Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over

As others have mentioned, the decline started long before social media and the Internet. When I was a child, in the 70s, my parents often had other families and couples over for dinner, and we often attended small dinner parties, too.

As an introvert, I absolutely loathed these gatherings and was frustrated by how powerless I was in avoiding them.

Recently, I have been reading over my mother's old letters she wrote to her parents at that time, in which she described the effort and social anxiety that went with this tradition. It was not something my parents enjoyed, but rather an obligation they felt they had to uphold. Someone invites you over, then that goes into an unspoken balance sheet, and you are required to reciprocate. She often spoke of "owing" dinner to people. I don't think she enjoyed it at all, though there were a few couples I can remember who were good friends of theirs, and those meetups were always a pleasure to listen in on. The rest were simply a drag.

I should note that their life in the 70s (in a middle-class college town) was not some idyllic paradise without the Internet, either. Everyone was constantly falling ill with colds or flu, and days were spent running dreary errands to shop for boring things that we now can get with a click. The rotary-dial telephone that hung in the kitchen was the heartbeat of the house, since replaced by Facebook and smartphones. My parents were always busy and exhausted.

Middle aged European here. I still regularly go to parties (dinner and otherwise) and I notice that there are two kinds of people: people who throw parties, and people who don't. This sounds like a truism, but what I mean is: there are people who regularly throw a party and people who never do it.

I am solidly in the first category. I throw dinner parties, birthday parties, drinking parties, dance parties, midsummer parties, midwinter parties, game parties, etc. Yes, it costs time and money and is a lot of work. But what people (probably the ones that never bother) tend to forget is how unbelievably gratifying it is to get a bunch of people together, to feed them and to make them talk, laugh, dance, etc. Afterwards you are tired but also grateful and socially energized in a way that feels fundamental to my existence.

How is the author of this piece going to cite a graph that shows an extreme increase in time spent at home that begins in 2020 and not mention COVID? We had social media in the 2010s. COVID made spending time outdoors/around other people an actual physical danger for over a year, and the psychological effects of that are lingering. Does anyone remember that one political cartoon where the guy is walking down the street, and everyone around him just looks like a virus particle? I think a lot of people consciously or subconsciously still see the world that way. If you don’t believe, reflect on how you would feel about attending a crowded indoor gathering in 2010 vs now, or how much unease you would feel if someone at the table next to you started coughing.

Blame the screens. Screens are blackholes that suck up your time, attention, awareness and senses.

Screens are evil. They wake up the dead past as if it's alive and happening now. It became so much the norm, that people are afraid to face the real world, real people, real talking. "Dinner party? OMG, real people with real faces that force us to talk to them? Noway sir".

Screens disconnected people from real world, from each other. I was trying a VR headset the other days and immediately threw it away, as it shut off my visual and audio senses completely.

When I met my wife, I discovered very quickly that she had savant-level hosting skills. She is an amazing cook, she prioritizes space to dine in our home (we made sure to have a dining table in our NYC apartment) and she thinks carefully about the experience of her guests. It's a quality that I benefit greatly from, and I'm grateful to her for it.

I moved from a rich city social life to a lonely suburban one (I have regrets, there are complicating factors). I met a fellow dad who mentioned a book as we started chatting and I was excited (someone who reads!).

As we talked about this very isolation problem he told me about his neighbors who kept inviting him over and offering to watch the kids for him and how he thought it was just weird and couldn’t trust them. It broke my heart — I could just imagine the neighbors trying to be good to their community and that very behavior is met with distrust.

(I read half the book he mentioned and asked him about it the next time I saw him. Turns out he hadn’t read the book, just heard about it on a podcast. My quest to meet someone who reads continues.)

This is very cultural. In Spain essentially no one throws dinner parties in the US style. It's rare to invite social acquaintances to one's home. These things are done - but mainly with family. Part of this is cultural and part reflects that homes are too small to fit many people. Most socializing is done outside, at a bar, cafe, restaurant, park, etc.

I've tried to do this in my community: Challenges faced.

- People unwilling to commit to an event > 7 days in advance

- People flaking even when they do

- Unreciprocated $100s of dollars spent is non sustainable, and lowkey feels kinda like buying others friendship

- People in urban places are living in smaller and smaller spaces. Though counterbalanced by many nicer apartment buildings have amenities spaces that help.

