These days I must make a real effort to be social on a regular basis. Personally I've found satisfaction in going to meetups to find like minds. I also go with my gut and in the moment ask to swap Instagram usernames with interesting people and promptly schedule with them to get coffee. If they prove to be as interesting and kind as I had sensed, then I invite them to a potluck dinner party which I throw every other month. In this way, I invite people under my umbrella, keep them in my life by regularly seeing them, slowly build a friendship, and hopefully they make friends with the regulars at dinner party. I must continually remind myself that I am the instigator and it's feels quite strange as a heavily introverted person. I don't particularly enjoy being the instigator for most social occasions but the pros outweigh the cons.
> I must continually remind myself that I am the instigator and it's feels quite strange as a heavily introverted person. I don't particularly enjoy being the instigator
Once I figured out that this was a skill and not just something people that are not me are born with, it made things a lot easier. Went from making up all kinds of stories in my head about myself and others to thinking about each interaction as practice and realized lot more people were like me, thinking I'll be invited somewhere or talked to if I was liked or was interesting enough; waiting for someone else to do the inviting or talking first. I just remind myself that a lot of others also want to be invited or talked to, and that reminder greatly reduced my fear of rejection.
Indeed I've had a similar realization and it's a very helpful reminder. Also every time I go to a meetup, I remind myself: to be interesting, you must be interested.
I think thats the crux of it, most people respond positively when others are interested in them. As long as its genuine, asking about, or be interested in, others goes a really long way.
It helps to know a thing or two, about a wide range of topics, for this reason.
Take for instance someone telling you about their career. "I'm a software developer".
You can express interest with a response like "Oh, thats cool, what made you go into that line of work?" but thats a very generic, shallow response.
If you know a thing or two about software, for example, you can ask more interesting questions that show your interest in them, and your knowledge of the space. "Woh cool, how is AI coding impacting your life?"
Suddenly, it seems like you're much more interesting yourself, AND you're interested in them.
The tricky part nowadays is everyone has very niche interests. It's harder than ever to really have a breadth of knowledge that is broadly applicable. This was easier before the internet, before travel, before telecommunication. When your community was your community and news traveled slowly, it was a lot easier to learn about what impacted others.
There are no uninteresting natural numbers. One, as the smallest natural number, is certainly interesting. Assume all numbers up to n are interesting. If n+1 is uninteresting it is the smallest uninteresting number and therefore interesting.
And yet everybody cares precisely nothing about almost all natural numbers.
You're doing good work, not just for yourself, but for others.
Sometimes, it may be just the knowledge that you're contributing positively to other peoples lives that makes it worth sacrificing some of your own comfort.
+1 for the potluck dinners. I find much satisfaction in seeing my social circles merging.
Another lost art is keeping a contacts list and contacting them regularly. People used to have these lists on paper and then send cards at least once per year on birthdays/christmas/independence. With this being relegated to social media, your contacts often fall in the cracks of the quirks of tech companies.
This mirrors my experience quite a bit. Hobbies that involve creative thinking and leaning on each others' skills are incredible at creating lasting social bonds which go beyond the hobby itself. For me that's music (creating it) and tabletop gaming (especially D&D or any similar RPG).
Meeting others through those activities and then gradually building upon the relationships via other social outings, dinner parties, weekend trips etc.
I'm also introverted but learned early on in life that it often just takes one person instigating things to rally a whole group.
YMMV but I find people who want to exchange socials like insta far less likely to meet up again then just old fashioned phone numbers. To such an extent that I exchange socials and not waste the time.
I took the CBT approach. First to change how I thought about things (as a skill to practice) and then that allowed me to do a form of exposure therapy. Mostly finding something small to start with, a single relevant question or comment that is genuine. Saying something nice to someone, like a stressed out cashier at the grocery store goes a long way, or commenting on something like someone reading the packaging of a item and you know it and can give a brief review.
I didn't start trying to have deep conversations or expectations of ever seeing that person again. Only simple interaction for social skill improvement and over time this small talk started to come more naturally. Then that snowball into this lighter feeling around people (so anything would have been perceived as rejection before became not personal and moved on) and that, in gaming terms, was a level-up to more meaningful interaction, then another level-up and another etc. This is a decades long practice that is still going. Like many skills some pick up faster than others.
Overall yes. When I attend a meetup then I have a mindset of putting myself out there and should I meet an interesting and kind person, then just ask to get coffee with them sometime and talk shop. Also I remind myself that the current conversation went well from my perspective, so probably from theirs too.
There's a post-Covid dynamic in large cities where people often report that meetups are not as social as they once were, that one isn't isn't likely to meet anyone outside the meetup (or perhaps ever again even inside it). It can even be cringe to some when someone like yourself acts as instigator, because there is a gnawing feeling the world has changed utterly and your approach is a futile attempt to go back to the past.
I don't know what the solution is, but I don't think it is general social meetups, or hobby meetups, or religions of the lax and casual type (someone posted on a previous HN thread that the Haredim and a comparable Muslim sect seem to be doing alright).
My experience is that meetups have largely the same dynamic, but the attendees very rarely reach out to get coffee. I can't think of a single instance in recent memory where someone has asked me, and yet I have many experiences where people later thank me for instigating. That used to bother me until I spoke with some people about it and realized it seemingly doesn't happen much these days outside of business pitches.
But personally I cannot afford to worry if they think it's cringe. For a long time I was lonely, even in a healthy marriage, but having friends that I see regularly is something that I have found to be a vital aspect of having good mental health and avoiding stagnation. So I continually take the risk and put myself out there when I meet an interesting and kind person.
Who is reporting this? That has not been my experience at all. Social hobbies are how I make almost all of my friends as an adult (specifically: music and tabletop gaming). It's been very consistent through my entire adult life. I often have to be the instigator at first, but it has led to lasting friendships where everyone contributes. To the degree of traveling overseas together and attending each others' weddings.
EDIT: The only "cringe" meetups I've attended were "singles meetups" in my city. Mild desperation and no common interests aren't exactly a social lubricant. Hobby meetups are great because if you're truly interested in the subject matter it's an easy/exciting conversation starter.
If you are somewhere with live music, consider yourself lucky. That has declined in many countries in the last decade, as so widely reported in the music press.
You mention tabletop gaming. This is exactly the stereotype among friends and colleagues of unfulfilling meetups in a city I recently moved from: multiple games meetups sprung up around the university and public library as a way to get people meeting and talking, but most casual attendees didn't find the natural socializing they hoped for ("people just seem too desperate"), while players keen on the games and not looking for socializing per se complained about the casuals not being commited enough.
I'm near a major city in the US. While live music as an industry is under attack from corporate behemoths like Ticketmaster pricing out small working artists, the local scene for musicians just looking to jam is alive and well. If you live within an hour of any major city in the US you can easily find people to play music with. I think the distinction between live music as a business and live music as a hobby is important; the headlines are talking about the former. (Not to downplay the problems that working musicians are facing. I feel for them).
For tabletop gaming, it definitely depends on the game. There certainly are salty regulars who have been playing their specific game for decades and who lack social grace with newcomers. But there are also nicer folks who enjoy teaching newcomers and building a community. It all comes down to having good event organizers. Sounds like the ones you heard about didn't manage expectations or toxic personalities well, which is a bummer.
To be clear I've absolutely experienced salty cringe behavior from stereotypical neckbeard gamer types at these events. But I've also met really nice people that I ended up hanging out with independently. Each meetup seems to attract a different crowd so I had to try a few before finding a group that was the right vibe for me.
Rehearsal spaces, small venues cheap enough to be booked by a group of 5-6 people for a day/evening (not necessarily bars or concert spaces), book a studio for a few hours and everyone pitch in.
Nearly 25 years ago, I had some friends from church who were able to organize a very stable meetup for tabletop gaming, and they met at least 2 times every week in a very large and popular, independent coffeehouse downtown. They had things going smoothly before I joined up, and let me tell you, it sort of saved my life. I was homeless at the time, but they kinda got me addicted to Magic: the Gathering, and at least it was a somewhat benign way to spend my evenings.
Note: this wasn't a church activity by any means, even though 3 of us were in ministry together. We didn't evangelize, although sometimes we discussed our common faith. This was strictly personal, social time for everyone.
The years we met in that coffeehouse were very successful. We often enjoyed at least 10 people around the table, all sorts of kids, although my church friends were elderly, retirement-age, but very sensitive to the needs of the poor and the street people who often joined us. That coffeehouse eventually closed, so we moved on to a Starbucks, and the stable group became smaller, but more tightly-knit. Eventually, I found a really awesome teahouse that was just a few blocks off the beaten path, and our group moved there. We no longer found ourselves yelling/screaming over the noise of crowds and steamed milk machines.
Eventually our group lost nearly everyone except us three. Sometimes we had a guest, but they didn't stay. I don't know why people drifted away. Perhaps we weren't welcoming, or fun, or young enough. But we did diversify our activities into board games, such as Clue, Rummikub, Boggle, trivia, Scrabble, you name it. And the teas and snacks were delicious there.
Now one key feature of the group is that one guy was there for the games. He was hardcore, heads-down, "we're playing these games!" with intense concentration. The other lady, she was there for socializing and chatting, but her garage-sale habit had garnered a closet full of games to bring. I was there for both, I suppose, but mainly I liked the social aspect, getting out of the house, having some good boba tea and stuff. The board games were definitely a means to an end. So we all had varying reasons for being there.
Sadly, the pandemic lockdowns killed our group for good. Not even the teahouse was able to weather that storm, and they closed their doors permanently, too. I haven't seen my friends in that long a time. We tried doing some online gaming together, coordinated, but it wasn't the same at all! I really miss them, and I really miss the excuse to get out of the house, and socialize, and I wish there was a stable activity that had that sort of impetus in 2026, but all my friends were made through those gaming activities, and as a result, I no longer have any friends.
Also many people simply aged out of it. When I moved to a major city I'd attend every programming meetup (had something to go to 3 nights/week for a solid 3 years), after covid I found more worthwhile hobbies with others.
What COVID broke is that there was no one to take over from the previous club leaders so they mostly just died with nothing to replace them and now the new generation doesn't really know how to rebuild it because they never experienced it.
On top of meetups evaporating, the big issue is post-COVID meetups meeting 3 nights/week nearly impossible. I have 3 or 4 meetups I try to regularly go to and I'm lucky if they are run monthly.
I was recently watching a video mentioning a study that it takes ~200 hours of constant contact on average to make a "close friend" and some 40-60 hours to get go from acquaintance to "casual friend", then 80-100 to be a what you'd simply call "friend".
Meeting up for 2-4 hours a month would take years upon years to make anything out if you don't supplement it yourself.
> I must continually remind myself that I am the instigator and it's feels quite strange as a heavily introverted person
Ironically, the potluck style events strike me as the most introverted way to socialize. Not to denigrate the initiative at all, I have two Canadian friendsgivings this month, and they're fun, but I really wouldn't see the hosts frequently otherwise, because they're the ones packing their schedules in advance, moving to the distant suburbs, or just don't get out much. I don't feel like I can hit them up for something more casual, whether it's always true or not, it's more of a calendar event style relationship I have with them.
The reason I don't take it upon myself to host these myself is primarily because the substance of my social life comes largely from common interests outside the house that I invest deeply into, some of which are non-event hangouts just to watch movies at theirs, hiking, climbing, billiards bar, coffee and a walk etc... I don't try to find like-minded people as much as I do people that I have enough chemistry with, and build on that.
That said, in general it is important to try to take any kind of initiative you can. Friendships don't build themselves, and everyone's scared to stick their neck out.
The simple answer is media. First television, then internet, then smartphones.
People used to actively seek the company of others - if for no other reason than out of boredom. Entertainment and parasocial relationships have filled that hole.
Another reason I might posit is declining birth rates and an aging population. Entire neighborhoods used to be filled with young families of roughly the same age. Now on any given city block in the US, there may only be 1 or 2 houses that have kids of any age in them. Smaller concentration of kids -> thinner market for playdates and sleepovers -> less interactions between families.
> Entertainment and parasocial relationships have filled that hole.
I would also add the suburbanization of American society. A neat little home in a neat little sub-division with a neat little patch of grass. You can sit on your grass in your own little kingdom, and be completely unbothered by the world around you.
It turns out, being completely unbothered is also unchallenging, and challenge drives us. And being alone and bored is enabled by television and scrolling.
Honestly, I view the suburbs as the worst of both worlds (urban and rural), with few benefits.
BTW: As an aside, this is why i think the suburbs-class loves tesla self driving so much. The one downside is the long monotony of transitting to the place where people gather to do your work. I'm not against self driving cars, but they enable suburban self-imposed isolation.
When I rented an apartment in central part of large city for 2 years, I literally haven’t never seen people from 2 other apartments on same floor as me and maybe had one chat with last one.
I rent house in suburbs, at nice cul de sac, I know names of neighbors in 2 houses and had chats with 2 more. So your mileage may vary A LOT. Although large city offers many more chances to randomly step up. Reaching literal center of city and it’s life in 30 minutes on subway is much different from reaching another burbs on car.
I’m from Germany so I can’t comment on the exact dynamics of American suburbia but I grew up in a medium to small town in a single family House and we were regularly in contact with the neighbors. Eventually I moved out into the next big city and in the apartment complex that I moved into it’s completely anonymous and no contact between neighbors except the occasional head nod.
This has largely been my experience as well but in the US. However, a new couple moved in next door to my apartment. We’ve done happy hour with them and I share the fruits of my cooking/baking adventures. Stop and chat when we are not in a hurry. For whatever reason we’ve not gotten to be much closer than friendly neighbors. Could be the woes of young professionals in their 30s without kids but the effort definitely feels greater than at other points of life.
Interesting experience I supposed. Mine is the exact opposite. Neighbors in the suburbs are a community , whereas in the city, it’s common for neighbors to remain strangers.
I've had far easier experience joining my neighborhood community in a city as many of my neighbors are literally walking around. My last 2 suburban neighborhood communities were on Facebook and the groups were less "lets get coffee" and more "that car that drove by is suspicious". One of my old neighbors in a city occasionally had a TV and cooler set up outside for people to drop by to watch baseball.
Prior to air conditioning the venerable front porch was the socialization locale of choice. A lot of houses in my city have a massive one and it's kinda sad to me to not see many people sitting on them virtually ever
On a larger scale I think it's _a_ factor, but not the only factor.
It's partly a numbers game. There are definitely amicable cul-de-sacs but if you are in an apartment complex there's 100x more "neighbors" you could interact with.
Suburbs also come with the tradeoff of driving, at least in America. It's a lot easier to socialize when you can put on some flip flops and walk to a friend's place or an event than it is to drive.
It can be hit or miss in either case, and there's socioeconomic and cultural forces that make real world interactions more scarce. If more of my income goes to rent and inflation is too high why would I burn through money on going out when I can stay home and watch a show or be on my phone
My cultural anthropology professor used to study remote villages in Nepal. Once he told the class a story about this one village where a group of people used to socialize each night, with each family taking turns hosting dinner at their home.
Then one family got a TV, and they stopped rotating because everyone wanted to spend the evening watching TV at that one family's house.
Then the other families got TVs, and they stopped the socializing tradition altogether, preferring to watch TV at home.
