The death of partying in the USA
derekthompson.org
derekthompson.org
https://www.reddit.com/r/GenX/comments/1lu102v/were_parties_...
The responses from the Gen Xers were a mix of bewilderment and sadness, stuff like "What do you mean parties like this, it's just a normal teenage party!? I feel so ancient and also so confused by this question." The whole comment section is worth a read, especially the disconnect between how the Gen Xers experienced adolescence and how the Gen Z poster does.
It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of youth with social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection. I also disagree with some of the comments here that are bringing up things like "real estate, transportation, and lodging". Sure, those are issues, but you have families and kids in the suburbs today just like you had families and kids in the suburbs in the 90s, and the fact that kids today can't even recognize "basic teen parties" and question whether they are some sort of made up fantasy can't just be waved away by the fact that real estate is more expensive today.
You have to be careful with Gen Z threads like this on Reddit and Twitter. They are inherently biased toward Gen Z people who are chronically online and deep into social media.
If you spend time with kids in the real world, you learn very rapidly that most of them aren't on platforms like Reddit and Twitter. Of those who use Reddit, few of them actually post anything or even have accounts.
The subset of Gen Z who actually post on Reddit is small and a lot of them fit the description of chronically online, so it's no wonder that Reddit Gen Z people speak as if their generation is not socially engaged at all.
Then when the popular kids were bored occasionally they'd end up at our shindigs
I look back at high school and see several popular groups. Did one rise above the others? Not in an obvious way.
Like you said: some were from wealthier families, some were the athletes and their groupies (no surprise). But I went to parties of all shapes and sizes - some in those groups I just mentioned and some in other groups. Didn’t really matter that there was a premier group of socialites.
We couldn't play any modern games, because every single person at the party would have had to have a Steam account or some license to the game, and have to log into it on my computers, then sign out when they were done... what a bunch of garbage. Nobody had their Steam passwords on hand.
With Quake3, you could sit down on any free machine and jump into a game instantly. I was also really surprised because some computers had the "official" Quake 3 purchased from Steam on Windows (friends who brought their own computers), some had the open source Quake 3 engine running on Linux, and some had official Linux clients... and they all worked together flawlessly.
Like, a movie party looks impossibly cool due to scripting and choreography.
I was the 'coming-of-age-in-the-late 90s' teen and went to exactly 1 party. And it wasn't even the backup party, it was the cool kids' party. Outside of that I hung out with close friends and that was enough, I wasn't interested in parties.
What do you mean exactly by the distinction between "socially marginalized" and "socially active"?
There was a social hierarchy where some kids were considered "popular" and others "unpopular", though really the distinction was more accurately between the beautiful/attractive kids and the average/unattractive kids, and certainly the unattractive kids did not get invited to the parties of the attractive kids, but the unattractive kids had plenty of parties among themselves, to which the attractive kids were usually not invited either.
Perhaps there were some kids who were truly marginalized, with no friends at all, but unattractiveness by itself did not necessarily marginalize you socially.
Although even as a non-participant, witnessing a party first-hand would be more informative than the filtered version you get from Hollywood.
Facebook is the canonical example of a social media platform that arrived after Gen X was young, but it now heavily used by Gen X while nearly completely shunned by Gen Z, with millenials somewhere in the middle.
Reddit and even Twitter are legacy social media platforms for Gen Z, especially younger Gen Z. The very oldest Gen Z people would have been too young to even use the internet when Reddit was launched.
I think the Reddit thread is just a reflection of the reality rather than an argument for accepting that reality.
You can attempt to discount the Reddit thread, but the submitted article wasn't even based on that.
Certainly true. But it's also undeniable that a huge number of them are on TikTok, Instagram and the like. I think OP's point still stands that today's youth have been affected by that.
The addiction is real, and such a huge portion of people have it and don't want to admit it. When you have to have your phone out while you're driving, you have a real problem.
Overscheduling is, I think, the biggest issue. Most of the teens I worked with had something going on almost every night, to the point where rescheduling due to rain or heat was an absolute nightmare. Sports were the biggest offenders. They would often have gym/strength training in the morning and then practice in the evening, almost every evening. Keep in mind I'm mostly talking about summer, so the school year itself was worse. Those that had jobs would do them during the day.
