The death of partying in the USA

https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-death-of-partying-in-the-usaand

by tysone • 1 year ago

435 721 1 year ago

eplatzek• 1 year ago

With COVID partying meant that someone could kill you with an illness. That's a pretty hard lesson to unlearn. They carries a lot of momentum.

Like with World Wars there's been a generational impact that changed how people relate to one another. The tribal momentum, of one monkey teaching the next, gets lost.

xeromal• 1 year ago

I'm sure COVID had something to do with it but I think partying is another casualty of social media.

Similar to discord for gaming, talking to your random peers has completely fell off

openbankerX• 1 year ago

prices too, partying is expensive and should be the first line item cut in hard times.

carl_dr• 1 year ago

Except the graph shows this was happening way before COVID. The internet and how that has changed how people relate is much more likely the reason.

api6• 1 year ago

One of the first things I did with the net was to connect with people to go out and party with. Amazing how that morphed into zombie doom scrolling, something I would never have predicted.

luckydata5• 1 year ago

in my opinion the largest effect is how we build cities. Having to drive everywhere and the separation between commercial, residential and industrial areas of american cities is very clearly a driver of this isolation.

southernplaces72• 1 year ago

With COVID partying meant that someone could kill you with an illness.

Given the mortality rate for people typically in the partying age group (and especially those under 30), you were more likely to die in a traffic accident on your way to or back from the party, or from alcohol poisoning, than from a case of COVID acquired there. Let's not exaggerate.

From the NIH: The median IFR for COVID based on age groups: 0.0003% at 0–19 years, 0.002% at 20–29 years, 0.011% at 30–39 years.

The 1918 Flu it was certainly not.

sltkr• 1 year ago

To be pedantic, it's still possible for people to modify their behavior based on mistaken beliefs (in this case, that COVID is really dangerous, when it isn't for healthy young people). Though I don't think this explains the actual trend in this case.

add-sub-mul-div• 1 year ago

Some people didn't want to get it even if they were guaranteed to survive, because they could pass it to others who were more vulnerable to it.

triceratops• 1 year ago

Dying isn't the only risk from catchig Covid.

VLM3• 1 year ago

Its the wrong statistical analysis of the situation. The death rate does not even remotely depend on infection source IIRC. Last stat I saw (from some years ago) was in excess of 96.7% of the population had blood antibodies for covid. You are going to catch covid, your only decision is when and what you can do WRT personal health to lower the risk (aside from "do not be old" there's "do not be fat" "do not be out of shape WRT cardio" etc) If your local hospital is swamped with cases it would be irresponsible to throw a rager and infect 100 people, at that moment. If your local hospital is empty and all the nurses are doing at work is posting tiktok dances for karma upvotes, and the odds of catching it eventually are 97%, you may as well have a good time; if you're going to get just as sick regardless if you have fun getting there or not. Almost all of the "lockdown time" was the latter not the former and only something approaching a civil rebellion ended the latter era. If it were not for that we would still be locked down today in 2025. The situation is not at all even remotely like smoking where not smoking means you're probably not going to get lung cancer. You are getting covid, and you have minimal but not zero control over when, if now is not a bad time, don't worry, if now is a bad time, out of an abundance of caution you might want to slow (not eliminate) the spread. You're getting it eventually, you can either be brave and happy and social on the way... or the opposite. A lot of people chose the latter.

patrickthebold• 1 year ago

Reminds me of the Jonathan Richman classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6Pg9IGgQpY

gilbetron3• 1 year ago

Holy crap, I've never seen a Janathan Richman recommendation on the Internet ever ;) I listened to him like crazy in college (1988ish) and saw him play once. My favorite still remains https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR6Ns3AcDco

I know two other people that know of Richman, four if you count my wife and son who I made listen to him!

edit: had to add Richman was a big influence on the Talking Heads :)

lr4444lr4• 1 year ago

The parental part bears special mention.

My spouse and I find that we are overwhelmingly the ones calling to organize playdates rather than vice versa. I'd like to think it's not that my kids are poorly socialized or misbehave - they've always received glowing reports at school. I give my kids business cards with my phone number to pass out to their friends to give to their parents, and there is also a class list where our phone numbers are listed (and where we find these other parents' contact info).

Something happened with the culture of getting kids to play with each other outside of school hours, and I don't know what it was. COVID lockdowns definitely delayed it from starting for our kids, but I know these parents are mostly in my generation, and we certainly played more together.

We live in the suburbs, so it's not a car creep problem - at least, no more than it was 60+ years ago when the numbers were better. When I ask the parents who stay, they tell me a vague mix of weekend junior sports leagues, visiting relatives, and just being really tired after working all week. They're lame excuses: spending time with kids constantly is _also_ really tiring.

Kids having regular playdates would encourage more familiarity among the families and trust in letting kids play unsupervised with each other. Often I take them to the main playground, and it's virtually empty. I can't believe I'm the only one in the community who's unhappy enough about this to try and change it.

lawlessone2• 1 year ago

I give my kids business cards with my phone number to pass out to their friends to give to their parents

Yeah if i was a kid i'd be mortified at having to do this.

luckydata5• 1 year ago

it's the only way it works. It took me MONTHS to get a hold of the number of my son's best friend's parents so that now we can organize maybe an afternoon of play every 4-5 weeks.

jamiek884• 1 year ago

I physically cringed reading it. The intention is great but if I was his kid those cards would be staying in my backpack. Making a kid stand out like that is risky as fuck for social standing.

But this is likely the worst forum in the world to talk about typical social skills.

wombatpm• 1 year ago

I would do this. Of course I’d have cards made up that say “Hoopy Frood who really knows where his towel is” as a screen for parents with similar sense of humor.

tclancy• 1 year ago

Really? While I don’t do it, the alternative is having a kid come home with a scrawled phone number that may or may not be right along with a vague recollection of the name of the parent I am supposed to be calling. Things are a little less akward in our life but it may be because we are closer to what OP describes as grandparents I suppose.

I get the idea, but I would suggest the reaction to an attempt at lubricating social interaction as “cringe” is part of the issue OP is describing.

jemmyw• 1 year ago

My kids would totally be up for this. I don't have business cards though

lr4444lr4• 1 year ago

My kids asked for them. They are under 10. (They asked me to write down my number to give to their friends. Business card is just as good.)

We don't have a landline, and there's no way in hell they're getting their own phones at that age.

fundad4• 1 year ago

It would be one thing if it worked. The OP admits that their kids don't initiate socializing but also claims they aren't poorly socialized. Blaming every parent but themselves when their parenting resulted in kids that don't seem to try hard enough.

volkl48• 1 year ago

I'll suggest you are thinking of the teenage years where anything involving your parents is mortifying.

That's not really the case with elementary school age kids.

tuna743• 1 year ago

If you are 5 year old it would most probably feel strange.

011000115• 1 year ago

Parents just want to watch their Internet content and it's easier to just stick their kids in front of a video game or computer vs having an event that requires parenting.

At least when parents are addicted to alcohol they can still be social and function as parents. Not so with Instagram/tiktok.

meepmorp• 1 year ago

How old are your kids?

mtrovo• 1 year ago

Oh that rings true and it's so depressive. But I think it has more to do with this notion that everything you do socially is awkward in some degree and could be seeing as bad or hurtful, smartphones didn't help us there with the chance of becoming the next national meme just a tiktok away.

Also social interactions nowadays have become so "one of a kind" and disconnected from a general contract that sometimes it's hard to not feel overwhelmed, I remember being 10 years old and just knocking on the door of my neighbourhood friends to check on them and kind of invite me in, depending on the time I would stay and grab dinner there and only come back home when it was getting too dark. Now as a parent I feel this serendipity is almost gone, you have to officially arrange play dates on parent groups, pick kids up, ask parents what kind of food should I offer, is it ok if I let them play videogames, is it ok to offer sugary drinks, list goes on and on.

In that world consuming media is much easier, but I wouldn't say that's because it is addictive on itself, I think there's a big portion of people that just got tired of trying to navigate how to interact with others. My impression is that the proportion between lurkers to posters increased with time on different platforms including in real life.

api6• 1 year ago

It was already happening before COVID. All these trends were. That just made it worse.

A major issue is the death of independent child play. In a lot of places if a kid — and we are talking up to early teens — is unsupervised police will be called. It’s entirely the result of daytime TV and true crime making people think there are pedophile nuts hiding in every bush when in reality abductions by strangers are incredibly rare. If a kid is abused or worse it’s almost always someone they know.

One of the things I love about where we live is that kids do still play outside. It’s a safe Midwestern suburb. We moved from SoCal and there you would definitely have some busybody call the cops. Of course it was perhaps more dangerous — not because of crime but cars. All the suburban streets have like 60mph speed limits in SoCal.

asdff8• 1 year ago

It depends where in socal of course like anywhere else. In a more urban part like in la there are no busy bodies, you see kids out skateboarding drainage culverts during school hours all the time.

firesteelrain2• 1 year ago

During COVID, every kid in the neighborhood was at my house. School was short maybe 1-3 hours then it was play time. I didn’t know all those kids lived in my neighborhood! Kids had no issue coming over.

I don’t know what the reason is for this phenomenon

ryandrake6• 1 year ago

Often the kids like to play together, but the parents are the ones that are just... weird and asocial. I hate to bring agism into this, but there definitely seems to be a generational gap with the adults.

Some of my kid's friends are raised by their parents, and others are (apparently) raised primarily by grandparents.

When my kid wants to get together with friends whose (50-60 year old) grandparents bring them by, the grandparents come up to the door, socialize for a bit while the kid runs inside, and then we talk about when the playtime will be over and they can come over to pick the kid up. If it's an event where we both bring the kids, I find it easy to shoot the breeze with the grandparents, have small talk about how the week went, and so on.

When the parents are, say, 25-35 year old range, it's a totally different vibe. They'll drive up, let the kid out of the car, and then race away without even getting out of their car. When playtime is at a local park or something, they sometimes hang around, but they go off into a corner, engrossed on their phone, totally ignoring the other parents (who, depending on their own ages are either chit chatting or locked into their Instagram).

I remember when I was a kid in the 80s, and not only would we love to get together at someone's house, but the parents would also be happy to get together for a little socialization, maybe throw some steaks on the grill, put on some Sportsball, or whatever. This practice seems to be dead now that I'm a parent!

lurking_swe• 1 year ago

context: i’m in my early 30’s and i’m not a parent

the behavior you described of the 25-35 year range is appalling. and those aren’t my kids so that’s saying something.

Call it what it is, antisocial. Baffling to me…why are people so weird?

antonymoose• 1 year ago

I’ll endorse this heavily.

We bought into a nice suburban community. Good schools, low crime, the dream.

No one knows any neighbors. Kids rarely play with one another intra-neighborhood despite a very healthy blend of age ranges. In fact, I’ve loosely associate with exactly one neighbor in the three years. We went out of our way to try and meet neighbors our first month. Most treated us as if we head too many heads on our shoulders.

Despite a heavy presence of children, no one here celebrate Halloween despite it being a beloved night growing up around here. Our first year we invested heavily in decorations and spent hundreds on the King size candy bars.

Society feels… dead compared to me as an early 90s child.

surgical_fire2• 1 year ago

I am probably that sort of parent. Truth is I dread socializing. I enjoy just hanging around with my family in the peace and quiet of my home. Not one to engage in small talk with neighbors, other parents, etc.

My daughter is still a baby, and I don't want her to become a shut-in because of my antisocial tendencies. So yeah, I will take her to the public playground, get her into the local sport activities, this sort of thing. But I would likely be the parent in the playground just sitting by himself while the daughter plays, maybe reading a book (I also hate social media in general, so no doomscrolling for me).

It's a difficult balance.

luckydata5• 1 year ago

I see this SO MUCH, I wonder if you're also in California. I find this state particularly difficult to have a social life in. Everyone is "friendly" but nobody wants to be your friend, always chasing something else and never making time (exceptions apply). It's been exhausting to live here and I can't wait to go back to Europe where social life was not nearly as difficult.

bluGill11• 1 year ago

People are friendly everywhere, but they mostly already have a full friend group and so are not looking to add more. Thus breaking in as a new comer is hard. However there are always people who need new friends it is just hard to find them.

heavyset_go• 1 year ago

I wonder how much of this comes down to wage stagnation and the need for not only both parents to work, but to work more hours and sometimes multiple jobs, just to keep from drowning. Especially when childcare is so expensive, it's a situation that can compound and spiral.

Apocryphon7• 1 year ago

I wonder how the generation of latchkey kids fared.

analog31• 1 year ago

One factor may have to do with birth rates and construction. I grew up in a neighborhood that was all built up within the span of a few years, and populated by young families, in the early 60s. There were kids all over the place. Anybody who wanted to play would just go out and holler, and they'd have a few other kids almost instantly.

Where my wife and I raised our kids, there was one neighbor with kids, and that's it.

Also, kids are more occupied now. "Back in my day" elementary school kids didn't have homework, and it was pretty minimal even through high school. My kids had homework starting in first grade. Naturally you want it to get done early while the kids are still awake, but this cuts into the prime hours for play. We should simply have revolted against it. But that's hindsight.

firesteelrain2• 1 year ago

I had lots of homework 80s-90s. But still managed to get outside, play, do stupid stuff. My house had all the kids playing video games and when we got tired of that we went to play sports.

taeric6• 1 year ago

What happened is that everything turned into playdates? When we were kids, the general direction was GTFO, and don't be late for dinner. Who did you go play with? Whoever was at the park. When you got older, you hopefully had access to the skating rink. Or maybe a bowling alley. Before that, kickball at the park. Pretty much every day. Maybe see if you can over shoot the swing again.

jppope3• 1 year ago

Totally valid observation, but things definitely changed. Neighbors don't know each other as well, so the grandma keeping an eye out the back window doesn't exist anymore. It was a village watching the kids before, its not that way now.

lbrito2• 1 year ago

There was a line somewhere about Americans being increasingly unable to handle unstructured socializing.

Parties typically have some sort of rules-based activity, be it beer pong or board games. Playdates themselves are perhaps the first manifestation of such phenomenon.

udkl• 1 year ago

The concept of playdates is amusing to me as an immigrant. In Indian cities where most people live in apartments, the kids just go down and play around with the 10s of kids from the neighborhood. Adults get free time and kids get to socialize and enjoy.

parpfish3• 1 year ago

Im convinced that car seat rules have played a big role in shaping child socialization.

When was a kid, you were done with your car seat by elementary school so one parent could offer to carpool a minivan full of kids to/from an event.

But now that some kids need their car seat into middle school carpools are gone and every kid needs their parent to pick them up. It requires way more planning and parental involvement

boogieknite• 1 year ago

some of our common free range play places included walking to the dump and new home construction sites to have dirt clod wars. maybe some structure isnt bad. i turned out fine but looking back it probably would have been cool to get taken to a park

micromacrofoot5• 1 year ago

I saw a reddit post where a woman was arrested for letting her 10 year old walk a mile alone

MontyCarloHall• 1 year ago

There’s no way to say this without coming across as extremely rude, but…

I give my kids business cards with my phone number to pass out to their friends to give to their parents

If this isn’t the only thing you/your kids do that’s well outside typical social norms, that’s probably the reason nobody else is inviting them. This is almost on the level of parents accompanying their adult kids to job interviews and then wondering why their kid didn’t get an offer.

lr4444lr4• 1 year ago

As I posted above, my kids literally asked for them. They are both under 10, and don't have their own phones.

throwaway1737385• 1 year ago

You might want to pause and think about why policing another person’s behavior like this is so fervently important to you. Most of the parents I’ve met wouldn’t push something like this on their kids but would rather treat it like a collaboration. Kids even at age 5 are capable of explaining that they don’t want to do something and nothing in the parent implied use of fiat. We all need to assume more good faith on the part of parents and of our neighbors if we want to have a social fabric and reasonable discussions.

conception• 1 year ago

Some good answers but also American parents are stretched thin but also perhaps want to be a larger part of their kids lives?

During the week I get maybe 10-30 minutes of quality time with them outside of the routine of weekly life. Maybe?

So if I want to do something with my children and have a relationship with them, the weekends are all I have.

