I am solidly in the first category. I throw dinner parties, birthday parties, drinking parties, dance parties, midsummer parties, midwinter parties, game parties, etc. Yes, it costs time and money and is a lot of work. But what people (probably the ones that never bother) tend to forget is how unbelievably gratifying it is to get a bunch of people together, to feed them and to make them talk, laugh, dance, etc. Afterwards you are tired but also grateful and socially energized in a way that feels fundamental to my existence.
Making a large party could be "type 2 fun" sometimes, ie exhausting and not very fun at the time, but satisfying to look back on as a kind of hard challenge I managed to accomplish, like climbing a cold mountain or so. But few are enough of those.
We put limits on ourselves psychologically in all sorts of ways, and we follow the ones we believe. There's a study that showed people who believe willpower is finite have finite willpower. I thought "well obviously, if you had finite willpower you'd know because you'd run out". Maybe we do just think too much?
If I don't feel like running and I go running, about two thirds of the time I feel like running after a few K. It's the same socially. The goal of introspection shouldn't be to freeze in a minute now.
Ask your parents, it was certainly a thing in the 80s too. Even if I think about my grandparents, they didn't constantly have others over. My grandfather was a chill village guy who liked to spend time alone, working in the garden, working in his shed etc. But there were more regular externally forced events, like big weddings, gathering for a pig slaughter, coming together to renovate the house etc.
What changes is the tradeoff threshold.
Now, being alone is more attractive to more people than before. Some liked being alone even in the times when it just meant books or doing some loner hobby like gardening or woodworking or whatnot. But with Netflix and YouTube the tradeoff shifts. Also as people get more flaky, socialization is even mharder, making people more flaky.
So introverts existed before but today mild introverts may act more introvert-like, who earlier would have preferred to err more on the extravert side.
But, that doesn't stop the fact that I do like people, I like organizing parties (or rather I don't particularly like the organizing but I like the result of having organized parties and having close friends) at my place and regularly invite friends. It's just that after that I'm exhausted and I need some alone time to recover. So being an introvert doesn't imply that you shouldn't make effort to reach out to people or that you won't enjoy being with others. It just means that having some alone time is necessary to recover.
That's the Big 5 meaning, which has some scientific backing. The other one that basically just means social/shy comes from Myers-Briggs, which while popular isn't based on anything and is pretty much just pseudoscience.
There are people whose feelings about it vary, but there are also people whose feelings about it are consistent but they do it anyway, and that sometimes gets mistaken for variability.
I taught at a community college for a few years and have spoken at conferences. Those engagements are immensely enjoyable and energizing to me because they're performances. The roles of the audience and presenter are clear. I do my thing and the audience does theirs. I get that energy and enjoyment (a ton more of it, actually) performing live music. I walk off a stage jazzed. It's a wonderful high.
The dinner party scenario is absorbs energy. It's not necessarily less enjoyable than performing, but because it's peer-to-peer there's so much more protocol, nuance, and thought than performing. Even if I'm talking with people I know well I don't walk away energized. With people who are new to me it's a lot of work. Like anything it has come easier w/ practice.
I'm here to tell you that you are most certainly wrong on this point. People exist that view this kind of thinking as so bafflingly alien that they can't understand how someone would think it.
Social interactions require enormous expenditure of energy for me. They are not pleasant or energizing, they are rituals that must be accomplished to help me blend into a world that is not designed for me. I am most assuredly not being convinced of this by books I have read.
Some people who are actually somewhat more on the introvert side but force themselves to socialize, think that it's in fact supposed to be a struggle, for everyone, and everyone who seems to enjoy it is to some degree pretending, and is more diligent in putting up with the discomfort, so it's a character quality trait how much you get your act together and endure socialization.
It's like hating blue cheese or certain vegetables or the taste of niche foods. But in fact some people do enjoy the food, and don't eat veggies because they must or have great discipline. In fact this is also true of exercise. It is something that people do enjoy, the pump, the endorphins etc. (Usually it does take getting to a baseline fitness level to make it enjoyable, so it's not a static personality trait.) Similarly with public speaking or working with people all day etc. Some people truly love it and look forward to it. It's not only that they are tough and endure the suffering better. They do like it.
Parent is not saying there weren't introverts in the 80s. But it wasn't a big thing, and people didn't make it their whole personality, in the numbers they do now.
We tend to anchor ourselves to labels. Lots of introverts I meet limit themselves in life needlessly because "I'm an introvert!" I see my old self in them.
I get more than enough social time from my partner and a small handful of friends that I see on occasion. I lived quite a full social life, with a huge variety of people and activities, yet surprisingly I don’t find it all that memorable or important in retrospect. It’s a similar feeling to looking back on one of my former careers.
Introversion can be a byproduct of so many different things that saying “it’s just a label” is not only absurd by itself, but utterly disrespectful too. It can be a choice too, sure, but that’s not the case for quite a lot of people.
We should take every opportunity to make life as fulfilling as possible, even if we don't always succeed due to things outside of our control. (Note: this is an abstract claim for what you want, I'm not saying being extroverted is more fulfilling than being an introvert.)
I do care about what values, passions and friends I have, and I have tried to find a set that is consistent.
I do not mind if someone tells me "I am an introvert", even if I do not find it extremely interesting. But if he says "I am introvert and will be unhappy all my life because I can't change that", I can't avoid thinking that he is focusing on something that does not help.
Certainly, what you find comfortable is somewhat choosey. Over time it changes and evolves, from your own experiences. The more you do things, the easier and more comfortable they become.
I believe that all we have in the world are our relationships, maybe hermits are content in their way of life because they never could truly socialize but I don't know about them being fully happy.
What we call shyness to me could be understood as a lack of social intelligence mixed with little self-confidence, both of which you can gain by being out-reaching and taking risks. Not to put the blame on anyone of course because it does take real hard work for "introverts". But again, it is to big a deal to be an oversight and not try to be better in your own way.
A lot of introverts actually like contact with other people. They often prefer smaller groups and a certain connection, they are more picky. And need some time alone afterwards.
But that doesn't mean they are hermits.
I used to think I like parties. That I have to like it. That something was wrong with me for not liking it. Now I know it is ok to not have fun at a party, and prefer a walk with a good friend or my wife. I am much happier this way.
As someone who had many years of depression, I know social isolation too. And it is just not the same.
That said, I admit it can at the same thing also be true that people cop out of a healthy way to stretch their boundaries or even expend just a little effort by mistakenly labeling themselves as introvert. Such misuse of the label doesn't mean it doesn't refer to a real thing and a real experience.
But even so, I often realise I self-justify not doing something and attribute it to my ADHD, excessively. It becomes a clutch, and I gravitate away from the willpower I do have.
That reminds me, it’s time to reach out to some friends and make weekend plans, even if I’d prefer having a quiet one. I’ve had too many recently :)
My current mantra is "I get to decide who I am." Identity is incredibly mutable, but we tend to get stuck with baked in early assumptions. It's so easy to think "I'm not good at this" and sort of silently translate that to "I could never be good at this," when not being good at a thing is everybody's natural state.
Of course, most skills are going to be easier for some people to pick up and harder for others, but that's rarely the determining factor; more often it's who's put in the time and effort.
It's so easy to forget that so many of these things are skills, and to assume that people that are good at them just got lucky, which is not only counterproductive to oneself, it's kind of disrespectful towards the others who worked so hard to get good at them.
those people need to know that extraverts are also awkward and shy, but they've practiced their social skills so over time that gets better.
I live this. Even today, I have to make myself be social, I have to practice (my first job as a waiter was the best thing to happen to me).
The human engagement muscle atrophies when you indulge "introversion" (for all definitions and causes), and our age of infinite individual delights has tipped the tradeoff towards "alone and easy". I wish the sensitivity toward and acceptance of "neurodivergent" had more recognition that the way humans have been doing things for the last 15000 years might have had some value.
There is nothing "natural" about living in some cramped city, meeting strangers all the time, trying to build connections and everybody leaving within 3-5 years to hundreds of miles away, navigating relationships online, working for big corporations with no stable coworkers, having to mingle with strangers all the time whose reputation, past etc you know nothing of etc.
We dropped all that social connection/obligation and associated support it provided for various people when we stopped doing things that historic way.
Talking about a thing to virtue signal is not the same as doing a thing.
People are different. People have different preferences. Everyone’s mind works in different ways. Any argument that can be summed up as “you’re just no trying hard enough” is fundamentally unsound, unhealthy, unhelpful and entirely disrespectful.
Before we talked as much about introversion and extroversion, people felt more obligated to do certain social events that they can more easily reject nowadays. That does mean it was uncomfortable and they had to push through friction because it's draining for introverts to do social events but being there also helped with making group of friends and staving loneliness. I do think this change in mores is one of the factors that contributes to the so called loneliness epidemics nowadays.
I hate exercise. Like I really really really hate it.
Should I just accept this and live a life without it?
I don’t think it’s such a stretch to say that socialisation is similar.
That is entirely up to you. It's your personal life and your time. No one has the right to say what you should or must do with your time.
Just like socialization, it's up to you on how much you do or don't do. Pretending everyone needs to because you like to is stupid.
Socialization is exhausting, I have to do enough of that working. I am not going to on my personal time. I really don't care what other people think of it, or what justification they use to try and make it some sort of requirement, or how much finger waving they're going to do.
I can feel my heart rate go up. Sometimes when asking or answering questions in the lecture hall I start quivering. Just the thought of standing up, preparing my question and follow ups can cause this.
You may be right in that it's an excuse. But at the same time there's this disgusting physical reaction and yes it's easier to give in than to stand up.
It's easier to interact with loved ones and close friends because you know they know you and won't judge if you say something wrong etc. But not so for any other interaction.
That doesn't mean it didn't exist then, it means it either wasn't socially acceptable or wasn't understood (or both) then. See also the graphs of left-handedness over time, which were basically flat at the actual level of left-handedness except for a big dip during the century or so when left-handed people were commonly forced to hide it and use their right hands.
It's also a source of chronic fatigue.
> The question is, in a society of freedom and free will, if your environment forces you into a behavior you're unhappy with, is that truly damaging?
Being forced to conform to a set pattern of social behaviour/enjoyment is thoroughly damaging to your psychological health. It baffles me that anyone would think not.
That being said, I still found a way to serve my community (my mosque). I am chartering a Toastmasters club to help grow people in their public speaking and leadership skills. It's incredibly fulfilling and also humbling because I'm probably the least accomplished person in the room (I'm a college dropout turned SWE, and there are doctors, medical and otherwise, professors, business owners, and more).
I feel way out of my league but there's so much excitement that I feel like I'd be letting the community down if I decided I don't want to talk to anyone for a while.
So yes, I agree with you. Putting yourself into situations where you may start uncomfortable but then eventually it becomes more uncomfortable to start. You just need the activation energy, i suppose.
At some point my partner told me I should stop saying I'm introverted because she saw me always interacting with people and enjoying it. So I reflected, realized she had a point, and stopped identifying as introverted.
Over time I realized that actually, I love interacting with people, especially closer friends. A "party" can be 4-6 people, it doesn't have to be huge. And sure, after larger events I still need some time to cool down, but stopping identifying as introverted has been a huge improvement overall to my life.
With less people, this happens less nowadays.
Honestly if this doesn’t sound a “the fuck am I saying?” alarm in your head I don’t know what to tell ya.
This isn’t a recent phenomenon. People have different social tendencies. People have always had different social tendencies. And this is way before you even factor in things like neurodivergence possibly tilting one towards preferring isolation or more intimate/lone activities.
It boggles the mind that anyone would think the introversion/extraversion dichotomy a product of modern times.
They are not saying that introverted and extroverted characteristics did not exist in people, they are saying that people did not run around proclaiming their introverted or extroverted status in the same way they do today and they didn’t use it to rationalize behaviour to the same extent.
“Throwing a party” is not an introvert vs. extrovert thing. What you do at the party is.
Encouraging someone to push past their comfort zone is helpful. But it seems less helpful to imply that you know more about the bounds of their comfort zones than they do, or that their comfort zone must simply be a cultural construct because it doesn't match yours.
e.g. It is not supposed to be about how much you like socializing or how good you are at it.
I can’t count how many people have chatted my ear off and bounced around the office, engaging other people in spontaneous enthusiastic conversation every day, only later to have them claim they’re introverted. The colloquial usage has expanded to encompass anyone who some times feels like staying home and watching Netflix instead of going out on Friday night. In other words, everyone.
I agree that it also becomes an excuse. I’ve had friends who really enjoy socializing and going to social events and also lament social isolation and loneliness, but being an “introvert” becomes the driving factor in their decision making about what to do on weekends or after work. You can see how much they enjoy social events when they’re basically obligated to attend (weddings, special event parties, immense peer pressure from friends trying to get them out of the house) but when left to their own decisions they’ll decide to stay home and be lazy 10 out of 10 times with “I’m an introvert” as the excuse. I’m excluding people with conditions like social anxiety disorder from this description, before anyone comments with whatabouts.
It gets really bad when they reach their 30s and 40s and they wonder why their friends have stopped sending invites to things (because they never accept) and they complain that dating is impossibly difficult (because they only leave the house for work)
Would that be a reasonable conclusion? Or should we conclude that this is a psychological limit and we just need to stop thinking so much?
Not to mention riding a bicycle as my only mode of transportation other than foot for ten years before I had a driver's license.
I enjoyed tackling people. I did not enjoy the exercise itself and would not have done it if I could have skipped right to the games without having done all that other stuff.
