Americans' social activity has steeply declined in the past 30 years
dataforprogress.orgWeed here you get at a "dispensary", which is a very unsexy term but apparently we also need to protect the ears of the innocent.
Out east you'd go get beer and wine at the "package store" or just, "packy"
And I assume the pertinent discussion is what happened/changed in the western world post WW II.
We have a lot more people these days and we're a lot more urbanized.
> My point was that much of what was done "then" in one's house are now done elsewhere
Yeah, and I don't think I believe that.
If more social time is desired at the macro system level, people need to have more leisure time (shorter work week, higher wages, good quality of life with more free time broadly speaking) and more third spaces to meet and socialize.
Citations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
Additional citations:
https://ibs.colorado.edu/new-research-on-disappearing-third-...
https://www.aei.org/domestic-policy/americas-third-places-ar...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13538...
https://esl.uchicago.edu/2023/11/01/third-places-what-are-th...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/business/third-place-mean...
NYC is a thriving city of 8.5 million people and one of the most economically active cities in the world, so your experience may be different than say, Gary, Indiana.
The first citation's relevant highlight is "All categories of third places experienced widespread closures from 2019 to 2021" which is obviously a COVID phenomenon and not a cultural trend. They admit so much. Data from that period I would say is generally irrelevant to discussing wider cultural trends. In fact a query to Gemini says that the number of independent (not chain) coffee shops is growing at 3.2% across the country and it gives this citation: https://www.locationscloud.com/research-report/us-coffee-sho...
The other Science Direct article says "Third places _may_ be closing in neighborhoods across the United States" (my emphasis).
The remaining articles seem to be opinion articles without hard data. They focus on the hypothetical problem of third places going away. In fact the AEI article talks about zoning which cannot possibly be of relevance to any decline in third places given that zoning is becoming less restrictive over time in the last decade.
Coffee shops and such don't feel like good third spaces to me, because I don't always want to spend money just to exist
Yes, third spaces/places include places you need to pay for.
That third spaces include commercial spaces does not imply that “free” (tax or donation funded) third spaces should not exist. Parks and museums are also great third spaces.
Compare this to earlier times when it might have been common and socially acceptable to sit for hours on a single purchase and just shoot the shit with fellow townspeople.
Children don't do that anymore; they basically don't leave the house because they have the Internet. They communicate through texting and Discord so they don't even have to "hang out." Beyond the social change, when I was a young adult most malls went 18+ (unless accompanied by parents/guardians) and most other businesses nowadays allow teens to loiter the way we use to. Businesses want people in and out once they are done.
Even if business allowed it, most parents don't allow their kids to leave the house unattended anymore.
In this thread you have multiple people saying they can't go out without paying 200$ or ordering 8$ beers. If you're in your 20s or 30s just go bar hopping in whatever the rundown part of your town is like people used to instead of going fine dining.
A movie ticket, inflation adjusted, costs the same as it used to for decades. Normal people just took it for granted that they had to smuggle some beers into the cinema rather than turning the whole evening into some hundreds of dollars spending spree.
Maybe so, but it doesn't feel like that to people. A lot of things are actually way cheaper than they used to be inflation adjusted (we complain about an $80 video game, but inflation adjusted they used to be well over $100, cheaper now even with all the microtransactions, we just remember a sticker that said $50). When I know that a decade ago I could see a $5 matinee and for $20 have drinks and popcorn too, knowing that $40 (albeit for a smaller drink/popcorn) isn't really twice the price doesn't stop the sticker shock, especially for people whose income didn't go up at the same rate as inflation.
The households where both parents work full time probably have increased in that time, but I'd say you have to go back closer to 50 years to really get to a time where it was still somewhat common for a housewife to be home all day with the kids.
1) Increasing job/economic insecurity.
2) Prices rising faster then income for majority of population.
3) increasing commute time around employment, activity hubs
4) kids activities/sports are now taken as seriously as work project deliverables. Previously it could be just gifted kids in school teams now with pay-to-play a lot more kids are involved in "serious sports".
Tying religion to politics was probably a bad idea for both religion and politics.
https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/the-lds-church-has-a-r... (“Just a bare majority of kids raised LDS are still LDS as adults (54%)“)
“No, not exactly...,” he replied in an increasingly exasperated tone. I could hear the struggle in his voice as he recognized the cracks forming in the thin veneer of his identity. “It’s like a pub, but it serves food. Like, real food, thoughtfully considered by a gastrochef.” She returned the serve, now teetering on boredom at minute four of the flight. “At our pub we call him Kevin. He makes the best pot pie.”
He regrouped and they found truce in talking about the weather in Toronto. I resisted the urge to twist around to ask if they knew any good restaurants downtown.
In Ireland that distinction matters. It generally will affect other things, like what time and how loud music will be played, how the tables and chairs will be organised and what type. It will often affect opening hours and the price of a pint. Gastro pubs also tend to be much larger.
In North America it seems the vast majority of "pubs" are gastro pubs, possibly why that lady couldn't see the difference. I personally love micropubs and they never serve food other than crisps and maybe a toastie.
I feel like a pedant but I get that dude in his 20s and had to speak up.
To be fair, at least in the US, anything calling itself a "pub" is already going down a marketing/branding road and it almost certainly means they're going to try to evoke an Irish or British sensibility.
All but the most extreme far-right and far-left people in the country really do agree on 95%+ of anything with daily relevance to their lives.
I have no idea who that is and I've never heard the song.
> As long as you don’t have a common culture and a common understanding of the basic rules that everyone agrees on, no one can spend time with each other comfortably.
Doesn't seem so to me.
Shared music is absolutely part of common culture
I would have thought that storming the Capitol, beating and killing police officers was Not Acceptable, but apparently I was wrong.
There are many such examples. We do not agree on the basic rules any more.
Vaccines are good.
See, not everyone agrees.
Talk to your neighbors and you'll find that everyone just cares about decent roads, decent schools, decent jobs, and decent healthcare.
They don't realize how much the "moral majority" differs in town as opposed to the city, the coasts as opposed to the bulk of the country, in small private liberal arts colleges in the east and at Mormon universities in Utah, or in China, Russia, or Bulgaria as compared to the suburb they grew up in.
If all of those people simply follow the central tendency, and give mass media the same (or greater) weight as they give their neighbors, that guarantees war all the time. It will always be better to listen and try to understand points of view that you aren't familiar with, rather than to hide in the safe (and always untrue depending on the shape of the border you draw) assumption that you represent the vast majority. This, without even considering whether the vast majority are right or wrong.
I mean, some people are so impervious to reality with this that they can lose election after election and believe that they are still 95% of people. Then they start theorizing about mind control and supernatural entities, just to keep from opening their eyes and ears.
Grew up as the only liberal or atheist family I knew in an ultra-conservative area, went to school in a liberal area, moved back to a conservative area.
Americans are far, far, far more similar than they are different.
Go travel the world and talk to people from e.g. low-trust societies if you don't believe me.
"Political issues" are by definition things that people disagree on. Saying people "disagree on political issues" is equivalent to saying "people disagree on things they disagree on."
But the vast majority of daily life is not driven by or meaningfully affected by any of these "issues on which people disagree." If you go and talk to your neighbors, even ones who you disagree with on disagreement-creating-topics, you will find you actually agree on nearly everything. The set of things you agree on is called "our culture."
Can I get a source for this? Or is this just something you are pulling out of nowhere to argue against someone else's lived experience because it conflicts with yours?
Now consider what fraction of things in a society could possibly be controversial, versus things like: "when a person is hurt, I should try to help them" or "when I owe money, I should pay it back," or "if I find money lying around, I should find the proper owner," or "if I'm taking an exam, I should not cheat on it."
These are beliefs that are nearly unanimous within American culture and not unanimous at all globally. Those are what constitute the core of "our culture." They are by definition nearly invisible to us.
In the past we all got our news from Walter Cronkite.
Suffering it, over and over and over, was what led humanity down the natural, logical path to becoming civilised and cooperative.
It's the lesson we need to learn well, if our self-appointed badge of Very Intelligent Species is to actually mean anything more than a pointless, neverending game of forming factions and battling other factions.
I had a pretty busy social life in university, 20 years ago
The first city I landed in afterwards, I was able to make some connections and was lucky enough some of my uni friends were around too
But I moved for work to a much further away city and my social life has dropped to zero since then. The pandemic and lockdowns didn't help of course, but that was years ago. I don't have a single friend in this city and I've lived here almost 10 years now
Admittedly I'm kind of socially awkward and quite afraid of new groups, which has only gotten worse over the years. I also haven't had any luck making lasting connections through work or anything like that.
I tend to blame myself for this but it's not too surprising to hear many others are struggling too
There is no left equivalent of that.
> The "demon-crat" attack is roughly analogous to the left's "nazi" attack
Abaolutely not. One is a name of political ideology. Calling them nazi is an attempt to describe their believes and behavior. It is a name consistent with reality. (Hey, some high profile ones even throw Hitler salute in public and we have enough of Hitler praise coming from lower profile ones).
Trying to pretend it is the same is absurd.
I’d imagine you don’t have any family around so the expats are sending time together instead of trying to assimilate.
Dipends how you see it. For North American standards, it's a lovely suburban neighbourhood in the Midwest; for us it's suburban hell because we love cities.
> the expats are sending time together instead of trying to assimilate
What do you mean by "assimilate" ?
-- Nigel Powers in "Goldmember"
Is your partner willing to do this with you? Probably not.
The simple answer is media. First television, then internet, then smartphones.
People used to actively seek the company of others - if for no other reason than out of boredom. Entertainment and parasocial relationships have filled that hole.
Another reason I might posit is declining birth rates and an aging population. Entire neighborhoods used to be filled with young families of roughly the same age. Now on any given city block in the US, there may only be 1 or 2 houses that have kids of any age in them. Smaller concentration of kids -> thinner market for playdates and sleepovers -> less interactions between families.
People are alienated, y'all.
Everything about modern life is designed so you do not have to directly depend on anyone for anything. You can instead be entirely dependent on a series of distant and unaccountable corporations to get through the day.
Thats why we plan to move to the burbs. Lots of ethnic enclaves where kids go around the neighborhood on their own and play.
There is lots of urban planning in the US that is poorly optimized. Walkable neighborhoods close to parks and schools are often filled with retirees, whereas young families are often crowded into newer neighborhoods at the edge of town with little infrastructure nearby.
