The simple answer is media. First television, then internet, then smartphones.
People used to actively seek the company of others - if for no other reason than out of boredom. Entertainment and parasocial relationships have filled that hole.
Another reason I might posit is declining birth rates and an aging population. Entire neighborhoods used to be filled with young families of roughly the same age. Now on any given city block in the US, there may only be 1 or 2 houses that have kids of any age in them. Smaller concentration of kids -> thinner market for playdates and sleepovers -> less interactions between families.
my 94 yo gpa is calling his homies ALL DAY LONG. ill see my best friends between once a week to once a month and texting comes and goes. if i got a phone call i assume its an emergency
> First television, then internet, then smartphones
i like vr so i sometimes wonder if itll catch on and if were in the "we know one or two people with a tv" era of the early 40s. theres certainly seems to be a financial incentive since it seems like tvs and phones have gone about as far as we can take them. its also certainly seems like a another leap down the isolation path as well
luckily i think most people reject vr bc it sucks to wear something on your face
Older people grew up socializing constantly so they can just start talking to strangers like they've known each other for years, especially if they are from the same town.
I volunteered at an old folks home from age 10-16 or so, this was back in early/mid 90s - before the Internet stole my attention - and the old people were of the Greatest Generation cohort (maybe some of the oldest from 1800s). I really enjoyed those talks and have always liked talking with old people since. I can sit with any of them and just talk for hours but rarely ever do this with younger/my aged people. Unfortunately, I fear this is ending soon as this latest generation of old people is kind of vile and not really seeking positive conversation (wild generalization but it's my experience). Instead they tend to want to tell you how to live, what to believe, who to vote for, etc. and then judge you when you don't comply or voice a differing opinion.
FWIW, I also think it's largely because boomer's collectively lost their minds and started acting out when their parent/grandparent generation was gone. It's like they didn't want to disappoint them so were acting on good behavior, but now their true colors show.
Media in general is probably the real answer. We lack boredom at home. Earlier you were bored, so you signed up for sports, went on cheap trips, camping, pretty much anything to get out. Talking to older people 60 - 70+, some of them spent three or four days at the clubhouse of their chosen sport, they where constantly out of the house, because that's were you weren't bored.
It's a negative feedback loop too. There used to be people out doing things so when folks got bored they'd go find them.
Now entertainment and social media sort of fill that gap (not really) but enough that there's less people out. Less people out mean it's less entertaining, so less people go out etc.
My controversial idea for urban planning: age and demographic based zoning.
There is lots of urban planning in the US that is poorly optimized. Walkable neighborhoods close to parks and schools are often filled with retirees, whereas young families are often crowded into newer neighborhoods at the edge of town with little infrastructure nearby.
You wouldn't even have to do much pressure to move the needle. Cities are already putting in millions of dollars to place their parks and schools, and etc. Offer tax incentives that encourage young families to move into family areas, singles into single areas, and retirees into retiree areas.
It sounds kind of crazy, but we more or less do this for student areas around colleges.
I don’t think it’s as simple as that. It seems like people are increasingly exhausted and disillusioned with life.
What you seem to be implying is people are lazy and choosing TikTok over real relationships. But I also think people choose TikTok because it’s low effort and they don’t have much gas left in the tank.
>seems like people are increasingly exhausted and disillusioned with life.
Counterpoint, people are TOLD and CONVINCED that they are exhausted and that life is way harder than it is.
Capitalism loves someone who is "too busy" to make stuff or avoid buying stuff.
Our lives are all about reducing friction and making everything easier.
Relative to 20-30 years ago we are so lucky and privileged. It's nuts how the victim mindset has spread.
I've lived all over the place and one thing I've seem priliferate is this mindset of "I'm a victim, doing this is too hard, so I just won't for X and Y reasons" while folks order Uber eats.
The baseline for what is acceptable has dropped so, so far. And I'm sure people will reply saying I just don't get it. Lol.
One could argue that both parents having to work is much more difficult than when one person could support a household. Houses, healthcare and education are objectively much more expensive as well. It's not "victim mindset", it's literal exhaustion because everything is much more expensive. There's also no way to retire vs pensions and other baby boomer offramps.
I think people are actually increasingly exhausted and disillusioned with life, but that increase is basically entirely due to spending hours doomscrolling and similar behavior.
> It seems like people are increasingly exhausted and disillusioned with life.
The interesting part is what causes what. Are people exhausted and disillusioned because they aren't experience life the same way as previously, or aren't they having these experiences because they are exhausted and disillusioned.
I think the media influence went far beyond just pacifying or entertaining.
The relentless satire is what really did it. It was all written by some of the smartest yet depraved and depressed people who found a home in comedy. What did we think was going to happen?
Satire is all well and good, but what are we doing when we no longer take anything seriously anymore? Social media, but particularly reddit, continues to be an echo chamber for these mentally castrated and bitter people who couldn't challenge the comedy with a life that was actually any better than what was being mocked.
I think Bowling Alone did a great job of describing the phenomena. I don't think it did a great job of explaining why it was happening.
It doesn't, for example, cover the privatization of public spaces, it doesn't mention mass white flight from cities to suburban sprawl due to people wanting to preserve apartheid, nor does it cover the rise in wealth inequality or the weakening of labor laws or the obliteration of pedestrian friendly infrastructure.
Instead, it pins it all on 'television' which, sure, but there's a reason why people gravitate towards entertainment that is served to them much more cheaply per-hour than not. It's a little like saying the problem with small pox is that the boils are painful, not the underlying virus systematically destroying your body.
In my personal experience in community organizing, the main pain points people have are 1) that they have day jobs that exhaust them, 2) the traffic sucks and they don't want to drive to our meetings, or 3) they need to pick up a second shift or another job to cover their basic needs. And even to those points, it's hard to get a public space where you can regularly meet that doesn't charge a lot of money, to provide food/refreshment, to maintain an ongoing potluck which requires a lot of coordination especially when it comes to preferences/dietary restrictions, etc. It's almost never out of a lack of interest. People desperately want community but there are so many barriers in place.
> It doesn't, for example, cover the privatization of public spaces, it doesn't mention mass white flight from cities to suburban sprawl due to people wanting to preserve apartheid
That's because, contrary to the way it's often depicted, the 20th century was overwhelmingly a flight from rural areas to cities. Suburbs were an outgrowth of that, but the reality is that rural areas were hollowed out the most. (Also, community engagement in rural areas with lots of sprawl was even higher than in cities).
> that they have day jobs that exhaust them
The median adult is spending 5+ hours on their phone a day. This is what is exhausting people. Everyone is essentially working a second job that involves lots of reading and attention and social engagement. It's a parasitic draw on our lives.
> they need to pick up a second shift or another job to cover their basic needs.
Maybe that's true for some people, but the data usually shows that income and free time is inversely related to community time. Poorer people are making more time for friends and family.
I can see what you're trying to do - reframe this problem as another outgrowth of class struggle. But it doesn't really explain the reality. A steelworker in the 1920s coming off of a 10-hour shift would still find the time and energy to go out dancing. A software engineer in 2026 is going to get off of work at 5pm and watch 3.4 more hours of screen time in a day.
>the 20th century was overwhelmingly a flight from rural areas to cities
You're talking about an entirely different phenomena. The move from rural areas to cities and exurbs happened in the 50s/60s with cheap mortgage rates, WWII-provisioned education, and large sweeping social services being enacted. White flight is a phenomena that started in the mid-60s to 80s that specifically coincided with integration.
>The median adult is spending 5+ hours on their phone a day. This is what is exhausting people
There's much to be said about the behavioral manipulation and dark patterns in apps and devices, sure. But I don't think television inherently was employing Skinner-boxes to get people to watch and that's what I was specifically speaking to. Regardless, that dark pattern of it is class struggle related if that's the direction you want to frame it (I see it more as just MBA-brained corporate sociopathy) because it seeks to extract capital from its users while externalizing all negatives onto the users themselves.
>Maybe that's true for some people, but the data usually shows that income and free time is inversely related to community time. Poorer people are making more time for friends and family.
Obviously. And this is clearly related to the fact that the more impoverished you are, the more you need to pool resources to survive. The pain points I illuminated are for individuals who are still showing up to community organizing work and much of what we do in these spaces is effectively providing enough mutual aid for them to survive.
> A steelworker in the 1920s coming off of a 10-hour shift would still find the time and energy to go out dancing.
You have proof of this? That they wouldn't just go home and get shitfaced or otherwise incapacitated? All steelworkers, per capita, were going out dancing regularly? And even so, this wasn't because they were economically incentivized by the rise of labor unions to be in community with others, building power and fighting for better rights? The 30 years of post-Reagan neoliberal expanisionism has effectively neutered unions - and that's something that wasn't covered either by Putnam.
I suspect another thing largely missed by Putnam was the rise of online social spaces. Connecting with friends via the phone, on Discord, in video game spaces - that's community. It's just different from the community envisioned by people in more elderly generations. The fact that you're even commenting on HackerNews is effectively proof against Putnam's claims.