While you're at it, rolling in an understanding that people are different and not everybody enjoys any particular thing would not go amiss.
DOSE - the happy chemicals of the brain - Dopamine, Oxytocin, Seratonin, and Endorphins.
Endorphins, in "most" people, are released during or after physical exercise. Upon release, they help reduce pain, which then sometimes triggers dopamine. This combination is called "runner's high", which can be why people choose to continue running. Those that don't ever "feel" this way, may give up on running and find other ways to get physical activity in their life regimen. Those that never physically exercise typically end up with weight problems, but not always.
The way the brain chemistry varies between people can be different based on many factors such as DNA, food, gut bacteria, environmental chemical exposure, and more... Humans, today, share the same set of chemicals empowering their bodies, however there is mostly small, but sometimes larger, variation in the quantities of those chemicals. So, we're all different, and yet we're all the same.
Chemistry plays a big role in perception of an activity - was it a good activity, or a bad one? Good activities tend to reinforce repeat behavior of that activity, bad ones help reinforce memories of what not to do. So, if you've never experienced runner's high, I could understand why you wouldn't be interested in running. Just don't be sedentary - the human body was not [built|evolved] for sedentary life.
... and not to bring AI into this conversation, but its why the tech is so different - its not tied to the materiality of our brain chemistry. Its merely the [approximate?] representation of our own brain electrical activity without the consequence of all that we are - pain, sadness, happiness, bliss, love, etc...
Full disclosure: I received a dopamine release from the writing of this reply ;P
I'm glad you found writing your reply to be enjoyable, because it's a lot of words to just miss the point.
So is playing basketball.
So please, don't unnecessarily simplify your analysis. It leaves a lot to be desires.
"I am friends with a disabled person" is almost as revealing as "I have experience, I am a social worker." Both types of people usually are so obnoxious, that I try to put distance between them and me as a knee jerk reaction.
I suspect that for many, if they had less social anxiety, they would actually prefer to socialize more. But the most successful way to reduce an anxiety is through exposure therapy: forcing yourself to do the thing. And in today's world it is much too easy to simply avoid exposing yourself to any socialization.
I see a lot of people who claim to be very introverted. But, also, a lot of those people are unhappy. They may be comfortable, but that's not the same as happy.
> 3 or 4 people who I know well is optimal for me.
Then invite 3 or 4 people over. That's much more than what most people do. Sounds like the optimal party size to me.
It will feel like more of a chore for introverts, but it's like a chore you need to do even if it feels bad in the moment, like doing laundry or exercising.
And worse for introverts - people who never invite other people eventually stop getting invited themselves, so to maintain social connection requires introverts to sometimes be the driver of the event.
That seems very much like exercising, no? You need a certain level of exercise to maintain basic physical capability but past that point there are diminishing returns. So if you truly detest exercising (or socializing) then you can stop there and still lead a healthy, functional life.
Even that is a challenge of finding the mental energy to pick the date , see that everyone can come, picking some activity (or if you're hosting - make sure with your wife that the date is fine. What about your kids - you wanna put them in bed before?) etc etc. Some of it is probably no big deal but my brain is making it look big, perhaps because I lean introvert as well. It's so much easier to just think about the idea and say 'naaa fuck it' and open Youtube instead.
But this is not a networking or new-friend-making style of party of course. Not even really a party, but fits "inviting people over for dinner".
I think a big problem is that people see this also as a thing where efficiency and productivity is important and they plan complicated activities etc. Similarly to how kids don't get much free time to just play and relax, adults also try to organize activities for themselves when just being together is often enough and the rest follows naturally.
Most of the times, everybody is happy even if things are not perfectly planned, and then they thank me for the "effort" (which was minimal, and sometimes can introduce confusions, as I need to adjust the date or the style as more constraints become evident).
I sometimes think it's a problem of my education of engineering as well, because I want everything planned well, think of all exceptional cases, etc.
I think this gets at the heart of the concern—it’s always easier to find something else distracting to do, but what’s the real cost? I don’t really know how to measure that, other than to say that American society and culture are doing particularly poorly right now.
100%
You can say naaa fuck it and open Youtube when your friends are over, as well as putting your kids to bed when they're there. It's fine!
If you do type 2 fun often enough, the level of anxiety drops. Imagine hosting a game night once: you have to ensure all your friends can attend, you agonize over the snacks, over picking the right games to play.
But if you power through and establish a tradition or join an existing one, it becomes simple, e.g.: every Thursday at 7pm you meet for a game of whatever you've been playing last week and a new game the host picked, the host brews tea, the guests bring whatever snacks they want. At the end of the session, you choose which game to play next week: the old one or the new one.
You can't just say "Oh boy am I an introvert." and just leave it at that.
Some people are extroverted picking their nose. Let me explain what I mean. That means they do it in front of others and don't give a fuck, or they might apologise when they get called out, and just do it all over again next minute. That's me. Other people are introverted picking their nose. They go away in private and they go ahead and pick their nose now that nobody is around. They're not necessarily in denial about it, and sometimes you can get them on the topic and compare notes. That's my wife.
It's not either or, it's all of the above: individuals do what feels good and if you're a great party thrower because it energizes you, you'll probably spread that influence some. And then possibly, the group reinforces itself by continuing to throw and attend parties.
At the same time, leisure time has changed: women work more, dads spend more time with kids, and the home offers a lot more easy entertainment that fits in with modern schedules. There seems to be less opportunities for parties with newer generations.
But of course, society seems to shun the party thrower because we're all busy. And so if nobody shows and the party thrower burns out, there's no influence spread. People dislike parties more and the idea reinforces again.
A mix of any of the above goes into our decisions about how to spend time.
That said, hiking up a mountain sounds like a great vacation to me, in a type 1 and 2 way. Active recreation is my gratifying form of recreation (balanced of course with some down time after), but I know this sounds like hell to a lot of people. I'm not sure we have a word for this divide as a culture.
Honestly. Put up or shut up.
I, too, like going to (some) parties, but more often I don't. I like hosting, but only small groups of people (3-6ish), and I cannot handle more than dozen at my place, though I don't mind going to parties where there are more. It's just that I end up talking with the handful of people I know.
Planning parties is, well, exhausting. Hosting them is exhausting. I'd much rather talk, chat with, go to concerts with, workout with, hike with people, than go to parties or host them.
When it comes to parties, I want to be invited, but don't want to go.
If there's one club I belong to, it's probably the Groucho Marx club. "I woudn't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member."
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I dont know where it started but we've turned this whole introvert/extrovert stuff into some sort of immutable characteristic.
As someone who has (and occasionally still does) throw parties, I totally do not relate. It's just tiring. I don't have time to mingle with the guests.
I prefer small, simple invitations. Ideally 2 families. Simple food. Not a lot of ceremony. Get together and talk (or play games, or whatever).
Similarly, I've drastically reduced going to bigger parties - at least with some hosts. These are people I like and want to spend time with, but they only throw large parties, and I get virtually no time with them at the party - they're too busy.
What I'm finding is that - as you noticed - people tend to want to be all or nothing. I'm having trouble finding people like me. I want to socialize, but not this way.
When I read the article, I immediately thought of several reasons he hadn't listed. Too tired to go into detail, but some of them are: Marriage and what was previously a 2 body problem became a 4 body problem (4 being the lower bound). Dual income with kids - we barely get enough time with the kids, and throwing a big party means neglecting them much, much more. Several other factors. This really is death by a thousand cuts.
I didn't relate to most of what you said, but I definitely see this sentiment. I hosted parties all the time till I got married, albeit not for logistical reasons. She's very unkeen on having people in her space, and carving out space for me was already a sacrifice for her.
Now I wish my friends hosted parties because I'd 100% go.
Middle aged American here. I go to more social gatherings than I have in any time since college.
I would add a second dimension to your stratification: People who have kids and those who don’t. Once you have kids who enter school age, there are more social opportunity than you have time for. Even many of the people who never threw parties before now host a few cookouts or birthday parties per year.
The events are based on people who attend the same school or whose kids are friends with your kid, so you’re not always hitting it off with all of the other parents as future best friends. However you do get exposed to a lot of new people and each new introduction increases your odds of finding people you connect with.
One realization is that it didn’t actually require having kids to start doing all of this. Inviting people over for a backyard cookout or a simple dinner was always easy. Easier without kids, actually. Most simply don’t make the initiative.
Another problem is the increasing burden that people create for themselves or their friends with social events: Expectations of bringing gifts, showing up with a bottle of wine that isn’t too cheap, dressing nicely, and the biggest event killer of all: Trying to find a date that works for everyone of the guests. Parent get together dispense with all of that. Everyone’s busy with kids. If you show up for 30 minutes in shorts and a T-shirt bearing no gifts and you have to leave early, everyone is just happy you came. A date is sent out and whoever is available can come. If not, we’ll see you next time.
Most people my age do have kids, especially given that I'm living somewhere fairly quiet. I like kids and get along with them well -- indeed, to the extent that I'd happily occasionally babysit for free. But parents seem to be living in a different world.
One difficulty is that most parents seem to be deeply invested in their home lives and daily routines, in a way that I find difficult to relate to, which can make small talk difficult. But one way or another, I should probably make some attempts to expand my social life.
That's too bad. I would say most of the other parents I meet aren't people I'd hang out with outside of kid events, but when you go to a lot of events you meet so many other adults that your odds of finding new friends goes up substantially
The way they talk about it, they’re limited to only hanging out with people who similarly have kids, and whose kids get along with their kids. They’re cut off from most of their other friends’ normal social activities, even if they have a really good babysitter, which is a rare luxury. Sometimes they hang out with other parents they don’t even particularly like, just because both of them having kids makes it possible.
I can think of several times in the last year alone where I’ve been looking forward to meeting my friends, only to have our plans ruined upon arriving and realizing that the venue we’d chosen didn’t allow minors. Brunch at a cafe, wine tasting and lunch at a winery.
idk. I understand how there’s a sort of solidarity and flexibility to the friends you make with fellow parents, but just from the outside, it looks like that’s barely making do with what you’ve got, not free to be socializing the way you actually want to.
This is only true if you limit your definition of "real" event to one without kids.
The social gatherings I was talking about have people bring their kids.
If you're not a parent and your only experience with parenting is through friends' lamentations about parenting, this probably won't land. What I'm trying to communicate is that the events are different, but they're not bad or unenjoyable. It's actually a lot of fun, and you meet a lot of new people too.
I know a few parents whose kids will only get along with a small number of close friends, but that's a minority. We takes our kids to different parks and they've learned to play with random kids that they've never met and may never see again. This is common for well socialized kids.
> that the venue we’d chosen didn’t allow minors. Brunch at a cafe, wine tasting and lunch at a winery.
I'm sorry to say, but this seems a lot like a you problem. I don't know why you'd think that wine tasting at a winery would be a kid-friendly event without checking.
Your location might play a part in it. I literally cannot think of a brunch venue, including $100/person places with reservation lists here, that don't allow minors. When making a reservation you tell them how many adults and how many kids, so that should have come up unless this was they were really unfamiliar with going out with kids? Either way, these problems are not frequent. As a parent you do a cursory check of a venue to make a judgment call if it's kid friendly or not.
1. "I hate losing sleep, and there are very few things in the world now important to me than a good night's sleep".
This has been a life changer for both of us. I used to be a late owl, but when she started going to bed at 9:30,I did too. We now have competitive "what was your sleep score" in the mornings over breakfast
2. "I do not enjoy conversations with more than 3 other people at the same time"
I don't mind crowds and can "hold forth" with entertaining stories and have fun doing it, but my wife has social anxiety that really only emerged in larger groups. She doesn't even like going to parties or bars, and after a few drinks, leaves me to it.
3. "I don't like getting wasted, and I don't even like getting slightly drunk if it screws up my sleep"
For me it's more medical. While I'm perfectly healthy, I noticed around the age of 45 that red wine gives me palpitations and tachycardia. Lots of beer (especially really nice beer) does the same. My father is 99 years old because he never drank alcohol. I honestly believe a single hangover would actually kill him. But certainly, years of "not kicking the shit out of his insides with booze" have contributed to his long life.
That doesn't mean I don't enjoy attending (never throwing) parties on occasion, but it's exhausting to me. Whenever I come home from a social occasion I need time to recover.
It's very much down to different personalities.
Going to the gym is exhausting, running a marathon is exhausting, spending a day weeding your garden or laying a new carpet could be exhausting.
Usually people feel great afterwards because of the experience and despite it being hard work and taking time to recover from. Parties etc. can be the same.
They can for some, but to be very clear, I don't. I feel mentally drained in a way I absolutely do not enjoy. The experience can be fun during, but the net benefit to me is low enough, and for many types of socialising it's firmly in the negative, that I restrict myself very much in terms of what socialising I consider worthwhile.
As I said, it's very much down to your personality - most of the time I'd rather spend time in peace and quiet alone or with my wife or son (and I need some of that time to be entirely alone)
In fact, I made the comment because the comment I replied to presented the opposite option and I wanted to point out that it depends on personality.
My point is, yes, sometimes it's good to just ignore the discomfort and push through, but we should also know that it's not how everyone feels about it. Some people actually willingly go down into a crowded basement club with loud music and not just as some kind of tough challenge to survive and shape your character to have tbuilt tolerance for that harsh environment,but they find it enjoyable, no matter how baffling it seems to the rest of us. I don't know proportions, but these people exist. Of course plenty of people are somewhere in the middle range, where they enjoy some aspects while hating the rest, and the thing they enjoy about loud clubs is likely about prospects getting laid and similar stuff.
