The new issue of The Atlantic has an exhaustive killer piece by Derek Thompson about aloneness and loneliness, The Anti-Social Century— Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. Personally, I spend a lot more time at home than I ever did before. I’m fine with that; mostly I like it and when I don’t, I figure, well, that’s what happens when you get old. I usually eat dinner with Roland most nights and with my friend Dan on Wednesdays when Roland has professional development at his school district. I look forward to a night alone at dinner once on a while so I can read a book.
Last night was Wednesday. I had dinner with the aforementioned friend Dan— AKA, Dr. Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist and celebrated author of Successful Aging, a NY Times bestseller. “Among the most important and vital things we can do to increase our health span— and possibly our lifespan— is to both maintain and create new associations with other people,”he told me over dinner. “Regardless of whether or not you feel lonely, human contact is neuroprotective— especially contact with people you don’t know, or people from different age groups, and different backgrounds. As I wrote in Successful Aging, having a conversation with somebody, you don’t know well is one of the most challenging and healthful things you can do for your brain. Meeting people of different backgrounds requires you to adopt a new perspective and that in itself increases empathy, tolerance, and expands your mind as you imagine different ways of living and different viewpoints. Of course maintaining friendships with people that are like-minded is also important because it provides a level of comfort, grounding, And both idly intellectual and emotional safety. You really need both. As the old poem goes:
Make new friends and keep the old,
One is silver and the other is gold
“Remember: even old friends were once new friends.The name of the game in aging gracefully, is to build up new neural pathways. Spending time with other people is one of the best ways to do that. That certainly doesn’t mean that you can’t or shouldn’t spend time alone. That can also be restorative, grounding, and calming. We need both. Everything in moderation, even moderation.”
I have 3 extra bedrooms in my house but I avoid having anyone stay over. Next week, though, I invited an old friend from college days who I know really well and share a lot of affection with. She’ll be here most of the week. Roland predicts it will drive me crazy after one day.
“The share of U.S. adults,” wrote Thompson, “having dinner or drinks with friends on any given night has declined by more than 30 percent in the past 20 years. ‘There’s an isolationist dynamic that’s taking place in the restaurant business,’ the Washington, D.C., restaurateur Steve Salis told me. ‘I think people feel uncomfortable in the world today. They’ve decided that their home is their sanctuary. It’s not easy to get them to leave.’ Even when Americans eat at restaurants, they are much more likely to do so by themselves. According to data gathered by the online reservations platform OpenTable, solo dining has increased by 29 percent in just the past two years. The No. 1 reason is the need for more ‘me time.’ The evolution of restaurants is retracing the trajectory of another American industry: Hollywood. In the 1930s, video entertainment existed only in theaters, and the typical American went to the movies several times a month. Film was a necessarily collective experience, something enjoyed with friends and in the company of strangers. But technology has turned film into a home delivery system. Today, the typical American adult buys about three movie tickets a year— and watches almost 19 hours of television, the equivalent of roughly eight movies, on a weekly basis. In entertainment, as in dining, modernity has transformed a ritual of togetherness into an experience of homebound reclusion and even solitude.”
Thompson noted that “The privatization of American leisure is one part of a much bigger story. Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data, going back to 1965. Between that year and the end of the 20th century, in-person socializing slowly declined. From 2003 to 2023, it plunged by more than 20 percent, according to the American Time Use Survey, an annual study conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among unmarried men and people younger than 25, the decline was more than 35 percent. Alone time predictably spiked during the pandemic. But the trend had started long before most people had ever heard of a novel coronavirus and continued after the pandemic was declared over. According to Enghin Atalay, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Americans spent even more time alone in 2023 than they did in 2021.”
Eroding companionship can be seen in numerous odd and depressing facts of American life today. Men who watch television now spend seven hours in front of the TV for every hour they spend hanging out with somebody outside their home. The typical female pet owner spends more time actively engaged with her pet than she spends in face-to-face contact with friends of her own species. Since the early 2000s, the amount of time that Americans say they spend helping or caring for people outside their nuclear family has declined by more than a third.
Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many observers have reduced this phenomenon to the topic of loneliness. In 2023, Vivek Murthy, Joe Biden’s surgeon general, published an 81-page warning about America’s “epidemic of loneliness,” claiming that its negative health effects were on par with those of tobacco use and obesity. A growing number of public-health officials seem to regard loneliness as the developed world’s next critical public-health issue. The United Kingdom now has a minister for loneliness. So does Japan.