It's completely different from when I graduated high school in '06. Very few sports took over your life in the summer. Football had practice in the mornings for part of the summer, and that's the only one I'm aware of. I don't get the emphasis on sports. I played some in school but never took them seriously and if they required that much time from me I would have been out.
I was a multi-sport athlete. My sibling played D1 soccer. It didn’t used to be like this.
I'd like to understand this more. Families like this that I know talk about it as though it's as unavoidable as their mortgage, but functionally isn't this entirely self-imposed? Is it a lack of vision for an alternative? Are whole families succumbing to peer pressure? I don't relate to it.
Though I suspect that lizard-brain emotions play a bigger role. Both self-medication attempts to get success by proxy, and also visually demonstrating (to themselves and their peer parents) that their kid is a Success Story at something.
I think part of the problem is that for people like her they can't imagine their kids not being in all sorts of sports, but they don't realize just how much the time commitment has ballooned. By the time it's too late they're all in and they're effectively in a sports sunk cost fallacy.
And remember at the end of the day, the most important aspects of being an athlete aren't one's performance on the field. It's everything else - learning to be committed to a team, forming life-long friendships, building positive memories, living a healthy lifestyle, etc.
My dad pushed me to play a sport I despised. Hated it from when I was young all the way to my last games.
But thank god he did. Changed my life completely. As a mediocre student, I could pick any school I wanted.
Love my dad, and he knew what was best. Even if I hated playing, it was all worth it.
Parents should set their kids up for success, and parents do know best - even if that means upsetting your child.
There’s a difference between what someone wants and what’s best for someone - and during my teens, I had that mixed up.
I grew up in a midwest farm town that just happened to have a couple incredible coaches that ran exceptional sports programs. I also had older brothers who were better than me that I learned from.
I was less good and more tough in that I was pretty much the slowest guy on the team in college, but I could absolutely hold my own in practice. Unfortunately, due to the recent NCAA roster limits, there doesn't seem to be a place for athletes like me in college anymore.
But I totally understand what you're saying, I can't say I ever (EVER!) enjoyed going to practice, but I stuck it out and ended up making it to the Big Ten level as a walk-on. I'm very proud of that accomplishment.
They'll still get to be on the team, but actually playing? Probably not.
I went to a small school. I was able to participate in a ton of different clubs. Varsity football players had big roles in the spring musicals. If you wanted to be a part of something and were even halfway decent one could have some chance of actually being a part of it. But when it's one varsity team of 50ish players for a school of 7,000 the odds of ever actually playing are slim to none.
The sad thing is that kids who can't afford to play in travel clubs will usually never have a chance to develop the skills they need to make the high school varsity team. And even the club teams are sort of an escalating arms race: if you want to make the "A" team then you'll have to pay for extra private lessons and position clinics.
It is their entire friend group and becomes their identity. It would be hard to intentionally tell my son "you're not playing sports anymore". He may come to that conclusion on his own or coaches may cut him at some point; that's life. But, for those that stay active in it, the inertia of it is strong.
Swimming is great. USA Swimming has a well-developed system. Elite kids get sorted into the serious clubs where they swim with Olympic champions, etc. But the vast majority of the clubs are rec level and focus on getting lots of people swimming and having fun. Everyone gets a USA Swimming ID number and times are entered into the national system; they get tracked no matter what. Late developers can still be sucked into the elite system if they earn it. Your local park district swim club most likely is in a conference where they compete against other park districts in your county. The only problem is that there are so many kids and races that a meet probably lasts 5 hours.
Soccer is likely to get better. MLS and NWSL teams are developing their youth training systems like in Europe, with success as young kids going through these systems are playing professionally in North America and Europe. They are going to keep sucking the air out of the "elite travel soccer" scam and hopefully what is left are the fun clubs for the kids.
Baseball is likely to get worse. MLB took over the baseball minor leagues and reduced the number of teams. With fewer professional spots available, the "elite" clubs are more and more important to getting kids into them.