The funny thing is that I used to go clubbing regularly because to me that was not about socialising per se. I'd be happy to go alone into an anonymous mass of people and just dance and switch off. I'd still need time to recover, but not nearly as much as with a group of people I'm expected to talk to.
That's universally held for me in other contexts as well. E.g. I can speak in front of thousands - and have - and not stress out at all. They're a non-descript mass at that point. I'm just talking, not conversing. But if any of them try to corner me to talk to me afterward? That is exhausting.
Those don't make me feel great afterwards either. I'd just feel I spend half a day just to end up where I already was.
> spending a day weeding your garden or laying a new carpet could be exhausting.
These would give me a good feeling. The result is what gives me the dopamine hit.
It might just be a rationalization, but the way I justify it is that as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized more what actually matters to me, and being a party host / spending time at parties doesn’t fit that category. I’d rather spend my time doing something else.
Well it's happening to the vast majority of people all at once, I don't think it's age, at least not only that. I haven't read the whole article yet perhaps he offers ideas on why this is happening but I'm guessing - better alternatives (Netflix), increased individualism etc. Society has changed a lot.
I think the major problem though is due to the way the world is rapidly shifting, and people's utter mental exhaustion, it's easier to sit and do nothing and become a mindless drone to 'the boob tube' or rather your phone than it is to be with your community.
This isn't something new, it's just becoming more evident, especially as there are less and less communities.
Just think about it, you likely live in some sort of apartment, town house, or suburban area, and how well do you know your neighbors? One apartment/house over, two, three? Or maybe just a friendly nod when you pass, but nothing more.
1. People work more. In particular, the shift to dual-income households means that women, who traditionally planned most parties before, no longer have time.
2. the shift to "lots of kids, sparse parenting" to "few kids, lots of investment" becomes another time sink focusing families inwards on themselves instead of outwards on the wider community
3. People just have less friends. especially so for a) single b) non college-degree and c) lower-income people. Probably due to #1 and the whole dating app epidemic no one has had a serious conversation about yet.
4. And yes, as you alluded to, it is "more fun to be alone" in the modern day. Less incentive to go out if you don't "feel" lonely nor bored.
I guess I could have just quoted the provided summary, but where's the fun in that?
>In sum: The death of the host is the story of lonely unmarried people and harried married dual-earner households; anxious parents spending more time with their children and less time with friends; and the typical home becoming such a riot of diverting comfort that people no longer have to invite human beings to interrupt their boredom.
(For perfectionists: people always have a good time when there’s some food and drinks and other people. Everything else, even music, is really optional.)
Then I became a single father and I haven't thrown a single party since then.
Damn I miss throwing parties.
It used to be if you throw a party and invite a bunch of people, the ones that say they'll come will probably come. Now, you invite a bunch of people, you get mostly a bunch of maybe and half don't show up.
It makes it both harder to plan and have the social risk of a dud of a party. Worst thing you want as a host is people not having a good time.
I doubt its that they forget - it probably just isn't gratifying to them. Different people find different things gratifying.
After the two kids the games disappeared and it just became a normal party where we could talk and such and a playdate for the our and the other parents kids.
We will probably do it again when we settle into a new home at least I hope.
I’m bad at throwing parties and I’m a bad cook.
So instead I invite friends/family to stay over. Even with kids.
Thats also very gratofying, play some board games, sit next to the fire and then have breakfast together.
Best way to copē with the world at it’s current state.
(Also a European here, mildly affectrd ny war)
People who don't throw parties might want to think about this. :)
I held weekly board game nights at my home for a year or two during the latter part of COVID. I loved board games and missed the weekly meetups that stopped happening due to lockdown. I only invited very close friends, all of whom are still very close. And I genuinely ruined my love of board games from how frustrating the experience proved to be. I put in a lot of effort to be a good host and everyone sure seemed to want to play board games, but over and over it was like herding cats once they were over. They were all acting in good faith, and yet that experience burned me out so much and my brain now associates board games with that experience so much that I barely play anymore, and don't enjoy it like I once did.
Now whether you want to use the label "introvert" or not, I was determined to push outside of my comfort zone that was staying in alone. But each of those dozens of nights drained me in a way that that cumulatively has left an emotional scar deep enough to impact my identity (being a person who loves board games was part of who I was, a part I liked)
I suspect that of the ways people will respond to this story, there are two that will be most common
1. What the heck are you talking about? I can't imagine having that experience
and
2. Yeah, that tracks
Whether or not you call those groups extrovert & introvert, and whether you believe such preferences are inherent, learned behavior, or social conditioning, here is a truth:
Trying to change your nature, however you came to have it, comes with a cost and can go wrong.
So for those who consider introversion to be mere choice, I encourage you to be less flippant in how you try to convince people of that.
Every culture with a tradition of being a welcoming host has a saying along the lines of, “the pleasure is in the preparation”.
For those of us that live that life, it’s hard to imagine it any other way.
Grateful for people who host and provide social opportunities even though I'm sometimes not outwardly social.
You are right: It was work, it was money. I am not exactly a social butterfly, but even I was able to pull off a gathering of four other people. It was so worth it, because we all had an absolute blast.
It was also very much needed. So I, for one, plan on doing my part to counter this trend.
More and more divergence, subcultures, while the mean tends towards a bad direction. And no understanding. Because why don’t they Just Do It?
Edit: But I hear that Europe is a large country.
Some say it isn't even a country /s
I had an introverted girlfriend who enjoyed my tradition of inviting couples over for small dinner parties, but if said couple didn't reciprocate the invitation within some arbitrary period, she would claim they were impolite and we shouldn't invite them anymore.
My view was and is: the number of people happy to be invited to a party is lower than the number of people who are happy to host. It's not rudeness, nor even selfishness; it's sometimes just a flavor of introvert behavior.
If this weren't true, you'd be too busy with invites to think of some friends as "they always throw great parties".
Nope. Its a bunch of work and stress and thoroughly beaten by a dull night in. If I want to bring people together, I'll pay for it to be done - e.g. a restaurant.
Now with the great late summer, it would be a great time for something like this again, but I just did not felt the energy, but also am a bit sad now to not just make something happen.
True. If I invite nobody it about matches the night in.
I'd love to throw amazing parties, but I can't reliably expect more than 2-3 people to show up, so I don't try.
Thanks for your service to humanity.
I have no doubt it might seem that way, but it doesn't seem like an interesting divide because the categorization doesn't really tell you anything about the people. But it's definitely a good rule of to thumb to remember the next time someone feels annoyed that "so and so never throws parties." It's also true when you visit friends in cities you never been. Some are natural and enthusiastic tour guides, some shun such a role.
But my guess is many the "never hosts" threw at least one party in the past and had a terrible experience and decided they suck at it.
I'm also assuming the never people you know are capable of throwing parties in terms of house size etc, and that you accounted for the ineligible in that respect.
I know people who are self-conscious about their messy houses and the idea of maintaining a presentable tidy house for parties would be enough for them to dismiss the idea outright even though they would like to do it in theory.
There is an epidemic of disconnection and loneliness, Putnam and others are 100% right. There's an organized effort by some people to isolate humans from each other as much as possible, and they have their own swarm of useful idiots to aide them.
The solution to this problem needs explicit action, this is not something that will take care of itself, or people would adapt to it.
I bought a domain recently, https://clubs.fyi that I will devote to this purpose of human connection[1], if anyone wants to join shoot me an email, there's nothing there yet but there will be stuff in a week or so. :)
1. Not connection in the SF-sense like Facebook, Meetup, etc.
AI is amazing. https://clubs.fyi/.
(I already had the backend but vibecoded a frontend in about an hour)
As an introvert, I absolutely loathed these gatherings and was frustrated by how powerless I was in avoiding them.
Recently, I have been reading over my mother's old letters she wrote to her parents at that time, in which she described the effort and social anxiety that went with this tradition. It was not something my parents enjoyed, but rather an obligation they felt they had to uphold. Someone invites you over, then that goes into an unspoken balance sheet, and you are required to reciprocate. She often spoke of "owing" dinner to people. I don't think she enjoyed it at all, though there were a few couples I can remember who were good friends of theirs, and those meetups were always a pleasure to listen in on. The rest were simply a drag.
I should note that their life in the 70s (in a middle-class college town) was not some idyllic paradise without the Internet, either. Everyone was constantly falling ill with colds or flu, and days were spent running dreary errands to shop for boring things that we now can get with a click. The rotary-dial telephone that hung in the kitchen was the heartbeat of the house, since replaced by Facebook and smartphones. My parents were always busy and exhausted.
It's worth noting that not everything that's good for you is enjoyable, especially in the moment.
Avoiding everything that's a "drag" means staying alone, passively consuming easy media, not exercising, eating hyper-palatble junk food, getting obese and probably depressed, etc.
> I should note that their life in the 70s (in a middle-class college town) was not some idyllic paradise without the Internet, either. Everyone was constantly falling ill with colds or flu, and days were spent running dreary errands to shop for boring things that we now can get with a click. The rotary-dial telephone that hung in the kitchen was the heartbeat of the house, since replaced by Facebook and smartphones.
While I agree that those cloying clickbait articles/videos idealizing random pre-smartphone teen photos and videos are obnoxious (as someone who grew up in that era). I think the modern emphasis on mindlessly reducing "friction" is going to prove ultimately unwise, though probably uncorrected as generational turnover causes people to forget what was lost, and certain degradation gets redefined as "normal" and accepted.
> My parents were always busy and exhausted.
So are modern parents, and all indications are they are more exhausted.
An accessible intro is Michael Easter's book The Comfort Crisis, which, while a little pop-sciencey, explores the idea that making our lives more and more comfortable (across various axes) creates a feedback cycle that shrinks our comfort zones, making some of the more rewarding (but potentially challenging/uncomfortable) things in life seem unthinkable.
For me this was a bit of a "once you've seen it you can't unsee it" kind of thing. Letting convenience be your primary metric for success often produces totally unsatisfying results, anywhere from how you build cities to the way you eat a meal.
The arc of the original World of Warcraft (broader social impacts aside) is an interesting microcosm to explore: players continually asked for convenience features that would simplify the most tedious aspects of the game and reduce social friction (organizing groups, traveling etc), but as they made things more convenient over the years, many people found that the game actually began to lose something important. The response culminated in a very successful re-release of the original, inconvenient, game after 15 years.
Comfort is also correlated to it, but I don't think it's exactly it either. A/C is very comfortable, and certainly there are psychological and physiological downsides to it. But I don't think there's any major rewarding experiences which A/C makes impossible or unthinkable. Maybe the taste of a cool glass of water after working all day in the hot sun? Some amount of resilience to high heat which makes traveling in hot places slightly more enjoyable? Experiencing the changing seasons more directly and consistently than just seeing a changing set of colors out your window? None of these are exactly trivial, but it doesn't seem like "optimizing for comfort removes all the color from life" is exactly right either.
Maybe it's just that suffering just for suffering's sake doesn't do anything. If you were in the universe where all houses are magically air conditioned 24/7 and offered to build a machine to make them uncomfortably hot for 4 months a year and uncomfortably cold for another 4 months a year, selling on the idea that, you know, variety is the spice of life, a little constant hardship toughens you up, I don't think anybody would buy that on its own.
But clearly people DO seem to go kind of crazy without pressure and challenges, whether you frame it as "convenience" or "comfort" or "eustress deficiency" or whatever. There's an entire category of hobbies and interests that are entirely based around doing uncomfortable or dangerous or stressful things (thrill-seeking). And even things like weightlifting, marathons, saunas, physically stressful things are often pleasurable and seem to obviously build character and resilience outside of just the act of lifting heavy things until it hurts too much to continue. I think weightlifting is a good analogy; hardly anyone would lift weights if there was no extrinsic reward at the end of it (e.g. health, vanity, bragging rights). The important thing isn't the inconvenience and uncomfortableness of lifting weights, it's something else.
Maybe "responsibility"? "self-actualization"? I think that's maybe closer to it.
Look up universe 25 and mouse utopia experiments. Exactly predicted this.
100%.. people tend to understand this much better with physical exercise.
Social connections have as much of an impact on mortality as e.g. smoking [1].
Yes, quitting smoking, working out, and talking to people is not pleasant - it is also healthy and good for you.
When I was an obese smoker who avoided people, I was stressed out by a lot of other things going on. As soon as those stressors were gone, the bad habits also went away without so much effort.
It's worth considering how many of these perceptions of "discomfort" are caused by other aspects of culture, not nature or nationality or era. All my stress was coming from trying way too hard as an insecure younger person.
I don’t enjoy going to the gym, but I love swimming and hiking, and love that. I haven’t worked out in a gym for years, I don’t want to, and I’m quite healthy and reasonably active.
Some people are just introverts, and I think the ‘optimal’ amount of IRL time is different for every individual. Much like my gym vs swimming example; quality social interaction can take many forms; some of my closest and most meaningful friendships over decades have been based on games (voice calls; discord chats; hanging out in person sometimes and going on trips together sometimes), and that works for me; and I don’t think I’m missing anything.
Prioritise genuine human and social interaction, and for introverts, get out of the comfort zone once in a while (being a hermit is not good). But whatever form that takes is secondary to the quality and how it fits your personality and quirks.
> I don’t enjoy going to the gym, but I love swimming and hiking, and love that. I haven’t worked out in a gym for years, I don’t want to, and I’m quite healthy and reasonably active.