- mixing circles -- people are often isolating their friend groups into niches (pickelball friends, church friends, D&D friends...)

- And IMO the overarching issue in America that creates so many problems -- Everyone is so overworked that they don't have the energy/capactity to do good things: Exercise, and hosting parties being two examples.

Article says "The share of adults who say they regularly have friends over has declined 70 percent since 1975", but this may not be an accurate comparison:

> Until 1985, the survey included only married households.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDB_Needham_Life_Style_Surveys

In my twenties I made spaghetti every Saturday night. This started as throwing some Ragu in a pot and adding some spices, and eventually morphed into crushing my own tomatoes and cooking over most of the day. I did this every week over years. A varied group of friends came to eat each week -- no plan, no notice, just come over if you have nothing else going on. It's how I met my wife -- I never would have had the courage to ask her out on a real date, but "I make spaghetti for my friends every Saturday, you should come over," was easier. It's been years and I don't often make spaghetti anymore.

Overall interesting piece.

> For any number of reasons, women seem to do better than men at making and keeping adult friendships

I think it’s social pressure and necessity.

When I fail to get my kids a thing they need to school people shrug their shoulders, and I think “I tried” but the pressure on my wife seems to be higher. She judges herself and others judge her harder. Likewise, to meet that pressure she uses her friend group for utility in the same way I might reach out to programmer friends I met at a conf to get a PR merged. She has a bench of mom friends who can pickup her kids and they will expect the same favor in return.

There is a family in our school group where the dad is much more active in that role as connector and planner, but it seems harder for him. I don't think people reach out to him as much for shared favors so he has to try harder. And beyond necessity, they are forming friends. I think the other primary caregivers that are usually women just do not think of him as friend material as quickly or easily as the other mothers. So overall it is harder for him (still do-able just noting a systemic weight).

I found myself taking care of a 10 year old in Taiwan for two weeks (with a group of other students/parents) and that short time was enough for me to do a 180 and really force me to be much more social. I planned things, and socialized. Both because it was fun and it was necessary. I controlled the calendar in totality, bore the risks and rewards and answered to myself. But when we rejoined as a family unit I slipped back into old patterns.

So now I know more what it feels like to have that connection and that symbiotic need. But I'm unsure what to do about it.

Feel like part of the issue is everyone’s self imposed neurosis about not intruding on others. My wife insists on not ever asking to come over to someone’s house - she only wants to be explicitly invited. We invite people over to our place when we can but this leads to us basically never visiting any of our friends because they aren’t the planning type.

Middle-aged, in the US. From my perspective, a lot of the change is due to overbooked children. My wife and I have a group of ~5 couples that we used to get together with regularly. Before any kids, it was ad-hoc, often out somewhere (dinner, bar, whatever). When the first couple had an infant, that changed to pot-lucks at their house (easy to put the kid down for the night). But now that 3 of the couples have kids, 2 of which are in middle-school, it's almost impossible to get the gang together - one of the kids always has some practice or another event. We still get tougher in smaller groups, but less frequently.

This is counter to when I was a kid - it was rare that I had a scheduled sports event on a Friday or Saturday evening. During the day, sure. But 6pm+ on Friday? Basically never. But that seems to be common now. Travel sports, so lots of weekends totally away, or specialized coaching at odd hours, or just a 3rd activity to pad that college application. It's crazy. I honestly have no idea how kids have any fun today (and I say that as somebody who played 2 varsity sports, one instrument, and was an Eagle Scout - but through middle school, I still had plenty of time for just hanging out - it was common to ride my bike for hours on a Sunday - into town, get an ice cream, across the river into DC, and back).

I developed a rich social life simply by saying "yes" to (nearly) every opportunity I was asked.

It takes energy and commitment, just like anything else worthwhile in life. Have the courage to not be good at something, to do it anyway, and to keep doing it.

Many years ago, there weren't so many opportunities, have to make some of your own. (I began my adult life in the midst of the pandemic. I am very aware of how empty the world can feel.) Join clubs, large events, book clubs, art shows, these things exist, you can find them. You won't have many friends at first, but you'll meet a lot of people. I nearly took the LSAT for fun because at some point some kind-of-friends/acquaintances were preparing for law school. Take every opportunity, do anything, figure out what you like, and who you like.