Media in general is probably the real answer. We lack boredom at home. Earlier you were bored, so you signed up for sports, went on cheap trips, camping, pretty much anything to get out. Talking to older people 60 - 70+, some of them spent three or four days at the clubhouse of their chosen sport, they where constantly out of the house, because that's were you weren't bored.
"playdates" is in itself a tell. That didn't used to be a thing. Kids would just... go out and find their friends and play. No parental scheduling or coordination required.
It’s not quite that simple, though. Various studies show that people are feeling increasingly lonely. It is not so much that media replace social activities, but rather that they tend to simply inhibit them.
People form communities when they have shared stressors that they work together to manage, but what remnants of that lifestyle remain today is little more than a skeuomorphic throwback to more vulnerable times.
Everything about modern life is designed so you do not have to directly depend on anyone for anything. You can instead be entirely dependent on a series of distant and unaccountable corporations to get through the day.
my 94 yo gpa is calling his homies ALL DAY LONG. ill see my best friends between once a week to once a month and texting comes and goes. if i got a phone call i assume its an emergency
> First television, then internet, then smartphones
i like vr so i sometimes wonder if itll catch on and if were in the "we know one or two people with a tv" era of the early 40s. theres certainly seems to be a financial incentive since it seems like tvs and phones have gone about as far as we can take them. its also certainly seems like a another leap down the isolation path as well
luckily i think most people reject vr bc it sucks to wear something on your face
Older people grew up socializing constantly so they can just start talking to strangers like they've known each other for years, especially if they are from the same town.
I volunteered at an old folks home from age 10-16 or so, this was back in early/mid 90s - before the Internet stole my attention - and the old people were of the Greatest Generation cohort (maybe some of the oldest from 1800s). I really enjoyed those talks and have always liked talking with old people since. I can sit with any of them and just talk for hours but rarely ever do this with younger/my aged people. They just chit chat about everything and silence is never awkward, they could talk about anything from the weather to big social/political issues with an open mind. Unfortunately, I fear this is ending soon as this latest generation of old people is kind of vile and not really seeking positive conversation (wild generalization but it's my experience). Instead they tend to want to tell you how to live, what to believe, who to vote for, etc. and then judge/ridicule you when you don't comply or voice a differing opinion.
FWIW, I also think it's largely because boomer's collectively lost their minds and started acting out when their parent/grandparent generation was gone. It's like they didn't want to disappoint them so were acting on good behavior, but now their true colors show.
Maybe. I think they had good intentions though, but it just turned out they spoiled the generation. I don’t think this was obvious until way past when the damage was done. The fact they provided so much for them and they ladder pull from their own kids is when it became apparent.
Of course I don’t call women “girl” or try to order in languages I don’t speak
Someone commented once about the Trader Joe’s people always flirting with everyone, and a) that’s probably true but b) is just being nice to random people these days so intimate and invasive that it’s equivalent to getting hit on? That would explain people cringing
It's a negative feedback loop too. There used to be people out doing things so when folks got bored they'd go find them.
Now entertainment and social media sort of fill that gap (not really) but enough that there's less people out. Less people out mean it's less entertaining, so less people go out etc.
And when you do find people out, they're wearing headphones and/or their nose is in a screen, and if you try to talk to them they look startled and annoyed like how dare you speak to me in a public place. The culture is just gone.
I think Bowling Alone did a great job of describing the phenomena. I don't think it did a great job of explaining why it was happening.
It doesn't, for example, cover the privatization of public spaces, it doesn't mention mass white flight from cities to suburban sprawl due to people wanting to preserve apartheid, nor does it cover the rise in wealth inequality or the weakening of labor laws or the obliteration of pedestrian friendly infrastructure.
Instead, it pins it all on 'television' which, sure, but there's a reason why people gravitate towards entertainment that is served to them much more cheaply per-hour than not. It's a little like saying the problem with small pox is that the boils are painful, not the underlying virus systematically destroying your body.
In my personal experience in community organizing, the main pain points people have are 1) that they have day jobs that exhaust them, 2) the traffic sucks and they don't want to drive to our meetings, or 3) they need to pick up a second shift or another job to cover their basic needs. And even to those points, it's hard to get a public space where you can regularly meet that doesn't charge a lot of money, to provide food/refreshment, to maintain an ongoing potluck which requires a lot of coordination especially when it comes to preferences/dietary restrictions, etc. It's almost never out of a lack of interest. People desperately want community but there are so many barriers in place.
> It doesn't, for example, cover the privatization of public spaces, it doesn't mention mass white flight from cities to suburban sprawl due to people wanting to preserve apartheid
That's because, contrary to the way it's often depicted, the 20th century was overwhelmingly a flight from rural areas to cities. Suburbs were an outgrowth of that, but the reality is that rural areas were hollowed out the most. (Also, community engagement in rural areas with lots of sprawl was even higher than in cities).
> that they have day jobs that exhaust them
The median adult is spending 5+ hours on their phone a day. This is what is exhausting people. Everyone is essentially working a second job that involves lots of reading and attention and social engagement. It's a parasitic draw on our lives.
> they need to pick up a second shift or another job to cover their basic needs.
Maybe that's true for some people, but the data usually shows that income and free time is inversely related to community time. Poorer people are making more time for friends and family.
I can see what you're trying to do - reframe this problem as another outgrowth of class struggle. But it doesn't really explain the reality. A steelworker in the 1920s coming off of a 10-hour shift would still find the time and energy to go out dancing. A software engineer in 2026 is going to get off of work at 5pm and watch 3.4 more hours of screen time in a day.
> I can see what you're trying to do - reframe this problem as another outgrowth of class struggle. But it doesn't really explain the reality. A steelworker in the 1920s coming off of a 10-hour shift would still find the time and energy to go out dancing.
I doubt that steelworkers around 1920 typically went out dancing after their shifts. Back then, there was a lack of radios or sound systems, and live music was likely reserved for more upscale establishments. The average worker would more likely have gone to a beer hall or pub to have a drink with his mates.
I haven’t been able to quickly find any statistics for the U.S. that go back that far, but in Germany, around 67% of 18- to 25-year-olds were still consuming alcohol regularly in 1973, whereas that figure had dropped to about 28% by 2023. I’m not suggesting that this trend is inherently negative, but there is, at the very least, a correlation with a decline in social activities.
Nobody's commented on your most important point: "city" does not equate to "community involvement." Suburban people statistically volunteer more and join groups more than rural or urban people, and rural people are more likely to meet in person with their groups than suburban or urban people [0].
I'm not sure how much that is age correlation. Suburbs are older and usually have more parents, so they're more likely to volunteer in clubs and organizations. Even in my urban area the most frequently volunteered at organization is the PTA and most of the soup kitchens and senior centers have volunteers in their late 30s to early-50s.
Community engagement isn't also quite the same thing as friend groups. This is making me interested in doing a similar analysis.
>the 20th century was overwhelmingly a flight from rural areas to cities
You're talking about an entirely different phenomena. The move from rural areas to cities and exurbs happened in the 50s/60s with cheap mortgage rates, WWII-provisioned education, and large sweeping social services being enacted. White flight is a phenomena that started in the mid-60s to 80s that specifically coincided with integration.
>The median adult is spending 5+ hours on their phone a day. This is what is exhausting people
There's much to be said about the behavioral manipulation and dark patterns in apps and devices, sure. But I don't think television inherently was employing Skinner-boxes to get people to watch and that's what I was specifically speaking to. Regardless, that dark pattern of it is class struggle related if that's the direction you want to frame it (I see it more as just MBA-brained corporate sociopathy) because it seeks to extract capital from its users while externalizing all negatives onto the users themselves.
>Maybe that's true for some people, but the data usually shows that income and free time is inversely related to community time. Poorer people are making more time for friends and family.
Obviously. And this is clearly related to the fact that the more impoverished you are, the more you need to pool resources to survive. The pain points I illuminated are for individuals who are still showing up to community organizing work and much of what we do in these spaces is effectively providing enough mutual aid for them to survive.
> A steelworker in the 1920s coming off of a 10-hour shift would still find the time and energy to go out dancing.
You have proof of this? That they wouldn't just go home and get shitfaced or otherwise incapacitated? All steelworkers, per capita, were going out dancing regularly? And even so, this wasn't because they were economically incentivized by the rise of labor unions to be in community with others, building power and fighting for better rights? The 30 years of post-Reagan neoliberal expanisionism has effectively neutered unions - and that's something that wasn't covered either by Putnam.
I suspect another thing largely missed by Putnam was the rise of online social spaces. Connecting with friends via the phone, on Discord, in video game spaces - that's community. It's just different from the community envisioned by people in more elderly generations. The fact that you're even commenting on HackerNews is effectively proof against Putnam's claims.
You don't connect with your friends on these platforms, mostly. You connect with amorphous anonymous mobs of people. Like on HN, you aren't my friend, just someone posting, and your username is interchangeable with the one attached to any other reply.
In places like Detroit racism was very much the primary reason in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s at least. Some of it was just personal racism, pure and simple. See "blockbusting" techniques used by realtors who would hire a black mother to walk down the street with a baby carriage to give the impetus for white people to sell quickly and cheaply. Or a black family moving into a house, the white neighbors trying to push them out via lawsuit for breaking a racially restrictive covenant, then losing so that all the white people left the neighborhood (e.g. read about Orsel and Minnie McGhee in Detroit, I was the primary author of the National Register nomination for their house).
The racist pressure to move was also a structural issue supported by the Federal government. Redlining meant you couldn't get loans to buy houses in certain neighborhoods, and those neighborhoods were exactly where black people lived. Literal walls could be constructed between two similar communities of different races so that the white side could be higher rated and have better access to loans (e.g., the Birwood Wall in Detroit). A ton has been written about the topic, I can't really do it justice, but the idea that people just wanted a bigger house was not the case. A lot of Detroit actually consisted of single-family homes with yards anyhow, so it was literally white people leaving a house for a very similar one.
Racism might be part of the reason, but you have nearly entirely white cities like Portland that also experienced their own explosive suburban growth in the same time period.
Also, if "suburbanization" was really the explanation for the decline in community, you would see a clear pattern where people (regardless of race) in the suburbs have fewer friends and social lives and people in urban areas have more. But the opposite is largely true!
> Any free Black person who refused to leave would be subject to lashing, a provision that was known as "Peter Burnett's lash law."
> The second exclusion law was enacted by the Territorial Legislature on September 21, 1849. This law specified that “it shall not be lawful for any n** or m*** to enter into, or reside” in Oregon, with exceptions made for those who were already in the territory.
> Voters [...] approved the exclusion clause by a wide margin. Incorporated into the Bill of Rights, the clause prohibited Black people from being in the state, owning property, and making contracts. Oregon thus became the only free state admitted to the Union with an exclusion clause in its constitution.
> but you have nearly entirely white cities like Portland that also experienced their own explosive suburban growth in the same time period
Yes, it was exactly my point that Portland was already the whitest metropolitan area in the country. And yes, I am well aware of the extensive redlining (my grandparents lived in Vanport before it was destroyed). And yet they still had people explode out into the suburbs through the 50s and 60s.
This is a counter-example to the thesis that urban flight was purely a racist response to "preserve apartheid".
No one is arguing that racism didn't exist. But suburbanization happened everywhere around the world where cars were introduced (even places with almost no diversity). To blame suburbanization as a purely racial phenomenon is not true.
I'm wondering how much of it was racism, and how much was people simply being aware that the "worse" areas of town had lots of crime (which they associated with the color of the people living there, not knowing any better) and they didn't want that crime to come to their area.
If I'm walking a street at night and I see a guy with attributes associated with poverty, I'm more likely to switch to the other side of road than if he's wearing a suit, just saying.
What they're describing is well documented, but my understanding is that the reality is a blend of what you're describing and what they're describing.
To this day there's significant social pressure to not acknowledge how much racism and racial division played a role in them growth of suburbs in the US, but ultimately it's the documented history which is revealed to those who research the topic.
In many cases individual families were not overtly racist but they were caught up in the economic effects created by racist dynamics and felt they had no choice to go along. If property prices in your neighborhood are decreasing, because neighbors are leaving, and you have the means would you not feel compelled to leave to somewhere with rising property values? Real estate firms intentionally tried to create waves of fear to get people to rush to move, selling low, and then profiting on selling to newer Black families.
It was common for suburbs to have deed restrictions limiting areas by race, and for a while federal housing guidelines would not underwrite developments that did not racially segregate.
At the same time there were massive amounts of state & federal funding pouring into suburbs and highly disruptive unpopular overhauls occurring in cities while cities were also losing tax revenue. For people with the option the future of good living seemed like it was in the suburbs independent of segregation, but part of what fueled the frenzy was the racial segregation.
That's been on my to-read list for a long time. I've read in brief about red-lining and loosely regulated mortgage providers but it'd be good to dive in much deeper. It's almost always so much uglier and much more deeply dystopian if and when you choose to dig past any surface layer of popular history towards more rigorous historiography.
My controversial idea for urban planning: age and demographic based zoning.
There is lots of urban planning in the US that is poorly optimized. Walkable neighborhoods close to parks and schools are often filled with retirees, whereas young families are often crowded into newer neighborhoods at the edge of town with little infrastructure nearby.
You wouldn't even have to do much pressure to move the needle. Cities are already putting in millions of dollars to place their parks and schools, and etc. Offer tax incentives that encourage young families to move into family areas, singles into single areas, and retirees into retiree areas.
It sounds kind of crazy, but we more or less do this for student areas around colleges.
People stay in the same house their whole lives though. Your young family zone is going to be a retiree zone in 30 years and that’s where the schools and parks will be then. Can’t realistically ask people to uproot and move 3 or 4 times in their life, that’s a very expensive proposition.
People are cynical about your idea, but it's not like it has never been done in society. There are in fact apartment complexes that focus on elderly demographics. Retirement homes are just that. What's a school but a bastion for a bunch of kids of similar age to socialize together (and should a random adult wander onto it, there'd be a lockdown).
Urban planning around these situations would be nice. But the very least we could do is build more third places that tries to attract that last middle demographic to come together; that mid 20's to 40's adults too old for college campuses but too young (and not on social security funds) for older gatherings. That's sort of what some bars can be, but a wide open space with less pressure to spend $15 on a "cheap" beer would be nice.
Yeah, I don't think the age disparity is talked about enough. Admitedly I'm in this weird "youngest millenial" bracket where, growing up, I was always much older than my parent's friend's kids. But even in general with young adult life: once you leave college, everyone around you feels "older".
There's maybe 1-2 other people around your age at work, unless you actively chose the massive internship to employment pipeline of MAANG, Big 4, or your industry equivalent that was still actively training employees. Not really for me; my first gig was pretty young, but going to a large corporation for much higher pay: it was a satellite office with 2-3 other people my age than a bunch of seasoned veterans.
Neighborhoods are the same way too. Even today, I can make small talk with my neighbors. But they are some 15+ years ahead of life with two young kids. Different vibe from a single dude in his 30's.
I don’t think it’s as simple as that. It seems like people are increasingly exhausted and disillusioned with life.
What you seem to be implying is people are lazy and choosing TikTok over real relationships. But I also think people choose TikTok because it’s low effort and they don’t have much gas left in the tank.