But that's a problem of the modern low-friction era. If cars hadn't been invented and you had to walk/carry things everywhere it wouldn't matter. No 10,000 steps nonsense. No what do I enjoy better: weights or swimming or hiking? You'd get a lot of exercise by just going about your life.
> Some people are just introverts, and I think the ‘optimal’ amount of IRL time is different for every individual.
I am an introvert, and a big basis of my comment is the personal realization that my drive to get IRL social time was actually insufficient to give me the amount of IRL social time I needed. I'm a lot happier if it's foisted on me and I have less control.
I always wonder if people say these things actually believe it.
Like are there people who really prefer junk food over good food even in the moment, or have to get their will power up to read a good book?
It just seems a sentiment that is so foreign to my exisetence.
Yes these people are more common than not.
I was once so depressed that I didn't leave my room except to use the bathroom for months, and in that time I developed lethargy so extreme that I couldn't even play causal FPS video games competently. My brain simply didn't work as well, despite having all the calories it needed.
30+ years forward, I moved to a new country, and we only have one kid. We haven't had this kind of big dinner for decades since my grandma passed away in the late 90s.
The families are getting smaller and more atomized, so only people who are VERY into big dinners throw them.
I am retired now and lucky to have my (now adult) children living nearby. Every Friday I cook a large pizza dinner for everyone, their spouses, and their children, and any friends they want to invite. I will always be an introvert, but this weekly meal is the highlight of my week.
The difference between this and what my parents did is that I host for my own pleasure and for what it does to bind the family together. I don't expect reciprocal invitations, and no obligation is ever implied (I hope).
Hopefully it helps the next generation stay connected and maybe your kids pick up this habit when older and it becomes a tradition.
TBH, if I were to retire today, I'd love to do that, too. I only have one son, so probably it's not going to be a big dinner, but I'd also invite friends of the family, too.
My grandma had four kids who all married and gave her ten nephews in total. On new year's eve we had this large dinners where pretty much 20 people gathered (sometimes more, when nephews got old enough to bring their partner OR some other uncle/aunt from other sides of the family joined).
That’s just anyone who has small kids. Or works in healthcare, childcare, or any service industry really. It has nothing to do with 1975 vs 2025 (unless you’re one of the small amount of people who work remotely, and you don’t have kids or a spouse who falls into one of the above categories).
Also after a few years you stop getting so many colds.
Simultaneously, air pollution is down, which lowers symptoms.
So it wouldn't surprise me if respiratory incidence is down. Of course there were also more kids in the 1970s, to your point.
That’s very likely true.
> one big difference is indoor air ventilation standards improved dramatically, leading to less spread of disease indoors.
I don’t know if this is. In 1975 air conditioning was much less prevalent, so people were much more likely to open windows. Buildings were also much leakier.
And it’s not simple as building ventilation has steadily improved, so teasing out the impact is almost impossible. In the 80s there was a big push for energy efficiency, so we went from 15 cfm/person in 1973 to 5 in 1981 then back to 20 in 1989.
But building envelopes also got much tighter, so there’s less uncontrolled ventilation.
I think respiratory flu is far less common now than it was. I have had a legit case of the flu only once in my adult life. After spending 15 years teaching in a public school, I had countless colds but never caught the flu. Of course, annual flu vaccines might have helped. Those weren't available in the 70s.
Strep throat was also a very common complaint in the letters. Throat cultures, home visits from the pediatrician, etc., were frequent, especially for my brother. I haven't seen a single case of strep in my extended family since. Maybe just lucky.
Many things have improved over the decades, but we do have an array of exciting tick-borne illnesses to make up for it!
They’re not far less common in average. Rates have gone down a bit with the annual flu shot, but there’s a few things going on.
-Flu rates vary wildly by year and decade. There were a few big pandemics where a very large percentage of people got the flu.
-There was no way to easily test for the flu, so people said they had it more frequently than they did.
In a given year about 12% of kids will come down with symptomatic influence which is not too far off from what we can estimate that historic numbers were in an average year.
>Strep
I looked up studies on this. Nothing conclusive, but likely no large change.
Recommendations about when to test have changed though because it turns out that if you culture every kid with a runny nose a large percentage of them will come back positive even though their symptoms are viral.
So you’re probably right that you notice fewer diagnosed strep cases, but there aren’t actually fewer symptomatic cases.
They can be fun, but I and almost everyone that I'm friends with much prefer to simply visit and hang out with no plans at all. Just be there, maybe chat a bit, maybe ignore each other and read a book for a few hours, maybe find something to eat / do a lightweight potluck. Which rather sucked that COVID ended up shutting down almost all of our communal places to visit for that.
Then at some point middle class Americans began copying these sorts of upper-middle class styled parties (again, as a form of class signalling; maybe partially because all the rich people in the movies and on TV and in magazines are doing it, and you want to seem like them), but Americans also fancied themselves as classless egalitarians, so it didn't really keep because the whole "conspicuous consumption" clashes with modern suburban ideals.
understandable, but if you think about it, it's kinda the price of keeping your "social network" alive. people nowadays understand that romantic relationships need maintenance and effort, but don't (yet?) understand that friendship require at least some maintenance as well. i guess that was even true-r before social media when you weren't constantly updated about what happened in friend X, Y and Z's lives.
most people nowadays don't really want to pay that price to keep relationships alive... and it's showing.
> My parents were always busy and exhausted.
what i'm about to write is absolutely anecdotical, but: i don't see people my age (30-40 years old) like super-relaxed either.
Nowadays, we definitely get together much less often but also it's usually at a restaurant.
This is counter to when I was a kid - it was rare that I had a scheduled sports event on a Friday or Saturday evening. During the day, sure. But 6pm+ on Friday? Basically never. But that seems to be common now. Travel sports, so lots of weekends totally away, or specialized coaching at odd hours, or just a 3rd activity to pad that college application. It's crazy. I honestly have no idea how kids have any fun today (and I say that as somebody who played 2 varsity sports, one instrument, and was an Eagle Scout - but through middle school, I still had plenty of time for just hanging out - it was common to ride my bike for hours on a Sunday - into town, get an ice cream, across the river into DC, and back).
Seems like these parents are prioritizing their kids and probably encouraging things they enjoy doing rather than wine night. Chances are the kids are enjoying life.
In addition for me, when I grew up we had family around. Currently my closest family member is ~600 miles away so they can't pop in to watch the kids.
I say this directly because you seem to have a weird anti socialization tone here that is common amount HN overall misanthropic tone
When I grew up in the South, football & basketball games were Friday & Saturday nights. Apparently this was common[1].
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friday_Night_Lights_(TV_series...
The single biggest reason, by far - kids stop playing sports because of parents who come and watch. Turns out parents think winning is important, which robs all the fun out of it.
As a counter anecdote; in high school I played 2 or 3 sports per season. I enjoyed them all immensely, despite the teams being (usually) objectively terrible. No parents ever came to watch (outside the ones offering necessary transport). We'd occasionally go a whole season without winning a single game. No expectations. Just having fun with my mates...
I'm really thankful it was my time, not my parents time.
Those activities frequently overlap. No, Cub Scouts does not care that the high school basketball game overlaps with the camping trip because Cub Scouts are not in high school. Parents are (still) not able to be in two places at a time.
This means that at least some of the time, the older kid goes to their game without their parents. (Because the younger child frequently cannot.)
If you are able to solve this for those parents, you can be the first $1B single-employee company.
People who have means sometimes are not able to see other people's contraints.
The football team has ~40 kids and basketball has ~12. The school has ~2000. At least in my area.
Small kids, of course, are a completely different story. But once they go through puberty, parents need to understand that their role in their kids life needs to change a little bit and their kids fucking need their own space with their friends.
Even if you have one child playing (or on the bench, or in the band, or cheerleading) and have come to watch, your other similar-age children will likely not be interested in sitting with you. They will want to sit with their friends, and rightfully so!
I guess it's just a generational thing, but my late Gen X mother was simply busy. Army drills twice a month will do that. I also concur with other responses that these were all social events anyway, so it's not like I was yearning for Mom to be there.
But how come the fertility rates are low? they ask.
Definitely a widespread trauma response of suppression.
How Hollywood handles its related optics says everything:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ZeroCovidCommunity/comments/1ncmclw...
Apparently everyone was attending mass largely because everyone else was.
If you are letting fear of disease get in the way of living a healthy and fulfilling life today, that's an unhealthy trauma response.
This is demonstrably untrue.
We in the US are in the 13th covid wave since the pandemic started from tracking wastewater data which is our most accurate way of determining transmission (fortunately at a much smaller peak as of right now than most waves)[1]. The past four years have had far higher covid transmission rates on average than the two years we consider societally "when covid was happening". It does not strictly follow seasonal patterns like the flu, we routinely get summer waves that peak quite highly. The flu does not do this. Millions of Americans have ME/CFS like symptoms after covid, some extremely severe.[2]
[1]https://www.pmc19.com/ [2]https://academic.oup.com/ooim/article/6/1/iqaf010/8379704?lo...
...doesn't prevent transmission
> acquired immunity
...only lasts 6 months or so, wanes, and a new variant arrives
> the general drop in the number of effected people
Long COVID is severely underdiagnosed
> that's an unhealthy trauma response
The precautionary principle is a rational response, especially what we already know about the widespread systemic damage that repeat COVID infections cause.
The only reliable protection right now is consistent N95 usage in public spaces, and very few people are doing that (though some certainly are, as I see them every day).
I no longer worry at all about attending a crowded indoor gathering - those would be impossible to avoid in NYC - but enjoying “a night in” without kids is a distinctly post-COVID phenomenon for myself and many people I know
It actually never stopped being a physical danger. The only thing that changed is how long it takes for the damage to unfold.
At the start of COVID, people were rightfully shocked that hospitals and morgues were overflowing, and they reacted accordingly. That's no longer an issue (for now) with these latest strains, but acquiring Long COVID and dealing with its effects is definitely still a real concern.
Long COVID is vastly underdiagnosed. You might not get it until your 4th/5th/6th re-infection. That reinfection might also be asymptomatic, and/or Long COVID doesn't set in until weeks or months afterward, meaning people often don't link the two events. People not taking precautions (majority) are getting re-infected on average once per year since immunity from a previous infection typically wanes after 6 months, and there are about two waves per year for any given area.
Vaccines are of limited utility since they don't prevent transmission. A consistently worn N95 in public spaces is the only reliable means of defense, and everybody in your household needs to do that in public for it to be effective within your household.
I’m not a Covid denier or anything either. I masked up and stayed in during the pandemic, I got the vaccine, etc. I had original first year Covid confirmed by a test, and I’m positive I’ve had it at least once again since then though didn’t get a test confirmation, so I’m 100% positive Covid is real (I feel like this is an obvious statement but I’m sure some people out there believe it’s a hoax or something). However I’ve seen exactly zero evidence other than online anecdotes that Long Covid exists or ever existed.
If it’s “vastly under diagnosed” I should personally know multiple people with it and should likely have family members with it (at least extended family) and yet I don’t. Not a single person. Honestly I think it’s one of those terminally online things that gets repeated a lot but only online.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/ooim/article/6/1/iqaf010/8379704?lo...
Part of the issue is it's unclear what long covid is, if it's the same thing as chronic fatigue syndrome, and who even knows enough about this to be worth listening to
It's just another post-acute infection syndrome that can occur from pretty much any contagious illness (flu, etc.). Most people reading this have probably experienced this. Ever had a cough that persisted multiple weeks after the rest of your illness went away? That's not because your cold permanently damaged your lungs or even that the virus is still around. It's because your immune system will sometimes get confused and continue to wage war in your throat (or whatever it thought was infected) long after the virus has been eliminated.
Probably for the aforementioned reasons: people aren't making the link.
Long COVID can lead to major bodily dysfunctions including heart disease, stroke, kidney impairment, neurological issues, autoimmune conditions, etc.
People are getting sick more often and not just with COVID, because recurring COVID infections have nuked their immune systems. There are studies proving how it impacts T-cell depletion, etc.
> If it’s “vastly under diagnosed” I should personally know multiple people with it
Are you not aware of your blatant contradiction here?
All that said: I don't do it myself, but I don't judge people who choose to mask up regularly when going out in public. It's a semi-normal thing in Asian communities, and I have two close (non-Asian) friends who do it. If nothing else, COVID de-stigmatized that practice here in the US.
As somebody who masks regularly in 2026, I definitely don't judge people who don't. Most people don't know the true risks, and even for those who do, the two lifestyles come with some important tradeoffs that I don't think should be forced on anybody, one way or the other.
Or how many medical professionals continue to be medical professionals while knowing it has an elevated risk of suicide.
Here's a Canadian researcher who still masks and explains how the many 'mistakes' were made in order to convince people to throw caution to the wind:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCft7qu1Iv4
For the US version, this is a decent timeline of events:
https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...
The best part was after that extended disinformation campaign, lawmakers asked people what they wanted to do, then told them what they wanted to hear:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240802024326/https://docs.hous...
But that didn't make the threat go away. People just pretended that it did. Group psychology is weird like that. Further compounding matters is the fact that neverending COVID reinfections impacts the part of the brain responsible for executive function, making it that much easier for people to not care. The more common and palatable term is "brain fog." Toxoplasmosis has a similar known reinforcing effect.
My personal calculation is the reward of enhanced expressiveness when interacting with others is worth the risk of infectious disease in 2026. In 2020, the variables were different!