In places like Detroit racism was very much the primary reason in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s at least. Some of it was just personal racism, pure and simple. See "blockbusting" techniques used by realtors who would hire a black mother to walk down the street with a baby carriage to give the impetus for white people to sell quickly and cheaply. Or a black family moving into a house, the white neighbors trying to push them out via lawsuit for breaking a racially restrictive covenant, then losing so that all the white people left the neighborhood (e.g. read about Orsel and Minnie McGhee in Detroit, I authored the National Register nomination for their house).
The racist pressure to move was also a structural issue supported by the Federal government. Redlining meant you couldn't get loans to buy houses in certain neighborhoods, and those neighborhoods were exactly where black people lived. Literal walls could be constructed between two similar communities of different races so that the white side could be higher rated and have better access to loans (e.g., the Birwood Wall in Detroit). A ton has been written about the topic, I can't really do it justice, but the idea that people just wanted a bigger house was not the case. A lot of Detroit actually consisted of single-family homes with yards anyhow, so it was literally white people leaving a house for a very similar one.
I'm 25. I go to work and then I go home. Same schedule since I got out of university. I do networking / IT. I usually buy a six pack of beer and then go to bed when I'm off, sometimes I'll stay up on my lab but I usually regret it because lack of sleep.
No bars, no dinners with anyone. I think the only blessing this lifestyle has given me is minimized impact from the failing economy we're in, at the cost of not seeing anyone or doing anything. I still have outside hobbies, but it's all too expensive to keep up with now, or being heavily regulated.
Not really satisfied, but the alternatives seem like an uphill battle for myself. Most of my friends have moved on to their marriages, kids, etc. Certainly entering childless uncle phase of my life.
You don't have to live this way. To begin with, drinking a six pack at night on a regular basis is absolutely terrible for your health. It disrupts your sleep and so you will always be operating well below what you could be. The social problems are harder to solve because they are society-wide and not individual, but at your age a lot can change, and I think it's really important that you don't start to give up and think of your situation as inevitable, lest you ossify.
Every single social event is a financial consideration now. Want to go out with the wife for the evening? It's going to cost $150+ for a baby sitter at $25/hour. The dinner + tip is going to cost $200. Parking is going to cost $50 - $100 if you go into a city. You could take public transportation but then you're loooking at that cost shifting back to the babysitter. Before you know it you're in for $300 - $500 just for a night off.
> The dinner + tip is going to cost $200. Parking is going to cost $50 - $100 if you go into a city.
Why are you driving into a city that costs $100 to park in and then to a restaurant that costs $100 per person if money is a consideration?
Go to a local restaurant. Go to one outside of that city. Do literally anything other than the scenario you described.
I guarantee that if you're near a city where you can find $100 parking, you can find 100 or 1000 amazing small restaurants that are affordable and interesting.
This is a type of defeatism where someone imagines the worst possible scenario, erases all other options, and then pretends it's a choice between the worst scenario or nothing at all.
I have often thought about how many movies and TV shows in my childhood (1980s) focused on plot lines of people regularly gathering at a bar after work. Did people really do that or is it just a Hollywood thing to put people in the same place? Now that I think about it, actually, I guess my department at work did this when I first started in the early 2000s, going out to the bar once or twice a week.
It's hard to imagine doing that nowadays. I have a family, so doing that instead of going home in the evening would be selfish (if done too often), but even if I were younger and had time, it would seem very extravagant now. When a beer is $8-10 or even more, it would be an expensive proposition to go to the bar every night after work. And if you order food it's even worse...
I think the answer to your question is right there in your post:
> Now that I think about it, actually, I guess my department at work did this when I first started in the early 2000s, going out to the bar once or twice a week.
> It's hard to imagine doing that nowadays. I have a family,
This still happens. Young people get together and go out after work. I don't go to pubs often, but when I meet up with someone after work the crowd is people meeting up after work with each other.
If everyone in your department is over 35 and has kids, you won't have much luck with this. If everyone is in their 20s and friendly, there's probably something going on.
I think a lot of people forgot how to be friendly with coworkers, especially if they spend a lot of time online. Online discussions about jobs mostly read like it's a cutthroat single player game where you shouldn't get too close to anyone because you can't trust anyone and you should be planning your next job hop anyway. I have to remind a lot of people younger than me that it's okay to have friends at work. You need to have friends outside of work, too, but you can be friendly with people at work.
People really did that regularly. It does seem to be economically related, for a lot of reasons.
One aspect is that a single income really was enough to not feel extravagant to have a home, a family, and afford to go to the bar a few nights a week. (Part of this was there wasn't as much random other stuff to buy, it wasn't being marketed to you nearly as aggressively either.)
I certainly did this quite a bit in the 1990's, and in the early 1980's I definitely remember my father going out at least twice a week and then the weekends also being for going out and doing something as a family at least 2/3 weekends per month - like trips to a nearby city, or to a sports game, or visit other family, or whatnot.
It used to be fairly common in smaller but densely populated areas in the United States, not so long ago (pre-2020). A lot of breweries were setup so that there were even outdoor areas that kids could be in. Usually one of the drafts was priced drastically lower than the others, and there were many unspoken relationship-based discounts or "try this" from the bartender or owner.
The unfortunate thing to me is that outside of VERY upscale or VERY downscale dive bars, every place is full of screens now. People go to bars and look at screens instead of talking as much as they used to.
It was mostly a fiction to advance the plot. Going to bars after work has always been a thing for young singles or old alcoholics, but pretty rare for parents/married people to do routinely.
I went first time with office team this year a couple of weeks back. Needless to say whole experience was atrocious. No common reference, movies, sports, TV and so on to talk about besides work. It was just: "Oh, what do you do on weekend? I do x,y,z " in a round-robbin manner.
It was definitely not good time, or even bad time one can remember, just an insipid gathering for 3 hours of doing nothing. $8 for a beer and $15-20 per person for lukewarm food not sure I'll be excited for another meet any time soon.
Dinner + tip can easily reach $200 if you're talking about a fancy restaurant for date night, even with just a single drink each. $50 for parking is crazy, that's like a music festival price or something.
Of course, if you live in the kind of city where the above is true, then a very delicious dinner + tip can usually be had for $50-75, it just won't be as fancy.
See that's the problem, you live IN the city, and you're not afraid of the city, so you know how it really is.
I've gotten the "Parking is too expensive and hard to find" from friends when I try and get them to come into the city to hang out. No, come to my apartment, park in the plentiful free protected street parking right out front, and then we'll walk the 5 minutes to the center of downtown.
There are different ways of approaching doing something:
"To do X requires me to do this and that. So heres how I'll do this and that to get to X. "
"I can't do X because it requires me to do this and that. "
There's a big difference between the 2. The latter is a lie, they just don't want to do what is required to do that. Its a way of phrasing things so people don't feel bad and they don't have to admit they don't want to do something.
Start looking for it and you'll see it in a lot of exchanges.
I remember when the iPhone first came out. I was at a bar, at a table with a few people I didn't really know. This was a pretty common occurrence.
You usually got a drank, talked. This was a kind of gothic-theme bar, all done up with spooky decorations, a good dj, interesting drinks. We'd host arts/culture slide show jams before the place really would get going for the night. The art was curated and swapped out monthly. There was a lot going on! The place did a lot to charge the space with energy and excitement, bringing a lot of different people together.
Then this guy at the table whipped out his phone and just ignored us all sitting there.
I knew right then and there that this was the beginning of the end.
Even before the iPhone it started happening with the Blackberry, Palm, et. al. I distinctly remember the early-mid '00's when my aunt got her first BB, a 7250(?) and it quickly became more important than anything else. Family get-togethers started to consist of her sitting by herself on her phone while the rest of us enjoyed each other's company.
My memory is that my phone was always on me, and I texted a lot on the go, but most of the texts were about meeting up, getting directions, or coordinating. After that, if a phone was brought out it was to do more of that in the group setting "Hey Sally is going to be here in 15 brining Jake"), then put back.
Now we're all dopamine seeking doom scrollers.
I've been out with a group of friends -- some I just met -- once this year. It also doesn't help that meals and drinks seem hard to justify for the price. I'm waxing nostalgia, but $30 of tacos used to be maybe $8; my $10 beer today was $3.
Thinking back to when I got my first smartphone 15 years ago, it occupied just so much of my attention and I figured it was some kind of honeymoon phase with a new gadget. But it never got less, if anything it's increased since then.
From personal experience, the juice isn't worth the squeeze for actually interacting with others, in person or online.
Even posting this comment is psychologically pulling teeth for me. I regularly type out long replies to comments, but I eventually return to the knowledge derived from a lifetime of past experience that, at best, the comment will be uncharitably misinterpreted by someone who will immediately jump down my throat for some entirely confabulated reason or, at worst, show no signs of having been read or heard at all. What's the point? Nine times out of ten, I just delete the draft and move on with my day and have no regrets. The opposite isn't true; I almost always regret leaving comments (and this one is already included).