Aaaand of course,quality of life in America is generally in decline and parents usually have no support structure (family etc) so no one has interest in the extra work of doing playdates.

asdff8• 1 year ago

It is kind of paradoxical because kids would like the opposite honestly. I love my parents, they are great people, but knowing myself as a kid if I was asked if I wanted to spend saturday with my friends or with my parents, I'd pick my friends every single time no hesitation. You don't laugh like you do with your friends with anyone else. You don't get into shenanigans. You don't have to worry about "behavior" or anything like that. No matter how nice and open your parents are, friends are truly liberating.

bluGill11• 1 year ago

Why so little time? A large part of the daily routine is things they should be doing with you as quality time. You shouldn't be cooking, eating, and dishes alone - that is a couple hours right there per day.

lc9er• 1 year ago

Kids used to just go outside, find one another, and play. I see that you are attempting to solve the problem with organizing playdates. However, I think that playdates and structured EVERYTHING for kids is a contributing factor to how we got here.

I think at some point, we need to acknowledge media sensationalism (traditional and social media varieties) have not only poisoned politics and bolstered conspiracy theory popularity, but have vastly overstated the dangers of every day life, making childhood and parenting much worse than a generation or two ago.

avhception2• 1 year ago

When I was a kid, we would always hatch a plan on what to do with the rest of the day while we were still at school. As soon as the bell rang, we hurried home to catch something to eat and then it was off to the woods to build that fortress or whatever. If there was no school, we'd call the house phones of our friends until we had a plan cooked up. And every day without fail we didn't want to go home. So much stuff to do!

Now, watching the kids my friends have - they won't even leave the house if their parents didn't plan a playdate and brought them there. Something is completely off.

wffurr3• 1 year ago

Same, it’s really disappointing how few parents have reached out to play compared to how often I am trying to find one of my kids’ friends who is around to play.

bluGill11• 1 year ago

Why are you doing this? Your kids should be able to find their own playmates. If you live on a farm I can see that kids can't get to anyone else's place without your help. The neighbor girl comes over to our house often to play with my daughter often. My son is annoyed that there are so few boys his age in walking distance (but we keep telling him to go visit the ones we know are in the neighborhood). We are lucky that neighbor girl is really outgoing as otherwise my daughter would sit at home complaining there is nobody to play with just like my son does...

asdff8• 1 year ago

Parties and kids aren't mutually exclusive. In fact some of my best memories growing up were from the times my parents took me to some house party where all the parents were talking and drinking and having their own adult fun, while us kids were running wild over the property and neighborhood until real late. Adults are excited, kids are excited, it just works, see you next weekend.

lbrito2• 1 year ago

As a father of 2 in Canada, I feel the same. Loving the discussion here.

Seems like an opening to build a SaaS to encourage kids to socialize.

DaSHacka5• 1 year ago

Seems like an opening to build a SaaS to encourage kids to socialize.

that's... not actually a terrible idea

bradlys• 1 year ago

Why do the kids need play dates? When I was a 7, you’d just talk to the kids down the street. I knew several kids within a few blocks of where I lived.

It seemed like a really far distance that I went to see people but now I realize I never went more than a quarter mile from home to see someone. There were just a lot of families in my area that had kids.

Of course, that’s not true in a lot of the areas I’m in now. My friends experience the same where it’s hard to meet people who have kids of similar age. There might be 50 homes and only 1-2 will have kids near the same age. Many won’t have any kids at all.

Thinking back on it, it was surprising how many kids there were near me near my age growing up compared to now.

watwut12• 1 year ago

We live in the suburbs, so it's not a car creep problem - at least, no more than it was 60+ years ago when the numbers were better.

Kids were not driven to playdates 60+ years ago. They would play with other kids living nearby. Parents would not organize their playdates either.

When I ask the parents who stay, they tell me a vague mix of weekend junior sports leagues, visiting relatives, and just being really tired after working all week. They're lame excuses: spending time with kids constantly is _also_ really tiring.

I do not seen how these are "lame excuses". Seems like valid things that lower your availability and also valid reasons to want to you remaining time for own rest.

Often I take them to the main playground, and it's virtually empty. I can't believe I'm the only one in the community who's unhappy enough about this to try and change it.

60+ years ago, 6 years old kids would go to main playground on their own. Partly it is that kids are much less independent these days ... and partly it is that their own rooms are much more fun. So, kids want to stay at home because it is good enough and parents do not want to sit bored on playground.

empath75• 1 year ago

There is a coordinated action problem here, I think. (I have three young kids).

When I was a kid, I could be relatively sure that if I went outside on a random day, there would be other kids playing outside. So, all the kids went outside most days to play.

I _could_ send my kid out to play and there _are_ other kids in the neighborhood, but almost all of them are inside playing video games. At best there might be some kids going on a walk with their parents.

If my oldest kid wants to interact with with his friends, his best bet is to get on fortnite, which he does most days _and he doesn't even like fortnite_.

bluGill11• 1 year ago

Families are smaller in general. That means there are less kids to see in most neighborhoods even if they are outside.

pavon3• 1 year ago

Another aspect of the coordination problem is that when I was a kid all the other children in the neighborhood rode the bus home together, and many of us got home before our parents were back from work, so playing together until dinner time was the natural thing to do.

These days, the school day is longer and more parents drive their kids to and from school, so extra effort is required for kids to get back together.

booleanbetrayal• 1 year ago

Every family is dual income now, so every family needs to find something to do with their kids once school lets out. Growing up in the 80's most families around were single income and kept kids at home over the summers. As a result, kids ruled the neighborhoods, bouncing around between houses all day, where there could be some reasonable expectation of peripheral oversight. Now, everyone is min-maxing camp schedule to ensure there is child oversight during working hours, and the neighborhoods are empty.

We decided to break from the trend and return our kids to more of a free-range kid paradigm, risking the disruption to our working schedules, this year. It sounds good in theory, but you are left with the realities of every other child friend being wrapped in camp schedules, as well. It took a lot of proactive discussions with other parents to convince them to keep their kids at home and accessible. But you're still left with the dual income problem, so you find yourself hiring a sitter to oversee and shuttle.

The result is an improvement over the 100% booked compartmentalized camp situation, but without the same level of independence that I experienced and have come to credit with really advancing my own personal development as a child.

pavon3• 1 year ago

By BLS statistics, 50% of married couples today both work[1], which is the same as it was in 1978, and lower than it was for most of the 80's and 90's[2]. There are some caveats to those statistics. They cover all married couples, including retirees, and there are more retirees today than in the 80s. It also doesn't differentiate between full-time and part-time work.

However, it does show that the majority of families were already dual-income by the 80's. The trend away from supporting a family on a single income started much earlier than that.

Anecdotally, all my friends in the 80's and 90's had both parents working, and we still got together to play all the time, either in the neighborhood for nearby friends, or dropped off for further ones.

[1]Table 2 in https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/famee.pdf

[2]https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2014/ted_20140602.htm

mock-possum4• 1 year ago

That’s interesting to hear, because I feel like all of my friends who have kids have a very conscientious approach towards socializing their kids, setting up play dates, (plus finding other parents they get along with to make new friends with!)

I really wonder what the less involved, less intentional approach would be - hope your kid figures it all out for themselves?

Exoristos• 1 year ago

A lot of Millennial parents are -- paranoid. We have had neighbors exclaim that they don't want their children saying hi to us or they'll learn to talk to "strangers". Or a neighbor whose little boy played with my daughters for months, but when they moved the mother scowlingly rejected the idea of playdates because part of her goal in getting a bigger house was -- to put it in my words -- insulating him from other children. These tend to be the same parents who micromanage their children in other ways, like very limited diets and excessive summertime clothing, so, again, it seems like some form of paranoia.

conductr9• 1 year ago

Take away all those kid's iPads and on-demand cartoons and I bet the parents start begging for more playdates

kawfey• 1 year ago

My spouse and I find that we are overwhelmingly the ones calling to organize playdates rather than vice versa.

Why do you think this is? Because it's very true for me too -- not only play dates but also just regular socializing, like hangouts, game nights, happy hours and bar dates, cookouts, holiday, parties, etc. I feel like I'm always the first one to text or call somebody. It makes me question what other people are doing.

lawlessone2• 1 year ago

Partying is more expensive than watching TV or playing games.

vrc• 1 year ago

I was going to disagree but then realized I now shell out at least $100 when two families and their kids show up for 3-4 pizzas with toppings and chips and dip and some juices.

And god forbid I try and provide fresh fruit and beverages on that budget…

cwoolfe• 1 year ago

It is if you are hosting; but if you are going to the party...hey, it's free food! I think a systematic analysis would show that it would be cheaper for all of us on the whole to share food at parties since it is cheaper to buy in bulk.

SoftTalker3• 1 year ago

A lot of parties have always been pitch-in or BYOB.

kjkjadksj5• 1 year ago

A fifth of vodka has been like $15 for at least a decade otoh

iLoveOncall• 1 year ago

This isn't a social effect at all, it's all a financial effect. Of course most of the HN population is isolated from those issues because we work in a high paying field, but nobody has any money to do anything anymore.

burnt-resistor4• 1 year ago

My grandma was the head of the local Air Force wives' club. Their house was always stocked like a full bar and at least several people stopped by for a visit just about every day. They knew at least 10 of their neighbors well, and some former neighbors too.

Find me community like this anywhere in America these days. Immigrant communities perhaps? Most Americans these days won't interact with their neighbors unless it's to complain or they want something transactionally.

kulahan• 1 year ago

That’s it - immigrant communities are wonderful in this regard, as are communities with lots of old people (maybe because they’re from a different time, maybe because they’re lonely, who knows).

ryandrake6• 1 year ago

Yea, our community definitely skews "over 50" and it's a lively, social place. We have an informal rule: If your garage door is fully open, then it's an invitation for anyone to stop by to socialize or chit chat while they're out on their walk or whatever. I know there are people who live in the neighborhood who are under 40, but you almost never see them, even outside of traditional working hours!

helloooooooo• 1 year ago

I am going to assume your grandmother probably didn’t work, and instead took made her and her husband’s social life her full time job.

It’s much easier to entertain constantly when one half of the relationship has the availability to do it.

If I’m mistaken, then holy heck how did your grandparents do it lmao.

AnimalMuppet• 1 year ago

I bet that if the head of the local Air Force wives' club did exactly that today, they'd get the same results.

burnt-resistor4• 1 year ago

I guess we're missing the local social super-connectors that were more numerous 40+ years ago. Perhaps we need to be mentoring, educating, subsidizing, and encouraging people on the little skills and techniques to bring others out of their hideaways.

011000115• 1 year ago

My Southern California neighborhood used to be like this. It was a diverse neighborhood of white, Filipino, Viet and Mexicans and it felt alive. Then covid hit and the demographics changed. Prices went up. Now the neighborhood is as quiet at night as where I lived in the bay area a few years ago. No open garages. No music.

People are generally unfriendly now and keep to themselves more. Sad what we've lost. We're still an immigrant community but the immigrants are from different places. I'm sure they paid too much for their houses and feel the stress. There are also some obvious cultural differences with respect to socializing and partying.

realityfactchex• 1 year ago

open garages

Can you say more about open garages and community? Is that about car culture, music, pool tables, garage "bars", sofas, TVs, or something else?

Would the whole local neighborhood be welcomed into open garages, or was open-garage-culture limited to people whom people already knew?

alexjplant• 1 year ago

Americans these days won't interact with their neighbors unless it's to complain or they want something transactionally.

It certainly depends. I had great neighbors when I lived on the river in a non-HOA community... many parties were had with sunset beer hangouts on the dock or beach. Military communities are also notably close-knit so what you say makes sense.

CommenterPerson• 1 year ago

You got this immigrant. We have a group of a few families. Each hosts at least one large event per year on occasions like Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Years and our own festivals. Everyone and their kids, and other friends / relatives join. Three families ended up on the same street by chance. We regularly cook or get takeout and get together at short notice. Alcohol and food play a big role.

That said, being an immigrant poses other kinds of challenges. So it's not all like the 1970s in the US, or where we came from.

david422• 1 year ago

Most Americans these days won't interact with their neighbors unless it's to complain or they want something transactionally.

My family moved into a small cul-de-sac with 5 houses total. I wanted to introduce myself, so I wrote a short letter with a little about ourselves and our contact info, and then dropped it into each neighbors mailbox. Only 1 neighbor wrote back, and 1 neighbor literally _returned the letter_ to our mailbox. So yea, that's the neighborhood I live in.

burnt-resistor4• 1 year ago

1 neighbor literally _returned the letter_ to our mailbox.

Not cool. How about that other neighbor though?

bapak• 1 year ago

Social networks have moved online and have been drowned in ads and TikTok dances. No time for in-person meetups unless you're going to that fancy instagrammable place to take pictures of yourself.

Der_Einzige• 1 year ago

lol!!!

“ It seems that the original modern American swingers were crew-cut World War II air force pilots and their wives. Like elite warriors everywhere, these “top guns” often developed strong bonds with one another, perhaps because they suffered the highest casualty rate of any branch of the military. According to journalist Terry Gould, “key parties,” like those later dramatized in the 1997 film The Ice Storm, originated on these military bases in the 1940s, where elite pilots and their wives intermingled sexually with one another before the men flew off toward Japanese antiaircraft fire.“

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sex-at-dawn/201211/n...

ProllyInfamous2• 1 year ago

Find me community like this anywhere in America these days.

The only reason I have become a staple member of my little dead-end, working-class street is because I don't email/text, and last summer I spent outdoors building a tinyhome (that all the passersby watched/asked about).

"How do I get ahold of you?" they used to ask... "Simple," I'd say, "just knock on my door between noon through sunset" [my calling hours, to use the historic term, posted by my doorbell]. Haven't even used my phone but a handful of times this 2025 — turned off entirely since early May — & my social life is what I want it to be, I am not alone any more than I wish to be.

I moved here two years ago, and already know everybody on my street (24 dwellings, total); it's primarily rentals, so when there is a new U-Haul I make sure to bring over a beer/conversation (typically a week after moving in — so they can settle/adjust/remember).

Before living in this working-class neighborhood, I lived in the nicer parts of towns... and honestly, these working-class people are nicer and more giving/understanding/decent than anywhere else I've ever lived (e.g. Westlake Hills [near Austin]; West End [Nashville]; Barton Hills [ATX]; Lookout Mountain [Tenn]).

Stop doing everything on your phone. Start being neighborly.

Example: multiple neighbors and I have jointly-purchased a nicer lawnmower, instead of each buying our own simpler pusher.

¢¢

fundad4• 1 year ago

I bet military service-members still socialize and get hammered.

gilbetron3• 1 year ago

They definitely still exist, my sister, and both of my sister in laws are extremely social people and regularly hang out, "party", with their neighbors and other friends. I additionally have a couple of coworkers that have block parties, and just really social communities. But they are definitely the exception now, and are only really for people that are just inherently social and extroverted. The rest of us, where "partying" is a lot more of an effort, just kind of don't anymore.

I miss it a little bit, like I enjoy being social for a couple of hours two or three times a week, but not much more. But a bunch of people like me makes for a poor social situation since it is hard to get everyone's social levels aligned.

ryao• 1 year ago

The chart labeled Percent Decline in Hours Spent Attending or Hosting Social Event by Age 2003 - 2024 seems to be a bad way of view thing the data since it assumes that there is an inherit difference on how people approach this based on arbitrary age groups. Having it be by birth year would be better, since it would reflect how the people in question’s habits are changing over time.

That said, party culture had been excessive in the past and it was impoverishing to many people. I and others my age more wisely do without, which leaves us with money for things that are more important than one offs.

rawgabbit• 1 year ago

Can’t throw a party if you’re living in your parents basement.

parpfish3• 1 year ago

I wonder whether housing plays a factor.