You wouldn't even have to do much pressure to move the needle. Cities are already putting in millions of dollars to place their parks and schools, and etc. Offer tax incentives that encourage young families to move into family areas, singles into single areas, and retirees into retiree areas.
It sounds kind of crazy, but we more or less do this for student areas around colleges.
One could also say that there are old people everywhere now.
Urban planning around these situations would be nice. But the very least we could do is build more third places that tries to attract that last middle demographic to come together; that mid 20's to 40's adults too old for college campuses but too young (and not on social security funds) for older gatherings. That's sort of what some bars can be, but a wide open space with less pressure to spend $15 on a "cheap" beer would be nice.
The relentless satire is what really did it. It was all written by some of the smartest yet depraved and depressed people who found a home in comedy. What did we think was going to happen?
Satire is all well and good, but what are we doing when we no longer take anything seriously anymore? Social media, but particularly reddit, continues to be an echo chamber for these mentally castrated and bitter people who couldn't challenge the comedy with a life that was actually any better than what was being mocked.
That was a very 90s 'thing'. Today people, especially young people, are exceedingly lacking in levity. Everything is serious.
Example of past generation seriousness: investing - put all your money in housing or the stock market and you'll get rich and comfortable. Example of current generation nihilism: everyone wanting to be an influencer. Some people will become successful and some more will get by but most will fail at that, by the mathematics of it. Or literal gambling as in the rise of Kalshi - if your life's crap with $0 or $1k but wouldn't be crap with $100k, why not put it all on 100x odds? Or something like looksmaxxing: will doing xyz to your jawline somehow result in success? Probably not, but it might and you weren't going to be successful otherwise anyway.
GP is wrong anyway, comedy's always been about saying what everyone is secretly thinking.
That actually was my whole point. How do you think they're saying what you're thinking? Where did you get those thoughts from? Comedy has been a tastemaking machine for a very long time.
People used to snap out of it around middle age, but I think that point is only getting younger. The illusion has been broken with recent politics. You can't satirize the already absurd while still being funny. The game has changed, but I still see a lot of defensive humor anyway. It's just sad really.
It doesn't, for example, cover the privatization of public spaces, it doesn't mention mass white flight from cities to suburban sprawl due to people wanting to preserve apartheid, nor does it cover the rise in wealth inequality or the weakening of labor laws or the obliteration of pedestrian friendly infrastructure.
Instead, it pins it all on 'television' which, sure, but there's a reason why people gravitate towards entertainment that is served to them much more cheaply per-hour than not. It's a little like saying the problem with small pox is that the boils are painful, not the underlying virus systematically destroying your body.
In my personal experience in community organizing, the main pain points people have are 1) that they have day jobs that exhaust them, 2) the traffic sucks and they don't want to drive to our meetings, or 3) they need to pick up a second shift or another job to cover their basic needs. And even to those points, it's hard to get a public space where you can regularly meet that doesn't charge a lot of money, to provide food/refreshment, to maintain an ongoing potluck which requires a lot of coordination especially when it comes to preferences/dietary restrictions, etc. It's almost never out of a lack of interest. People desperately want community but there are so many barriers in place.
I don't thin racism was the dominant factor for people moving out of the cities. Today the suburb I'm in is packed with immigrants.
Regardless, I don't think you're being very charitable.
Some other links:
https://news.iu.edu/live/news/24906-research-ties-persistenc...
https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2021/10/white-flight...
https://psmag.com/news/ghosts-of-white-people-past-witnessin...
There's also this rather infamous quote by one of the most powerful Republican strategists in the 80s, Lee Atwater: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater#:~:text=Later%20in...
I won't quote it here but it's very telling.
The racist pressure to move was also a structural issue supported by the Federal government. Redlining meant you couldn't get loans to buy houses in certain neighborhoods, and those neighborhoods were exactly where black people lived. Literal walls could be constructed between two similar communities of different races so that the white side could be higher rated and have better access to loans (e.g., the Birwood Wall in Detroit). A ton has been written about the topic, I can't really do it justice, but the idea that people just wanted a bigger house was not the case. A lot of Detroit actually consisted of single-family homes with yards anyhow, so it was literally white people leaving a house for a very similar one.
If I'm walking a street at night and I see a guy with attributes associated with poverty, I'm more likely to switch to the other side of road than if he's wearing a suit, just saying.
Also, if "suburbanization" was really the explanation for the decline in community, you would see a clear pattern where people (regardless of race) in the suburbs have fewer friends and social lives and people in urban areas have more. But the opposite is largely true!
That's honestly a little wild that people don't realize exactly what principles Oregon was founded on and the role Portland played in all of it.
One, the Portland municipal government explicitly admits to racism during white flight: https://www.portland.gov/bps/planning/adap/history-racist-pl...
Two, the state itself has passed multiple anti-Black exclusionary laws and was founded as a 'white utopia': https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/exclusion_laws/#...
> Any free Black person who refused to leave would be subject to lashing, a provision that was known as "Peter Burnett's lash law."
> The second exclusion law was enacted by the Territorial Legislature on September 21, 1849. This law specified that “it shall not be lawful for any n** or m*** to enter into, or reside” in Oregon, with exceptions made for those who were already in the territory.
> Voters [...] approved the exclusion clause by a wide margin. Incorporated into the Bill of Rights, the clause prohibited Black people from being in the state, owning property, and making contracts. Oregon thus became the only free state admitted to the Union with an exclusion clause in its constitution.
This, too, is covered extensively: https://www.oregonlive.com/history/2020/06/oregons-founders-...
And more: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53996159
I honestly don't know if you could've found a worse example.
Yes, it was exactly my point that Portland was already the whitest metropolitan area in the country. And yes, I am well aware of the extensive redlining (my grandparents lived in Vanport before it was destroyed). And yet they still had people explode out into the suburbs through the 50s and 60s.
This is a counter-example to the thesis that urban flight was purely a racist response to "preserve apartheid".
No one is arguing that racism didn't exist. But suburbanization happened everywhere around the world where cars were introduced (even places with almost no diversity). To blame suburbanization as a purely racial phenomenon is not true.
To this day there's significant social pressure to not acknowledge how much racism and racial division played a role in them growth of suburbs in the US, but ultimately it's the documented history which is revealed to those who research the topic.
In many cases individual families were not overtly racist but they were caught up in the economic effects created by racist dynamics and felt they had no choice to go along. If property prices in your neighborhood are decreasing, because neighbors are leaving, and you have the means would you not feel compelled to leave to somewhere with rising property values? Real estate firms intentionally tried to create waves of fear to get people to rush to move, selling low, and then profiting on selling to newer Black families.
It was common for suburbs to have deed restrictions limiting areas by race, and for a while federal housing guidelines would not underwrite developments that did not racially segregate.
At the same time there were massive amounts of state & federal funding pouring into suburbs and highly disruptive unpopular overhauls occurring in cities while cities were also losing tax revenue. For people with the option the future of good living seemed like it was in the suburbs independent of segregation, but part of what fueled the frenzy was the racial segregation.
All those centrally planned things you mentioned were green(ish) field developments
Cars enabled people to have free standing houses and work became decentralised, which was also due to cars.
Many people prefer to live in a free standing house.
That's because, contrary to the way it's often depicted, the 20th century was overwhelmingly a flight from rural areas to cities. Suburbs were an outgrowth of that, but the reality is that rural areas were hollowed out the most. (Also, community engagement in rural areas with lots of sprawl was even higher than in cities).
> that they have day jobs that exhaust them
The median adult is spending 5+ hours on their phone a day. This is what is exhausting people. Everyone is essentially working a second job that involves lots of reading and attention and social engagement. It's a parasitic draw on our lives.
> they need to pick up a second shift or another job to cover their basic needs.
Maybe that's true for some people, but the data usually shows that income and free time is inversely related to community time. Poorer people are making more time for friends and family.
I can see what you're trying to do - reframe this problem as another outgrowth of class struggle. But it doesn't really explain the reality. A steelworker in the 1920s coming off of a 10-hour shift would still find the time and energy to go out dancing. A software engineer in 2026 is going to get off of work at 5pm and watch 3.4 more hours of screen time in a day.
You're talking about an entirely different phenomena. The move from rural areas to cities and exurbs happened in the 50s/60s with cheap mortgage rates, WWII-provisioned education, and large sweeping social services being enacted. White flight is a phenomena that started in the mid-60s to 80s that specifically coincided with integration.
>The median adult is spending 5+ hours on their phone a day. This is what is exhausting people
There's much to be said about the behavioral manipulation and dark patterns in apps and devices, sure. But I don't think television inherently was employing Skinner-boxes to get people to watch and that's what I was specifically speaking to. Regardless, that dark pattern of it is class struggle related if that's the direction you want to frame it (I see it more as just MBA-brained corporate sociopathy) because it seeks to extract capital from its users while externalizing all negatives onto the users themselves.
>Maybe that's true for some people, but the data usually shows that income and free time is inversely related to community time. Poorer people are making more time for friends and family.
Obviously. And this is clearly related to the fact that the more impoverished you are, the more you need to pool resources to survive. The pain points I illuminated are for individuals who are still showing up to community organizing work and much of what we do in these spaces is effectively providing enough mutual aid for them to survive.
> A steelworker in the 1920s coming off of a 10-hour shift would still find the time and energy to go out dancing.
You have proof of this? That they wouldn't just go home and get shitfaced or otherwise incapacitated? All steelworkers, per capita, were going out dancing regularly? And even so, this wasn't because they were economically incentivized by the rise of labor unions to be in community with others, building power and fighting for better rights? The 30 years of post-Reagan neoliberal expanisionism has effectively neutered unions - and that's something that wasn't covered either by Putnam.
I suspect another thing largely missed by Putnam was the rise of online social spaces. Connecting with friends via the phone, on Discord, in video game spaces - that's community. It's just different from the community envisioned by people in more elderly generations. The fact that you're even commenting on HackerNews is effectively proof against Putnam's claims.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/09/28/how-urban...
Community engagement isn't also quite the same thing as friend groups. This is making me interested in doing a similar analysis.
