share of that work, and the people who invited us over were also single income families.
But also, it’s not like we aren’t socializing at all. We’re just much more likely to arrange lower-effort gatherings such as picnics in the park.
That said, we’d probably do it a lot more if it were possible to get affordable health care while working a 30 hour work week.
This also depends on the pennies we have to spare. I also as a middle aged and middle class European like to invite friends over, but the youth these days (and many many adults, at least around here) don't have the money to spend on this. Not the only reason, but a substantial one IMO.
there's more than two types, because the type that never throws parties can be subdivided into smaller groups of people who throw parties due to familial requirements - kids, visiting relatives from other countries and so forth.
I self-identify as an introvert and don't much like social obligations. Nevertheless it's nice every once in a while that my wife drags me into them. If she's not there as a catalyst, I would probably be rotting at home with vitamin D deficiency.
Grateful for people who host and provide social opportunities even though I'm sometimes not outwardly social.
I'd like to share my experience throwing parties, and some thoughts on introversion & extroversion.
I held weekly board game nights at my home for a year or two during the latter part of COVID. I loved board games and missed the weekly meetups that stopped happening due to lockdown. I only invited very close friends, all of whom are still very close. And I genuinely ruined my love of board games from how frustrating the experience proved to be. I put in a lot of effort to be a good host and everyone sure seemed to want to play board games, but over and over it was like herding cats once they were over. They were all acting in good faith, and yet that experience burned me out so much and my brain now associates board games with that experience so much that I barely play anymore, and don't enjoy it like I once did.
Now whether you want to use the label "introvert" or not, I was determined to push outside of my comfort zone that was staying in alone. But each of those dozens of nights drained me in a way that that cumulatively has left an emotional scar deep enough to impact my identity (being a person who loves board games was part of who I was, a part I liked)
I suspect that of the ways people will respond to this story, there are two that will be most common
1. What the heck are you talking about? I can't imagine having that experience
and
2. Yeah, that tracks
Whether or not you call those groups extrovert & introvert, and whether you believe such preferences are inherent, learned behavior, or social conditioning, here is a truth:
Trying to change your nature, however you came to have it, comes with a cost and can go wrong.
So for those who consider introversion to be mere choice, I encourage you to be less flippant in how you try to convince people of that.
It's almost unbelievable that people like you exist. Attending a gathering is torture enough. Hosting one, repeatedly at that, sounds like living in the ninth circle of hell.
People might be getting fatter or more unfit. Still there are subcultures where people are fit as all --. The commitment is unreal. The amount they can talk about fitness is truly endless. And if you asked them it would be all about character and social milieu. Things might have changed in the last decades, but that’s at best uninteresting facts to them.
More and more divergence, subcultures, while the mean tends towards a bad direction. And no understanding. Because why don’t they Just Do It?
>people who regularly throw a party and people who never do it.
I have no doubt it might seem that way, but it doesn't seem like an interesting divide because the categorization doesn't really tell you anything about the people. But it's definitely a good rule of to thumb to remember the next time someone feels annoyed that "so and so never throws parties." It's also true when you visit friends in cities you never been. Some are natural and enthusiastic tour guides, some shun such a role.
But my guess is many the "never hosts" threw at least one party in the past and had a terrible experience and decided they suck at it.
I'm also assuming the never people you know are capable of throwing parties in terms of house size etc, and that you accounted for the ineligible in that respect.
I know people who are self-conscious about their messy houses and the idea of maintaining a presentable tidy house for parties would be enough for them to dismiss the idea outright even though they would like to do it in theory.
> 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.
The article actually mentions lower income people rarely hosting anything, and simply having less frienships. So it is also in some small part an economic issue.
You're doing the Lord's work. Thank you so much for that, even though I don't directly benefiting from it.
There is an epidemic of disconnection and loneliness, Putnam and others are 100% right. There's an organized effort by some people to isolate humans from each other as much as possible, and they have their own swarm of useful idiots to aide them.
The solution to this problem needs explicit action, this is not something that will take care of itself, or people would adapt to it.
I bought a domain recently, https://clubs.fyi that I will devote to this purpose of human connection[1], if anyone wants to join shoot me an email, there's nothing there yet but there will be stuff in a week or so. :)
1. Not connection in the SF-sense like Facebook, Meetup, etc.
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.
> It was not something my parents enjoyed, but rather an obligation they felt they had to uphold. ... 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.
It's worth noting that not everything that's good for you is enjoyable, especially in the moment.
Avoiding everything that's a "drag" means staying alone, passively consuming easy media, not exercising, eating hyper-palatble junk food, getting obese and probably depressed, etc.
> 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.
While I agree that those cloying clickbait articles/videos idealizing random pre-smartphone teen photos and videos are obnoxious (as someone who grew up in that era). I think the modern emphasis on mindlessly reducing "friction" is going to prove ultimately unwise, though probably uncorrected as generational turnover causes people to forget what was lost, and certain degradation gets redefined as "normal" and accepted.
> My parents were always busy and exhausted.
So are modern parents, and all indications are they are more exhausted.
Back in the 80s/90s, when my grandma was alive, we used to have big holiday dinners for the whole big family (I think in total of 10+ people) in her small apartment (about 20 m^2, perhaps even less). It was extremely crowdy and some people used to eat standing outside and chat with each other. But it was also one of my best memories.
30+ years forward, I moved to a new country, and we only have one kid. We haven't had this kind of big dinner for decades since my grandma passed away in the late 90s.
The families are getting smaller and more atomized, so only people who are VERY into big dinners throw them.
I am retired now and lucky to have my (now adult) children living nearby. Every Friday I cook a large pizza dinner for everyone, their spouses, and their children, and any friends they want to invite. I will always be an introvert, but this weekly meal is the highlight of my week.
The difference between this and what my parents did is that I host for my own pleasure and for what it does to bind the family together. I don't expect reciprocal invitations, and no obligation is ever implied (I hope).
Yeah that's really good, and I agree with the sentiment.
TBH, if I were to retire today, I'd love to do that, too. I only have one son, so probably it's not going to be a big dinner, but I'd also invite friends of the family, too.
My grandma had four kids who all married and gave her ten nephews in total. On new year's eve we had this large dinners where pretty much 20 people gathered (sometimes more, when nephews got old enough to bring their partner OR some other uncle/aunt from other sides of the family joined).
> Everyone was constantly falling ill with colds or flu
That’s just anyone who has small kids. Or works in healthcare, childcare, or any service industry really. It has nothing to do with 1975 vs 2025 (unless you’re one of the small amount of people who work remotely, and you don’t have kids or a spouse who falls into one of the above categories).
Also after a few years you stop getting so many colds.
> Simultaneously, air pollution is down, which lowers symptoms
That’s very likely true.
> one big difference is indoor air ventilation standards improved dramatically, leading to less spread of disease indoors.
I don’t know if this is. In 1975 air conditioning was much less prevalent, so people were much more likely to open windows. Buildings were also much leakier.
And it’s not simple as building ventilation has steadily improved,
so teasing out the impact is almost impossible. In the 80s there was a big push for energy efficiency, so we went from 15 cfm/person in 1973 to 5 in 1981 then back to 20 in 1989.
But building envelopes also got much tighter, so there’s less uncontrolled ventilation.
I think respiratory flu is far less common now than it was. I have had a legit case of the flu only once in my adult life. After spending 15 years teaching in a public school, I had countless colds but never caught the flu. Of course, annual flu vaccines might have helped. Those weren't available in the 70s.
Strep throat was also a very common complaint in the letters. Throat cultures, home visits from the pediatrician, etc., were frequent, especially for my brother. I haven't seen a single case of strep in my extended family since. Maybe just lucky.
Many things have improved over the decades, but we do have an array of exciting tick-borne illnesses to make up for it!
> I think respiratory flu is far less common now than it was. I have had a legit case of the flu only once in my adult life. After spending 15 years teaching in a public school, I had countless colds but never caught the flu.
They’re not far less common in average. Rates have gone down a bit with the annual flu shot, but there’s a few things going on.
-Flu rates vary wildly by year and decade. There were a few big pandemics where a very large percentage of people got the flu.
-There was no way to easily test for the flu, so people said they had it more frequently than they did.
In a given year about 12% of kids will come down with symptomatic influence which is not too far off from what we can estimate that historic numbers were in an average year.
>Strep
I looked up studies on this. Nothing conclusive, but likely no large change.
Recommendations about when to test have changed though because it turns out that if you culture every kid with a runny nose a large percentage of them will come back positive even though their symptoms are viral.
So you’re probably right that you notice fewer diagnosed strep cases, but there aren’t actually fewer symptomatic cases.
There also used to be pretty strong social expectations to host and visit such parties. That was essentially gone by like 1990, for my area, and I always kind of got the feel that everyone was glad to see the expectation disappear.
They can be fun, but I and almost everyone that I'm friends with much prefer to simply visit and hang out with no plans at all. Just be there, maybe chat a bit, maybe ignore each other and read a book for a few hours, maybe find something to eat / do a lightweight potluck. Which rather sucked that COVID ended up shutting down almost all of our communal places to visit for that.
> It was not something my parents enjoyed, but rather an obligation they felt they had to uphold.
understandable, but if you think about it, it's kinda the price of keeping your "social network" alive. people nowadays understand that romantic relationships need maintenance and effort, but don't (yet?) understand that friendship require at least some maintenance as well. i guess that was even true-r before social media when you weren't constantly updated about what happened in friend X, Y and Z's lives.
most people nowadays don't really want to pay that price to keep relationships alive... and it's showing.
> My parents were always busy and exhausted.
what i'm about to write is absolutely anecdotical, but: i don't see people my age (30-40 years old) like super-relaxed either.
Same for me in the 80s. We'd always have the extended family together multiple times a year and frequently at my house. My mom always stressed out over it and it's the only time she yelled at my brother and I for not cleaning enough. I occasionally enjoyed playing with cousins but mostly found it annoying that all these people were using my house.
Nowadays, we definitely get together much less often but also it's usually at a restaurant.
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.
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.
Before screens you visited even less. Well if you compare the 1960s to today - but the 1960s had the phone as well. Compare 1700 to today and you realize quickly that "visiting your sister who married just one village over is a big deal and it couldn't happen often".
Tools are not value neutral, and it’s time we internalise that. Tools are designed with a purpose. An AK-47 is a tool. Its purpose is killing. Its creator was acutely aware of it and by the end even expressed remorse.
Yes, screens can be enabling, but your parent comment is obviously talking of the norm we’re facing. Facebook isn’t value neutral, neither is Instagram, nor TikTok, nor a myriad other insanely popular services which command too many lives. Those are tools designed explicitly to suck up your time, to feed the bellies of their owners at your expense.
Digital tools are made even more not value neutral by the fact that other humans are actively influencing them even while you're using them, via "the algorithm", "dark design patterns", etc.
At least with an AK-47 or a hammer, once you own it physically, it's yours and the original creator isn't sending you subtle psychological nudges to utilize it one way or the other.
I mean... you are substituting your family on a little screen for going out into the real world and making some new friends. I'd argue that, yes, just because you wrap it in "I love my family don't question me" it doesn't change anything.
>Spoken like someone with no friends or relatives that live far away. Screens can also be extremely connecting.
Most my family is scattered. Screens can be connecting. But it doesn't replace local connection and my experience seems more to delay the inevitable drifting away of such relations due to distance. I suppose it at least tests how much your loved ones care to keep in contact with you.
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.
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. I used to watch she cooking and it was so elegant. She uses the stove to its full, including baking, and still has the leisure to talk to me and cut raw food quickly.
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.
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.
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.
that's true. and I noticed that was true when I met my internet friends in real life and I noticed the real life interaction made the bond much more valuable and more complex than it was.
even when it's GOOD it's not as good as real life, however, it does take less effort.
I actually doubt it. For one, "blame" implies damage and I'm not sure this is even a real problem. But I actually think it corresponds with rising prosperity (which councides with the rise of technology). People associate with tribes and clans for mutual support and protection and it's just much less necessary now.
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.
For me it's indeed around COVID where my habits changed. That deserves more attention indeed. Something about the vibe changed. Could be just me, and could be just a coincidence that is happened around COVID. But it's worth considering.
Where I'm from religious observance went down considerably and permanently - it was declining before the pandemic, but it reached a tipping point only in the early 20s.
Apparently everyone was attending mass largely because everyone else was.
I'd be interested to see how the drop correlates with pets. We got a dog during COVID, she acclimated to a house which never has guests. Now she can't handle guests. Shame on us, perhaps, but anyway there it is.
The chart cutting off in 2022 makes it hard to glean too much.
I no longer worry at all about attending a crowded indoor gathering - those would be impossible to avoid in NYC - but enjoying “a night in” without kids is a distinctly post-COVID phenomenon for myself and many people I know
> COVID made spending time outdoors/around other people an actual physical danger for over a year, and the psychological effects of that are lingering.
It actually never stopped being a physical danger. The only thing that changed is how long it takes for the damage to unfold.
At the start of COVID, people were rightfully shocked that hospitals and morgues were overflowing, and they reacted accordingly. That's no longer an issue (for now) with these latest strains, but acquiring Long COVID and dealing with its effects is definitely still a real concern.
Long COVID is vastly underdiagnosed. You might not get it until your 4th/5th/6th re-infection. That reinfection might also be asymptomatic, and/or Long COVID doesn't set in until weeks or months afterward, meaning people often don't link the two events. People not taking precautions (majority) are getting re-infected on average once per year since immunity from a previous infection typically wanes after 6 months, and there are about two waves per year for any given area.
Vaccines are of limited utility since they don't prevent transmission. A consistently worn N95 in public spaces is the only reliable means of defense, and everybody in your household needs to do that in public for it to be effective within your household.
I'll take you seriously when I see scientists and doctors masking up and taking the precautions that you COVID truthers still cling to. Go to an infectious disease conference. They don't look like people who think like you.
It's not hard to find the science backing my claims. As for why doctors don't mask, they're humans too, and just as susceptible to propaganda and competing forces like wanting to "return to normal" or simply having kids in school and assuming getting them to mask is too tall of an order (frankly, it is imo).
Here's a Canadian researcher who still masks and explains how the many 'mistakes' were made in order to convince people to throw caution to the wind:
But that didn't make the threat go away. People just pretended that it did. Group psychology is weird like that. Further compounding matters is the fact that neverending COVID reinfections impacts the part of the brain responsible for executive function, making it that much easier for people to not care. The more common and palatable term is "brain fog." Toxoplasmosis has a similar known reinforcing effect.
We still know so little about Long COVID. For all we know, it's just going to be the next (or contemporary) microplastics debate where we just have to live with it until we start really seeing long term effects. But since it's not affecting our ability to make the rich richer, we won't get much serious mainstream support for the issue. Instead focusing on diligent work in labs in the background.
All that said: I don't do it myself, but I don't judge people who choose to mask up regularly when going out in public. It's a semi-normal thing in Asian communities, and I have two close (non-Asian) friends who do it. If nothing else, COVID de-stigmatized that practice here in the US.
As somebody who masks regularly in 2026, I definitely don't judge people who don't. Most people don't know the true risks, and even for those who do, the two lifestyles come with some important tradeoffs that I don't think should be forced on anybody, one way or the other.
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).
Overbooked children or just mathematical combination? If you have 5 friends each with 1 kid and the kid only does 2 things a week chances are you won’t ever get them all together.
Seems like these parents are prioritizing their kids and probably encouraging things they enjoy doing rather than wine night. Chances are the kids are enjoying life.
I'm sure it's a bit of both, but as I said, when I was a kid in this region, it was uncommon for any Friday night activities for the kids. Weeknights and weekend mornings/afternoons, absolutely. But we're not trying to get together on a random Tuesday.
Wednesday was Peewee/little kid sports, Thursday evening was Jr High sports games, Friday evening was High School sports games, and Saturday was college sports games.
Where I grew up (and live now) - DC metro - those games are often Friday, but it's not that common for families without high school kids to attend. And by the time the kids are in high school (or even middle school), the parents just drop them and come home. But yeah, unsurprising that these are bigger social events south and mid-west.
Some families have multiple children. Those kids are quite frequently of different ages, and thus will have entirely different activities (most high school football teams will not allow 5th graders to play, for example).
Those activities frequently overlap. No, Cub Scouts does not care that the high school basketball game overlaps with the camping trip because Cub Scouts are not in high school. Parents are (still) not able to be in two places at a time.
This means that at least some of the time, the older kid goes to their game without their parents. (Because the younger child frequently cannot.)
If you are able to solve this for those parents, you can be the first $1B single-employee company.
maybe because I don't live in a car-centric country, but I would just bike there myself with my friends, play, and bike home with my friends. From I was a kid until end of high school. Parents would often come to watch, but not always, and the fun was being with my friends anyways so it didn't matter.
At a typical US high school, not very many of the students are actually playing. For most of them, it's mainly a social event, something to take a date to, or a time to hang out in the bleachers with peers.
Even if you have one child playing (or on the bench, or in the band, or cheerleading) and have come to watch, your other similar-age children will likely not be interested in sitting with you. They will want to sit with their friends, and rightfully so!
I was in marching band (so I played at all the games). Is that not normal?