[Perfect next job for Pete Buttigieg or Kamala Harris.]
But solitude and loneliness are not one and the same. “It is actually a very healthy emotional response to feel some loneliness,” the NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg told me. “That cue is the thing that pushes you off the couch and into face-to-face interaction.” The real problem here, the nature of America’s social crisis, is that most Americans don’t seem to be reacting to the biological cue to spend more time with other people. Their solitude levels are surging while many measures of loneliness are actually flat or dropping. A 2021 study of the widely used UCLA Loneliness Scale concluded that “the frequently used term ‘loneliness epidemic’ seems exaggerated.” Although young people are lonelier than they once were, there is little evidence that loneliness is rising more broadly today. A 2023 Gallup survey found that the share of Americans who said they experienced loneliness “a lot of the day yesterday” declined by roughly one-third from 2021 to 2023, even as alone time, by Atalay’s calculation, rose slightly.
Day to day, hour to hour, we are choosing this way of life— its comforts, its ready entertainments. But convenience can be a curse. Our habits are creating what Atalay has called a “century of solitude.” This is the anti-social century.
…The individual preference for solitude, scaled up across society and exercised repeatedly over time, is rewiring America’s civic and psychic identity. And the consequences are far-reaching— for our happiness, our communities, our politics, and even our understanding of reality… What happened in the 1970s? Klinenberg, the sociologist, notes a shift in political priorities: The government dramatically slowed its construction of public spaces. “Places that used to anchor community life, like libraries and school gyms and union halls, have become less accessible or shuttered altogether,” he told me. Putnam points, among other things, to new moral values, such as the embrace of unbridled individualism. But he found that two of the most important factors were by then ubiquitous technologies: the automobile and the television set.
Starting in the second half of the century, Americans used their cars to move farther and farther away from one another, enabling the growth of the suburbs and, with it, a retreat into private backyard patios, private pools, a more private life. Once Americans got out of the car, they planted themselves in front of the television. From 1965 to 1995, the typical adult gained six hours a week in leisure time. They could have devoted that time— 300 hours a year!— to community service, or pickup basketball, or reading, or knitting, or all four. Instead, they funneled almost all of this extra time into watching more TV.
Television transformed Americans’ interior decorating, our relationships, and our communities. In 1970, just 6 percent of sixth graders had a TV set in their bedroom; in 1999, that proportion had grown to 77 percent. Time diaries in the 1990s showed that husbands and wives spent almost four times as many hours watching TV together as they spent talking to each other in a given week. People who said TV was their “primary form of entertainment” were less likely to engage in practically every social activity that [political scientist Robert] Putnam counted: volunteering, churchgoing, attending dinner parties, picnicking, giving blood, even sending greeting cards. Like a murder in Clue, the death of social connections in America had any number of suspects. But in the end, I believe the likeliest culprit is obvious. It was Mr. Farnsworth, in the living room, with the tube.
If two of the 20th century’s iconic technologies, the automobile and the television, initiated the rise of American aloneness, the 21st century’s most notorious piece of hardware has continued to fuel, and has indeed accelerated, our national anti-social streak. Countless books, articles, and cable-news segments have warned Americans that smartphones can negatively affect mental health and may be especially harmful to adolescents. But the fretful coverage is, if anything, restrained given how greatly these devices have changed our conscious experience. The typical person is awake for about 900 minutes a day. American kids and teenagers spend, on average, about 270 minutes on weekdays and 380 minutes on weekends gazing into their screens, according to the Digital Parenthood Initiative. By this account, screens occupy more than 30 percent of their waking life.
Some of this screen time is social, after a fashion. But sharing videos or texting friends is a pale imitation of face-to-face interaction. More worrisome than what young people do on their phone is what they aren’t doing. Young people are less likely than in previous decades to get their driver’s license, or to go on a date, or to have more than one close friend, or even to hang out with their friends at all. The share of boys and girls who say they meet up with friends almost daily outside school hours has declined by nearly 50 percent since the early 1990s, with the sharpest downturn occurring in the 2010s.