I doubt that steelworkers around 1920 typically went out dancing after their shifts. Back then, there was a lack of radios or sound systems, and live music was likely reserved for more upscale establishments. The average worker would more likely have gone to a beer hall or pub to have a drink with his mates.
I haven’t been able to quickly find any statistics for the U.S. that go back that far, but in Germany, around 67% of 18- to 25-year-olds were still consuming alcohol regularly in 1973, whereas that figure had dropped to about 28% by 2023. I’m not suggesting that this trend is inherently negative, but there is, at the very least, a correlation with a decline in social activities.
When I am tired from work, I spend more time on phone after. And less time doing other more engaging activities. When I had easy workday, I am more likely to do something else.
> Poorer people are making more time for friends and family.
This is what I found: "the social interactions of those from lower-income households tend to revolve around family members and neighbors" and "richer people spend more with their self-selected friends".
This would confirm exactly what OP wrote - people who do socialize do it with people nearby.
> I can see what you're trying to do - reframe this problem as another outgrowth of class struggle.
They are referring to what they see as they do their community organizing. You dismiss it all, because none of that should theoretically matter.
I have a similar experience but I don't think this disagrees with the parent. My mental exhaustion makes me seek out low-friction "junk food" behaviors. But much like drinking after work because you had a long day, the phone exhausts you in another way. The cure and disease are one in the same here.
What you seem to be implying is people are lazy and choosing TikTok over real relationships. But I also think people choose TikTok because it’s low effort and they don’t have much gas left in the tank.
The interesting part is what causes what. Are people exhausted and disillusioned because they aren't experience life the same way as previously, or aren't they having these experiences because they are exhausted and disillusioned.
I'm trying to focus on both in my life, and I have become much happier as a result.
Counterpoint, people are TOLD and CONVINCED that they are exhausted and that life is way harder than it is.
Capitalism loves someone who is "too busy" to make stuff or avoid buying stuff.
Our lives are all about reducing friction and making everything easier.
Relative to 20-30 years ago we are so lucky and privileged. It's nuts how the victim mindset has spread.
I've lived all over the place and one thing I've seem priliferate is this mindset of "I'm a victim, doing this is too hard, so I just won't for X and Y reasons" while folks order Uber eats.
The baseline for what is acceptable has dropped so, so far. And I'm sure people will reply saying I just don't get it. Lol.
Your contempt for humanity is blinding you to real issues people face every day. Yes, some things have gotten better over the years, but some things have gotten a lot worse.
>I've lived all over the place and one thing I've seem priliferate is this mindset of "I'm a victim, doing this is too hard, so I just won't for X and Y reasons" while folks order Uber eats.
There's a lot I can do by myself. But at the end of the day, someone choosing not to ghost me for a hangout or take the time to get together regularly is a 2-way street. Even pre-pandemic, it's been said people are flakier than ever.
There are systematic reasons to explain this, but on a micro level: "just work harder" is not a solution to friendship.
Is life today bleaker or harder than it was during the Great Depression? People still made time for each other.
What if it is the media that is making people exhausted and disillusioned? Not the other way around.
I’m arguing there are legitimate reasons why people are exhausted and disillusioned with the current state of the world.
There's a reason people call it "doomscrolling", and it's not because it's healthy escapism. Bad news and defeatism is psychologically addictive, and platforms have financial incentive to pump your brain full of negativity. Regardless of how bad it is outside, the internet is not a protective bubble - it's an opium den.
Today, computers allow for mass dystopian control. Cameras and algorithms everywhere with no chance of appealing to an actual human.
There are multiple kinds of suffering, and even if more people have sufficient nutrition and health than in the great depression, it's much harder to see hope for the future today.
Now entertainment and social media sort of fill that gap (not really) but enough that there's less people out. Less people out mean it's less entertaining, so less people go out etc.
> First television, then internet, then smartphones
i like vr so i sometimes wonder if itll catch on and if were in the "we know one or two people with a tv" era of the early 40s. theres certainly seems to be a financial incentive since it seems like tvs and phones have gone about as far as we can take them. its also certainly seems like a another leap down the isolation path as well
luckily i think most people reject vr bc it sucks to wear something on your face
edit: grammar (still bad but better)
FWIW, I also think it's largely because boomer's collectively lost their minds and started acting out when their parent/grandparent generation was gone. It's like they didn't want to disappoint them so were acting on good behavior, but now their true colors show.
When I do it though it’s very cool and fun!
Of course I don’t call women “girl” or try to order in languages I don’t speak
Someone commented once about the Trader Joe’s people always flirting with everyone, and a) that’s probably true but b) is just being nice to random people these days so intimate and invasive that it’s equivalent to getting hit on? That would explain people cringing
why not? I guarantee it's less offensive than you think to be bad at a language but try anyway. I get the desire to avoid embarrassment - it's something I find really difficult to push through, but you've gotta do a whole lot of speaking badly to speak well, and people are generally very appreciative of someone earnestly trying.
If you met someone in person struggling to speak english, would you be offended? or would you be collaborative like "lets figure this out together"
> someone earnestly trying
and then there are occasions where someone orders in a language they dont speak because they assume the person taking their order cant understand english. being associated with someone performing that level of bad faith in public makes me wish restaurants had eject seats
But if the OP is talking about the US, there's that whole other dynamic mentioned in the sibling comment.
You: hej må jeg have... et varm chokolade?
Them: of course, will there be anything else?
You: hvis det er okay jeg ville gerne øve mig på dansk *smile* åbenbart har jeg virkelig brug for det
Them: selvfølgelig! det kommer til... fem-og-halvfems kroner. Sidder i ind, eller ude?
If you don't explicitly say that you are trying to practise then yeah, they are going to default to whatever makes the interaction go smoother. Everyone does that, all the time! But people are generally pretty supportive of another person trying to learn. And of course, people aren't going to assume you think they can't speak english if you say you're practicing (it's not hard to smile and say how lovely you think the language is or whatever.
In general waitstaff and service workers deal with people being indecisive, slow, speaking with confusing dialects, speech impediments all day long. It is not an imposition to work through an imperfect language - and its pretty much the only way anyone ever gets good at a language.
I also get the impulse to be a little jealous of those natural born sunny extroverts who find it easy to do this. For me it does require pushing through a little discomfort, and often I wouldn't if I were busy doing something else. But it's 100% my own discomfort, not the other person. Being asked to hold a conversation in your own native language is not a chore
You may tell the Danish cafe staff that you need Danish and you want to practice, but that poor person is an employee and hardly in a position to tell you what they really think.
I also know Danish people who prefer to speak in english. If I were speaking to them for hours at a party, and they voiced that request, I would oblige. But avoiding trying to speak danish in denmark because of the fear some danish people would be annoyed or even offended without ever asking them is utter insanity.
You say you have travelled the world for language practise, but how did you manage that if you refused to speak the language for fear of somehow offending or inconveniencing people by speaking in their language. Why was it any different from just staying home and reading websites in your target language?
I travel the world for language practice and don't feel too embarassed because 1) I try to get to a B1 level before talking, and 2) I travel in a way that brings me into contact with a lot of elderly people happy for any social contact and novelty. But I am definitely aware of the need to avoid inconveniencing younger people.
Your expectation, imposed upon yourself. I get it, I was embarassed too. It's really not that serious, you can be bad at stuff publicly. Nobody is advocating following people around forcing them to teach you something, but you can still have a great time with people with whom share no language in common. Speaking anything at all just makes things more fun, and people are way more willing to help than you think.
It's just not rude to go to a foreign country armed only with a1 duolingo and a prayer. It's a lot less rude than going there and only speaking english to everyone you meet... Yes even in denmark, even to young people.
As I have gotten better at danish I have had many more young people (the majority of my friend group and social experienced given I went to university here) express that they would prefer to speak to me in danish than the other way around. They were, by default, always making themselves a little uncomfortable, feel a little slower, seem less educated for the sake of communicating with me, because I gave them no other option. Now that I give them the option of switching to a context where I seem like a fool and they are the master, they are happy to take it.
Younger Europeans do not necessarily see it as rude for a foreign visitor to come and speak only English. Many local younger people spend a significant portion of their lives in an English-language environment on social media, and mixed European marriages now often use English as the home language. English is no longer seen as an outside thing by which foreigners speaking it are being rude and unappreciative.
And again, domain loss is already ongoing for European languages (and for the Nordic languages this has been observed for like decades now), so it isn't necessarily the case that locals feel more proficient about certain things in their native language and less proficient in English. I have colleagues who would prefer to speak English about technical matters for their own sake, not mine.
I can't emphasise enough that I am not only literally a young european, living with a young european partner, with a young european social circle, but I also exist in the real world and not in reddit. I have lived here in denmark for coming up on 10 years.
Yes, I know some extremely online people who have learned better english than danish and talk about noticing a decline in their danish skills. Those few who spend all their time online, on reddit and the like. It's definitely a type, one that by my estimation skews male, autistic, and introverted. Prime hacker news demographic type thing :)
I get it, for you as a linguist its remarkable that this could happen, that people could exist that lose their native tongue or learn another to a higher proficiency of that of the country they live in. We do live in unprecedented times.
However I do not think it is universal, or a majority of young people - I also know many more people who have better knowledge in Danish than in english. It is explicitly on issues of politics, business, science, law, etc that people prefer to speak in danish with me because they do not know the words in english, including at meetup groups dedicated to those things.
1) For some years now, restaurant wait staff in several large European cities, including my former hometown, often only speak English; you simply can't order in the local language. I am basically the only person who complains about this; my peers who are locals don't bat an eye, they don't see it as offensive at all because English is so normal for them.
2) I have a longtime asssociation with one of those Southeastern European countries known as an emigrant factory. My friends who left to Northern or Central Europe or the Baltics have relatively little interest in using the local language except where (like in Germany) required for interacting with bureaucracy. They feel fine living in English. Back in that country, it has not been unusual for the last decade-plus to hear younger people speaking to each other a mixture of English and the local language, and foreigners moving there now complain they get little opportunity to immerse in the local language as I once did.