I guess it's just a generational thing, but my late Gen X mother was simply busy. Army drills twice a month will do that. I also concur with other responses that these were all social events anyway, so it's not like I was yearning for Mom to be there.
Same - my friends group had weekly (and sometimes more than-weekly) gatherings that all faded away when kids arrived. The group aligned more around kids and new friends met through kids activities.
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.
I do agree that this is a very good quality of a wife. I have a friend whose wife is like this and I can't tell you how much effort he saved for himself.
There are more good qualities to look for than anyone can possess. Just make sure your partner has good qualities and encourage them. Then have "a village" where other good qualities that you have have between the two of you cover as much of the rest as possible.
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.)
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.
But that's also great, meeting in a restaurant or bar. Or perhaps renting a cabinet space in one. Or just going on a picnic or free outdoor concert together. Doesn't need to be someone's home. I feel a lot of these things have shrunk massively.
Yes, I agree. What I'm finding, though, is everyone else in my circle doesn't value meeting in a restaurant. They insist these things should be in a home. Or if it's a restaurant, someone should pay for the whole crowd. And as you can imagine, it eventually becomes a "I do all this effort to invite family X to our home for parties, but they never invite us to their home" - conveniently forgetting that family X does want to spend time with them - just not at their own home.
I also found that they seem to value the tradition and style (quality of food, quality of dinnerware, quality of decoration, etc) much more than the company.
Before marriage, we (guys) would get together often. After marriage, it promptly stopped. And the accounting began.
As I said in another comment, the causes of the decline are plenty, and nothing really dominates. I've given a few reasons here and elsewhere, but I'm sure there are many more. It's a death by a thousand cuts. The reasons I give here are due to a certain sub-clique. It won't apply to others' experiences.
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.
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.
I think there's this huge gap coming with age. Nobody does that spaghetti thing anymore, good friends after finishing school move elsewhere, responsibilities in many new fields increase and the opportunities to meet hundred candidates decrease exponentially. So even if you'd continue doing the spaghetti, I doubt you'd have too many to feed...
Alternatively, one could hold a social interaction not centered around some form of consumption, and then you don't have to worry about satisfying people's consumptive preferences
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.
You'll want to try and expand your circle of friends to include those that are the planning type and will bring variety to the location. Either that, or start changing the location.
If you don't, people will get bored and eventually the group will disband.
> For any number of reasons, women seem to do better than men at making and keeping adult friendships
I think it’s social pressure and necessity.
When I fail to get my kids a thing they need to school people shrug their shoulders, and I think “I tried” but the pressure on my wife seems to be higher. She judges herself and others judge her harder. Likewise, to meet that pressure she uses her friend group for utility in the same way I might reach out to programmer friends I met at a conf to get a PR merged. She has a bench of mom friends who can pickup her kids and they will expect the same favor in return.
There is a family in our school group where the dad is much more active in that role as connector and planner, but it seems harder for him. I don't think people reach out to him as much for shared favors so he has to try harder. And beyond necessity, they are forming friends. I think the other primary caregivers that are usually women just do not think of him as friend material as quickly or easily as the other mothers. So overall it is harder for him (still do-able just noting a systemic weight).
I found myself taking care of a 10 year old in Taiwan for two weeks (with a group of other students/parents) and that short time was enough for me to do a 180 and really force me to be much more social. I planned things, and socialized. Both because it was fun and it was necessary. I controlled the calendar in totality, bore the risks and rewards and answered to myself. But when we rejoined as a family unit I slipped back into old patterns.
So now I know more what it feels like to have that connection and that symbiotic need. But I'm unsure what to do about it.
I don't even think this is an extrovert/intropvert thing completely, so much as what people are used to/how they were brought up.
Some people are very concerned with appearances and therefore uncomfortable with people in their homes (in either direction - too shabby, or flaunting).
Other people (with some overlap with above) are too OCD? about planning and so they turn hosting into such an ordeal they are overwhelmed by it.
In general I find that while I am an introvert, hosting a group isn't really a big deal. I find 2:2 with another couple to be more draining than a group of 10 in terms of being able to step away and catch a moment of calm. Further, as a host .. I get to select who is coming in the first place!
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.
> 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
In my social circle, if you're inviting people over, then you need to satisfy:
I'm a parent and while I invite people over (indeed, this last Sunday we had another couple and their kid over) and do this thing, very few of our parent friends appear to do it. Or I guess maybe they do it with each other and just don't invite us, but I think it's rarer than you think.
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.
Community in the US was largely centered around the church. I think it is an uphill battle getting a large group of people to get together and hang out multiple times a week when they don’t have a very compelling reason outside of the socialization itself to do so (i.e. the threat of eternal damnation)
> 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.
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)
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.
Smoking actually has gone up in the recent few years with younger people, especially women. Not sure if buy the same amount in every country, but an uptick is noticeable.
And yes, this is all down to a few celebrities and influencers who are popular with that crowd showing off the habit in public. A fashion.
> yet there is no demand for it to get outlawed and there won't be any time soon. It is pretty sad.
Fortunately this is very slowly starting to crack. Maybe not from social pressure as it deserves, but litigation is finally starting to catch up with the tech and some recent court rules have started putting some simple yet major compromises on Meta. We're talking "need to remove likes" levels of major.
I think these are still in appeal (or have already settled), but I'm keeping a close eye on this.
> Personally feels insane that people find this surprising or puzzling. (…) This is obviously because of social media or other algorithmic applications.
Facebook was founded over twenty years ago. There are adults in the world who have no recollection of a life before social media. In that sense it shouldn’t be surprising or puzzling, should it?
> 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.
Remember when young adults were literally shouting online “let China suck up all my data” in response to the proposed TikTok ban? I (and probably you) lived in and can remember a world before the internet was in every part of our lives, but there are adults living now who can’t. It is not obvious to them.
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.
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 explained the relevance of mobile phones to you.
People are not always at home.
Without a mobile phone you had an excuse.
Now you don't really.
It doesn't even matter whether or not you were actually home - there was less of a social expectation to always call because it was a recognised excuse that you "were in the neighborhood" and implicitly had no way to check without dropping by.
I already responded to this point at length here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49892375 but in brief: on this interpretation, mobile phones should actually result in more successful drop-bys, because you can call or text when you're "in the neighborhood". Thus, mobile phones are not an excuse to avoid home visits.
You're still missing the point entirely: A lot of those visits are not wanted and weren't wanted to the point that unwanted visits were a trope in media.
Before they would happen because we had no ways to stop them until someone was at the door with a plausible excuse.
> You're still missing the point entirely: A lot of those visits are not wanted
> Before they would happen because we had no ways to stop them
Yes, in a sense, I'm missing that point, because I began with the assumption that more socializing was good, and the dramatic reduction of socializing is to be mourned. If your point is "good riddance to dinner parties", I personally wouldn't agree with that.
Of course individual people differ in their preferences for socialization. However, I don't think it's justified to project personal anti-social feelings onto the majority. You might be annoyed by unexpected visitors, but to others it may be a delightful surprise. When you refer to "A lot of those visits", that's your own personal view and doesn't necessarily represent the views of others. Obviously your visitors didn't feel the same way, otherwise they would have stayed home.
No, my point was not "good riddance to dinner parties". I was explaining to you why the advent of the mobile phone has at least a role in the reduction of socialising by making it easier for people to shut down visits.
It doesn't require people to not want to socialise for it to have that effect. It merely requires a proportion of visits to be unwanted or inconvenient then and there.
> You might be annoyed by unexpected visitors, but to others it may be a delightful surprise.
It might be to some. Even to me sometimes. But it was enough of a nuisance that the unwanted visit - as I've pointed out already - became a significant a trope in fiction, and a part of our cultural fabric. The "we were in the neighbourhood" was e.g. a regular vehicle for visits in TV series that has now largely disappeared except when it is used to highlight someone intentionally sidestepping social norms to impose an unwanted visit.
You dismissed fiction earlier, for no good reason: A widespread trope doesn't arise in a vacuum. It worked as a trope in fiction because it was a real and significant thing.
You've had this explained to you at length now. I struggle to see why you find it hard to understand, so I'm leaning towards thinking you're being intentionally obtuse about it at this point.
> I was explaining to you why the advent of the mobile phone has at least a role in the reduction of socialising by making it easier for people to shut down visits.
I agree that mobile phones have a role in the reduction of socializing.
However, I don't agree with the reason you've given, and I have at least two objections:
1. Mobile phones don't actually shut down unplanned socializing. On the contrary, they make it easier to have unplanned socializing, because they allow you to contact another person no matter when or where either of you happen to be.
2. There's no empirical evidence that a significant number of unexpected visits in the past were unwanted. Surely some were, but not nearly enough IMO to explain the dramatic reduction of in-person socializing.
My theory, in contrast, is that the ubiqiutious internet access of smartphones has addicted people to the practically limitless forms of entertainment and attention-grabbing online, and this internet browsing has usurped in-person socializing as a pastime. This change has nothing to do with how easy or hard it is to arrange visits. People have stopped dropping by because they don't want to drop by, not because they can't conveniently drop by.
For the same reason, people have also cut down on non-social activities like reading books. They aren't replacing socializing with book reading.
> You dismissed fiction earlier, for no good reason: A widespread trope doesn't arise in a vacuum.
I dismissed fiction because it deliberately exaggerates for effect, e.g., comedic effect. There may be a grain of truth to it, but fiction by definition is not an accurate reflection of reality.
> I struggle to see why you find it hard to understand,
I'm not struggling to understand. I simply disagree with your analysis.
> so I'm leaning towards thinking you're being intentionally obtuse about it at this point.
You can lean whatever way you want, but you're wrong, and you're also wrong about me "forgetting" the rest of the world when the submitted article is explicitly about the United States: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49894515
True, but back in the day one had to pay for every call, sometimes at per-minute rates: always so for long distance, and in some areas even for local calls. Quite a contrast to today's unlimited-minutes cellular plans (which likely get used little enough that the providers have no trouble offering them).
A key factor in the development of dialup BBS systems in the US was that local calls were usually at least flat-rate, with unlimited service available here and there.
Bringing it back to the topic at hand, back then I recall a number of social events revolving around local BBSes in Champaign-Urbana, and Fidonet's Net 115 in the Chicago area. All that sort of thing vaporized pretty quickly once the internet opened up.
> back in the day one had to pay for every call, sometimes at per-minute rates: always so for long distance, and in some areas even for local calls.
Where and when did you pay per-minute for local calls? Everywhere I lived and traveled within the US back in the day, so to speak, local calls were always unlimited, even in rural areas.
In the Chicago area you had options ranging from fully-metered to unlimited throughout the metro area. In the 1990s, as more people got online, the unlimited plans went away, and the best you got was that calls within eight miles were flat-rate but pay-per-call.
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. (On the other hand, a laptop or desktop works just as well or better for checking social media. Indeed I'm currently typing on a laptop.)
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.
You seem to be completely autistic and determined to raise disputes where none exist.
Maybe in your suburban sprawl where multiple telephones and multiple cars per household are essential necessities because it’s a 90 minute walk to a shop or a friend’s then one would have unlimited local calls but in huge parts of the rest of the world unlimited calling simply wasn’t a thing.
I can’t imagine you get invited to many dinner parties.
> You’ve broken and disrespected the HN guidelines towards several people throughout this thread
How so? At worst, I said "Um".
Regardless of what you believe I've done, do you not acknowledge that you ought to follow the guidelines, and that personal insults are unacceptable, blatantly cross the line? The guidelines don't say that you get to violate them if someone else does. It may be hypocritical of me—though I disagree with that here—but in any case it's not nonsensical.
> Today it is more widespread, but it used to be highly unusual.
I can't even speak about today, because I haven't had a landline in years. But at least in the US, unlimited local calls were definitely not unusual in the pre-smartphone era.
So, in other words you're writing off the vast majority of the world and forgetting that we're not by any means all in the US here and by no means are all of us talking only about the US.
> I can't even speak about today, because I haven't had a landline in years. But at least in the US, unlimited local calls were definitely not unusual in the pre-smartphone era.
The context I gave was clear: It followed right after pointing out the US is unusual in this respect - the statement referred to that.
It's not clear to me whether you are intentionally obtuse or if you're genuinely struggling to pick up the context here, but either way you are being incredibly obtuse throughout this conversation. I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, but consider that I'm not the only one here who have picked up on this.
> by no means are all of us talking only about the US.
> It's not clear to me whether you are intentionally obtuse or if you're genuinely struggling to pick up the context here
The submitted HN article is about the US:
"We’re witnessing the death of hosting in America."
The charts in the submitted article are also about Americans exclusively.
So yes, we are in fact talking only about the US, and I am not obtuse or missing the context. I've been aware of the context the entire time.
What did you think we were talking about?
I'm not "writing off the vast majority of the world" or "forgetting" anything. The submitted article just happens to be about the US, not the rest of the world, and the patterns of socializing in other countries may be very different.
I did debate in the 00s though and my experience differed - it was already a highly technical affair that didn’t really require strong communication skills, but rather was more about playing logic tricks to be technically “correct” and saying so much that your opponent couldn’t counter all of it during rebuttals. That was enough to get me into the final playoffs at the national championships, and to this day I’ve been told that I focus too much on being “right” rather than being empathetic or persuasive, so debate was not the social panacea that it might have once been.
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.
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.
The first comment I see saying this. What about the percentage of people who actually own their home? Who can afford a "party"? It does mention dual income but how correlated is this change with the decoupling of economic productivity gains with worker wealth and income?
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.
But frankly I wasn't kidding when I said every quality survey shows this.
If you have ever seen an article suggesting that loneliness is higher in the West or in capitalist economies or whatever, you have been 100% misled. That is essentially just a made up narrative that plays well in articles
Face validity. Someone may have pulled together numbers for this in a study, but this area is a new facet of interpersonal behavior at a macro-economic level, so there won't be much published on the subject yet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We've been actively working to reverse this, getting to know lots of our neighbors. One thing that splits the difference in terms of planning pain was backyard fires. We like to relax around the fire anyway (even summer nights are cold in the high desert) and we just send out a casual "fire night" message to our friends list. We have snacks and drinks on hand, and people show up or they don't. My wife's east coast and was missing her "stoop-sits" from Philly, and this is our west coast variant.
You might be on to something. I am one of those school nights people. Having people over will kill all "me-time" for that evening - once you get them out of the house, you do the dishes and it's straight to bed, usually. Meaning I had zero time for myself, I was hosting. The idea of having no "me-time" between two work days is hell for me. It was OK in my 20s and 30s, but not now in middle age.
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 think the point of the article is more about meeting with others at all, as opposed to it specifically being at home. So hang out with friends 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.
I still host dinner parties. I even had one last night! But this article does touch on many things
I like hosting. People like attending. But they never do. I'll host several a year, and there are constantly people who say they'll come, and then never do
I'm not at the point no longer inviting people, but I've thought about it before
About 8 years ago I joined a meetup of techies that just... meets once a month at a restaurant for dinner; no agenda otherwise.
We stopped meeting for a bit during the pandemic, and then after the pandemic just moved to a group text message.
The big factor is that we all just kinda agree that we're meeting once a month. Because it's at a restaurant, it's super easy and requires almost no planning.
Kinda makes me want to find a place to have a monthly pot-luck with like-minded people.
I love inviting friends and their partners to my place for parties, board games, movie nights, or just hanging out and listening to music. But over time, I’ve witnessed a huge decline in these gatherings. As soon as someone had a kid, they stopped coming to almost 99% of events - maybe showing up once a year, if that. Getting older didn't help either; once people hit 30, everyone started double - checking if they actually had the time or energy to go out.
Finally, as soon as I had my own kid, parties ended for me too. I stopped hosting and attending altogether (I've only organized one and visited one in the last four years). So yes, I can see this shift happening, and it’s sad. But honestly, I have no idea where I’d even find the time or energy to start doing it again.
Beyond that, I value the time I spend with my child more than any other social interaction. Maybe it's just me, but as a Millennial, the warmth, love, and comfort I have at home with my kid completely fulfill my social needs. I’m simply no longer looking for those warm feelings elsewhere.
American here married with 2 children. When my kids were young < 10 we would host several parties a year, bbq's in the summer, birthdays and holidays were always at our place. After about 10+ years of this my wife and I realized we were now dreading whatever upcoming party. We felt like a catering company serving food/drinks/entertainment while everyone else enjoyed it. What made it worse was almost always there would be that one person would mistake this for an all night feast and never leave. I hated having to kick people out but I can't sleep the next day away. Thus we stopped. I know this will vary wildly with the kinds of guests you have and yes we stopped inviting the problem people. Now we do very low-key parties usually less than 5 people and are very selective on who we invite. No regrets here.
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.
This summer I went to every pagan group I could and came to the conclusion that, for people who are settled in householder mode, the basic things you can do are (1) have a potluck and (2) have a fire, in that order. Martin Prechtel says "The feast is the only ritual" and even the Christian ministers I know won't argue about it, I mean https://four12global.com/articles/breaking-bread/
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.
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.
A few years ago I came across a HN comment by a guy who wrote "The 2-Hour Cocktail Party". I read his comments and then got the book, and it seemed fantastic, smoothing over all the painful issues that happen when you host.