Later on, there is simply not enough time in the day. You can wake up grateful every day that you can do whatever you wish. You will never want for a closer friend. There will always be some challenging adventure you can take. Or a comfortable evening with some close friends. Your friends will show up at your door with gifts, you will see the sunset from some mountain you climbed, you'll run through the rain with your friends and laugh, you'll be familiar with half the rooftops in whatever city you're near, you will have career and social opportunities just because of how many people you know.

And finally, you will have a responsibility to provide good prosocial opportunities for someone else who is figuring out the world.

It is possible.

Humanity's revealed preferences are really, really strong here.

As basically every country on Earth gets richer, two things happen in survey results.

One is that as people get richer they spend more time apart. Household sizes get smaller, the number of social interactions per week goes down, etc.

You'll also see that as countries get richer people say that they report feeling less lonely. Loneliness is less of an issue for the rich countries who live more apart. The correlation between this and GDP is comical. As you get to poorer countries, like clockwork, people report being lonelier in surveys.

The evidence suggests that as people get more choice they decide to see people less and they also feel happier for it and less lonely. So I don't think there's a problem here.

As a heavy introvert, I've started organizing small get-togethers with the help of my wife. I realized that, past a certain age, I was seeing my friends less and less. There are good friends I might see only once a year, when I did the math regarding life expectancy, I realized that if things continued on that path, I might see certain important people, at best, only another 30 or 35 times in total. So, at the start of the year, I decided to organize a monthly poker night and dinner with my inner circle, and to my surprise, everyone accepted. A few days ago, I ran into a former university classmate, I suggested he'd be welcome at my home for these gatherings, and his eyes lit up at the prospect. Another thing that caught my attention is that my female friends all have active social lives, whereas that is very rare among the men I know (again, past a certain age).

> Everybody might prefer, in the abstract, a world of dinner parties, neighborhood friendships, and spontaneous gatherings. But on any given Wednesday at 7:45pm., it is easier to look at a screen than to host a party; easier to listen to a podcast while doing yoga than to plan a gathering. This is not so much an individual failure as a coordination failure. Modernity has shifted leisure from activities that require coordination with other people toward activities that can be consumed without the permission or participation of others. Compared to TikTok, a dinner party is a terrible leisure technology.

This extra coordination “friction” is the killer. The lesson is, if you want more dinner parties you have to reduce the extra coordination “friction” to a minimum.

I'm surprised at this being correlated w/ intensive parenting. Modern parents ARE tired and parenting a lot. That's why on the weekends we invite our friends with kids over and the kids run around and entertain each other so we can have some "Just talk to adults" time with the other parents, maybe watch the NFL games. Even when we take turns hosting, we easily get over the 12x a year mark through this.

Personally feels insane that people find this surprising or puzzling.

You wouldn't be surprised if everyone was smoking and smoking rate was going up massively and then we had a surge of people getting cancer.

This is obviously because of social media or other algorithmic applications. It literally herds people.

It couldn't be more obvious how unhealthy it is, yet there is no demand for it to get outlawed and there won't be any time soon. It is pretty sad.

If you think about the second/third order effects that it will have, it is massively worse than alcohol/drugs.

I see this as a manifestation of the loss of teaching effective communication skills. This takes a moment to explain, so please slow down and consider this: before the cultural revolutions of the 1960's, general education included more emphasis on communications conflicts and resolutions of them. For example, every school had a debate team, and the various forms and rules of debate were common knowledge. Yes, this is true. Debate and watching people skilled at argumentative discussion used to be a popular form of entertainment. Then, during the cultural revolution of the 1960s, the best or the "stars of debate" all sided with the youth culture and not the establishment. That then triggered the removal of debate from educations, from entertainment, and from public life. Now, decades later we have the situation that groups of adults cannot form without conflicts and arguments that drive the community creation aspects away. We have created a culture that cannot communicate, because we have stopped teaching basic oral conflict negotiation of any form.

I'm American and I enjoy hosting at my house. I do it often (imo).

I think some of the stats reviewed in this post are crazy because it is specifically "did it 12+ times in the last year", which means if you only did it 11 times, you simply register as a 'false' according to this modeling.