In person social commitments somehow became even worse than the online ones. Every single friend (and at this point extended family member) I've had or made since college, people that pre-2012 were the most open and humane-minded people I've ever met, I've either ghosted or been ghosted by because I won't demonize who they want to demonize or mindlessly let them complain about problems they don't and won't try to either understand or fix. ("Well, that's not my experience" and "If you run into assholes all day..." is already flashing before my eyes.)
In my experience, being charitable, accurate, or helpful became so socially toxic (both offline and online) that every social group began to metaphorically shoot on sight at any sign of dissent.
After a certain point, I just gave up and withdrew from almost all avoidable social contact. And on top of all this, why would I pay to have this kind of repeated negative experience?! It's boggles the mind.
And I don't think I'm alone in this experience, even in the slightest.
Just some personal anecdotes: I've come into the orbit of a local "no phones" meetup group in my city. I discovered it by seeing a black and white printed scan of a hand-drawn flyer on a pole by my apartment. Currently it's just organized by one guy who sends out random Signal pings for stuff to do like a potluck picnic, group trip to some free instructed yoga at a park, craft night at a local bar/bookstore, etc., and usually there's ~4-15 people that show up. I organized a World Postcard Day postcard writing party last week, found a venue that would host for free, donated some of my own dollars to provide free official WPD postcards to attendees, and had 7 people come write postcards with me, I convinced 4 of them to sign up for Postcrossing, it was a great time.
If anybody else is looking for change, try setting something like this up. It has so far been free, easy, relatively low stakes, and I think by virtue of the main focus being "no phones", you get some great people who are all tired of the same algorithmic churn.
I became very good friends with someone who I met at one of the meetups and we've done all kinds of things just the 2 of us and have had some really interesting conversations, which is something I haven't done in a LONG time.
This is more complex than you might thing. First, there's far more places to meet people - rather than having them over for coffee, we meet in a coffeeshop. Networks have provided a "together in time" alternative to "together in place", so people can game, talk, ... via voice and video rather than traveling to a common location. There's far more 2-working-member families than previously, so the ability to organize household events is reduced. Finally, there's far more organized sports activities that consume both child and parent time. These pull everybody out of the house.
I’ll never forget a conversation I overheard on a plane years back: a caricature of a man in his 20s failing repeatedly to explain to an older lady what a “gastropub” was. Each time, he rephrased his description, and each time she responded, “that sounds like a pub.”
“No, not exactly...,” he replied in an increasingly exasperated tone. I could hear the struggle in his voice as he recognized the cracks forming in the thin veneer of his identity. “It’s like a pub, but it serves food. Like, real food, thoughtfully considered by a gastrochef.” She returned the serve, now teetering on boredom at minute four of the flight. “At our pub we call him Kevin. He makes the best pot pie.”
He regrouped and they found truce in talking about the weather in Toronto. I resisted the urge to twist around to ask if they knew any good restaurants downtown.
Yeah, but they weren't as common as they are today. There were pubs and eateries before also, but again, not so common. My point was that much of what was done "then" in one's house are now done elsewhere. Some, of course, aren't done and I'm not sure they're quite so popular.
And I assume the pertinent discussion is what happened/changed in the western world post WW II.
Decline in religion + third spaces combined with socioeconomic system expectations of a 40 hour work week + two incomes needed to live comfortably. Places and time for community and social activities has declined, and so social activity has as well.
If more social time is desired at the macro system level, people need to have more leisure time (shorter work week, higher wages, good quality of life with more free time broadly speaking) and more third spaces to meet and socialize.
Is there a citation for the decline in third spaces? I read such a claim often. But in my part of the US (Brooklyn NY) the number of third spaces like coffee shops and pottery studios is booming.
When I was a kid kids used to just hang out. We'd take a bus, ride bikes, or walk to the mall, the park, the woods, fast food restaurant, record store, dollar store, etc and just loiter. Nobody had any money to buy anything, but boy we'd browse and loiter. Sometimes we'd just walk for hours. We'd walk miles and miles and miles just to sit at a table at Burger King with a single small fry between our group and hang out there.
Children don't do that anymore; they basically don't leave the house because they have the Internet. They communicate through texting and Discord so they don't even have to "hang out." Beyond the social change, when I was a young adult most malls went 18+ (unless accompanied by parents/guardians) and most other businesses nowadays allow teens to loiter the way we use to. Businesses want people in and out once they are done.
Even if business allowed it, most parents don't allow their kids to leave the house unattended anymore.
NYC is a thriving city of 8.5 million people and one of the most economically active cities in the world, so your experience may be different than say, Gary, Indiana.
Thank you! I skimmed these citations and I remain unconvinced. But I think really answering the question would be a real research project, not a HN back and forth :)
The first citation's relevant highlight is "All categories of third places experienced widespread closures from 2019 to 2021" which is obviously a COVID phenomenon and not a cultural trend. They admit so much. Data from that period I would say is generally irrelevant to discussing wider cultural trends. In fact a query to Gemini says that the number of independent (not chain) coffee shops is growing at 3.2% across the country and it gives this citation: https://www.locationscloud.com/research-report/us-coffee-sho...
The other Science Direct article says "Third places _may_ be closing in neighborhoods across the United States" (my emphasis).
The remaining articles seem to be opinion articles without hard data. They focus on the hypothetical problem of third places going away. In fact the AEI article talks about zoning which cannot possibly be of relevance to any decline in third places given that zoning is becoming less restrictive over time in the last decade.
The 40 hour work week is most assuredly not new in the past 30 years.
The households where both parents work full time probably have increased in that time, but I'd say you have to go back closer to 50 years to really get to a time where it was still common for a housewife to be home all day with the kids.
2) Prices rising faster then income for majority of population.
3) increasing commute time around employment, activity hubs
4) kids activities/sports are now taken as seriously as work project deliverables. Previously it could be just gifted kids in school teams now with pay-to-play a lot more kids are involved in "serious sports".
regarding the 40 hour work week, I wonder what "always on" is doing to impact social activities. Meaning, you work 40 hours in the office, then you go home and get online and work a few more hours each night.
I can't square this with the fact that I have a perfect storm situation that should point me there. I am a foreigner of minority ethnicity to the United States living in a high-rise building of 600 people that has no Schelling point common-space to spend time in that's located in a city that is expensive and I have all the social contact I desire: family, close friends, more distant friends, neighbours, strangers in the building, familiar strangers in the area.
I talked about how relatively easy it is to have social contact here at all levels and so I must conclude that most people simply have better uses for their time (by their own judgment) than this. https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-10-09/Community
A lot of people are convinced of things without ever trying, which they then use to justify not trying.
"I mildly attempted doing this once and it didn't work, so I won't bother trying again" describes a shocking amount of people's experiences.
I sometimes think people fail on purpose to justify apathy or giving up.
Then if anyone says anything they scream about how their experience is valid and nobody can tell them otherwise. It's wild.
There's something important about being outside our comfort zones. We need entropy in our lives and the best way to accomplish that is being in new environments with different people/creatures. What I've found is over time my comfort zone expands as I become familiar with more stuff.
because suburbs and housing models like it designed around a closed loop even some apartment building which have high population density encourage social isolation.
compare a 'luxury' Florida apartment vs the old New York apartments built in the 1800s. the NY apartments have narrow stairs, one way in.
likewise dense / small cities / villages in either africa/europe etc force more natural social interaction.
even for friends - easier to host friends when they can easily walk to your home & they don't have to drink & drive.
so blaming tv, social media, video games etc doesn't get to the root of the matter.
It would be useful to know whether the same trends have happened in other places. If iPhones are causing people to be less social, we should see similar trends in France and Japan.
If we didn’t see the same trends, it points to reasons more specific to the US.
in America we have had 20 years of "Tech Disruption"., making the world a better place and relentless technical innovation, combined with the 'corporization' of America
Has our day to day lives improved?
Do we work less, live healthier, have less stress?
Seems like this (the younger generation) is far worse off then pre-internet connected, smartphone generation
As long as technology keeps being visible I don't think society will be improved by it. The development in the past few years have let me to the conclusion that having technology insisting on being in your face, it will not benefit society. It has to blend into the background and be something you pull out when you need it. Almost anything "big tech" has produced in the past 25 year have pushed technology into the foreground.
I had a pretty busy social life in university, 20 years ago
The first city I landed in afterwards, I was able to make some connections and was lucky enough some of my uni friends were around too
But I moved for work to a much further away city and my social life has dropped to zero since then. The pandemic and lockdowns didn't help of course, but that was years ago. I don't have a single friend in this city and I've lived here almost 10 years now
Admittedly I'm kind of socially awkward and quite afraid of new groups, which has only gotten worse over the years. I also haven't had any luck making lasting connections through work or anything like that.