3) Themes of anti-globalization and protection of European cultural and linguistic diversity have increasingly become associated with the far-right (a quarter-century ago, this was a passion of the left in some countries!). As is known, the far-right is a vocal force but a minority everywhere.
as for 2, yes young people sometimes speak to each other in a mix of english and danish. It's using danish grammar, and critically, not english. You couldn't follow at all if you only spoke english (and with significant difficulty if you only spoke danish for that matter). I consider this similar to the process that creates slang
the other part of 2 regarding people that don't rush to learn the local language. Yes I know people who do this. After living here long enough, especially if they plan to stay, they tend to change their tune. I think there is a lot of motivated reasoning on this topic in particular, including stuff I have said to people myself in the past that friends like to remind me of - Whne I first came here I literally used to talk about how its so hard to practise language because locals won't help while being surrounded by locals who are happy to help. I won't speculate as to why people change after staying somewhere long, its just a tendency I have seen.
regarding 3, it is seemingly often associated with the far right yes, especially when bound with nationalism and themes of invasion/protection, but not unique to those contexts. I have experienced this in leftist political spaces personally, up to the point of votes being held and passing, restricting language in spoken meetings to danish only, explicitly for the comfort of those attending. And of course, I have also experienced this in entirely unpolitical spaces like hobby clubs, discussions at parties, and at work.
Our modern day equivalent is being on HN or Reddit all day long
I would also add the suburbanization of American society. A neat little home in a neat little sub-division with a neat little patch of grass. You can sit on your grass in your own little kingdom, and be completely unbothered by the world around you.
It turns out, being completely unbothered is also unchallenging, and challenge drives us. And being alone and bored is enabled by television and scrolling.
Honestly, I view the suburbs as the worst of both worlds (urban and rural), with few benefits.
BTW: As an aside, this is why i think the suburbs-class loves tesla self driving so much. The one downside is the long monotony of transitting to the place where people gather to do your work. I'm not against self driving cars, but they enable suburban self-imposed isolation.
Everyone had a part of their house that was essentially a bar and they would have house parties all the time.
So I don't think it's sub-urbanization per se.
It's partly a numbers game. There are definitely amicable cul-de-sacs but if you are in an apartment complex there's 100x more "neighbors" you could interact with.
Suburbs also come with the tradeoff of driving, at least in America. It's a lot easier to socialize when you can put on some flip flops and walk to a friend's place or an event than it is to drive.
It can be hit or miss in either case, and there's socioeconomic and cultural forces that make real world interactions more scarce. If more of my income goes to rent and inflation is too high why would I burn through money on going out when I can stay home and watch a show or be on my phone
People don't throw parties with them nearly as much any more because throwing a party with an at-home bar in a suburban house essentially requires drunk driving. We've gotten much more strict about since 1980 for very good reason.
Happy hours are still relatively common in cities because you can get home without driving.
It's funny that as a child in the suburbs I had maybe 10 neighbors within a half mile and we only knew 2 of them. I never saw them. There were no sidewalks and people didn't walk around.
In fact, in our typical suburban boredom, sometimes we'd sneak around our neighbor's properties to see if we could learn who they were. We were pretending to be spies. One time we discovered that our closest neighbors had goats and we were blown away. I never did meet the people living in those suburban houses in the 10 years we lived in that house.
I feel like some people are just making assumptions or are extremely introverted.
It's not just about neighbors.
It's much more appealing to get to the street and walk when you have 4 cafes, a theater, two libraries and a gym in a 10 minute radius than when you just get to walk next to lawns for an hour.
And there's a point to be made for the added friction of a small home. The more self sufficient your house is the harder it is to convince yourself to get out.
The suburbs were soul sucking to me, the people were largely insufferable. I knew my neighbors, but hated them because 90% of our conversations were some form of “I noticed your grass wasn’t cut this week” or “your cans sat on the curb until the morning”. There were some good ones, but like me they mostly hid in their back yard to avoid the Karen’s.
Sometimes I don't want to have a conversation with my neighbor who I really don't have anything in common with except they live next door.
In a big city you can find people that are exactly your tribe or explore a new one.
What are you talking man? Atomic family from 50s with their suburb is literally the utopia for American and whatnot family. Kids running around in droves, BBQ with neighbors, helping around with a house, etc. Good luck having that in New York rat cages.
The reality is that prewar housing in cities in the US was still frequently single family housing. The Chicago Bungalow is an obvious example.
The difference was in how close they were to each other and how much of the infrastructure was given to cars.
I’m not sure I buy that there is some tidy explanation about suburbanization leading to the decline in social interaction but if you think everyone describing city living is describing midtown manhattan you’ve got to myopic view of what urban housing means.
This is true of suburbs as well fwiw. There are lots of walkable suburbs with common community space and not a McMansion or big box shop to be seen.
I grew up in the suburbs and it was a miserable experience. If I wanted to go anywhere I had to ask an adult to drive me. There were no sidewalks. Nearest friend's house was a mile away, and my parents were understandably afraid of letting us go there alone. It was a 100% car-dependent suburb. Everything was so spread out. Nobody wanted to live on a main road with cars, so there were endless dead-ends and culs-de-sac so everybody can have their own little traffic-free neighborhood
One time I literally WALKED SIX MILES to the mall because I was just so bored. I literally spent about half a day just walking on streets with cars going 40+ miles per hour with no shoulder. What's worse is that I had to go behind my parents back to do it because who wants their kid walking next to F-150s going 40 miles an hour?
I thought things would get better once I could drive. Things improved a little bit, but it's hard to afford a car + insurance + gas at 17 years old. The car was a huge drain on my limited resources. I was so eager to get rid of it
Once I discovered the "rat cages" you're deriding, life became a whole lot better for me. I refuse to raise my kids in the suburbs. Kids deserve better than that.
Where did that "utopia" ideal come from?
> Good luck having that in New York rat cages
Yeah, that isn't good either. That's poverty. Do you think poverty doesn't exist in the suburbs?
It can't possibly be something in the middle! All or nothing.
Once I moved to the city I didn’t know my neighbors. People kept to themselves or the turnover was high.
Cities have shared parks. I don't have any yard. But I have wonderful parks within short walking distance. There are far more amenities and so much more to offer at public parks than private yards. It's a shared backyard
In the suburbs, everybody has their own play structure in their back yard. In cities, we have bigger, better play structures that more kids can use simultaneously which encourages more social interaction.
Plus the actual article itself is commenting on a decline of socializing that's occurred in the last 30 years. But suburbs have been predominant the US for around 60 years. And there's similar declines occurring in more dense cities like NYC and Washington. If it was strictly a suburb problem then someone living in Manhattan shouldn't have been affected but last I heard even those cities are affected.
This stands in stark contrast to my car-free life. Every time I go out of the house to travel somewhere, I run into people I know. I say hi to strangers. I nod to pedestrians crossing the street. I have a brief conversation with somebody on the bus. I didn't expect that traveling by transit or bike would have such a positive impact on my well-being.
Knowing what I know now, it's not possible for me to go back to a suburban car-dependent life. It would be a major step backwards
when you're in a car, the possibility for a positive social interaction is nearly 0. I don't know about you but I've never been happier after driving my car
when you're not in a car, there's just more opportunities for small social interactions. You can choose to take those opportunities or not, but they're there. There's just something different about being eye-to-eye with people and not separated by a sound proof metal and glass cage
These however are all effects of a larger mentality of hyper-individualism and hyper-productivity, symptoms of late-stage capitalism.
ironically, urban commutes are substantially shorter on average
> leaving the individual with little time for self improvement and free time. It deteriorates the third place by not allowing time to dedicate to it.
what? there's so many urban third places.
The truth is there is no archetype of an "American suburb." They can be wildly different from each other. I grew up in Whittier, a suburb of Los Angeles, famous for car culture. You can find videos today all over the place of lowriders on hydraulics cruising Whittier Blvd. It's referenced in rap songs from the 90s. But you could also walk or ride a bike. Whittier Blvd itself is two lanes each way for much of its length and is the biggest street in the city. I lived two blocks from this street and walked places all the time. I knew all my neighbors. Kids played in the streets. We walked to parks and played there, too. Whittier even has a really nice wilderness park thanks to Turnbull Canyon, where you're not really remote but you can feel that way. In high school when we were assigned to read Walden Pond and produce similar journals, I found isolated creekbeds where you couldn't hear or see anything except the woods and kept a paper journal I wrote in.
On the other hand, my sisters have moved out to Murrieta, CA and are raising their children there. It's a radically different experience. My wife asked if we could walk to a convenience store when we first visited and my sister was almost laughing at us. It's miles away, some streets have no sidewalks, the streets are a hundred feet wide with 50 mph+ speed limits. It's also hot as hell because it's out in the desert.
Both suburbs, even both in Southern California, but very different experiences with very different communities.
Hacker News talks past each other a lot by not acknowledging this and reducing everything down to "suburbs" or "American" and assuming that kind of shorthand has a clear, universal meaning.
Even television and media consumption in general are not the automatic atomizers they're being characterized as. Aside from the old watercooler monoculture of having something to talk about when everyone watched the same five primetime shows, for sports fans and especially when pay-per-view first took off, gathering at one person's house to collectively watch together was almost ubiqitous. That's not even considering cinema in theaters, which were always a group event. I grew up with that. We almost never watched anything alone in the 80s. If people are now primarily watching video media on their phones from their beds while alone, that is a lot different than how we grew up 40 years ago. Reading was more characteristic of alone-time media consumption.
I finally went and visited the house where she had rented in Tiburon (it was just a block from the Paradise Loop path, a pleasant bike ride from SF), and I was like, "Mom, Tiburon is totally a suburb." And her response was "Oh, well your sisters could walk to school and I could walk to the grocery store, so it didn't feel like a suburb to me."
This hating on suburbs has got to stop. It's fine if you don't like it, but I have way more friends in suburbia than I ever had in the faceless city where people just walked right on past out of fear.
There's maybe 1-2 other people around your age at work, unless you actively chose the massive internship to employment pipeline of MAANG, Big 4, or your industry equivalent that was still actively training employees. Not really for me; my first gig was pretty young, but going to a large corporation for much higher pay: it was a satellite office with 2-3 other people my age than a bunch of seasoned veterans.
Neighborhoods are the same way too. Even today, I can make small talk with my neighbors. But they are some 15+ years ahead of life with two young kids. Different vibe from a single dude in his 30's.
https://www.puttingourdifferencestowork.com/pdf/j.1467-9477....
Then one family got a TV, and they stopped rotating because everyone wanted to spend the evening watching TV at that one family's house.
Then the other families got TVs, and they stopped the socializing tradition altogether, preferring to watch TV at home.