It’s bleaker because everyone knows a lot more. People back in the day were for lack of a better word- naive. They had no idea what others were doing outside of their neighborhood and what was in the newspapers. There are incredible, chronic hidden pressures in the world now even if you individually disengage from social media and the like.
No one's saying there aren't legitimate reasons to be disillusioned with the world - but that's not mutually exclusive from people socializing or having community. If anything, it's one reasons people are so exhausted and defeated to begin with.
There's a reason people call it "doomscrolling", and it's not because it's healthy escapism. Bad news and defeatism is psychologically addictive, and platforms have financial incentive to pump your brain full of negativity. Regardless of how bad it is outside, the internet is not a protective bubble - it's an opium den.
In the Great Depression there was community and hope. People could band together, form unions or political movements.
Today, computers allow for mass dystopian control. Cameras and algorithms everywhere with no chance of appealing to an actual human.
There are multiple kinds of suffering, and even if more people have sufficient nutrition and health than in the great depression, it's much harder to see hope for the future today.
> It seems like people are increasingly exhausted and disillusioned with life.
The interesting part is what causes what. Are people exhausted and disillusioned because they aren't experience life the same way as previously, or aren't they having these experiences because they are exhausted and disillusioned.
This might be controversial, and I'm not saying it has to be the case, but I believe at least part of it is due to lack of sunlight / outside movement (vs all day in office, car, train, home with stuffy air and sometimes not even openable windows) and nutrition (too much processed and fortified food, not enough protein for many people).
I'm trying to focus on both in my life, and I have become much happier as a result.
>seems like people are increasingly exhausted and disillusioned with life.
Counterpoint, people are TOLD and CONVINCED that they are exhausted and that life is way harder than it is.
Capitalism loves someone who is "too busy" to make stuff or avoid buying stuff.
Our lives are all about reducing friction and making everything easier.
Relative to 20-30 years ago we are so lucky and privileged. It's nuts how the victim mindset has spread.
I've lived all over the place and one thing I've seem priliferate is this mindset of "I'm a victim, doing this is too hard, so I just won't for X and Y reasons" while folks order Uber eats.
The baseline for what is acceptable has dropped so, so far. And I'm sure people will reply saying I just don't get it. Lol.
I think people are actually increasingly exhausted and disillusioned with life, but that increase is basically entirely due to spending hours doomscrolling and similar behavior.
I don't need people to tell me. My rent and paycheck are a very convincing argument in and of themselves.
>I've lived all over the place and one thing I've seem priliferate is this mindset of "I'm a victim, doing this is too hard, so I just won't for X and Y reasons" while folks order Uber eats.
There's a lot I can do by myself. But at the end of the day, someone choosing not to ghost me for a hangout or take the time to get together regularly is a 2-way street. Even pre-pandemic, it's been said people are flakier than ever.
There are systematic reasons to explain this, but on a micro level: "just work harder" is not a solution to friendship.
Life has become increasingly expensive. Safety nets that used to be there, aren’t anymore. We’re surrounded by enshittification. Social divides, and antagonism between social groups are high.
Your contempt for humanity is blinding you to real issues people face every day. Yes, some things have gotten better over the years, but some things have gotten a lot worse.
One could argue that both parents having to work is much more difficult than when one person could support a household. Houses, healthcare and education are objectively much more expensive as well. It's not "victim mindset", it's literal exhaustion because everything is much more expensive. There's also no way to retire vs pensions and other baby boomer offramps.
I think the media influence went far beyond just pacifying or entertaining.
The relentless satire is what really did it. It was all written by some of the smartest yet depraved and depressed people who found a home in comedy. What did we think was going to happen?
Satire is all well and good, but what are we doing when we no longer take anything seriously anymore? Social media, but particularly reddit, continues to be an echo chamber for these mentally castrated and bitter people who couldn't challenge the comedy with a life that was actually any better than what was being mocked.
I've heard that everything is nihilistic. Things are funny when you're life's good. Things are serious when your life's not good but following them will to make it good. Things are nihilistic when your life's not good but gambling has a chance of making it good and that's the best option you see.
Example of past generation seriousness: investing - put all your money in housing or the stock market and you'll get rich and comfortable. Example of current generation nihilism: everyone wanting to be an influencer. Some people will become successful and some more will get by but most will fail at that, by the mathematics of it. Or literal gambling as in the rise of Kalshi - if your life's crap with $0 or $1k but wouldn't be crap with $100k, why not put it all on 100x odds? Or something like looksmaxxing: will doing xyz to your jawline somehow result in success? Probably not, but it might and you weren't going to be successful otherwise anyway.
GP is wrong anyway, comedy's always been about saying what everyone is secretly thinking.
> comedy's always been about saying what everyone is secretly thinking
That actually was my whole point. How do you think they're saying what you're thinking? Where did you get those thoughts from? Comedy has been a tastemaking machine for a very long time.
People used to snap out of it around middle age, but I think that point is only getting younger. The illusion has been broken with recent politics. You can't satirize the already absurd while still being funny. The game has changed, but I still see a lot of defensive humor anyway. It's just sad really.
I remember when the iPhone first came out. I was at a bar, at a table with a few people I didn't really know. This was a pretty common occurrence.
You usually got a drank, talked. This was a kind of gothic-theme bar, all done up with spooky decorations, a good dj, interesting drinks. We'd host arts/culture slide show jams before the place really would get going for the night. The art was curated and swapped out monthly. There was a lot going on! The place did a lot to charge the space with energy and excitement, bringing a lot of different people together.
Then this guy at the table whipped out his phone and just ignored us all sitting there.
I knew right then and there that this was the beginning of the end.
Even before the iPhone it started happening with the Blackberry, Palm, et. al. I distinctly remember the early-mid '00's when my aunt got her first BB, a 7250(?) and it quickly became more important than anything else. Family get-togethers started to consist of her sitting by herself on her phone while the rest of us enjoyed each other's company.
My memory is that my phone was always on me, and I texted a lot on the go, but most of the texts were about meeting up, getting directions, or coordinating. After that, if a phone was brought out it was to do more of that in the group setting "Hey Sally is going to be here in 15 brining Jake"), then put back.
Now we're all dopamine seeking doom scrollers.
I've been out with a group of friends -- some I just met -- once this year. It also doesn't help that meals and drinks seem hard to justify for the price. I'm waxing nostalgia, but $30 of tacos used to be maybe $8; my $10 beer today was $3.
Thinking back to when I got my first smartphone 15 years ago, it occupied just so much of my attention and I figured it was some kind of honeymoon phase with a new gadget. But it never got less, if anything it's increased since then.
I was out in NYC when the iphone 2007 came out, without an app store and without 3G broadband, and I don’t think it was that entertaining to the people I saw with it. It was still mostly just for text communications.
It wasn’t until iphone 3G in 2008 that you had a full fledged browser with unlimited broadband capable of streaming audio, maps, and visiting websites with graphics. And, of course, new apps coming out everyday.
The battery was also not good enough to use long for a long time.
Every single social event is a financial consideration now. Want to go out with the wife for the evening? It's going to cost $150+ for a baby sitter at $25/hour. The dinner + tip is going to cost $200. Parking is going to cost $50 - $100 if you go into a city. You could take public transportation but then you're loooking at that cost shifting back to the babysitter. Before you know it you're in for $300 - $500 just for a night off.
> The dinner + tip is going to cost $200. Parking is going to cost $50 - $100 if you go into a city.
Why are you driving into a city that costs $100 to park in and then to a restaurant that costs $100 per person if money is a consideration?
Go to a local restaurant. Go to one outside of that city. Do literally anything other than the scenario you described.
I guarantee that if you're near a city where you can find $100 parking, you can find 100 or 1000 amazing small restaurants that are affordable and interesting.
This is a type of defeatism where someone imagines the worst possible scenario, erases all other options, and then pretends it's a choice between the worst scenario or nothing at all.
Some people live on a different planet.. The last social event I did (last night) I took the train to their house which cost me $5 return, and we went out to eat at a Japanese restaurant where I got a Chicken Katsu for $17AUD. This social event cost me not much more than if I had sat at home and ate dinner normally.
When I'm visiting developing countries, I'm often in awe of the increased social activity and wondering why we don't have that in the western world anymore. One thing I think about is the cost increase like this.
Baumol's cost disease often comes to mind - in my (might be wrong) application of it - western society simply has had too much productivity and efficiency improvements. You can make more money as a software developer or as an investment banker because those jobs have gotten more efficient and have higher payouts to employers who want the best employees.
There can't be efficiency improvements in efficiency for child care, so the only way to have people want to become child care workers is to pay a competitive salary, so the efficiency increases in the other unrelated fields directly increase the cost of child care.
Developing countries don't have this problem and domestic labor and child care are still cheap.
I spend about half of every year cycling the developing world. Whatever the continent, I'm seeing more and more young people on their phones watching short-length video. I don't think they are far behind the West in the decline of socializing.
Babysitting is cheap if there are enough aunts and uncles (or trustworthy teenage neighbor girls) around, but in Western countries many of us don't have siblings or moved too far away.
I think the friction is a much bigger issue than the cost. People are stuck in a trap of scrolling short form video because it provides no friction. While organizing a picnic is extremely high friction relative to social media scrolling.
I think to solve this we are going to have to blow up social media and make going out in public more convenient and friendly. Otherwise we are going to end up in a WALL-E society where people spend all day with their meta glasses streaming AI generated micro dramas.
I have often thought about how many movies and TV shows in my childhood (1980s) focused on plot lines of people regularly gathering at a bar after work. Did people really do that or is it just a Hollywood thing to put people in the same place? Now that I think about it, actually, I guess my department at work did this when I first started in the early 2000s, going out to the bar once or twice a week.
It's hard to imagine doing that nowadays. I have a family, so doing that instead of going home in the evening would be selfish (if done too often), but even if I were younger and had time, it would seem very extravagant now. When a beer is $8-10 or even more, it would be an expensive proposition to go to the bar every night after work. And if you order food it's even worse...
Interestingly, "went to a bar in the past year" is one of the few questions in the survey whose answer basically didn't budge (52% in 1995 vs. 49% in 2026).
I think the answer to your question is right there in your post:
> Now that I think about it, actually, I guess my department at work did this when I first started in the early 2000s, going out to the bar once or twice a week.
> It's hard to imagine doing that nowadays. I have a family,
This still happens. Young people get together and go out after work. I don't go to pubs often, but when I meet up with someone after work the crowd is people meeting up after work with each other.
If everyone in your department is over 35 and has kids, you won't have much luck with this. If everyone is in their 20s and friendly, there's probably something going on.
I think a lot of people forgot how to be friendly with coworkers, especially if they spend a lot of time online. Online discussions about jobs mostly read like it's a cutthroat single player game where you shouldn't get too close to anyone because you can't trust anyone and you should be planning your next job hop anyway. I have to remind a lot of people younger than me that it's okay to have friends at work. You need to have friends outside of work, too, but you can be friendly with people at work.
I'm afraid to have friends at work because I get attached and I feel bad when I leave after 2-5 years. I have to make career moves to get raises and progress, and it's easiest if I'm not too fond of the people around me.
This is also the same reason that companies push "culture" and try to emphasize how we're a team or a family.
In university, I made a few friends who went to different international schools growing up. Their parents were diplomats or executives who moved cities/countries every couple of years, and they'd switch schools to go with them. They were charismatic and personable, and quick to make friends.
But at the same time, after our natural relationship ran its course (due to graduations or leaving a student team), it felt like they disappeared. My relationship with them wouldn't linger like with other friends (even if weakened).
Another friend of mine directly described this view that "friendships have a time and place" in life. I thought about that perspective and didn't fully agree, but it still taught me that it's perfectly possible and even healthy to make friends quickly even if circumstances are temporary.
My view is that even if you become good friends with someone (at work or elsewhere) and they leave, you still end up with a network of friends across the country in different workplaces. Even when the nature of the friendship changes, you can still catch up with many of your old friends on occasion (like around the holidays).
And even if relationships completely fade, I believe that genuine relationships will always be a nice experience.
I guess my point was that the socializing depicted in media was older people, not just young singles.
If I didn't have kids, would I want to go out multiple nights a week for a few beers with friends? I don't know. I'd certainly think about the cost of it more now than when I was 25.
Similarly for restaurants - they've gotten so expensive, and often the food isn't as good as we remember - that my wife and I don't seem to be as interested in going out to eat as we used to.
> Online discussions about jobs mostly read like it's a cutthroat single player game where you shouldn't get too close to anyone because you can't trust anyone and you should be planning your next job hop anyway
You don't think this is a response to corporate culture? Especially over the last few years.
It was mostly a fiction to advance the plot. Going to bars after work has always been a thing for young singles or old alcoholics, but pretty rare for parents/married people to do routinely.
I live in an urban area. Most bars in the area have a decent crowd after work into the night. The demographics of the crowd varies based on the bar. Based on your description we're roughly the same age, as a data point I wind up out after work usually 2-3x a week.
There's one bar I go to regularly where there's a couple of guys who I've literally never seen absent over the years.
People really did that regularly. It does seem to be economically related, for a lot of reasons.
One aspect is that a single income really was enough to not feel extravagant to have a home, a family, and afford to go to the bar a few nights a week. (Part of this was there wasn't as much random other stuff to buy, it wasn't being marketed to you nearly as aggressively either.)
I certainly did this quite a bit in the 1990's, and in the early 1980's I definitely remember my father going out at least twice a week and then the weekends also being for going out and doing something as a family at least 2/3 weekends per month - like trips to a nearby city, or to a sports game, or visit other family, or whatnot.
It used to be fairly common in smaller but densely populated areas in the United States, not so long ago (pre-2020). A lot of breweries were setup so that there were even outdoor areas that kids could be in. Usually one of the drafts was priced drastically lower than the others, and there were many unspoken relationship-based discounts or "try this" from the bartender or owner.
The unfortunate thing to me is that outside of VERY upscale or VERY downscale dive bars, every place is full of screens now. People go to bars and look at screens instead of talking as much as they used to.
I went first time with office team this year a couple of weeks back. Needless to say whole experience was atrocious. No common reference, movies, sports, TV and so on to talk about besides work. It was just: "Oh, what do you do on weekend? I do x,y,z " in a round-robbin manner.
It was definitely not good time, or even bad time one can remember, just an insipid gathering for 3 hours of doing nothing. $8 for a beer and $15-20 per person for lukewarm food not sure I'll be excited for another meet any time soon.
Babysitting is the big one for me. I can eat cheaper, but I can't really get a cheaper babysitter. My wife used to babysit for 5 bucks an hour just 10 years ago, and high school aged girls now want 20 an hour minimum. We're not talking "professionals" and my cost of going out is now at least 60-80 bucks without acting else.
See that's the problem, you live IN the city, and you're not afraid of the city, so you know how it really is.
I've gotten the "Parking is too expensive and hard to find" from friends when I try and get them to come into the city to hang out. No, come to my apartment, park in the plentiful free protected street parking right out front, and then we'll walk the 5 minutes to the center of downtown.
There are different ways of approaching doing something:
"To do X requires me to do this and that. So heres how I'll do this and that to get to X. "
"I can't do X because it requires me to do this and that. "
There's a big difference between the 2. The latter is a lie, they just don't want to do what is required to do that. Its a way of phrasing things so people don't feel bad and they don't have to admit they don't want to do something.