Basketball and football, same deal. Lacrosse? Universities couldn't care less about it anymore. It's a dead sport, many parents haven't figured it out yet.
I like flag football a lot. There are adult leagues too, coed and men’s only. The NFL is smart to push it; kids that excel can eventually transition to the real thing while the rest enjoy it and learn the finer details of the game and likely become bigger fans of NFL teams.
This sounds horrific. I did little leagues, grew bored (and nearsighted), randomly played outside for hours, did videogames (sometimes obsessively), built "forts" inside and out, went to / hosted parties, got into trouble, made amends (usually), family vacations, etc. Over identifying with groups and things seems crazy to me.
Maybe I'm overcompensating for my parent's (and at times my own) religious fervor. So much emotional investment seems unhinged.
Hopefully my kids can learn to enjoy their childhood. There will be plenty of time for serious commitments when they're adults.
The problem is kids being bored can be a good thing but they are never allowed to be. When I was a kid the internet didn’t even exist let alone cell phones and the only rule was “be home before sundown”. Kids now have way too many distractions and structure and are never given the ability to explore their own world on their own. It’s been manufactured for them.
Hold off on giving your child a phone as long as possible. Once your kids are old enough (your choice...but it's before they are teens), send them outside, shut the door, and go about your business.
Tell them to come back for lunch. Then send them outside again and tell them to come back for dinner.
I mean this in all sincerity. Don't plan their day for them. Make them go out and plan their day on the fly. Friend's house a mile away? Walk over and see if they can come out and play. Not home? Oh well, walk back or head to a different friend's house. There is value in this friction.
Don't be the person who gives your child a frictionless youth. The hard way is the best way.
Let your kids go out and ride bikes and you may end up with one getting hit by a car. Those are the risks every parent has to manage.
But if we let the edge cases dictate how we raise our kids, we end up with what we don't want - overly managed bubble-youth kids who can't think for themselves.
Is that a risk or a near certainty?
Looking for online guidelines, I find this:
> According to an American Academy of Pediatrics survey of social workers that was posted in Science Daily, children under 12 years old should not be left alone for more than four hours. The social workers who were surveyed also concluded that child neglect will likely be considered when children are injured during that time period. --- https://www.tedbakerlaw.com/child-unsupervised-neglect/
A scraped knee might be injury enough.
It's not like they'd have a chance to get creatively bored without the (physical) activities. Instead, if they're like most teens, they'd dopamine-junkie rot with their smartphone or game console.
> When I was a kid the internet didn’t even exist let alone cell phones
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/09/business/youth-sports-pri...
> For many families, the money they spend on sports is an investment in their child’s future. Roughly two in 10 youth sports parents think their child has the ability to play Division I college sports, and one in 10 thinks his or her child could reach the professional ranks or the Olympics, according to the Aspen Institute survey.
That is properly insane. The delusion…
* In 2017, there were ~1,108,400 US high school football players.
* In 2017, there were ~67,800 US college football players.
* In 2017, 255 players were drafted into the NFL.
So from high school to playing in the NFL, odds of 0.023%, or about 1:4346.
Even then, the average tenure of a professional NFL player is 39 months.
--
Football is one of the easier sports to go pro in as well.
I remember having an interview with an engineering professor from Tufts when I was applying to schools, and one of the first things he asked me was what team sports I played. Being a typical nerdy kid I avoided athletics -- even though I was good at them -- and was surprised that he was so adamant about team sports. I didn't even take gym class after 9th grade because I figured out how to get an exemption, which, looking back at it, probably made my college applications weaker.
This was in 2001, and I can only imagine it's gotten worse.
The formula that I eventually arrived at is that the college application process is a punishment of the middle and upper middle classes for aspiring to the perquisites of its betters.
Honestly, to the California State University and University of California system high school GPA doesn't matter at all. All you have to do is two years at a California Community College and do well there and you'll have your pick of which CSU or UC to transfer to.
Rather than restricting screen time, admittedly not an easy battle (stating how it is, not how it should be), they outsource/circumvent that through organized activity.