Young people aren’t becoming homeowners at the same rate, so there’s a sense of transience to their living situations that make forming neighbor communities seem like a waste of time.

luckydata5• 1 year ago

nah, we partied plenty when we rented and not knowing someone for long is not a reason not to hang out. What has been eroded is the habit of hanging out because there's no easily accessible third spaces. I'll give you an example: when I lived in Spain I would just walk in the corner bar for a quick beer or a coffee or something to eat, I would very likely run into a neighbor and would chat. The chat would lead to "hey let's do something". In the USA it's almost always the case that people need to make plan, the lack of spontaneity kills most plans.

aaronbaugher• 1 year ago

In my Midwestern US town, there are still lots of third spaces. The mall, bars, bowling alleys, an arcade, and even some new things like a trampoline place. People just aren't using them nearly as much, to the point that the mall is a tomb and the stores are going away. But the people stopped showing up first.

ryukoposting• 1 year ago

Seems like a no-brainer to me. This is an accurate characterization of my entire adult life. My wife and I are looking at buying a house, and we've concluded that we can't despite living in Wisconsin and making far, far more than the median income around here. There's no end in sight.

Our social structure isn't built around neighbors. I could name 2 people I've shared an apartment building with in the last 5 years. Incidentally, they were a couple in the same 3-flat as me, who were there for my entire time in that building. I think the lower density and shared spaces (in that case, a garage) made the difference.

asdff8• 1 year ago

I kind of see this among different friend groups. I have a number of friends out in the midwest where a mortgage might be 180k. They are most all buying homes. These places have garages, basements, front and back yards. And they are throwing parties with their space.

Bit different for those in the high cost of living area. Hanging out is usually a pregame to go to bars because you can't fit very many people in the apartment. Not to say it doesn't happen just you can't exactly throw a party and have a big table of food and a bbq going and cornhole and beer pong and three available bathrooms all at the same time like you can out in the flyover states. At least not without dropping literally 10x as much on what would be a smaller property anyhow with no basement and not much of a lot.

In many ways it seems like the old life of yesteryear these sorts of articles bemoan is still in fact the current year in many places if the housing prices support it. And there are many places that fly under the radar that aren't in those top 5 major metro regions.

gilbetron3• 1 year ago

My 20s were full of partying, and I wasn't a homeowner a was really introverted at the time. You just cram into whoever's apartment was having that party and have fun. Our partying dropped off after becoming a homeowner, actually.

Apreche• 1 year ago

This article isn’t wrong, but it neglects to mention real estate, transportation, and lodging. A party needs a venue, and it needs guests. And the guests need a way to get to and from the venue. If they stay a long time, they need a place to sleep.

People these days don’t own real estate. Wealthy people own it all. Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes. It’s kind of hard to throw a big party without a big home, a yard, a big kitchen, etc. Small apartments are for small get-togethers that probably don’t register as parties.

Likewise, the larger someone’s home is, the more likely it is to be location in an area with low population density and little to no public transportation. Congrats, you can throw a party, but who are you inviting? All your friends are far away. How can they get there? How long can they stay? Can you accommodate them sleeping there? You aren’t friends with your neighbors who can party easily. You are friends with people on the Internet who are strewn about the world.

And of course, if you live in a major city with lots of friends, small apartment strikes again.

This is part of the reason we have seen the rise of more public events like conventions. There’s a hotel involved. It’s a multi-day event worth traveling to. A lot of people you know will be there. It costs everyone some money, but it’s not out of the realm to go a few times a year. Best part, nobody’s home gets trashed!

amgutier• 1 year ago

In my younger days I threw 100 person parties in a San Francisco apartment - it's standing room only for sure, but so is going to a crowded bar. And I've cooked for 15 without a dining table - you eat on the floor wherever you can find space.

Now I don't disagree with your point; I'm not 22 anymore and live in the burbs and have a less full social calendar, largely due to the logistical overhead of finding my way into the city or getting friends from the city out here. But I do want to say you can have a lot of fun with a lot of friends in a small space with the right attitude :)

esafak5• 1 year ago

That's the spirit!

lisbbb5• 1 year ago

Instead of "don't disagree" please say: "I agree" it is proper English and not some stylized, holier-than-thou sounding, completely logically twisted up act.

1oooqooq• 1 year ago

more importantly imo: maids and housewives.

good riddance btw. but we need to adjust because partying is nice. we are still working ad if we have a free employee taking care of half our lives.

welp, it's always a class issue.

sokoloff2• 1 year ago

Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes.

About 2/3 of households in the US own the home they live in. Renting is the minority, not the majority.

Retric2• 1 year ago

Owning an apartment isn’t materially different than renting an apartment here. It’s sometimes better as many apartments have free or rentable spaces available for parties as a selling point, but rarely can you use that space late in the evening.

Owning a home in an HOA area can drastically cut down on what kinds of parties you can host.

roadside_picnic• 1 year ago

Thank you for mentioning this! There's this weird, persistent meme that large corporations are buying up all the housing and nobody owns homes anymore, which is fundamentally not supported by the data.

There are shifting trends in generational home ownership rates, but these are still just initial trends we're seeing. If you look at the data [0] owner occupied has gone down from the 2000s housing bubble, but in the grand scheme of things is not even particularly low.

People also have this mistaken belief that investors like Black Rock are buying up huge swaths of property, when in reality most "investment" properties are bought by families and individuals, consider anyone who know who owns an AirBNB rental or other rental property, they would be considered "investors".

Most Americans still live in a house, and own that house (or at least, some member of their household owns it).

0. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

hnpolicestate• 1 year ago

This is misleading. The trend is going in the opposite direction and the figure is closer to 53% https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1ew7tp6/no_67_o...

danaris• 1 year ago

But what's the demographic breakdown of this?

How many of that 2/3 is households that have owned the home for 20+ years—ie, since before the subprime crash?

How many of that 2/3 is households of people 65+? And how many is people under 30? Partying is still largely a young people's game, and even if your "household" owns the home you live in, if that's your parents or grandparents, you're much less likely to be hosting parties there.

bethekidyouwant• 1 year ago

Yeah, but the 2/3 of people are old boomers that don’t party.

asdff8• 1 year ago

That is severely overrepresented by old farts who don't party. Among people who party most probably rent.

JohnTHaller• 1 year ago

For adults under 35, less than 38% own their own home and the rate is falling.

Also, it varies quite a lot by state. Over 3/4 of adults own their own home in West Virginia, but in New York it's a bit over 1/2.

torginus3• 1 year ago

yeah, as an East European, it's crazy that our real estate prices are basically the same as the non-super expensive US cities, and we make like one-fifth the salary.

In fact I just checked and the ratio of avg salary to real estate prices is about the same as in New York.

p_j_w• 1 year ago

People these days don’t own real estate. Wealthy people own it all.

The article says a similar decline is seen among the wealthy.

mathiaspoint• 1 year ago

My sister and her husband throw a pretty great annual Halloween party at the house they rent which is 1-2 hours from the nearest city and a good 15-20 minutes from the nearest town.

I don't think the real estate situation helps but I think there's a deeper social problem driving both of those effects.

vjvjvjvjghv4• 1 year ago

"People these days don’t own real estate. Wealthy people own it all. Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes. "

This is only true in some HCOL places ands big cities. Plenty of people own homes.

throwawayq34232• 1 year ago

Not in high-density areas like cities. People own homes in low density areas (middle of nowhere), which makes them isolated, hence no communal activities like partying.

pantalaimon• 1 year ago

I'm not convinced. I live in Berlin and everyone is living in a flat, yet I've had my fair share of home parties, even in small two room apartments where half the party spilled out to the stairwell.

libertine• 1 year ago

I don't think Berlin is a good example because partying is kind of part of the city subculture.

People travel there literally to party.

Broken_Hippo2• 1 year ago

I'm pretty sure Berlin has public transportation. I have it here in Trondheim, Norway - but only one town that I've lived in the states had busses. They didn't run all night, on Sunday, nor did they visit all areas of the somewhat small town. (I'm from the US, lived more places there than I have in Norway)

Other places had taxis (that you couldn't order ahead of time to get to work on time) and some had none until they uber/lyft. (Don't know the current situation).

I'm going to guess the other thing Berlin has is safe areas to walk. I can go to a party and walk home, safely on walking paths complete with shortcuts, without even being harassed by the police and risk getting arrested and in jail for the night (for public intoxication). None of these were luxuries I had in the states.

And I'll say that yes, I've been in some small apartments - but only some folks with small apartments can host. You probably have no clue how many would host if they only had enough space, but a small apartment with 2 adults that have hobbies limits things.

conductr9• 1 year ago

I don't think Berlin life corresponds much to USA life in this regard. We mostly have suburban sprawl and many areas that would be similarly dense, are not very populated with children/teens (because parent's often move to the suburbs)

JKCalhoun3• 1 year ago

US suburbs have not changed. I grew up in US suburbs (in the 70's and early 80's) and there was partying.

My own personal theory? Music sucks now, ha ha.

yesfitz• 1 year ago

US suburbs have very much changed!

The median new home size skyrocketed in the '80s.[1]

Many of the post-war suburbs were planned communities built with schools, churches, grocery stores, and other necessities within walking distance.[2] Compare that to developments today (and since the '90s), that are all housing, lack sidewalks, and require a car to get to necessities.

Serendipity doesn't happen when everyone's in cars. You don't pull over to invite an acquaintance over for a beer or offer to watch their kids.

1: https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/average-home-size/#smal...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levitt_%26_Sons#Construction_o...

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 1 year ago

The consumption of music has changed.

I almost never meet people who like the same bands as I do. I can listen to new music that I love at home. If I go to a bar or a party I'm going to mostly hear music I don't like, and if I do like it, I could have already heard it at home.

Maybe that is part of it

esafak5• 1 year ago

People rarely like music made decades after they were young; tastes settle.

os2warpman2• 1 year ago

People these days don’t own real estate.

The home ownership rate has been 64%, plus or minus about 1%, for the last 45 years.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S

cantSpellSober• 1 year ago

The number of first-time home owners has plummeted though

https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics/research-rep...

biker142541• 1 year ago

Perhaps, but what about the median age of buyers? That tells a more complete story here https://www.axios.com/2024/11/04/home-buyer-age-older

echelon2• 1 year ago

Phones are the reason.

Everyone gets quick and lazy dopamine from phones. Why bother with anything else?

Think about how much time goes into phones. Who has time to plan? Who has time to coordinate?

Phones are probably why the birth rate is declining too.

You don't even need a house to party. You can use a pavilion at a park, go out in the woods like the rednecks I grew up around did, party at the trailer park. Homes are by no means a limiting factor.

It's 100% our phones.

jcranmer• 1 year ago

People these days don’t own real estate. Wealthy people own it all. Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes.

If you look at a graph of home ownership in the US by cohort at various points in time (see, e.g., https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/08/homeownership...), while the rates are somewhat lower, between the highest point and the lowest point the difference is at worst 10 percentage points.

This sentiment strikes me a lot more as people in their 20's complaining that they're poor because they don't have the financial resources of someone in their 40's, despite having more resources than the latter did at their age.

MichaelZuo2• 1 year ago

It is really strange to read complaints that the vast vast majority of 20 somethings have no chance of competing against older established households in the housing market.

I would hope so, otherwise that would mean the country/locale is so bad that older households are packing their bags and fleeing.

So the most desirable properties, such as large SFHs, townhouses, penthouses, etc… within a short driving distance of an attractive city will likely be owned by the latter, by definition.

micromacrofoot5• 1 year ago

This sentiment strikes me a lot more as people in their 20's complaining that they're poor because they don't have the financial resources of someone in their 40's, despite having more resources than the latter did at their age.

Home prices have doubled over the past 20 years, twice the rate of income increases

This isn't just "complaining"

HEmanZ• 1 year ago

That’s the absolute percentage difference. Look at the under 35 category, it’s literally down 25%. That means 1/4 people that would have owned a house in that age group don’t now. Under 45 is a relative drop of ~17%, so about 1/5. One in four to one in five people is more than enough to see an effect.

I doubt it’s the only cause at all, this anti-social (“Bowling Alone”) trend has been going on for generations, and probably has multiple causes. But the US housing crunch on young people is adding to it.

And this damn attitude of “the younger generations are just entitled weenies” about housing is about the most infuriating attitude in the world. My parents bought their first house on a single earners blue collar salary at the age of 27. That house, with almost no updates, now literally needs a top 1% salary and payments for 30 years to be able to afford. Don’t tell the kids to stop whining when they’re watching older generations gobble up their future in the name of preserving property values.

api6• 1 year ago

That's for the whole country. This site is very heavily biased toward people who live in major cities, where real estate has in fact become the purview of only the rich.

Short version of the history:

Starting in the late 1990s, you had a super-concentration of both good jobs and interesting culture in a short list of cities: SF Bay, New York, LA/OC, Seattle, and a few others. I remember growing up during this period and the whole cultural zeitgeist was "if you don't live in one of those cities, you can't do anything."

These cities have always had an allure, especially creative centers like LA and NYC, but what I mean is that it got much more extreme. It fits with the general cultural zeitgeist of everything centralizing and going to the extreme right side in an increasingly tight power-law distribution.

This was followed by insane real estate hyperinflation in those cities, of course, because if you try to take all the "interesting" stuff in the world's largest economy and a nation of 300+ million people and cram it into a few metros, that happens.

The rest of the country still has a lot of affordable real estate, less so than it used to -- RE has appreciated everywhere and not just in the US -- but it's far less insane than the top-tier cities.

I post this every chance I get:

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...

aksss• 1 year ago

You need a home to party? News to my younger self. Parties in crowded shitty apartments, outdoors, or even in cars were the norm when we were young.

This complaint - we don’t have nice houses so we can’t party - is unintentionally emblematic of the root issue in misaligned expectations and excuses for realigned priorities. Nobody Inknew when young had houses either.

Look, it’s not obviously bad to me that young people party less. Blame gaming, blame some resurgent conservative cultural values, blame the internet or even laziness. Maybe the youth today just have better things to do, and that okay. Binge drinking, drugs, and stupid decisions aren’t necessary good investments in time, and many, many, friends from back in the day didn’t survive it. Like less kids smoking cigarettes, maybe this is a good thing (for them and all of us).

But it’s ridiculous to try and turn this behavioral trend into some manifesto on housing inequality. Give me a break.

Phanyxx• 1 year ago

And even if every person did live in a detached home where they could hypothetically throw a party, there are smartphone connected Ring cameras everywhere. Parents always know what's going on now.

simplicio• 1 year ago

Eh, I feel like my (and most peoples) main exposure to house parties was in HS and college when basically no one owns their own home. Rented apartments, houses and family homes seemed to work fine then, I can't really think why that wouldn't be the case now.

Note the age-group with the biggest drop is 15-24, its not like the average 18 year old owned their own home circa 1995.

Aurornis3• 1 year ago

People these days don’t own real estate. Wealthy people own it all. Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes. It’s kind of hard to throw a big party without a big home, a yard, a big kitchen, etc. Small apartments are for small get-togethers that probably don’t register as parties.

This is baffling to me. Most of the parties I went to in high school, college, and my 20s were in people's tiny apartments, small rented houses, and small yards.

Maybe expectations changed? Now it seems more like people feel the need to get ready before going out, to bring something, to pre-coordinate to arrive with a group of friends, to have a lot of space, to have everything pre-cleaned and ready to be the background in photos, and maybe even to have a meat and cheese platter that gets posted to social media. It seems there's much less willingness to just go places, be cramped, and just hang out.

blurbleblurble• 1 year ago

People are tired

98codes2• 1 year ago

Good insights -- people now have to have their party look good for their social feeds: insta, tiktok, whatever. I'm forever thankful that I never had to even think about that, and even if people were taking pictures, nobody gave a damn about the background.

starkparker2• 1 year ago

Gen Z in particular is deathly afraid of having an earnest but unflattering moment captured in someone else's TikTok and distributed to the entire planet.

peterangular• 1 year ago

were in people's tiny apartments, small rented houses, and small yards

Anymore this feels impossible due to neighbors, landlords, and police. I have so many anecdotes... I don't think it's "getting ready" as much as it's an intolerant society of chronically entitled people. Also, it's increasingly expensive to go out + I truly believe we're experiencing the destruction of "3rd places"

My 20's had a good amount of that too... but it was increasingly at odds with real consequence and risk. I'm just safer at home with my SO, in my space. It's getting much worse for younger generations :(

speleding• 1 year ago

I agree that owning real estate doesn't seem a big issue to me, but urban design does: I lived on both sides of the pond and in the USA getting to a party usually involved driving somewhere. That means organizing to go there with a group and a designated driver to stay sober, or getting a taxi (too expensive, when I was young). In Europe, I could just get on my bike and show up by myself. That lowers the barrier to entry considerably. As far as I can tell, urban sprawl in the US has made it even more car dependent today than when I was growing up.

sershe• 1 year ago

That reminds me of an article I can't find anymore on the plight of the American poor couple trying to raise a child in a gasp 900sqft. Uh, check real estate sqft averages around the world?