I tend to blame myself for this but it's not too surprising to hear many others are struggling too
Social media, smart phones, and all of that are heavily responsible for this, but at the same time I think the main crux of the issue, in my opinion, is that we don’t have a common culture anymore. As long as you don’t have a common culture and a common understanding of the basic rules that everyone agrees on, no one can spend time with each other comfortably.
The fragmentation of culture is also the fault of social media (and all media to a lesser extent). It's far easier to get sucked in to echo chambers where other opinions are mocked or shut out.
In the past we all got our news from Walter Cronkite.
The homogenization of culture was the fault of traditional centralized media. If you go back before the printing press, there was actually a much greater diversity of cultures and languages. Decentralized (social) media is bringing us back to how traditionally tribal humanity used to be.
I may be incorrectly inferring that you think this is a good thing, but "traditionally tribal humanity" were constantly at war with one another. I'm not sure that's something we want to go back to.
I don’t think the “agreeing middle” is 95% anymore. Maybe this is a Chronically Online POV but it seems the extremes are growing quickly, the center is shrinking, and society is going bimodal.
The center is mostly offline, thinks both extremes are very small portions of the population, and doesn't post on social media. So they seem small but really there are a lot of people like this who aren't shouting into the internet 24/7, so you just remember that what you hear is all the extremists shouting, not the people you saw during the course of a week who weren't.
The central part of their identity is to assume that they're the vast majority of people. It allows them not to have to think about stuff too hard - it's all settled, and it's settled on what the people I'm exposed to (i.e. friends, family, and the television) think. I'm safe just repeating that and reporting people who deviate from that.
They don't realize how much the "moral majority" differs in town as opposed to the city, the coasts as opposed to the bulk of the country, in small private liberal arts colleges in the east and at Mormon universities in Utah, or in China, Russia, or Bulgaria as compared to the suburb they grew up in.
If all of those people simply follow the central tendency, and give mass media the same (or greater) weight as they give their neighbors, that guarantees war all the time. It will always be better to listen and try to understand points of view that you aren't familiar with, rather than to hide in the safe (and always untrue depending on the shape of the border you draw) assumption that you represent the vast majority. This, without even considering whether the vast majority are right or wrong.
I mean, some people are so impervious to reality with this that they can lose election after election and believe that they are still 95% of people. Then they start theorizing about mind control and supernatural entities, just to keep from opening their eyes and ears.
Is that the type of "culture" that this statement is referring to?
> As long as you don’t have a common culture and a common understanding of the basic rules that everyone agrees on, no one can spend time with each other comfortably.
That 95% number is so far from the truth. Gen Z males are significantly (though not majority) right wing and Gen Z females are the exact opposite. Based on data, 67% of the time, Gen Z males and females do not agree on the same political issues.
"Political issues" are by definition things that people disagree on. Saying people "disagree on political issues" is equivalent to saying "people disagree on things they disagree on."
But the vast majority of daily life is not driven by or meaningfully affected by any of these "issues on which people disagree." If you go and talk to your neighbors, even ones who you disagree with on disagreement-creating-topics, you will find you actually agree on nearly everything. The set of things you agree on is called "our culture."
In my experience it’s not because there’s lack of attempts to get people together
When given the option between: socializing with people in a shared space and being at home and entertaining yourself people are consciously choosing the latter.
When I ask why, this is what I hear from other people the most:
-I don’t have time
-I don’t have transportation
-Who else is going to be there
Etc…
There seems to be a genuine lack of desire whatsoever to simply get yourself to a place where there is a free event.
And to be clear this is not just talking about one particular type of event
I just went to a Democratic socialist of America event this weekend in support of Gaza, and the amount of people who showed up compared to the number of people who are on the list (even the organizing list) is some vanishingly small group.
If the plurality of individuals don’t want to join groups in person because they feel satisfied by themselves, then that’s a signal of some kind.
Americans are very intolerant of others, whether it's political convictions or food preferences; the few that have kids threat the little ones like fragile glassware that can't be moved or otherwise inconvenienced, so it doesn't surprise me that they meet others less. My wife and I meet with a varying group of friends every week, or even more, but we're all immigrants. We've tried to invite local acquaintances, but they always find a reason to say no and just stay home.
They're right about the intolerance, though. One tribe literally calls the other "Demon-crats", and has worked to reduce participation based on gender, sexuality and skin color.
Both sides are at fault. Here in the Midwest many a supporter of the Democratic party are legitimately afraid of being fired if their support became public knowledge, while on the other hand in California (or other "Blue" states) it's the exact opposite. It's astonishing to see how much Americans relish oppressing their fellow citizens.
The internet is awash with seething tribal hatred. It's impossible to honestly believe this is only an issue with the right. The "demon-crat" attack is roughly analogous to the left's "nazi" attack (nazis, after all, are the secular-progressive equivalent of demons, with Adolf Hitler being their Satan), and the latter attack is infinitely more common than the former, even on HN.
I think unhappiness is the default of human state. Or rather discontent. Its probably wired into us bc if we were ever content we wouldnt procreate, try to attain financial success, etc
I don't think so. Everyone was a lot happier 10-15 years ago when the culture felt less fucked. I think people can't feel happy if they don't feel basically safe, and the world's problems are so incomprehensible, and solutions to them see so impossible to imagine, that there is a background unsafety overlaid on everything, even if one's immediate conditions are pretty good.
Dipends how you see it. For North American standards, it's a lovely suburban neighbourhood in the Midwest; for us it's suburban hell because we love cities.
> the expats are sending time together instead of trying to assimilate
You are getting a lot of downvotes but I 100% agree with you. These are the types of conversations where someone's cultural background / bias is evident and its obvious to me most of your responders have never spent time outside the US.
This has actually been a trend since the 1960s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
The simple answer is media. First television, then internet, then smartphones.
People used to actively seek the company of others - if for no other reason than out of boredom. Entertainment and parasocial relationships have filled that hole.
Another reason I might posit is declining birth rates and an aging population. Entire neighborhoods used to be filled with young families of roughly the same age. Now on any given city block in the US, there may only be 1 or 2 houses that have kids of any age in them. Smaller concentration of kids -> thinner market for playdates and sleepovers -> less interactions between families.
Yes the post's title calls to mind that 'Bowling Alone' was already detailing loss of cohesion nearly 30 years ago.
People are alienated, y'all.
my 94 yo gpa is calling his homies ALL DAY LONG. ill see my best friends between once a week to once a month and texting comes and goes. if i got a phone call i assume its an emergency
> First television, then internet, then smartphones
i like vr so i sometimes wonder if itll catch on and if were in the "we know one or two people with a tv" era of the early 40s. theres certainly seems to be a financial incentive since it seems like tvs and phones have gone about as far as we can take them. its also certainly seems like a another leap down the isolation path as well
luckily i think most people reject vr bc it sucks to wear something on your face
edit: grammar (still bad but better)
Older people grew up socializing constantly so they can just start talking to strangers like they've known each other for years, especially if they are from the same town.
I volunteered at an old folks home from age 10-16 or so, this was back in early/mid 90s - before the Internet stole my attention - and the old people were of the Greatest Generation cohort (maybe some of the oldest from 1800s). I really enjoyed those talks and have always liked talking with old people since. I can sit with any of them and just talk for hours but rarely ever do this with younger/my aged people. Unfortunately, I fear this is ending soon as this latest generation of old people is kind of vile and not really seeking positive conversation (wild generalization but it's my experience). Instead they tend to want to tell you how to live, what to believe, who to vote for, etc. and then judge you when you don't comply or voice a differing opinion.
FWIW, I also think it's largely because boomer's collectively lost their minds and started acting out when their parent/grandparent generation was gone. It's like they didn't want to disappoint them so were acting on good behavior, but now their true colors show.
Media in general is probably the real answer. We lack boredom at home. Earlier you were bored, so you signed up for sports, went on cheap trips, camping, pretty much anything to get out. Talking to older people 60 - 70+, some of them spent three or four days at the clubhouse of their chosen sport, they where constantly out of the house, because that's were you weren't bored.
Communal boredom is where a lot of our creativity comes from.
It's a negative feedback loop too. There used to be people out doing things so when folks got bored they'd go find them.
Now entertainment and social media sort of fill that gap (not really) but enough that there's less people out. Less people out mean it's less entertaining, so less people go out etc.
> Now on any given city block in the US, there may only be 1 or 2 houses that have kids of any age in them.
Thats why we plan to move to the burbs. Lots of ethnic enclaves where kids go around the neighborhood on their own and play.
My controversial idea for urban planning: age and demographic based zoning.
There is lots of urban planning in the US that is poorly optimized. Walkable neighborhoods close to parks and schools are often filled with retirees, whereas young families are often crowded into newer neighborhoods at the edge of town with little infrastructure nearby.
You wouldn't even have to do much pressure to move the needle. Cities are already putting in millions of dollars to place their parks and schools, and etc. Offer tax incentives that encourage young families to move into family areas, singles into single areas, and retirees into retiree areas.