Start looking for it and you'll see it in a lot of exchanges.
Dinner + tip can easily reach $200 if you're talking about a fancy restaurant for date night, even with just a single drink each. $50 for parking is crazy, that's like a music festival price or something.
Of course, if you live in the kind of city where the above is true, then a very delicious dinner + tip can usually be had for $50-75, it just won't be as fancy.
You don't have to go to fancy restaurants for a date you know. Maybe for your anniversary. People who insist on fancy everything are probably not worth the trouble.
I'm in the bay area and dinner for two is absolutely nowhere close to $200 unless you are going somewhere fancy or ordering many drinks. Looking at my transaction history, it's closer to about $40 per person.
Hey no totally I agree, 15/sandwich is so much more than I remember and 12/drink is nuts. With inflation and cost of living here it’s like double what I remember from 2018 ‘burbs. I’m not trying to say it’s necessarily cheap.
But as someone lucky enough to be able to eat out almost every day at a variety of restaurants I have no trouble staying under 35/person without drinks. That place is not an outlier.
And like, fancy cocktails are nice but I don’t think you can say that it’s impossible to go out and do anything without spending $500 like OP claimed.
I'm 25. I go to work and then I go home. Same schedule since I got out of university. I do networking / IT. I usually buy a six pack of beer and then go to bed when I'm off, sometimes I'll stay up on my lab but I usually regret it because lack of sleep.
No bars, no dinners with anyone. I think the only blessing this lifestyle has given me is minimized impact from the failing economy we're in, at the cost of not seeing anyone or doing anything. I still have outside hobbies, but it's all too expensive to keep up with now, or being heavily regulated.
I love not socializing. I've never enjoyed a party in my life, I hate dating, I don't want to lose any time in the day to hanging out with anyone. But what I wonder is if am I fundamentally an antisocial person, or am I a product of my cursed environment and trapped in the momentum of the antisocial tidal wave that has been happening since before I was born?
I have an abundance of positive social experiences that remind me that the highs are high and the low are low and I just need to push through it to find that next great experience.
I can definitely see how someone who doesn't have many positive reference experiences would prefer to just be alone and avoid the lows all together.
Not that you asked, but I'd encourage you to not define yourself as antisocial. You just haven't found your kin yet, and if you keep looking you can find it.
I think it’s also a comfort or maybe risk/reward analysis thing.
I think staying at home basically rotting is more comfortable, sure. No judgment here, I’ve done that for months at a time. But the payoff is also… underwhelming. I mean you get basically nothing, just monotony and silence.
The more risky things, like dating or going to a party, are much more uncomfortable. But the potential payoff is a lot more. I mean you can really strike it up with someone, find someone on your wavelength. It can be exciting, exhilarating.
But it lacks the certainty. The reward is higher, but so is the drawback. If I stay inside and do nothing, at least I know the outcome. It’s more enticing in that way. But I also know I won’t make any memories that way. There won’t be some moment or some person I’ll look back on fondly.
Not really satisfied, but the alternatives seem like an uphill battle for myself. Most of my friends have moved on to their marriages, kids, etc. Certainly entering childless uncle phase of my life.
You don't have to live this way. To begin with, drinking a six pack at night on a regular basis is absolutely terrible for your health. It disrupts your sleep and so you will always be operating well below what you could be. The social problems are harder to solve because they are society-wide and not individual, but at your age a lot can change, and I think it's really important that you don't start to give up and think of your situation as inevitable, lest you ossify.
I'm 32 now and met some of my current best friends when I was 26. My parents are 60 and just moved to a new country and within a year they met a dozen new people they now hang out with all the time.
It sounds cliche but it's literally true that there's always time to meet new people no matter what phase of life you're in.
Related: when I was 25 I had a depressive existential crisis and felt like my life was basically over. It's common, and therapy was a lifesaver. If you feel like you might be depressed then talking to someone can really help. Take care of yourself as best you can!
Mate you are only 25, those people getting married and having kids are doing it early. You have another 10+ years before you could even think about the childless uncle phase as a construct.
The flip side is that you have time for hobbies, regular workouts instead of beer belly dad bod, you can play sports, bike or skateboard (including socializing), play chess, whatever you like, go to concerts, walk around town photographing.
Everything young parents don't have time for or are too tired for.
Work as much overtime as you possibly can for a few months or even a year and save as much as you can. Then get rid of any material possessions bogging you down and go travel and find life.
So it's basically Rush's "Working Man" - "So I get home at five o'clock and I take myself out an ice-cold beer. Always seem to be wond'rin' Why there's nothin' goin' down here. It seems to me I could live my life a lot better than I think I am. I guess that's why they call me...They call me the workin' man"
(and this goes back farther than 30 years. Closer to 50 now)
I can't square this with the fact that I have a perfect storm situation that should point me there. I am a foreigner of minority ethnicity to the United States living in a high-rise building of 600 people that has no Schelling point common-space to spend time in that's located in a city that is expensive and I have all the social contact I desire: family, close friends, more distant friends, neighbours, strangers in the building, familiar strangers in the area.
I talked about how relatively easy it is to have social contact here at all levels and so I must conclude that most people simply have better uses for their time (by their own judgment) than this. https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-10-09/Community
Fellow desi here, and I am happy for you, but I haven't had the same experience at all in the Bay. Imo, there is something in American culture which makes people very incurious about other cultures...because there are so many immigrants from all over the world, Americans find it hard to relate to anyone not American. My favorite example to illustrate this is how "where are you from" is everyone's favorite question in South Asia and often asked with good intentions, but it can be considered rude in the States.
A lot of people are convinced of things without ever trying, which they then use to justify not trying.
"I mildly attempted doing this once and it didn't work, so I won't bother trying again" describes a shocking amount of people's experiences.
I sometimes think people fail on purpose to justify apathy or giving up.
Then if anyone says anything they scream about how their experience is valid and nobody can tell them otherwise. It's wild.
There's something important about being outside our comfort zones. We need entropy in our lives and the best way to accomplish that is being in new environments with different people/creatures. What I've found is over time my comfort zone expands as I become familiar with more stuff.
The flip side to this is thinking everyone is on equal footing and that your trying is the same as their trying. They're just doing it wrong.
Most people in this post's comments that are "not trying" seem to also be depressed in some way. If you've never experienced it, depression can make trying impossible not just a minor inconvenience. Going to therapy can help, or not. Taking anti-depressants can help, or not.
Also a "mild attempt at doing this once" that ends very poorly can cause a depressed or anxious person to spiral into a self-hatred looping hellscape. It's not a rational decision they're making it just happens. After you've experienced that you're very cautious and try to never feel it again.
And then the kicker is when you're paralyzed like this everyone just thinks you're lazy or unmotivated and pretty much tells you "don't be depressed stupid" which further sends you into having a poor outlook of yourself and it spirals from there. I've been in and out of this several times in my life, it's not pleasant. I've also tried every single remedy known to man and sometimes nothing works.
To put it simply: their experience is probably valid and nobody should tell them otherwise.
I'm a white foreigner in Asia and feel the exact same as you. But I also realize, because I'm different than everyone else, there is more interest in getting to know me.
Also, people that are different than everyone else (but same background as me) seek me out to be friends.
For example, there is a HUGE difference between a Seattle Tech event where I am literally the same as the other 60 people in the room vs Vietnamese Tech event where I am one of 3 people that speak english. Those other 2 English speakers are going to walk over and chat with me.
This is precisely because you are a foreigner of minority ethnicity (the minority ethnicity points towards hailing from a more traditional culture compared to if you were white and therefore you would be from Europe which does not have a traditional culture, it has a modern culture).
To clarify the idea: you have a healthy social matrix but if you marry and settle in the US, your grandchildren won't.
Right, and perhaps that indicates that the decline in social activity is a conscious trade-off made as Americans (a relatively wealthy group) prefer to live in detached land properties. That points to the social activity decline as not being something to be bemoaned but something to be celebrated because people have the opportunity to choose otherwise and they have done so in droves.
Just some personal anecdotes: I've come into the orbit of a local "no phones" meetup group in my city. I discovered it by seeing a black and white printed scan of a hand-drawn flyer on a pole by my apartment. Currently it's just organized by one guy who sends out random Signal pings for stuff to do like a potluck picnic, group trip to some free instructed yoga at a park, craft night at a local bar/bookstore, etc., and usually there's ~4-15 people that show up. I organized a World Postcard Day postcard writing party last week, found a venue that would host for free, donated some of my own dollars to provide free official WPD postcards to attendees, and had 7 people come write postcards with me, I convinced 4 of them to sign up for Postcrossing, it was a great time.
If anybody else is looking for change, try setting something like this up. It has so far been free, easy, relatively low stakes, and I think by virtue of the main focus being "no phones", you get some great people who are all tired of the same algorithmic churn.
I became very good friends with someone who I met at one of the meetups and we've done all kinds of things just the 2 of us and have had some really interesting conversations, which is something I haven't done in a LONG time.
I re-started using meetup just a couple of weeks ago after feeling the same way. And, honestly, my interactions were great. Meetup was scheduled, people showed up, we had a good time. I live in a smaller city and found two to go to in one night(ping pong and board games)
Meetup was fine 10+ years ago, but it's my go-to example of enshittification today. It feels like they're actively trying to kill it with every new change to the app / web experience. But despite that there are some good groups.
This is more complex than you might thing. First, there's far more places to meet people - rather than having them over for coffee, we meet in a coffeeshop. Networks have provided a "together in time" alternative to "together in place", so people can game, talk, ... via voice and video rather than traveling to a common location. There's far more 2-working-member families than previously, so the ability to organize household events is reduced. Finally, there's far more organized sports activities that consume both child and parent time. These pull everybody out of the house.
I’ll never forget a conversation I overheard on a plane years back: a caricature of a man in his 20s failing repeatedly to explain to an older lady what a “gastropub” was. Each time, he rephrased his description, and each time she responded, “that sounds like a pub.”
“No, not exactly...,” he replied in an increasingly exasperated tone. I could hear the struggle in his voice as he recognized the cracks forming in the thin veneer of his identity. “It’s like a pub, but it serves food. Like, real food, thoughtfully considered by a gastrochef.” She returned the serve, now teetering on boredom at minute four of the flight. “At our pub we call him Kevin. He makes the best pot pie.”
He regrouped and they found truce in talking about the weather in Toronto. I resisted the urge to twist around to ask if they knew any good restaurants downtown.
A pub must serve drink. It doesn't need to serve food.
In Ireland that distinction matters. It generally will affect other things, like what time and how loud music will be played, how the tables and chairs will be organised and what type. It will often affect opening hours and the price of a pint. Gastro pubs also tend to be much larger.
In North America it seems the vast majority of "pubs" are gastro pubs, possibly why that lady couldn't see the difference. I personally love micropubs and they never serve food other than crisps and maybe a toastie.
I feel like a pedant but I get that dude in his 20s and had to speak up.
> In North America it seems the vast majority of "pubs" are gastro pubs
To be fair, at least in the US, anything calling itself a "pub" is already going down a marketing/branding road and it almost certainly means they're going to try to evoke an Irish or British sensibility.
Yeah, but they weren't as common as they are today. There were pubs and eateries before also, but again, not so common. My point was that much of what was done "then" in one's house are now done elsewhere. Some, of course, aren't done and I'm not sure they're quite so popular.
And I assume the pertinent discussion is what happened/changed in the western world post WW II.
For the last century (and still today) we called them cafés (in Germany). Coffee shop was the term we used for joints in Amsterdam where you could buy ... well, joints.
Decline in religion + third spaces combined with socioeconomic system expectations of a 40 hour work week + two incomes needed to live comfortably. Places and time for community and social activities has declined, and so social activity has as well.
If more social time is desired at the macro system level, people need to have more leisure time (shorter work week, higher wages, good quality of life with more free time broadly speaking) and more third spaces to meet and socialize.
An enormous portion of my social life is through my church. Bible studies, committee, small groups, Sunday schools are the main structures things, and then you make friends through it and start having other people over and hanging out with them. I don't know what my social life would look like without it.
Is there a citation for the decline in third spaces? I read such a claim often. But in my part of the US (Brooklyn NY) the number of third spaces like coffee shops and pottery studios is booming.
there's diners and bars in every corner of middle America. What's changed, I think, is the level of striverism among young people.
In this thread you have multiple people saying they can't go out without paying 200$ or ordering 8$ beers. If you're in your 20s or 30s just go bar hopping in whatever the rundown part of your town is like people used to instead of going fine dining.
A movie ticket, inflation adjusted, costs the same as it used to for decades. Normal people just took it for granted that they had to smuggle some beers into the cinema rather than turning the whole evening into some hundreds of dollars spending spree.
Part of it may be high rents. I read that rents increased a lot because of fashion stores. They make so much revenue per hour that more traditional stores (like the laundry, the washing machine store, the sewing store, the tabletop games store, and maybe cheaper cafes and restaurants just can't compete.
You were downvoted but you are correct. Some classic examples of third spaces are English pubs and Dutch coffee houses.
That third spaces include commercial spaces does not imply that “free” (tax or donation funded) third spaces should not exist. Parks and museums are also great third spaces.
While in many countries cafes and pubs served as real third places in the past, rising rents (and other costs) have led many establishments to discourage people from lingering. At my old haunts, loud music is now played to get customers moving on, and the very second you're done with your drink the wait staff will swoop down and ask if you want to place another order (i.e. a hint to pay more or get out).
Compare this to earlier times when it might have been common and socially acceptable to sit for hours on a single purchase and just shoot the shit with fellow townspeople.
When I was a kid kids used to just hang out. We'd take a bus, ride bikes, or walk to the mall, the park, the woods, fast food restaurant, record store, dollar store, etc and just loiter. Nobody had any money to buy anything, but boy we'd browse and loiter. Sometimes we'd just walk for hours. We'd walk miles and miles and miles just to sit at a table at Burger King with a single small fry between our group and hang out there.
Children don't do that anymore; they basically don't leave the house because they have the Internet. They communicate through texting and Discord so they don't even have to "hang out." Beyond the social change, when I was a young adult most malls went 18+ (unless accompanied by parents/guardians) and most other businesses nowadays allow teens to loiter the way we use to. Businesses want people in and out once they are done.
Even if business allowed it, most parents don't allow their kids to leave the house unattended anymore.
NYC is a thriving city of 8.5 million people and one of the most economically active cities in the world, so your experience may be different than say, Gary, Indiana.
Thank you! I skimmed these citations and I remain unconvinced. But I think really answering the question would be a real research project, not a HN back and forth :)
The first citation's relevant highlight is "All categories of third places experienced widespread closures from 2019 to 2021" which is obviously a COVID phenomenon and not a cultural trend. They admit so much. Data from that period I would say is generally irrelevant to discussing wider cultural trends. In fact a query to Gemini says that the number of independent (not chain) coffee shops is growing at 3.2% across the country and it gives this citation: https://www.locationscloud.com/research-report/us-coffee-sho...
The other Science Direct article says "Third places _may_ be closing in neighborhoods across the United States" (my emphasis).