I really wanted to try it out, but moved from the city just after reading it and haven't yet.
> Something quite deep in the human psyche seems to want desperately to turn off our self-talk and silence our nattering internal monologues by turning up the volume of other characters’ voices.
Over the past few years, rather than seeking to drown out that internal monologue with external entertainment, I've found myself feeding that monologue into Claude to have what I know is an ersatz conversation. And sometimes I work with Claude to write stories around whatever I'm thinking about, basically a form of escapism and sometimes wish fulfillment through personalized fiction. How weird does this make me? Is it inherently unhealthy?
Edit to add: To tie it back to the theme of the article, the result is, of course, the same; I spend more time alone, less time talking with real people.
I wonder, does this correlate to declining home ownership?
A house party seems to me like a great idea if you actually own the house. But if you don't own the damn place (or, worse, houseshare), you are working full time, and are no longer in your 20s, having people over loses much of its appeal. Especially for larger gatherings.
Certainly a part of it. I've either had roommates [no need/space to invite more over] or a draconian landlord. Nearly 40 and I'm only now within reach of ownership.
Current landlord took exactly one evening to notice my new car; that was neat. The photograph and demands for justification were not. They, apparently, thought there might be more rent to seek from a non-existent tenant.
I've seen mention there are more owners nowadays; I'd argue they're also more controlling. Those who rent are often practically living supervised.
I did wonder about that. It mentions that lower-income individuals have less friends and thus throw less parties. But part of me wondered if that was precisely because they lacked the space to host anything more than a few friends over. Someone in a $2000/month studio apartment may not have the time nor money to try and host anything to begin with. And given costs these days, even the thought of eating out and meeting with friends is difficult.
The church is a huge part of building community and relationships. Its not that you can't find community and relationships outside of church, it just makes it that much easier. I have found that unless you are seeing people at least once a week or every other week with regularity, it is hard to develop a strong friendship. Church on Sundays, community group, and the occasional group party like our annual costumes and cocktails party build a foundation for developing strong individual relationships. I think with the decline of the church a lot of people just don't have things in their life that provide that relational structure. Some definitely do though!
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.
> 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.
I still do this once a month a more frequently, I think Oslo being a small city allows me and my friends to afford this with ease of public transport.
Me and a pal talked about this problem exactly a week ago, we chatted how we just invite more and more friends but sheldomly get invited ourselves, and our conclusion was some people just are not good at hosting. I say that because they never hesitate to attend.
hwoever, my phone contact is fileld with peoples allergies notes, likes/dislikes and similar so I keep the party fit for all. Catering to everyones allergy and everyone seems to have one here in West is mad challenging.
#1 Hording: If you've got a house full of crap, and you're deeply ashamed of it, you're not going to be having visitors over, ever. You're also not going to mention it on surveys.
We, the American public, have been collecting shit at a prodigious rate. Many of us pay rent for stuff that won't fit in our home. It's why the storage industry is so reliably profitable.
#2 Paranoia: Otis Toole[1] kidnapped then killed Adam Walsh. His father publicised his kidnapping, and fueled a moral panic that sent American parents deep into paranoia. Kids used to be free range, and were often collectively instructed to "go outside to play, and come inside when the street lights come on". After that event, we're afraid to even let them walk to a friends house a few doors over.
The end of the fairness rule, and the rise of fear based media like Fox news certainly didn't help in the rise of distrust.
#1 is a big reason for our house. The house (and garage) badly needs a significant declutter, but we are both working professionals and don't have the energy to make a significant enough dent, especially since we both have hobbies where we accumulate more stuff all the time as well (especially me, I impulse buy board games and don't cull the ones I'm not playing often enough).
It doesn't help that I design board games too, and have too much of an easy excuse to want to get these games so I can 'research' them.
And because I'm mentally tired all the time after work, that also seems to lower my willpower. And clicking the 'buy' button online is way too easy to do.
We did used to host a monthly game designer playtest night before the pandemic, but our house had a lot less stuff back then. And being stuck in the house during the pandemic with nothing to do but play solo board games and video games (and also the uncertainty if I was even going to make it through the pandemic, since I already had respiratory issues from asthma) definitely accelerated the bad impulse buying habits I already had.
We have made slight dents in it, but the significant declutter probably won't happen until the next time I'm in between jobs, assuming there's at least a month in between jobs.
This is an interesting article and I think it touches on something I've observed as well across my generation which is a lack of participation in society, institutions, and more. This generation and the one after that prefers to "like" a "post" and maybe go vote. Civic institutions? Maybe a token $5 that they were guilt tripped into contributing. By the way why does Europe have all these great museums and nice gardens? Someone paid for it. You spend 10s of thousands of dollars to go look at their stuff. Maybe you should spend that money locally instead so you have your own stuff at home to look at.
We by and large seem to not understand that nobody is going to do these things for us. I'm not sure if it was a parenting failure or just changes in how society prefers to function, but when you look around and see nobody is inviting you to dinner you should conclude that you should be the one to initiate the change. It's the same mentality I see when folks just want the government to do something, or some corporation to do something about climate change for example, but they are unwilling to also simultaneously take their own personal actions. Change starts with you. Nobody is coming to save you. You have to run for office. You have to volunteer at your local community center. You have to take on the leadership role at your church or other place of worship. You have to spend the money and host dinner parties. You have to coordinate these things and yes you have to do it on top of your other responsibilities. Alternatively, you just don't have these things anymore and social media isn't going to replace them.
Also kids - hard to get people together with kids. Not just time constraints (some seem quite strange to me - kids go to bed at 7PM? My parents just let me go to sleep whenever) but also inability to locate, to engage in conversation - mid conversation they stop some kid is doing something and now you kind of realize whatever you were talking about wasn't important to begin with, and more. I'm not criticizing folks for having kids or anything and I think "childfree" movements are extremely cringe and stupid, but having kids in lieu of extra effort, leads to some social isolation from what I've observed.
Then next thing you know you are in your late 40s and you don't have friends anymore.
Of course these are very broad strokes I'm painting. But I think there's quite a bit of truth to it.
The period in my life when I hosted parties was when I was a mostly broke college student and flatsharing (you can get a surprising mileage out of cheap Sangria and snacks).
For most people posting on HN, I would guess, money would not be even in the top-3 of reasons.
I actually went to a dinner party this past Saturday. It was planned and coordinated by my best friend's wife (of course). It was the only one this year. I'm sure they will be holiday parties, thanks to my sister-in-law, but that was the one dinner party in 2026. My cohort is mostly retired, so it's not from a lack of spare time.
I was recently introduced to the term "house-shy", for people who don't want anyone else seeing what the inside of their house looks like. I have a few friends who are "house-shy", that I for one reason or another have seen the houses of (often years after becoming friends with them). I think the percentage of Americans who are hoarders or borderline, is underestimated.
If anyone reading this has a job (plumber, A/C repair, etc.) that regularly gives them a glimpse of the inside of people's homes, I would be curious as to their thoughts on this.
Year 3626 Edward Gibbon II picks this up like a case study in late Roman Empire decline. He would likely not blame screen overuse, burnout, rising costs/inflation, shyness, loss of communication skills (as mentioned in this chat). These things are symptoms rather than primary causes.
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.
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.
I would bet these days 80 year olds are having about as many dinner parties as 23 year olds. The topic here isn’t general observations about home ownership, it is whether home ownership rate since 1970 caused a drop in dinner parties by 68%. It didn’t.
Not all of it, but Americans are working significantly more now than they did in 1975[1]. One would expect compromises to be made to clear space for more work hours.
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.
How do gender roles and sexism figure into this? I'm sure it's not the only reason, but it wouldn't surprise me if most of the 'party' work ended up falling on the wife more often than not.
root cause: young generation wants to rent, not own. Young generation wants high density living and a shift of ownership towards landlords and private equity. As such, entertaining in a walnut sized apartment is a little less practical.
Getting people to buy (their first and only) home is a really important issue. Creating more landlords doesn't not solve housing problems.
I don't particularly like hosting, although I will do so, but I do enjoy gatherings of friends and interesting people over good food and good wine. What my wife and I did was join a dinner club. There are all variety of dinner clubs in almost every major city in the world. We are in our 40s and are the youngest members, because it seems most of the folks who join dinner clubs are older retirees that no longer have large families at home to host dinners with/for, but nonetheless we've found it rewarding.
Given that, though, I do see a bit of a generational divide. It definitely seems like the social circles of people in my generation and younger are larger, but not as deep. I have very good friends who have all moved to different places across the country, I fly to visit them, but the last time all of us were together was at someone's wedding. Contrast this with older generations who often have nearby lifelong friends and close by family, that provides them a smaller but deeper social circle with more opportunities for in-person interaction.
Dinner clubs are great, but not a replacement for the fact my closest friends are spread out all over the country. I don't really have a solve for that. If I were rich, I'd convince everyone to take remote jobs so we could build a "compound" with a bunch of houses all together and be near each other, but the economic realities don't make that possible for any of us.
I was going to spout off my opinion without reading the article but well, yeah they covered the exact reasons why we don't host more: my wife and I are too busy, the kids have taken over too much of the house with toys to clean it fast and elaborate hovering play dates have taken the place of what would have been adult time in decades past. For better or worse, probably better, people also don't seem to want to drink as much anymore and many people have restrictive vegan gluten free diets. It's more about finding parents of kids who are friends with your kids
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.)
> 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.
My mother was a stay at home mom and at least from my perspective she never seemed isolated but that seemed to be because there were many other stay at home moms on our block. We basically knew everyone on our block that had kids, which was most of them back then. I distinctly remember all the time we spent at our neighbours' houses for combination play dates and card games. Us kids would play inside or outside and the moms would play cards and socialize. There were always people coming and going and it felt like the entire block was a sort of extended family. I don't remember many organized dinner parties but that could just be from being a small child at the time so we weren't up late and didn't spend time sitting at the "adult table" when there were gatherings (we'd be fed something and then go play with the other kids in the basement or another room).
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).
Inviting friends over for dinner is the ONLY way I can get my wife and daughter to clear their stuff from the common areas.
A party with 10 guests is even better.
All three of us are hoarders, to an extent, but I alone am able to go into a cleaning frenzy approximately once or twice a year and get rid of mega-junk. Unfortunately, they don't seem able to do so.
So, I consider dinners still to be a useful tradition, though perhaps the motivations have shifted a bit.
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.
Another factor is alcohol consumption and the tolerance for drinking and driving. DUI citations were rare when I was young. I rarely see people drinking at parties I go to now.
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.)
Idk man. It could also be that people like you are being jerks. You sound like the people that made me quit going to church, as long as we're on topic. The CPI has been bullshit for years now. People 100% work more than ever, and not for nothing. The average household needs to work more hours per week to afford the same things. This has been obvious for a long time. Hours worked per year, per household peaked in the 1990's at around 2300 hrs, and it's sat around there since then. I wonder what could've happened in the 80's to cause this?
Id agree. Ive dealt with bullies like them before. Doesnt matter what proof you pull out of your ass. You're always wrong, no matter what you say. Reminds me of Upton Sinclair's quote "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it", but more akin to political positions, and active refusal and rebuttal of anything said in opposition to their political view.
I was making a social point that "average TV shows showing families" is a rough reflection of the current happenstance of the age in which they were made. Its not a "proof" or whatever governmental numbers were smoothed over or otherwise faked to make US households look healthier or better.
> The average household needs to work more hours per week to afford the same things.
A weirdness ive seen.. Entertainment equipment like TVs, game consoles, cell phones, and such are cheap compared to the 1970's through early 2000's. Used to be entertainment was EXPENSIVE. But housing? Our house, in the Midwest, in early 2000s, sold for $160k. We bought it in 2022 for $375k. And on GIS, i see the same exact trend everywhere in my county. Other counties that we looked at moving to, similar. Same story as far as I looked.
Also, federal minimum wage has kept the same for what, since 2007? Union participation has plummeted to like 15%. Workers work longer for less money. Can barely afford a shitty apartment (too small to host parties), BUT that $400 70" TV with a game console is cheap.. and it helps you forget poverty and loneliness with artificial plenty (in game), and company (remotely, on a game).
> I wonder what could've happened in the 80's to cause this?
Reagan, Mergers and Acquisitions crisis (and resulting venture capital buying and shredding companies en masse now), stagnating wages, heavy pushing of "Right to Work" laws, and all of this trickle-down that makes me think I'm just a urinal.
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.
Agreed - my social life has frequent gatherings only because my wife is, despite working and having kids, extremely motivated to meet up with friends. If she didn’t have that motivation we probably wouldn’t be seeing anyone, and if she weren’t working then that could compensate.
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).
So the vast majority of people have more space for entertaining than in 1975.
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.
Were houses that much bigger in the 1970s, though? Families definitely were bigger, so there were more people per square meter. I think overall, it's a sociological change, not a financial one. People are just less into hosting parties; too much hassle of cleaning up & preparing food, too many online distractions, etc.
I’ve sorely wanted to host folks for game nights and shared meals and movies and the like. In fact, in the 2010s I’d play host to folks on the semi-regular since having people in my space is far less energy draining than being a guest in someone else’s.
Since ~2018, I’ve hosted guests three times.
Why the change?
Well, the landlord began charging for garage parking that used to be gratis, forcing cheapskates and broke renters into the visitor spaces. Then they clawed back 25% of guest parking for premium EV charging, meaning even guests with EVs couldn’t park there once they finished charging. Then the landlord stopped enforcing that, meaning folks with EVs can’t charge them because the spots are always full of combustion vehicles. This meant public transit and cycling were the only remaining options for guest access, the former of which required an hour-long detour for my friends to catch a single, specific bus route, while the latter would see them crossing stroads and cycling on state highways with vehicular traffic.
The local logistics are fungible however, and not the sole reason for the drop off. The bigger reason, admittedly, is fatigue. We spend eight hours working, then commute one to two hours each way (~10mi). Include time to prepare for work, make meals, and decompress after, and you’re left with ~1-2hrs a day for free time before having to sleep. Most employers I’ve worked for would side-eye you with disdain for trying to leave early to host an event at home, meaning we don’t feel comfortable asking for the time off in the first place. That doesn’t even include the associated workloads of our guests, who just have to show up almost immediately after work and don’t mind using their very limited free time hanging out in my space.
Then you bake in the fiscal costs - fuel for transit, food to share or prepare, parking and transit fees - and the data harvesting costs (landlord surveillance logging your entry, advertising displays profiling you, Flock camera at the sole neighborhood entrance tracking your entry and exit, etc) and it just doesn’t make fiscal or psychological sense to host at home. That doesn’t even touch on renters having smaller spaces than homeowners making hosting more of a challenge, potential noise complaints about your jovial party from a nosey neighbor getting your lease non-renewed, or the ease of just queuing up for a game remotely (even if it lacks the payoff of a physical visit from another human).
The closest I came to hosting on the regular was that brief window where COVID was managed but before RTO came hammering down. I squeezed in two visits during that time, before mandatory RTO and the insane commutes and shitty job market just kinda sapped all the energy from my circles for anything but basic survival.
Which is all a lengthy way of saying that the problem as I see it is that these events are declining because fewer people are thriving, and more people feel barely able to survive. The excess energy I do have doesn’t go to hosting so much as enjoying social events elsewhere, but that only happens because I am privileged enough to be able to take the next day off from work for recovery without getting fussed at by my employer; nobody else in my circles has that luxury at present.
Maybe you live somewhere extremely shitty but my family's friend groups get together all the time, it's not that hard. Just go over to their place, you just make up 101 excuses not to do it.
Maybe I wasn’t clear: the red carpet has remained deployed the entire time, but since 2018 circumstances have changed for such a large amount of my social circles that hosting events is the exception rather than the norm, specifically because of a lack of time, lack of money, lack of employer flexibility, lack of job prospects, and/or lack of energy. That’s not me making excuses, that’s literally the reasons folks don’t come over for me or most others in my buildings - and those who do visit often only come once, because they get towed for parking in the wrong spot and thus don’t want to return.
Much of the same reasons apply for why I don’t visit others: they’re too tired to host, or lack the space, or have hostile neighbors, or aren’t near public transit, or lack parking, or lack the budget to buy more food, or lack the employer willing to let them work flexibly to make all of the previous issues less problematic.
It’s great that your sample size is able to make it work but clearly mine cannot at present. It’s not a matter of “excuses”, but tangible and logical rationale for why - even when I can cover the logistics and costs myself on their behalf - they’d rather have that hour of free time to themselves for recovery before another fourteen hour day of prep-commute-work-commute-eat.
I can't believe noone has been discussing cost of living as a reason. Food is more expensive, owning a place big enough to invite people over is more expensive, even free time is more expensive. To me, this seems pretty straightforward: people are getting priced out of fun.
Could be, but your income should be going up in unison. If its not, its time to re-evaluate your career. Cost of living adjustments should be keeping pace with inflation, which is also a check-and-balance for business owners, to realize inflating costs to customers isn't necessarily a good thing.
The narcissism of food restrictions— and in general— has contributed to this. I love to cook, but it’s dreadful to have to assemble everyone’s restrictions into a meal. How can I make a vegan, gluten free, organic, global , etc meal ?