I never was much of a partier as a teen but I've been to a few, and they were all in flats ranging from much smaller than an American house to literally one room sometimes with 15 people in it. Had no problem falling asleep drunk on somebody's kitchen floor or on a couch in a room with a bunch of other people.

Even in the US a dorm room (a tiny, rented place) is a stereotyped party location.

Oh and ofc numbers are wrong. The houses in the US are bigger than ever and homeownership rate is smth like 60%.

mindslight• 1 year ago

This is such weird reasoning. When you're young and throwing parties where you're implicitly inviting a whole lot of people who you don't know, they will be bringing random chaos and you want to appear judgement proof and have it be someone else's property getting accelerated wear and tear. By the time you own a house with a yard, you're only inviting people you already know, with maybe one layer of transitive trust. Perhaps this focus on owning a house as the first step to doing anything points to the real problem though?

jajko• 1 year ago

Jeez, youngish people feeling left out on investing into real estate see it as root of most of problems this world is facing now.

Sorry but can't agree, as do most folks here backing up with some hard data. That 'glass is half-empty' approach to daily life ain't healthy long term, ever thought about that?

DoneWithAllThat• 1 year ago

This is just absolute total nonsense. Normal people do own real estate. Lots of people rented back then and do now. Friends were “far away” back then too, they took their cars, bummed rides, took buses, whatever. Where do they sleep? Where do you think they slept back then? The floor, the couch, the lawn, or they didn’t sleep at all and just went home in the morning.

ike2792• 1 year ago

I'm not saying this isn't part of the problem, but my experience has been different. When I was in my 20s, my friends and I all lived in apartments and had parties fairly often. I recall that when I was a kid in the 90s my parents often went to small house parties as well. Now, in my 40s, neither I nor anyone I know ever goes to parties despite us all owning houses and cars and living fairly close to one another.

My theory is that people have fewer parties because people have gotten flakier about attending larger social events. It is much easier to cancel plans at the last minute with a text or a social media DM, and people always seem to want to keep their options open. We've moved to getting together only with one other couple/family at a time b/c any time we try to have larger group events half of the invite list will cancel the day of.

leptons• 1 year ago

No, owning a house does not give you more license to throw a party. Not owning a car never stopped anyone determined to go to a party. A place to sleep? What kind of party are you imagining in your head? One where people travel hundreds of miles and need a hotel? Your take is ridiculous. People party in small apartments all the time, I've been to hundreds. I took the bus there many times, or got rides from other friends going to the party, and now ride-sharing is a thing. Sleep?? That was never, ever part of the equation. I know it's a tired cliche, and usually used as a troll, but I can confidently say that you obviously don't get invited to many parties.

ianferrel• 1 year ago

Homeownership rates in the US fluctuate, but are basically flat over the past ~45 years.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S

Klonoar3• 1 year ago

And the guests need a way to get to and from the venue.

Add in the odd issue of younger people not getting their drivers licenses or owning/having access to a car.

It could be anecdotal but I've seen this in a number of locales across the country. Curious if there's hard numbers on it.

9rx10• 1 year ago

Wealthy people own it all.

Most homes in the US are mortgaged. More likely the banks, which ultimately means the depositors, who are just as likely to be everyday average people (the wealthy normally keep their wealth in things like businesses), own most of it.

carabiner2• 1 year ago

Spending all of your time studying in high school and college is your best hope at landing in the vanishing middle class. With decreasing job security as well as hyperinflation, continuing that work ethic into your 20s and 30s is quite reasonable. Everyone is too exhausted to party.

kjkjadksj5• 1 year ago

In college we’d only study 3 or 4 days a week to make room for the drinking

carabiner2• 1 year ago

In mine, we studied 7 days a week.

searine• 1 year ago

It's cause were poor.

LeanderK• 1 year ago

Purely anecdotal, but I was recently reflecting at the current trend of people posting really extensive morning routines. Waking up, meditation, yoga, gym, shower, eating breakfast, meal-prepping,....having a whole day before your day starts. While they should impress you with their healthiness and discipline, I just thought how utterly lonely and sterile most of them look like. And you're completely done after work if this is your morning, you can just go to bed and repeat the same the next day. I found it quite sad, actually.

pjc505• 1 year ago

I don't believe those are real. People are simply posting that because it's the kind of post that gets likes. Influencer life is a mirage.

Aerbil313• 1 year ago

No, it's real. I have AuDHD and very strictly defined routines are how I manage to function day-to-day. It's not a productivity hack or how I'll be a billionaire in 5 years though, like scrollheads often promote. It's just how my brain works. A small fraction of those influencers might also be neurodivergent and sincerely posting what works for them.

Barrin92• 1 year ago

It's an observation that precedes likes and modern influencers, as Baudrillard noticed in his 1989 book America:

"The skateboarder with his Walkman, the intellectual working on his wordprocessor, the Bronx breakdancer whirling frantically in the Roxy, the jogger and the body-builder: everywhere, whether in regard to the body or the mental faculties, you find the same blank solitude, the same narcissistic refraction. This omnipresent cult of the body is extraordinary. [...] This ‘into’ is the key to everything. The point is not to be nor even to have a body, but to be into your own body. Into your sexuality, into your own desire. Into your own functions, as if they were energy differentials or video screens. The hedonism of the ‘into’ [...]"

The replacement of a genuine social life with a kind of machine like, solitary optimization, the point of American Psycho basically, is very much real, common among ordinary people. This is every "second brain" note taking fanatic who never actually does anything but collect notes.

"What people are contemplating on their word-processor screens is the operation of their own brains. It is not entrails that we try to interpret these days, nor even hearts or facial expressions; it is, quite simply, the brain. We want to expose to view its billions of connections and watch itoperating like a video-game. All this cerebral, electronic snobbery is hugely affected - far from being the sign of a superior knowledge of humanity, it is merely the mark of a simplified theory, since the human being is here reduced to the terminal excrescence of his or her spinal chord."

frollogaston16• 1 year ago

Yeah I know 0 people like this. And I'd believe it if 1-2 people are actually like that without me knowing, cause they need to manage ADHD or something, but not a large number.

Balgair• 1 year ago

Sounds like a lonely cockatoo that overly preens itself to the point that it pulls out it's feathers.

deadbabe• 1 year ago

I mean everything you listed there could be done within 2 hours if you do it all at home. Not sure what the big deal is, you wake up at 7 and you’re ready for the day by 9.

But oh yea maybe laying in bed for an hour doom scrolling on your phone before you finally get up is a more efficient use of time.

mtalantikite3• 1 year ago

Well, the loneliness coming through on those posts might just be from the fact that the people that are posting on social media like that are, in fact, lonely and looking for connection. I have a pretty extensive morning routine of practicing music, sitting for meditation/pranayama, food, shower all before work, and then Muay Thai or yoga or strength training in the evening. I just don't post it on social media because I don't have social media. I still go out to see music/art and friends etc, but I also live in NYC where it's easy to do that.

carlosjobim• 1 year ago

What are they supposed to do instead? If you can't get together to drink with friends in the evening, this is a very good option.

jongjong• 1 year ago

People don't party if their life is bad.

avhception2• 1 year ago

I broadly agree with the article.

I'm also wondering if the rising political polarization is at least in part caused by the "antisocial" phenomenon. If you're not exposed to a spectrum of political worldviews through being involved with all these people you randomly met back in the day, it becomes easier to dehumanize the people you disagree with. You also never have to listen to their talking points, because you can just block them out online.

strangefellow• 1 year ago

It's also the opposite. People are exposed to the most extreme, unhinged, and horrifying aspects of humanity on a continuous basis through every form of media and connectivity. It shapes your unconscious risk/reward expectations around forming connections. Someone invites you over to their house for dinner? You just saw a YouTube video about a woman who mixes her urine into her cooking and feeds it to unsuspecting guests to heal what ails them. Almost every form of engaging with the world these days -- except genuinely connecting with others -- makes genuinely connecting with others feel riskier than it is.

pjc505• 1 year ago

The talking points themselves have got much worse. So many things are now mainstream, especially in racism, that would have been kept out of "polite company" previously. It's not that social media has made people less aware of other's political views, it's made them more aware, which is why they hate each other. Entire accounts exist (libsoftiktok) for the purpose of exposing people to views which they will hate, so they can get angry and ramp up their rhetoric.

generalenvelope• 1 year ago

It feels ridiculous not to mention car dependence and the things that enabled it: restrictive zoning, parking minimums, the car lobby.

In the last 50 years, the US has bulldozed dense, mixed used housing that enabled community and tight knit neighborhoods. More economically/socially viable housing (read: an apartment on top of a business) has literally been banned in much of the US. Ensuring that there's a large plot of asphalt to house personal vehicles that are ever increasing in size is baked into zoning laws (though some cities have finally banned parking minimums). Suburbia sprawls, literally requiring most of the country to own a car.

I would love to see some data on this, but my intuition is that everyone is physically farther away as a result, which weakens their general connection and likelihood to party together, and makes it harder for them to get to/from a party in the first place.

There's other feasible side effects too like less savings due to the cost of owning a car (I've seen estimates of the US average exceeding $10k/yr), or expensive housing exacerbated by all of the above - less space for housing due to roads/parking (and the cost rising as a direct result of a developer needing to include parking), and rising taxes to finance more and more infrastructure: suburban sprawl means more roads, pipes, electrical lines, while contributing significantly less economic value (Strong Towns has done some great graphics on how much dense urban areas subsidize their sprawling single family home filled counterparts).

Gigachad2• 1 year ago

It’s car dependence, but the impacts were delayed because people used to just drink and drive. Now that’s rightfully seen as unacceptable, but we are still left with car dependence. So people just don’t leave home now.

frollogaston16• 1 year ago

It was totally unacceptable to drink and drive in the 2000s, and the sharp decline didn't start until right after. You'd also find a similar decline in socializing among non-driving-age children.

asdff8• 1 year ago

The sprawl of suburbia isn't so much outside the top 5-10ish cities. Even "growing" places like Columbus OH in the midwest, you can go from cornfield to cornfield across the built environment in probably 25 miles and about as many minutes on the freeway network that is entirely uncongested since it is so overbuilt for the population (unlike in those top 5 places where it may be underbuilt). By and large that is how the bulk of the country looks and operates. The idea that you'd drive an hour and still be in the same metro region is this big exception that people living in that exception assume must be the norm, but really isn't.

Roguelazer2• 1 year ago

I mean, ~90M people live in one of the top 10 metro areas, which is about ¼ of the country. Not sure that I'd necessarily call that an "exception".

VLM3• 1 year ago

According to the US Census Bureau, the median house age in the usa is 1980. I live in a 1960 house of the type that is supposedly illegal, although every house in my suburb built since then has had building codes and planning regulations forcing walkability. Cars are forced for specialization. I had a 20 mile each way commute to an absolutely horrible neighborhood but a very high paying job. I am in walking distance of some minimum wage manual labor jobs. I can't afford to work at those minimum wage manual labor jobs and live here, and a car is incredibly cheap compared to my higher income. No one can explain why an architectural movement peaking in 1950s-1970s had no effect on socialization for decades until the smartphone era. Multiple entire generations lived in "soulless car filled suburbs" and socialized wildly according to the data in the article... until smartphones... There's an entire mythology built around the idea that any new problem that occurs began coincidentally with the construction of suburbs in the 1950s, even if the new problem didn't appear for the first 75 years of suburban living.

pavon3• 1 year ago

But that hasn't changed much between the 80s and now. It was bad then and it is bad now. So I don't see it being a significant factor for change in socialization on that timescale.

frollogaston16• 1 year ago

It feels ridiculous to bring up car dependence in an article about 1980-2020 social trends, when the US was car-dependent the entire time, and the big drop was in the 2010s in particular.

bravesoul2• 1 year ago

Is 1 in 25 bad? I am more 1 in Inf... I mean I don't know what counts but I am happier to do things that are not a party. Examples: go to events in the city, restaurants, sunday lunch at relatives, work socials, school parent socials.

Even in my 20s I went to... the pub! Mayhe a nightclub. To me parties are more school age/university thing and are a great way to have a good time on a budget. Just some drinks and a speaker required.

thisisauserid• 1 year ago

"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."

Spurious. This has likely always been true unless you live with said friends.

d4nte• 1 year ago

Yeah. My cat sleeps next to me, sits in my lap while I work, and follows me around the house. That’s a lot of hours every day.

SimianSci• 1 year ago

If I were to try and pinpoint one of the leading causes of this issue myself, I would personally say that Americans have an outdated and ineffective model regarding its use of addictive substances or what I like to now call "Brain Hacking" systems as they are not necessarily just physical substances anymore.

Recreational drugs cause unbelievable havok within communities where they are unleashed. Its well known that such drugs have chemical compounds capable of "hacking" our physiology and causing a whole host of negative effects while ensuring the user stays addicted. I consider these "Brain Hacking" systems just the same as I consider social media like TikTok and Instagram. They both are designed specifically in ways to entice users to be addicted without any concern for the harms they cause. It baffles me that simply because it is not a physical substance it gets treated as less dangerous than the harder substances.

We keep seeing these issues in America when its very clear that similar things would occur if we made recreational substances as common as water and just as accessible. Revenously addicted people, dont party, they dont socialize, they retreat from society, and stop forming deeper releationships. It is no surprise that this is creating issues for us.

Americans have always been the world's leading consumer of drugs, and now that we have digital drugs, they are more accessible and in demand than ever. So much so that the cartels desinging and pedeling these products, are basically the most powerful companies in our society.

Liquix• 1 year ago

Recreational drugs cause unbelievable havok within communities where they are unleashed.

Like.. Stable adults indulging in pot or mushrooms? IME has quite the opposite effect. Addictive drugs which devastate communities are usually not referred to as "recreational".

You're spot on about the outdated threat model and people not fully grasping how damaging social media/internet addiction is.

pjc505• 1 year ago

Socializing in most Western countries used to be built entirely around an addictive mind altering substance, alcohol. Despite its many flaws it was extremely pro-social. Other drugs had their own party scenes.

throwaway1737385• 1 year ago

Not to mention the stereotype of the 50’s housewife using “diet pills” to get more done. Back then they were amphetamines.

shawndrost• 1 year ago

Does anyone know why "Hours spent in childcare" started skyrocketing in the 1990s? Here is the graph from the article: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2g7_!,w_1456,c_limit...

tpmoney• 1 year ago

Off the cuff that coincides pretty well with the rise of “helicopter parenting” and “tiger mom” trends.

Nicook• 1 year ago

and less children per woman. I figure thats got to be the main driver. China actually a really good case study with the one child policy and rise of little kings.

Roguelazer2• 1 year ago

It does seem like there's something wrong with that data; I find it somewhat implausible that the average parent was only caring for their child for 1.7 hours a day in 1985; even if you assume that all of the tween and teens were free-range and only got an hour or two of parenting a day, little kids have always required nonstop attention to make sure that they're not actively dying.

Although... the infant mortality rate in the US has dropped by more than 50% since 1985, so who knows...

chlodwig• 1 year ago

Yeah, I've wondered if there is some sort change in how people think about and label their activities. Would a 1950s parent even think of themselves as doing a defined activity called "childcare"? Or rather, the children are just around, as the parent is doing things. If I am cooking dinner while a toddler putters around the floor and a baby is in a high-chair eating scraps I give him, am I doing "childcare"? Would a 1950s parent think of that as doing "childcare"?

tstrimple• 1 year ago

I was born in '83 and I'd say this mostly describes my upbringing. We were left to our own devices the vast majority of the time. By the time I hit my teens, most days I'd barely see my parents at all. At some point you've got kids raising other kids as the parents are absent.

imzadi• 1 year ago

Burrowing into the appendix tables of the American Time Use Survey, she unearthed the fact that just 4.1 percent of Americans said they “attended or hosted” a party or ceremony on a typical weekend or holiday in 2023. In other words, in any given weekend, just one in 25 US households had plans to attend a social event.

