"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.