It sounds kind of crazy, but we more or less do this for student areas around colleges.
I don’t think it’s as simple as that. It seems like people are increasingly exhausted and disillusioned with life.
What you seem to be implying is people are lazy and choosing TikTok over real relationships. But I also think people choose TikTok because it’s low effort and they don’t have much gas left in the tank.
>seems like people are increasingly exhausted and disillusioned with life.
Counterpoint, people are TOLD and CONVINCED that they are exhausted and that life is way harder than it is.
Capitalism loves someone who is "too busy" to make stuff or avoid buying stuff.
Our lives are all about reducing friction and making everything easier.
Relative to 20-30 years ago we are so lucky and privileged. It's nuts how the victim mindset has spread.
I've lived all over the place and one thing I've seem priliferate is this mindset of "I'm a victim, doing this is too hard, so I just won't for X and Y reasons" while folks order Uber eats.
The baseline for what is acceptable has dropped so, so far. And I'm sure people will reply saying I just don't get it. Lol.
One could argue that both parents having to work is much more difficult than when one person could support a household. Houses, healthcare and education are objectively much more expensive as well. It's not "victim mindset", it's literal exhaustion because everything is much more expensive. There's also no way to retire vs pensions and other baby boomer offramps.
I think people are actually increasingly exhausted and disillusioned with life, but that increase is basically entirely due to spending hours doomscrolling and similar behavior.
> It seems like people are increasingly exhausted and disillusioned with life.
The interesting part is what causes what. Are people exhausted and disillusioned because they aren't experience life the same way as previously, or aren't they having these experiences because they are exhausted and disillusioned.
I think the media influence went far beyond just pacifying or entertaining.
The relentless satire is what really did it. It was all written by some of the smartest yet depraved and depressed people who found a home in comedy. What did we think was going to happen?
Satire is all well and good, but what are we doing when we no longer take anything seriously anymore? Social media, but particularly reddit, continues to be an echo chamber for these mentally castrated and bitter people who couldn't challenge the comedy with a life that was actually any better than what was being mocked.
I think Bowling Alone did a great job of describing the phenomena. I don't think it did a great job of explaining why it was happening.
It doesn't, for example, cover the privatization of public spaces, it doesn't mention mass white flight from cities to suburban sprawl due to people wanting to preserve apartheid, nor does it cover the rise in wealth inequality or the weakening of labor laws or the obliteration of pedestrian friendly infrastructure.
Instead, it pins it all on 'television' which, sure, but there's a reason why people gravitate towards entertainment that is served to them much more cheaply per-hour than not. It's a little like saying the problem with small pox is that the boils are painful, not the underlying virus systematically destroying your body.
In my personal experience in community organizing, the main pain points people have are 1) that they have day jobs that exhaust them, 2) the traffic sucks and they don't want to drive to our meetings, or 3) they need to pick up a second shift or another job to cover their basic needs. And even to those points, it's hard to get a public space where you can regularly meet that doesn't charge a lot of money, to provide food/refreshment, to maintain an ongoing potluck which requires a lot of coordination especially when it comes to preferences/dietary restrictions, etc. It's almost never out of a lack of interest. People desperately want community but there are so many barriers in place.
> It doesn't, for example, cover the privatization of public spaces, it doesn't mention mass white flight from cities to suburban sprawl due to people wanting to preserve apartheid
That's because, contrary to the way it's often depicted, the 20th century was overwhelmingly a flight from rural areas to cities. Suburbs were an outgrowth of that, but the reality is that rural areas were hollowed out the most. (Also, community engagement in rural areas with lots of sprawl was even higher than in cities).
> that they have day jobs that exhaust them
The median adult is spending 5+ hours on their phone a day. This is what is exhausting people. Everyone is essentially working a second job that involves lots of reading and attention and social engagement. It's a parasitic draw on our lives.
> they need to pick up a second shift or another job to cover their basic needs.
Maybe that's true for some people, but the data usually shows that income and free time is inversely related to community time. Poorer people are making more time for friends and family.
I can see what you're trying to do - reframe this problem as another outgrowth of class struggle. But it doesn't really explain the reality. A steelworker in the 1920s coming off of a 10-hour shift would still find the time and energy to go out dancing. A software engineer in 2026 is going to get off of work at 5pm and watch 3.4 more hours of screen time in a day.
>the 20th century was overwhelmingly a flight from rural areas to cities
You're talking about an entirely different phenomena. The move from rural areas to cities and exurbs happened in the 50s/60s with cheap mortgage rates, WWII-provisioned education, and large sweeping social services being enacted. White flight is a phenomena that started in the mid-60s to 80s that specifically coincided with integration.
>The median adult is spending 5+ hours on their phone a day. This is what is exhausting people
There's much to be said about the behavioral manipulation and dark patterns in apps and devices, sure. But I don't think television inherently was employing Skinner-boxes to get people to watch and that's what I was specifically speaking to. Regardless, that dark pattern of it is class struggle related if that's the direction you want to frame it (I see it more as just MBA-brained corporate sociopathy) because it seeks to extract capital from its users while externalizing all negatives onto the users themselves.
>Maybe that's true for some people, but the data usually shows that income and free time is inversely related to community time. Poorer people are making more time for friends and family.
Obviously. And this is clearly related to the fact that the more impoverished you are, the more you need to pool resources to survive. The pain points I illuminated are for individuals who are still showing up to community organizing work and much of what we do in these spaces is effectively providing enough mutual aid for them to survive.
> A steelworker in the 1920s coming off of a 10-hour shift would still find the time and energy to go out dancing.
You have proof of this? That they wouldn't just go home and get shitfaced or otherwise incapacitated? All steelworkers, per capita, were going out dancing regularly? And even so, this wasn't because they were economically incentivized by the rise of labor unions to be in community with others, building power and fighting for better rights? The 30 years of post-Reagan neoliberal expanisionism has effectively neutered unions - and that's something that wasn't covered either by Putnam.
I suspect another thing largely missed by Putnam was the rise of online social spaces. Connecting with friends via the phone, on Discord, in video game spaces - that's community. It's just different from the community envisioned by people in more elderly generations. The fact that you're even commenting on HackerNews is effectively proof against Putnam's claims.
Was the flight out of the cities to "preserve apartheid" or did many people simply want the suburban lifestyle with a yard and bigger house?
I don't thin racism was the dominant factor for people moving out of the cities. Today the suburb I'm in is packed with immigrants.
Regardless, I don't think you're being very charitable.
In places like Detroit racism was very much the primary reason in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s at least. Some of it was just personal racism, pure and simple. See "blockbusting" techniques used by realtors who would hire a black mother to walk down the street with a baby carriage to give the impetus for white people to sell quickly and cheaply. Or a black family moving into a house, the white neighbors trying to push them out via lawsuit for breaking a racially restrictive covenant, then losing so that all the white people left the neighborhood (e.g. read about Orsel and Minnie McGhee in Detroit, I authored the National Register nomination for their house).
The racist pressure to move was also a structural issue supported by the Federal government. Redlining meant you couldn't get loans to buy houses in certain neighborhoods, and those neighborhoods were exactly where black people lived. Literal walls could be constructed between two similar communities of different races so that the white side could be higher rated and have better access to loans (e.g., the Birwood Wall in Detroit). A ton has been written about the topic, I can't really do it justice, but the idea that people just wanted a bigger house was not the case. A lot of Detroit actually consisted of single-family homes with yards anyhow, so it was literally white people leaving a house for a very similar one.
This has been written about broadly by social historians. This book, in particular, is illuminating: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691133867/wh...
Some other links:
https://news.iu.edu/live/news/24906-research-ties-persistenc...
https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2021/10/white-flight...
https://psmag.com/news/ghosts-of-white-people-past-witnessin...
There's also this rather infamous quote by one of the most powerful Republican strategists in the 80s, Lee Atwater: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater#:~:text=Later%20in...
I won't quote it here but it's very telling.
The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein is another good source on the topic, covering how racist governmental polices played a role.
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I'm 25. I go to work and then I go home. Same schedule since I got out of university. I do networking / IT. I usually buy a six pack of beer and then go to bed when I'm off, sometimes I'll stay up on my lab but I usually regret it because lack of sleep.
No bars, no dinners with anyone. I think the only blessing this lifestyle has given me is minimized impact from the failing economy we're in, at the cost of not seeing anyone or doing anything. I still have outside hobbies, but it's all too expensive to keep up with now, or being heavily regulated.
At this point I think your experience can be multiplied by millions and still be quite accurate.
Do you want to socialise more but can’t or are you satisfied with how things are?
Not really satisfied, but the alternatives seem like an uphill battle for myself. Most of my friends have moved on to their marriages, kids, etc. Certainly entering childless uncle phase of my life.