There's a huge difference between not hosting or attending a party and not attending a social event. "Party" has very specific connotations. If I go out bowling with my friends or have a game night, I don't call that a party, but it is certainly a social event.

CoastalCoder• 1 year ago

I agree. I was graduated from highschool around 1990. My friend group was very active every weekend, we just didn't do "parties".

psyclobe• 1 year ago

Yeah. I haven't gone out in decades.

Apocryphon7• 1 year ago

Compare to Dave Barry's "The Greatest (Party) Generation", about his parents who were of the Mad Men era:

https://archive.is/Uyrys#selection-2109.17-2109.48

codegrappler• 1 year ago

Anecdotally a lot of families we see in my social circle can be reliably split between single income and dual income households. We see the single income folks far more than we see the dual income folks, which tracks with this article. If I come home from work and my wife says “Sarah and family are coming for dinner tonight”, I know that my wife has tidied up the house, coordinated food and all I have to do is pour some drinks and maybe cook something on the grill (that has already been purchased and prep’d). If no one has done that? Far less likely I would see that same family that night.

watwut12• 1 year ago

Being stay at home parent is extremely isolating. It is most lonely thing one can do. You spend ovwrwhelming majority of the day completely alone. No collegues to bump into you and talking with you. If the stay at home parent does not actively organizes meetups, they are completely alone until partner comes home ... after he talked with people at work.

xboxnolifes• 1 year ago

Thats another argument. The stay at home parent created a lot of the social parties.

kjkjadksj5• 1 year ago

Sounds like my wfh job

upheaval• 1 year ago

Whats there to party about

__mharrison__• 1 year ago

Anxious Generation... Anyone with kids should read it.

anotherevan• 1 year ago

As an aside, did anyone else see the background start to darken as they scrolled down and lost interest in reading as you knew a "Please oh pretty please subscribe to my newsletter!" overlay was going to slide into view?

I wish I had a ublock filter or a userscript to deal with this…

Bradlinc• 1 year ago

I’ve stopped hosting as many dinner parties because accommodating diverse food preferences has become increasingly challenging. It’s a smaller factor compared to many mentioned in the article, but I thought it was worth adding.

SoftTalker3• 1 year ago

And not just preference but allergies. I'm not sure why but it seems like the number and prevalence of food allergies has really gone up since the 1980s/1990s. Back then you didn't really worry much about food allergies when you were thinking about foods to serve at a party.

phendrenad2• 1 year ago

People are introverted and have no social skills thanks to smartphones. People have no shared interests in general, because there are so many niches. People have low self-esteem and body image issues. People are afraid that they'll get drunk and their behavior will be filmed and go viral. Previously available "soft" party drugs are too dangerous. People have no place to host a party, because they're all renters (not that it matters, the HOA has a strict no-smooth-jazz-music-after-3pm policy!)

pjc505• 1 year ago

People are afraid that they'll get drunk and their behavior will be filmed and go viral.

I think this is an underappreciated "phones killed socialization" angle. People used to post partying pics on social media. Then employers started going through social media to screen candidates. Facial recognition and automatic tagging means that it's not sufficient to not post party photos to your own social media, you need to make sure they aren't posted anywhere.

Which is a deterrent to partying as a concept once you start thinking in terms of "will this be bad for my social credit if an informant reports me to the employability police by posting me drunk?"

ryandrake6• 1 year ago

I don't know how this didn't become a serious taboo. People who post pictures and video from a private event without everyone's consent should be shunned, but somehow this became normalized. I've heard of the recent trend to hand out stickers for everyone to put over their cameras during events, and that's a really good development, but we shouldn't even need to do that. It should be socially disgusting to even take the pictures in the first place.

floren2• 1 year ago

People have no place to host a party, because they're all renters

I've seen this repeated in several comments and I just don't get it -- renting a place, be it a college apartment or a full house as an adult, has never stopped me from throwing a party. Maybe if there was a "no parties" rule in the lease (which I've never seen, and I've rented at least a dozen different places) and the landlord lived in the building, but otherwise rentals are fair game.

frollogaston16• 1 year ago

If anything, renters are more likely to throw parties. They don't care about the building or even the inside in the long-term. The likely worst case is losing a month's rent in the deposit, which you're likely to lose some of anyway even if you keep it perfectly clean.

keiferski• 1 year ago

Yeah, pretty much every college town is full of renters throwing parties. One consequence of that is how student-aimed housing tends to be lower quality.

frollogaston16• 1 year ago

The no shared interests / too many niches thing doesn't go mentioned enough.

tim333• 1 year ago

Everyone's looking at their phones instead.

ipnon• 1 year ago

As soon as the screen became marginally more interesting than the person next to you social life was pretty much doomed.

chkaloon• 1 year ago

The article mentions alcohol consumption by kids, but I think it doesn't emphasize enough the effect of efforts like Mothers Against Drunk Driving and strict DUI laws. Back in the 70s and 80s having a few drinks at a party, bar or friend's house was normal and part of the social lubrication. Even drinks during lunch was common where I worked. No more. You either need to have a designated driver, find a taxi (which doesn't exist in most rural areas), or just not drink. The first two are a pain, so people opt for the latter and that social inhibition hangs around, and folks go home early. Have to get up for work in the morning, you know.

dddddaviddddd2• 1 year ago

You either need to have a designated driver, find a taxi (which doesn't exist in most rural areas), or just not drink.

Or live in a place where you don’t drive to get around.

bluGill11• 1 year ago

Very few places on earth are like that. Even in Europe's dense cities there are a lot of cars, get outside of that and there is no hope of an alternative. Though Europe is somewhat likely to have a bar within walking distance of your house, but a lot of people in Europe drive to whatever bar they drink in at least sometime.

Most of the world's public transportation sees themselves as a way to get to work and so parties which happen off hours in places hard for transport to reach get bad or no service.

micromacrofoot5• 1 year ago

or drive drunk, which if my upbringing was any indication, happened all the time

tayo42• 1 year ago

0.08 allows for a few drinks

okdood64• 1 year ago

One person's definition of a few is 3 over 4 hours. Another person's is 5 over 2 hours. (That's even mentioning the size of the drink. A standard can of beer or a pint? A 1 ounce shot or 1.5 ounce shot?)

Here-in lies a major problem of drunk driving. (Outside of self-responsibility.)

reginald78• 1 year ago

I feel like while there were laws against furnishing alcohol to minors and the like, I never really heard of some one's parents getting charged because some kid crashed his car after boozing it up at a party back then. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention but it seems like the enforcement of that really stepped up.

tartoran2• 1 year ago

Oh, it certainly happened. Some people don't have a limit and decency isn't on their minds and when they get in trouble the law is used against them. Also bitter neighbors could call the cops on you.

thinkingtoilet3• 1 year ago

Let's be honest. A lot of previous partying was made possible by lots and lots and lots of drinking and driving. That of course still goes on today, but nearly at the levels of the past.

dmix• 1 year ago

That was before Uber...

chimeracoder2• 1 year ago

That was before Uber...

Get outside a major urban area and it's extremely difficult to find an Uber at the hours when you'd expect to be leaving a party to go home.

Heck, this is true even in some suburbs of New York City.

thinkingtoilet3• 1 year ago

I live in a rural area. Uber is not a reliable option late at night.

0_____0• 1 year ago

People were drinking and driving in 1800s New England?

complianceowl• 1 year ago

I cannot speak for ze others, but as a creature of ze night… I must confess, I vas, I vas indeed.

MisterTea3• 1 year ago

I am sure there were plenty of sauced stage coach drivers and horsemen.

ludicrousdispla• 1 year ago

Well, they had self-driving transportation back then so more like drinking and riding.

pelagicAustral• 1 year ago

I would gamble that people were drinking and driving hours after the invention of the wheel.

ratg13• 1 year ago

I would say prices and economy play as large of a role.

When I was in university we thrived on nickel drafts and dive bars.

These days it's $10/cocktail + cover charge.

BriggyDwiggs42• 1 year ago

Yeah it’s just the prices honestly

dddddaviddddd2• 1 year ago

Or walkable neighbourhoods, or public transportation.

thinkingtoilet3• 1 year ago

I live in a rural area. Neither of those things were ever an option. It was always drinking and driving out here.

frollogaston16• 1 year ago

The chart still shows a good amount of partying around 2009.

dr_dshiv• 1 year ago

8bit Vibes Party in Amsterdam this Saturday, swing by! https://lu.ma/l4074pxg?locale=en-GB

flerchin• 1 year ago

Grouping up with the guys to play an online game wouldn't count here. Nor various other online activities that I would consider social. The drop-off in alcohol is stark, but probably good? I suppose we would see an uptick in weed in legal and probably also illegal states.

The article focuses on US because that's the data they have, but I wonder if it's a similar trend for other developed countries. Anyone sharing a personal anecdote is probably not meaningful. These are broad trends and really hard to intuit by lived experience.

mtalantikite3• 1 year ago

When I was in high school in the late 90s/early 2000s, we'd go hang out somewhere with each other IRL and then when it got late and we got home we'd meet up in some online game (usually Starcraft or Diablo). So we'd still be hanging out at least two nights a week IRL.

If we counted only online gaming then we'd have been hanging out every night.

frollogaston16• 1 year ago

Yeah, there are good reasons that doesn't count. Maaybe if it were in-person and not over headsets.

MisterTea3• 1 year ago

Parties were where you went to meet random strangers, get intoxicated, and maybe get laid. None of this is exciting anymore. People are less motivated to go out. We have other forms of socialization.

I blame a lot of the de-socialization on our constantly connected society. Since everyone is in contact with each other 24/7 via social media the idea of meeting random people is less exciting. The 24/7 news cycle also injects a lot of doom and anxiety making people more aware of dangers - intoxicated driving, overdose, violence, rape, etc. Parties might be viewed as more dangerous than exciting. Now add to that, 24/7 streaming of TV and highly addictive video games. There is plenty of distraction to fill the boredom gaps that used to motivate people to go out. And finally, I think covid drove a lot of people into a more isolationist mindset. I know a few people, including myself, who have admitted they go out far less post covid compared to pre covid.

efields• 1 year ago

This feels right. More than anything, it's the function of the Internet.

orangecat3• 1 year ago

I'd argue that it's specifically the combination of social media and smartphones. 2000s era "social networks" of AIM and forums were fine; you had to actually be at your computer so it wasn't an all-consuming activity for most people.

ryandrake6• 1 year ago

I don't think it's right. Despite the Internet, we really aren't in a constantly connected society. In fact, I'd argue we are less connected now than we have been for a long time. Everyone's "on" Social Media, but they're not socializing on it. They're spouting into the void, promoting and advertising themselves, tunneling themselves deep into echo chambers, but it's not really social. People write and write and write, but the only things they read are what the algorithms feed to them. I guess I'm gatekeeping socialization, but this doesn't seem like socialization to me.

When someone posts a clever quip to Twitter and gets 10,000 likes, this isn't socialization. It feels more like some weird performance art.

frollogaston16• 1 year ago

People aren't even constantly connected via social media anymore. That was a thing in Facebook's earlier years, now most stuff is algorithmically fed from randos.

Workaccount2• 1 year ago

Those basement dwelling computer nerds of the early '00s were way ahead of their time. We just had to dial in the content to get everyone else addicted.

frollogaston16• 1 year ago

I remember the exact moment I saw our star football player log into Minecraft in class

hn_throwaway_995• 1 year ago

This was a post on the GenX subreddit (from a Gen Zer) from just a couple days ago asking about if parties as portrayed in late 90s/early 00s "teen movies" were actually a real thing:

https://www.reddit.com/r/GenX/comments/1lu102v/were_parties_...

The responses from the Gen Xers were a mix of bewilderment and sadness, stuff like "What do you mean parties like this, it's just a normal teenage party!? I feel so ancient and also so confused by this question." The whole comment section is worth a read, especially the disconnect between how the Gen Xers experienced adolescence and how the Gen Z poster does.

It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of youth with social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection. I also disagree with some of the comments here that are bringing up things like "real estate, transportation, and lodging". Sure, those are issues, but you have families and kids in the suburbs today just like you had families and kids in the suburbs in the 90s, and the fact that kids today can't even recognize "basic teen parties" and question whether they are some sort of made up fantasy can't just be waved away by the fact that real estate is more expensive today.

Aurornis3• 1 year ago

It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of youth with social media, smart phones,

You have to be careful with Gen Z threads like this on Reddit and Twitter. They are inherently biased toward Gen Z people who are chronically online and deep into social media.

If you spend time with kids in the real world, you learn very rapidly that most of them aren't on platforms like Reddit and Twitter. Of those who use Reddit, few of them actually post anything or even have accounts.

The subset of Gen Z who actually post on Reddit is small and a lot of them fit the description of chronically online, so it's no wonder that Reddit Gen Z people speak as if their generation is not socially engaged at all.

yubblegum• 1 year ago

Basically, the kids who were socially marginalized in the prenetworks era also did not get to see the parties the socially active kids were having, and would have wondered at it all. It would have certainly been also 'a new experience' for them! Except back then they didn't have a place like reddit to go to and wonder out loud.

generalizations• 1 year ago

That should also be true of the Gen Xers replying though. So I think that effectively cancels out.

esafak5• 1 year ago

Also known as selection bias. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias

afavour• 1 year ago

If you spend time with kids in the real world, you learn very rapidly that most of them aren't on platforms like Reddit and Twitter. Of those who use Reddit, few of them actually post anything or even have accounts.

Certainly true. But it's also undeniable that a huge number of them are on TikTok, Instagram and the like. I think OP's point still stands that today's youth have been affected by that.

98codes2• 1 year ago

I wonder how the levels of engagement compare between an extremely online GenX person, an average GenZ person, and an extremely online Gen Z person would look like.

AuryGlenz7• 1 year ago

That's true. However, I worked as a photographer for about 10 years (quit about 2 years ago) and high school senior photos were one of my specialties, so I got to know a lot of teenagers.

Overscheduling is, I think, the biggest issue. Most of the teens I worked with had something going on almost every night, to the point where rescheduling due to rain or heat was an absolute nightmare. Sports were the biggest offenders. They would often have gym/strength training in the morning and then practice in the evening, almost every evening. Keep in mind I'm mostly talking about summer, so the school year itself was worse. Those that had jobs would do them during the day.

It's completely different from when I graduated high school in '06. Very few sports took over your life in the summer. Football had practice in the mornings for part of the summer, and that's the only one I'm aware of. I don't get the emphasis on sports. I played some in school but never took them seriously and if they required that much time from me I would have been out.

slg• 1 year ago

There is still a big difference between not being invited to/attending parties and not knowing if they even exist as a concept.

torginus3• 1 year ago

I'm not quite sure if smartphones are still all that popular. With the rise of WFH, (and for Gen-Z, having a Covid lockdown college experience), most people are on actual computers and are sitting at home.

wil421• 1 year ago

I get the same vibe from HN and other places on Reddit. Lots of folks are online in multiple places at all times. If I bring up a random internet topic in real like people give me weird looks.

SubmarineClub• 1 year ago

Except the data repeatedly bears out that younger generations are spending more and more time online and in isolation.

The idea that the internet remains the province solely of a few loner geeks is a total fantasy. Reddit is one of the most popular websites in the world.

Also, I was a shy nerd in high school who used reddit, and I still partied. Fuck, I made my own booze to take to parties.

Meanwhile my youngest brother - who is super social - graduated high school in the last few years and reports that partying is totally dead compared to my day.

lapcat8• 1 year ago

You have to be careful with Gen Z threads like this on Reddit and Twitter. They are inherently biased toward Gen Z people who are chronically online and deep into social media.