Even on the TFR point, the birth rate in 1976 in USA was 1.74, 2025 it was 1.6. So it's not like a China situation where it went from over 3 to less than 1 in 50 years.
And, as is often the case, the simple answer is incomplete/oversimplified. Because there are cultures which have absorbed those technologies while remaining much more social than Western cultures. And they are ones that are less individualistic and stress more of a group, family or clan mentality.
The issue with fertility rates is similar/correlated. Most of the developed world is seeing rates far below replacement, but some cultures are far more resistant to the influences of technology than others. Many developed countries have tried to address their low birth rates from a policy standpoint, essentially paying people a small percentage of what it costs to raise a child to incentivize parenthood. But I’d argue it’s far more important to address their low birth rate as a cultural issue, which is basically a semi-narcissistic focus on maximizing our own lives rather than doing what’s best for our (for lack of a better word) tribe. Because the less individualistic a society is, the less it’s struggling with these problems.
I’d posit that a lot of this has to do with the decline of religiosity in Western cultures. Religion was where a lot of people got their group cohesion and sense of an importance of something greater than self. And while I’m no fan of religion, we’ve removed it without replacing it with something else that serves the same function. We’re going to have to find that something or these sorts of trends will only continue.
When given the option between: socializing with people in a shared space and being at home and entertaining yourself people are consciously choosing the latter.
When I ask why, this is what I hear from other people the most:
-I don’t have time
-I don’t have transportation
-Who else is going to be there
Etc…
There seems to be a genuine lack of desire whatsoever to simply get yourself to a place where there is a free event.
And to be clear this is not just talking about one particular type of event
I just went to a Democratic socialist of America event this weekend in support of Gaza, and the amount of people who showed up compared to the number of people who are on the list (even the organizing list) is some vanishingly small group.
If the plurality of individuals don’t want to join groups in person because they feel satisfied by themselves, then that’s a signal of some kind.
It was framed as ‘Every Activity’ costs that much though which is just not true.
It is legitimately expensive to go out to places here. I just pay it because I can, but to act otherwise is burying your head in the sand.
But as someone lucky enough to be able to eat out almost every day at a variety of restaurants I have no trouble staying under 35/person without drinks. That place is not an outlier.
And like, fancy cocktails are nice but I don’t think you can say that it’s impossible to go out and do anything without spending $500 like OP claimed.
And, no food isn't that cheap in the city.
I've gotten the "Parking is too expensive and hard to find" from friends when I try and get them to come into the city to hang out. No, come to my apartment, park in the plentiful free protected street parking right out front, and then we'll walk the 5 minutes to the center of downtown.
There are different ways of approaching doing something:
"To do X requires me to do this and that. So heres how I'll do this and that to get to X. "
"I can't do X because it requires me to do this and that. "
There's a big difference between the 2. The latter is a lie, they just don't want to do what is required to do that. Its a way of phrasing things so people don't feel bad and they don't have to admit they don't want to do something.
Start looking for it and you'll see it in a lot of exchanges.
Of course, if you live in the kind of city where the above is true, then a very delicious dinner + tip can usually be had for $50-75, it just won't be as fancy.
It's hard to imagine doing that nowadays. I have a family, so doing that instead of going home in the evening would be selfish (if done too often), but even if I were younger and had time, it would seem very extravagant now. When a beer is $8-10 or even more, it would be an expensive proposition to go to the bar every night after work. And if you order food it's even worse...
I think the demographics of HN would explain why this seems like hollywood fiction when it is/was very normal behavior.
People really did that.
Maybe not every single night, but weekly for sure
I went first time with office team this year a couple of weeks back. Needless to say whole experience was atrocious. No common reference, movies, sports, TV and so on to talk about besides work. It was just: "Oh, what do you do on weekend? I do x,y,z " in a round-robbin manner.
It was definitely not good time, or even bad time one can remember, just an insipid gathering for 3 hours of doing nothing. $8 for a beer and $15-20 per person for lukewarm food not sure I'll be excited for another meet any time soon.
One aspect is that a single income really was enough to not feel extravagant to have a home, a family, and afford to go to the bar a few nights a week. (Part of this was there wasn't as much random other stuff to buy, it wasn't being marketed to you nearly as aggressively either.)
I certainly did this quite a bit in the 1990's, and in the early 1980's I definitely remember my father going out at least twice a week and then the weekends also being for going out and doing something as a family at least 2/3 weekends per month - like trips to a nearby city, or to a sports game, or visit other family, or whatnot.
> Now that I think about it, actually, I guess my department at work did this when I first started in the early 2000s, going out to the bar once or twice a week.
> It's hard to imagine doing that nowadays. I have a family,
This still happens. Young people get together and go out after work. I don't go to pubs often, but when I meet up with someone after work the crowd is people meeting up after work with each other.
If everyone in your department is over 35 and has kids, you won't have much luck with this. If everyone is in their 20s and friendly, there's probably something going on.
I think a lot of people forgot how to be friendly with coworkers, especially if they spend a lot of time online. Online discussions about jobs mostly read like it's a cutthroat single player game where you shouldn't get too close to anyone because you can't trust anyone and you should be planning your next job hop anyway. I have to remind a lot of people younger than me that it's okay to have friends at work. You need to have friends outside of work, too, but you can be friendly with people at work.
If I didn't have kids, would I want to go out multiple nights a week for a few beers with friends? I don't know. I'd certainly think about the cost of it more now than when I was 25.
Similarly for restaurants - they've gotten so expensive, and often the food isn't as good as we remember - that my wife and I don't seem to be as interested in going out to eat as we used to.
You don't think this is a response to corporate culture? Especially over the last few years.
But at the same time, after our natural relationship ran its course (due to graduations or leaving a student team), it felt like they disappeared. My relationship with them wouldn't linger like with other friends (even if weakened).
Another friend of mine directly described this view that "friendships have a time and place" in life. I thought about that perspective and didn't fully agree, but it still taught me that it's perfectly possible and even healthy to make friends quickly even if circumstances are temporary.
My view is that even if you become good friends with someone (at work or elsewhere) and they leave, you still end up with a network of friends across the country in different workplaces. Even when the nature of the friendship changes, you can still catch up with many of your old friends on occasion (like around the holidays).
And even if relationships completely fade, I believe that genuine relationships will always be a nice experience.
I get your logic, but I so don't want to live that life. Screw money, I spend ~8h per day at work, I want to hang out with people I like.
There's one bar I go to regularly where there's a couple of guys who I've literally never seen absent over the years.
I don’t think money is a barrier to getting out.
I think to solve this we are going to have to blow up social media and make going out in public more convenient and friendly. Otherwise we are going to end up in a WALL-E society where people spend all day with their meta glasses streaming AI generated micro dramas.
Why are you driving into a city that costs $100 to park in and then to a restaurant that costs $100 per person if money is a consideration?
Go to a local restaurant. Go to one outside of that city. Do literally anything other than the scenario you described.
I guarantee that if you're near a city where you can find $100 parking, you can find 100 or 1000 amazing small restaurants that are affordable and interesting.
This is a type of defeatism where someone imagines the worst possible scenario, erases all other options, and then pretends it's a choice between the worst scenario or nothing at all.
Going to the movies costs my family $100 without concessions. The zoo $80, the aquarium $100, art museum $80. There's a decent public park system but we're often the only ones there. McDonalds doesn't have playplaces anymore, sleepovers barely exist. The nearest bowling alley is 30 minutes away and runs us about $60 an hour without food.
Add food to anything (which most places don't allow from outside) and you're sometimes doubling the price for complete trash.
I had a burger, fries and 2 beers last night at one of these small local restaurants. It was $47 with tip. I had a bbq plate the other day at a local restaurant. 2 meats, 2 sides was $26 dollars before a drink or tip was added.
Going out in the US is so expensive now, even the low end, that you might as well do something nicer.
Baumol's cost disease often comes to mind - in my (might be wrong) application of it - western society simply has had too much productivity and efficiency improvements. You can make more money as a software developer or as an investment banker because those jobs have gotten more efficient and have higher payouts to employers who want the best employees.
There can't be efficiency improvements in efficiency for child care, so the only way to have people want to become child care workers is to pay a competitive salary, so the efficiency increases in the other unrelated fields directly increase the cost of child care.
Developing countries don't have this problem and domestic labor and child care are still cheap.
Is Southern Europe not part of The West?
Feels like a guinea pig society with all of the rapid changes happening
Why do you feel the need to spend money to socialize?
You usually got a drank, talked. This was a kind of gothic-theme bar, all done up with spooky decorations, a good dj, interesting drinks. We'd host arts/culture slide show jams before the place really would get going for the night. The art was curated and swapped out monthly. There was a lot going on! The place did a lot to charge the space with energy and excitement, bringing a lot of different people together.
Then this guy at the table whipped out his phone and just ignored us all sitting there.
I knew right then and there that this was the beginning of the end.
Now we're all dopamine seeking doom scrollers.
I've been out with a group of friends -- some I just met -- once this year. It also doesn't help that meals and drinks seem hard to justify for the price. I'm waxing nostalgia, but $30 of tacos used to be maybe $8; my $10 beer today was $3.
My online social activity has declined a lot since then though, there was just so much unnecessary drama, oversharing, and vying for attention, emotional support, etc and the people that gave it burned out and left, leaving just emotionally needy people yelling into the void while the others moved on with their lives.
The baseline keeps dropping.
It wasn’t until iphone 3G in 2008 that you had a full fledged browser with unlimited broadband capable of streaming audio, maps, and visiting websites with graphics. And, of course, new apps coming out everyday.
The battery was also not good enough to use long for a long time.
Sounds like the real gothic-guy in the place. ; )
Also a similar story: This was a kind of normal bar, all done up with fine photos for decorations, good music, good drinks. We'd host performances and jams before the place really would get going for the night. The art was curated and swapped out monthly. There was a lot going on! The place did a lot to charge the space with energy and excitement, bringing a lot of different people together. Then one day a guy got bored and went home alone early. I knew then and there, that place was finished!
No bars, no dinners with anyone. I think the only blessing this lifestyle has given me is minimized impact from the failing economy we're in, at the cost of not seeing anyone or doing anything. I still have outside hobbies, but it's all too expensive to keep up with now, or being heavily regulated.