Then there is the "competitive" nature. Can't have our kid just goofing around, (and I know the next bit is a bit exagerated and sarcastic, but often not untrue), I need the wins for my fantastic parent Facebook posts.
Lastly, non organized means unsupervised. Parents, I think especially in the US, are (thaught to) regard the world as a dangerzone for kids. Hanging around without oversight or protection, it is just time before they will surely get abducted, mugged, raped or murdered. Is this pure paranoia, or a media fueled self fulfilling prophecy? Can you blame parents for being overly protective for their (often only) child?
It’s a common trend in many domains: universities, housing, jobs. An underabundance of resources means people need to gear up to fight over the things that still exist.
Maybe another approach would be to use a lottery among applicants.
Given the aforementioned process to discover the best athletes (which, I assume, means tryouts, but the exact mechanism wasn't specified, granted), the worst athletes should be revealed in that.
Sure, there is room to game that, but:
1. Who wants to be known as a poor athlete where one is already playing at a high level outside of school?
2. Who wants to keep up the ruse of being a poor athlete throughout the year? If you are suddenly amazing at the sport after making it look like you've never seen the sport before, you won't be long for the team.
If someone who is skilled is able to play up that they are weak continuously, oh well. It need not be perfect. A best effort attempt to try and give those who don't have opportunities outside of school is good enough.
> Maybe another approach would be to use a lottery among applicants.
That seems reasonable as well.
Reminds me of my dad (b. 1945) talking about his HS sports experience in the early ‘60s at a large (~3500) Southern California public school. Not only were there varsity, JV and frosh teams, in high-interest sports like football and basketball there were multiple teams for every grade. Competition was still high if you wanted to play at the highest level, but if you wanted to play, there was probably an option for you.
Public schools are simply not funded the same way today
Is there any measure of how much of that reaches pupils and improves their education versus the amount sucked up by middle layers, consultants, prestige buildings, etc?
It might be similar to the US health spend .. high per capita spend, low outcomes per citizens (compared to, say, Australia) .. with a rich middle layer of providers, insurers, etc.
My HS spent millions on a completely new athletics complex. our math and reading scores were in the dirt, classrooms had 70s era carpet growing crap I don't want think about, the band had 30 year old uniforms...but we had a gorgeous basketball complex.
Most likely is she living vicariously through her daughter's basketball experience or it is seen as an economic improvement, for her daughter or both. Her daughter likely sees that being a teacher doesn't pay well and multiple jobs are needed. This helps push for this "sports is a job" mentality.
Tiger Woods a the Williams sisters promote the idea of making it big if your just work at the same sport over and over at a young age. This is often a case of Law of Small Numbers.
Others might have the worst kind of parent. One that only loves their child if their good at sports.
But I put up with it. Summer in the rural south in the 1990s could be a deeply boring affair, without something to occupy us. I was easily in the best shape of my life at the end of the summer (I could run 11-miles in about an hour without stopping). But then, after school started, I met someone else who enjoyed the same obscure punk music I did, and who owned a drum set, and quickly decided I wanted to play music much more than spend all day every day on the soccer field. So before the first game, I quit the team. I think they went on to do pretty well. My band was terrible, but we had fun.
I guess my point is that—in 1997, at a rural school in the south that very much cared mostly about the football team, playing soccer in high school was still a full-time commitment.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26027673
"conditions in which a society ceases to progress, and instead starts to stagnate internally. Increased output and competition intensify but yield no clear results or innovative, technological breakthroughs." "more competitive with little corresponding rewards"
I don't overschedule my kids. It's ridiculous what I see going on and I'm not friends with those "driven" parents whose motivations I simply can't fathom. There is a total lack of respect for basic academics amongst them, too.
I'm over-generalizing of course, but that's the vibe I get. It's because many, both older and younger, entirely skipped the whole personal computing thing.
In other words, they have no idea what computers can do, and they just want the phone things that are easy to do on the phone.
I've tried to teach my kids about computers, but they're extremely resistant. They just don't care. Their friends don't either, except for one who is notably interested in everything.