Wouldn't Gen X responses on those threads also be inherently biased toward Gen X people who are chronically online and deep into social media?

insane_dreamer• 1 year ago

inherently biased toward Gen Z people who are chronically online and deep into social media

most of the Gen Z people I know fit this description

is there really a significant Gen Z cohort that isn't "chronically online and deep into social media"?

autoexec2• 1 year ago

It's also true that it's "chronically online" GenX folks who are replying to the "chronically online" GenZ folks.

Even if we assume that "chronically online" people and reddit users are nerdier, less social in the real world, tend to be more introverted, less likely to go to parties in general, etc. we're still left with teen parties being normal for the GenX nerds and alien to the GenZ nerds.

As an old, chronically online, more introverted, nerd I can say that I absolutely attended parties in my teens and early 20s (only some of which were lan parties or BBS meetups)

coldtea3• 1 year ago

so it's no wonder that Reddit Gen Z people speak as if their generation is not socially engaged at all.

Still one sees them even outside all glued to their screens.

acquiesce• 1 year ago

No. The “new generation” now knows what the outcasts and the undesirables of the “old generation” felt like. The more I speak to the younger crowd the more parallels I find which just means the “default” shifted towards a society of people who don’t know a different way, but are unaware of what goes on around them. The undesirables of the old knew, but couldn’t do anything about it.

It’s like people who are bewildered when newspapers say bankers got caught having a massive orgy of some 50+ attendees in a hotel in Switzerland. There is always a party, but you’re not invited. Simple as.

colinwilyb• 1 year ago

What's newspaper? ;)

yieldcrv2• 1 year ago

I knew the Diddy party charges wouldn’t stick because the aggrieved persons descriptions sound like commonly held parties in Los Angeles with quite a lot of consent involved (and courts aren't able to parse more nuanced aspects of consent, so people are left with a reliance on mutual cooperation)

this detail isn’t as important to people as wondering if I’ve gone to an LA sex party and whatever preconception they have of that and now me

Just like those bankers, and this thread, there is always a party

breakyerself• 1 year ago

I mean normal teen parties when I was a teenager were places for teens to get blackout drunk and make bad decisions. I empathize with your position somewhat, but it wasn't all good.

tlogan3• 1 year ago

Not all parties were like that. Or at least I was never invited to those. We geeks stuck to LAN parties, got drunk, and played games. Since there were no girls around, we managed to avoid making any bad decisions :)

But we did party way more than kids today.

basisword• 1 year ago

Getting drunk and making bad decisions (within reason) is:

a) fun

b) how you learn

namdnay• 1 year ago

The type of people posting these questions on reddit today wouldn't have been at those parties yesterday, so I don't think we can extrapolate some overarching theme here

My anecdotal experience with two children who are young adults is that there are still house-parties (nearly) every weekend at high-school, but that there's a lot less drinking, and they're a lot more open and mature (i'm not sure i would have enjoyed being a trans kid in a 90s high school)

hn_throwaway_995• 1 year ago

I'm not saying the kid who posted this is a 100% representative sample, but at least in my experience of the teenagers I know, childhood has changed drastically in the last 25 years.

If you look at some of the poster's comments there, he laments that even when he does go to house parties, everyone is just sitting around on their phone. I have certainly seen that.

they're a lot more open and mature

Maybe in some ways but hopelessly regressed in others. For example, Scott Galloway talks about how 50% of men aged 18-24 have never asked someone out in person: https://youtube.com/shorts/5sq4P5RCIrg?si=iMVDyAU4eyzgMN2j

I think that's one minor example of the monumental shift that has happened among young people.

fnord77• 1 year ago

I feel like this article was spawned by that reddit post and subsequent related tweets.

kenjackson• 1 year ago

I think this article was way overdone, based on what I see with my teenage kids. They don't go to any "parties", but during the summer they are at the beach around 4x per week with bonfires at night. Almost 1/3 of their class (at a somewhat small school) is there.

And with Snapchat they know where everyone is. It's typical on a Friday school night they are scanning their map to see, "this group is at the mall. this group is at the football. this group went to her house." And then pick where to go.

Honestly, the current method of social gathering seems so much better than what I did in the 80s.

yieldcrv2• 1 year ago

Its definitely more efficient than riding on your bike or later a car, hoping someone was home

realo• 1 year ago

Aaaahhh... You have "beach" ... with the "bonfires" option pack ... This is very nice urban furniture.

Here we have "streets" and , occasionally, "public parks".

Forget the "bonfires" option.

almosthere• 1 year ago

Yeah and in 30 years a thought post on brainnit will appear in everyone's head and they'll ask Gen-Zer's did you really have a brain that was isolated from everyone elses?

And someone will respond:

It's really sad to me how we fucked you guys up and you didn't even have phones...

zackmorris• 1 year ago

Ya I'm shocked by it too, said as a Gen Xer born in the late 1970s, occasionally a Xennial.

I partied for 4 years of college which is something like 30 years in sober adult terms. Our ragers were reminiscent of Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds, all of those old party movies that didn't age well. Scenes from Hackers, Fight Club, The Matrix, Trainspotting, Go, Swingers, Made, 200 Cigarettes, SLC Punk, Dazed and Confused, PCU, even Undergrads (a cartoon) were so spot-on for campus life, living for the weekend. Can't Hardly Wait, American Pie, Varsity Blues, Waiting, Superbad, etc came later, and I almost consider those watered down versions of the feral partying that happened earlier just as the internet went mainstream, but still canon.

A Friday night at my city's bar scene today looks like what our Sunday or Monday was. People half tipsy on 2 drinks, even though they're Ubering home later. The faint scent of ganja now instead of basements filled with smoke and first timers trying laughing gas. Nobody puking or disappearing around a corner to relieve themselves. No sound of bottles shattering. I feel like a curator of a museum now, a derelict from a forgotten time.

In fairness, I went to college in the midwest, where there was nothing else to do. Now the West Coast has effectively legalized drugs, awakening much of the country to the full human experience, and people have done the trips and plant medicine and maybe realize at a young age that alcohol and tobacco are rough drugs that tear you up. Which is admirable, but they also prepare you for getting torn up as an adult. To miss out on learning how to make your way home on drunk logic before you black out seems like a crucial rite of passage has been lost.

And it shows. In our country's embrace of puritanical politics like we saw in the jingoist 2000s, regentrified for the antivax era. In the worship of unspoiled beauty, idolizing of influencers, pursuit of financial security over visceral experience. In the fanboyism, bootlicking and drinking the kool-aid for every new evolutionary tech that cements the status quo instead of freeing the human spirit in a revolutionary manner. I gotta be honest, most of what's happening today is laughable to my generation. Blah I sound like a Boomer. Ok cryable then. We're in mourning. We worry about the kids today. All work and no play and all that. It's killing our souls, and theirs.

I guess my final thought after writing this is that partying is one of the most powerful reality-shifting tools in our arsenal. All of this can't be it. This can't be how America ends. You know what to do.

throwforfeds• 1 year ago

I remember a friend who was going to school in Boston coming to visit me at my college in western Massachusetts freshman year. I brought him to some off campus house in the woods, probably 200 or so people there, huge bonfire in the back, bands playing in the basement. We're passing a bottle of Jameson back and forth. Probably around 1 am everyone just heard someone screaming "that's my fucking couch!" from the outside deck as a few dudes tossed her couch into the bonfire. The flames were as high as the house and 15 minutes later the fire department was there. My friend couldn't believe what was going on, which honestly was a typical Friday night (aside from the couch burning).

I've lived in Brooklyn for about 20 years now, and while the parties still happen, most of them have become corporate. There are $50 covers and $15 beers, with wristbands you have to load a credit card onto instead of $5 covers and $2 beers in an illegal warehouse (cash only). The kids also seem to be taking ketamine a lot more than anything else, so they kinda disassociate and don't really dance that much at the clubs, whereas mdma and coke were things you ran into more when I was their age and people were not shy about grabbing someone on the dancefloor and grinding on each other for the night. They are definitely more sheltered and tame than we were as a whole, which isn't necessarily a bad thing I guess.

kortex• 1 year ago

I had never really considered partying as a reality-shifting tool, but as someone fond of regional burn events, yeah, it totally is.

Humans have partied for aeons. It's not just about letting off steam, it's about building social bonds, it's about traditions and rituals and marking key points in life.

This whole thread makes me rather sad, but in the same breath, makes me feel like there is real, actionable good to be done by promoting and helping run events. Not corporate pay-to-play curated experiences, which keep you on rails and only serve to condition more consumption behaviors, but relatively low cost, volunteer-run, do-it-yourself events. The latter, from my experience, have an absolutely infectious component of wanting to contribute, volunteer, create art, and drag others into the experience. But they are also a lot of work and not everyone is cut out for it.

It really has me thinking about lowering the bar to any sort of experience that gives folks a reprieve from the default world, however fleeting.

jollyllama• 1 year ago

The economic realities shouldn't be discounted. With more competitive conditions, the youth have to work much harder to secure the same opportunities relative to previous generation. With this comes the decline of partying or other high risk or non-productive activities. It's also true of adults - nightclubs are not as much of a thing as they were in decades prior.

DebtDeflation• 1 year ago

Hold up. GenX'er here, graduated college in the mid 90s. Are you telling me that college keg parties in the basements of off-campus housing is no longer a thing?

WorldPeas4• 1 year ago

still alive and well, across multiple social strata, happy to report.

weinzierl• 1 year ago

"It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of youth with social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection."

I honestly believe social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection does a lot less damage to the current generation than partying did to my generation. I can recommend the 1995 Larry Clark movie "kids" for a more balanced view how parties often looked like and which negative side effects they could have. Real life was not like in "American Pie" at all and that is where I guess Gen Z is getting their impression from.

barbazoo• 1 year ago

I honestly believe social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection does a lot less damage to the current generation than partying did to my generation.

Zuck, is that you? :)

movie "kids" for a more balanced view how parties often looked like

Teens (and pre-teens) having sex, doing hard drugs and drinking liquor is completely unlike "how parties often looked like" for anyone I know but YMMV.

frollogaston16• 1 year ago

The article title mentions partying, but there's a chart that's just about going out with 2+ friends. That's a terrible thing to lose. I was a kid in the 2000s, and the vast majority of socializing was just harmless fun, not the extreme.

danjc• 1 year ago

One aspect to consider is that the vast proportion of content in automated feeds isn't even sincere - it's just engagement farming.

zygentoma• 1 year ago

The responses from the Gen Xers were a mix of bewilderment and sadness, stuff like "What do you mean parties like this, it's just a normal teenage party!?

Well, it's a normal teenage party /in the US/.

I think in Europe, partying always looked a lot different (also different from country to country, here). I also mostly was bewildered by parties in teen movies from the early 00s.

whoisyc• 1 year ago

Another day, another well-meaning internet community falling victim to the creative writing major testing water on Reddit before trying to make it in Hollywood.

StefanBatory• 1 year ago

I grew up very sheltered, my mom had anxiety and I was a single child.

I remember being unable to comprehend how in media, people could just go somewhere without issues to met with people or even go for a walk. I knew that was a thing, but I could not imagine what it's actually like and if it's real.

darth_avocado• 1 year ago

Over protection and coddling are definitely a cause of lower social skills. When I was a kid, parents with leave children with a babysitter who was essentially an older child, sometimes just by a couple of years. Other times the kids would just be wandering around by themselves while parents didn’t care until it was dinner time. “Parties” weren’t just alcohol induced sex fests like they show on TV. Often it was 10 kids bunched around a single computer with $5 worth of chips and soda trying to beat a boss fight. A lot of those things are not only frowned upon now, but as a parent, could land you in jail.

If you wonder why children no longer grow up with a different outlook to life, then that’s probably it.

ethan_smith• 1 year ago

Digital socialization has replaced many functions of physical parties - Discord hangouts, gaming sessions, and video calls offer connection without the logistics burden or social risks. The question isn't whether socializing has died, but whether its digital evolution provides the same developmental benefits as in-person gatherings.

hn_throwaway_995• 1 year ago

I honestly am having trouble believing folks think that digital socialization is anywhere near an acceptable substitute (vs. an adjunct) for in-person socialization. And tons of research supports this. Can't remember the woman who talks about AI meaning "Artificial Intimacy", where you have 1500 "friends" but nobody to feed your cat when you go on vacation.

Here is Scott Galloway talking about the significance of asking someone out in-person vs. online dating, https://youtube.com/shorts/5sq4P5RCIrg

ChrisMarshallNY3• 1 year ago

The old "boomer" parties were even wilder.

Some girl's parents would leave for the weekend, and she'd quietly invite a friend or two over.

Somehow, word would get out, and 400 people would show up, with multiple kegs, and the place would get trashed.

lapcat8• 1 year ago

That's not a boomer thing. It more or less happened to me too.

WorldPeas4• 1 year ago

I think you need some sort of youth density for that. If you live in a low-density suburb where most people no longer have kids it's hard, even if you have a tool like the internet.

watwut12• 1 year ago

That is what she gets for having weak boundaries tho. And it is a thing that if you have seen, you will actively teach your kids to avoid - by saying no soom enough.

frollogaston16• 1 year ago

Some people want to make everything about "walkable cities." Maybe they can come back with socialization stats for non-driving-age kids, or those in Manhattan.

autoexec2• 1 year ago

Something tells me that tightly packed populations in urban settings and their landlords are way less accepting of huge parties in an apartment playing loud music than a small number of homeowners in a suburb are about someone in the cul-de-sac having a house party playing loud music.

konart• 1 year ago

As a millennial - I'm also amazed by these parties. Some of my peers had this kind of experience, but for me this is something from parallel universe.

Mostly because I never really understood the fun part.

ngruhn• 1 year ago

It was my favorite activity in the world. But that also makes it tough to "let go" when your 30s approach. Even when the hangovers get worse. I'm kinda grateful for the pandemic shutting everything down for a while. Before that I had massive FOMO when I "did nothing" on the weekend. I know a bunch of guys who did nothing else with their lives.

danans• 1 year ago

the fact that kids today can't even recognize "basic teen parties" and question whether they are some sort of made up fantasy

While I agree there is a technology-driven loneliness epidemic, what is so sacred about those "basic teen parties"?

People from any time before the 70s wouldn't recognize them either. Also, they were fictional caricatures written for movies, not real life, where teen parties were considerably less interesting.

frollogaston16• 1 year ago

I grew up in the 90s-2000s in a place were people were very serious about school. Very few kids were getting drunk etc, there were very few couples and 0 teen pregnancies, but there was still a healthy amount of socializing. That chart showing going out with 2+ friends was still a high % then, and it matched my experience.

This completely changed after iPhones and Facebook became popular enough. It ruined even the regular socializing. Even the few boy bullies started doing this lame-ass cyberbullying instead. Sometimes I wondered where the cool kids were on weekdays, then I checked my Minecraft server logs.

al_borland• 1 year ago

I graduated high school in 2001, which sounds like a similar era, but what I saw seemed very different. So maybe things changed pretty quickly once computers hit the mainstream and I’m just a bit older than you.

At my high school we had several girls get pregnant. I remember a kid getting a DUI and he made a necklace out of the tube used to blow in the breathalyzer and wore it with pride. In my first class of the day the kid who sat next to me had a flask he’d be drinking from at 8am.

A couple years after I graduated news broke that the track coach was basically throwing Diddy parties (we’ll leave it at that to avoid getting graphic). He, and several others, ended up in prison.

This was all in a sleepy little Midwest town that many would describe as charming and quaint.

Though Minecraft didn’t exist until I was already in the workforce. Facebook came out when I was in college. Facebook seemed to be a thing with certain groups (sorority girls seems to have a lot of competitions to get the most friends), but no one in my group of friends in college talked about it at all. I don’t think any of them even had accounts until later. Web 1.0 didn’t really change society, but Web 2.0 shifted it massively, especially once Web 2.0 made its way into people’s pockets.

I worked at the computer help desk at my university. We would get calls from high school seniors, who got accepted, trying to get their student email address early. They wanted to sign up for Facebook. I always found these calls strange, and the sorority girls too. People were either really into it, like an addict, or they were completely indifferent; I saw very little in between in those first years. Facebook probably blew up way more with the mainstream once they dropped the edu requirement. After that, there was a lot of social pressure to join.