The graphs with once per year are much more reasonable.

I'm sure these stats still tell you something about life in america, but I feel like this bar is set so extremely high. I'm saying this as someone who LOVES hosting - I don't want to do it 12 times a year. (maybe it's because I set too high of a quality bar for myself?)

I think the default for get-togethers now is a 3rd space, like a bar or a food hall. I'm sure we're all spending more time at home than the 70s and 90s, but it still seems like every couple of weeks I'm going somewhere with friends/acquaintances. Its just not in people's houses.

Apparently around 2004 people started spending more money on food-away-from-home than food-at-home, and it has only increased from there. Dining out seems just much more standard now.

In my experience, most people are overworked, stressed and exhausted.

I don't find it surprising at all that social activities have been declining. It sounds like normal mammal behavior in fact.

Not American.

One big thing I feel contributing to this is a lack of time.

And the more strange unusual thing, many folks basically have "school nights", they don't do anything because they're going to work the next day.

Perhaps work becoming more mentally intensive makes this more difficult.

Swede here, I used to host a lot of dinners and parties.

But then i realized that it was mostly me who hosted them and the few times i got invited there was an agreement that guest chip in on the costs or that it was a potluck kind of thing.

Made me regret spending all that time and money on the parties i hosted.

> But in the 1950s and 1960s, tens of millions of women traded their unpaid household management jobs for salaried jobs, and the family social calendar frayed

I don't think it was exactly a "trade". Women were still (and in some relationships still are) the household managers for the most part.

One notable difference: People were much more likely to have a maid, housekeeper, or nanny in 1950. About 1 in 25 households did then, in 1900 it was 1 in 13.

Another interesting thing is that I think the art of hosting is generational in a way. I grew up watching my parents have massive annual parties and friends over all the time. I learned from watching, and picked my apartment layout and arranged the furniture in it to optimize for comfortable conversation and seating for ~8-12 people. I like being the default host, I still have friends over for TTGs or video games a few times a month. Some people are just not good at getting their space comfortable for gatherings (or they don't offer guests drink / snacks). Or they turn it into a spotify jukebox thing where it's hard to talk over the speakers (or their soundtrack is annoying).

Can I offer up one more possible contributor? Maybe it's cliche, but car dependency. I have family and friends in my own medium-sized city, but the thought of driving all the way over there (20 minutes - 1 hour, totally random), or, even worse, forcing them to drive all the way over here by the invitation, is a bit much. Driving home, even worse. You wanna have some drinks (maybe more than "some", lol), but you gotta drive home.

I know in the 70s folks were just as, if not more car dependent, but it kinda worked back then. I only have real experience in the 90s, but even then, I remember my parents having people over, and I never got the impression they came from very far. Sometimes blocks away. They still drove... but it wasn't the same.

A night of dinner and bowling. Meet us for dinner, then go bowling. Come for just dinner or just bowling. Late for dinner? Not a problem; order whatever; all separate checks. Show up and watch a little bowling, then leave; no problem, whatever you want. Smaller group goes for drinks after bowling? Have fun?

or

Dinner at my house. Starts at 6pm. Don't be late. What to wear? What to bring? Special diet restrictions? Can't be late. How long to stay? Smoking in back yard? Alcohol on site? So many questions and so much to clean up.

This may not be shared by other people, but my two cents.

I personally don't like inviting people to my house (or going to other people's houses) because I already spend a good chunk of my day indoors (I work from home). Whenever possible, I prefer to meet outside.

I actually love and fancy about big breakfasts.

Just imagine that your family and a friend's family are going to camping today. You tell the other guy, hey, tomorrow morning we are going to prepare a big breakfast for everyone. If you don't mind spending an extra 5 minutes diverting into our driveway (mine is 5 mins away from the freeway), you can have a full breakfast before we go camping. The other guy says Yes that's perfect, and the next morning the whole family roll in, smelling sausage, bacon and fried eggs.

Damn that's something I'd like to do once I get rid of my hemmorhoids.

This is why I joined the masons. It’s a dinner party every month with interesting people I would never have met otherwise.

Restaurants, bars, and other meeting places largely sucked until 2005. Tea and coffee houses barely existed.

