Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out

You wrote this:

For example, "reduced weekly social hangouts by more than three hours a week" sounds impressive until you remember a week is composed of 7 days, and 3 hours / 7 days = ~0.43 hours a day, or approximately 26 minutes less hanging out per day on average. That's a rounding error.

after writing this:

The interesting thing about statistics is you can twist them to mean anything you want.

That’s ironic given how bad your analysis was. It is not relevant the percent of 24 hours that 26 minutes represents. What is relevant is the percent decline in social activity that 26 minutes per day represents. For instance, if people engaged on average in 6 hours of social activity per week and then that dropped by 3 hours that would constitute a significant drop.

One aspect of this might be economic. I know I had a little more money leeway if you go back a few years.

Another thing not mentioned is hanging out online. There are a lot of different ways to do that, and although none of them are the same as hanging out in person, they can be similar to one degree or another.

Especially over the next few years as VR and AR devices become more capable and comfortable, I think the idea of hanging out will start to include virtual options.

Also looking further out, imagine cities that are designed with good density and also integrate efficient and inexpensive public transportation using small private autonomous vehicles. You could take the hassle and most of the cost of driving out of meet ups.

Trends like this don't cause all the popular places to have half as many customers. Trends like this cause the number of popular places to go down, over years and years, leaving the existing ones as full as ever, because the customers are there for the crowd, not for the virtues of that specific place.

It's not just phones because the trends observed by Putnam preceded all of that.

The changes that occured between the 1970s and before and the 1980s and after add up to be major watershed in American and more broadly western culture. You can blame neoliberalism but I think the real change is deeper than that. It's the shift from modernity to post-modernity. And post-modernity is an apt term because the name itself is backward looking and doesn't stand *for* anything, only *against* something.

The optimism of modernity, the belief in the perfectability of society, the abolition of want, of unlimited horizons - all these whiggish things - butt up against some very hard limits. These limits had been in the zeitgeist since the second world war, but reached the mass market in the 1980s.

The US is the quintessential modern country, in the sense of the word I am describing, a child of the Enlightenment. It only follows that the end of modernity would be hard on the American psyche, harder than in older countries with pre-modern cultural DNA.

If you ask me, the lack of third space is a super underrated cause relative to phone usage.

When people talk about phone use as a cause of isolation, I think of Victorian descriptions of melancholic women and their obsession with novels that brought them to that state.