Again, it's undercounted. Furthermore, LC is more comparable to AIDS than it is run of the mill influenza in the systems it affects and how. Also, note it took years of denial and lag before people finally acknowledged the long-term damage that AIDS caused. Except here it's not sexually transmitted but instead airborne year round.
Anyway, do you what want. I'm just pointing out most people have been misled, so they can't even make informed decisions. People with LC live with this regret.
Screens are evil. They wake up the dead past as if it's alive and happening now. It became so much the norm, that people are afraid to face the real world, real people, real talking. "Dinner party? OMG, real people with real faces that force us to talk to them? Noway sir".
Screens disconnected people from real world, from each other. I was trying a VR headset the other days and immediately threw it away, as it shut off my visual and audio senses completely.
Tools are not value neutral, and it’s time we internalise that. Tools are designed with a purpose. An AK-47 is a tool. Its purpose is killing. Its creator was acutely aware of it and by the end even expressed remorse.
Yes, screens can be enabling, but your parent comment is obviously talking of the norm we’re facing. Facebook isn’t value neutral, neither is Instagram, nor TikTok, nor a myriad other insanely popular services which command too many lives. Those are tools designed explicitly to suck up your time, to feed the bellies of their owners at your expense.
At least with an AK-47 or a hammer, once you own it physically, it's yours and the original creator isn't sending you subtle psychological nudges to utilize it one way or the other.
Most my family is scattered. Screens can be connecting. But it doesn't replace local connection and my experience seems more to delay the inevitable drifting away of such relations due to distance. I suppose it at least tests how much your loved ones care to keep in contact with you.
If they are not a clanker.
What do you think it is? Be clear.
> If they are not a clanker.
Probably not: "I was trying a VR headset the other days".
https://fortune.com/2026/06/22/1-in-3-young-adults-living-wi...
I have a friend who is married and have 3 kids. His wife is a SAHM. She didn't know anything about cooking before they got married back in 2011, and nowadays she could easily throw a party for 10-12 people with only half of day of preparation (excluding shopping) -- and that's 10 Chinese dishes she had to cook, not BBQ stuffs. That's crazy for us. I can't imagine how much time it would take us to prepare even 5 dishes. I used to watch she cooking and it was so elegant. She uses the stove to its full, including baking, and still has the leisure to talk to me and cut raw food quickly.
It takes practices. She having 3 kids definitely "helps" with the practice. Nowadays people don't get to practice these things. It's like a myth to us.
I think it's kinda impossible for a two-worker family unless you are really into this kind of stuffs. Otherwise taking care of work and kids is already way too much for us.
While TV has been a thing for a long time, content was limited, and more importantly curated. You couldn't manage your own playlists/subscriptions and almost infinite content on subjects that interest you.
Video games were mostly for kids.
There were no social media feeds optimize to monopolize your attention and make you doomscroll.
Hey even having a TV/widescreen at home has a direct impact on couples sex life...which magically reactivate when the light goes out.
The internet is wonderful for many things but nobody can denies it has an impact on our in person social life.
TVs had already affected our lives tremendously, computers and the internet just went nuts with it.
We need a new way to use it safely for us and the world writ large.
even when it's GOOD it's not as good as real life, however, it does take less effort.
As we talked about this very isolation problem he told me about his neighbors who kept inviting him over and offering to watch the kids for him and how he thought it was just weird and couldn’t trust them. It broke my heart — I could just imagine the neighbors trying to be good to their community and that very behavior is met with distrust.
(I read half the book he mentioned and asked him about it the next time I saw him. Turns out he hadn’t read the book, just heard about it on a podcast. My quest to meet someone who reads continues.)
I also found that they seem to value the tradition and style (quality of food, quality of dinnerware, quality of decoration, etc) much more than the company.
Before marriage, we (guys) would get together often. After marriage, it promptly stopped. And the accounting began.
As I said in another comment, the causes of the decline are plenty, and nothing really dominates. I've given a few reasons here and elsewhere, but I'm sure there are many more. It's a death by a thousand cuts. The reasons I give here are due to a certain sub-clique. It won't apply to others' experiences.
> Until 1985, the survey included only married households.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDB_Needham_Life_Style_Surveys
That's all I'm saying.
- People unwilling to commit to an event > 7 days in advance
- People flaking even when they do
- Unreciprocated $100s of dollars spent is non sustainable, and lowkey feels kinda like buying others friendship
- People in urban places are living in smaller and smaller spaces. Though counterbalanced by many nicer apartment buildings have amenities spaces that help.
- mixing circles -- people are often isolating their friend groups into niches (pickelball friends, church friends, D&D friends...)
- And IMO the overarching issue in America that creates so many problems -- Everyone is so overworked that they don't have the energy/capactity to do good things: Exercise, and hosting parties being two examples.
I was raised in a social environment where mixing circles was normal and it took me a while to realize that that's not how Americans do things. It certainly creates a lot of difficulties connecting with others, and at least for myself I am a lot less motivated to get to know people better when I'm the X or Y buddy they reach out to when the people they actually want to hang out with are unavailable.
You want N people. Assume 1/2 won't show. Invite 2N people. Either ask people to bring a bit of food, or provide food for 1.5xN and if you get only N then you'll have leftovers.
> - Unreciprocated $100s of dollars spent is non sustainable, and lowkey feels kinda like buying others friendship
If you have the disposable invome for it then it's its own reward, and you're not buying friends: you're helping them make new friends with your other guests, and this is something they'll appreciate about you. They might or might not reciprocate because as we've seen in this thread, many are not into hosting.
> - mixing circles -- people are often isolating their friend groups into niches (pickelball friends, church friends, D&D friends...)
Mixing is half the point!!
> - And IMO the overarching issue in America that creates so many problems -- Everyone is so overworked that they don't have the energy/capactity to do good things: Exercise, and hosting parties being two examples.
That's what long weekends are for, so host a party on a day in a long weekend.
See my last point, they're too busy/tired. 1/2 the people bring chips and salsa they picked up last minute on the way there.
> Mixing is half the point
People no longer want mixing. Anyone who disagrees about anything they believe is "toxic" or microviolent.
> That's what long weekends are for
People already maxxed want rest, isolation, catchup a breath on the very few long weekends. Those who do happen to have capacity want social media viable things to show off their status to their friends.
> See my last point, they're too busy/tired. 1/2 the people bring chips and salsa they picked up last minute on the way there.
And that is fine, at least the first time. People learn and will not bring chips and salsa afterwards. Plus, the goal of the shared dinner is to have people over, not to enjoy fancy meals.
Well, maybe some are like that. They'll stop coming to your parties, or you'll stop inviting them, or you already know they are like this so you won't even invite them. The rest will keep showing up -- they're the fun ones!
See, that's your problem. You don't throw a house party because you want to go to other house parties. You do that because and only because, you want to throw a house party.
Maybe the truth is I dont want to throw a house party -- I want the outcomes of a house party... Friends, community, being known, meeting someone who might become a friend/spouse, not being alone on isolating holidays (like thanksgiving / christmas / NYE) .
- "Do you use gluten-free pasta? I think I have a gluten allergy."
- "Why always ethnic food like pasta? What's wrong with white people food, like Cheeseburgers?"
People have become too complicated.
You respond with "that's what I'm making, you're welcome to bring anything yourself to add to it".
Covers dietary issues along with a decent dose of "STFU and show up". People are complicated but you also give too much of a shit.
> For any number of reasons, women seem to do better than men at making and keeping adult friendships
I think it’s social pressure and necessity.
When I fail to get my kids a thing they need to school people shrug their shoulders, and I think “I tried” but the pressure on my wife seems to be higher. She judges herself and others judge her harder. Likewise, to meet that pressure she uses her friend group for utility in the same way I might reach out to programmer friends I met at a conf to get a PR merged. She has a bench of mom friends who can pickup her kids and they will expect the same favor in return.
There is a family in our school group where the dad is much more active in that role as connector and planner, but it seems harder for him. I don't think people reach out to him as much for shared favors so he has to try harder. And beyond necessity, they are forming friends. I think the other primary caregivers that are usually women just do not think of him as friend material as quickly or easily as the other mothers. So overall it is harder for him (still do-able just noting a systemic weight).
I found myself taking care of a 10 year old in Taiwan for two weeks (with a group of other students/parents) and that short time was enough for me to do a 180 and really force me to be much more social. I planned things, and socialized. Both because it was fun and it was necessary. I controlled the calendar in totality, bore the risks and rewards and answered to myself. But when we rejoined as a family unit I slipped back into old patterns.
So now I know more what it feels like to have that connection and that symbiotic need. But I'm unsure what to do about it.
I've had plenty of people throughout my life express wanting to come over to my place and hang. There's definitely a social grace of how you'd phrase it, but it's not like it's some alien concept.
Coming from a very WASPy family, I am very much in the Guess culture -- for a long time I wouldn't dream of inviting myself over somewhere -- but I genuinely think taking some cues from Ask culture people makes a lot of things easier and more sociable.
If you don't, people will get bored and eventually the group will disband.
My household hosts a lot and we’ve come to expect a full on 50% flake rate, down to multiple instances of people getting to our street and deciding to stop at the restaurant at the end for food and go home instead of arriving.
It means if we invite less than 5 people there are occasions where literally no one shows up. It’s also difficult to plan for when the odds go in the other direction like one news year party where we invited 30 people, expected ~15 and had 29 show up.
That's insane. Who does that and how does it make you feel and have you told them?
It’s a mix of people with social anxiety and people who have FOMO and agree to three different events on the same day.
The more polite ones in that second group have done things like shown up in tuxes for a casual party and dipped 10 minutes later for some other event.
No talking to the various people in this category has done anything so they just get treated as nice to haves of they show up and we wait 0 seconds for them for anything scheduled.
> That's insane.
You meet a lot of weird people in software
That's not a software-engineer attribute. I live in another major software hub on the east coast and people are not like this over here.
We're not prepared to say exactly why they are weird.
It may go further back than that but I don’t have experience before the 2010s
It takes energy and commitment, just like anything else worthwhile in life. Have the courage to not be good at something, to do it anyway, and to keep doing it.
Many years ago, there weren't so many opportunities, have to make some of your own. (I began my adult life in the midst of the pandemic. I am very aware of how empty the world can feel.) Join clubs, large events, book clubs, art shows, these things exist, you can find them. You won't have many friends at first, but you'll meet a lot of people. I nearly took the LSAT for fun because at some point some kind-of-friends/acquaintances were preparing for law school. Take every opportunity, do anything, figure out what you like, and who you like.
Later on, there is simply not enough time in the day. You can wake up grateful every day that you can do whatever you wish. You will never want for a closer friend. There will always be some challenging adventure you can take. Or a comfortable evening with some close friends. Your friends will show up at your door with gifts, you will see the sunset from some mountain you climbed, you'll run through the rain with your friends and laugh, you'll be familiar with half the rooftops in whatever city you're near, you will have career and social opportunities just because of how many people you know.
And finally, you will have a responsibility to provide good prosocial opportunities for someone else who is figuring out the world.
It is possible.
As basically every country on Earth gets richer, two things happen in survey results.
One is that as people get richer they spend more time apart. Household sizes get smaller, the number of social interactions per week goes down, etc.
You'll also see that as countries get richer people say that they report feeling less lonely. Loneliness is less of an issue for the rich countries who live more apart. The correlation between this and GDP is comical. As you get to poorer countries, like clockwork, people report being lonelier in surveys.
The evidence suggests that as people get more choice they decide to see people less and they also feel happier for it and less lonely. So I don't think there's a problem here.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5547349/
https://ourworldindata.org/lonely-not-alone
But frankly I wasn't kidding when I said every quality survey shows this.
If you have ever seen an article suggesting that loneliness is higher in the West or in capitalist economies or whatever, you have been 100% misled. That is essentially just a made up narrative that plays well in articles
Good article on this a few days ago that I’ve been thinking about a lot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49812533
Apparently around 2004 people started spending more money on food-away-from-home than food-at-home, and it has only increased from there. Dining out seems just much more standard now.
Yes, that is a pretty typical thing. Starting around late 20s, pretty much most guys are either part of a steady relationship, usually with kids or permanently without a relationship. The men with families have their own family events and get included in the wife's social and family circle. The guys who do not get paired up are not welcome at those events and wives forbid the partnered up guys to hang out with their single male friends on the other days. To be fair, there is nowadays anyway so much online entertainment, that it probably will be fine in the end.
Sounds pretty mean!
This extra coordination “friction” is the killer. The lesson is, if you want more dinner parties you have to reduce the extra coordination “friction” to a minimum.
I would do this multiple times a week because it was so easy and required minimal coordination.
I think some of the stats reviewed in this post are crazy because it is specifically "did it 12+ times in the last year", which means if you only did it 11 times, you simply register as a 'false' according to this modeling.
The graphs with once per year are much more reasonable.
I'm sure these stats still tell you something about life in america, but I feel like this bar is set so extremely high. I'm saying this as someone who LOVES hosting - I don't want to do it 12 times a year. (maybe it's because I set too high of a quality bar for myself?)
In my social circle, if you're inviting people over, then you need to satisfy:
1. Neat + Tidy house
2. Good food, and lots of it
Both take time, and not for tired parents.
(To be clear: These are not my expectations...)
It's certainly not like I remember it in the 80s, but still happens a lot, and my uninformed take is: "community" in the US was never that cohesive, it only took so much to make it fall apart.