It’s emblematic of the me-first attitude. Instead of deferential guests , grateful to be welcomed over, everyone demands they are catered to on their terms.
I politely asked my neighbor to take her shoes off before entering, and she complained that I should have warned her of my no shoes policy before coming over.
I offer my guests unopened slippers to wear while they are here, too .
That other Abundance guy writes convincingly that our abundant present isn’t that satisfying. This is also self-consciously a bit tilted towards the author’s milieu. Even the Abundant Class are overworked, undersocialized, and too preoccupied with cheap technological thrills.
For example, if you're younger, it's a lot harder to throw a dinner party in your tiny overpriced apartment than it might have been for a previous generation of people who already owned homes in their twenties.
It is also harder to throw a party when both partners in a relationship need to work full time to make ends meet.
It is also harder to throw parties when invitees also are overworked and tired and are habituated to netflix, rather than going out.
If you live in a city, going to a public space is inevitably easier. If you live in a suburb, staying home is inevitably easier.
It's much more plausible to me that these trends are due to underlying material conditions more than they are to some fundamental change in the social attitudes of people (though obviously both can play a role).
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
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 wouldn't call diagnosing people for actual medical issues we learned about since the 70s an en vogue thing. Other than those, it's pretty much just vegan / non-vegan.
> In Bowling Alone, 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.
Well yeah, no surprise. Planning takes time and executing even more. Get the house and garden cleaned up, buy supplies, prep and cook/grill everything, clean up everything, restore "normal" functionality of the house again.
> The trouble with going all in on this explanation—beyond the fact that it embraces a version of learned helplessness for men—is that leisure time has increased overall since the 1950s.
Leisure time maybe, but any decent party takes hours of work. Host a dozen people, they're there until at least 2200 if not longer, and then it's hours worth of cleanup work. In ye olde times, that fell under the responsibility of the housewife during the next day, but nowadays? Oh hell no.
On top of that, workloads have gone extremely compressed over the last decades "thanks" to surveillance capitalism squeezing every tiny sliver of time. No more downtimes at the water cooler and coffee machine, it's work work work work work. When you arrive home, you are completely and utterly drained.
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.
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.
I personally find that I’m often extroverted and sometimes introverted. I think it’s less helpful to think of this as a static character attribute and more of a mood. I think the parent is pointing to the idea that by labeling something this may reinforce it such that introverts become more introverted by finding validation in books like Quiet, for better or worse. It’s a part of an interesting discussion that doesn’t seem to get talked about much at the very least.
I like the definition of extrovert and introvert that says that extroverts are regain their energy by being in group whereas introverts regains there by being alone. According to that, I'm an introvert, I need my alone time so that I can recenter myself and recover my energy. I do feel drained when being in events with a lot of people.
But, that doesn't stop the fact that I do like people, I like organizing parties (or rather I don't particularly like the organizing but I like the result of having organized parties and having close friends) at my place and regularly invite friends. It's just that after that I'm exhausted and I need some alone time to recover. So being an introvert doesn't imply that you shouldn't make effort to reach out to people or that you won't enjoy being with others. It just means that having some alone time is necessary to recover.
Sure, but it all depends on whether it's causing you problems or not. There are different ways to life to one's satisfaction. If you're having problems, you should change things up and push through discomfort and friction or just try things. But if you found a balance that works, then it's fine if that involves being alone a lot and just occasionally meeting people. Depends also on phase of life. In college freshman year you probably want to force yourself to go out regardless of how you feel, to establish some contacts and friends. Once you have a circle, it's fine to just live the way you enjoy it actually.
I'm an introvert. I occasionally love going to a big conference/event, including regularly speaking at them. I find it incredibly fun, and incredibly exhausting. It's fun and rewarding enough to do anyway despite being exhausting. I know other people who find it energizing.
There are people whose feelings about it vary, but there are also people whose feelings about it are consistent but they do it anyway, and that sometimes gets mistaken for variability.
You're making the mistake of supposing that since you are often extroverted you assume that many or even most people must be similar, just on a gradient. This is quite an extroverted think to think, so I believe you :)
I'm here to tell you that you are most certainly wrong on this point. People exist that view this kind of thinking as so bafflingly alien that they can't understand how someone would think it.
Social interactions require enormous expenditure of energy for me. They are not pleasant or energizing, they are rituals that must be accomplished to help me blend into a world that is not designed for me. I am most assuredly not being convinced of this by books I have read.
This is such a clear headed comment, so many people use this introvert trait as an excuse for not making any effort to reach out even to dear friends, to not step out of their own comfort, and to not take any risk.
I believe that all we have in the world are our relationships, maybe hermits are content in their way of life because they never could truly socialize but I don't know about them being fully happy.
What we call shyness to me could be understood as a lack of social intelligence mixed with little self-confidence, both of which you can gain by being out-reaching and taking risks. Not to put the blame on anyone of course because it does take real hard work for "introverts". But again, it is to big a deal to be an oversight and not try to be better in your own way.
I don't know if it is clear headed. It disregards scientific consensus on introversion / extraversion being a real thing, and it also speaks against the actual experience of many people. Furthermore, you conflate introverts with hermits.
A lot of introverts actually like contact with other people. They often prefer smaller groups and a certain connection, they are more picky. And need some time alone afterwards.
But that doesn't mean they are hermits.
I used to think I like parties. That I have to like it. That something was wrong with me for not liking it. Now I know it is ok to not have fun at a party, and prefer a walk with a good friend or my wife. I am much happier this way.
As someone who had many years of depression, I know social isolation too. And it is just not the same.
That said, I admit it can at the same thing also be true that people cop out of a healthy way to stretch their boundaries or even expend just a little effort by mistakenly labeling themselves as introvert. Such misuse of the label doesn't mean it doesn't refer to a real thing and a real experience.
> lack of social intelligence mixed with little self-confidence, both of which you can gain by being out-reaching and taking risks.
I live this. Even today, I have to make myself be social, I have to practice (my first job as a waiter was the best thing to happen to me).
The human engagement muscle atrophies when you indulge "introversion" (for all definitions and causes), and our age of infinite individual delights has tipped the tradeoff towards "alone and easy". I wish the sensitivity toward and acceptance of "neurodivergent" had more recognition that the way humans have been doing things for the last 15000 years might have had some value.
At least since the agricultural revolution (settling happened at various times depending on region, but we are talking thousands of years, up to 12k) up until a couple of hundred years ago most people lived in small communities of a few hundred people, where their great-great-grandparents also lived, huge extended family networks, regular festivities and behaviors tied to and strongly prescribed by farming work seasons and religious customs, semi-arranged marriages, job/land inherited from father to son.
There is nothing "natural" about living in some cramped city, meeting strangers all the time, trying to build connections and everybody leaving within 3-5 years to hundreds of miles away, navigating relationships online, working for big corporations with no stable coworkers, having to mingle with strangers all the time whose reputation, past etc you know nothing of etc.
We previously were more accepting, eg, if you read the accounts of various socialites trying to include shy, reclusive, or eccentric friends in high society, you see real effort and concern to include them despite the difference in behavior.
We dropped all that social connection/obligation and associated support it provided for various people when we stopped doing things that historic way.
Talking about a thing to virtue signal is not the same as doing a thing.
It might be clear headed in tone but the argument is fundamentally absurd.
People are different. People have different preferences. Everyone’s mind works in different ways. Any argument that can be summed up as “you’re just no trying hard enough” is fundamentally unsound, unhealthy, unhelpful and entirely disrespectful.
I'm not sure, I think there is value in pushing through friction regardless of if you are introverted or not. One thing that is common to all humans is that loneliness correlates strongly with lack of satisfaction in life and being less healthy.
Before we talked as much about introversion and extroversion, people felt more obligated to do certain social events that they can more easily reject nowadays. That does mean it was uncomfortable and they had to push through friction because it's draining for introverts to do social events but being there also helped with making group of friends and staving loneliness. I do think this change in mores is one of the factors that contributes to the so called loneliness epidemics nowadays.
People may be different, but that doesn’t mean we should accept it all the time.
I hate exercise. Like I really really really hate it.
Should I just accept this and live a life without it?
I don’t think it’s such a stretch to say that socialisation is similar.
The expression "80% of life is just showing up" seemed like such a useless cliche to me, until I tried it.
I'm not too sure about that. Personally I feel like for myself it's tied up with self esteem. I have confidence in my skills, just never when there's strangers watching. Also to maintain the world state in your head and avoid stepping on toes etc.
I can feel my heart rate go up. Sometimes when asking or answering questions in the lecture hall I start quivering. Just the thought of standing up, preparing my question and follow ups can cause this.
You may be right in that it's an excuse. But at the same time there's this disgusting physical reaction and yes it's easier to give in than to stand up.
It's easier to interact with loved ones and close friends because you know they know you and won't judge if you say something wrong etc. But not so for any other interaction.
Once I realized my introversion was psychological and mutable, not some fixed aspect of my personality, it changed my life.
We tend to anchor ourselves to labels. Lots of introverts I meet limit themselves in life needlessly because "I'm an introvert!" I see my old self in them.
I see my old self in what you’re saying. I used to be extremely extroverted, spending nearly all my free time socializing, but now I find much more life satisfaction as an introvert. I derive a lasting sense of pleasure and peace from the things I build, especially physical things, while social interactions only created at best a fleeting sense of satisfaction. I also have much more time for reading, contemplation, and enjoying nature.
I get more than enough social time from my partner and a small handful of friends that I see on occasion. I lived quite a full social life, with a huge variety of people and activities, yet surprisingly I don’t find it all that memorable or important in retrospect. It’s a similar feeling to looking back on one of my former careers.
Good on you. But this doesn’t apply to everyone. Hell, I’d even be willing to bet that your case is extremely niche.
Introversion can be a byproduct of so many different things that saying “it’s just a label” is not only absurd by itself, but utterly disrespectful too. It can be a choice too, sure, but that’s not the case for quite a lot of people.
I personally avoid to think about my self with labels about what "immutable" things "I am". Like "he is tall", "he has Z skin color", "he has 9 fingers", "he has brain type X", "he is thin", etc.
I do care about what values, passions and friends I have, and I have tried to find a set that is consistent.
I do not mind if someone tells me "I am an introvert", even if I do not find it extremely interesting. But if he says "I am introvert and will be unhappy all my life because I can't change that", I can't avoid thinking that he is focusing on something that does not help.
Maybe it applies to you too. Have you tried ?
> 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.
That doesn't mean it didn't exist then, it means it either wasn't socially acceptable or wasn't understood (or both) then. See also the graphs of left-handedness over time, which were basically flat at the actual level of left-handedness except for a big dip during the century or so when left-handed people were commonly forced to hide it and use their right hands.
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.
Introversion is a learned behavior of comfort. Extroversion is a learned behavior of comfort. "Damage" is going outside your comfort zone. Everyone can damage their comfort zone. The brain and body is a chemical soup refined from a combination of your DNA and your environment (what you feed it and are exposed to). The question is, in a society of freedom and free will, if your environment forces you into a behavior you're unhappy with, is that truly damaging?
This is such an arrogant thing to say and completely untrue.
> The question is, in a society of freedom and free will, if your environment forces you into a behavior you're unhappy with, is that truly damaging?
Being forced to conform to a set pattern of social behaviour/enjoyment is thoroughly damaging to your psychological health. It baffles me that anyone would think not.
How do you know, anonymous coward ?
Do you have any academic sources for this claim?
Humans have a great capacity to convince ourselves of anything, it's the beauty of language! For every decision you want to make, you can always find one quote or idiom supporting it, and another against it. Yes we have to learn from the lessons of history yet every time "it's different this time"!
From my memory of the 80’s, the introverts dealt with the stress of dealing with so many people for so long by quietly getting drunk enough to talk to people.
With less people, this happens less nowadays.
I think the concept has some value, but like most behavioral labels they’ve become so loosely defined and abused that they barely mean anything any more.
I can’t count how many people have chatted my ear off and bounced around the office, engaging other people in spontaneous enthusiastic conversation every day, only later to have them claim they’re introverted. The colloquial usage has expanded to encompass anyone who some times feels like staying home and watching Netflix instead of going out on Friday night. In other words, everyone.
I agree that it also becomes an excuse. I’ve had friends who really enjoy socializing and going to social events and also lament social isolation and loneliness, but being an “introvert” becomes the driving factor in their decision making about what to do on weekends or after work. You can see how much they enjoy social events when they’re basically obligated to attend (weddings, special event parties, immense peer pressure from friends trying to get them out of the house) but when left to their own decisions they’ll decide to stay home and be lazy 10 out of 10 times with “I’m an introvert” as the excuse. I’m excluding people with conditions like social anxiety disorder from this description, before anyone comments with whatabouts.
It gets really bad when they reach their 30s and 40s and they wonder why their friends have stopped sending invites to things (because they never accept) and they complain that dating is impossibly difficult (because they only leave the house for work)
> but I doubt this was a discussion in the 80s
Honestly if this doesn’t sound a “the fuck am I saying?” alarm in your head I don’t know what to tell ya.
This isn’t a recent phenomenon. People have different social tendencies. People have always had different social tendencies. And this is way before you even factor in things like neurodivergence possibly tilting one towards preferring isolation or more intimate/lone activities.
It boggles the mind that anyone would think the introversion/extraversion dichotomy a product of modern times.
It’s a little odd how everyone is misreading this comment.
They are not saying that introverted and extroverted characteristics did not exist in people, they are saying that people did not run around proclaiming their introverted or extroverted status in the same way they do today and they didn’t use it to rationalize behaviour to the same extent.
This is never a popular take but I think you completely nailed it. Anytime I see someone who has framed their world through the extrovert/introvert lens it's always done as justification for antisocial behavior. Lots of buzz phrases like "needing to recharge your batteries" while never admitting that socializing itself is a skill that needs practice to improve at so it doesn't feel like as much work.
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?
Introversion means "finding company tiring". It doesn't mean you don't enjoy company. Most (but not all) introverts find company to be pleasurable for a limited period of time.
> 3 or 4 people who I know well is optimal for me.
Then invite 3 or 4 people over. That's much more than what most people do. Sounds like the optimal party size to me.
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.
I think you're spot on about it being type 1/type 2: people have stopped doing a lot of type 2 fun activities, because they have many more type 1 fun activities and because it's no longer socially obligatory to have type 2 fun.
If you do type 2 fun often enough, the level of anxiety drops. Imagine hosting a game night once: you have to ensure all your friends can attend, you agonize over the snacks, over picking the right games to play.
But if you power through and establish a tradition or join an existing one, it becomes simple, e.g.: every Thursday at 7pm you meet for a game of whatever you've been playing last week and a new game the host picked, the host brews tea, the guests bring whatever snacks they want. At the end of the session, you choose which game to play next week: the old one or the new one.
> 3 or 4 people who I know well is optimal for me.
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 understand the feeling, what worked for me was "you know what, fuck it, I will just plan it more loosely, let's see what goes wrong or who is unhappy".
Most of the times, everybody is happy even if things are not perfectly planned, and then they thank me for the "effort" (which was minimal, and sometimes can introduce confusions, as I need to adjust the date or the style as more constraints become evident).
I sometimes think it's a problem of my education of engineering as well, because I want everything planned well, think of all exceptional cases, etc.
> 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. But I think it's more than just about being an introvert or extrovert. In the past, boredome created a reason for most people to visit someone, play cards, host friends, or go somewhere. At present, more and more people (introverts and extroverts) are already turning to social media, streaming, gaming, YouTube, and any other online platforms as these offer modern, instant, unlimited entertainment with almost no coordination or planning.
> but my brain is making it look big
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!
Even introverts need social connection (perhaps more so) - research here [1]. Introverts are people who feel they have used energy when interacting socially, rather than gaining energy from social interaction. It's not shyness or anti-social traits.
It will feel like more of a chore for introverts, but it's like a chore you need to do even if it feels bad in the moment, like doing laundry or exercising.
And worse for introverts - people who never invite other people eventually stop getting invited themselves, so to maintain social connection requires introverts to sometimes be the driver of the event.
[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10328046/
I think of my wife and myself as extroverts and we do have a very large social circle. Still we don’t host as often as we wanted, maybe once every two months. One of the reasons is it can get very expensive. The last party we threw was a Sunday brunch for about 15 adults and a handful of kids, and we spent over $500 just in pastries. People still bring stuff but we don’t expect them to. Dinner can get even more expensive particularly if you cook meat dishes these days. Then all the time it takes which also translates into money. To host a dinner party it takes me part of the week shopping and the entire weekend cooking and organizing. So most times is better just to call a couple of friends and go out to a restaurant.
$25 a person just in pastries is pretty astounding. I think I could make it happen with the most expensive bakery (which is imo not the best in town but close to it) and eating little else. So hats off, that’s impressive. Hope they were enjoyed, great pastries are really a delight.
Eh, in this economy I think it's fine to request contribution, either material or monetary. Also once every two months or so is pretty decent, cheers to you
Depends what you do. I enjoyn hosting big parties because I spend a lot of time cooking for them, which I love doing and everyone appreciates. Then I have the opportunity to interact as much as I want.
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.
Character traits, technology, leisure time, have all changed.