You don't have to live this way. To begin with, drinking a six pack at night on a regular basis is absolutely terrible for your health. It disrupts your sleep and so you will always be operating well below what you could be. The social problems are harder to solve because they are society-wide and not individual, but at your age a lot can change, and I think it's really important that you don't start to give up and think of your situation as inevitable, lest you ossify.
Uphill battles are often worth fighting.
Every single social event is a financial consideration now. Want to go out with the wife for the evening? It's going to cost $150+ for a baby sitter at $25/hour. The dinner + tip is going to cost $200. Parking is going to cost $50 - $100 if you go into a city. You could take public transportation but then you're loooking at that cost shifting back to the babysitter. Before you know it you're in for $300 - $500 just for a night off.
> The dinner + tip is going to cost $200. Parking is going to cost $50 - $100 if you go into a city.
Why are you driving into a city that costs $100 to park in and then to a restaurant that costs $100 per person if money is a consideration?
Go to a local restaurant. Go to one outside of that city. Do literally anything other than the scenario you described.
I guarantee that if you're near a city where you can find $100 parking, you can find 100 or 1000 amazing small restaurants that are affordable and interesting.
This is a type of defeatism where someone imagines the worst possible scenario, erases all other options, and then pretends it's a choice between the worst scenario or nothing at all.
I have often thought about how many movies and TV shows in my childhood (1980s) focused on plot lines of people regularly gathering at a bar after work. Did people really do that or is it just a Hollywood thing to put people in the same place? Now that I think about it, actually, I guess my department at work did this when I first started in the early 2000s, going out to the bar once or twice a week.
It's hard to imagine doing that nowadays. I have a family, so doing that instead of going home in the evening would be selfish (if done too often), but even if I were younger and had time, it would seem very extravagant now. When a beer is $8-10 or even more, it would be an expensive proposition to go to the bar every night after work. And if you order food it's even worse...
I think the answer to your question is right there in your post:
> Now that I think about it, actually, I guess my department at work did this when I first started in the early 2000s, going out to the bar once or twice a week.
> It's hard to imagine doing that nowadays. I have a family,
This still happens. Young people get together and go out after work. I don't go to pubs often, but when I meet up with someone after work the crowd is people meeting up after work with each other.
If everyone in your department is over 35 and has kids, you won't have much luck with this. If everyone is in their 20s and friendly, there's probably something going on.
I think a lot of people forgot how to be friendly with coworkers, especially if they spend a lot of time online. Online discussions about jobs mostly read like it's a cutthroat single player game where you shouldn't get too close to anyone because you can't trust anyone and you should be planning your next job hop anyway. I have to remind a lot of people younger than me that it's okay to have friends at work. You need to have friends outside of work, too, but you can be friendly with people at work.
People really did that regularly. It does seem to be economically related, for a lot of reasons.
One aspect is that a single income really was enough to not feel extravagant to have a home, a family, and afford to go to the bar a few nights a week. (Part of this was there wasn't as much random other stuff to buy, it wasn't being marketed to you nearly as aggressively either.)
I certainly did this quite a bit in the 1990's, and in the early 1980's I definitely remember my father going out at least twice a week and then the weekends also being for going out and doing something as a family at least 2/3 weekends per month - like trips to a nearby city, or to a sports game, or visit other family, or whatnot.
It used to be fairly common in smaller but densely populated areas in the United States, not so long ago (pre-2020). A lot of breweries were setup so that there were even outdoor areas that kids could be in. Usually one of the drafts was priced drastically lower than the others, and there were many unspoken relationship-based discounts or "try this" from the bartender or owner.
The unfortunate thing to me is that outside of VERY upscale or VERY downscale dive bars, every place is full of screens now. People go to bars and look at screens instead of talking as much as they used to.
It was mostly a fiction to advance the plot. Going to bars after work has always been a thing for young singles or old alcoholics, but pretty rare for parents/married people to do routinely.
> Did people really do that or is it just a Hollywood thing to put people in the same place
People really did that.
Maybe not every single night, but weekly for sure
Yeah, often once a week only team up until COVID.
Most people did not go to bars. As with many things, an unrealistic image portrayed in media. Perhaps more did, but far from most.
Agree.
I went first time with office team this year a couple of weeks back. Needless to say whole experience was atrocious. No common reference, movies, sports, TV and so on to talk about besides work. It was just: "Oh, what do you do on weekend? I do x,y,z " in a round-robbin manner.
It was definitely not good time, or even bad time one can remember, just an insipid gathering for 3 hours of doing nothing. $8 for a beer and $15-20 per person for lukewarm food not sure I'll be excited for another meet any time soon.
A picnic is basically free, for those near enough to open spaces. Likewise for hikes, which I’ll happily pay to drive an hour or more to enjoy.
I don’t think money is a barrier to getting out.
Dinner + tip is not $200, parking is not $50, I live in a city lol
Dinner + tip can easily reach $200 if you're talking about a fancy restaurant for date night, even with just a single drink each. $50 for parking is crazy, that's like a music festival price or something.
Of course, if you live in the kind of city where the above is true, then a very delicious dinner + tip can usually be had for $50-75, it just won't be as fancy.
See that's the problem, you live IN the city, and you're not afraid of the city, so you know how it really is.
I've gotten the "Parking is too expensive and hard to find" from friends when I try and get them to come into the city to hang out. No, come to my apartment, park in the plentiful free protected street parking right out front, and then we'll walk the 5 minutes to the center of downtown.
Your friends just don't want to hangout.
There are different ways of approaching doing something:
"To do X requires me to do this and that. So heres how I'll do this and that to get to X. "
"I can't do X because it requires me to do this and that. "
There's a big difference between the 2. The latter is a lie, they just don't want to do what is required to do that. Its a way of phrasing things so people don't feel bad and they don't have to admit they don't want to do something.
Start looking for it and you'll see it in a lot of exchanges.
50 is steep for parking, but between dinner/drinks/rideshare, you can pretty quickly hit $250 on a nice-but-not-crazy date night in my HCOL city.
Yeah, if you’re getting three drinks each and an uber sure. I don’t think it’s an insane amount to spend.
It was framed as ‘Every Activity’ costs that much though which is just not true.
I live in the boonies and dinner + tip (and drinks) for two can easily be $200. Parking is free here because, ya know, boonies and whatnot.
That's eating at an expensive place. I paid $60 for two at a local restaurant last week, that's including an appetizer.
Prices have risen faster than wages but $200 is a choice. They simply have high standards and treat it like poverty.
The change in lifestyle expectations should be as well documented as the changes in social contact.
Depends on the city. Here you can have a really nice time out for two people for $250.
Which city? Downtown Austin? Seattle?
Those are the exact two I’ve lived in actually
I remember when the iPhone first came out. I was at a bar, at a table with a few people I didn't really know. This was a pretty common occurrence.
You usually got a drank, talked. This was a kind of gothic-theme bar, all done up with spooky decorations, a good dj, interesting drinks. We'd host arts/culture slide show jams before the place really would get going for the night. The art was curated and swapped out monthly. There was a lot going on! The place did a lot to charge the space with energy and excitement, bringing a lot of different people together.
Then this guy at the table whipped out his phone and just ignored us all sitting there.
I knew right then and there that this was the beginning of the end.
Even before the iPhone it started happening with the Blackberry, Palm, et. al. I distinctly remember the early-mid '00's when my aunt got her first BB, a 7250(?) and it quickly became more important than anything else. Family get-togethers started to consist of her sitting by herself on her phone while the rest of us enjoyed each other's company.
My memory is that my phone was always on me, and I texted a lot on the go, but most of the texts were about meeting up, getting directions, or coordinating. After that, if a phone was brought out it was to do more of that in the group setting "Hey Sally is going to be here in 15 brining Jake"), then put back.
Now we're all dopamine seeking doom scrollers.
I've been out with a group of friends -- some I just met -- once this year. It also doesn't help that meals and drinks seem hard to justify for the price. I'm waxing nostalgia, but $30 of tacos used to be maybe $8; my $10 beer today was $3.
Thinking back to when I got my first smartphone 15 years ago, it occupied just so much of my attention and I figured it was some kind of honeymoon phase with a new gadget. But it never got less, if anything it's increased since then.
Now it's not just phones. It's video games, it's that new TV show people watch in the background, it's X and Y.
The baseline keeps dropping.
From personal experience, the juice isn't worth the squeeze for actually interacting with others, in person or online.
Even posting this comment is psychologically pulling teeth for me. I regularly type out long replies to comments, but I eventually return to the knowledge derived from a lifetime of past experience that, at best, the comment will be uncharitably misinterpreted by someone who will immediately jump down my throat for some entirely confabulated reason or, at worst, show no signs of having been read or heard at all. What's the point? Nine times out of ten, I just delete the draft and move on with my day and have no regrets. The opposite isn't true; I almost always regret leaving comments (and this one is already included).