Uphill battles are often worth fighting.
A number of military historians would beg to differ.
Everything young parents don't have time for or are too tired for.
It sounds cliche but it's literally true that there's always time to meet new people no matter what phase of life you're in.
Related: when I was 25 I had a depressive existential crisis and felt like my life was basically over. It's common, and therapy was a lifesaver. If you feel like you might be depressed then talking to someone can really help. Take care of yourself as best you can!
"Nothing in this world worth having comes easy"
And we always can try finding the gentle slopes, going around on the longer track, less crowded. The journey is what counts not the destination here.
That said, I met my spouse in my early 30s. Was worth switching countries for and that was 13 years ago. We met playing the same silly text-based MMORPG some years ago. I have never been very social, but not being social doesn't mean that you won't meet people in non-traditional ways.
I think staying at home basically rotting is more comfortable, sure. No judgment here, I’ve done that for months at a time. But the payoff is also… underwhelming. I mean you get basically nothing, just monotony and silence.
The more risky things, like dating or going to a party, are much more uncomfortable. But the potential payoff is a lot more. I mean you can really strike it up with someone, find someone on your wavelength. It can be exciting, exhilarating.
But it lacks the certainty. The reward is higher, but so is the drawback. If I stay inside and do nothing, at least I know the outcome. It’s more enticing in that way. But I also know I won’t make any memories that way. There won’t be some moment or some person I’ll look back on fondly.
I can definitely see how someone who doesn't have many positive reference experiences would prefer to just be alone and avoid the lows all together.
Not that you asked, but I'd encourage you to not define yourself as antisocial. You just haven't found your kin yet, and if you keep looking you can find it.
(and this goes back farther than 30 years. Closer to 50 now)
If anybody else is looking for change, try setting something like this up. It has so far been free, easy, relatively low stakes, and I think by virtue of the main focus being "no phones", you get some great people who are all tired of the same algorithmic churn.
I became very good friends with someone who I met at one of the meetups and we've done all kinds of things just the 2 of us and have had some really interesting conversations, which is something I haven't done in a LONG time.
The reason for the decline in social activity is not that it was insufficiently commercialized. Meetup should be a nonprofit.
I still host board game events on Meetup, although I'm hoping to switch to my open source alternative soon. I think the other commercial options such as Discord and Facebook are worse, and people have gotten used to Meetup.
in America we have had 20 years of "Tech Disruption"., making the world a better place and relentless technical innovation, combined with the 'corporization' of America
Has our day to day lives improved?
Do we work less, live healthier, have less stress?
Seems like this (the younger generation) is far worse off then pre-internet connected, smartphone generation
compare a 'luxury' Florida apartment vs the old New York apartments built in the 1800s. the NY apartments have narrow stairs, one way in.
likewise dense / small cities / villages in either africa/europe etc force more natural social interaction.
even for friends - easier to host friends when they can easily walk to your home & they don't have to drink & drive.
so blaming tv, social media, video games etc doesn't get to the root of the matter.
It says "Connect with Others. Learn. Be Active".
Strikes me as good advice 10 years ago when I wrote it, and just as good now.
I talked about how relatively easy it is to have social contact here at all levels and so I must conclude that most people simply have better uses for their time (by their own judgment) than this. https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-10-09/Community
"I mildly attempted doing this once and it didn't work, so I won't bother trying again" describes a shocking amount of people's experiences.
I sometimes think people fail on purpose to justify apathy or giving up.
Then if anyone says anything they scream about how their experience is valid and nobody can tell them otherwise. It's wild.
There's something important about being outside our comfort zones. We need entropy in our lives and the best way to accomplish that is being in new environments with different people/creatures. What I've found is over time my comfort zone expands as I become familiar with more stuff.
Most people in this post's comments that are "not trying" seem to also be depressed in some way. If you've never experienced it, depression can make trying impossible not just a minor inconvenience. Going to therapy can help, or not. Taking anti-depressants can help, or not.
Also a "mild attempt at doing this once" that ends very poorly can cause a depressed or anxious person to spiral into a self-hatred looping hellscape. It's not a rational decision they're making it just happens. After you've experienced that you're very cautious and try to never feel it again.
And then the kicker is when you're paralyzed like this everyone just thinks you're lazy or unmotivated and pretty much tells you "don't be depressed stupid" which further sends you into having a poor outlook of yourself and it spirals from there. I've been in and out of this several times in my life, it's not pleasant. I've also tried every single remedy known to man and sometimes nothing works.
To put it simply: their experience is probably valid and nobody should tell them otherwise.
To clarify the idea: you have a healthy social matrix but if you marry and settle in the US, your grandchildren won't.
Also, people that are different than everyone else (but same background as me) seek me out to be friends.
For example, there is a HUGE difference between a Seattle Tech event where I am literally the same as the other 60 people in the room vs Vietnamese Tech event where I am one of 3 people that speak english. Those other 2 English speakers are going to walk over and chat with me.
FWIW here in San Francisco I have found many people it’s fun to be around.
If we didn’t see the same trends, it points to reasons more specific to the US.
Not OP, but wanted add for myself it did.
I took the CBT approach. First to change how I thought about things (as a skill to practice) and then that allowed me to do a form of exposure therapy. Mostly finding something small to start with, a single relevant question or comment that is genuine. Saying something nice to someone, like a stressed out cashier at the grocery store goes a long way, or commenting on something like someone reading the packaging of a item and you know it and can give a brief review.
I didn't start trying to have deep conversations or expectations of ever seeing that person again. Only simple interaction for social skill improvement and over time this small talk started to come more naturally. Then that snowball into this lighter feeling around people (so anything would have been perceived as rejection before became not personal and moved on) and that, in gaming terms, was a level-up to more meaningful interaction, then another level-up and another etc. This is a decades long practice that is still going. Like many skills some pick up faster than others.
Once I figured out that this was a skill and not just something people that are not me are born with, it made things a lot easier. Went from making up all kinds of stories in my head about myself and others to thinking about each interaction as practice and realized lot more people were like me, thinking I'll be invited somewhere or talked to if I was liked or was interesting enough; waiting for someone else to do the inviting or talking first. I just remind myself that a lot of others also want to be invited or talked to, and that reminder greatly reduced my fear of rejection.
I think thats the crux of it, most people respond positively when others are interested in them. As long as its genuine, asking about, or be interested in, others goes a really long way.
Take for instance someone telling you about their career. "I'm a software developer".
You can express interest with a response like "Oh, thats cool, what made you go into that line of work?" but thats a very generic, shallow response.
If you know a thing or two about software, for example, you can ask more interesting questions that show your interest in them, and your knowledge of the space. "Woh cool, how is AI coding impacting your life?"
Suddenly, it seems like you're much more interesting yourself, AND you're interested in them.
The tricky part nowadays is everyone has very niche interests. It's harder than ever to really have a breadth of knowledge that is broadly applicable. This was easier before the internet, before travel, before telecommunication. When your community was your community and news traveled slowly, it was a lot easier to learn about what impacted others.
Some people act so shocked when you tell them you did something because it would make you richer and not because an angel came to you in a dream and whispered in your ear to save the disenfranchised underclass (and all the cats) by writing code, or whatever's the current faux na pas reason to pursue a vocation these days.
Answering why you picked this particular path to high income is more interesting of an answer to the person asking and carries the conversation. Did your parents do it, did you have a professor that captured your attention, did you just google “easiest job to make a lot of money?” and pick the first one?
Someone asking wants to understand how and why you make decisions. What motives you. Etc. It’s the XY problem and from the other person’s perspective, you’re answering the wrong one.
This is too simplistic. Someone might ask that for a million reasons. Also, you will be judged not only by your answer. Being so direct might show you are not on autopilot in the conversation, your humour or that you only care about money, depending on a lot of other factors. It might make one more memorable as well. I personally would read it as light humour, unless it is accompanied by a dead eyes stare.
To be fair, most people are uninteresting.
Maybe the goal should be to be okay with being ordinary.
TRYING to be interesting (or interested) is just tiresome.
If you meet someone who is completely and utterly uninteresting, that in itself is interesting.
And yet everybody cares precisely nothing about almost all natural numbers.
How do we even define interesting ? Like interesting opinions/hobbies? Good storyteller ? Who cares about that. I do need to like you and you need to be an agreeable person imo, but no having a real unique life or opinions is really not that necessary imo. Having a sense of humor is a big plus to me though.
What do you mean by that? What's the difference between a person and their story?
This is why you can not "interview" innovative or creative people- and only get a flat "imposter" image of the creative person. The observation hinders the process and all you get is basically the "house keeping" routines- weaving together some plausible stories, on how a "idea" came to be.
The true process is a walk in the mountains. Some scribbled notes. Glued together during some conversation on a similar topic with friends. I always found it fascinating, how the "iterrators" can dismiss something/someone that clearly works- just because they can not dissect and reproduce it.
And it doesn't have to be anything special; you could find joy together in the mundane:
Petting cats, watching the rain, taking a walk through the woods without saying anything..
As another person for whom relation stuff does not come naturally, this was incredibly helpful because little pieces of advise really do work, because they really are nice things to do/say.
A favorite example of mine, when starting to talk to someone who probably already doesn't care for you is to find something -- anything -- that it's clear they like or chose, which you also happen to like, and pay it a genuine positive complement. And perhaps talk about it a little bit.
But let's put that aside, the negativity really comes from the fact that every time I have seen it brought up in real life, it is being wielded like a cudgel by a person not practicing what is in the book. It is effectively corporate short hand for "you need to learn how to be a better servant".
Some folks take this over the top and do a weird, false-feeling thing like sprinkle the person's name into conversation over and over, or at the start/middle/end. And it makes the conversation feel stilted, fake, and like a situation is being forced. And that casts a negative light on the overarching idea that people like being remembered, and their own name is a big part of that.
Agreed, but I'm not so sure this was previously true. Or at least not _as_ true. There used to be a lot of more socializing by default. People who were poor in this skill set still had relatively regular social opportunities.
This seems to be gone today, and now it's purely manual.
I agree that it is a skill, but like any skill it helps immensely to start learning it as a child. It took me until my 30s to realize that my parents were essentially... antisocial. And that most of the social skill lessons I took from them, if any, were probably wrong and unproductive. I spent a lot of time (and money) trying to learn to overcome that, but never made any progress.