It's not either or, it's all of the above: individuals do what feels good and if you're a great party thrower because it energizes you, you'll probably spread that influence some. And then possibly, the group reinforces itself by continuing to throw and attend parties.
At the same time, leisure time has changed: women work more, dads spend more time with kids, and the home offers a lot more easy entertainment that fits in with modern schedules. There seems to be less opportunities for parties with newer generations.
But of course, society seems to shun the party thrower because we're all busy. And so if nobody shows and the party thrower burns out, there's no influence spread. People dislike parties more and the idea reinforces again.
A mix of any of the above goes into our decisions about how to spend time.
I used to believe in this dichotomy but not anymore. I've seen ppl go from shutin to extroverts after they have kids. So called introverts never learn how to enjoy socialization so it drains them.
I dont know where it started but we've turned this whole introvert/extrovert stuff into some sort of immutable characteristic.
I wonder if intro/extra-version is less explanatory than the people-who-enjoy-doing-things-on-vacation vs people-who-enjoy-doing-nothing-on-vacation divide. I'm an introvert who loves throwing parties because I can perform hosting chores if I feel awkward (prep food, do dishes, refill drinks, introduce people).
That said, hiking up a mountain sounds like a great vacation to me, in a type 1 and 2 way. Active recreation is my gratifying form of recreation (balanced of course with some down time after), but I know this sounds like hell to a lot of people. I'm not sure we have a word for this divide as a culture.
Introversion is a skill issue. People who aren’t extroverts are just not as good at socialising, so they find it difficult and tiring, but they could get better and then it would be easy.
> 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.
As someone who has (and occasionally still does) throw parties, I totally do not relate. It's just tiring. I don't have time to mingle with the guests.
I prefer small, simple invitations. Ideally 2 families. Simple food. Not a lot of ceremony. Get together and talk (or play games, or whatever).
Similarly, I've drastically reduced going to bigger parties - at least with some hosts. These are people I like and want to spend time with, but they only throw large parties, and I get virtually no time with them at the party - they're too busy.
What I'm finding is that - as you noticed - people tend to want to be all or nothing. I'm having trouble finding people like me. I want to socialize, but not this way.
When I read the article, I immediately thought of several reasons he hadn't listed. Too tired to go into detail, but some of them are: Marriage and what was previously a 2 body problem became a 4 body problem (4 being the lower bound). Dual income with kids - we barely get enough time with the kids, and throwing a big party means neglecting them much, much more. Several other factors. This really is death by a thousand cuts.
I think 2 families counts as a dinner party.
It could. But I also mentioned "Simple food, not a lot of ceremony." :-)
I agree about the two groups. I spent years trying to invite some friends to our home for dinner, but we always had "scheduling conflicts." Then one time I suggested going out to a restaurant, and we immediately scheduled it and did it that weekend. I finally figured out that they didn't want to come to our home because they thought that then they would have to recipricate and invite us over, which they didn't want to do.
What I would do is to invite people to a restaurant for a reciprocation to their invitation of us to their home. We would honestly acknowledge that we don’t know how to cook well and don’t plan to improve that before the universe dies.
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 relate to this. My extravert wife throws the parties. I’m the introvert. I enjoy parties at our place so much more than at other peoples.
Same situation for me - my wife is an extrovert's extrovert, and I am on the introvert side. However, I'm the one who organizes and hosts a quarterly cocktail party. It's a lot work - after every one of these parties I tell myself "I'm not doing those anymore". But I've received so much positive feedback from the attendees that I end up doing it again. It ultimately is very satisfying and worth the effort for me.
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.
Totally agree with this. People are usually pretty eager to help out (particularly the introverts - this can give them a momentary break from socializing, while alos making them feel included).
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
The funny thing is that I used to go clubbing regularly because to me that was not about socialising per se. I'd be happy to go alone into an anonymous mass of people and just dance and switch off. I'd still need time to recover, but not nearly as much as with a group of people I'm expected to talk to.
That's universally held for me in other contexts as well. E.g. I can speak in front of thousands - and have - and not stress out at all. They're a non-descript mass at that point. I'm just talking, not conversing. But if any of them try to corner me to talk to me afterward? That is exhausting.
> 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)
Call me introvert or not, before doing the exercise I feel a little resistance to do it, but after - feel very energized. For parties: it's diametrically different - feel big boost of dopamine before party, but after - I feel some regrets, so I'm just trying to not think about later.
I don't feel regrets per se, but I do certainly need to recover, while after exercise I feel good. Regular exercise usually makes me more likely to exercise more, while with social functions that's not viable for me.
> Going to the gym is exhausting, running a marathon is exhausting,
Those don't make me feel great afterwards either. I'd just feel I spend half a day just to end up where I already was.
> spending a day weeding your garden or laying a new carpet could be exhausting.
These would give me a good feeling. The result is what gives me the dopamine hit.
Only a specific subset of people enjoy running a marathon. Hell, as it is a fixed length (and not a fixed duration), it is even worse if you are not at the top of fitness and VO2max: how many people would enjoy running for 6+ hours?
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.)
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 don't know that I agree. My dad used to be pretty solitary when he was younger, but now that he's retired, he's constantly socializing and has built a large network of friends (which is really good for his mental health).
I think you are agreeing with me. Retired = not worried about career. People aged late 20s to say, mid-50s tend to be very career-focused.
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.
The main bullet points I get for reasons involve
1. People work more. In particular, the shift to dual-income households means that women, who traditionally planned most parties before, no longer have time.
2. the shift to "lots of kids, sparse parenting" to "few kids, lots of investment" becomes another time sink focusing families inwards on themselves instead of outwards on the wider community
3. People just have less friends. especially so for a) single b) non college-degree and c) lower-income people. Probably due to #1 and the whole dating app epidemic no one has had a serious conversation about yet.
4. And yes, as you alluded to, it is "more fun to be alone" in the modern day. Less incentive to go out if you don't "feel" lonely nor bored.
I guess I could have just quoted the provided summary, but where's the fun in that?
>In sum: The death of the host is the story of lonely unmarried people and harried married dual-earner households; anxious parents spending more time with their children and less time with friends; and the typical home becoming such a riot of diverting comfort that people no longer have to invite human beings to interrupt their boredom.
Is that it though, parents with no time? Do single people with no kids socialize more than parents once they are past high school and college? Im not so sure.
I used to throw parties not long ago. At least once a week, often more than that. Anywhere between 5 and 35 people.
Then I became a single father and I haven't thrown a single party since then.
Damn I miss throwing parties.
> Afterwards you are tired but also grateful and socially energized in a way that feels fundamental to my existence.
Every culture with a tradition of being a welcoming host has a saying along the lines of, “the pleasure is in the preparation”.
For those of us that live that life, it’s hard to imagine it any other way.
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 wonder if increasing rates of two income families has changed the tradeoffs.
My partner and I basically stopped having people over to dinner after our first kid was born. We want to, but it’s difficult to make the time to prepare the house for hosting, assemble a meal worthy of guests, and clean up afterward. When I was a kid my mother, who stayed at home, would do the lion’s share of that work, and the people who invited us over were also single income families.
But also, it’s not like we aren’t socializing at all. We’re just much more likely to arrange lower-effort gatherings such as picnics in the park.
That said, we’d probably do it a lot more if it were possible to get affordable health care while working a 30 hour work week.
This also depends on the pennies we have to spare. I also as a middle aged and middle class European like to invite friends over, but the youth these days (and many many adults, at least around here) don't have the money to spend on this. Not the only reason, but a substantial one IMO.
there's more than two types, because the type that never throws parties can be subdivided into smaller groups of people who throw parties due to familial requirements - kids, visiting relatives from other countries and so forth.
I self-identify as an introvert and don't much like social obligations. Nevertheless it's nice every once in a while that my wife drags me into them. If she's not there as a catalyst, I would probably be rotting at home with vitamin D deficiency.
Grateful for people who host and provide social opportunities even though I'm sometimes not outwardly social.
I'd like to share my experience throwing parties, and some thoughts on introversion & extroversion.
I held weekly board game nights at my home for a year or two during the latter part of COVID. I loved board games and missed the weekly meetups that stopped happening due to lockdown. I only invited very close friends, all of whom are still very close. And I genuinely ruined my love of board games from how frustrating the experience proved to be. I put in a lot of effort to be a good host and everyone sure seemed to want to play board games, but over and over it was like herding cats once they were over. They were all acting in good faith, and yet that experience burned me out so much and my brain now associates board games with that experience so much that I barely play anymore, and don't enjoy it like I once did.
Now whether you want to use the label "introvert" or not, I was determined to push outside of my comfort zone that was staying in alone. But each of those dozens of nights drained me in a way that that cumulatively has left an emotional scar deep enough to impact my identity (being a person who loves board games was part of who I was, a part I liked)
I suspect that of the ways people will respond to this story, there are two that will be most common
1. What the heck are you talking about? I can't imagine having that experience
and
2. Yeah, that tracks
Whether or not you call those groups extrovert & introvert, and whether you believe such preferences are inherent, learned behavior, or social conditioning, here is a truth:
Trying to change your nature, however you came to have it, comes with a cost and can go wrong.
So for those who consider introversion to be mere choice, I encourage you to be less flippant in how you try to convince people of that.
I got tired just reading this comment.
asabiyyah is a vital component to the survival of civilization
It's almost unbelievable that people like you exist. Attending a gathering is torture enough. Hosting one, repeatedly at that, sounds like living in the ninth circle of hell.
Thanks for your service to humanity.
There's a third and fourth group. People who get invited to these parties and people who are never invited to parties
People might be getting fatter or more unfit. Still there are subcultures where people are fit as all --. The commitment is unreal. The amount they can talk about fitness is truly endless. And if you asked them it would be all about character and social milieu. Things might have changed in the last decades, but that’s at best uninteresting facts to them.
More and more divergence, subcultures, while the mean tends towards a bad direction. And no understanding. Because why don’t they Just Do It?
Edit: But I hear that Europe is a large country.
>people who regularly throw a party and people who never do it.
I have no doubt it might seem that way, but it doesn't seem like an interesting divide because the categorization doesn't really tell you anything about the people. But it's definitely a good rule of to thumb to remember the next time someone feels annoyed that "so and so never throws parties." It's also true when you visit friends in cities you never been. Some are natural and enthusiastic tour guides, some shun such a role.
But my guess is many the "never hosts" threw at least one party in the past and had a terrible experience and decided they suck at it.
I'm also assuming the never people you know are capable of throwing parties in terms of house size etc, and that you accounted for the ineligible in that respect.
I know people who are self-conscious about their messy houses and the idea of maintaining a presentable tidy house for parties would be enough for them to dismiss the idea outright even though they would like to do it in theory.
> 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.
> It depends who you invite.
True. If I invite nobody it about matches the night in.
The article actually mentions lower income people rarely hosting anything, and simply having less frienships. So it is also in some small part an economic issue.
You're doing the Lord's work. Thank you so much for that, even though I don't directly benefiting from it.
There is an epidemic of disconnection and loneliness, Putnam and others are 100% right. There's an organized effort by some people to isolate humans from each other as much as possible, and they have their own swarm of useful idiots to aide them.
The solution to this problem needs explicit action, this is not something that will take care of itself, or people would adapt to it.
I bought a domain recently, https://clubs.fyi that I will devote to this purpose of human connection[1], if anyone wants to join shoot me an email, there's nothing there yet but there will be stuff in a week or so. :)
1. Not connection in the SF-sense like Facebook, Meetup, etc.
>there will be stuff in a week or so
AI is amazing. https://clubs.fyi/.
(I already had the backend but vibecoded a frontend in about an hour)
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.
> It was not something my parents enjoyed, but rather an obligation they felt they had to uphold. ... 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.
It's worth noting that not everything that's good for you is enjoyable, especially in the moment.
Avoiding everything that's a "drag" means staying alone, passively consuming easy media, not exercising, eating hyper-palatble junk food, getting obese and probably depressed, etc.
> 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.
While I agree that those cloying clickbait articles/videos idealizing random pre-smartphone teen photos and videos are obnoxious (as someone who grew up in that era). I think the modern emphasis on mindlessly reducing "friction" is going to prove ultimately unwise, though probably uncorrected as generational turnover causes people to forget what was lost, and certain degradation gets redefined as "normal" and accepted.
> My parents were always busy and exhausted.
So are modern parents, and all indications are they are more exhausted.
> It's worth noting that not everything that's good for you is enjoyable, especially in the moment.
100%.. people tend to understand this much better with physical exercise.
Social connections have as much of an impact on mortality as e.g. smoking [1].
Yes, quitting smoking, working out, and talking to people is not pleasant - it is also healthy and good for you.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2910600/
Back in the 80s/90s, when my grandma was alive, we used to have big holiday dinners for the whole big family (I think in total of 10+ people) in her small apartment (about 20 m^2, perhaps even less). It was extremely crowdy and some people used to eat standing outside and chat with each other. But it was also one of my best memories.
30+ years forward, I moved to a new country, and we only have one kid. We haven't had this kind of big dinner for decades since my grandma passed away in the late 90s.
The families are getting smaller and more atomized, so only people who are VERY into big dinners throw them.
This is a good point.
I am retired now and lucky to have my (now adult) children living nearby. Every Friday I cook a large pizza dinner for everyone, their spouses, and their children, and any friends they want to invite. I will always be an introvert, but this weekly meal is the highlight of my week.
The difference between this and what my parents did is that I host for my own pleasure and for what it does to bind the family together. I don't expect reciprocal invitations, and no obligation is ever implied (I hope).
Yeah that's really good, and I agree with the sentiment.
TBH, if I were to retire today, I'd love to do that, too. I only have one son, so probably it's not going to be a big dinner, but I'd also invite friends of the family, too.
Yeah i have similar fond memories.
My grandma had four kids who all married and gave her ten nephews in total. On new year's eve we had this large dinners where pretty much 20 people gathered (sometimes more, when nephews got old enough to bring their partner OR some other uncle/aunt from other sides of the family joined).
Yeah my grandma has four kids too, so it was a big family when every kid started to pump out grandkids. :)
> Everyone was constantly falling ill with colds or flu
That’s just anyone who has small kids. Or works in healthcare, childcare, or any service industry really. It has nothing to do with 1975 vs 2025 (unless you’re one of the small amount of people who work remotely, and you don’t have kids or a spouse who falls into one of the above categories).
Also after a few years you stop getting so many colds.
You're likely correct, but one big difference is indoor air ventilation standards improved dramatically, leading to less spread of disease indoors.
Simultaneously, air pollution is down, which lowers symptoms.
So it wouldn't surprise me if respiratory incidence is down. Of course there were also more kids in the 1970s, to your point.
> Simultaneously, air pollution is down, which lowers symptoms
That’s very likely true.
> one big difference is indoor air ventilation standards improved dramatically, leading to less spread of disease indoors.
I don’t know if this is. In 1975 air conditioning was much less prevalent, so people were much more likely to open windows. Buildings were also much leakier.
And it’s not simple as building ventilation has steadily improved, so teasing out the impact is almost impossible. In the 80s there was a big push for energy efficiency, so we went from 15 cfm/person in 1973 to 5 in 1981 then back to 20 in 1989.
But building envelopes also got much tighter, so there’s less uncontrolled ventilation.
The tobacco smoke had to find its way out through natural ventilation or be filered by A/C.
Colds, yes.
I think respiratory flu is far less common now than it was. I have had a legit case of the flu only once in my adult life. After spending 15 years teaching in a public school, I had countless colds but never caught the flu. Of course, annual flu vaccines might have helped. Those weren't available in the 70s.
Strep throat was also a very common complaint in the letters. Throat cultures, home visits from the pediatrician, etc., were frequent, especially for my brother. I haven't seen a single case of strep in my extended family since. Maybe just lucky.
Many things have improved over the decades, but we do have an array of exciting tick-borne illnesses to make up for it!
> I think respiratory flu is far less common now than it was. I have had a legit case of the flu only once in my adult life. After spending 15 years teaching in a public school, I had countless colds but never caught the flu.
They’re not far less common in average. Rates have gone down a bit with the annual flu shot, but there’s a few things going on.
-Flu rates vary wildly by year and decade. There were a few big pandemics where a very large percentage of people got the flu.
-There was no way to easily test for the flu, so people said they had it more frequently than they did.
In a given year about 12% of kids will come down with symptomatic influence which is not too far off from what we can estimate that historic numbers were in an average year.
>Strep
I looked up studies on this. Nothing conclusive, but likely no large change.
Recommendations about when to test have changed though because it turns out that if you culture every kid with a runny nose a large percentage of them will come back positive even though their symptoms are viral.
So you’re probably right that you notice fewer diagnosed strep cases, but there aren’t actually fewer symptomatic cases.
There also used to be pretty strong social expectations to host and visit such parties. That was essentially gone by like 1990, for my area, and I always kind of got the feel that everyone was glad to see the expectation disappear.
They can be fun, but I and almost everyone that I'm friends with much prefer to simply visit and hang out with no plans at all. Just be there, maybe chat a bit, maybe ignore each other and read a book for a few hours, maybe find something to eat / do a lightweight potluck. Which rather sucked that COVID ended up shutting down almost all of our communal places to visit for that.