I don't ever host anyone in my tiny city apartment, we go out. It would be far worse to "host at home". There a places dedicated to hosting, it's a service, why would we not engage with that service?

Spending 3 hours at Qahwah and then wandering over to Port Sa'id is not some lesser experience than doing it all at home. If anything it's a much better experience

The largest wake-up call for me on this was realizing how little my day-to-day life changed during the COVID lockdowns. I never quite realized that what I thought was normal was isolation by national standards. I spent the majority of my 20s basically getting up, going to work, coming home, showering, gaming, sleeping, then getting up to do it again.

After the vaccines I made massive changes. I'd reconnected with old friends during lockdown and they suggested I move to be closer to them. My employer was supportive so I ended up moving to the Bay, even got a large pay bump along side it.

Now if I have an evening alone it's because it's what I chose to do. I ended up connecting with well over a hundred people through friends-of-friends and there's always someone down to do something. We have dinner parties at least once a month, sometimes its one of us cooking for the others, other times its a potluck about bringing something in season. Because of the group size and meetup frequency, there's no pressure to schedule things where everyone can attend and no one feels left out if the timing just didn't work that time. There's always going to be another time.

I am immeasurably happier. Most of my 20s I went to bed reminiscing about how childhood was more fun, now I rarely think back.

Ironically, this whole thing basically killed my video game hobby. I just don't have much motivation to play them now that I can message one of several group chats any day of the week and go do something with people in real life.

You have to be very deliberate about this I find. The number of people who, for whatever reason, buy into the "introvert" mentality: proudly claiming it online, wearing cancelled plans or lets stay in t-shirts, etc is partly responsible for this I think.

In my experience, if you don't accept the first invitation you're much less likely to get another one for repeat events.

My wife and I are in our mid/late 30s and American and I'd say I we go to a proper party hosted by friends or host one ourselves at least once a month. In a "third place" we probably socialize another 1.5 times a week with friends at places like bars or meeting for dinner. This seems to be the norm around me. What's the difference? We live in NYC. It's very easy for us to get around, there's no drunk-driving and there are of course many opportunities for social activities outside the home. Back in the suburban state I come from I've noticed this is not the norm amongst my friends who still live there.

> But when both parents are already inundated with literal white-collar work, it’s hard to add the job of unpaid party planner.

>The trouble with going all in on this explanation—beyond the fact that it embraces a version of learned helplessness for men—is that leisure time has increased overall since the 1950s.

It feels like this doesn't entirely folllow. If the issue is party planning is too similar to work, having more leisure time doesn't fix that.

Like im a computer programmer. I like computer programming and also did it as leisure. When I was employed as a computer programmer it lost most of its appeal as a leisure activity even though in absolute terms i had more free time then before.

Crucially too, people do not know _how_ to host anymore either, treat guests. A host needs a certain self effacing attentivess. host also needs to provide an abundance too, there always should be too much food, too muxh drink, more time to stay.

1. More women work

2. More remote communication

3. Fewer friends through church

4. Fewer friends through kid’s school

5. Kids have more homework and more structure activity than they used to.

6. Less need for entertainment

I had a slightly older Mexican neighbor who would go out of his way to invite everyone in the apartment complex to watch pay per view fights and cook.

He was actually from Mexico, I suspect from a culture that values community much more. I don’t know Hispanic culture that well, but I’ve also gotten this vibe from former partners.

Long long ago when my black family first moved to California they made sure to co locate in the same area. This was partially due to the realities of segregation, but it also made making dinner for your nephew much easier.

Now the community is obsolete. Replaced by insta validation loops.

I wonder if another factor is how many people move around the country.

For families with kids, forming deep friendships as an adult can be a logistical challenge.

Many people have no current relationship with friends they made in college or high school

I love inviting friends and their partners to my place for parties, board games, movie nights, or just hanging out and listening to music. But over time, I’ve witnessed a huge decline in these gatherings. As soon as someone had a kid, they stopped coming to almost 99% of events - maybe showing up once a year, if that. Getting older didn't help either; once people hit 30, everyone started double - checking if they actually had the time or energy to go out.