The decline of hanging out can’t be shrugged off as a benign generational change, something akin to a preference for bell-bottoms over skinny jeans. Human childhood— including adolescence— is a uniquely sensitive period in the whole of the animal kingdom, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in The Anxious Generation. Although the human brain grows to 90 percent of its full size by age 5, its neural circuitry takes a long time to mature. Our lengthy childhood might be evolution’s way of scheduling an extended apprenticeship in social learning through play. The best kind of play is physical, outdoors, with other kids, and unsupervised, allowing children to press the limits of their abilities while figuring out how to manage conflict and tolerate pain. But now young people’s attention is funneled into devices that take them out of their body, denying them the physical-world education they need.
Teen anxiety and depression are at near-record highs: The latest government survey of high schoolers, conducted in 2023, found that more than half of teen girls said they felt “persistently sad or hopeless.” These data are alarming, but shouldn’t be surprising. Young rats and monkeys deprived of play come away socially and emotionally impaired. It would be odd if we, the self-named “social animal,” were different.
Socially undeveloped childhood leads, almost inexorably, to socially stunted adulthood. A popular trend on TikTok involves 20‑somethings celebrating in creative ways when a friend cancels plans, often because they’re too tired or anxious to leave the house. These clips can be goofy and even quite funny. Surely, sympathy is due; we all know the feeling of relief when we claw back free time in an overscheduled week. But the sheer number of videos is a bit unsettling. If anybody should feel lonely and desperate for physical-world contact, you’d think it would be 20-somethings, who are still recovering from years of pandemic cabin fever. But many nights, it seems, members of America’s most isolated generation aren’t trying to leave the house at all. They’re turning on their cameras to advertise to the world the joy of not hanging out.
If young adults feel overwhelmed by the emotional costs of physical-world togetherness— and prone to keeping even close friends at a physical distance— that suggests that phones aren’t just rewiring adolescence; they’re upending the psychology of friendship as well.
Last year, the Princeton University sociologist Patrick Sharkey was working on a book about how places shape American lives and economic fortunes. He had a feeling that the rise of remote work might have accelerated a longer-term trend: a shift in the amount of time that people spend inside their home. He ran the numbers and discovered “an astounding change” in our daily habits, much more extreme than he would have guessed. In 2022— notably, after the pandemic had abated— adults spent an additional 99 minutes at home on any given day compared with 2003.
This finding formed the basis of a 2024 paper, “Homebound,” in which Sharkey calculated that, compared with 2003, Americans are more likely to take meetings from home, to shop from home, to be entertained at home, to eat at home, and even to worship at home. Practically the entire economy has reoriented itself to allow Americans to stay within their four walls. This phenomenon cannot be reduced to remote work. It is something far more totalizing— something more like “remote life.”
One might ask: Why wouldn’t Americans with means want to spend more time at home? In the past few decades, the typical American home has become bigger, more comfortable, and more entertaining. From 1973 to 2023, the size of the average new single-family house increased by 50 percent, and the share of new single-family houses that have air-conditioning doubled, to 98 percent. Streaming services, video-game consoles, and flatscreen TVs make the living room more diverting than any 20th-century theater or arcade. Yet conveniences can indeed be a curse. By Sharkey’s calculations, activities at home were associated with a “strong reduction” in self-reported happiness.
A homebound life doesn’t have to be a solitary life. In the 1970s, the typical household entertained more than once a month. But from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, the frequency of hosting friends for parties, games, dinners, and so on declined by 45 percent, according to data that Robert Putnam gathered. In the 20 years after Bowling Alone was published, the average amount of time that Americans spent hosting or attending social events declined another 32 percent.
…All of this time alone, at home, on the phone, is not just affecting us as individuals. It’s making society weaker, meaner, and more delusional. Marc Dunkelman, an author and a research fellow at Brown University, says that to see how chosen solitude is warping society at large, we must first acknowledge something a little counterintuitive: Today, many of our bonds are actually getting stronger.
Parents are spending more time with their children than they did several decades ago, and many couples and families maintain an unbroken flow of communication. “My wife and I have texted 10 times since we said goodbye today,” Dunkelman told me when I reached him at noon on a weekday. “When my 10-year-old daughter buys a Butterfinger at CVS, I get a phone notification about it.”
…Home-based, phone-based culture has arguably solidified our closest and most distant connections, the inner ring of family and best friends (bound by blood and intimacy) and the outer ring of tribe (linked by shared affinities). But it’s wreaking havoc on the middle ring of “familiar but not intimate” relationships with the people who live around us, which Dunkelman calls the village. “These are your neighbors, the people in your town,” he said. We used to know them well; now we don’t.
