Who Americans spend their time with

Here is one source:

http://melbourneinstitute.unimelb.edu.au/assets/documents/hi...

Basically men tend to have fewer friends than women and depend more on their spouses for this.

What are the units of the x-axis? And what is the source of the data? Such terrible graph design never should have made the front page.

Here's a couple reasons this is a lame article

1) It partially involves demographic and political aspects that are not permitted to be discussed on this site; that leads to a lot of echo chamber "I donno" responses. You can't have insight when discussing something you can't discuss. Whats the point of hitting the echo chamber like a tuning fork other than to verify "yes it continues to ring with only one note"? Yup that tuning fork / echo chamber is still not a hi-fi speaker in terms of expressing full bandwidth reality.. so is it more likely the article is inappropriate or that moderation standards will change? It seems more likely this is a bad article.

2) The ratios make very little sense. Mush together the "family" graph, the "children" graph and the "partner" graph for a couple ages for a specific example. Much as "coworkers" doesn't mean everyone works part time, it really means a minority of us work more than full time while the majority don't work and have no coworkers by definition. So comparing the ratios in the "children" graph with more than half unemployed with a side dish of typical breeding years it implies something like half of stay at home parent age bracket has pre-school kid at home, which would not appear to be nearly enough to maintain population. If almost no one had kids this would make sense. There's no point discussing an article that has highly questionable aspects to it.

3) There will be the usual ultra-low quality comments bashing introverts for being born that way. Time alone is only horrifying if you're horrified with yourself or who you are. Otherwise, its a lot of fun. Extroverts being a malfunctioning minority, implies its not really a problem that introverts are doing just fine as they age. Intro/Extro debate is mildly interesting yet mostly irrelevant to the article.

4) As a side dish its mostly a collection of cultural mis-beliefs that are somewhat impermissible, even with this evidence. Well, everyone knows every 20-something spends every night fashionably socializing all night long. Uh, no, almost no 20-something does that outside the echo chamber and most importantly the "everyone knows" aspect, and even the tiny minority of extreme party people are in a somewhat exponential decline to zero by age 30. For an example of an impermissible thought, how do you sell "new urbanism" to everyone, when statistically no one goes out at night? The amount of time people spend with their partner is shockingly stable for decades although everyone knows all marriages decline, except that it seems on very few actually do decline. Everyone knows that grandparents are taking care of more (grand)kids than ever before, yet the absolute number in the graph is scarcely larger than teen moms. Everyone knows the time alone graph goes up with age because friends are dying off or moving away and supposedly people forget how to make friends or similar nonsense and that's the only socially acceptable explanation, except for the friends graph shows a predictable child-bearing age decline and then actually slightly increases with age, such that people are both alone much more as they age while also spending slightly more time with friends. The problem is none of these issues are demographically or politically verboten like point #1 but are socially unacceptable to think about or express in public. So again the article cannot be discussed, making it a bad article.

I figured it out eventually but at first I thought X was percent of people.

Also confusing is the "8 hours per day" subscript. Took me a while to figure out it actually is the Y axis labeling (but poorly placed and styled).

Some data from an interview with Prof. John Cacioppo, the director of the University of Chicago’s Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience and author of Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection (W. W. Norton & Co., 2009)

http://fortune.com/2016/06/22/loneliness-is-a-modern-day-epi...

"I’ve seen studies that suggest the percentage of Americans who report chronic feelings of loneliness has risen over the past few decades.

Looking from a few different sources of data, it seems that way. The percentage of Americans who responded that they regularly or frequently felt lonely was between 11% and 20% in the 1970s and 1980s [the percentage varied depending on the study].

In 2010, the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) did a nationally representative study in 2010 and found it was closer to 40% to 45%. And a recent study done on older adults out of University of California - San Francisco put it at 43%. In our own longitudinal studies, we’ve seen it at about 26% and longitudinal studies in Europe have found around the same thing; there could be mathematical reasons for why it’s lower in longitudinal studies than in cross-sectional studies ones.

So loneliness levels are on the rise, we’re just not sure by how much. Why do you think this is the case?

We aren’t as closely bound. We no longer live in the same village for generations, which means we don’t have the same generational connections. That releases social constraints—relationships are formed and replaced more easily today. We have Tinder, Match, eHarmony and all these kinds of places you can dial up and find friendships, connections and opportunities that didn’t exist. In the last 15 years or so, many of those face-to-face connections have been replaced with social networking.

We’ve found that if you use social networking as a way to promote face-to-face conversation, it lowers loneliness. But if you use a destination, as a replacement for the face-to-face, it increases loneliness."

Interestingly, a paper found evidence for declining loneliness among American college and high school students. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25422313

If I need to guess I'd say that online social networking may promote face-to-face socialization among students, while it is often used as a replacement for in-person interactions among older adults.