> generally dislike computers and think they're inefficient, inconvenient, and too hard to use for most purposes they associate with devices
The idea that the internet remains the province solely of a few loner geeks is a total fantasy. Reddit is one of the most popular websites in the world.
Also, I was a shy nerd in high school who used reddit, and I still partied. Fuck, I made my own booze to take to parties.
Meanwhile my youngest brother - who is super social - graduated high school in the last few years and reports that partying is totally dead compared to my day.
Wouldn't Gen X responses on those threads also be inherently biased toward Gen X people who are chronically online and deep into social media?
I've probably withdrawn more from society specifically because I had the entertainment of being online, tons of knowledge to consume, a tool to build digital things, etc. I had none of that in most of the 90s, so I went to raves and keg parties every weekend and experimented with lots of drugs and even had sex.
Yes, and also society changes people. I think that's the point, and you allude to it:
> I've probably withdrawn more from society specifically because I had the entertainment of being online, tons of knowledge to consume, a tool to build digital things, etc. I had none of that in most of the 90s
The younger generations are suprised that we used to party all the time, because they never had a chance to live under the same circumstances.
Maybe now, yes, but not 20+ years ago when they were younger and going out and partying.
But let's allow the person I addressed to reply instead of imposing your own interpretation.
most of the Gen Z people I know fit this description
is there really a significant Gen Z cohort that isn't "chronically online and deep into social media"?
Even if we assume that "chronically online" people and reddit users are nerdier, less social in the real world, tend to be more introverted, less likely to go to parties in general, etc. we're still left with teen parties being normal for the GenX nerds and alien to the GenZ nerds.
As an old, chronically online, more introverted, nerd I can say that I absolutely attended parties in my teens and early 20s (only some of which were lan parties or BBS meetups)
Still one sees them even outside all glued to their screens.
It’s like people who are bewildered when newspapers say bankers got caught having a massive orgy of some 50+ attendees in a hotel in Switzerland. There is always a party, but you’re not invited. Simple as.
this detail isn’t as important to people as wondering if I’ve gone to an LA sex party and whatever preconception they have of that and now me
Just like those bankers, and this thread, there is always a party
But we did party way more than kids today.
a) fun
b) how you learn
My anecdotal experience with two children who are young adults is that there are still house-parties (nearly) every weekend at high-school, but that there's a lot less drinking, and they're a lot more open and mature (i'm not sure i would have enjoyed being a trans kid in a 90s high school)
If you look at some of the poster's comments there, he laments that even when he does go to house parties, everyone is just sitting around on their phone. I have certainly seen that.
> they're a lot more open and mature
Maybe in some ways but hopelessly regressed in others. For example, Scott Galloway talks about how 50% of men aged 18-24 have never asked someone out in person: https://youtube.com/shorts/5sq4P5RCIrg?si=iMVDyAU4eyzgMN2j
I think that's one minor example of the monumental shift that has happened among young people.
And with Snapchat they know where everyone is. It's typical on a Friday school night they are scanning their map to see, "this group is at the mall. this group is at the football. this group went to her house." And then pick where to go.
Honestly, the current method of social gathering seems so much better than what I did in the 80s.
Here we have "streets" and , occasionally, "public parks".
Forget the "bonfires" option.
This right here is emblematic of the change in culture. When Gen X were young you weren't allowed to have bonfires (in most public places) either, but that never stopped anyone. Nowadays the kids are too afraid to do anything.
Or is it just the reduction in lead? That is what is oft cited as the reason for why crime rates have dropped substantially over a very similar period. Which may leave my framing of the kids being fearful to be a little off, rather the reduction in lead would suggest that they have better impulse control, but I am sure you can understand that the intent there is the same either way.
And starting them does not make one courageous, just jerks.
What's the difference? There has been nothing to suggest that the kids today are afraid of fire itself – with earlier implication that they would have bonfires in parks if allowed to – so, what else could they be afraid of other than to upset someone else? Perhaps you forgot to read the thread before replying?
> And starting them does not make one courageous, just jerks.
Now you're going off into la-la land. Did not read the thread confirmed.