You wouldn't be surprised if everyone was smoking and smoking rate was going up massively and then we had a surge of people getting cancer.
This is obviously because of social media or other algorithmic applications. It literally herds people.
It couldn't be more obvious how unhealthy it is, yet there is no demand for it to get outlawed and there won't be any time soon. It is pretty sad.
If you think about the second/third order effects that it will have, it is massively worse than alcohol/drugs.
"In Bowling Alone, Putnam acknowledged that women have historically been the keepers of the family social calendar, planning the birthday parties and neighborhood potlucks. For any number of reasons, women seem to do better than men at making and keeping adult friendships and making plans with other families"
The author states that they dismiss this thesis because "groups have more leisure time now than before" but that's not a valid rebuttal. The problem isn't the amount of leisure time, but the way that leisure time is used. It's easier for a planning and hosting novice to invite friends out than it is to host. If you don't have the skills to host, it doesn't matter how much time you have, you won't host.
I have a 1930s vintage Hood (the milk company) "basic" cookbook. In it's 800 pages, it includes hundreds of pages about how to run the larder of a household including how to understand how a carcass is broken up (and how to do it yourself) so you can chat with some fundamentals with the butcher, rules of thumb for how to stock a brand new kitchen with tools and supplies and also how to plan for an entire month's worth of groceries and using the whole animal to stretch your budget, how to plan and prepare and set a large dinner party, how to preserve your food with several different canning methods, an entire section about coffee and how to be a gentle coffee snob (in the 30s!) and about a hundred pages of printed photos to illustrate those points. The chapter on cookies starts with two pages discussing cookies as an abstract concept!
This tome is just a tiny part of what used to be the "Woman's job". You could construct equivalently large tomes for most other tasks and duties and "Roles", especially the one about managing social networks!
But western society offloaded all that work to women so long ago that it largely forgot to even recognize it! When women were allowed to seek careers, quite frankly men did not pick up the slack at all. They basically just assumed all this stuff happened magically it seems. There was no institution that really worked to push this knowledge to people, as it previously was largely passed down mother to daughter outside of institutions, and no 90s era "home economics" classes didn't even come close, so the chain was broken and a lot of that knowledge just kind of didn't make it to younger generations!
Very true in a lot of domains! When I first became a parent I had to learn a lot about “mental load” or risk my marriage. A lot of women won’t put up with that anymore (rightfully so)
All I can say is the consequences of a degrading mental/social health are harder to grasp than a hangover or, for the lack of a better smoking example, lung cancer.
Still I'm also puzzled by the amount of people, even in my own social circle, that "just want to wind down after work" (read: completely fry their brain)
And as for time, the average person finds time for hours of short form video and other useless tasks. Which is actually the real problem, social media has sucked up everyone’s time and attention to the point people don’t socialise anymore.
I know what you mean, but the real issue for most people is time, money, and social connections. Dinner parties were way down before TikTok. Most people I know cannot host at all, either they live with their parents or their apartment is in such rough shape that it would take days of cleaning to be able to invite people over.
Who finds this surprising or puzzling? I do not see this sentiment in the article or in the comments here. Are you making up people to get mad at?
And yes, this is all down to a few celebrities and influencers who are popular with that crowd showing off the habit in public. A fashion.
Fortunately this is very slowly starting to crack. Maybe not from social pressure as it deserves, but litigation is finally starting to catch up with the tech and some recent court rules have started putting some simple yet major compromises on Meta. We're talking "need to remove likes" levels of major.
I think these are still in appeal (or have already settled), but I'm keeping a close eye on this.
Facebook was founded over twenty years ago. There are adults in the world who have no recollection of a life before social media. In that sense it shouldn’t be surprising or puzzling, should it?
> It couldn't be more obvious how unhealthy it is, yet there is no demand for it to get outlawed and there won't be any time soon.
Remember when young adults were literally shouting online “let China suck up all my data” in response to the proposed TikTok ban? I (and probably you) lived in and can remember a world before the internet was in every part of our lives, but there are adults living now who can’t. It is not obvious to them.
and why wouldn't it? we went from 40 hours of one person being able to support a household, now it's more assumed to be 80 hours from two people
our time has been stolen from us
productivity has increased, but so have working hours, people in the workforce, commuting time, etc
The people in my life who are always throwing parties, have insteresting hobbies like surfing, playing music or rock climbing are basically minimal users of social networking.
So allied to the lack of dinner parties, there’s fewer reasons to even go to someone’s house any more, you can just text them… or not even bother and check their socials to see what impression of a life they’re presenting today.
Um, we had phones before mobile phones.
It was common during my childhood for us to always have something in the cupboard - like a cake or biscuits or chocolate - that we could offer in case someone just dropped by.
It's been decades since I've cared about having anything ready for a possible surprise visitor, as while before I'd feel rude if I didn't have anything, now I'd feel they were rude for not checking in advance as now they rarely have an excuse for not doing so.
The question is, what exactly is the relevance of mobile vs. non-mobile phones?
I think it really depends on the walking distance. If someone is your neighbor, there's not a lot of effort saved from calling or texting first.
Going back to the OP, these are two very different things: "you can just text them… or not even bother and check their socials to see what impression of a life they’re presenting today."
As far as one-to-one communication is concerned, a landland call is just as good as a mobile call or a text. But social media addiction is an entirely different matter. That's not even about announced vs. unannounced visits but rather about living in the real world vs. living in a virtual world.
> was a frequent plot point in various media.
I'm not sure that citing fiction is useful.
People are not always at home.
Without a mobile phone you had an excuse.
Now you don't really.
It doesn't even matter whether or not you were actually home - there was less of a social expectation to always call because it was a recognised excuse that you "were in the neighborhood" and implicitly had no way to check without dropping by.
Before they would happen because we had no ways to stop them until someone was at the door with a plausible excuse.
> Before they would happen because we had no ways to stop them
Yes, in a sense, I'm missing that point, because I began with the assumption that more socializing was good, and the dramatic reduction of socializing is to be mourned. If your point is "good riddance to dinner parties", I personally wouldn't agree with that.
Of course individual people differ in their preferences for socialization. However, I don't think it's justified to project personal anti-social feelings onto the majority. You might be annoyed by unexpected visitors, but to others it may be a delightful surprise. When you refer to "A lot of those visits", that's your own personal view and doesn't necessarily represent the views of others. Obviously your visitors didn't feel the same way, otherwise they would have stayed home.
It doesn't require people to not want to socialise for it to have that effect. It merely requires a proportion of visits to be unwanted or inconvenient then and there.
> You might be annoyed by unexpected visitors, but to others it may be a delightful surprise.
It might be to some. Even to me sometimes. But it was enough of a nuisance that the unwanted visit - as I've pointed out already - became a significant a trope in fiction, and a part of our cultural fabric. The "we were in the neighbourhood" was e.g. a regular vehicle for visits in TV series that has now largely disappeared except when it is used to highlight someone intentionally sidestepping social norms to impose an unwanted visit.
You dismissed fiction earlier, for no good reason: A widespread trope doesn't arise in a vacuum. It worked as a trope in fiction because it was a real and significant thing.
You've had this explained to you at length now. I struggle to see why you find it hard to understand, so I'm leaning towards thinking you're being intentionally obtuse about it at this point.
I agree that mobile phones have a role in the reduction of socializing.
However, I don't agree with the reason you've given, and I have at least two objections:
1. Mobile phones don't actually shut down unplanned socializing. On the contrary, they make it easier to have unplanned socializing, because they allow you to contact another person no matter when or where either of you happen to be.
2. There's no empirical evidence that a significant number of unexpected visits in the past were unwanted. Surely some were, but not nearly enough IMO to explain the dramatic reduction of in-person socializing.
My theory, in contrast, is that the ubiqiutious internet access of smartphones has addicted people to the practically limitless forms of entertainment and attention-grabbing online, and this internet browsing has usurped in-person socializing as a pastime. This change has nothing to do with how easy or hard it is to arrange visits. People have stopped dropping by because they don't want to drop by, not because they can't conveniently drop by.
For the same reason, people have also cut down on non-social activities like reading books. They aren't replacing socializing with book reading.
> You dismissed fiction earlier, for no good reason: A widespread trope doesn't arise in a vacuum.
I dismissed fiction because it deliberately exaggerates for effect, e.g., comedic effect. There may be a grain of truth to it, but fiction by definition is not an accurate reflection of reality.
> I struggle to see why you find it hard to understand,
I'm not struggling to understand. I simply disagree with your analysis.
> so I'm leaning towards thinking you're being intentionally obtuse about it at this point.
You can lean whatever way you want, but you're wrong, and you're also wrong about me "forgetting" the rest of the world when the submitted article is explicitly about the United States: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49894515
True, but back in the day one had to pay for every call, sometimes at per-minute rates: always so for long distance, and in some areas even for local calls. Quite a contrast to today's unlimited-minutes cellular plans (which likely get used little enough that the providers have no trouble offering them).
A key factor in the development of dialup BBS systems in the US was that local calls were usually at least flat-rate, with unlimited service available here and there.
Bringing it back to the topic at hand, back then I recall a number of social events revolving around local BBSes in Champaign-Urbana, and Fidonet's Net 115 in the Chicago area. All that sort of thing vaporized pretty quickly once the internet opened up.
Where and when did you pay per-minute for local calls? Everywhere I lived and traveled within the US back in the day, so to speak, local calls were always unlimited, even in rural areas.
Interesting. This may be due to the size of Chicago.
I didn't see such varied options, not even in Minneapolis.
Almost everywhere outside the US, Canada and New Zealand.
And indeed, the subtitle of the HN submitted article is "We’re witnessing the death of hosting in America."
Where I lived, suburban United States, landlines were ubiquitous, and we used them all the time.
If you’re the person who is out, then you don’t have a landline to call. Or then have to make the decision while out to go and find a payphone and have correct change and put in money to make a call to see if the person is in, while the clock is frantically ticking on the call.
Like if you’re equidistant between your house and your friends house, it is also simpler to walk to theirs and find them rather than walk home, call them, check they’re in, and then walk to theirs anyway.
Also if you weren’t the person who paid the phone bill, it was often presented to you as a more parsimonious solution to use your feet rather than the telephone.
Another example is if you made a plan to meet somewhere at a specific time and the person didn’t turn up. You would have no clue about where they were or what happened even if you found a payphone and called their house and it rang out. You were still s.o.l. for the rest of the day so dealt with it.
You seem to be completely changing the situation. In this comment, you're talking about wanting to visit someone at home, whereas in your original comment, you're talking about not wanting to visit someone at home: "there’s fewer reasons to even go to someone’s house any more, you can just text them… or not even bother and check their socials to see what impression of a life they’re presenting today."
In other words, the mobile phone is a replacement for a home visit rather than a means for a home visit. (On the other hand, a laptop or desktop works just as well or better for checking social media. Indeed I'm currently typing on a laptop.)
It's true that mobile phones can make it easier than landlines to find out if someone is home, but if that's how people were using mobile phones, then you would expect more home visits, or at least more successful home visits.
> Also if you weren’t the person who paid the phone bill, it was often presented to you as a more parsimonious solution to use your feet rather than the telephone.
I don't understand this point. Long-distance calls were frequently billed per call, but of course walking is not a replacement for those. Local calls were typically unlimited for a fixed monthly rate.
Maybe in your suburban sprawl where multiple telephones and multiple cars per household are essential necessities because it’s a 90 minute walk to a shop or a friend’s then one would have unlimited local calls but in huge parts of the rest of the world unlimited calling simply wasn’t a thing.
I can’t imagine you get invited to many dinner parties.
> I can’t imagine you get invited to many dinner parties.
Please read and respect the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
How so? At worst, I said "Um".
Regardless of what you believe I've done, do you not acknowledge that you ought to follow the guidelines, and that personal insults are unacceptable, blatantly cross the line? The guidelines don't say that you get to violate them if someone else does. It may be hypocritical of me—though I disagree with that here—but in any case it's not nonsensical.
Mostly in the US. Today it is more widespread, but it used to be highly unusual.
Yes, I'm referring to the US.
> Today it is more widespread, but it used to be highly unusual.
I can't even speak about today, because I haven't had a landline in years. But at least in the US, unlimited local calls were definitely not unusual in the pre-smartphone era.
So, in other words you're writing off the vast majority of the world and forgetting that we're not by any means all in the US here and by no means are all of us talking only about the US.
> I can't even speak about today, because I haven't had a landline in years. But at least in the US, unlimited local calls were definitely not unusual in the pre-smartphone era.
The context I gave was clear: It followed right after pointing out the US is unusual in this respect - the statement referred to that.
It's not clear to me whether you are intentionally obtuse or if you're genuinely struggling to pick up the context here, but either way you are being incredibly obtuse throughout this conversation. I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, but consider that I'm not the only one here who have picked up on this.
> It's not clear to me whether you are intentionally obtuse or if you're genuinely struggling to pick up the context here
The submitted HN article is about the US:
"We’re witnessing the death of hosting in America."
The charts in the submitted article are also about Americans exclusively.
So yes, we are in fact talking only about the US, and I am not obtuse or missing the context. I've been aware of the context the entire time.
What did you think we were talking about?
I'm not "writing off the vast majority of the world" or "forgetting" anything. The submitted article just happens to be about the US, not the rest of the world, and the patterns of socializing in other countries may be very different.
Maybe it's declined since the 50s in favor of football or so on but I'd like to see the numbers.