The remaining articles seem to be opinion articles without hard data. They focus on the hypothetical problem of third places going away. In fact the AEI article talks about zoning which cannot possibly be of relevance to any decline in third places given that zoning is becoming less restrictive over time in the last decade.
The 40 hour work week is most assuredly not new in the past 30 years.
The households where both parents work full time probably have increased in that time, but I'd say you have to go back closer to 50 years to really get to a time where it was still somewhat common for a housewife to be home all day with the kids.
2) Prices rising faster then income for majority of population.
3) increasing commute time around employment, activity hubs
4) kids activities/sports are now taken as seriously as work project deliverables. Previously it could be just gifted kids in school teams now with pay-to-play a lot more kids are involved in "serious sports".
I don't know about the sports. It's probably more serious now. Youth soccer is a whole thing that didn't exist at all when I was a kid. But lots of kids played Little League or basketball or football back then (1970s). "Travel" teams were probably not as common, but I was not a sports kid so I don't have a lot of direct experience. There were also swimming lessons, music lessons, Cub Scouts, a lot of other kids activities. It wasn't all just hanging out at home.
Yeah I think there's this fictional idea that families in the past didn't struggle with money and need both parents to work. My father worked full time and my mother worked about 30 hours a week when I was a child (1970s).
regarding the 40 hour work week, I wonder what "always on" is doing to impact social activities. Meaning, you work 40 hours in the office, then you go home and get online and work a few more hours each night.
I made an app for iOS for creating a social roster and setting specific catchup cadences for each friend. It's free, is purely local and has no backend, and was co-created by my wife and I. We've gotten a lot of value out of it, and it has measurably improved our lives. Try it out if you're interested!
Fun dumbbell plot. I like how the bottom "Used the internet" is graphically and metaphorically the foundation for the entire presentation of change. The change is so total that you might miss it, as if it is the baseline or the water we are all swimming in.
It would be useful to know whether the same trends have happened in other places. If iPhones are causing people to be less social, we should see similar trends in France and Japan.
If we didn’t see the same trends, it points to reasons more specific to the US.
Japan is not necessarily applicable 1:1; homes are smaller and space is at a premium so people are far more likely to just go sit somewhere… and nowadays they are usually on their phone.
because suburbs and housing models like it designed around a closed loop even some apartment building which have high population density encourage social isolation.
compare a 'luxury' Florida apartment vs the old New York apartments built in the 1800s. the NY apartments have narrow stairs, one way in.
likewise dense / small cities / villages in either africa/europe etc force more natural social interaction.
even for friends - easier to host friends when they can easily walk to your home & they don't have to drink & drive.
so blaming tv, social media, video games etc doesn't get to the root of the matter.
Research on this has been done and the cause is known. There is just no desire to improve the conditions of social activity on the part of civil society or the government.
I think social interactions are very tiring, especially today. The reason being, most people want to be impressed by someone somehow, but the comparison is no longer the person down the street, but some really really funny person that lives on a social media feed. Another reason is, people are getting less and less accustomed to any pushback, since they are not used to it anymore, any discussion above smalltalk is difficult.
It's probably true that some form of a satisfying social interaction is missing today, but I would say it's a trope any will do to make us happy. In general any type of party I've been to recently, I've enjoyed leaving as soon as possible.
Gonna be real honest here. I live across classes and and observe quite a few
The entirety of the socialization decline I see is with the poor and middle class. The poor seem to have to work a ton more and struggle to make ends meet while still living in a highly individualistic world without the shared community of previous poorer cultures of the past.
And from my observations the middle class are amusing themselves to death while simply becoming sloths at home doing very little other than their children’s sports. No hosting, not social manners and little get together than gets in the way of television or video games.
The upper class and wealthy socialize a great deal. I mean a ton. Shared vacations, constant social occasions hosting fund raisers galas sports hobbies etc. practically non stop.
Do folks have social nerd meetup suggestions in the Bay Area? I'm pulling my hair out here in Mountain View. Aside from trying to run my own, with limited success, it's veeery slim pickings.
The primary focus is on RE, of course, but the folks there are generally curious, and a large minority of the talks are about forward engineering.
I gave a talk on work I had done with the Signal Foundation on building a binary->binary rewriting tool to secure their Intel SGX1 enclaves against the various Spectre and LVI vulnerabilities.
You mean their Monday open mics, their monthly book club, and their... motorcycle enthusiasts meetup, if that's still going on? I've been at that open mic for years, most weeks. I've tried the book club, and I don't have enough interest in motorcycles.
> One of the steepest declines in the survey is for "entertaining people in my home." While in 1995, 88% of Americans reported entertaining others at home at least once in the past year, this number has declined to 67% in 2026.
That really jumped out at me. I don't doubt it, but it's just weird because my partner and I constantly watch home improvement shows on HGTV where folks are constantly talking about improving their kitchen or other space "to entertain guests". And my partner is always nagging at me about the same thing - upgrading the kitchen or backyard so we can have guests. But our house is fine and we never have guests over. I get this sense from a lot of people. I think people love the fantasy of having guests to entertain, but no one ever wants to actually do it.
I've spent about $1000 on equipment and classes so far, and about a year of my time. My problem is that I still kind of suck, and I have no friends who also play pickleball. So at open play, people just beat me so they can finally get to play with their own friends. This is really demoralizing!
in America we have had 20 years of "Tech Disruption"., making the world a better place and relentless technical innovation, combined with the 'corporization' of America
Has our day to day lives improved?
Do we work less, live healthier, have less stress?
Seems like this (the younger generation) is far worse off then pre-internet connected, smartphone generation
As long as technology keeps being visible I don't think society will be improved by it. The development in the past few years have let me to the conclusion that having technology insisting on being in your face, it will not benefit society. It has to blend into the background and be something you pull out when you need it. Almost anything "big tech" has produced in the past 25 year have pushed technology into the foreground.
I had a pretty busy social life in university, 20 years ago
The first city I landed in afterwards, I was able to make some connections and was lucky enough some of my uni friends were around too
But I moved for work to a much further away city and my social life has dropped to zero since then. The pandemic and lockdowns didn't help of course, but that was years ago. I don't have a single friend in this city and I've lived here almost 10 years now
Admittedly I'm kind of socially awkward and quite afraid of new groups, which has only gotten worse over the years. I also haven't had any luck making lasting connections through work or anything like that.
I tend to blame myself for this but it's not too surprising to hear many others are struggling too
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I'm going to call out housing as a huge factor here for four reasons:
1. Every third space represents an ever-larger opportunity cost of being turned into housing. If you can close a pub and turn it into million dollar condos, that commercial rent is going up;
2. More expensive rents are an input into everything done at a business or third space;
3. This decreases spending ability in real terms. 20 years ago, you could get a pint in London for 2-3 pounds. Now it's 6-7. Have wages doubled? No. And pubs were (and are) part of the UK social fabric; and
4. People need to work more to pay for their ever-larger mortgages and other debt. This gives people less time.
Expensive housing is literally destroying society.
Socializing with people who are not friends is too shallow and unsatisfying. How are you? I’m good. But you’re not good and nothing is good. Okay but that is just pleasantries and not even a literal question. Still it bothers. What’s better? Putting on a fake smile so that you can have idle, useless chatter with near-strangers because you happen to be proximate due to eating habits? Or not.
Satisfying would be to bond over common problems and share common joys. But again too surface-level if not even taboo. I swear it’s gotten to the point where AI or whatever the next doom is could take 5% of all jobs. And there would be talk like, oh poor Joe he lost his job and has no marketable skill. Yup. Yup. Any solutions? Any venting? No, just frustrating reminders of impotence.
The absurdity of going to work every day as a wage commodity, another line item for the bougies to increase profits, then go “consume” your wages so that your “disposable income” can go towards the impossible goal of increasing profits into eterntiy, then see advertizements about how consumers are ruining the planet by buying food that they have no skill, land, or means to grow. But why talk about that? You can’t, not even in a fabled “social democratic” society.
We could be talking about real problems. Just venting, or maybe educating each other, or maybe even doing something about it. Even strangers since we all obviously, as plain as fucking day, go through these bullshit motions every day. We see each other. But we can’t talk about it.
In my experience it’s not because there’s lack of attempts to get people together
When given the option between: socializing with people in a shared space and being at home and entertaining yourself people are consciously choosing the latter.
When I ask why, this is what I hear from other people the most:
-I don’t have time
-I don’t have transportation
-Who else is going to be there
Etc…
There seems to be a genuine lack of desire whatsoever to simply get yourself to a place where there is a free event.
And to be clear this is not just talking about one particular type of event
I just went to a Democratic socialist of America event this weekend in support of Gaza, and the amount of people who showed up compared to the number of people who are on the list (even the organizing list) is some vanishingly small group.
If the plurality of individuals don’t want to join groups in person because they feel satisfied by themselves, then that’s a signal of some kind.
Social media, smart phones, and all of that are heavily responsible for this, but at the same time I think the main crux of the issue, in my opinion, is that we don’t have a common culture anymore. As long as you don’t have a common culture and a common understanding of the basic rules that everyone agrees on, no one can spend time with each other comfortably.
Is that the type of "culture" that this statement is referring to?
> As long as you don’t have a common culture and a common understanding of the basic rules that everyone agrees on, no one can spend time with each other comfortably.
I don’t think the “agreeing middle” is 95% anymore. Maybe this is a Chronically Online POV but it seems the extremes are growing quickly, the center is shrinking, and society is going bimodal.
The center is mostly offline, thinks both extremes are very small portions of the population, and doesn't post on social media. So they seem small but really there are a lot of people like this who aren't shouting into the internet 24/7, so you just remember that what you hear is all the extremists shouting, not the people you saw during the course of a week who weren't.
The central part of their identity is to assume that they're the vast majority of people. It allows them not to have to think about stuff too hard - it's all settled, and it's settled on what the people I'm exposed to (i.e. friends, family, and the television) think. I'm safe just repeating that and reporting people who deviate from that.
They don't realize how much the "moral majority" differs in town as opposed to the city, the coasts as opposed to the bulk of the country, in small private liberal arts colleges in the east and at Mormon universities in Utah, or in China, Russia, or Bulgaria as compared to the suburb they grew up in.
If all of those people simply follow the central tendency, and give mass media the same (or greater) weight as they give their neighbors, that guarantees war all the time. It will always be better to listen and try to understand points of view that you aren't familiar with, rather than to hide in the safe (and always untrue depending on the shape of the border you draw) assumption that you represent the vast majority. This, without even considering whether the vast majority are right or wrong.
I mean, some people are so impervious to reality with this that they can lose election after election and believe that they are still 95% of people. Then they start theorizing about mind control and supernatural entities, just to keep from opening their eyes and ears.
That 95% number is so far from the truth. Gen Z males are significantly (though not majority) right wing and Gen Z females are the exact opposite. Based on data, 67% of the time, Gen Z males and females do not agree on the same political issues.
"Political issues" are by definition things that people disagree on. Saying people "disagree on political issues" is equivalent to saying "people disagree on things they disagree on."
But the vast majority of daily life is not driven by or meaningfully affected by any of these "issues on which people disagree." If you go and talk to your neighbors, even ones who you disagree with on disagreement-creating-topics, you will find you actually agree on nearly everything. The set of things you agree on is called "our culture."
I disagree. These are fundamental viewpoints that affect every aspect of everyday life. The biggest disagreements are in fundamental things like whether to have children, childrearing gender roles, household responsibilities between genders, education about gender issues/LGBTQ etc. These are not some far away issues that don’t affect everyday life. The overall fundamental issue seems to be in regards to gender roles, and that affects every married couple.
The fragmentation of culture is also the fault of social media (and all media to a lesser extent). It's far easier to get sucked in to echo chambers where other opinions are mocked or shut out.
In the past we all got our news from Walter Cronkite.
The homogenization of culture was the fault of traditional centralized media. If you go back before the printing press, there was actually a much greater diversity of cultures and languages. Decentralized (social) media is bringing us back to how traditionally tribal humanity used to be.
I may be incorrectly inferring that you think this is a good thing, but "traditionally tribal humanity" were constantly at war with one another. I'm not sure that's something we want to go back to.
Yes, it was (and some places, sadly continues to be) the ultimate horror that people can visit upon each-other.
Suffering it, over and over and over, was what led humanity down the natural, logical path to becoming civilised and cooperative.
It's the lesson we need to learn well, if our self-appointed badge of Very Intelligent Species is to actually mean anything more than a pointless, neverending game of forming factions and battling other factions.
Americans are very intolerant of others, whether it's political convictions or food preferences; the few that have kids threat the little ones like fragile glassware that can't be moved or otherwise inconvenienced, so it doesn't surprise me that they meet others less. My wife and I meet with a varying group of friends every week, or even more, but we're all immigrants. We've tried to invite local acquaintances, but they always find a reason to say no and just stay home.
They're right about the intolerance, though. One tribe literally calls the other "Demon-crats", and has worked to reduce participation based on gender, sexuality and skin color.
Both sides are at fault. Here in the Midwest many a supporter of the Democratic party are legitimately afraid of being fired if their support became public knowledge, while on the other hand in California (or other "Blue" states) it's the exact opposite. It's astonishing to see how much Americans relish oppressing their fellow citizens.
The internet is awash with seething tribal hatred. It's impossible to honestly believe this is only an issue with the right. The "demon-crat" attack is roughly analogous to the left's "nazi" attack (nazis, after all, are the secular-progressive equivalent of demons, with Adolf Hitler being their Satan), and the latter attack is infinitely more common than the former, even on HN.
I think unhappiness is the default of human state. Or rather discontent. Its probably wired into us bc if we were ever content we wouldnt procreate, try to attain financial success, etc
I don't think so. Everyone was a lot happier 10-15 years ago when the culture felt less fucked. I think people can't feel happy if they don't feel basically safe, and the world's problems are so incomprehensible, and solutions to them see so impossible to imagine, that there is a background unsafety overlaid on everything, even if one's immediate conditions are pretty good.
Dipends how you see it. For North American standards, it's a lovely suburban neighbourhood in the Midwest; for us it's suburban hell because we love cities.
> the expats are sending time together instead of trying to assimilate
You are getting a lot of downvotes but I 100% agree with you. These are the types of conversations where someone's cultural background / bias is evident and its obvious to me most of your responders have never spent time outside the US.
Once I figured out that this was a skill and not just something people that are not me are born with, it made things a lot easier. Went from making up all kinds of stories in my head about myself and others to thinking about each interaction as practice and realized lot more people were like me, thinking I'll be invited somewhere or talked to if I was liked or was interesting enough; waiting for someone else to do the inviting or talking first. I just remind myself that a lot of others also want to be invited or talked to, and that reminder greatly reduced my fear of rejection.
I think thats the crux of it, most people respond positively when others are interested in them. As long as its genuine, asking about, or be interested in, others goes a really long way.
Take for instance someone telling you about their career. "I'm a software developer".
You can express interest with a response like "Oh, thats cool, what made you go into that line of work?" but thats a very generic, shallow response.
If you know a thing or two about software, for example, you can ask more interesting questions that show your interest in them, and your knowledge of the space. "Woh cool, how is AI coding impacting your life?"
Suddenly, it seems like you're much more interesting yourself, AND you're interested in them.