In person social commitments somehow became even worse than the online ones. Every single friend (and at this point extended family member) I've had or made since college, people that pre-2012 were the most open and humane-minded people I've ever met, I've either ghosted or been ghosted by because I won't demonize who they want to demonize or mindlessly let them complain about problems they don't and won't try to either understand or fix. ("Well, that's not my experience" and "If you run into assholes all day..." is already flashing before my eyes.)
In my experience, being charitable, accurate, or helpful became so socially toxic (both offline and online) that every social group began to metaphorically shoot on sight at any sign of dissent.
After a certain point, I just gave up and withdrew from almost all avoidable social contact. And on top of all this, why would I pay to have this kind of repeated negative experience?! It's boggles the mind.
And I don't think I'm alone in this experience, even in the slightest.
Just some personal anecdotes: I've come into the orbit of a local "no phones" meetup group in my city. I discovered it by seeing a black and white printed scan of a hand-drawn flyer on a pole by my apartment. Currently it's just organized by one guy who sends out random Signal pings for stuff to do like a potluck picnic, group trip to some free instructed yoga at a park, craft night at a local bar/bookstore, etc., and usually there's ~4-15 people that show up. I organized a World Postcard Day postcard writing party last week, found a venue that would host for free, donated some of my own dollars to provide free official WPD postcards to attendees, and had 7 people come write postcards with me, I convinced 4 of them to sign up for Postcrossing, it was a great time.
If anybody else is looking for change, try setting something like this up. It has so far been free, easy, relatively low stakes, and I think by virtue of the main focus being "no phones", you get some great people who are all tired of the same algorithmic churn.
I became very good friends with someone who I met at one of the meetups and we've done all kinds of things just the 2 of us and have had some really interesting conversations, which is something I haven't done in a LONG time.
The meetup app still exists.
This is more complex than you might thing. First, there's far more places to meet people - rather than having them over for coffee, we meet in a coffeeshop. Networks have provided a "together in time" alternative to "together in place", so people can game, talk, ... via voice and video rather than traveling to a common location. There's far more 2-working-member families than previously, so the ability to organize household events is reduced. Finally, there's far more organized sports activities that consume both child and parent time. These pull everybody out of the house.
I’ll never forget a conversation I overheard on a plane years back: a caricature of a man in his 20s failing repeatedly to explain to an older lady what a “gastropub” was. Each time, he rephrased his description, and each time she responded, “that sounds like a pub.”
“No, not exactly...,” he replied in an increasingly exasperated tone. I could hear the struggle in his voice as he recognized the cracks forming in the thin veneer of his identity. “It’s like a pub, but it serves food. Like, real food, thoughtfully considered by a gastrochef.” She returned the serve, now teetering on boredom at minute four of the flight. “At our pub we call him Kevin. He makes the best pot pie.”
He regrouped and they found truce in talking about the weather in Toronto. I resisted the urge to twist around to ask if they knew any good restaurants downtown.
I can assure you we had "coffeeshop"s in the ancient times.
Yeah, but they weren't as common as they are today. There were pubs and eateries before also, but again, not so common. My point was that much of what was done "then" in one's house are now done elsewhere. Some, of course, aren't done and I'm not sure they're quite so popular.
And I assume the pertinent discussion is what happened/changed in the western world post WW II.
Wait until they find out "coffee shops" preceded "coffee at home"
Wait until they find out that commodities markets started off as coffee shops.
And Lloyd's of London. Formerly Lloyd's coffee shop.
Decline in religion + third spaces combined with socioeconomic system expectations of a 40 hour work week + two incomes needed to live comfortably. Places and time for community and social activities has declined, and so social activity has as well.
If more social time is desired at the macro system level, people need to have more leisure time (shorter work week, higher wages, good quality of life with more free time broadly speaking) and more third spaces to meet and socialize.
Citations:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49644650
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49644302
Is there a citation for the decline in third spaces? I read such a claim often. But in my part of the US (Brooklyn NY) the number of third spaces like coffee shops and pottery studios is booming.
When I was a kid kids used to just hang out. We'd take a bus, ride bikes, or walk to the mall, the park, the woods, fast food restaurant, record store, dollar store, etc and just loiter. Nobody had any money to buy anything, but boy we'd browse and loiter. Sometimes we'd just walk for hours. We'd walk miles and miles and miles just to sit at a table at Burger King with a single small fry between our group and hang out there.
Children don't do that anymore; they basically don't leave the house because they have the Internet. They communicate through texting and Discord so they don't even have to "hang out." Beyond the social change, when I was a young adult most malls went 18+ (unless accompanied by parents/guardians) and most other businesses nowadays allow teens to loiter the way we use to. Businesses want people in and out once they are done.
Even if business allowed it, most parents don't allow their kids to leave the house unattended anymore.
Does it count as a third space if you have to pay for it?
Coffee shops and such don't feel like good third spaces to me, because I don't always want to spend money just to exist
> Does it count as a third space if you have to pay for it?
Yes, third spaces/places include places you need to pay for.
legister's comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50091295 mentions it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
Additional citations:
https://ibs.colorado.edu/new-research-on-disappearing-third-...
https://www.aei.org/domestic-policy/americas-third-places-ar...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13538...
https://esl.uchicago.edu/2023/11/01/third-places-what-are-th...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/business/third-place-mean...
NYC is a thriving city of 8.5 million people and one of the most economically active cities in the world, so your experience may be different than say, Gary, Indiana.
Thank you! I skimmed these citations and I remain unconvinced. But I think really answering the question would be a real research project, not a HN back and forth :)
The first citation's relevant highlight is "All categories of third places experienced widespread closures from 2019 to 2021" which is obviously a COVID phenomenon and not a cultural trend. They admit so much. Data from that period I would say is generally irrelevant to discussing wider cultural trends. In fact a query to Gemini says that the number of independent (not chain) coffee shops is growing at 3.2% across the country and it gives this citation: https://www.locationscloud.com/research-report/us-coffee-sho...
The other Science Direct article says "Third places _may_ be closing in neighborhoods across the United States" (my emphasis).
The remaining articles seem to be opinion articles without hard data. They focus on the hypothetical problem of third places going away. In fact the AEI article talks about zoning which cannot possibly be of relevance to any decline in third places given that zoning is becoming less restrictive over time in the last decade.
The 40 hour work week is most assuredly not new in the past 30 years.
The households where both parents work full time probably have increased in that time, but I'd say you have to go back closer to 50 years to really get to a time where it was still common for a housewife to be home all day with the kids.
This 40 hr/week need to be combined with
1) Increasing job/economic insecurity.
2) Prices rising faster then income for majority of population.
3) increasing commute time around employment, activity hubs
4) kids activities/sports are now taken as seriously as work project deliverables. Previously it could be just gifted kids in school teams now with pay-to-play a lot more kids are involved in "serious sports".
Dual income earners hasn't even increased that much, 44% in 1967 to 53% in 2011 - https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2014/ted_20140602.htm
regarding the 40 hour work week, I wonder what "always on" is doing to impact social activities. Meaning, you work 40 hours in the office, then you go home and get online and work a few more hours each night.
The constant aggregate dopamine demand and chasing activities is certainly not helping, imho. "Work, home, doomscroll, repeat."
I can't square this with the fact that I have a perfect storm situation that should point me there. I am a foreigner of minority ethnicity to the United States living in a high-rise building of 600 people that has no Schelling point common-space to spend time in that's located in a city that is expensive and I have all the social contact I desire: family, close friends, more distant friends, neighbours, strangers in the building, familiar strangers in the area.
I talked about how relatively easy it is to have social contact here at all levels and so I must conclude that most people simply have better uses for their time (by their own judgment) than this. https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-10-09/Community
A lot of people are convinced of things without ever trying, which they then use to justify not trying.
"I mildly attempted doing this once and it didn't work, so I won't bother trying again" describes a shocking amount of people's experiences.
I sometimes think people fail on purpose to justify apathy or giving up.
Then if anyone says anything they scream about how their experience is valid and nobody can tell them otherwise. It's wild.
There's something important about being outside our comfort zones. We need entropy in our lives and the best way to accomplish that is being in new environments with different people/creatures. What I've found is over time my comfort zone expands as I become familiar with more stuff.
because suburbs and housing models like it designed around a closed loop even some apartment building which have high population density encourage social isolation.
compare a 'luxury' Florida apartment vs the old New York apartments built in the 1800s. the NY apartments have narrow stairs, one way in.
likewise dense / small cities / villages in either africa/europe etc force more natural social interaction.
even for friends - easier to host friends when they can easily walk to your home & they don't have to drink & drive.
so blaming tv, social media, video games etc doesn't get to the root of the matter.
It would be useful to know whether the same trends have happened in other places. If iPhones are causing people to be less social, we should see similar trends in France and Japan.
If we didn’t see the same trends, it points to reasons more specific to the US.
Last night I found a post-it note in my copy of _The Organized Mind_ by Daniel J. Levitin.
It says "Connect with Others. Learn. Be Active".