All of that sounds many times better than just being alone without a community.
> It was not something my parents enjoyed, but rather an obligation they felt they had to uphold.
understandable, but if you think about it, it's kinda the price of keeping your "social network" alive. people nowadays understand that romantic relationships need maintenance and effort, but don't (yet?) understand that friendship require at least some maintenance as well. i guess that was even true-r before social media when you weren't constantly updated about what happened in friend X, Y and Z's lives.
most people nowadays don't really want to pay that price to keep relationships alive... and it's showing.
> My parents were always busy and exhausted.
what i'm about to write is absolutely anecdotical, but: i don't see people my age (30-40 years old) like super-relaxed either.
Same for me in the 80s. We'd always have the extended family together multiple times a year and frequently at my house. My mom always stressed out over it and it's the only time she yelled at my brother and I for not cleaning enough. I occasionally enjoyed playing with cousins but mostly found it annoying that all these people were using my house.
Nowadays, we definitely get together much less often but also it's usually at a restaurant.
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.
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.
Before screens you visited even less. Well if you compare the 1960s to today - but the 1960s had the phone as well. Compare 1700 to today and you realize quickly that "visiting your sister who married just one village over is a big deal and it couldn't happen often".
> They are a tool and as such value neutral.
Tools are not value neutral, and it’s time we internalise that. Tools are designed with a purpose. An AK-47 is a tool. Its purpose is killing. Its creator was acutely aware of it and by the end even expressed remorse.
Yes, screens can be enabling, but your parent comment is obviously talking of the norm we’re facing. Facebook isn’t value neutral, neither is Instagram, nor TikTok, nor a myriad other insanely popular services which command too many lives. Those are tools designed explicitly to suck up your time, to feed the bellies of their owners at your expense.
Digital tools are made even more not value neutral by the fact that other humans are actively influencing them even while you're using them, via "the algorithm", "dark design patterns", etc.
At least with an AK-47 or a hammer, once you own it physically, it's yours and the original creator isn't sending you subtle psychological nudges to utilize it one way or the other.
I mean... you are substituting your family on a little screen for going out into the real world and making some new friends. I'd argue that, yes, just because you wrap it in "I love my family don't question me" it doesn't change anything.
>Spoken like someone with no friends or relatives that live far away. Screens can also be extremely connecting.
Most my family is scattered. Screens can be connecting. But it doesn't replace local connection and my experience seems more to delay the inevitable drifting away of such relations due to distance. I suppose it at least tests how much your loved ones care to keep in contact with you.
This has been going on since at least the mid 1970s if the graphs in the article are anything to go by. How will you blame the screens then?
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.
> My hunch is they have an agenda and is willing to lie to spice up the story.
What do you think it is? Be clear.
> If they are not a clanker.
Probably not: "I was trying a VR headset the other days".
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...
People have had parties in parents basements, tenements, city parks, open fields, caves, for all of human history
Why, then, do you look at the speck in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the log in your own eye?
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. I used to watch she cooking and it was so elegant. She uses the stove to its full, including baking, and still has the leisure to talk to me and cut raw food quickly.
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.
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.
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.
that's true. and I noticed that was true when I met my internet friends in real life and I noticed the real life interaction made the bond much more valuable and more complex than it was.
even when it's GOOD it's not as good as real life, however, it does take less effort.
I actually doubt it. For one, "blame" implies damage and I'm not sure this is even a real problem. But I actually think it corresponds with rising prosperity (which councides with the rise of technology). People associate with tribes and clans for mutual support and protection and it's just much less necessary now.
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.
For me it's indeed around COVID where my habits changed. That deserves more attention indeed. Something about the vibe changed. Could be just me, and could be just a coincidence that is happened around COVID. But it's worth considering.
Where I'm from religious observance went down considerably and permanently - it was declining before the pandemic, but it reached a tipping point only in the early 20s.
Apparently everyone was attending mass largely because everyone else was.
I'd be interested to see how the drop correlates with pets. We got a dog during COVID, she acclimated to a house which never has guests. Now she can't handle guests. Shame on us, perhaps, but anyway there it is.
The chart cutting off in 2022 makes it hard to glean too much.
I no longer worry at all about attending a crowded indoor gathering - those would be impossible to avoid in NYC - but enjoying “a night in” without kids is a distinctly post-COVID phenomenon for myself and many people I know
I noticed that too. It's unreasonable to extrapolate anything from that graph when it only ends at 2022.
> COVID made spending time outdoors/around other people an actual physical danger for over a year, and the psychological effects of that are lingering.
It actually never stopped being a physical danger. The only thing that changed is how long it takes for the damage to unfold.
At the start of COVID, people were rightfully shocked that hospitals and morgues were overflowing, and they reacted accordingly. That's no longer an issue (for now) with these latest strains, but acquiring Long COVID and dealing with its effects is definitely still a real concern.
Long COVID is vastly underdiagnosed. You might not get it until your 4th/5th/6th re-infection. That reinfection might also be asymptomatic, and/or Long COVID doesn't set in until weeks or months afterward, meaning people often don't link the two events. People not taking precautions (majority) are getting re-infected on average once per year since immunity from a previous infection typically wanes after 6 months, and there are about two waves per year for any given area.
Vaccines are of limited utility since they don't prevent transmission. A consistently worn N95 in public spaces is the only reliable means of defense, and everybody in your household needs to do that in public for it to be effective within your household.
I'll take you seriously when I see scientists and doctors masking up and taking the precautions that you COVID truthers still cling to. Go to an infectious disease conference. They don't look like people who think like you.
It's not hard to find the science backing my claims. As for why doctors don't mask, they're humans too, and just as susceptible to propaganda and competing forces like wanting to "return to normal" or simply having kids in school and assuming getting them to mask is too tall of an order (frankly, it is imo).
Here's a Canadian researcher who still masks and explains how the many 'mistakes' were made in order to convince people to throw caution to the wind:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCft7qu1Iv4
For the US version, this is a decent timeline of events:
https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...
The best part was after that extended disinformation campaign, lawmakers asked people what they wanted to do, then told them what they wanted to hear:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240802024326/https://docs.hous...
But that didn't make the threat go away. People just pretended that it did. Group psychology is weird like that. Further compounding matters is the fact that neverending COVID reinfections impacts the part of the brain responsible for executive function, making it that much easier for people to not care. The more common and palatable term is "brain fog." Toxoplasmosis has a similar known reinforcing effect.
We still know so little about Long COVID. For all we know, it's just going to be the next (or contemporary) microplastics debate where we just have to live with it until we start really seeing long term effects. But since it's not affecting our ability to make the rich richer, we won't get much serious mainstream support for the issue. Instead focusing on diligent work in labs in the background.
All that said: I don't do it myself, but I don't judge people who choose to mask up regularly when going out in public. It's a semi-normal thing in Asian communities, and I have two close (non-Asian) friends who do it. If nothing else, COVID de-stigmatized that practice here in the US.
I appreciate that.
As somebody who masks regularly in 2026, I definitely don't judge people who don't. Most people don't know the true risks, and even for those who do, the two lifestyles come with some important tradeoffs that I don't think should be forced on anybody, one way or the other.
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).
Overbooked children or just mathematical combination? If you have 5 friends each with 1 kid and the kid only does 2 things a week chances are you won’t ever get them all together.
Seems like these parents are prioritizing their kids and probably encouraging things they enjoy doing rather than wine night. Chances are the kids are enjoying life.
I'm sure it's a bit of both, but as I said, when I was a kid in this region, it was uncommon for any Friday night activities for the kids. Weeknights and weekend mornings/afternoons, absolutely. But we're not trying to get together on a random Tuesday.
> it was rare that I had a scheduled sports event on a Friday or Saturday evening
When I grew up in the South, football & basketball games were Friday & Saturday nights. Apparently this was common[1].
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friday_Night_Lights_(TV_series...
Wednesday was Peewee/little kid sports, Thursday evening was Jr High sports games, Friday evening was High School sports games, and Saturday was college sports games.
Where I grew up (and live now) - DC metro - those games are often Friday, but it's not that common for families without high school kids to attend. And by the time the kids are in high school (or even middle school), the parents just drop them and come home. But yeah, unsurprising that these are bigger social events south and mid-west.
what kind of shitty parents just drop their kids off at their high school football or basketball game and then just leave to not watch them play?
Some families have multiple children. Those kids are quite frequently of different ages, and thus will have entirely different activities (most high school football teams will not allow 5th graders to play, for example).
Those activities frequently overlap. No, Cub Scouts does not care that the high school basketball game overlaps with the camping trip because Cub Scouts are not in high school. Parents are (still) not able to be in two places at a time.
This means that at least some of the time, the older kid goes to their game without their parents. (Because the younger child frequently cannot.)
If you are able to solve this for those parents, you can be the first $1B single-employee company.
I meant kids that go to watch the game.
The football team has ~40 kids and basketball has ~12. The school has ~2000. At least in my area.
maybe because I don't live in a car-centric country, but I would just bike there myself with my friends, play, and bike home with my friends. From I was a kid until end of high school. Parents would often come to watch, but not always, and the fun was being with my friends anyways so it didn't matter.
At a typical US high school, not very many of the students are actually playing. For most of them, it's mainly a social event, something to take a date to, or a time to hang out in the bleachers with peers.
Even if you have one child playing (or on the bench, or in the band, or cheerleading) and have come to watch, your other similar-age children will likely not be interested in sitting with you. They will want to sit with their friends, and rightfully so!
I was in marching band (so I played at all the games). Is that not normal?
I guess it's just a generational thing, but my late Gen X mother was simply busy. Army drills twice a month will do that. I also concur with other responses that these were all social events anyway, so it's not like I was yearning for Mom to be there.
Same - my friends group had weekly (and sometimes more than-weekly) gatherings that all faded away when kids arrived. The group aligned more around kids and new friends met through kids activities.
A culture where people with 2–3 kids are already swamped with work and obligations.
But how come the fertility rates are low? they ask.
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.
Tell her that again man, I'm sure it warms her heart
Just want to chime in that I have had the same experience and am similarly appreciative!
I do agree that this is a very good quality of a wife. I have a friend whose wife is like this and I can't tell you how much effort he saved for himself.
If a husband has the same quality it would be very good too. It is not something only a wife can possess!
Let's say it's a good quality for a partner, or, anyone!
There are more good qualities to look for than anyone can possess. Just make sure your partner has good qualities and encourage them. Then have "a village" where other good qualities that you have have between the two of you cover as much of the rest as possible.
Yeah, I would 100% not be in a relationship with a man who cannot cook and host.
True! But in an ideal partnership each partner brings something that the other needs.
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.)
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.
But that's also great, meeting in a restaurant or bar. Or perhaps renting a cabinet space in one. Or just going on a picnic or free outdoor concert together. Doesn't need to be someone's home. I feel a lot of these things have shrunk massively.
Yes, I agree. What I'm finding, though, is everyone else in my circle doesn't value meeting in a restaurant. They insist these things should be in a home. Or if it's a restaurant, someone should pay for the whole crowd. And as you can imagine, it eventually becomes a "I do all this effort to invite family X to our home for parties, but they never invite us to their home" - conveniently forgetting that family X does want to spend time with them - just not at their own home.
I also found that they seem to value the tradition and style (quality of food, quality of dinnerware, quality of decoration, etc) much more than the company.
Before marriage, we (guys) would get together often. After marriage, it promptly stopped. And the accounting began.
As I said in another comment, the causes of the decline are plenty, and nothing really dominates. I've given a few reasons here and elsewhere, but I'm sure there are many more. It's a death by a thousand cuts. The reasons I give here are due to a certain sub-clique. It won't apply to others' experiences.
Same here in Japan
That's because you don't eat dinner until 10pm
More likely because Spain has the highest percentage of apartment dwellers in Europe.
..as the American 20-something influencers on TikTok want you to know.
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.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
I think there's this huge gap coming with age. Nobody does that spaghetti thing anymore, good friends after finishing school move elsewhere, responsibilities in many new fields increase and the opportunities to meet hundred candidates decrease exponentially. So even if you'd continue doing the spaghetti, I doubt you'd have too many to feed...
- "Sorry, but I'm on a low-carb diet, no carbs and especially not after 3pm"
- "Do you use gluten-free pasta? I think I have a gluten allergy."
- "Why always ethnic food like pasta? What's wrong with white people food, like Cheeseburgers?"
People have become too complicated.
Alternatively, one could hold a social interaction not centered around some form of consumption, and then you don't have to worry about satisfying people's consumptive preferences
You mean it brings together friends and filters out annoying people? You're pointing out a feature, not a bug.
I don't know anyone in the US who thinks of spaghetti as ethnic food. Maybe in 1930.
I think figuring out how to make everybody happy is fun. You end up exploring options you never otherwise would.
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.
I think it’s harsh to publicly describe your wife as neurotic for following basic etiquette
You'll want to try and expand your circle of friends to include those that are the planning type and will bring variety to the location. Either that, or start changing the location.
If you don't, people will get bored and eventually the group will disband.
Overall interesting piece.
> For any number of reasons, women seem to do better than men at making and keeping adult friendships
I think it’s social pressure and necessity.
When I fail to get my kids a thing they need to school people shrug their shoulders, and I think “I tried” but the pressure on my wife seems to be higher. She judges herself and others judge her harder. Likewise, to meet that pressure she uses her friend group for utility in the same way I might reach out to programmer friends I met at a conf to get a PR merged. She has a bench of mom friends who can pickup her kids and they will expect the same favor in return.
There is a family in our school group where the dad is much more active in that role as connector and planner, but it seems harder for him. I don't think people reach out to him as much for shared favors so he has to try harder. And beyond necessity, they are forming friends. I think the other primary caregivers that are usually women just do not think of him as friend material as quickly or easily as the other mothers. So overall it is harder for him (still do-able just noting a systemic weight).
I found myself taking care of a 10 year old in Taiwan for two weeks (with a group of other students/parents) and that short time was enough for me to do a 180 and really force me to be much more social. I planned things, and socialized. Both because it was fun and it was necessary. I controlled the calendar in totality, bore the risks and rewards and answered to myself. But when we rejoined as a family unit I slipped back into old patterns.
So now I know more what it feels like to have that connection and that symbiotic need. But I'm unsure what to do about it.
I don't even think this is an extrovert/intropvert thing completely, so much as what people are used to/how they were brought up.
Some people are very concerned with appearances and therefore uncomfortable with people in their homes (in either direction - too shabby, or flaunting).
Other people (with some overlap with above) are too OCD? about planning and so they turn hosting into such an ordeal they are overwhelmed by it.
In general I find that while I am an introvert, hosting a group isn't really a big deal. I find 2:2 with another couple to be more draining than a group of 10 in terms of being able to step away and catch a moment of calm. Further, as a host .. I get to select who is coming in the first place!
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.
> 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
In my social circle, if you're inviting people over, then you need to satisfy:
1. Neat + Tidy house
2. Good food, and lots of it
Both take time, and not for tired parents.
(To be clear: These are not my expectations...)
I'm a parent and while I invite people over (indeed, this last Sunday we had another couple and their kid over) and do this thing, very few of our parent friends appear to do it. Or I guess maybe they do it with each other and just don't invite us, but I think it's rarer than you think.
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.
Community in the US was largely centered around the church. I think it is an uphill battle getting a large group of people to get together and hang out multiple times a week when they don’t have a very compelling reason outside of the socialization itself to do so (i.e. the threat of eternal damnation)
It is by no means exclusive to America.
> 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.
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.
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.
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)
That doesn't explain the declines before that. It requires a lot of domestic skills and time to host a good party.
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.
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?
Smoking actually has gone up in the recent few years with younger people, especially women. Not sure if buy the same amount in every country, but an uptick is noticeable.
And yes, this is all down to a few celebrities and influencers who are popular with that crowd showing off the habit in public. A fashion.
> Personally feels insane that people find this surprising or puzzling.
Who finds this surprising or puzzling? I do not see this sentiment in the article or in the comments here. Are you making up people to get mad at?
> yet there is no demand for it to get outlawed and there won't be any time soon. It is pretty sad.
Fortunately this is very slowly starting to crack. Maybe not from social pressure as it deserves, but litigation is finally starting to catch up with the tech and some recent court rules have started putting some simple yet major compromises on Meta. We're talking "need to remove likes" levels of major.
I think these are still in appeal (or have already settled), but I'm keeping a close eye on this.
> Personally feels insane that people find this surprising or puzzling. (…) This is obviously because of social media or other algorithmic applications.
Facebook was founded over twenty years ago. There are adults in the world who have no recollection of a life before social media. In that sense it shouldn’t be surprising or puzzling, should it?
> 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.
Remember when young adults were literally shouting online “let China suck up all my data” in response to the proposed TikTok ban? I (and probably you) lived in and can remember a world before the internet was in every part of our lives, but there are adults living now who can’t. It is not obvious to them.
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
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.
Um, we had phones before mobile phones.
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.
> was a frequent plot point in various media.
I'm not sure that citing fiction is useful.
I explained the relevance of mobile phones to you.
People are not always at home.
Without a mobile phone you had an excuse.
Now you don't really.
It doesn't even matter whether or not you were actually home - there was less of a social expectation to always call because it was a recognised excuse that you "were in the neighborhood" and implicitly had no way to check without dropping by.