I don't know what the solution is, but I don't think it is general social meetups, or hobby meetups, or religions of the lax and casual type (someone posted on a previous HN thread that the Haredim and a comparable Muslim sect seem to be doing alright).
What COVID broke is that there was no one to take over from the previous club leaders so they mostly just died with nothing to replace them and now the new generation doesn't really know how to rebuild it because they never experienced it.
I was recently watching a video mentioning a study that it takes ~200 hours of constant contact on average to make a "close friend" and some 40-60 hours to get go from acquaintance to "casual friend", then 80-100 to be a what you'd simply call "friend".
Meeting up for 2-4 hours a month would take years upon years to make anything out if you don't supplement it yourself.
Hall, J. A. (2019). How many hours does it take to make a friend? Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 36(4), 1278-1296. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407518761225
EDIT: The only "cringe" meetups I've attended were "singles meetups" in my city. Mild desperation and no common interests aren't exactly a social lubricant. Hobby meetups are great because if you're truly interested in the subject matter it's an easy/exciting conversation starter.
You mention tabletop gaming. This is exactly the stereotype among friends and colleagues of unfulfilling meetups in a city I recently moved from: multiple games meetups sprung up around the university and public library as a way to get people meeting and talking, but most casual attendees didn't find the natural socializing they hoped for ("people just seem too desperate"), while players keen on the games and not looking for socializing per se complained about the casuals not being commited enough.
For tabletop gaming, it definitely depends on the game. There certainly are salty regulars who have been playing their specific game for decades and who lack social grace with newcomers. But there are also nicer folks who enjoy teaching newcomers and building a community. It all comes down to having good event organizers. Sounds like the ones you heard about didn't manage expectations or toxic personalities well, which is a bummer.
To be clear I've absolutely experienced salty cringe behavior from stereotypical neckbeard gamer types at these events. But I've also met really nice people that I ended up hanging out with independently. Each meetup seems to attract a different crowd so I had to try a few before finding a group that was the right vibe for me.
Note: this wasn't a church activity by any means, even though 3 of us were in ministry together. We didn't evangelize, although sometimes we discussed our common faith. This was strictly personal, social time for everyone.
The years we met in that coffeehouse were very successful. We often enjoyed at least 10 people around the table, all sorts of kids, although my church friends were elderly, retirement-age, but very sensitive to the needs of the poor and the street people who often joined us. That coffeehouse eventually closed, so we moved on to a Starbucks, and the stable group became smaller, but more tightly-knit. Eventually, I found a really awesome teahouse that was just a few blocks off the beaten path, and our group moved there. We no longer found ourselves yelling/screaming over the noise of crowds and steamed milk machines.
Eventually our group lost nearly everyone except us three. Sometimes we had a guest, but they didn't stay. I don't know why people drifted away. Perhaps we weren't welcoming, or fun, or young enough. But we did diversify our activities into board games, such as Clue, Rummikub, Boggle, trivia, Scrabble, you name it. And the teas and snacks were delicious there.
Now one key feature of the group is that one guy was there for the games. He was hardcore, heads-down, "we're playing these games!" with intense concentration. The other lady, she was there for socializing and chatting, but her garage-sale habit had garnered a closet full of games to bring. I was there for both, I suppose, but mainly I liked the social aspect, getting out of the house, having some good boba tea and stuff. The board games were definitely a means to an end. So we all had varying reasons for being there.
Sadly, the pandemic lockdowns killed our group for good. Not even the teahouse was able to weather that storm, and they closed their doors permanently, too. I haven't seen my friends in that long a time. We tried doing some online gaming together, coordinated, but it wasn't the same at all! I really miss them, and I really miss the excuse to get out of the house, and socialize, and I wish there was a stable activity that had that sort of impetus in 2026, but all my friends were made through those gaming activities, and as a result, I no longer have any friends.
But personally I cannot afford to worry if they think it's cringe. For a long time I was lonely, even in a healthy marriage, but having friends that I see regularly is something that I have found to be a vital aspect of having good mental health and avoiding stagnation. So I continually take the risk and put myself out there when I meet an interesting and kind person.
And I remember once hearing my mum ask my dad - why do you keep inviting them over, they never invite us in return. And I remember what my dad said - yeah they don't, but I'm doing it because I want to be close to them and I enjoy spending time with them - even if they never invite us over it's still worth it.
Yes it can feel cringe but I would argue we need to just accept it as prosocial and not cringe. We are cringe for thinking normal social things are cringe.
Like, I would probably have thought OP was after my money like 5 years ago. But now I would just assume good faith.
It's like "Well, sure, they can be gay, but ~holding hands in public~? We've got to have some sense of morality around here or we're no better than animals!"
Living with your parents in your 20s isn't cringe, it's a powerfule economic decision. Having or not having kids isn't cringe it's a personal decision. Carrying a dog in a purse is cringe, it's practical. Being an impoverished drug addict isn't cringe. Crying out for help with mental illness isn't cringe. Telling loved ones you love them in public isn't cringe.
Inviting people to continue sociallizing with you at a later date isn't cringe, that's just fucking friendship.
People are using the word to label entirely regular perfectly acceptable behavior as if it is genuinely bad simply because they don't like it. Sure, okay, you personally don't like it when people express interest in you beyond your 30 second attention span, but who the fuck gave you the right to decide that society can't make friends in public? Damn, okay, OP said it was cringe to ask people if they want to hang out, guess I'll just die a hermit.
There is a need for the word 'cringe' for wannabe, fake, dishonest, superficial etc. expressions that are embarrassing. But it is way over used and should not be used on people who are trying to mock them. It is way too easy to be a critique.
I don't think that's a post-COVID dynamic as much as a pre-COVID one that got accelerated. When I moved to a new city in 2018, I spent a lot of time at meetups and had exactly that issue. No one would want to meetup outside the group (to be fair, most of it was that some people seemed to be willing to travel really far for a meetup group but not for other things), and you wouldn't see the same people often enough to really be friends within the group.
Meeting others through those activities and then gradually building upon the relationships via other social outings, dinner parties, weekend trips etc.
I'm also introverted but learned early on in life that it often just takes one person instigating things to rally a whole group.
Ironically, the potluck style events strike me as the most introverted way to socialize. Not to denigrate the initiative at all, I have two Canadian friendsgivings this month, and they're fun, but I really wouldn't see the hosts frequently otherwise, because they're the ones packing their schedules in advance, moving to the distant suburbs, or just don't get out much. I don't feel like I can hit them up for something more casual, whether it's always true or not, it's more of a calendar event style relationship I have with them.
The reason I don't take it upon myself to host these myself is primarily because the substance of my social life comes largely from common interests outside the house that I invest deeply into, some of which are non-event hangouts just to watch movies at theirs, hiking, climbing, billiards bar, coffee and a walk etc... I don't try to find like-minded people as much as I do people that I have enough chemistry with, and build on that.
That said, in general it is important to try to take any kind of initiative you can. Friendships don't build themselves, and everyone's scared to stick their neck out.
Another lost art is keeping a contacts list and contacting them regularly. People used to have these lists on paper and then send cards at least once per year on birthdays/christmas/independence. With this being relegated to social media, your contacts often fall in the cracks of the quirks of tech companies.
But this also created a group of its own that I was coining together for regular Thursday craft beer night or occasionally having wine and beef together.
I stopped though, many years ago as when I started my own family, family and work consumed me too much to have regular night life and meetup exercising and my home was always my sanctum, I rarely invite people to my home. this is where i rest and only some inner circle has entrance there.
that inner circle was developed during last 20+ years and I don't find much space to expand this circle unless somebody new spends with me 20+ years having random access to my limited time.
And that's ok. having up to 5 close friends who you see and talk to regularly if you're 45+ is already enough. Random folk... can stay online. like here to share ideas and then bring them back home.
I actually stopped looking for new friends based on the interests.. I have enough in that gang to cover already. sharing interest related insights is where I use internet mostly.
one of the reasons why place like HN started becoming attractive again as after ditching FB, Discord and many other places with just noise instead of valuable insight and content only HN, lobsters and telnet/ssh BBSes become legitimate sources of idea sharing and tech progress.
other topics are covered fine for decades and when I'm randomly at bar sometimes (usually work delegations outside my own town) then I'm open for one evening conversation about any nonsense just to stay connected with the city folk, but no huge expectactions about phone sharing or another meeting.
I never share my social accounts connection with strangers. I stopped doing that.. it's just spam after all and like collecting f* pokemon cards instead of having meaningful relationship. One can't maintain relationship with 1000+ people so I dropped all that and keep online activities either socially anonymous or narrowed to under 100 people whom I at least remember I had a drink with, once.
It’s not as tangible as a paper card but by being an email, people can just hit reply and answer. Every year a few dozen people write back to our card (out of maybe 350 recipients), and a lot of people have said that this is one of their favorite messages to get all year.
I think people can tell when you actually put time into something instead of just making a quick conventional card with platitudes. It’s helped us keep in touch with people from all over the place, across different continents, etc, who we might not stay in touch with so much otherwise.
Sometimes, it may be just the knowledge that you're contributing positively to other peoples lives that makes it worth sacrificing some of your own comfort.
A friend to me is someone with whom you can drop the mask of social propriety near-completely - share unpopular opinions, make racist jokes (directed at them or others), talk about the opposite sex (assuming hetero), gossip about other people, talk about your own relationships, give honest feedback, do borderline illegal stuff like smoke weed etc. Because this is what intimacy means.
If I meet my friend after a bad haircut and he doesn't immediately go "what the fuck is wrong with your hair?", he's not a true friend, just someone I hang out with.
I think most people stop having friendships like this after grade school or university. I suspect some people have never had a friendship like this.
Forming friendships after schooling isn't hard, but it takes work. That said, I've had a good number of small social interactions that usually don't even lead to an acquaintance over the last decade, and even those feel good just to get out of my shell. Then there's the people I'd recognize if I saw them again and maybe remember their names. And a small but close group of about 12 and counting have become incredibly close friends that have recently begun mingling with my prior set of really close friends (different states, so we have a couple yearly gatherings).
Beyond that, the second half of my first paragraph was about how some of those people probably become more than just acquaintances.