I did enjoyed debate team activities btw. The above is what I eventually realized later.
I don't find it surprising at all that social activities have been declining. It sounds like normal mammal behavior in fact.
Along with inflation adjusted (real) disposable income: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A229RX0
One big thing I feel contributing to this is a lack of time.
And the more strange unusual thing, many folks basically have "school nights", they don't do anything because they're going to work the next day.
Perhaps work becoming more mentally intensive makes this more difficult.
But then i realized that it was mostly me who hosted them and the few times i got invited there was an agreement that guest chip in on the costs or that it was a potluck kind of thing.
Made me regret spending all that time and money on the parties i hosted.
If the only friends you have are those you have to pay, when the money's gone, are they likely to stick around? (Likely not)
But if they do, then maybe you've found a true friendship.
What a wonderfully American comment..... the very idea that somebody is financially benefiting who dosn't 'deserve' it is an athema to your society.
Maybe OP's friends simply had less money (the horror!)? Or perhaps they had more children, so less time to cook and less time to spend with friends?
Not everything in life is zero-sum monney game. After all, have you ever wondered why children climb trees?
I don't think it was exactly a "trade". Women were still (and in some relationships still are) the household managers for the most part.
One notable difference: People were much more likely to have a maid, housekeeper, or nanny in 1950. About 1 in 25 households did then, in 1900 it was 1 in 13.
Another interesting thing is that I think the art of hosting is generational in a way. I grew up watching my parents have massive annual parties and friends over all the time. I learned from watching, and picked my apartment layout and arranged the furniture in it to optimize for comfortable conversation and seating for ~8-12 people. I like being the default host, I still have friends over for TTGs or video games a few times a month. Some people are just not good at getting their space comfortable for gatherings (or they don't offer guests drink / snacks). Or they turn it into a spotify jukebox thing where it's hard to talk over the speakers (or their soundtrack is annoying).
or
Dinner at my house. Starts at 6pm. Don't be late. What to wear? What to bring? Special diet restrictions? Can't be late. How long to stay? Smoking in back yard? Alcohol on site? So many questions and so much to clean up.
Yes -- the main reason my wife and I stopped doing "Spaghetti Sundays" was because I hated cleaning up the house (for hours and hours!) before the guests showed up.
I know in the 70s folks were just as, if not more car dependent, but it kinda worked back then. I only have real experience in the 90s, but even then, I remember my parents having people over, and I never got the impression they came from very far. Sometimes blocks away. They still drove... but it wasn't the same.
Back in the 70s there may have been 1 or 2 affordable neighborhoods in your metro area where people in their late 20s could buy a house -- and they were both probably fairly close to the city center. Nowdays, I'd say those neighborhoods are likely to be farther away from the city center (exurbs) and thus farther away from each other.
I think about this with my hometown friends in the PNW. Growing up we all lived in Bellevue, Redmond, and Kirkland, and now those areas are all too expensive and folks are living in Issaquah, Duvall, Renton, etc.
I personally don't like inviting people to my house (or going to other people's houses) because I already spend a good chunk of my day indoors (I work from home). Whenever possible, I prefer to meet outside.
Just imagine that your family and a friend's family are going to camping today. You tell the other guy, hey, tomorrow morning we are going to prepare a big breakfast for everyone. If you don't mind spending an extra 5 minutes diverting into our driveway (mine is 5 mins away from the freeway), you can have a full breakfast before we go camping. The other guy says Yes that's perfect, and the next morning the whole family roll in, smelling sausage, bacon and fried eggs.
Damn that's something I'd like to do once I get rid of my hemmorhoids.
After the vaccines I made massive changes. I'd reconnected with old friends during lockdown and they suggested I move to be closer to them. My employer was supportive so I ended up moving to the Bay, even got a large pay bump along side it.
Now if I have an evening alone it's because it's what I chose to do. I ended up connecting with well over a hundred people through friends-of-friends and there's always someone down to do something. We have dinner parties at least once a month, sometimes its one of us cooking for the others, other times its a potluck about bringing something in season. Because of the group size and meetup frequency, there's no pressure to schedule things where everyone can attend and no one feels left out if the timing just didn't work that time. There's always going to be another time.
I am immeasurably happier. Most of my 20s I went to bed reminiscing about how childhood was more fun, now I rarely think back.
Ironically, this whole thing basically killed my video game hobby. I just don't have much motivation to play them now that I can message one of several group chats any day of the week and go do something with people in real life.
I don't ever host anyone in my tiny city apartment, we go out. It would be far worse to "host at home". There a places dedicated to hosting, it's a service, why would we not engage with that service?
Spending 3 hours at Qahwah and then wandering over to Port Sa'id is not some lesser experience than doing it all at home. If anything it's a much better experience
In my experience, if you don't accept the first invitation you're much less likely to get another one for repeat events.
I think the real key is that we are all within walking distance of each other. Friends who live a ten-minute drive away (still close!) are also invited but rarely show up. Also, no one has kids yet.
>The trouble with going all in on this explanation—beyond the fact that it embraces a version of learned helplessness for men—is that leisure time has increased overall since the 1950s.
It feels like this doesn't entirely folllow. If the issue is party planning is too similar to work, having more leisure time doesn't fix that.
Like im a computer programmer. I like computer programming and also did it as leisure. When I was employed as a computer programmer it lost most of its appeal as a leisure activity even though in absolute terms i had more free time then before.
2. More remote communication
3. Fewer friends through church
4. Fewer friends through kid’s school
5. Kids have more homework and more structure activity than they used to.
6. Less need for entertainment
He was actually from Mexico, I suspect from a culture that values community much more. I don’t know Hispanic culture that well, but I’ve also gotten this vibe from former partners.
Long long ago when my black family first moved to California they made sure to co locate in the same area. This was partially due to the realities of segregation, but it also made making dinner for your nephew much easier.
Now the community is obsolete. Replaced by insta validation loops.
Family and community are highly valued and protected in their culture. Something Americans have lost their way from.
For families with kids, forming deep friendships as an adult can be a logistical challenge.
Many people have no current relationship with friends they made in college or high school
Finally, as soon as I had my own kid, parties ended for me too. I stopped hosting and attending altogether (I've only organized one and visited one in the last four years). So yes, I can see this shift happening, and it’s sad. But honestly, I have no idea where I’d even find the time or energy to start doing it again.
Beyond that, I value the time I spend with my child more than any other social interaction. Maybe it's just me, but as a Millennial, the warmth, love, and comfort I have at home with my kid completely fulfill my social needs. I’m simply no longer looking for those warm feelings elsewhere.
What I gleam from TV shows is: The wife invited people over to brag about her husband's recent promotion or her children's achievements. Once over, they gossiped about a perceived fault in the other family (did you see the son's long hair? I heard he smokes weed!
Sounds like a suburban nightmare. There surely are other socializing events that were more beneficial; like a weekly bowling club meeting.
Some people are very concerned with appearances and therefore uncomfortable with people in their homes (in either direction - too shabby, or flaunting).
Other people (with some overlap with above) are too OCD? about planning and so they turn hosting into such an ordeal they are overwhelmed by it.
In general I find that while I am an introvert, hosting a group isn't really a big deal. I find 2:2 with another couple to be more draining than a group of 10 in terms of being able to step away and catch a moment of calm. Further, as a host .. I get to select who is coming in the first place!
I always look at happiness in terms of pillars, social, family, work, spiritual. Work somehow has taken over everything. It seems culturally engrained.
I know social media is a factor but while we all fall down the rabbit hole occasionally, it doesn't stop anyone organising a get together.
Over the past few years, rather than seeking to drown out that internal monologue with external entertainment, I've found myself feeding that monologue into Claude to have what I know is an ersatz conversation. And sometimes I work with Claude to write stories around whatever I'm thinking about, basically a form of escapism and sometimes wish fulfillment through personalized fiction. How weird does this make me? Is it inherently unhealthy?
Edit to add: To tie it back to the theme of the article, the result is, of course, the same; I spend more time alone, less time talking with real people.
https://www.hackyexperiments.com/blog/machines-of-loving-emb...
This reminded me of the insurance company TV ad:
https://www.ispot.tv/ad/S7KX/geico-cancelled-plans
> Americans are unhappier than ever
For a slightly different take, the great Experimental History blog wrote about this (in a way...) too:
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/there-is-no-epidemic-...
> More recent data suggests that teenage loneliness might have ticked back up to where it was in the 1980s, and the evidence here is mixed overall, depending on which data sets and cohorts you look at. We don’t yet have enough data to be sure which way the effects go on average, but we do have enough to be sure that those effects are neither large nor universal.
We stopped meeting for a bit during the pandemic, and then after the pandemic just moved to a group text message.
The big factor is that we all just kinda agree that we're meeting once a month. Because it's at a restaurant, it's super easy and requires almost no planning.
Kinda makes me want to find a place to have a monthly pot-luck with like-minded people.
For most people posting on HN, I would guess, money would not be even in the top-3 of reasons.
Me and a pal talked about this problem exactly a week ago, we chatted how we just invite more and more friends but sheldomly get invited ourselves, and our conclusion was some people just are not good at hosting. I say that because they never hesitate to attend.
hwoever, my phone contact is fileld with peoples allergies notes, likes/dislikes and similar so I keep the party fit for all. Catering to everyones allergy and everyone seems to have one here in West is mad challenging.
I really wanted to try it out, but moved from the city just after reading it and haven't yet.
It’s like if you gave your grouchy shut in uncle a megaphone to scream at everyone from his veranda every day nonstop
I also said that the main reason I don't do it more often is that my friends don't live near me. My neighborhood (and several of the ones closest) are mostly populated by other homeowners, whereas my friends live in neighborhoods further away that have mostly people who rent.
> The decrease in hosting is over 60% regardless of age, homeownership is UP in the same time period, down 10% in the youngest cohort, not enough to account for the massive drop in dinner parties.
Nothing in the article would preclude the statistic from being true if young people had massively fewer dinner parties and older people had a modest increase. It doesn't claim that's the case, but it doesn't claim that it's not either. You're presenting it as 60% uniformly across all age groups, and there's no evidence of that in the article.
A house party seems to me like a great idea if you actually own the house. But if you don't own the damn place (or, worse, houseshare), you are working full time, and are no longer in your 20s, having people over loses much of its appeal. Especially for larger gatherings.
The chart for time spent at home exploded after covid, but I didn't see much talk about that. It seems people got comfortable being home alone and it just continued.
We by and large seem to not understand that nobody is going to do these things for us. I'm not sure if it was a parenting failure or just changes in how society prefers to function, but when you look around and see nobody is inviting you to dinner you should conclude that you should be the one to initiate the change. It's the same mentality I see when folks just want the government to do something, or some corporation to do something about climate change for example, but they are unwilling to also simultaneously take their own personal actions. Change starts with you. Nobody is coming to save you. You have to run for office. You have to volunteer at your local community center. You have to take on the leadership role at your church or other place of worship. You have to spend the money and host dinner parties. You have to coordinate these things and yes you have to do it on top of your other responsibilities. Alternatively, you just don't have these things anymore and social media isn't going to replace them.
Also kids - hard to get people together with kids. Not just time constraints (some seem quite strange to me - kids go to bed at 7PM? My parents just let me go to sleep whenever) but also inability to locate, to engage in conversation - mid conversation they stop some kid is doing something and now you kind of realize whatever you were talking about wasn't important to begin with, and more. I'm not criticizing folks for having kids or anything and I think "childfree" movements are extremely cringe and stupid, but having kids in lieu of extra effort, leads to some social isolation from what I've observed.
Then next thing you know you are in your late 40s and you don't have friends anymore.
Of course these are very broad strokes I'm painting. But I think there's quite a bit of truth to it.
If anyone reading this has a job (plumber, A/C repair, etc.) that regularly gives them a glimpse of the inside of people's homes, I would be curious as to their thoughts on this.
#1 Hording: If you've got a house full of crap, and you're deeply ashamed of it, you're not going to be having visitors over, ever. You're also not going to mention it on surveys.
We, the American public, have been collecting shit at a prodigious rate. Many of us pay rent for stuff that won't fit in our home. It's why the storage industry is so reliably profitable.
#2 Paranoia: Otis Toole[1] kidnapped then killed Adam Walsh. His father publicised his kidnapping, and fueled a moral panic that sent American parents deep into paranoia. Kids used to be free range, and were often collectively instructed to "go outside to play, and come inside when the street lights come on". After that event, we're afraid to even let them walk to a friends house a few doors over.
The end of the fairness rule, and the rise of fear based media like Fox news certainly didn't help in the rise of distrust.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottis_Toole#Murder_of_Adam_Wal...
It doesn't help that I design board games too, and have too much of an easy excuse to want to get these games so I can 'research' them.
And because I'm mentally tired all the time after work, that also seems to lower my willpower. And clicking the 'buy' button online is way too easy to do.
We did used to host a monthly game designer playtest night before the pandemic, but our house had a lot less stuff back then. And being stuck in the house during the pandemic with nothing to do but play solo board games and video games (and also the uncertainty if I was even going to make it through the pandemic, since I already had respiratory issues from asthma) definitely accelerated the bad impulse buying habits I already had.
We have made slight dents in it, but the significant declutter probably won't happen until the next time I'm in between jobs, assuming there's at least a month in between jobs.
Maybe it's the culture or because you are an immigrant in another land, that you feel that bond.
But it's very apparent.
There are probably people who are good at this and love to do this, but I think there are fewer and fewer families who are into big dinners.