Social media has always felt like a proxy for actual social interaction. It scratches just enough of that itch to make people think they are connected to others, without providing any actual connection, as the whole experience is largely passive.

scotty79• 1 year ago

I never saw the point of those. People, alcohol, what's fun about any of that? Tripping over your own legs with a bunch of similarly incapable humans while drowning in noise and fine particulates is toddler level fun. But with potential of acquiring adult level damage.

rubzah2• 1 year ago

It was always mostly people trying to recreate what they had seen in movies a party should be.

lisbbb5• 1 year ago

That's pretty funny. I was a teen in the late '80s and only attended maybe 1 party as depicted in films and it was on a college campus where a couple of buddies and I scammed our way in by acting like we were college students (actually HS Juniors at the time). It was pretty epic. I know of a couple other notorious parties during that time that I didn't attend. I think the answer is a resounding "yes"--that crazy parties were actually a thing.

angra_mainyu2• 1 year ago

Millennial here - they definitely were real! Even back in 2008-2010 when I was in high school.

steve_adams_862• 1 year ago

Even after high school, when I moved to the city we had parties quite often. They weren't quite as large, drunk, or disorganized, but people actually got together all the time. Some places were like designated party spots, where no one had kids or demanding jobs so it was a reliable place to head and have a good time.

My kids don't know anyone or anything like that. It's so strange. They still have sleep overs where they play video games and use their phones. That's fine in a way. At their age I was in the woods getting drunk and starting bonfires. It was fun as hell, but maybe something closer to the middle would be ideal.

SideQuark6• 1 year ago

It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of youth with social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection.

It's also fascinating how every generation in recorded history has similar claims about the next, yet somehow mankind has improved quality of life for so many.

Simply google (without quotes) "list of ancients bemoaning youth" and read millennia of similar claims, some of which could be used today and sound new.

bluefirebrand7• 1 year ago

yet somehow mankind has improved quality of life for so many

I think it would be hard to argue that Gen Z has a higher quality of life than Gen X

hn_throwaway_995• 1 year ago

I think it's such a huge mistake to think "well, it's always been like that, this is just a continuation of what's been going on in recorded history." Especially when the data tells a very different story.

For example, just look at one metric: weight. Kids these days (and, obviously, adults as well) are overweight and obese in numbers that are off the charts (off the charts because you barely had any obese kids in decades past). They used to always call it "adult-onset diabetes", which now they prefer to call it Type 2 diabetes because you see so many kids getting it, which is tragic IMO. To be clear, I'm not solely blaming the childhood obesity epidemic on smartphones or social media - I'm just using it as an example of something that has changed for kids that we should be worried about, not just hand wave away as "Meh, adults have always bemoaned youth."

Rates of teenage depression, loneliness and anxiety have skyrocketed in the pass 15 years, and when you dig into the data it doesn't look like just a rate of diagnosis issue.

Teenagers themselves (as a group) are telling us they are significantly more unhappy than teenagers in years past. We should listen to them.

rufus_foreman3• 1 year ago

> It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of youth

We? We, kemosabe?

I did not completely fuck up a lot of youth.

Don't include me in this.

47282847• 1 year ago

Responsibility, the ability to respond. Since you are able to do stuff, you also share responsibility, also for things you do not act upon, even if you don’t want to take it on. You can and you were definitely able to make different choices of what you want and wanted to engage with, and what you decided to ignore. You are an active part of society, if you want that or not.

arkwin• 1 year ago

I was a teenager in high school around 2005 and living in the Midwest. There were lots of underage drinking and parties going on during that time.

That being said, most of it was "cool parents" that allowed such behavior because we didn't own anything as teens.

We would have rules like, if you're drinking there, you have to stay the night or call your parents to pick you up.

I think it was just a different time; it seemed more forgiving. Now, a cop will pull you over and give you a DUI and mess up your life for a while. But I heard stories back then ~ '70s, where cops would make sure a drunk person got home safely at night instead of throwing the book at them.

I am sure it is harder for kids today who mostly live online in their algorithmic bubbles. And harder for parents to condone such activity, because who wants to be the parent where cops come knocking on your door and charge you with supplying alcohol to minors?

ProllyInfamous2• 1 year ago

Similar age (a bit older) but I always remember our core group of friends' parents would pass around a key-collection plate — "this is a safe environment to have a little bit of fun in" — the only time I ever remember a drunk peer driving home... he was then banned from all future private party invites. Sadly/predictably, he would later perish in a DUI, early 20s...

Damn, I miss the late 90s/aughts. Damn, I'm old (and fat, too; I "made it", somehow!)

codingwagie• 1 year ago

there are deep reasons for why society is not like this anymore

BeFlatXIII• 1 year ago

Care to list them?

OkayPhysicist• 1 year ago

Elaborating on this a bit, I think it's less that things are less forgiving, but that our risk tolerances have dramatically shrunk. Millennial parents are less risk tolerant with their kids' safety, and Gen Z / A kids and young adults are more careful about the rules.

The root cause of this risk intolerance might be dispersed, just a cumulative result of cable news scare tactics, dropping birth rates and more investment per child, but I suspect a big aspect of it is that risk taking is no longer the only way to get a dopamine hit. Prior to the modern internet, if you avoided all the normal risk-taking behaviors associated with teenagers and young adults, you'd just be bored to death. Now the reward side of the risk-reward balance is just the difference between high-quality fun from meatspace shenanigans versus lower-quality enjoyment derived from social media and online gaming.

SoftTalker3• 1 year ago

As more women poured their weekdays into 9-to-5 work, men failed to take over the logistical labor required to fill out the social calendar

LOL. The men were working too, as they always were, which is why women used to do most of the social planning. They didn't "fail to take over."

watwut12• 1 year ago

I remember seeing articles about working women doing more social managing then working men. It is one of reasons why women do not seek new partner as fast as men after divorce - they are more likely to keep friends they are content with.

cjbgkagh• 1 year ago

The inevitable side effect of the financialization of the human experience. People are in constant competition with each other and the amount of time they can spend not competing is proportionate to the amount of slack in the economic system. Keeping slack costs money, removing it makes money, it's very hard to almost impossible to stop something that makes money. It would take an Amish level of zealotry.

I think the focus on short term gains by sacrificing long term viability is in part due to the inability to accurately measure future prospects, whenever there is doubt shot-termism prevails. The bird in the hand wins over the two in the bush. I think maximizing long term gains would be directly tied to human flourishing so if we could accurately measure long term externalities we could align capitalist and human interests. Convincing those who gain from short-termism to agree to use more accurate metrics is impossible when not using it makes them more money.

I don't know how to fix this. A society will not allow itself to undergo 'creative destruction' in an era where we bailout corporations. And socialism certainly is not going to fix it, socialists have their own kind of rather destructive short-termism.

NotAnOtter• 1 year ago

I used to throw loads of parties. At somepoint I realized..

1. It's expensive. I never once got a reasonable contribution from my friends. I knew this at the time, but eventually I was over it. Paying $100-250 per event just to deal with all the work and drama that comes with it.. not worth.

2. It's a lot of work. Hours of prep, hours of hosting, hours of clean up after. At the end of the day ~12 hours of effort for ~4 hours of fun is not a good ROI.

3. It frequently was an excuse to get drunk or high. Which is fun, whatever. But as I grew more health conscious, this was less and less appealing. I can drink on my own if I want.

4. There are better alternatives. I don't have to do any of the above options if I just jump on Discord for a while. Or join a rec league sport. Or spend it with my family.

ryandrake6• 1 year ago

I don't think the point of a party is "ROI" either in terms of the dimensions of time, effort, or money. When I decide to host one, this kind of "cost" is assumed. I don't worry about it because I can afford it (in all three dimensions), and the point of hosting a get-together is not to make a profit on any of those dimensions or break even. I look at it as: I'm spending time+effort+money, and the return, for myself and everyone who attends, is not any of those three. It's getting some much needed socialization and a fun experience. I guess your point is that you're not getting as much fun out of it to justify the spend?

laszlograves• 1 year ago

1991 millennial here offering some perspective.

Transferred to a California state college a little late (27) and wrapped up my computer science degree @ SFSU finished in 2019 so somewhat recent anecdotal experience.

I met a lot of people just like me while in college. Lot of people mid to late 20s. One of my best friends in college was in the international business club fb group and they’d always host events or pub crawls every Thursday night. I’d ping my gf (now wife) and she’d asynchronously invite all of her friends and then I’d be inviting all our college friends so by the time we arrived we’d have a merged friend group. We met so many cool folks this way and people from different majors with diverse backgrounds.

It helped to be in San Francisco of course.

Now as far as the housing discussion I’d say that the 7% rates that are historically normal feel oppressive after 15 years of low rates following the Great Recession. I bought a place in the edge of the Bay Area last year with 5% down at 7% because I didn’t have the income that I have now when rates were low. We were saving for the last 7 years delaying a bunch of major life milestones. The prices in our zip code already dropped ~15% before we bought so we saved about a 20% down payments worth off the up front cost. I barely qualified with 270k combined income and I’m not sure ppl understand how weird that feels until they experience it. The home wasn’t even a median priced SFH in fact it was well below at about 750k. I kept a bunch of vested stock and savings but yeah not sure how things will shake out. It’s a tough market for sure.

tlogan3• 1 year ago

I have a politically sensitive but potentially insightful question.

I live in San Francisco, where we have a desegregation busing policy. In practice, this means kids don’t attend their neighborhood schools. They’re assigned to schools across the city (Instead of investing in improving schools in underprivileged neighborhoods, we (voters) decided it is better (and cheaper) to bus those kids to schools in more affluent areas - but that is beside the point)

One theory I’ve heard is that this setup leads to less socializing (or “partying”) among teens, since their school friends often live far away. That raises an interesting question: To what extent does busing contribute to reduced peer interaction outside school?

Also, how common are these busing policies across the U.S. today? Is San Francisco an outlier, or is this a widespread approach?

verall• 1 year ago

It is common and it is coupled with investment in improving schools in underprivileged neighborhoods.

A school in a poor area gets heavy investment and then can pull ("magnet") a certain percentage of their students from a much wider area. Involved parents apply for their children to go to these schools since they have the best art or theater or robotics or whatever programs.

This acknowledges that an important part of a successful school is parental involvement and a general culture of students that are interested in learning.

In practice, at least in my childhood, the schools largely self-segregated by the classes they took, i.e. AP or not, more or less challenging tracks ("honors" classes).

I still think it was a net positive. At least students in the underprivileged areas got access to these advanced programs, even if there were still social barriers. And as a kid from the suburbs, I got to meet kids outside of my suburban cohort - I think this was really valuable to me as a bit of a misfit.

skeaker• 1 year ago

Had a similar situation when I was young. Living far away only really impacts your ability to host events which can suck for things like your birthday parties, as getting a large number of people to all go out of their way is pretty much impossible. Other than that it doesn't affect your ability to socialize or attend events hosted by others.

VLM3• 1 year ago

Three issues that are important but nobody wants to discuss (why?):

Inflation in the cost of law enforcement. As an X-er I received some truly epic paint-peeling flame-throwing "angry dad-style" lectures from cops and one time I got caught and my parents were called and I paid a municipal citation (not a misdemeanor or felony) equivalent to thirteen hours of minimum wage labor (essentially, one teenage afterschool weekly paycheck...). Now a days it would be kinder if the cops just shot the kid, as they will lose their license semi-permanently which means no job and no programmed activities and no sports, forbidden from joining the military (note the GI Bill paid for my college), lose their security clearance if they are already in the .mil, expelled from college / retract admission, suspended from school, that means no college diploma, no diploma as a job ticket to get one of the very few remaining "good jobs" etc. Seems a little inflated of a punishment over "a couple beers" People like discussing the inflation rate of real estate, lack of inflation in wages, but they should discuss inflation in the punishment for having a few drinks. A general cultural trend toward absolutism where everything thats permitted is mandatory and everything thats not permitted has no limit to the resulting punishment to prevent it. Toe the line precisely, or suffer the full weight of the law, and the line does not include partying, so you'd be crazy to do that.

"In the old days" the cultural expectation was everyone works 9-5. No one is allowed that anymore, they either work 24x7 as servants on call to their feudalistic owner, or have weird hours and gig economy jobs. Most people cannot "drop by after work around 6 for a beer". Can you drink at work? I can't. Can you go to work drunk? I can't. Some people, maybe most people, are not allowed to ever be "not at work". You're not even allowed to sleep if your boss feels like texting you; you surely can't get drunk at a friends house without getting fired. Don't worry that beer (or ten) will only cost you a one year job search to get a new job. When everyone is under house arrest by their employer, nobody parties.

There's a long tradition in the USA of trashing a proper name and the following generation abandons it while doing the same thing under a new name. Every generation before gen-x loved going to malls, then a long indoctrination campaign to use security forces and police to "keep those annoying teenage kids out of malls" started in the 1980s, and here I am in the 2020s and I STILL will not go to the mall because of heavy handed security, and my generation and younger is killing the malls because malls hate me because I was once a teen that hung out at the mall a lifetime ago. So, WRT parties, post "Animal House" movie era, a party means vandalism, drunk driving accidents, police arrests, visiting the ER for alcohol (or other) intoxication, etc. The marketing has been successful and my generation and younger no longer "attend parties". We "hike at the park" or "tailgate at the (kids?) sport event" or "hang out at the festival" or "board game night" doing EXACTLY what we did when people partied, but for marketing reasons we never party anymore, its a "tailgate" sporting event. This makes the article pretty weak sauce, an entire article about doing search and replace in a word processor for "party" and "board game night" is not a significant lifestyle change.

lo_zamoyski• 1 year ago

"women have long been the keepers of the family social calendar. Wives, not husbands, historically planned the quilting parties, the bridge games, and the neighborhood potlucks. But in the second half of the 20th century, many women swapped unpaid family jobs for salaried positions."

This is a very good observation, and I think that somewhere in the social revolutions of the 20th century, we failed to appreciate the extremely important historical roles women played that were central to traditional societies. Even today, we believe the stock caricatures of pre-feminist societies, which in a way is unsurprising, given that most people alive today never experienced anything other than the post-revolutionary world. We just accept caricature as fact, and we view history anachronistically through the lens of our present social realities.

In traditional societies, the family assumes the basic and most important social unit and social point of reference, with the married couple as the foundation for it. This already creates a network of social ties that radiate from the marriage, most conspicuously family ties which are doubled. Husbands typically gravitated toward the public sphere, securing the material well-being of the family through their participation in public life (in other words, their work was primarily for the sake of the domestic sphere). Wives typically gravitated toward the domestic sphere which was the seat of family life. So while men were heads of the family, women were heads of the household. And this was an honor, as family life was the primary business of life; the husband's career or job was primarily in service to family life. Ideally, husbands provided the means that allowed wives to be free to be mothers, unburdened by competing commitments. (Of course, this doesn't mean fathers did not participate in domestic life, nor that women did not participate in public life. It is rather a matter of emphasis and "center of gravity", so to speak.) By analogy, kings are exalted fathers, and queens are exalted mothers.

And since the family is the center of social life, and women are mistresses of the domestic sphere, it is fitting that women should have a more social orientation. Indeed, it is expected that women would be the catalysts of many of the social ties with the broader community.

In that sense, the careerism that women today are taught from an early age to pursue and prioritize not only deprives women of the opportunity to function as wives and mothers, most exalted and honored roles that they are, but it deprives society of much of its social glue, as women have a greater tendencies to care about cultivating social bonds than men do.

What we're taught today instead is that the career, not family life, is the supreme occupation of life and the primary source of our happiness. We are therefore taught that women were historically deprived of this opportunity, chained to the bleak life of being "stay-at-home moms" (a vicious term, if there ever was one), covered in baby puke and toddler shit, under the tyrannical boot of her husband like some slave. We demean motherhood as some kind of drudgery for poor, uneducated, unattractive women instead of the privilege that it is, in fact the privilege of raising the future generation. Children are no longer a wonderful gift, but a burden and an obstacle. You might be able to turn them into sources of prestige, if you can get them into the best schools or whatever. The career is the center of life; children, the family, even the spouse - these are all secondary now.