I already responded to this point at length here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49892375 but in brief: on this interpretation, mobile phones should actually result in more successful drop-bys, because you can call or text when you're "in the neighborhood". Thus, mobile phones are not an excuse to avoid home visits.
You're still missing the point entirely: A lot of those visits are not wanted and weren't wanted to the point that unwanted visits were a trope in media.
Before they would happen because we had no ways to stop them until someone was at the door with a plausible excuse.
> You're still missing the point entirely: A lot of those visits are not wanted
> Before they would happen because we had no ways to stop them
Yes, in a sense, I'm missing that point, because I began with the assumption that more socializing was good, and the dramatic reduction of socializing is to be mourned. If your point is "good riddance to dinner parties", I personally wouldn't agree with that.
Of course individual people differ in their preferences for socialization. However, I don't think it's justified to project personal anti-social feelings onto the majority. You might be annoyed by unexpected visitors, but to others it may be a delightful surprise. When you refer to "A lot of those visits", that's your own personal view and doesn't necessarily represent the views of others. Obviously your visitors didn't feel the same way, otherwise they would have stayed home.
No, my point was not "good riddance to dinner parties". I was explaining to you why the advent of the mobile phone has at least a role in the reduction of socialising by making it easier for people to shut down visits.
It doesn't require people to not want to socialise for it to have that effect. It merely requires a proportion of visits to be unwanted or inconvenient then and there.
> You might be annoyed by unexpected visitors, but to others it may be a delightful surprise.
It might be to some. Even to me sometimes. But it was enough of a nuisance that the unwanted visit - as I've pointed out already - became a significant a trope in fiction, and a part of our cultural fabric. The "we were in the neighbourhood" was e.g. a regular vehicle for visits in TV series that has now largely disappeared except when it is used to highlight someone intentionally sidestepping social norms to impose an unwanted visit.
You dismissed fiction earlier, for no good reason: A widespread trope doesn't arise in a vacuum. It worked as a trope in fiction because it was a real and significant thing.
You've had this explained to you at length now. I struggle to see why you find it hard to understand, so I'm leaning towards thinking you're being intentionally obtuse about it at this point.
> I was explaining to you why the advent of the mobile phone has at least a role in the reduction of socialising by making it easier for people to shut down visits.
I agree that mobile phones have a role in the reduction of socializing.
However, I don't agree with the reason you've given, and I have at least two objections:
1. Mobile phones don't actually shut down unplanned socializing. On the contrary, they make it easier to have unplanned socializing, because they allow you to contact another person no matter when or where either of you happen to be.
2. There's no empirical evidence that a significant number of unexpected visits in the past were unwanted. Surely some were, but not nearly enough IMO to explain the dramatic reduction of in-person socializing.
My theory, in contrast, is that the ubiqiutious internet access of smartphones has addicted people to the practically limitless forms of entertainment and attention-grabbing online, and this internet browsing has usurped in-person socializing as a pastime. This change has nothing to do with how easy or hard it is to arrange visits. People have stopped dropping by because they don't want to drop by, not because they can't conveniently drop by.
For the same reason, people have also cut down on non-social activities like reading books. They aren't replacing socializing with book reading.
> You dismissed fiction earlier, for no good reason: A widespread trope doesn't arise in a vacuum.
I dismissed fiction because it deliberately exaggerates for effect, e.g., comedic effect. There may be a grain of truth to it, but fiction by definition is not an accurate reflection of reality.
> I struggle to see why you find it hard to understand,
I'm not struggling to understand. I simply disagree with your analysis.
> so I'm leaning towards thinking you're being intentionally obtuse about it at this point.
You can lean whatever way you want, but you're wrong, and you're also wrong about me "forgetting" the rest of the world when the submitted article is explicitly about the United States: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49894515
> Um, we had phones before mobile phones.
True, but back in the day one had to pay for every call, sometimes at per-minute rates: always so for long distance, and in some areas even for local calls. Quite a contrast to today's unlimited-minutes cellular plans (which likely get used little enough that the providers have no trouble offering them).
A key factor in the development of dialup BBS systems in the US was that local calls were usually at least flat-rate, with unlimited service available here and there.
Bringing it back to the topic at hand, back then I recall a number of social events revolving around local BBSes in Champaign-Urbana, and Fidonet's Net 115 in the Chicago area. All that sort of thing vaporized pretty quickly once the internet opened up.
> back in the day one had to pay for every call, sometimes at per-minute rates: always so for long distance, and in some areas even for local calls.
Where and when did you pay per-minute for local calls? Everywhere I lived and traveled within the US back in the day, so to speak, local calls were always unlimited, even in rural areas.
In the Chicago area you had options ranging from fully-metered to unlimited throughout the metro area. In the 1990s, as more people got online, the unlimited plans went away, and the best you got was that calls within eight miles were flat-rate but pay-per-call.
> In the Chicago area you had options
Interesting. This may be due to the size of Chicago.
I didn't see such varied options, not even in Minneapolis.
*> Where and when did you pay per-minute for local calls?
Almost everywhere outside the US, Canada and New Zealand.
My question was directed toward someone who is clearly in the United States.
And indeed, the subtitle of the HN submitted article is "We’re witnessing the death of hosting in America."
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.
> 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. (On the other hand, a laptop or desktop works just as well or better for checking social media. Indeed I'm currently typing on a laptop.)
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.
You seem to be completely autistic and determined to raise disputes where none exist.
Maybe in your suburban sprawl where multiple telephones and multiple cars per household are essential necessities because it’s a 90 minute walk to a shop or a friend’s then one would have unlimited local calls but in huge parts of the rest of the world unlimited calling simply wasn’t a thing.
I can’t imagine you get invited to many dinner parties.
> You seem to be completely autistic
> I can’t imagine you get invited to many dinner parties.
Please read and respect the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You’ve broken and disrespected the HN guidelines towards several people throughout this thread so it’s nonsensical to go invoking them at others.
> You’ve broken and disrespected the HN guidelines towards several people throughout this thread
How so? At worst, I said "Um".
Regardless of what you believe I've done, do you not acknowledge that you ought to follow the guidelines, and that personal insults are unacceptable, blatantly cross the line? The guidelines don't say that you get to violate them if someone else does. It may be hypocritical of me—though I disagree with that here—but in any case it's not nonsensical.
nah he's right, you seem rather maladjusted.
> Local calls were typically unlimited for a fixed monthly rate.
Mostly in the US. Today it is more widespread, but it used to be highly unusual.
> Mostly in the US.
Yes, I'm referring to the US.
> Today it is more widespread, but it used to be highly unusual.
I can't even speak about today, because I haven't had a landline in years. But at least in the US, unlimited local calls were definitely not unusual in the pre-smartphone era.
> Yes, I'm referring to the US.
So, in other words you're writing off the vast majority of the world and forgetting that we're not by any means all in the US here and by no means are all of us talking only about the US.
> I can't even speak about today, because I haven't had a landline in years. But at least in the US, unlimited local calls were definitely not unusual in the pre-smartphone era.
The context I gave was clear: It followed right after pointing out the US is unusual in this respect - the statement referred to that.
It's not clear to me whether you are intentionally obtuse or if you're genuinely struggling to pick up the context here, but either way you are being incredibly obtuse throughout this conversation. I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, but consider that I'm not the only one here who have picked up on this.
> by no means are all of us talking only about the US.
> It's not clear to me whether you are intentionally obtuse or if you're genuinely struggling to pick up the context here
The submitted HN article is about the US:
"We’re witnessing the death of hosting in America."
The charts in the submitted article are also about Americans exclusively.
So yes, we are in fact talking only about the US, and I am not obtuse or missing the context. I've been aware of the context the entire time.
What did you think we were talking about?
I'm not "writing off the vast majority of the world" or "forgetting" anything. The submitted article just happens to be about the US, not the rest of the world, and the patterns of socializing in other countries may be very different.
I did debate in the 00s though and my experience differed - it was already a highly technical affair that didn’t really require strong communication skills, but rather was more about playing logic tricks to be technically “correct” and saying so much that your opponent couldn’t counter all of it during rebuttals. That was enough to get me into the final playoffs at the national championships, and to this day I’ve been told that I focus too much on being “right” rather than being empathetic or persuasive, so debate was not the social panacea that it might have once been.
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.
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.
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.
The first comment I see saying this. What about the percentage of people who actually own their home? Who can afford a "party"? It does mention dual income but how correlated is this change with the decoupling of economic productivity gains with worker wealth and income?
Home ownership in the US is higher now than in the 70s https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
Along with inflation adjusted (real) disposable income: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A229RX0
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.
Here are some good high quality surveys:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5547349/
https://ourworldindata.org/lonely-not-alone
But frankly I wasn't kidding when I said every quality survey shows this.
If you have ever seen an article suggesting that loneliness is higher in the West or in capitalist economies or whatever, you have been 100% misled. That is essentially just a made up narrative that plays well in articles
Face validity. Someone may have pulled together numbers for this in a study, but this area is a new facet of interpersonal behavior at a macro-economic level, so there won't be much published on the subject yet.
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
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.
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.
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.
Freeloaders. It tells you something about the relationships that those "friends" choose to build.
If the only friends you have are those you have to pay, when the money's gone, are they likely to stick around? (Likely not)
But if they do, then maybe you've found a true friendship.
> Freeloaders. It tells you something about the relationships that those "friends" choose to build.
What a wonderfully American comment..... the very idea that somebody is financially benefiting who dosn't 'deserve' it is an athema to your society.
Maybe OP's friends simply had less money (the horror!)? Or perhaps they had more children, so less time to cook and less time to spend with friends?
Not everything in life is zero-sum monney game. After all, have you ever wondered why children climb trees?
i really started to loathe potlucks. i'd rather not be invited tbh.
We've been actively working to reverse this, getting to know lots of our neighbors. One thing that splits the difference in terms of planning pain was backyard fires. We like to relax around the fire anyway (even summer nights are cold in the high desert) and we just send out a casual "fire night" message to our friends list. We have snacks and drinks on hand, and people show up or they don't. My wife's east coast and was missing her "stoop-sits" from Philly, and this is our west coast variant.
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.
You might be on to something. I am one of those school nights people. Having people over will kill all "me-time" for that evening - once you get them out of the house, you do the dishes and it's straight to bed, usually. Meaning I had zero time for myself, I was hosting. The idea of having no "me-time" between two work days is hell for me. It was OK in my 20s and 30s, but not now in middle age.
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 think the point of the article is more about meeting with others at all, as opposed to it specifically being at home. So hang out with friends 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.
I still host dinner parties. I even had one last night! But this article does touch on many things
I like hosting. People like attending. But they never do. I'll host several a year, and there are constantly people who say they'll come, and then never do
I'm not at the point no longer inviting people, but I've thought about it before
About 8 years ago I joined a meetup of techies that just... meets once a month at a restaurant for dinner; no agenda otherwise.
We stopped meeting for a bit during the pandemic, and then after the pandemic just moved to a group text message.
The big factor is that we all just kinda agree that we're meeting once a month. Because it's at a restaurant, it's super easy and requires almost no planning.
Kinda makes me want to find a place to have a monthly pot-luck with like-minded people.
I love inviting friends and their partners to my place for parties, board games, movie nights, or just hanging out and listening to music. But over time, I’ve witnessed a huge decline in these gatherings. As soon as someone had a kid, they stopped coming to almost 99% of events - maybe showing up once a year, if that. Getting older didn't help either; once people hit 30, everyone started double - checking if they actually had the time or energy to go out.
Finally, as soon as I had my own kid, parties ended for me too. I stopped hosting and attending altogether (I've only organized one and visited one in the last four years). So yes, I can see this shift happening, and it’s sad. But honestly, I have no idea where I’d even find the time or energy to start doing it again.
Beyond that, I value the time I spend with my child more than any other social interaction. Maybe it's just me, but as a Millennial, the warmth, love, and comfort I have at home with my kid completely fulfill my social needs. I’m simply no longer looking for those warm feelings elsewhere.
American here married with 2 children. When my kids were young < 10 we would host several parties a year, bbq's in the summer, birthdays and holidays were always at our place. After about 10+ years of this my wife and I realized we were now dreading whatever upcoming party. We felt like a catering company serving food/drinks/entertainment while everyone else enjoyed it. What made it worse was almost always there would be that one person would mistake this for an all night feast and never leave. I hated having to kick people out but I can't sleep the next day away. Thus we stopped. I know this will vary wildly with the kinds of guests you have and yes we stopped inviting the problem people. Now we do very low-key parties usually less than 5 people and are very selective on who we invite. No regrets here.
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.
This summer I went to every pagan group I could and came to the conclusion that, for people who are settled in householder mode, the basic things you can do are (1) have a potluck and (2) have a fire, in that order. Martin Prechtel says "The feast is the only ritual" and even the Christian ministers I know won't argue about it, I mean https://four12global.com/articles/breaking-bread/
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.
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
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.
No need to suspect ;)
Family and community are highly valued and protected in their culture. Something Americans have lost their way from.
A few years ago I came across a HN comment by a guy who wrote "The 2-Hour Cocktail Party". I read his comments and then got the book, and it seemed fantastic, smoothing over all the painful issues that happen when you host.
I really wanted to try it out, but moved from the city just after reading it and haven't yet.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32879851
> Something quite deep in the human psyche seems to want desperately to turn off our self-talk and silence our nattering internal monologues by turning up the volume of other characters’ voices.
Over the past few years, rather than seeking to drown out that internal monologue with external entertainment, I've found myself feeding that monologue into Claude to have what I know is an ersatz conversation. And sometimes I work with Claude to write stories around whatever I'm thinking about, basically a form of escapism and sometimes wish fulfillment through personalized fiction. How weird does this make me? Is it inherently unhealthy?
Edit to add: To tie it back to the theme of the article, the result is, of course, the same; I spend more time alone, less time talking with real people.
I wonder, does this correlate to declining home ownership?
A house party seems to me like a great idea if you actually own the house. But if you don't own the damn place (or, worse, houseshare), you are working full time, and are no longer in your 20s, having people over loses much of its appeal. Especially for larger gatherings.
Certainly a part of it. I've either had roommates [no need/space to invite more over] or a draconian landlord. Nearly 40 and I'm only now within reach of ownership.
Current landlord took exactly one evening to notice my new car; that was neat. The photograph and demands for justification were not. They, apparently, thought there might be more rent to seek from a non-existent tenant.
I've seen mention there are more owners nowadays; I'd argue they're also more controlling. Those who rent are often practically living supervised.
I did wonder about that. It mentions that lower-income individuals have less friends and thus throw less parties. But part of me wondered if that was precisely because they lacked the space to host anything more than a few friends over. Someone in a $2000/month studio apartment may not have the time nor money to try and host anything to begin with. And given costs these days, even the thought of eating out and meeting with friends is difficult.
The church is a huge part of building community and relationships. Its not that you can't find community and relationships outside of church, it just makes it that much easier. I have found that unless you are seeing people at least once a week or every other week with regularity, it is hard to develop a strong friendship. Church on Sundays, community group, and the occasional group party like our annual costumes and cocktails party build a foundation for developing strong individual relationships. I think with the decline of the church a lot of people just don't have things in their life that provide that relational structure. Some definitely do though!
Lots of focus on the negatives, but it's rather uplifting to see that fathers are spending 4x as much time with their kids.
I feel like my house is never clean/tidy enough.
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.
> It's too much fun to be home alone
This reminded me of the insurance company TV ad:
https://www.ispot.tv/ad/S7KX/geico-cancelled-plans
> Americans are unhappier than ever
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-...
> 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.
I still do this once a month a more frequently, I think Oslo being a small city allows me and my friends to afford this with ease of public transport.
Me and a pal talked about this problem exactly a week ago, we chatted how we just invite more and more friends but sheldomly get invited ourselves, and our conclusion was some people just are not good at hosting. I say that because they never hesitate to attend.
hwoever, my phone contact is fileld with peoples allergies notes, likes/dislikes and similar so I keep the party fit for all. Catering to everyones allergy and everyone seems to have one here in West is mad challenging.
They missed two big causes.
#1 Hording: If you've got a house full of crap, and you're deeply ashamed of it, you're not going to be having visitors over, ever. You're also not going to mention it on surveys.
We, the American public, have been collecting shit at a prodigious rate. Many of us pay rent for stuff that won't fit in our home. It's why the storage industry is so reliably profitable.
#2 Paranoia: Otis Toole[1] kidnapped then killed Adam Walsh. His father publicised his kidnapping, and fueled a moral panic that sent American parents deep into paranoia. Kids used to be free range, and were often collectively instructed to "go outside to play, and come inside when the street lights come on". After that event, we're afraid to even let them walk to a friends house a few doors over.
The end of the fairness rule, and the rise of fear based media like Fox news certainly didn't help in the rise of distrust.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottis_Toole#Murder_of_Adam_Wal...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-by-one_error
#1 is a big reason for our house. The house (and garage) badly needs a significant declutter, but we are both working professionals and don't have the energy to make a significant enough dent, especially since we both have hobbies where we accumulate more stuff all the time as well (especially me, I impulse buy board games and don't cull the ones I'm not playing often enough).