Plus they also don’t have to be polished. Don’t bother cleaning up the house and order a pizza, and everyone will still have a good time. Or just go out to a restaurant and not worry about any of that.
I think this definitely applies to my friends and I. They could be working on their next DJ session at the club next month or their next TCG tournament deck/strategy, and I could be working on projects that go nowhere. So many hobbies are now just another form of work.
But I think driving and traffic is definitely another problem, especially in the US. No one wants to spend Thursday evening or Saturday 8am in traffic,
Parties (any kind) are entertainment and they compete with other forms of entertainment.
We have way more options to amuse ourselves now than a few decades ago.
Television.
Being stay at home parent is super lonely experience, basically the most lonely occupation you can have. In most jobs, you meet people and you do talk to people without trying to. Fairly often, they are unavoidable whether you want it or not. If you are at home with a kid, you are truly absolutely alone, unless you organize something. Every other guy here on HN complains about Covid being lonely, but it was less lonely and socially easier situation than being stay at home parent.
So, alternative framing is that women stopped organizing these as their need do organize them went down. And men did not had that need in the first place, so it did not changed from their point of view.
And simultaneously, it ceased to be acceptable to be the kind of dad who spends multiple evenings a week with buddies, not really spending time with his kids.
There are parks, splash pads, playgrounds—plenty of places where parents naturally gather without needing to be organized.
Getting people to buy (their first and only) home is a really important issue. Creating more landlords doesn't not solve housing problems.
This makes it even more difficult to host because of everybody's needs and regimes they dont buckle on.
I was just planning a dinner party a while ago and the Venn diagram of what foods I could make was truly vexing.
I will move heaven and earth and scrub pots and pans for someone with Celiac, but working around people’s mere preferences is irritating.
prior generations would just eat around it or suck it up.
My friend circle in our old city included both Falstaffian omnivores and vegans, and we entertained often. It's not hard to ensure there's food available for folks on a more restrictive diet, and even my friends with UCI racing licenses generally ate like normal people at social events.
Mileage varies, obviously.
(I will say, however, that after having made a vegan "bolognese" once, I have no need to do so again. It was much more effort than the already time-consuming genuine article.)
So the vast majority of people have more space for entertaining than in 1975.
A party with 10 guests is even better.
All three of us are hoarders, to an extent, but I alone am able to go into a cleaning frenzy approximately once or twice a year and get rid of mega-junk. Unfortunately, they don't seem able to do so.
So, I consider dinners still to be a useful tradition, though perhaps the motivations have shifted a bit.
First Sunday of the month or whatever, we send out a reminder text, we provide coffee and a little food, people bring way more food than we can eat, and we invite everyone we know, from our different social circles. No pressure.
It’s a moderate amount of work, but it’s very gratifying to bring people together. People have made good friends at our brunch that they hang out with all the time now. It’s been interesting to see how hungry people are for social interaction, some people have driven or taken the subway more than an hour to come. People bring their kids or babies if they have them, age range is from 20s to 60s, it’s very chill.
It’s also a great “next step” when I meet someone I’d like to be friends with: “hey, my wife and I do a monthly brunch, it’s really low-key, you should come!”
For the record, I’m an introvert, but I can tell this is really good for me.
I don’t want ask my rich well off friends around cause of my humble existence.
Try easing into it - go on a late afternoon sunset picnic (ironically also on the list) - a blanket, cheese, crackers, cured meat and wine and a portable speaker. Everyone is happy and it’s super cheap, the outdoors is your living room and a couple hours before sunset never disappoints (though depending on where you are the weather might be a challenge).
My parents hosted many dinner and hors d’oeuvre parties, because my mother didn't work outside the home and was available to shoulder all that organization and work.
Americans throughout treat RSVPs as meaningless, show up if they feel like it, and think it's fine to cancel plans five minutes before the scheduled start.
Unless you're a glutton for punishment, you take the hint at some point.
I like hosting. People like attending. But they never do. I'll host several a year, and there are constantly people who say they'll come, and then never do
I'm not at the point no longer inviting people, but I've thought about it before
Too many people are passive and have a follower or consumer attitude to everything in life. Anything outside of the routine is impossible to consider.
There are less women with free time on their hands and the need to mingle with people they wouldn’t otherwise encounter, because they’re at home most of the time.
How do you successfully get your time back from your toddler?
Interesting. I would have assumed the correlation is with the rise of the internt and smartphones, but it looks like the drop precedes that.
Given that, though, I do see a bit of a generational divide. It definitely seems like the social circles of people in my generation and younger are larger, but not as deep. I have very good friends who have all moved to different places across the country, I fly to visit them, but the last time all of us were together was at someone's wedding. Contrast this with older generations who often have nearby lifelong friends and close by family, that provides them a smaller but deeper social circle with more opportunities for in-person interaction.
Dinner clubs are great, but not a replacement for the fact my closest friends are spread out all over the country. I don't really have a solve for that. If I were rich, I'd convince everyone to take remote jobs so we could build a "compound" with a bunch of houses all together and be near each other, but the economic realities don't make that possible for any of us.
I’ve sorely wanted to host folks for game nights and shared meals and movies and the like. In fact, in the 2010s I’d play host to folks on the semi-regular since having people in my space is far less energy draining than being a guest in someone else’s.
Since ~2018, I’ve hosted guests three times.
Why the change?
Well, the landlord began charging for garage parking that used to be gratis, forcing cheapskates and broke renters into the visitor spaces. Then they clawed back 25% of guest parking for premium EV charging, meaning even guests with EVs couldn’t park there once they finished charging. Then the landlord stopped enforcing that, meaning folks with EVs can’t charge them because the spots are always full of combustion vehicles. This meant public transit and cycling were the only remaining options for guest access, the former of which required an hour-long detour for my friends to catch a single, specific bus route, while the latter would see them crossing stroads and cycling on state highways with vehicular traffic.
The local logistics are fungible however, and not the sole reason for the drop off. The bigger reason, admittedly, is fatigue. We spend eight hours working, then commute one to two hours each way (~10mi). Include time to prepare for work, make meals, and decompress after, and you’re left with ~1-2hrs a day for free time before having to sleep. Most employers I’ve worked for would side-eye you with disdain for trying to leave early to host an event at home, meaning we don’t feel comfortable asking for the time off in the first place. That doesn’t even include the associated workloads of our guests, who just have to show up almost immediately after work and don’t mind using their very limited free time hanging out in my space.
Then you bake in the fiscal costs - fuel for transit, food to share or prepare, parking and transit fees - and the data harvesting costs (landlord surveillance logging your entry, advertising displays profiling you, Flock camera at the sole neighborhood entrance tracking your entry and exit, etc) and it just doesn’t make fiscal or psychological sense to host at home. That doesn’t even touch on renters having smaller spaces than homeowners making hosting more of a challenge, potential noise complaints about your jovial party from a nosey neighbor getting your lease non-renewed, or the ease of just queuing up for a game remotely (even if it lacks the payoff of a physical visit from another human).
The closest I came to hosting on the regular was that brief window where COVID was managed but before RTO came hammering down. I squeezed in two visits during that time, before mandatory RTO and the insane commutes and shitty job market just kinda sapped all the energy from my circles for anything but basic survival.
Which is all a lengthy way of saying that the problem as I see it is that these events are declining because fewer people are thriving, and more people feel barely able to survive. The excess energy I do have doesn’t go to hosting so much as enjoying social events elsewhere, but that only happens because I am privileged enough to be able to take the next day off from work for recovery without getting fussed at by my employer; nobody else in my circles has that luxury at present.
If you have no open parking spots and no public transit to your place, then you are not hosting people except those who are within a walkable route.
Much of the same reasons apply for why I don’t visit others: they’re too tired to host, or lack the space, or have hostile neighbors, or aren’t near public transit, or lack parking, or lack the budget to buy more food, or lack the employer willing to let them work flexibly to make all of the previous issues less problematic.
It’s great that your sample size is able to make it work but clearly mine cannot at present. It’s not a matter of “excuses”, but tangible and logical rationale for why - even when I can cover the logistics and costs myself on their behalf - they’d rather have that hour of free time to themselves for recovery before another fourteen hour day of prep-commute-work-commute-eat.
If you're not getting that, you're being scammed.
For example, if you're younger, it's a lot harder to throw a dinner party in your tiny overpriced apartment than it might have been for a previous generation of people who already owned homes in their twenties.
It is also harder to throw a party when both partners in a relationship need to work full time to make ends meet.
It is also harder to throw parties when invitees also are overworked and tired and are habituated to netflix, rather than going out.
If you live in a city, going to a public space is inevitably easier. If you live in a suburb, staying home is inevitably easier.
It's much more plausible to me that these trends are due to underlying material conditions more than they are to some fundamental change in the social attitudes of people (though obviously both can play a role).
1. Everything costs more. A lot more.
2. Wages have stagnated for decades, unless you're in that magical IT job.
3. It's now a 2 wage earner setup to afford rent or mortgage. And smaller and less hostable residences.
4. The lower your income, the worse your schedule for planning anything. Same with friends.
5. Self-entertainment is a lot cheaper.
Basically, capitalism has squeezed out being able to afford parties, and the time commitment away from "hustling".
Even with 1995-ish, we had Married with Children, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, and Friends. All these show apartments or houses that a single worker could afford, and fund house/apartment parties. And this is a single person paying for housing.
Sure, those are fictions for TV, but it also shows just how normal and common it was, that low/middle income folks had lots of options and good amount of time. That's just no longer true for most Americans.
When you noticed you were relying on evidence from fiction, instead of verbally acknowledging that that was what you were doing, you should've stopped relying on the "evidence".
It might make sense every now and them to rely on fiction for evidence in domains where it is very hard to obtain any data at all, but in this particular, there is plenty of hard data of what US workers used to earn, what they earn now, what houses and food used to cost and what they cost now.
(I expect that the hard data will fail to support your belief that things have gotten significantly harder economically for the average person.)
I was making a social point that "average TV shows showing families" is a rough reflection of the current happenstance of the age in which they were made. Its not a "proof" or whatever governmental numbers were smoothed over or otherwise faked to make US households look healthier or better.
> The average household needs to work more hours per week to afford the same things.
A weirdness ive seen.. Entertainment equipment like TVs, game consoles, cell phones, and such are cheap compared to the 1970's through early 2000's. Used to be entertainment was EXPENSIVE. But housing? Our house, in the Midwest, in early 2000s, sold for $160k. We bought it in 2022 for $375k. And on GIS, i see the same exact trend everywhere in my county. Other counties that we looked at moving to, similar. Same story as far as I looked.
Also, federal minimum wage has kept the same for what, since 2007? Union participation has plummeted to like 15%. Workers work longer for less money. Can barely afford a shitty apartment (too small to host parties), BUT that $400 70" TV with a game console is cheap.. and it helps you forget poverty and loneliness with artificial plenty (in game), and company (remotely, on a game).
> I wonder what could've happened in the 80's to cause this?
Reagan, Mergers and Acquisitions crisis (and resulting venture capital buying and shredding companies en masse now), stagnating wages, heavy pushing of "Right to Work" laws, and all of this trickle-down that makes me think I'm just a urinal.
Plus when you have kids it’s a lot more convenient than trying to wrangle them at the end of a fun time lol
Most of our gatherings are actually at the beach because for most it is just a short walk from home and there are shops very close that sell super cold beers and drinks so you don't even have to carry a huge cooler.
Then there's the 'all about me' meme, where people are horrid conversationalists who can't entertain an idea unrelated to self-reporting, with personalization expectations on consumption: little Bobby needs X, little Harry has to Y, little Prescilla can't Z, and woe betide anyone who doesn't do the done diet. Another element of conversation failure is the distinct lack of experience and interests in such a great swathe of the population, who seem to vacillate between survival mode and televisual fiction forays. I've also noticed many people hit their 40s and seem to decide celebrating the bands and foods they followed in their youth may be their most persistent wont and love, with seemingly zero ambition to explore further. Woe betide anyone who would wish to continue learning and exploring, contemplate art, find echoes in history, or seek to discuss pressing global issues and their potential future trajectories.
I always try to teach the young'uns Eleanore Roosevelt's quip: Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.
Other good quotes here (fortune implementation): https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
It’s emblematic of the me-first attitude. Instead of deferential guests , grateful to be welcomed over, everyone demands they are catered to on their terms.
I politely asked my neighbor to take her shoes off before entering, and she complained that I should have warned her of my no shoes policy before coming over.
I offer my guests unopened slippers to wear while they are here, too .
I’m fortunate to have friends in their 60s and 70s where I can still enjoy the traditional dinner experience.
Well yeah, no surprise. Planning takes time and executing even more. Get the house and garden cleaned up, buy supplies, prep and cook/grill everything, clean up everything, restore "normal" functionality of the house again.
> The trouble with going all in on this explanation—beyond the fact that it embraces a version of learned helplessness for men—is that leisure time has increased overall since the 1950s.
Leisure time maybe, but any decent party takes hours of work. Host a dozen people, they're there until at least 2200 if not longer, and then it's hours worth of cleanup work. In ye olde times, that fell under the responsibility of the housewife during the next day, but nowadays? Oh hell no.
On top of that, workloads have gone extremely compressed over the last decades "thanks" to surveillance capitalism squeezing every tiny sliver of time. No more downtimes at the water cooler and coffee machine, it's work work work work work. When you arrive home, you are completely and utterly drained.
Personally, I need my weekend just to recover.