The tricky part nowadays is everyone has very niche interests. It's harder than ever to really have a breadth of knowledge that is broadly applicable. This was easier before the internet, before travel, before telecommunication. When your community was your community and news traveled slowly, it was a lot easier to learn about what impacted others.
To be fair, most people are uninteresting.
Maybe the goal should be to be okay with being ordinary.
TRYING to be interesting (or interested) is just tiresome.
And it doesn't have to be anything special; you could find joy together in the mundane:
Petting cats, watching the rain, taking a walk through the woods without saying anything..
If you meet someone who is completely and utterly uninteresting, that in itself is interesting.
And yet everybody cares precisely nothing about almost all natural numbers.
Sometimes, it may be just the knowledge that you're contributing positively to other peoples lives that makes it worth sacrificing some of your own comfort.
Another lost art is keeping a contacts list and contacting them regularly. People used to have these lists on paper and then send cards at least once per year on birthdays/christmas/independence. With this being relegated to social media, your contacts often fall in the cracks of the quirks of tech companies.
Meeting others through those activities and then gradually building upon the relationships via other social outings, dinner parties, weekend trips etc.
I'm also introverted but learned early on in life that it often just takes one person instigating things to rally a whole group.
Not OP, but wanted add for myself it did.
I took the CBT approach. First to change how I thought about things (as a skill to practice) and then that allowed me to do a form of exposure therapy. Mostly finding something small to start with, a single relevant question or comment that is genuine. Saying something nice to someone, like a stressed out cashier at the grocery store goes a long way, or commenting on something like someone reading the packaging of a item and you know it and can give a brief review.
I didn't start trying to have deep conversations or expectations of ever seeing that person again. Only simple interaction for social skill improvement and over time this small talk started to come more naturally. Then that snowball into this lighter feeling around people (so anything would have been perceived as rejection before became not personal and moved on) and that, in gaming terms, was a level-up to more meaningful interaction, then another level-up and another etc. This is a decades long practice that is still going. Like many skills some pick up faster than others.
I don't know what the solution is, but I don't think it is general social meetups, or hobby meetups, or religions of the lax and casual type (someone posted on a previous HN thread that the Haredim and a comparable Muslim sect seem to be doing alright).
But personally I cannot afford to worry if they think it's cringe. For a long time I was lonely, even in a healthy marriage, but having friends that I see regularly is something that I have found to be a vital aspect of having good mental health and avoiding stagnation. So I continually take the risk and put myself out there when I meet an interesting and kind person.
EDIT: The only "cringe" meetups I've attended were "singles meetups" in my city. Mild desperation and no common interests aren't exactly a social lubricant. Hobby meetups are great because if you're truly interested in the subject matter it's an easy/exciting conversation starter.
You mention tabletop gaming. This is exactly the stereotype among friends and colleagues of unfulfilling meetups in a city I recently moved from: multiple games meetups sprung up around the university and public library as a way to get people meeting and talking, but most casual attendees didn't find the natural socializing they hoped for ("people just seem too desperate"), while players keen on the games and not looking for socializing per se complained about the casuals not being commited enough.
For tabletop gaming, it definitely depends on the game. There certainly are salty regulars who have been playing their specific game for decades and who lack social grace with newcomers. But there are also nicer folks who enjoy teaching newcomers and building a community. It all comes down to having good event organizers. Sounds like the ones you heard about didn't manage expectations or toxic personalities well, which is a bummer.
To be clear I've absolutely experienced salty cringe behavior from stereotypical neckbeard gamer types at these events. But I've also met really nice people that I ended up hanging out with independently. Each meetup seems to attract a different crowd so I had to try a few before finding a group that was the right vibe for me.
Note: this wasn't a church activity by any means, even though 3 of us were in ministry together. We didn't evangelize, although sometimes we discussed our common faith. This was strictly personal, social time for everyone.
The years we met in that coffeehouse were very successful. We often enjoyed at least 10 people around the table, all sorts of kids, although my church friends were elderly, retirement-age, but very sensitive to the needs of the poor and the street people who often joined us. That coffeehouse eventually closed, so we moved on to a Starbucks, and the stable group became smaller, but more tightly-knit. Eventually, I found a really awesome teahouse that was just a few blocks off the beaten path, and our group moved there. We no longer found ourselves yelling/screaming over the noise of crowds and steamed milk machines.
Eventually our group lost nearly everyone except us three. Sometimes we had a guest, but they didn't stay. I don't know why people drifted away. Perhaps we weren't welcoming, or fun, or young enough. But we did diversify our activities into board games, such as Clue, Rummikub, Boggle, trivia, Scrabble, you name it. And the teas and snacks were delicious there.
Now one key feature of the group is that one guy was there for the games. He was hardcore, heads-down, "we're playing these games!" with intense concentration. The other lady, she was there for socializing and chatting, but her garage-sale habit had garnered a closet full of games to bring. I was there for both, I suppose, but mainly I liked the social aspect, getting out of the house, having some good boba tea and stuff. The board games were definitely a means to an end. So we all had varying reasons for being there.
Sadly, the pandemic lockdowns killed our group for good. Not even the teahouse was able to weather that storm, and they closed their doors permanently, too. I haven't seen my friends in that long a time. We tried doing some online gaming together, coordinated, but it wasn't the same at all! I really miss them, and I really miss the excuse to get out of the house, and socialize, and I wish there was a stable activity that had that sort of impetus in 2026, but all my friends were made through those gaming activities, and as a result, I no longer have any friends.
What COVID broke is that there was no one to take over from the previous club leaders so they mostly just died with nothing to replace them and now the new generation doesn't really know how to rebuild it because they never experienced it.
I was recently watching a video mentioning a study that it takes ~200 hours of constant contact on average to make a "close friend" and some 40-60 hours to get go from acquaintance to "casual friend", then 80-100 to be a what you'd simply call "friend".
Meeting up for 2-4 hours a month would take years upon years to make anything out if you don't supplement it yourself.
Ironically, the potluck style events strike me as the most introverted way to socialize. Not to denigrate the initiative at all, I have two Canadian friendsgivings this month, and they're fun, but I really wouldn't see the hosts frequently otherwise, because they're the ones packing their schedules in advance, moving to the distant suburbs, or just don't get out much. I don't feel like I can hit them up for something more casual, whether it's always true or not, it's more of a calendar event style relationship I have with them.
The reason I don't take it upon myself to host these myself is primarily because the substance of my social life comes largely from common interests outside the house that I invest deeply into, some of which are non-event hangouts just to watch movies at theirs, hiking, climbing, billiards bar, coffee and a walk etc... I don't try to find like-minded people as much as I do people that I have enough chemistry with, and build on that.
That said, in general it is important to try to take any kind of initiative you can. Friendships don't build themselves, and everyone's scared to stick their neck out.
The simple answer is media. First television, then internet, then smartphones.
People used to actively seek the company of others - if for no other reason than out of boredom. Entertainment and parasocial relationships have filled that hole.
Another reason I might posit is declining birth rates and an aging population. Entire neighborhoods used to be filled with young families of roughly the same age. Now on any given city block in the US, there may only be 1 or 2 houses that have kids of any age in them. Smaller concentration of kids -> thinner market for playdates and sleepovers -> less interactions between families.
I would also add the suburbanization of American society. A neat little home in a neat little sub-division with a neat little patch of grass. You can sit on your grass in your own little kingdom, and be completely unbothered by the world around you.
It turns out, being completely unbothered is also unchallenging, and challenge drives us. And being alone and bored is enabled by television and scrolling.
Honestly, I view the suburbs as the worst of both worlds (urban and rural), with few benefits.
BTW: As an aside, this is why i think the suburbs-class loves tesla self driving so much. The one downside is the long monotony of transitting to the place where people gather to do your work. I'm not against self driving cars, but they enable suburban self-imposed isolation.
Everyone had a part of their house that was essentially a bar and they would have house parties all the time.
So I don't think it's sub-urbanization per se.
It's partly a numbers game. There are definitely amicable cul-de-sacs but if you are in an apartment complex there's 100x more "neighbors" you could interact with.
Suburbs also come with the tradeoff of driving, at least in America. It's a lot easier to socialize when you can put on some flip flops and walk to a friend's place or an event than it is to drive.
It can be hit or miss in either case, and there's socioeconomic and cultural forces that make real world interactions more scarce. If more of my income goes to rent and inflation is too high why would I burn through money on going out when I can stay home and watch a show or be on my phone
Then one family got a TV, and they stopped rotating because everyone wanted to spend the evening watching TV at that one family's house.
Then the other families got TVs, and they stopped the socializing tradition altogether, preferring to watch TV at home.
People are alienated, y'all.
Everything about modern life is designed so you do not have to directly depend on anyone for anything. You can instead be entirely dependent on a series of distant and unaccountable corporations to get through the day.
> First television, then internet, then smartphones
i like vr so i sometimes wonder if itll catch on and if were in the "we know one or two people with a tv" era of the early 40s. theres certainly seems to be a financial incentive since it seems like tvs and phones have gone about as far as we can take them. its also certainly seems like a another leap down the isolation path as well
luckily i think most people reject vr bc it sucks to wear something on your face
edit: grammar (still bad but better)
FWIW, I also think it's largely because boomer's collectively lost their minds and started acting out when their parent/grandparent generation was gone. It's like they didn't want to disappoint them so were acting on good behavior, but now their true colors show.
When I do it though it’s very cool and fun!
Of course I don’t call women “girl” or try to order in languages I don’t speak
Someone commented once about the Trader Joe’s people always flirting with everyone, and a) that’s probably true but b) is just being nice to random people these days so intimate and invasive that it’s equivalent to getting hit on? That would explain people cringing
Our modern day equivalent is being on HN or Reddit all day long
Now entertainment and social media sort of fill that gap (not really) but enough that there's less people out. Less people out mean it's less entertaining, so less people go out etc.
https://www.puttingourdifferencestowork.com/pdf/j.1467-9477....
It doesn't, for example, cover the privatization of public spaces, it doesn't mention mass white flight from cities to suburban sprawl due to people wanting to preserve apartheid, nor does it cover the rise in wealth inequality or the weakening of labor laws or the obliteration of pedestrian friendly infrastructure.
Instead, it pins it all on 'television' which, sure, but there's a reason why people gravitate towards entertainment that is served to them much more cheaply per-hour than not. It's a little like saying the problem with small pox is that the boils are painful, not the underlying virus systematically destroying your body.
In my personal experience in community organizing, the main pain points people have are 1) that they have day jobs that exhaust them, 2) the traffic sucks and they don't want to drive to our meetings, or 3) they need to pick up a second shift or another job to cover their basic needs. And even to those points, it's hard to get a public space where you can regularly meet that doesn't charge a lot of money, to provide food/refreshment, to maintain an ongoing potluck which requires a lot of coordination especially when it comes to preferences/dietary restrictions, etc. It's almost never out of a lack of interest. People desperately want community but there are so many barriers in place.
That's because, contrary to the way it's often depicted, the 20th century was overwhelmingly a flight from rural areas to cities. Suburbs were an outgrowth of that, but the reality is that rural areas were hollowed out the most. (Also, community engagement in rural areas with lots of sprawl was even higher than in cities).
> that they have day jobs that exhaust them
The median adult is spending 5+ hours on their phone a day. This is what is exhausting people. Everyone is essentially working a second job that involves lots of reading and attention and social engagement. It's a parasitic draw on our lives.
> they need to pick up a second shift or another job to cover their basic needs.
Maybe that's true for some people, but the data usually shows that income and free time is inversely related to community time. Poorer people are making more time for friends and family.
I can see what you're trying to do - reframe this problem as another outgrowth of class struggle. But it doesn't really explain the reality. A steelworker in the 1920s coming off of a 10-hour shift would still find the time and energy to go out dancing. A software engineer in 2026 is going to get off of work at 5pm and watch 3.4 more hours of screen time in a day.
I doubt that steelworkers around 1920 typically went out dancing after their shifts. Back then, there was a lack of radios or sound systems, and live music was likely reserved for more upscale establishments. The average worker would more likely have gone to a beer hall or pub to have a drink with his mates.
I haven’t been able to quickly find any statistics for the U.S. that go back that far, but in Germany, around 67% of 18- to 25-year-olds were still consuming alcohol regularly in 1973, whereas that figure had dropped to about 28% by 2023. I’m not suggesting that this trend is inherently negative, but there is, at the very least, a correlation with a decline in social activities.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/09/28/how-urban...
Community engagement isn't also quite the same thing as friend groups. This is making me interested in doing a similar analysis.
You're talking about an entirely different phenomena. The move from rural areas to cities and exurbs happened in the 50s/60s with cheap mortgage rates, WWII-provisioned education, and large sweeping social services being enacted. White flight is a phenomena that started in the mid-60s to 80s that specifically coincided with integration.
>The median adult is spending 5+ hours on their phone a day. This is what is exhausting people
There's much to be said about the behavioral manipulation and dark patterns in apps and devices, sure. But I don't think television inherently was employing Skinner-boxes to get people to watch and that's what I was specifically speaking to. Regardless, that dark pattern of it is class struggle related if that's the direction you want to frame it (I see it more as just MBA-brained corporate sociopathy) because it seeks to extract capital from its users while externalizing all negatives onto the users themselves.
>Maybe that's true for some people, but the data usually shows that income and free time is inversely related to community time. Poorer people are making more time for friends and family.
Obviously. And this is clearly related to the fact that the more impoverished you are, the more you need to pool resources to survive. The pain points I illuminated are for individuals who are still showing up to community organizing work and much of what we do in these spaces is effectively providing enough mutual aid for them to survive.
> A steelworker in the 1920s coming off of a 10-hour shift would still find the time and energy to go out dancing.
You have proof of this? That they wouldn't just go home and get shitfaced or otherwise incapacitated? All steelworkers, per capita, were going out dancing regularly? And even so, this wasn't because they were economically incentivized by the rise of labor unions to be in community with others, building power and fighting for better rights? The 30 years of post-Reagan neoliberal expanisionism has effectively neutered unions - and that's something that wasn't covered either by Putnam.
I suspect another thing largely missed by Putnam was the rise of online social spaces. Connecting with friends via the phone, on Discord, in video game spaces - that's community. It's just different from the community envisioned by people in more elderly generations. The fact that you're even commenting on HackerNews is effectively proof against Putnam's claims.
I don't thin racism was the dominant factor for people moving out of the cities. Today the suburb I'm in is packed with immigrants.
Regardless, I don't think you're being very charitable.
The racist pressure to move was also a structural issue supported by the Federal government. Redlining meant you couldn't get loans to buy houses in certain neighborhoods, and those neighborhoods were exactly where black people lived. Literal walls could be constructed between two similar communities of different races so that the white side could be higher rated and have better access to loans (e.g., the Birwood Wall in Detroit). A ton has been written about the topic, I can't really do it justice, but the idea that people just wanted a bigger house was not the case. A lot of Detroit actually consisted of single-family homes with yards anyhow, so it was literally white people leaving a house for a very similar one.
Also, if "suburbanization" was really the explanation for the decline in community, you would see a clear pattern where people (regardless of race) in the suburbs have fewer friends and social lives and people in urban areas have more. But the opposite is largely true!
That's honestly a little wild that people don't realize exactly what principles Oregon was founded on and the role Portland played in all of it.