And this has downstream effects that cause a radical transformation of society and culture that affects the entire social and economic environment, like the atrophy of social ties mentioned in the article. For instance, try supporting a family on a single income today (in the 1950s, a middle class/working class man could do just that). Now women who want to live in a traditional way are constrained in that choice, as economic and social realities make that difficult. That's why I roll my eyes when someone thinks bucking demographic decline is just a matter of throwing some money at the problem. Our society and our culture has become hostile to family life. The grain and pattern of modern life, rather than supporting it, adds friction and resistance. And since family life is the foundation for the rest, the health or lack thereof of family life is a predictor of the health of the broader society.

rwl4• 1 year ago

This was a great read! I'm not a paid subscriber, so I'll post my thoughts here.

One angle I think that might be missing is that when only men worked outside the home, women would be stuck at home all day with housework and childcare which I would guess was quite isolating. So I would guess these gatherings were a lifeline.

When women entered the workforce, they gained the same quasi-social environment men had enjoyed all along. Work friendships might not be as deep as neighborhood ones, but they're "good enough" to take the edge off loneliness. Not only that, but now both partners would come home fatigued from a full day of work. So neither would have a strong drive to now setup these gatherings. Before, you had one exhausted partner who could be coaxed into socializing by a partner who genuinely needed it. Now you have mutual exhaustion. Even worse, planning a party starts to feel like another work project rather than something restorative.

There's a multi-generational aspect to this too. Their kids learned the lesson that home is for family and screens, not for social gatherings. Computers and smartphones arrived and provided social interaction that required minimal energy. No cleaning the house, no planning food, no getting dressed. Perfect for an already exhausted population that had been socially declining for years.

travisb• 1 year ago

Even beyond mutual exhaustion is housework. When both partners works outside the home, they still have to do the housework when they get home or on the weekend. Previously that would have been the job of the one staying at home.

The 20-ish hours a week needed for domestic chores has to come from somewhere.

millipede• 1 year ago

I've been throwing moderately large parties the past 2 years (12-40 people) and the lack of partying is definitely noticeable. Most people don't reciprocate, making it disheartening to keep doing it. I wanted to build friendships out of it, and hopefully get invited to more parties myself, but so far it hasn't happened. It's a decent amount of set up (cleaning, buying food, coordinating), and a lot of clean up after too. The ROI isn't where I want it.

I kind of wonder if people have just forgot what to do after the party is over. I had hoped it would be "that was so fun, we should host one", but instead it just kinda fades away in their minds.

ImPostingOnHN• 1 year ago

going to a party is less intimidating (particularly effort-wise) than hosting one

maybe co-host one with somebody who you think might enjoy hosting but is reticent to try

ashdksnndck• 1 year ago

Also if you just want to make your own parties easier to host, you can ask the guest list if anyone will volunteer to help with specific tasks or supplies.

pinkmuffinere• 1 year ago

If you happen to live in San Diego, I'll happily invite you to my parties! They generally involve board games, making a fire, having dinner, watching a movie, or going to the beach. Alcohol optional. Not super wild, but always a good time for me :)

doh• 1 year ago

I am in SD and would love an invite. I am keep thinking about uniting more like minded people for a while. My email is r@seslu.com

ZephyrBlu• 1 year ago

Very few people want to host/organize other people.

The end goal of throwing parties shouldn’t be friendship or getting invited to other people parties, it’s building a large loose network of people you’re acquaintances/shallow friends with and becoming a super connector.

If you ONLY want to make friends or get invited to parties I think focusing on finding specific people and spending time with them 1:1 is a much better way to do that.

megaloblasto• 1 year ago

Damn, I always thought the end goal of throwing a party was to get buzzed and have a good time with friends.

starkparker2• 1 year ago

The ROI isn't where I want it.

I know this is HN, but sometimes - maybe, hopefully, sometimes - neither R nor I is involved in an action.

If you aren't enjoying doing it then by all means stop doing it. But throwing a party isn't supposed to have deliverables or action items.

spiderice2• 1 year ago

To each their own.. but I think throwing a party to make friends is a totally reasonable plan and expectation. And if it isn't working out, then the ROI isn't there.

I go to "couples game nights" with my wife and her friends even though I don't really like them. But I like having friends in the neighborhood. So it's worth it to me when one of her friends husbands (who is now my friend) shows me the deck they've been building in their backyard all because I went to a somewhat painful game night.

I think you have it nearly completely backwards. Society would be far better off if more people were willing to do the "un-fun" things (like planning and hosting a party) in order to socialize. GP should be applauded.

unstatusthequo• 1 year ago

Right, when OKRs and KPIs and other startup bullshit jargon are applied to parties, maybe it’s not really the spirit of a party at all, is it?

amenhotep• 1 year ago

It's a slightly jargony way to say "it isn't worth it to me", which is totally fine. Come on.

BeetleB• 1 year ago

I wanted to build friendships out of it, and hopefully get invited to more parties myself, but so far it hasn't happened.

From this and other comments, it seems you think you didn't make friends, because you're not invited to other parties. There seems a leap here.

If the others are holding big parties and not inviting you - sure.

If they just don't throw parties, then they likely are still your friends :-)

But as another commenter said: Going to parties is not necessarily the best way to make friends. Whenever I go to a big party, the host is way too busy to spend a meaningful amount of time with me. Of course he's not going to become my friend that way! Going to big parties is for guests to make friends with other guests - not with the host.

I have some good friends who throw only big parties - I've stopped going to them. What's the point if I can't interact with them?

kurthr• 1 year ago

That's about the right size for a potluck. Set a rough guide for the main and have people post what they're bringing. If they're good friends they'll put their dishes in the washer/sink and some will help clean before they leave. If they aren't good guests (bring something + fun + clean up) they don't get invited back. Have it once a month on the same day. Plan to rotate it and talk about it at the party.

Of course people have all sorts of different ideas of what a party should be, what to bring, and what to do while you're there, but doing it all yourself is really hard. If you're getting it catered with cleaning staff, it's very different than having mostly the same close friends, month after month year after year.

mcdeltat• 1 year ago

Many commenters focusing on the ROI part of your comment but I totally agree with your premise based on my own experience as a young person.

How I would word it is younger people are generally less inclined to invest in (real/in-person?) social interaction. I suspect some bar for motivation or entertainment has changed so people don't socialise the same. Probably intertwined with rise in mental health issues too. Be less interested in socialising and it's no surprise the result is less socialising, in one form or another.

In my experience yeah people don't often reach out or reciprocate effectively when it comes to socialising. Or they stick to a very small group.

angra_mainyu2• 1 year ago

cleaning, buying food, coordinating

Food? A party's just booze and music, maybe even move some furniture out of the way for a dance floor.

frollogaston16• 1 year ago

Chart goes down fast soon after 2010. There's another article about a decline in young Americans' health since 2007. And, we all know what happened around that time.

"I don’t like the simplistic idea that smartphones are purely anti-social" well I do. It's in-your-face obvious any time you're in public, and especially if you were in school back when smartphones started gaining popularity. There's a longer explanation too, but same conclusion.

gdsdfe• 1 year ago

I bet you anything this is related to wage growth or lack thereof ... I mean why would you party if you have no disposable income ?!

janalsncm3• 1 year ago

As with many large scale social trends there will be several contributing factors, so nuance will always be the first victim of people with an axe to grind.

If you want to say that an decrease in X is the sole cause of a decrease in Y, it might be a good idea to check whether there are other places where 1) X increased but Y decreased or 2) X decreased but Y increased. Different moments in time, different countries, etc.

For myself personally I have moved around a good amount, so it is naturally harder to make social connection, and even if I’m invited to social events with friends in other places it is physically hard to attend them.

bagacrap• 1 year ago

I feel like it would be more worrisome if partying had doubled in the last XX years.

advael2• 1 year ago

I like that this delves into the relationship between "helicopter parenting" and this trend, and maybe I missed it, but I find that it conspicuously lacks economic precarity and the decline of real wages over this time period as an explanation. Hosting social events does cost free time and money and most people have way less of both in real terms than the period it's comparing to

rightbyte2• 1 year ago

Free time and mental energy is the limiting factor I think.

Personally I observe that social events seem to be most common among students who also are quite poor.

However mental energy and free time is surely correlated with wealth.

advael2• 1 year ago

The effects of wealth on outcomes meaningful to most humans look mostly like a step functions, with some continuous-lookin' bits here and there. Anecdotally my assumption is that partying x wealth is bimodal, with peaks near the top and the middle-bottom of the wealth distributions. But homeless people and people scraping by on two minimum-wage jobs, both of which comprise a larger portion of america than when I was a child, are unlikely to be able to host or even often attend parties, like I think there's a sharp step to basically zero after a certain poverty line unless you're in a really integrated community (also less common over that time period, to be fair)

sota_pop• 1 year ago

I see this cultural shift resulting from multiple contributing factors: 1. The increasingly litigious environment that is the US. Where people are becoming more risk-averse out of fear of being liable for whatever. 2. The fact that anything you did, be it something great or a faux pas, social or otherwise, was much more ephemeral. At best it would be captured in people’s memories for a couple of weeks or the occasional cell phone pic that was inevitably lost with the hardware. More recently, everything you do is recorded, indexed, and preserved with accompanying text, photos, and video - _forever_ - thanks to social media and the internet.

Also, agreeing with other posts, the onus of “sports culture” for kids (and families) in k-12 schools these days is absolutely unbelievable.

edit: Also, finding out the following Monday (in school) that a “party” to which you weren’t invited occurred over the weekend was unpleasant. Witnessing a middle-school-aged kid discover a “party” to which they weren’t invited in real-time as it is streaming live on social media is absolutely heart-breaking.

sailfast• 1 year ago

Shit’s expensive. Period.

What teenager has $60 to spend at the movies?

standardUser• 1 year ago

A an older millennial, I have been pleasantly surprised by how vibrant my social life can be as long as I put in some effort. One key is living in a reasonably dense urban area. I have friends who make art and music, fiends who do standup comedy, friends on municipal sports teams - the ways to connect with people are expansive. And people in my age group (early 40's) seem only a little less inclined to make plans and go out compared to my friends in their 30's.

Even with my oldest friends, all of whom are busy with their kids, mortgages and spouses, we still prioritize taking trips to see each other and for everyone to get to know each other's kids.

So if you're anything like me (grown, mostly single, living alone in a dense urban center) I refuse to believe any social or technological developments have ruined our chances at human companionship.

But that's millennials. I have absolutely no idea how Gen Z will navigate this world. The fact that they seem to be choosing the least useful, social or pleasurable vice in the world (vaping), which also happens to be among the most viciously addictive vices (for many people) does not bode well in my opinion, no matter how enlightened the anti-alcohol stance may appear.

sirodoht• 1 year ago

If anyone wants to be invited to house parties in London, UK, I'm happy to invite anyone who emails theo+hn@torchandzen.com! Number of people ranges from 10 to 50, activities from talking and eating to picnics and dancing.

Animats• 1 year ago

It's not just the US. The nightclub and bar industry is tanking in the UK and Europe, too. UK: [1][2] Berlin.[3] Paris.[4]

[1] https://ntia.co.uk/nightclub-industry-struggles-with-over-10...

[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk-pub-closures-beer-taxe...

[3] https://www.dw.com/en/is-berlin-in-a-club-death-spiral/a-703...

[4] https://www.latribunedelhotellerie.com/paris-society-cession...

tracerbulletx• 1 year ago

I'd guess the biggest driver of this is a lack of boredom. There's a certain investment of time and stress to throw a party, if you're just going to be completely bored it gets you over that hurdle, if you can play games and talk in a group chat instead you might not pass the threshold for bothering a lot of the time.

chickensong• 1 year ago

I see a lot of reasons and excuses about the decline in partying, and the internet is obviously changing society and culture, as well as every generation of parents, but at some point everyone needs to take some responsibility and make their own decisions. At least people today have amazing tools to throw parties, if that's what they want to do.

FWIW, I spent the holiday weekend raving under the stars in the forest and it was great, as always. Mostly old people though.

frollogaston16• 1 year ago

Beware of the "Less-Social Teens" chart using a nonzero Y axis.

ChrisArchitect• 1 year ago

Searches article text for mention of the words pandemic, covid, video games or even the word concert. Nothing. This isn't a serious piece. Moving on.

sheepybloke• 1 year ago

As a zennial, there are a couple things that contribute: 1. No one has a car when you're younger unless your parents are well off. Most people I know didn't have access to a car until college. Makes it hard to get to parties when only 1 of your friends has a car that fills up instantly. 2. Most of your friends are online anyways. You're going to hang out with friends every night because they're on discord, waiting for you to get on and play your social game together. Why would you hang out in person if you can hang out online? You can't get to their house anyways. 3. Similarly to that, none of my friends live near each other anymore. We all moved to different cities for different reasons. So many people I've talked to are similar. It also makes it harder to find new friends, since everyone has their friends. They're just not near.

FireSquid2006• 1 year ago

There are definitely less in high school, but has college really changed that much? I'm a student right now, and while I'm not involved with it, it definitely seems like Greek life people always have parties going on.

aiiizzz• 1 year ago

I wouldn't ever endorse drinking, let alone underage drinking, and parties don't sound fun without drinking. Therefore, no parties. What's needed is a new class of drugs, something healthier and legal, that make people sociable like drinking does.

coldtea3• 1 year ago

Because people have lost their will to live. It's evident even in their talk about how exhaustive social interaction, parties, the outside world in general is, and how they'd rather stay cozy at home - even in their early 20s.

6510• 1 year ago

No one had cameras, if one did something strange it would be funny or embarrassing for a week or two. More usually everyone was to drunk to really take notice of "strange" behavior.

Hypergraphe• 1 year ago

Not directly related to the article, but, the way we played multiplayer games on a sofa back in the 90s was way more funnier and fullfilling than what it is now through steam/discord. The sharing was not the same.

Projectiboga• 1 year ago

The enforcement on underage drinking has really altered the equation. And I'd guess the ubiquity of cell phones is another limit. The party culture of the 50s through the 90s-early 00s wasn't the norm it was the aberration from the times before. I think dancing it self has been in decline too. I tried to get the kids (teens and middle school) dancing at a small summer community and they just wanted to stand there and take turns playing their favorites from their own Spotify lists. They seem less open to just listing to unfamiliar music and maybe using Shazam to get some leads for new listening.

bentt• 1 year ago

As a parent, what my wife and I see is that when the kids have access to the internet, they socialize on the internet. When they don't have access to the internet, they socialize in real life. Most often it's just a question of convenience. It's a pain in the ass to get together. It used to be the only way.

Another thing is that parents just don't leave their kids alone any more. My sister's son is almost 20 and she's still thinking about his goings on even when he's at college. This might be nice in terms of feeling loved, but independence is almost required to bring partying back.

khelavastr• 1 year ago

There were fewer bullies. These days, if you try to get together s group of people with strong passion you're likely to be targeted by people who insist on inclusion in resource sharing or else they'll persecute the group that advantages itself.

biohcacker84• 1 year ago

Addictive tech in your hand is an evolutionary trap.

Much like cars are to squirrels, squirrels have evolved to run into a straight line to the nearest tree at the hint of any danger. And for all threats other than cars that is the correct thing.

But many squirrels are "trapped" by evolution to cross the path of a car when there is no need to do so.

Humanity's curiosity, sociability and OCDness have all been trapped by algorithms and smart phones.

And it is shortening lives and even more so reducing reproduction. A faint hope is, that with all such evolutionary pressure, we can evolve our way out of them.... eventually.

iceKirin• 1 year ago

Perhaps the ultimate form of human existence is to be physically expressionless yet intensely passionate on the internet.

cypherg• 1 year ago

Once again, they’re severely discounting socialization over the internet. Twitch, discord, et al account for massive amounts of socialization. For many kids it’s easier to chat or stream than it is to find the other 2-3 weird kids into their particular hobby. Watch the TV documentary “Social Studies” if you think Gen Z isn’t partying. “Euphoria” is definitely an exaggeration but it’s relatable to Gen Z for a reason. Anecdotally, I see Genz all the time at raves and concerts. These aren’t “animal house” style events but still.

The death of partying in the USA

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