Strikes me as good advice 10 years ago when I wrote it, and just as good now.
Digital captupture of society
So here's the question:
in America we have had 20 years of "Tech Disruption"., making the world a better place and relentless technical innovation, combined with the 'corporization' of America
Has our day to day lives improved?
Do we work less, live healthier, have less stress?
Seems like this (the younger generation) is far worse off then pre-internet connected, smartphone generation
As long as technology keeps being visible I don't think society will be improved by it. The development in the past few years have let me to the conclusion that having technology insisting on being in your face, it will not benefit society. It has to blend into the background and be something you pull out when you need it. Almost anything "big tech" has produced in the past 25 year have pushed technology into the foreground.
I'm Canadian not American but I feel this keenly
I had a pretty busy social life in university, 20 years ago
The first city I landed in afterwards, I was able to make some connections and was lucky enough some of my uni friends were around too
But I moved for work to a much further away city and my social life has dropped to zero since then. The pandemic and lockdowns didn't help of course, but that was years ago. I don't have a single friend in this city and I've lived here almost 10 years now
Admittedly I'm kind of socially awkward and quite afraid of new groups, which has only gotten worse over the years. I also haven't had any luck making lasting connections through work or anything like that.
I tend to blame myself for this but it's not too surprising to hear many others are struggling too
Social media, smart phones, and all of that are heavily responsible for this, but at the same time I think the main crux of the issue, in my opinion, is that we don’t have a common culture anymore. As long as you don’t have a common culture and a common understanding of the basic rules that everyone agrees on, no one can spend time with each other comfortably.
The fragmentation of culture is also the fault of social media (and all media to a lesser extent). It's far easier to get sucked in to echo chambers where other opinions are mocked or shut out.
In the past we all got our news from Walter Cronkite.
The homogenization of culture was the fault of traditional centralized media. If you go back before the printing press, there was actually a much greater diversity of cultures and languages. Decentralized (social) media is bringing us back to how traditionally tribal humanity used to be.
I may be incorrectly inferring that you think this is a good thing, but "traditionally tribal humanity" were constantly at war with one another. I'm not sure that's something we want to go back to.
We absolutely do have a common culture. The fact so many people think we do not is derivative of social media and smartphones.
All but the most extreme far-right and far-left people in the country really do agree on 95%+ of anything with daily relevance to their lives.
I don’t think the “agreeing middle” is 95% anymore. Maybe this is a Chronically Online POV but it seems the extremes are growing quickly, the center is shrinking, and society is going bimodal.
The center is mostly offline, thinks both extremes are very small portions of the population, and doesn't post on social media. So they seem small but really there are a lot of people like this who aren't shouting into the internet 24/7, so you just remember that what you hear is all the extremists shouting, not the people you saw during the course of a week who weren't.
Society is going bimodal on the 1% of issues that bisect people. Those 1% of issues are consuming 99% of our mass-media airtime.
Talk to your neighbors and you'll find that everyone just cares about decent roads, decent schools, decent jobs, and decent healthcare.
The central part of their identity is to assume that they're the vast majority of people. It allows them not to have to think about stuff too hard - it's all settled, and it's settled on what the people I'm exposed to (i.e. friends, family, and the television) think. I'm safe just repeating that and reporting people who deviate from that.
They don't realize how much the "moral majority" differs in town as opposed to the city, the coasts as opposed to the bulk of the country, in small private liberal arts colleges in the east and at Mormon universities in Utah, or in China, Russia, or Bulgaria as compared to the suburb they grew up in.
If all of those people simply follow the central tendency, and give mass media the same (or greater) weight as they give their neighbors, that guarantees war all the time. It will always be better to listen and try to understand points of view that you aren't familiar with, rather than to hide in the safe (and always untrue depending on the shape of the border you draw) assumption that you represent the vast majority. This, without even considering whether the vast majority are right or wrong.
I mean, some people are so impervious to reality with this that they can lose election after election and believe that they are still 95% of people. Then they start theorizing about mind control and supernatural entities, just to keep from opening their eyes and ears.
For a long time the number 1 song in the USA was "Choosin Texas" by Ella Langley.
I have no idea who that is and I've never heard the song.
Is that the type of "culture" that this statement is referring to?
> As long as you don’t have a common culture and a common understanding of the basic rules that everyone agrees on, no one can spend time with each other comfortably.
Doesn't seem so to me.
> Is that the type of "culture" that this statement is referring to?
Shared music is absolutely part of common culture
That wasn't the question.
That 95% number is so far from the truth. Gen Z males are significantly (though not majority) right wing and Gen Z females are the exact opposite. Based on data, 67% of the time, Gen Z males and females do not agree on the same political issues.
You are missing the point.
"Political issues" are by definition things that people disagree on. Saying people "disagree on political issues" is equivalent to saying "people disagree on things they disagree on."
But the vast majority of daily life is not driven by or meaningfully affected by any of these "issues on which people disagree." If you go and talk to your neighbors, even ones who you disagree with on disagreement-creating-topics, you will find you actually agree on nearly everything. The set of things you agree on is called "our culture."
That should be "In-Person Social Activity Has Steeply Declined". While online social activity has increased significantly.
It saddens me that soon we'll need to split this out between actual human-to-human activity and parasocial bot-stuff. (Worse, covertly-bot stuff.)
together we are alone
In my experience it’s not because there’s lack of attempts to get people together
When given the option between: socializing with people in a shared space and being at home and entertaining yourself people are consciously choosing the latter.
When I ask why, this is what I hear from other people the most:
-I don’t have time
-I don’t have transportation
-Who else is going to be there
Etc…
There seems to be a genuine lack of desire whatsoever to simply get yourself to a place where there is a free event.
And to be clear this is not just talking about one particular type of event
I just went to a Democratic socialist of America event this weekend in support of Gaza, and the amount of people who showed up compared to the number of people who are on the list (even the organizing list) is some vanishingly small group.
If the plurality of individuals don’t want to join groups in person because they feel satisfied by themselves, then that’s a signal of some kind.
This was foreseeable. We all know it. We all know why. Yet we fail to do anything about it.
It's happening in other countries as well. Any suggestions what could be done about it?
Turn off all social media and organize around shared beliefs/interests
It's not just social media, it's all solo entertainment - streaming, cable, 24 hour news, video games, everything.
I think turning off all social media would help if others do that as well but as an individual action it's likely to cut you off even more.
Easy. Reduce our use of technology and stop consuming so much. It will require you to lower your standard of living.
Is your partner willing to do this with you? Probably not.
Americans are very intolerant of others, whether it's political convictions or food preferences; the few that have kids threat the little ones like fragile glassware that can't be moved or otherwise inconvenienced, so it doesn't surprise me that they meet others less. My wife and I meet with a varying group of friends every week, or even more, but we're all immigrants. We've tried to invite local acquaintances, but they always find a reason to say no and just stay home.
Totally off-base projection based on your very small sample size.
They're right about the intolerance, though. One tribe literally calls the other "Demon-crats", and has worked to reduce participation based on gender, sexuality and skin color.
Both sides are at fault. Here in the Midwest many a supporter of the Democratic party are legitimately afraid of being fired if their support became public knowledge, while on the other hand in California (or other "Blue" states) it's the exact opposite. It's astonishing to see how much Americans relish oppressing their fellow citizens.
The internet is awash with seething tribal hatred. It's impossible to honestly believe this is only an issue with the right. The "demon-crat" attack is roughly analogous to the left's "nazi" attack (nazis, after all, are the secular-progressive equivalent of demons, with Adolf Hitler being their Satan), and the latter attack is infinitely more common than the former, even on HN.
"There are only two things I can't stand in this world: people who are intolerant of other people's cultures, and the Dutch."
-- Nigel Powers in "Goldmember"
Cause our culture is f'ed, lol. Everyone I know is unhappy. It's impossible to be happy when things are this messed up.
I think unhappiness is the default of human state. Or rather discontent. Its probably wired into us bc if we were ever content we wouldnt procreate, try to attain financial success, etc
I don't think so. Everyone was a lot happier 10-15 years ago when the culture felt less fucked. I think people can't feel happy if they don't feel basically safe, and the world's problems are so incomprehensible, and solutions to them see so impossible to imagine, that there is a background unsafety overlaid on everything, even if one's immediate conditions are pretty good.
I guess we are different then. A non-stop state of panic/fear does not make me feel like procreating.
You must live in a terrible place. That’s not my experience at all in a suburban neighborhood.
I’d imagine you don’t have any family around so the expats are sending time together instead of trying to assimilate.
> You must live in a terrible place.
Dipends how you see it. For North American standards, it's a lovely suburban neighbourhood in the Midwest; for us it's suburban hell because we love cities.
> the expats are sending time together instead of trying to assimilate
What do you mean by "assimilate" ?
You are getting a lot of downvotes but I 100% agree with you. These are the types of conversations where someone's cultural background / bias is evident and its obvious to me most of your responders have never spent time outside the US.