One, the Portland municipal government explicitly admits to racism during white flight: https://www.portland.gov/bps/planning/adap/history-racist-pl...
Two, the state itself has passed multiple anti-Black exclusionary laws and was founded as a 'white utopia': https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/exclusion_laws/#...
> Any free Black person who refused to leave would be subject to lashing, a provision that was known as "Peter Burnett's lash law."
> The second exclusion law was enacted by the Territorial Legislature on September 21, 1849. This law specified that “it shall not be lawful for any n** or m*** to enter into, or reside” in Oregon, with exceptions made for those who were already in the territory.
> Voters [...] approved the exclusion clause by a wide margin. Incorporated into the Bill of Rights, the clause prohibited Black people from being in the state, owning property, and making contracts. Oregon thus became the only free state admitted to the Union with an exclusion clause in its constitution.
This, too, is covered extensively: https://www.oregonlive.com/history/2020/06/oregons-founders-...
And more: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53996159
I honestly don't know if you could've found a worse example.
Yes, it was exactly my point that Portland was already the whitest metropolitan area in the country. And yes, I am well aware of the extensive redlining (my grandparents lived in Vanport before it was destroyed). And yet they still had people explode out into the suburbs through the 50s and 60s.
This is a counter-example to the thesis that urban flight was purely a racist response to "preserve apartheid".
No one is arguing that racism didn't exist. But suburbanization happened everywhere around the world where cars were introduced (even places with almost no diversity). To blame suburbanization as a purely racial phenomenon is not true.
If I'm walking a street at night and I see a guy with attributes associated with poverty, I'm more likely to switch to the other side of road than if he's wearing a suit, just saying.
To this day there's significant social pressure to not acknowledge how much racism and racial division played a role in them growth of suburbs in the US, but ultimately it's the documented history which is revealed to those who research the topic.
In many cases individual families were not overtly racist but they were caught up in the economic effects created by racist dynamics and felt they had no choice to go along. If property prices in your neighborhood are decreasing, because neighbors are leaving, and you have the means would you not feel compelled to leave to somewhere with rising property values? Real estate firms intentionally tried to create waves of fear to get people to rush to move, selling low, and then profiting on selling to newer Black families.
It was common for suburbs to have deed restrictions limiting areas by race, and for a while federal housing guidelines would not underwrite developments that did not racially segregate.
At the same time there were massive amounts of state & federal funding pouring into suburbs and highly disruptive unpopular overhauls occurring in cities while cities were also losing tax revenue. For people with the option the future of good living seemed like it was in the suburbs independent of segregation, but part of what fueled the frenzy was the racial segregation.
Some other links:
https://news.iu.edu/live/news/24906-research-ties-persistenc...
https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2021/10/white-flight...
https://psmag.com/news/ghosts-of-white-people-past-witnessin...
There's also this rather infamous quote by one of the most powerful Republican strategists in the 80s, Lee Atwater: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater#:~:text=Later%20in...
I won't quote it here but it's very telling.
Cars enabled people to have free standing houses and work became decentralised, which was also due to cars.
Many people prefer to live in a free standing house.
Thats why we plan to move to the burbs. Lots of ethnic enclaves where kids go around the neighborhood on their own and play.
There is lots of urban planning in the US that is poorly optimized. Walkable neighborhoods close to parks and schools are often filled with retirees, whereas young families are often crowded into newer neighborhoods at the edge of town with little infrastructure nearby.
You wouldn't even have to do much pressure to move the needle. Cities are already putting in millions of dollars to place their parks and schools, and etc. Offer tax incentives that encourage young families to move into family areas, singles into single areas, and retirees into retiree areas.
It sounds kind of crazy, but we more or less do this for student areas around colleges.
Urban planning around these situations would be nice. But the very least we could do is build more third places that tries to attract that last middle demographic to come together; that mid 20's to 40's adults too old for college campuses but too young (and not on social security funds) for older gatherings. That's sort of what some bars can be, but a wide open space with less pressure to spend $15 on a "cheap" beer would be nice.
There's maybe 1-2 other people around your age at work, unless you actively chose the massive internship to employment pipeline of MAANG, Big 4, or your industry equivalent that was still actively training employees. Not really for me; my first gig was pretty young, but going to a large corporation for much higher pay: it was a satellite office with 2-3 other people my age than a bunch of seasoned veterans.
Neighborhoods are the same way too. Even today, I can make small talk with my neighbors. But they are some 15+ years ahead of life with two young kids. Different vibe from a single dude in his 30's.
What you seem to be implying is people are lazy and choosing TikTok over real relationships. But I also think people choose TikTok because it’s low effort and they don’t have much gas left in the tank.
Is life today bleaker or harder than it was during the Great Depression? People still made time for each other.
What if it is the media that is making people exhausted and disillusioned? Not the other way around.
I’m arguing there are legitimate reasons why people are exhausted and disillusioned with the current state of the world.
There's a reason people call it "doomscrolling", and it's not because it's healthy escapism. Bad news and defeatism is psychologically addictive, and platforms have financial incentive to pump your brain full of negativity. Regardless of how bad it is outside, the internet is not a protective bubble - it's an opium den.
Today, computers allow for mass dystopian control. Cameras and algorithms everywhere with no chance of appealing to an actual human.
There are multiple kinds of suffering, and even if more people have sufficient nutrition and health than in the great depression, it's much harder to see hope for the future today.
The interesting part is what causes what. Are people exhausted and disillusioned because they aren't experience life the same way as previously, or aren't they having these experiences because they are exhausted and disillusioned.
I'm trying to focus on both in my life, and I have become much happier as a result.
Counterpoint, people are TOLD and CONVINCED that they are exhausted and that life is way harder than it is.
Capitalism loves someone who is "too busy" to make stuff or avoid buying stuff.
Our lives are all about reducing friction and making everything easier.
Relative to 20-30 years ago we are so lucky and privileged. It's nuts how the victim mindset has spread.
I've lived all over the place and one thing I've seem priliferate is this mindset of "I'm a victim, doing this is too hard, so I just won't for X and Y reasons" while folks order Uber eats.
The baseline for what is acceptable has dropped so, so far. And I'm sure people will reply saying I just don't get it. Lol.
>I've lived all over the place and one thing I've seem priliferate is this mindset of "I'm a victim, doing this is too hard, so I just won't for X and Y reasons" while folks order Uber eats.
There's a lot I can do by myself. But at the end of the day, someone choosing not to ghost me for a hangout or take the time to get together regularly is a 2-way street. Even pre-pandemic, it's been said people are flakier than ever.
There are systematic reasons to explain this, but on a micro level: "just work harder" is not a solution to friendship.
Your contempt for humanity is blinding you to real issues people face every day. Yes, some things have gotten better over the years, but some things have gotten a lot worse.
The relentless satire is what really did it. It was all written by some of the smartest yet depraved and depressed people who found a home in comedy. What did we think was going to happen?
Satire is all well and good, but what are we doing when we no longer take anything seriously anymore? Social media, but particularly reddit, continues to be an echo chamber for these mentally castrated and bitter people who couldn't challenge the comedy with a life that was actually any better than what was being mocked.
That was a very 90s 'thing'. Today people, especially young people, are exceedingly lacking in levity. Everything is serious.
Example of past generation seriousness: investing - put all your money in housing or the stock market and you'll get rich and comfortable. Example of current generation nihilism: everyone wanting to be an influencer. Some people will become successful and some more will get by but most will fail at that, by the mathematics of it. Or literal gambling as in the rise of Kalshi - if your life's crap with $0 or $1k but wouldn't be crap with $100k, why not put it all on 100x odds? Or something like looksmaxxing: will doing xyz to your jawline somehow result in success? Probably not, but it might and you weren't going to be successful otherwise anyway.
GP is wrong anyway, comedy's always been about saying what everyone is secretly thinking.
That actually was my whole point. How do you think they're saying what you're thinking? Where did you get those thoughts from? Comedy has been a tastemaking machine for a very long time.
People used to snap out of it around middle age, but I think that point is only getting younger. The illusion has been broken with recent politics. You can't satirize the already absurd while still being funny. The game has changed, but I still see a lot of defensive humor anyway. It's just sad really.
You usually got a drank, talked. This was a kind of gothic-theme bar, all done up with spooky decorations, a good dj, interesting drinks. We'd host arts/culture slide show jams before the place really would get going for the night. The art was curated and swapped out monthly. There was a lot going on! The place did a lot to charge the space with energy and excitement, bringing a lot of different people together.
Then this guy at the table whipped out his phone and just ignored us all sitting there.
I knew right then and there that this was the beginning of the end.
Now we're all dopamine seeking doom scrollers.
I've been out with a group of friends -- some I just met -- once this year. It also doesn't help that meals and drinks seem hard to justify for the price. I'm waxing nostalgia, but $30 of tacos used to be maybe $8; my $10 beer today was $3.
The baseline keeps dropping.
It wasn’t until iphone 3G in 2008 that you had a full fledged browser with unlimited broadband capable of streaming audio, maps, and visiting websites with graphics. And, of course, new apps coming out everyday.
The battery was also not good enough to use long for a long time.
Why are you driving into a city that costs $100 to park in and then to a restaurant that costs $100 per person if money is a consideration?
Go to a local restaurant. Go to one outside of that city. Do literally anything other than the scenario you described.
I guarantee that if you're near a city where you can find $100 parking, you can find 100 or 1000 amazing small restaurants that are affordable and interesting.
This is a type of defeatism where someone imagines the worst possible scenario, erases all other options, and then pretends it's a choice between the worst scenario or nothing at all.
Baumol's cost disease often comes to mind - in my (might be wrong) application of it - western society simply has had too much productivity and efficiency improvements. You can make more money as a software developer or as an investment banker because those jobs have gotten more efficient and have higher payouts to employers who want the best employees.
There can't be efficiency improvements in efficiency for child care, so the only way to have people want to become child care workers is to pay a competitive salary, so the efficiency increases in the other unrelated fields directly increase the cost of child care.
Developing countries don't have this problem and domestic labor and child care are still cheap.
Is Southern Europe not part of The West?
I don’t think money is a barrier to getting out.
I think to solve this we are going to have to blow up social media and make going out in public more convenient and friendly. Otherwise we are going to end up in a WALL-E society where people spend all day with their meta glasses streaming AI generated micro dramas.
It's hard to imagine doing that nowadays. I have a family, so doing that instead of going home in the evening would be selfish (if done too often), but even if I were younger and had time, it would seem very extravagant now. When a beer is $8-10 or even more, it would be an expensive proposition to go to the bar every night after work. And if you order food it's even worse...
> Now that I think about it, actually, I guess my department at work did this when I first started in the early 2000s, going out to the bar once or twice a week.
> It's hard to imagine doing that nowadays. I have a family,
This still happens. Young people get together and go out after work. I don't go to pubs often, but when I meet up with someone after work the crowd is people meeting up after work with each other.
If everyone in your department is over 35 and has kids, you won't have much luck with this. If everyone is in their 20s and friendly, there's probably something going on.
I think a lot of people forgot how to be friendly with coworkers, especially if they spend a lot of time online. Online discussions about jobs mostly read like it's a cutthroat single player game where you shouldn't get too close to anyone because you can't trust anyone and you should be planning your next job hop anyway. I have to remind a lot of people younger than me that it's okay to have friends at work. You need to have friends outside of work, too, but you can be friendly with people at work.
But at the same time, after our natural relationship ran its course (due to graduations or leaving a student team), it felt like they disappeared. My relationship with them wouldn't linger like with other friends (even if weakened).
Another friend of mine directly described this view that "friendships have a time and place" in life. I thought about that perspective and didn't fully agree, but it still taught me that it's perfectly possible and even healthy to make friends quickly even if circumstances are temporary.
My view is that even if you become good friends with someone (at work or elsewhere) and they leave, you still end up with a network of friends across the country in different workplaces. Even when the nature of the friendship changes, you can still catch up with many of your old friends on occasion (like around the holidays).
And even if relationships completely fade, I believe that genuine relationships will always be a nice experience.
If I didn't have kids, would I want to go out multiple nights a week for a few beers with friends? I don't know. I'd certainly think about the cost of it more now than when I was 25.
Similarly for restaurants - they've gotten so expensive, and often the food isn't as good as we remember - that my wife and I don't seem to be as interested in going out to eat as we used to.
You don't think this is a response to corporate culture? Especially over the last few years.
There's one bar I go to regularly where there's a couple of guys who I've literally never seen absent over the years.
One aspect is that a single income really was enough to not feel extravagant to have a home, a family, and afford to go to the bar a few nights a week. (Part of this was there wasn't as much random other stuff to buy, it wasn't being marketed to you nearly as aggressively either.)
I certainly did this quite a bit in the 1990's, and in the early 1980's I definitely remember my father going out at least twice a week and then the weekends also being for going out and doing something as a family at least 2/3 weekends per month - like trips to a nearby city, or to a sports game, or visit other family, or whatnot.
People really did that.
Maybe not every single night, but weekly for sure
I went first time with office team this year a couple of weeks back. Needless to say whole experience was atrocious. No common reference, movies, sports, TV and so on to talk about besides work. It was just: "Oh, what do you do on weekend? I do x,y,z " in a round-robbin manner.
It was definitely not good time, or even bad time one can remember, just an insipid gathering for 3 hours of doing nothing. $8 for a beer and $15-20 per person for lukewarm food not sure I'll be excited for another meet any time soon.
Feels like a guinea pig society with all of the rapid changes happening
Why do you feel the need to spend money to socialize?
I've gotten the "Parking is too expensive and hard to find" from friends when I try and get them to come into the city to hang out. No, come to my apartment, park in the plentiful free protected street parking right out front, and then we'll walk the 5 minutes to the center of downtown.
There are different ways of approaching doing something:
"To do X requires me to do this and that. So heres how I'll do this and that to get to X. "
"I can't do X because it requires me to do this and that. "
There's a big difference between the 2. The latter is a lie, they just don't want to do what is required to do that. Its a way of phrasing things so people don't feel bad and they don't have to admit they don't want to do something.
Start looking for it and you'll see it in a lot of exchanges.
Of course, if you live in the kind of city where the above is true, then a very delicious dinner + tip can usually be had for $50-75, it just won't be as fancy.
It was framed as ‘Every Activity’ costs that much though which is just not true.
It is legitimately expensive to go out to places here. I just pay it because I can, but to act otherwise is burying your head in the sand.
But as someone lucky enough to be able to eat out almost every day at a variety of restaurants I have no trouble staying under 35/person without drinks. That place is not an outlier.
And like, fancy cocktails are nice but I don’t think you can say that it’s impossible to go out and do anything without spending $500 like OP claimed.
No bars, no dinners with anyone. I think the only blessing this lifestyle has given me is minimized impact from the failing economy we're in, at the cost of not seeing anyone or doing anything. I still have outside hobbies, but it's all too expensive to keep up with now, or being heavily regulated.
I can definitely see how someone who doesn't have many positive reference experiences would prefer to just be alone and avoid the lows all together.
Not that you asked, but I'd encourage you to not define yourself as antisocial. You just haven't found your kin yet, and if you keep looking you can find it.