The middle ring is key to social cohesion, Dunkelman said. Families teach us love, and tribes teach us loyalty. The village teaches us tolerance. Imagine that a local parent disagrees with you about affirmative action at a PTA meeting. Online, you might write him off as a political opponent who deserves your scorn. But in a school gym full of neighbors, you bite your tongue. As the year rolls on, you discover that your daughters are in the same dance class. At pickup, you swap stories about caring for aging relatives. Although your differences don’t disappear, they’re folded into a peaceful coexistence. And when the two of you sign up for a committee to draft a diversity statement for the school, you find that you can accommodate each other’s opposing views. “It’s politically moderating to meet thoughtful people in the real world who disagree with you,” Dunkelman said. But if PTA meetings are still frequently held in person, many other opportunities to meet and understand one’s neighbors are becoming a thing of the past. “An important implication of the death of the middle ring is that if you have no appreciation for why the other side has their narrative, you’ll want your own side to fight them without compromise.”
The village is our best arena for practicing productive disagreement and compromise— in other words, democracy. So it’s no surprise that the erosion of the village has coincided with the emergence of a grotesque style of politics, in which every election feels like an existential quest to vanquish an intramural enemy. For the past five decades, the American National Election Studies surveys have asked Democrats and Republicans to rate the opposing party on a “Feeling Thermometer that ranges from zero (very cold/unfavorable) to 100 (very warm/favorable). In 2000, just 8 percent of partisans gave the other party a zero. By 2020, that figure had shot up to 40 percent. In a 2021 poll by Generation Lab/Axios, nearly a third of college students who identify as Republican said they wouldn’t even go on a date with a Democrat, and more than two-thirds of Democratic students said the same of members of the GOP.
Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election had many causes, including inflation and frustration with Joe Biden’s leadership. But one source of Trump’s success may be that he is an avatar of the all-tribe, no-village style of performative confrontation. He stokes out-group animosity, and speaks to voters who are furiously intolerant of political difference. To cite just a few examples from the campaign, Trump called Democrats “enemies of the democracy” and the news media “enemies of the people,” and promised to “root out” the “radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”
Social disconnection also helps explain progressives’ stubborn inability to understand Trump’s appeal. In the fall, one popular Democratic lawn sign read harris walz: obviously. That sentiment, rejected by a majority of voters, indicates a failure to engage with the world as it really is. Dunkelman emailed me after the election to lament Democratic cluelessness. “How did those of us who live in elite circles not see how Trump was gaining popularity even among our literal neighbors?” he wrote. Too many progressives were mainlining left-wing media in the privacy of their home, oblivious that families down the street were drifting right. Even in the highly progressive borough of Brooklyn, New York, three in 10 voters chose Trump. If progressives still consider MAGA an alien movement, it is in part because they have made themselves strangers in their own land.
Practicing politics alone, on the internet, rather than in community isn’t only making us more likely to demonize and alienate our opponents, though that would be bad enough. It may also be encouraging deep nihilism. In 2018, a group of researchers led by Michael Bang Petersen, a Danish political scientist, began asking Americans to evaluate false rumors about Democratic and Republican politicians, including Trump and Hillary Clinton. “We were expecting a clear pattern of polarization,” Petersen told me, with people on the left sharing conspiracies about the right and vice versa. But some participants seemed drawn to any conspiracy theory so long as it was intended to destroy the established order. Members of this cohort commonly harbored racial or economic grievances. Perhaps more important, Petersen said, they tended to feel socially isolated. These aggravated loners agreed with many dark pronouncements, such as “I need chaos around me” and “When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn.’ ” Petersen and his colleagues coined a term to describe this cohort’s motivation: the need for chaos.
Although chaotically inclined individuals score highly in a popular measure for loneliness, they don’t seem to seek the obvious remedy. “What they’re reaching out to get isn’t friendship at all but rather recognition and status,” Petersen said. For many socially isolated men in particular, for whom reality consists primarily of glowing screens in empty rooms, a vote for destruction is a politics of last resort— a way to leave one’s mark on a world where collective progress, or collective support of any kind, feels impossible.
…The anti-social century has been bad enough: more anxiety and depression; more “need for chaos” in our politics. But I’m sorry to say that our collective detachment could still get worse. Or, to be more precise, weirder.
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