Finally, as soon as I had my own kid, parties ended for me too. I stopped hosting and attending altogether (I've only organized one and visited one in the last four years). So yes, I can see this shift happening, and it’s sad. But honestly, I have no idea where I’d even find the time or energy to start doing it again.

Beyond that, I value the time I spend with my child more than any other social interaction. Maybe it's just me, but as a Millennial, the warmth, love, and comfort I have at home with my kid completely fulfill my social needs. I’m simply no longer looking for those warm feelings elsewhere.

Not US, under 40. The depiction of dinner parties makes me think not much was lost.

What I gleam from TV shows is: The wife invited people over to brag about her husband's recent promotion or her children's achievements. Once over, they gossiped about a perceived fault in the other family (did you see the son's long hair? I heard he smokes weed!

Sounds like a suburban nightmare. There surely are other socializing events that were more beneficial; like a weekly bowling club meeting.

I don't even think this is an extrovert/intropvert thing completely, so much as what people are used to/how they were brought up.

Some people are very concerned with appearances and therefore uncomfortable with people in their homes (in either direction - too shabby, or flaunting).

Other people (with some overlap with above) are too OCD? about planning and so they turn hosting into such an ordeal they are overwhelmed by it.

In general I find that while I am an introvert, hosting a group isn't really a big deal. I find 2:2 with another couple to be more draining than a group of 10 in terms of being able to step away and catch a moment of calm. Further, as a host .. I get to select who is coming in the first place!

Families (mine included) are just too busy. Working, commuting, homework, trying to get some exercise in. Any spare time I try to spend it with my children.

I always look at happiness in terms of pillars, social, family, work, spiritual. Work somehow has taken over everything. It seems culturally engrained.

I know social media is a factor but while we all fall down the rabbit hole occasionally, it doesn't stop anyone organising a get together.

I actually went to a dinner party this past Saturday. It was planned and coordinated by my best friend's wife (of course). It was the only one this year. I'm sure they will be holiday parties, thanks to my sister-in-law, but that was the one dinner party in 2026. My cohort is mostly retired, so it's not from a lack of spare time.

American here married with 2 children. When my kids were young < 10 we would host several parties a year, bbq's in the summer, birthdays and holidays were always at our place. After about 10+ years of this my wife and I realized we were now dreading whatever upcoming party. We felt like a catering company serving food/drinks/entertainment while everyone else enjoyed it. What made it worse was almost always there would be that one person would mistake this for an all night feast and never leave. I hated having to kick people out but I can't sleep the next day away. Thus we stopped. I know this will vary wildly with the kinds of guests you have and yes we stopped inviting the problem people. Now we do very low-key parties usually less than 5 people and are very selective on who we invite. No regrets here.

The church is a huge part of building community and relationships. Its not that you can't find community and relationships outside of church, it just makes it that much easier. I have found that unless you are seeing people at least once a week or every other week with regularity, it is hard to develop a strong friendship. Church on Sundays, community group, and the occasional group party like our annual costumes and cocktails party build a foundation for developing strong individual relationships. I think with the decline of the church a lot of people just don't have things in their life that provide that relational structure. Some definitely do though!

> Something quite deep in the human psyche seems to want desperately to turn off our self-talk and silence our nattering internal monologues by turning up the volume of other characters’ voices.

Over the past few years, rather than seeking to drown out that internal monologue with external entertainment, I've found myself feeding that monologue into Claude to have what I know is an ersatz conversation. And sometimes I work with Claude to write stories around whatever I'm thinking about, basically a form of escapism and sometimes wish fulfillment through personalized fiction. How weird does this make me? Is it inherently unhealthy?

Edit to add: To tie it back to the theme of the article, the result is, of course, the same; I spend more time alone, less time talking with real people.

> It's too much fun to be home alone

This reminded me of the insurance company TV ad:

https://www.ispot.tv/ad/S7KX/geico-cancelled-plans

> Americans are unhappier than ever

For a slightly different take, the great Experimental History blog wrote about this (in a way...) too:

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/there-is-no-epidemic-...

> More recent data suggests that teenage loneliness might have ticked back up to where it was in the 1980s, and the evidence here is mixed overall, depending on which data sets and cohorts you look at. We don’t yet have enough data to be sure which way the effects go on average, but we do have enough to be sure that those effects are neither large nor universal.