I think staying at home basically rotting is more comfortable, sure. No judgment here, I’ve done that for months at a time. But the payoff is also… underwhelming. I mean you get basically nothing, just monotony and silence.
The more risky things, like dating or going to a party, are much more uncomfortable. But the potential payoff is a lot more. I mean you can really strike it up with someone, find someone on your wavelength. It can be exciting, exhilarating.
But it lacks the certainty. The reward is higher, but so is the drawback. If I stay inside and do nothing, at least I know the outcome. It’s more enticing in that way. But I also know I won’t make any memories that way. There won’t be some moment or some person I’ll look back on fondly.
Uphill battles are often worth fighting.
A number of military historians would beg to differ.
It sounds cliche but it's literally true that there's always time to meet new people no matter what phase of life you're in.
Related: when I was 25 I had a depressive existential crisis and felt like my life was basically over. It's common, and therapy was a lifesaver. If you feel like you might be depressed then talking to someone can really help. Take care of yourself as best you can!
Everything young parents don't have time for or are too tired for.
(and this goes back farther than 30 years. Closer to 50 now)
I talked about how relatively easy it is to have social contact here at all levels and so I must conclude that most people simply have better uses for their time (by their own judgment) than this. https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-10-09/Community
"I mildly attempted doing this once and it didn't work, so I won't bother trying again" describes a shocking amount of people's experiences.
I sometimes think people fail on purpose to justify apathy or giving up.
Then if anyone says anything they scream about how their experience is valid and nobody can tell them otherwise. It's wild.
There's something important about being outside our comfort zones. We need entropy in our lives and the best way to accomplish that is being in new environments with different people/creatures. What I've found is over time my comfort zone expands as I become familiar with more stuff.
Most people in this post's comments that are "not trying" seem to also be depressed in some way. If you've never experienced it, depression can make trying impossible not just a minor inconvenience. Going to therapy can help, or not. Taking anti-depressants can help, or not.
Also a "mild attempt at doing this once" that ends very poorly can cause a depressed or anxious person to spiral into a self-hatred looping hellscape. It's not a rational decision they're making it just happens. After you've experienced that you're very cautious and try to never feel it again.
And then the kicker is when you're paralyzed like this everyone just thinks you're lazy or unmotivated and pretty much tells you "don't be depressed stupid" which further sends you into having a poor outlook of yourself and it spirals from there. I've been in and out of this several times in my life, it's not pleasant. I've also tried every single remedy known to man and sometimes nothing works.
To put it simply: their experience is probably valid and nobody should tell them otherwise.
Also, people that are different than everyone else (but same background as me) seek me out to be friends.
For example, there is a HUGE difference between a Seattle Tech event where I am literally the same as the other 60 people in the room vs Vietnamese Tech event where I am one of 3 people that speak english. Those other 2 English speakers are going to walk over and chat with me.
To clarify the idea: you have a healthy social matrix but if you marry and settle in the US, your grandchildren won't.
If anybody else is looking for change, try setting something like this up. It has so far been free, easy, relatively low stakes, and I think by virtue of the main focus being "no phones", you get some great people who are all tired of the same algorithmic churn.
I became very good friends with someone who I met at one of the meetups and we've done all kinds of things just the 2 of us and have had some really interesting conversations, which is something I haven't done in a LONG time.
The reason for the decline in social activity is not that it was insufficiently commercialized. Meetup should be a nonprofit.
Arthur Schopenhauer
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-01/how-uni-life-has-chan...
By the end I felt so sorry for the young man they profiled, what an enormous life experience he largely misses out on.
“No, not exactly...,” he replied in an increasingly exasperated tone. I could hear the struggle in his voice as he recognized the cracks forming in the thin veneer of his identity. “It’s like a pub, but it serves food. Like, real food, thoughtfully considered by a gastrochef.” She returned the serve, now teetering on boredom at minute four of the flight. “At our pub we call him Kevin. He makes the best pot pie.”
He regrouped and they found truce in talking about the weather in Toronto. I resisted the urge to twist around to ask if they knew any good restaurants downtown.
In Ireland that distinction matters. It generally will affect other things, like what time and how loud music will be played, how the tables and chairs will be organised and what type. It will often affect opening hours and the price of a pint. Gastro pubs also tend to be much larger.
In North America it seems the vast majority of "pubs" are gastro pubs, possibly why that lady couldn't see the difference. I personally love micropubs and they never serve food other than crisps and maybe a toastie.
I feel like a pedant but I get that dude in his 20s and had to speak up.
To be fair, at least in the US, anything calling itself a "pub" is already going down a marketing/branding road and it almost certainly means they're going to try to evoke an Irish or British sensibility.
And I assume the pertinent discussion is what happened/changed in the western world post WW II.
We have a lot more people these days and we're a lot more urbanized.
> My point was that much of what was done "then" in one's house are now done elsewhere
Yeah, and I don't think I believe that.
Weed here you get at a "dispensary", which is a very unsexy term but apparently we also need to protect the ears of the innocent.
Out east you'd go get beer and wine at the "package store" or just, "packy"
If more social time is desired at the macro system level, people need to have more leisure time (shorter work week, higher wages, good quality of life with more free time broadly speaking) and more third spaces to meet and socialize.
Citations:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49644650
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49644302
In this thread you have multiple people saying they can't go out without paying 200$ or ordering 8$ beers. If you're in your 20s or 30s just go bar hopping in whatever the rundown part of your town is like people used to instead of going fine dining.
A movie ticket, inflation adjusted, costs the same as it used to for decades. Normal people just took it for granted that they had to smuggle some beers into the cinema rather than turning the whole evening into some hundreds of dollars spending spree.
Coffee shops and such don't feel like good third spaces to me, because I don't always want to spend money just to exist
Yes, third spaces/places include places you need to pay for.
That third spaces include commercial spaces does not imply that “free” (tax or donation funded) third spaces should not exist. Parks and museums are also great third spaces.
Compare this to earlier times when it might have been common and socially acceptable to sit for hours on a single purchase and just shoot the shit with fellow townspeople.
Children don't do that anymore; they basically don't leave the house because they have the Internet. They communicate through texting and Discord so they don't even have to "hang out." Beyond the social change, when I was a young adult most malls went 18+ (unless accompanied by parents/guardians) and most other businesses nowadays allow teens to loiter the way we use to. Businesses want people in and out once they are done.
Even if business allowed it, most parents don't allow their kids to leave the house unattended anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
Additional citations:
https://ibs.colorado.edu/new-research-on-disappearing-third-...
https://www.aei.org/domestic-policy/americas-third-places-ar...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13538...
https://esl.uchicago.edu/2023/11/01/third-places-what-are-th...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/business/third-place-mean...
NYC is a thriving city of 8.5 million people and one of the most economically active cities in the world, so your experience may be different than say, Gary, Indiana.
The first citation's relevant highlight is "All categories of third places experienced widespread closures from 2019 to 2021" which is obviously a COVID phenomenon and not a cultural trend. They admit so much. Data from that period I would say is generally irrelevant to discussing wider cultural trends. In fact a query to Gemini says that the number of independent (not chain) coffee shops is growing at 3.2% across the country and it gives this citation: https://www.locationscloud.com/research-report/us-coffee-sho...
The other Science Direct article says "Third places _may_ be closing in neighborhoods across the United States" (my emphasis).
The remaining articles seem to be opinion articles without hard data. They focus on the hypothetical problem of third places going away. In fact the AEI article talks about zoning which cannot possibly be of relevance to any decline in third places given that zoning is becoming less restrictive over time in the last decade.
The households where both parents work full time probably have increased in that time, but I'd say you have to go back closer to 50 years to really get to a time where it was still somewhat common for a housewife to be home all day with the kids.
1) Increasing job/economic insecurity.
2) Prices rising faster then income for majority of population.
3) increasing commute time around employment, activity hubs
4) kids activities/sports are now taken as seriously as work project deliverables. Previously it could be just gifted kids in school teams now with pay-to-play a lot more kids are involved in "serious sports".
https://morelandjs.github.io/chumlord-site/
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/chumlord/id6767711584
If we didn’t see the same trends, it points to reasons more specific to the US.
compare a 'luxury' Florida apartment vs the old New York apartments built in the 1800s. the NY apartments have narrow stairs, one way in.
likewise dense / small cities / villages in either africa/europe etc force more natural social interaction.
even for friends - easier to host friends when they can easily walk to your home & they don't have to drink & drive.
so blaming tv, social media, video games etc doesn't get to the root of the matter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
Research on this has been done and the cause is known. There is just no desire to improve the conditions of social activity on the part of civil society or the government.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49891295
It's probably true that some form of a satisfying social interaction is missing today, but I would say it's a trope any will do to make us happy. In general any type of party I've been to recently, I've enjoyed leaving as soon as possible.
The entirety of the socialization decline I see is with the poor and middle class. The poor seem to have to work a ton more and struggle to make ends meet while still living in a highly individualistic world without the shared community of previous poorer cultures of the past.
And from my observations the middle class are amusing themselves to death while simply becoming sloths at home doing very little other than their children’s sports. No hosting, not social manners and little get together than gets in the way of television or video games.
The upper class and wealthy socialize a great deal. I mean a ton. Shared vacations, constant social occasions hosting fund raisers galas sports hobbies etc. practically non stop.
I gave a talk on work I had done with the Signal Foundation on building a binary->binary rewriting tool to secure their Intel SGX1 enclaves against the various Spectre and LVI vulnerabilities.
The now-defunct maker space I used to visit inherited a former general manager from Maker Nexus, he was very... apathetic about tech in general.
Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49891295
It says "Connect with Others. Learn. Be Active".
Strikes me as good advice 10 years ago when I wrote it, and just as good now.
That really jumped out at me. I don't doubt it, but it's just weird because my partner and I constantly watch home improvement shows on HGTV where folks are constantly talking about improving their kitchen or other space "to entertain guests". And my partner is always nagging at me about the same thing - upgrading the kitchen or backyard so we can have guests. But our house is fine and we never have guests over. I get this sense from a lot of people. I think people love the fantasy of having guests to entertain, but no one ever wants to actually do it.
in America we have had 20 years of "Tech Disruption"., making the world a better place and relentless technical innovation, combined with the 'corporization' of America
Has our day to day lives improved?
Do we work less, live healthier, have less stress?
Seems like this (the younger generation) is far worse off then pre-internet connected, smartphone generation
I had a pretty busy social life in university, 20 years ago
The first city I landed in afterwards, I was able to make some connections and was lucky enough some of my uni friends were around too
But I moved for work to a much further away city and my social life has dropped to zero since then. The pandemic and lockdowns didn't help of course, but that was years ago. I don't have a single friend in this city and I've lived here almost 10 years now
Admittedly I'm kind of socially awkward and quite afraid of new groups, which has only gotten worse over the years. I also haven't had any luck making lasting connections through work or anything like that.
I tend to blame myself for this but it's not too surprising to hear many others are struggling too
1. Every third space represents an ever-larger opportunity cost of being turned into housing. If you can close a pub and turn it into million dollar condos, that commercial rent is going up;
2. More expensive rents are an input into everything done at a business or third space;
3. This decreases spending ability in real terms. 20 years ago, you could get a pint in London for 2-3 pounds. Now it's 6-7. Have wages doubled? No. And pubs were (and are) part of the UK social fabric; and
4. People need to work more to pay for their ever-larger mortgages and other debt. This gives people less time.
Expensive housing is literally destroying society.
Go to Asia and you'll see people glued to their phones everywhere while out in public.
Satisfying would be to bond over common problems and share common joys. But again too surface-level if not even taboo. I swear it’s gotten to the point where AI or whatever the next doom is could take 5% of all jobs. And there would be talk like, oh poor Joe he lost his job and has no marketable skill. Yup. Yup. Any solutions? Any venting? No, just frustrating reminders of impotence.
The absurdity of going to work every day as a wage commodity, another line item for the bougies to increase profits, then go “consume” your wages so that your “disposable income” can go towards the impossible goal of increasing profits into eterntiy, then see advertizements about how consumers are ruining the planet by buying food that they have no skill, land, or means to grow. But why talk about that? You can’t, not even in a fabled “social democratic” society.
We could be talking about real problems. Just venting, or maybe educating each other, or maybe even doing something about it. Even strangers since we all obviously, as plain as fucking day, go through these bullshit motions every day. We see each other. But we can’t talk about it.
When given the option between: socializing with people in a shared space and being at home and entertaining yourself people are consciously choosing the latter.
When I ask why, this is what I hear from other people the most:
-I don’t have time
-I don’t have transportation
-Who else is going to be there
Etc…
There seems to be a genuine lack of desire whatsoever to simply get yourself to a place where there is a free event.
And to be clear this is not just talking about one particular type of event
I just went to a Democratic socialist of America event this weekend in support of Gaza, and the amount of people who showed up compared to the number of people who are on the list (even the organizing list) is some vanishingly small group.
If the plurality of individuals don’t want to join groups in person because they feel satisfied by themselves, then that’s a signal of some kind.
All but the most extreme far-right and far-left people in the country really do agree on 95%+ of anything with daily relevance to their lives.
I have no idea who that is and I've never heard the song.
> As long as you don’t have a common culture and a common understanding of the basic rules that everyone agrees on, no one can spend time with each other comfortably.
Doesn't seem so to me.
Shared music is absolutely part of common culture
Talk to your neighbors and you'll find that everyone just cares about decent roads, decent schools, decent jobs, and decent healthcare.
They don't realize how much the "moral majority" differs in town as opposed to the city, the coasts as opposed to the bulk of the country, in small private liberal arts colleges in the east and at Mormon universities in Utah, or in China, Russia, or Bulgaria as compared to the suburb they grew up in.
If all of those people simply follow the central tendency, and give mass media the same (or greater) weight as they give their neighbors, that guarantees war all the time. It will always be better to listen and try to understand points of view that you aren't familiar with, rather than to hide in the safe (and always untrue depending on the shape of the border you draw) assumption that you represent the vast majority. This, without even considering whether the vast majority are right or wrong.
I mean, some people are so impervious to reality with this that they can lose election after election and believe that they are still 95% of people. Then they start theorizing about mind control and supernatural entities, just to keep from opening their eyes and ears.
"Political issues" are by definition things that people disagree on. Saying people "disagree on political issues" is equivalent to saying "people disagree on things they disagree on."
But the vast majority of daily life is not driven by or meaningfully affected by any of these "issues on which people disagree." If you go and talk to your neighbors, even ones who you disagree with on disagreement-creating-topics, you will find you actually agree on nearly everything. The set of things you agree on is called "our culture."
In the past we all got our news from Walter Cronkite.
Suffering it, over and over and over, was what led humanity down the natural, logical path to becoming civilised and cooperative.
It's the lesson we need to learn well, if our self-appointed badge of Very Intelligent Species is to actually mean anything more than a pointless, neverending game of forming factions and battling other factions.
Is your partner willing to do this with you? Probably not.
-- Nigel Powers in "Goldmember"
I’d imagine you don’t have any family around so the expats are sending time together instead of trying to assimilate.
Dipends how you see it. For North American standards, it's a lovely suburban neighbourhood in the Midwest; for us it's suburban hell because we love cities.
> the expats are sending time together instead of trying to assimilate
What do you mean by "assimilate" ?