It doesn't help that I design board games too, and have too much of an easy excuse to want to get these games so I can 'research' them.
And because I'm mentally tired all the time after work, that also seems to lower my willpower. And clicking the 'buy' button online is way too easy to do.
We did used to host a monthly game designer playtest night before the pandemic, but our house had a lot less stuff back then. And being stuck in the house during the pandemic with nothing to do but play solo board games and video games (and also the uncertainty if I was even going to make it through the pandemic, since I already had respiratory issues from asthma) definitely accelerated the bad impulse buying habits I already had.
We have made slight dents in it, but the significant declutter probably won't happen until the next time I'm in between jobs, assuming there's at least a month in between jobs.
(title sounds like tim robinson' new project)
This is an interesting article and I think it touches on something I've observed as well across my generation which is a lack of participation in society, institutions, and more. This generation and the one after that prefers to "like" a "post" and maybe go vote. Civic institutions? Maybe a token $5 that they were guilt tripped into contributing. By the way why does Europe have all these great museums and nice gardens? Someone paid for it. You spend 10s of thousands of dollars to go look at their stuff. Maybe you should spend that money locally instead so you have your own stuff at home to look at.
We by and large seem to not understand that nobody is going to do these things for us. I'm not sure if it was a parenting failure or just changes in how society prefers to function, but when you look around and see nobody is inviting you to dinner you should conclude that you should be the one to initiate the change. It's the same mentality I see when folks just want the government to do something, or some corporation to do something about climate change for example, but they are unwilling to also simultaneously take their own personal actions. Change starts with you. Nobody is coming to save you. You have to run for office. You have to volunteer at your local community center. You have to take on the leadership role at your church or other place of worship. You have to spend the money and host dinner parties. You have to coordinate these things and yes you have to do it on top of your other responsibilities. Alternatively, you just don't have these things anymore and social media isn't going to replace them.
Also kids - hard to get people together with kids. Not just time constraints (some seem quite strange to me - kids go to bed at 7PM? My parents just let me go to sleep whenever) but also inability to locate, to engage in conversation - mid conversation they stop some kid is doing something and now you kind of realize whatever you were talking about wasn't important to begin with, and more. I'm not criticizing folks for having kids or anything and I think "childfree" movements are extremely cringe and stupid, but having kids in lieu of extra effort, leads to some social isolation from what I've observed.
Then next thing you know you are in your late 40s and you don't have friends anymore.
Of course these are very broad strokes I'm painting. But I think there's quite a bit of truth to it.
Money. In the 70s, a single income family could afford to host. Who has money for that these days?
The period in my life when I hosted parties was when I was a mostly broke college student and flatsharing (you can get a surprising mileage out of cheap Sangria and snacks).
For most people posting on HN, I would guess, money would not be even in the top-3 of reasons.
I actually went to a dinner party this past Saturday. It was planned and coordinated by my best friend's wife (of course). It was the only one this year. I'm sure they will be holiday parties, thanks to my sister-in-law, but that was the one dinner party in 2026. My cohort is mostly retired, so it's not from a lack of spare time.
I was recently introduced to the term "house-shy", for people who don't want anyone else seeing what the inside of their house looks like. I have a few friends who are "house-shy", that I for one reason or another have seen the houses of (often years after becoming friends with them). I think the percentage of Americans who are hoarders or borderline, is underestimated.
If anyone reading this has a job (plumber, A/C repair, etc.) that regularly gives them a glimpse of the inside of people's homes, I would be curious as to their thoughts on this.
Year 3626 Edward Gibbon II picks this up like a case study in late Roman Empire decline. He would likely not blame screen overuse, burnout, rising costs/inflation, shyness, loss of communication skills (as mentioned in this chat). These things are symptoms rather than primary causes.
I would think that in 1600 years, it would be more like Edward Gibbon CC or such.
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.
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
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.
Surely you could still meet people outside of home while living in a small apartment? At least that’s what everyone here in Japan does.
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.
I would bet these days 80 year olds are having about as many dinner parties as 23 year olds. The topic here isn’t general observations about home ownership, it is whether home ownership rate since 1970 caused a drop in dinner parties by 68%. It didn’t.
Not all of it, but Americans are working significantly more now than they did in 1975[1]. One would expect compromises to be made to clear space for more work hours.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060
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.
How do gender roles and sexism figure into this? I'm sure it's not the only reason, but it wouldn't surprise me if most of the 'party' work ended up falling on the wife more often than not.
That was the first reason given in the article: more dual-income households, less free time for women to organize and cook.
root cause: young generation wants to rent, not own. Young generation wants high density living and a shift of ownership towards landlords and private equity. As such, entertaining in a walnut sized apartment is a little less practical.
Getting people to buy (their first and only) home is a really important issue. Creating more landlords doesn't not solve housing problems.
A graph about social changes that cuts off at 2022 is beyond worthless.
I don't particularly like hosting, although I will do so, but I do enjoy gatherings of friends and interesting people over good food and good wine. What my wife and I did was join a dinner club. There are all variety of dinner clubs in almost every major city in the world. We are in our 40s and are the youngest members, because it seems most of the folks who join dinner clubs are older retirees that no longer have large families at home to host dinners with/for, but nonetheless we've found it rewarding.
Given that, though, I do see a bit of a generational divide. It definitely seems like the social circles of people in my generation and younger are larger, but not as deep. I have very good friends who have all moved to different places across the country, I fly to visit them, but the last time all of us were together was at someone's wedding. Contrast this with older generations who often have nearby lifelong friends and close by family, that provides them a smaller but deeper social circle with more opportunities for in-person interaction.
Dinner clubs are great, but not a replacement for the fact my closest friends are spread out all over the country. I don't really have a solve for that. If I were rich, I'd convince everyone to take remote jobs so we could build a "compound" with a bunch of houses all together and be near each other, but the economic realities don't make that possible for any of us.
I was going to spout off my opinion without reading the article but well, yeah they covered the exact reasons why we don't host more: my wife and I are too busy, the kids have taken over too much of the house with toys to clean it fast and elaborate hovering play dates have taken the place of what would have been adult time in decades past. For better or worse, probably better, people also don't seem to want to drink as much anymore and many people have restrictive vegan gluten free diets. It's more about finding parents of kids who are friends with your kids
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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
My mother was a stay at home mom and at least from my perspective she never seemed isolated but that seemed to be because there were many other stay at home moms on our block. We basically knew everyone on our block that had kids, which was most of them back then. I distinctly remember all the time we spent at our neighbours' houses for combination play dates and card games. Us kids would play inside or outside and the moms would play cards and socialize. There were always people coming and going and it felt like the entire block was a sort of extended family. I don't remember many organized dinner parties but that could just be from being a small child at the time so we weren't up late and didn't spend time sitting at the "adult table" when there were gatherings (we'd be fed something and then go play with the other kids in the basement or another room).
> If you are at home with a kid, you are truly absolutely alone, unless you organize something.
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?
You absolutely can, but you can also just show up and meet the people that are there.
Its a pain in the ass to host something and id rather see my friends at a bar/restaurant.
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).
Don't take a percent change of a percent change.
Inviting friends over for dinner is the ONLY way I can get my wife and daughter to clear their stuff from the common areas.
A party with 10 guests is even better.
All three of us are hoarders, to an extent, but I alone am able to go into a cleaning frenzy approximately once or twice a year and get rid of mega-junk. Unfortunately, they don't seem able to do so.
So, I consider dinners still to be a useful tradition, though perhaps the motivations have shifted a bit.
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 is a charming idea and I am inspired to try it. We just need more face time (vs. Facetime) in our lives.
Why is church in there?
Another factor is alcohol consumption and the tolerance for drinking and driving. DUI citations were rare when I was young. I rarely see people drinking at parties I go to now.
In the end you get tired of always hosting and never getting invited back.
Too many people are passive and have a follower or consumer attitude to everything in life. Anything outside of the routine is impossible to consider.
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.
>Sure, those are fictions for TV
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.)
Idk man. It could also be that people like you are being jerks. You sound like the people that made me quit going to church, as long as we're on topic. The CPI has been bullshit for years now. People 100% work more than ever, and not for nothing. The average household needs to work more hours per week to afford the same things. This has been obvious for a long time. Hours worked per year, per household peaked in the 1990's at around 2300 hrs, and it's sat around there since then. I wonder what could've happened in the 80's to cause this?
Id agree. Ive dealt with bullies like them before. Doesnt matter what proof you pull out of your ass. You're always wrong, no matter what you say. Reminds me of Upton Sinclair's quote "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it", but more akin to political positions, and active refusal and rebuttal of anything said in opposition to their political view.
I was making a social point that "average TV shows showing families" is a rough reflection of the current happenstance of the age in which they were made. Its not a "proof" or whatever governmental numbers were smoothed over or otherwise faked to make US households look healthier or better.
> The average household needs to work more hours per week to afford the same things.
A weirdness ive seen.. Entertainment equipment like TVs, game consoles, cell phones, and such are cheap compared to the 1970's through early 2000's. Used to be entertainment was EXPENSIVE. But housing? Our house, in the Midwest, in early 2000s, sold for $160k. We bought it in 2022 for $375k. And on GIS, i see the same exact trend everywhere in my county. Other counties that we looked at moving to, similar. Same story as far as I looked.
Also, federal minimum wage has kept the same for what, since 2007? Union participation has plummeted to like 15%. Workers work longer for less money. Can barely afford a shitty apartment (too small to host parties), BUT that $400 70" TV with a game console is cheap.. and it helps you forget poverty and loneliness with artificial plenty (in game), and company (remotely, on a game).
> I wonder what could've happened in the 80's to cause this?
Reagan, Mergers and Acquisitions crisis (and resulting venture capital buying and shredding companies en masse now), stagnating wages, heavy pushing of "Right to Work" laws, and all of this trickle-down that makes me think I'm just a urinal.
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.
I am surprised i had to scroll this far to see the whole thing was powered by women’s unpaid labor.
Agreed - my social life has frequent gatherings only because my wife is, despite working and having kids, extremely motivated to meet up with friends. If she didn’t have that motivation we probably wouldn’t be seeing anyone, and if she weren’t working then that could compensate.
Maybe it helps that 50 years ago people could actually afford to buy things like big houses where to throw parties at.
Take a look at this graph https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/housing1.png?...
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
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).
So the vast majority of people have more space for entertaining than in 1975.
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.
Were houses that much bigger in the 1970s, though? Families definitely were bigger, so there were more people per square meter. I think overall, it's a sociological change, not a financial one. People are just less into hosting parties; too much hassle of cleaning up & preparing food, too many online distractions, etc.
Midlife millennial American here.
I’ve sorely wanted to host folks for game nights and shared meals and movies and the like. In fact, in the 2010s I’d play host to folks on the semi-regular since having people in my space is far less energy draining than being a guest in someone else’s.
Since ~2018, I’ve hosted guests three times.
Why the change?
Well, the landlord began charging for garage parking that used to be gratis, forcing cheapskates and broke renters into the visitor spaces. Then they clawed back 25% of guest parking for premium EV charging, meaning even guests with EVs couldn’t park there once they finished charging. Then the landlord stopped enforcing that, meaning folks with EVs can’t charge them because the spots are always full of combustion vehicles. This meant public transit and cycling were the only remaining options for guest access, the former of which required an hour-long detour for my friends to catch a single, specific bus route, while the latter would see them crossing stroads and cycling on state highways with vehicular traffic.
The local logistics are fungible however, and not the sole reason for the drop off. The bigger reason, admittedly, is fatigue. We spend eight hours working, then commute one to two hours each way (~10mi). Include time to prepare for work, make meals, and decompress after, and you’re left with ~1-2hrs a day for free time before having to sleep. Most employers I’ve worked for would side-eye you with disdain for trying to leave early to host an event at home, meaning we don’t feel comfortable asking for the time off in the first place. That doesn’t even include the associated workloads of our guests, who just have to show up almost immediately after work and don’t mind using their very limited free time hanging out in my space.
Then you bake in the fiscal costs - fuel for transit, food to share or prepare, parking and transit fees - and the data harvesting costs (landlord surveillance logging your entry, advertising displays profiling you, Flock camera at the sole neighborhood entrance tracking your entry and exit, etc) and it just doesn’t make fiscal or psychological sense to host at home. That doesn’t even touch on renters having smaller spaces than homeowners making hosting more of a challenge, potential noise complaints about your jovial party from a nosey neighbor getting your lease non-renewed, or the ease of just queuing up for a game remotely (even if it lacks the payoff of a physical visit from another human).
The closest I came to hosting on the regular was that brief window where COVID was managed but before RTO came hammering down. I squeezed in two visits during that time, before mandatory RTO and the insane commutes and shitty job market just kinda sapped all the energy from my circles for anything but basic survival.
Which is all a lengthy way of saying that the problem as I see it is that these events are declining because fewer people are thriving, and more people feel barely able to survive. The excess energy I do have doesn’t go to hosting so much as enjoying social events elsewhere, but that only happens because I am privileged enough to be able to take the next day off from work for recovery without getting fussed at by my employer; nobody else in my circles has that luxury at present.
Maybe you live somewhere extremely shitty but my family's friend groups get together all the time, it's not that hard. Just go over to their place, you just make up 101 excuses not to do it.
Maybe I wasn’t clear: the red carpet has remained deployed the entire time, but since 2018 circumstances have changed for such a large amount of my social circles that hosting events is the exception rather than the norm, specifically because of a lack of time, lack of money, lack of employer flexibility, lack of job prospects, and/or lack of energy. That’s not me making excuses, that’s literally the reasons folks don’t come over for me or most others in my buildings - and those who do visit often only come once, because they get towed for parking in the wrong spot and thus don’t want to return.
Much of the same reasons apply for why I don’t visit others: they’re too tired to host, or lack the space, or have hostile neighbors, or aren’t near public transit, or lack parking, or lack the budget to buy more food, or lack the employer willing to let them work flexibly to make all of the previous issues less problematic.
It’s great that your sample size is able to make it work but clearly mine cannot at present. It’s not a matter of “excuses”, but tangible and logical rationale for why - even when I can cover the logistics and costs myself on their behalf - they’d rather have that hour of free time to themselves for recovery before another fourteen hour day of prep-commute-work-commute-eat.
You should move to a different apartment. That's the only language landlords understand.
I can't believe noone has been discussing cost of living as a reason. Food is more expensive, owning a place big enough to invite people over is more expensive, even free time is more expensive. To me, this seems pretty straightforward: people are getting priced out of fun.
Could be, but your income should be going up in unison. If its not, its time to re-evaluate your career. Cost of living adjustments should be keeping pace with inflation, which is also a check-and-balance for business owners, to realize inflating costs to customers isn't necessarily a good thing.
If you're not getting that, you're being scammed.
The narcissism of food restrictions— and in general— has contributed to this. I love to cook, but it’s dreadful to have to assemble everyone’s restrictions into a meal. How can I make a vegan, gluten free, organic, global , etc meal ?
It’s emblematic of the me-first attitude. Instead of deferential guests , grateful to be welcomed over, everyone demands they are catered to on their terms.
I politely asked my neighbor to take her shoes off before entering, and she complained that I should have warned her of my no shoes policy before coming over.
I offer my guests unopened slippers to wear while they are here, too .
That other Abundance guy writes convincingly that our abundant present isn’t that satisfying. This is also self-consciously a bit tilted towards the author’s milieu. Even the Abundant Class are overworked, undersocialized, and too preoccupied with cheap technological thrills.
Material conditions certainly affect this too.
For example, if you're younger, it's a lot harder to throw a dinner party in your tiny overpriced apartment than it might have been for a previous generation of people who already owned homes in their twenties.
It is also harder to throw a party when both partners in a relationship need to work full time to make ends meet.
It is also harder to throw parties when invitees also are overworked and tired and are habituated to netflix, rather than going out.
If you live in a city, going to a public space is inevitably easier. If you live in a suburb, staying home is inevitably easier.
It's much more plausible to me that these trends are due to underlying material conditions more than they are to some fundamental change in the social attitudes of people (though obviously both can play a role).
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
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 wouldn't call diagnosing people for actual medical issues we learned about since the 70s an en vogue thing. Other than those, it's pretty much just vegan / non-vegan.
It’s amazing how dietary restrictions and medical issues track with political affiliation. Who knew?
> In Bowling Alone, 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.
Well yeah, no surprise. Planning takes time and executing even more. Get the house and garden cleaned up, buy supplies, prep and cook/grill everything, clean up everything, restore "normal" functionality of the house again.
> The trouble with going all in on this explanation—beyond the fact that it embraces a version of learned helplessness for men—is that leisure time has increased overall since the 1950s.
Leisure time maybe, but any decent party takes hours of work. Host a dozen people, they're there until at least 2200 if not longer, and then it's hours worth of cleanup work. In ye olde times, that fell under the responsibility of the housewife during the next day, but nowadays? Oh hell no.
On top of that, workloads have gone extremely compressed over the last decades "thanks" to surveillance capitalism squeezing every tiny sliver of time. No more downtimes at the water cooler and coffee machine, it's work work work work work. When you arrive home, you are completely and utterly drained.
Personally, I need my weekend just to recover.