No one's just going to become a lifelong friend of radical candor bumping in to you waiting in line for coffee for the same reason that you're not going to become someone else's lifelong friend of radical candor when you bump in to them waiting for coffee.
The schoolyard friends you mentioned didn't just automagically happen either. You were thrust in to an environment with lots of variables. You remained in that environment for a significant period of time. There were some you vibed with on perhaps just the first day, and some of those continued to vibe with you in the coming days, weeks, months, and years. Some of them went different ways over the years, and perhaps you stuck with one or two for the entire time, but that cohesion is effort whether it feels that way or not. It requires the right initial conditions and for the conditions to continue to be correct over time.
The bestest greatest friends of all time can fall to simple geographical distance if one or both of the participants isn't fulfilled by the new long-distance nature of the relationship. The conditions must remain sufficient for the relationship to endure.
The only way to see if the conditions are sufficient is to meet people and cultivate relationships with them. You as you are will naturally filter many or most just as many or most would filter you, but where's the harm in that? No one's friends with everyone, and not every friend need be some platonic soul mate.
Why can't the big group of acquaintances not lead to real friendship?
I would haver guesst that's the way you find friends. Stranger -> acquaintances -> friends -> close friends?
There are more people LARPing as friends than are actually friends these days. Then I can see why many people reject "friendships" completely. Just dressing up and doing stuff with a few people is tedious unless it's mainly just about the thing you're doing (such as sports).
But then he invites them to his potluck and I think the friendship dies there. That potluck is like a graveyard of all his potential friendships. It just becomes a "hangout group" i.e. fake friends. Also, every other month is too infrequent.
Personally I think the best way to make friends is at places where you might meet them in a context that gives you sufficient and regular 1:1 time. This is almost always school or work.
They don't say that they don't then go on to develop deeper friendships outside of the potluck, only that the potluck is a step in the road. It provides a low-stress low-stakes scene of congenially likely like-minded people in which people who are relative strangers can pair and group off if they choose to.
Approaching someone at a potluck like this, or chatting to your dinner neighbors, is way easier and likely more fruitful than chatting up strangers at a bar.
It is far easier to develop a friendship with someone who you can see interacting positively with your other friends. Easier to see more facets of an individual as they interact with people of slightly differing opinion.
I really genuinely cannot conceive how you're seeing it as a graveyard rather than a garden. Like...throwing a potluck is so vastly much more effort than showing up to someone else's event. They are putting genuine effort in to regularly surrounding themselves with people they enjoy. There's just no way that any of those people are "fake friends". They may be but mere acquantances, but even then these are people that are chosen to be invited. Everyone there is there because they were wanted and wanted to be there. If the host feelt they were fake friends, they wouldn't be invited, would they?
Compare this to a monthly coworker dinner where the only reason everyone's there is because the boss said so. Where everyone agrees Janice from accounting is always trying way to hard to laugh at everyone's jokes and Bob from QA just didn't quite grok the message behind "How to Make Friends and Influence People" and so uses everyone's name in every sentence because he figures that's important.
> I think most people stop having friendships like this after grade school or university.
When I was younger, I was never open with people who would be insulting to me or found it important to make racist jokes. I would simply not tell them what I think to avoid conflict or insult. They were assymetrically open, I was not.
But I genuinely did not cared about their haircuts either.
It depends on the personality. Some people are very open. Some are not. I find social open-ness much harder than closed-ness. The open-ness approach, though, is most likely the better strategy indeed. It just helps little when people are naturally closed off mentally already.
I enjoy meetups, but those have been pretty much nonexistent here since covid.
As soon as I stopped it all stopped.
And like really all stopped; via digital comms everyone from the social group has said they realized after the plans I pulled together was their extent of their social life.
American culture fuckin' sucks. And it's Americans propping it up. It isn't Russia or the other usual boogeymen.
We’re going through the aftermath of the old social paradigm collapsing, while dealing with the hangover from the COVID response (including massive inflation), and the robber barons are feasting on the corpse while manipulating the public because of course they are.
We’ll find a new one eventually, and people will adapt (eventually) and they won’t feel the suck in the same way everyone used to the old way does right now.
It will just be normal to them.
Of course it’s going to suck in the meantime.
You could ask anyone who grew up in the USSR, India (who wasn’t top .001% anyway), China would lived through the Great Leap Forward, etc.
It did wonders for me.
Small side project, if you know of a nice club in you area please submit it: https://clubs.fyi
1. Every third space represents an ever-larger opportunity cost of being turned into housing. If you can close a pub and turn it into million dollar condos, that commercial rent is going up;
2. More expensive rents are an input into everything done at a business or third space;
3. This decreases spending ability in real terms. 20 years ago, you could get a pint in London for 2-3 pounds. Now it's 6-7. Have wages doubled? No. And pubs were (and are) part of the UK social fabric; and
4. People need to work more to pay for their ever-larger mortgages and other debt. This gives people less time.
Expensive housing is literally destroying society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
Research on this has been done and the cause is known. There is just no desire to improve the conditions of social activity on the part of civil society or the government.
Go to Asia and you'll see people glued to their phones everywhere while out in public.
The now-defunct maker space I used to visit inherited a former general manager from Maker Nexus, he was very... apathetic about tech in general.
I am not sure what you mean by "apathetic about tech in general" but my experience has been that folks who go to makerspaces are excited about making things in the physical world. That tends to carry over to tech that empowers them to do so (e.g. 3d printers, CNC machines, laser cutters, ...).
Your mileage may vary.
I gave a talk on work I had done with the Signal Foundation on building a binary->binary rewriting tool to secure their Intel SGX1 enclaves against the various Spectre and LVI vulnerabilities.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-01/how-uni-life-has-chan...
By the end I felt so sorry for the young man they profiled, what an enormous life experience he largely misses out on.
The entirety of the socialization decline I see is with the poor and middle class. The poor seem to have to work a ton more and struggle to make ends meet while still living in a highly individualistic world without the shared community of previous poorer cultures of the past.
And from my observations the middle class are amusing themselves to death while simply becoming sloths at home doing very little other than their children’s sports. No hosting, not social manners and little get together than gets in the way of television or video games.
The upper class and wealthy socialize a great deal. I mean a ton. Shared vacations, constant social occasions hosting fund raisers galas sports hobbies etc. practically non stop.
I wonder how many of them would count this as work time, since so much of value add at high level positions is precisely through activities like that.
That really jumped out at me. I don't doubt it, but it's just weird because my partner and I constantly watch home improvement shows on HGTV where folks are constantly talking about improving their kitchen or other space "to entertain guests". And my partner is always nagging at me about the same thing - upgrading the kitchen or backyard so we can have guests. But our house is fine and we never have guests over. I get this sense from a lot of people. I think people love the fantasy of having guests to entertain, but no one ever wants to actually do it.
Satisfying would be to bond over common problems and share common joys. But again too surface-level if not even taboo. I swear it’s gotten to the point where AI or whatever the next doom is could take 5% of all jobs. And there would be talk like, oh poor Joe he lost his job and has no marketable skill. Yup. Yup. Any solutions? Any venting? No, just frustrating reminders of impotence.
The absurdity of going to work every day as a wage commodity, another line item for the bougies to increase profits, then go “consume” your wages so that your “disposable income” can go towards the impossible goal of increasing profits into eterntiy, then see advertizements about how consumers are ruining the planet by buying food that they have no skill, land, or means to grow. But why talk about that? You can’t, not even in a fabled “social democratic” society.
We could be talking about real problems. Just venting, or maybe educating each other, or maybe even doing something about it. Even strangers since we all obviously, as plain as fucking day, go through these bullshit motions every day. We see each other. But we can’t talk about it.
Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over
It's probably true that some form of a satisfying social interaction is missing today, but I would say it's a trope any will do to make us happy. In general any type of party I've been to recently, I've enjoyed leaving as soon as possible.
Arthur Schopenhauer
In person socialising is definitely down, likely the overall too, but I would not base a social activity judgement on a questionnaire like this here alone, I miss important elements.
Also yes media, phones, TV etc.
Here in the EU, I know most of the people on my street because I walk by them every day on my way to the store. In the US, even though I lived less than 1 mile/500ish meters from the store, I couldn't walk there if I wanted to.
After the pandemic it's like everyone forgot this. The coffee shops are all students studying or people rushing in and out, the pubs and cafes are all ghost towns or groups of people being very insular. Even at events like the farmer's market there's less socializing and more "go get the things and go move on, don't look around, don't talk to people", the vendors even mention how boring it is these days without anyone just chatting anymore.
"Go out and be in the world" seems to have just died.
So the social cohesion in the USA is absolutely broken.
What is more tragic, though, is how they try to export their insanity onto other countries, be it Canada or the EU. Trump also supporting war criminal and genocidal man Putin, is such a clear fact for the agent Krasnov theory.
Evil in joint operation here.
The population in the USA really need to begin to think about their political system. That two-party system does not really work; and the transition to a de-facto one-party system led by an authoritarian clique is even worse. The system is totally broken here.
Having a chat with the butcher, barista, etc. or just bumping into people you know and talking for a few minutes is pretty uplifting when it happens regularly.
I feel like the containerization of life erodes this.
But on the serious side - it all make sense because we have more ways to socialize without going out (via chats, games, etc.). Although it would be interesting to see the same stats for Gen Z and Gen Alpha
I see most of the kids are constantly on mobile and when they are not, they feel a void. It was almost similar to not having friends in pre social media age.
I see people getting more and more absorbed in screen so much so to forget greeting people. This happens to me all the time , someone known coming out of elevator, I am ready to greet, but they simply did not notice or noticed too late and vice versa
And they keep saying why people aren't socializing or making babies and blame it on phone.
Feels anti-human to purposely deny yourself what makes humans human.
I think it's way more healthy for me to be able to talk about life every day for an hour online, than meeting up once per week for two hours over beer. I still see them in person on a monthly basis.
Hint: it's diversity.
If you're hit on yourself, politely decline, and strike up a different topic of conversation.
Most of the meetups I attend are not "glorified pickup activities".
There are also plenty of nerdy meetups. Some of the biggest nerds I know I've met through board game and trivia meetups.
Long ago places had large parks, outdoor swimming pools, cities became less of a place to live and more of an efficient use of space/money and thus the human aspect was removed.
Technology in the sense of games, twitter, chat, etc removes the superfical need for human contact but ruins real bonds with people