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The Death of Partying in the USA

The Death of Partying in the USA

140 comments

·July 9, 2025

Apreche

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

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 :)

sokoloff

> 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.

roadside_picnic

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

floatingtorch

Yes, it’s surprised me how this meme was everywhere in the comments while the data does not support it. I’d bet it’s splashy headlines in news outlets. Important to correct it so that policy is focused on what’s most effective.

arp242

I don't know about the United States, but in (parts of) Europe it is the case. "Nobody owns homes any more" is an exaggeration of course, but things are not alright in the housing market, in part because private corporations are buying up quite a large percentage of the housing stock to rent. I think in Ireland it's about half.

Like I said, I don't know about the US. It's a big place and you're probably taking too much of a "grand scheme of things" view here. Aside from geographical diversity, total % of home ownership doesn't change that fast – lots of older people already own homes, their children often inherit those homes. Houses aren't like hotdog sales and numbers change slowly.

What matters more is how much does an average 25 or 30 year old pay in housing costs? What hope does someone with a decent (but not exceptionally well-paid) job have of purchasing a house? A single % of home ownership across the entire population doesn't really capture that. Doubly so for such a large country as the US. I'm sure there are affordable homes out in the sticks, but also ... no jobs. That might work for the remote software dev, but not everyone is a software dev.

In Ireland the total housing ownership has fallen, but not dramatically. However, the reality for people not already having a home is quite bleak. Buying a house now is significantly more expensive than it was a decade or two ago, as is renting. I could buy an apartment on my own ten years ago with a salary that really wasn't all that great. I'd have no hope today. My rent today is about three and a half times what it was 15 years ago. There is a generation of working 20 and 30-year old who are still living at home because they can't really afford to move out.

JohnTHaller

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.

Retric

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.

Gigachad

To some extent but there are differences. You have housing stability, a fixed price going forward, the ability to renovate most of the internals, and the ability to affix things to the walls without worrying about marks when you have to move out.

asdff

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

danaris

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.

hnpolicestate

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...

bethekidyouwant

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

mathiaspoint

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.

DidYaWipe

It's not going to get any better, either, as states let corporations buy up entire neighborhoods. When you combine that scourge with HOAs, you have the end of home ownership in the USA.

hnpolicestate

You correctly blame corporate buy up of real estate as a problem but nobody ever cites upper income new immigrants as a problem. Where I live the only people purchasing $600k - $1 million residential properties are newly arrived Chinese, Eastern European, South Asian and Arab immigrants.

Makes for a very angry native population who are being pushed out of the places they were born for new arrivals. We'll never be able to build enough housing to account for the continual flow of well to do immigrants and native population.

throw10920

In a twist that has multiple levels of irony, I've heard that there's protests going on in Mexico right now about this, with the wealthy immigrants/tourists being from the US.

DidYaWipe

Yeah, that's a good one too. I remember reading that China was allegedly trying to curtail this by limiting money movement out of the country for large transactions, but we all know that the people with that kind of money will find a way (if those "efforts" were even really being made).

atonse

Are you claiming that they’re already well to do (by American standards) when they arrive?

I can’t count a single immigrant in my network that was rich by American standards (which makes them filthy rich by most other nations standards) and then chose to move here.

Sure my sample size is probably 30 families (across a dozen countries) but that’s not nothing.

Every single one built their net worth here. Meaning that opportunity is also available to natives.

p_j_w

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

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

1oooqooq

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.

lr4444lr

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.

ryandrake

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!

antonymoose

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.

Dusseldorf

That's really rough. We bought into a neighborhood in an older college town, and I think that's helped things a bit for us. Smaller houses and yards, so people hang out around the neighborhood or in parks. Everyone's out walking their dogs all the time, and pretty much everyone is happy to stop and chat. I think it's just about getting lucky and finding places where people prioritize the community rather than having giant houses, giant yards with swingsets, and giant cars so they never need to talk to anyone.

iamdelirium

Have you thought maybe its your environment? I think the "nice suburban communities" have always been filled with antisocial people (as someone who grew it in them). People go to the suburbs for quiet and to be left alone.

I barely knew anyone in the neighborhood when I was living with my parents in the suburbs. My friends were all from school and required a car to hang out.

In contrast, now as an adult, I live in a dense major city (that's supposedly filled with crime according right wing news) and I see kids all the time walking around. I have a young kid and he interacts with his neighbors a lot more. My mailman knows of my kid and when we moved across the street.

Our closest couple's friend is a 5 minute walk away and its nice to randomly run into them on a weekend when taking a walk.

We regularly have wine and food on Fridays with one of my neighbors who have a kid close to our age and its easy and without friction.

lurking_swe

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?

Dusseldorf

It's the phones. No one has anything to talk about anymore because constant scrolling leaves you with nothing to show. And then it's self perpetuating --easier to keep slamming the dopamine button than trying to make conversation with a completely atrophied social muscle.

analog31

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.

lawlessone

>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.

jamiek88

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.

jppope

An honest attempt from a social adult to develop a sense of community is far from cringe. Reasonably speaking, its actions like that which can actually make socialization happen. If the old way wasn't working, so try something else.

lr4444lr

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.

InitialLastName

This is something I think about with my kids when they get to that age. I was calling my friends (on their landlines, using our landline) regularly by then, talking to their parents en route to getting them on the phone, and arranging visits. My kids won't grow up in a world where that's something that happens, and I'm not sure how to support their social independence in a world where (as you say) it seems nigh-on-negligent for them to have their own phones.

wombatpm

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.

jemmyw

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

tclancy

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.

luckydata

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.

zoomablemind

I thought a prime time for contacting the parents is right after school when picking up the kid. Everyone is there waiting, so it's just natural to chit chat, esp when the kids are friends.

taeric

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.

parpfish

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

udkl

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.

lbrito

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.

jppope

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.

taeric

I suspect they didn't know each other that well back in the day, either. We just tell ourselves that they did. When we've lived in apartment complexes, as an easy example, there were a lot of people we didn't know. We just also got to know a few that we would see on a regular basis, as well.

heavyset_go

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.

Apocryphon

I wonder how the generation of latchkey kids fared.

01100011

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.

mtrovo

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.

Apocryphon

I think there's something to the notion that everything has to be overproduced now. The technology aspect is part of this (you have more tools to make events 'better', so if you don't you might look bad), and so is the culture of making things safer (and so necessitates more organization, more formalization). People get burned out easily and drop out from it.

meepmorp

How old are your kids?

01100011

We've got a toddler. Currently bracing for the upcoming shit-show which will be the pre-school and beyond years.

asdff

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.

lc9er

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.

avhception

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.

asdff

Kids aren't left to their own devices anymore. They are handed a device. It also doesn't help the cops in a lot of places will arrest the parent for letting the kid out.

generalenvelope

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).

asdff

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.

Gigachad

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.

burnt-resistor

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.

david422

> 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.

01100011

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

> 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

> 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

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.

kulahan

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).

ryandrake

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!

AnimalMuppet

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

helloooooooo

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.

LeanderK

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.

parpfish

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.

ryukoposting

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.

asdff

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.

luckydata

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.

imzadi

> 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.

thisisauserid

"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

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.

lisathompson

[flagged]

ryao

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.

shawndrost

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

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

SimianSci

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

> 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.

avhception

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

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.