People, including teenagers, can and do act in pro-social and non assholish ways for reasons other then fear. Simple as that.
> Now you're going off into la-la land. Did not read the thread confirmed.
I did read the thread. The thread projects fear on them, because quite a few people on HN cant explain teenagers not destroying things or not breaking the "no fire in the park rules" by anything else then the fear.
Quite a few people here assume that since they were jerks, everyone young was a jerk and everyone who is not a jerk must do so out of fear.
It is unlikely a hermit living in the forest, who hasn't seen another human in years, can find ways to be an asshole. So, technically, it is possible to not be an asshole without worry for others. But it would also be unusual to call such a person an asshole given the lack of opportunities to be one.
Realistically, to be an asshole is, at least in part, to show lack of worry for others. So, no, worry is a necessary precondition here. Assholes demonstrate less-to-no worry, while "less assholes" are more afraid of how their actions affect others.
> The thread projects fear on them, because quite a few people on HN cant explain teenagers not destroying things or not breaking the "no fire in the park rules" by anything else then the fear.
Yeah. No. You just made that up. The only comment in the entire thread you could, if you squint hard enough, take to be about fear is mine. It contained the word "fearful", which is a very different concept to "fear", but I'll grant you that it shares some of the same letters. Perhaps you'd didn't bother reading the entire thing?
But even if you did somehow read the wrong word somehow, it explains that it may not be fearfulness at all, rather greater impulse control. The exact opposite of what you are suggesting.
Are you sure you are not a sociopath? Your reasoning here id quote off and if trulu fear and worry is the only reason for you to not be an asshole or jerk ... I dont wsmt to be around.
And yes superior impulse control can make teenagers behave better amd not do fires where they should not.
I have nothing to do with this. Ad hominem is a logical fallacy. "Read the thread", as the saying goes, doesn't just mean look at the words on the screen. It also implies understand what is written. Reaching the point of logical fallacy proves that the words were not understood. Why keep replying before reading (meaning also understanding) the thread?
> Your reasoning here id quote off and if trulu fear and worry is the only reason for you to not be an asshole or jerk ...
Fear plays no part in this discussion. It is mentioned nowhere, aside from the inane ramblings that were pointed out earlier, and is unrelated to anything being discussed.
Worry is applicable. It may also manifest as concern. But either way, it is the awareness of others (or lack thereof) that is at least a precondition, if not a defining feature, of being an asshole. Again, the hermit in the forest isn't not an asshole just by virtue of not being unable to act out his assholish ways. It is quite possible said hermit actually is an asshole. But without a situation where worry/concern is applicable, there is no way for an outsider to be able to know, and thus nobody would label said hermit as such. To meaningfully introduce the concept of being an asshole (or to not be), worry/concern about other people also must necessarily be included.
per HN rules[0]:
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
And someone will respond:
It's really sad to me how we fucked you guys up and you didn't even have phones...
I partied for 4 years of college which is something like 30 years in sober adult terms. Our ragers were reminiscent of Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds, all of those old party movies that didn't age well. Scenes from Hackers, Fight Club, The Matrix, Trainspotting, Go, Swingers, Made, 200 Cigarettes, SLC Punk, Dazed and Confused, PCU, even Undergrads (a cartoon) were so spot-on for campus life, living for the weekend. Can't Hardly Wait, American Pie, Varsity Blues, Waiting, Superbad, etc came later, and I almost consider those watered down versions of the feral partying that happened earlier just as the internet went mainstream, but still canon.
A Friday night at my city's bar scene today looks like what our Sunday or Monday was. People half tipsy on 2 drinks, even though they're Ubering home later. The faint scent of ganja now instead of basements filled with smoke and first timers trying laughing gas. Nobody puking or disappearing around a corner to relieve themselves. No sound of bottles shattering. I feel like a curator of a museum now, a derelict from a forgotten time.
In fairness, I went to college in the midwest, where there was nothing else to do. Now the West Coast has effectively legalized drugs, awakening much of the country to the full human experience, and people have done the trips and plant medicine and maybe realize at a young age that alcohol and tobacco are rough drugs that tear you up. Which is admirable, but they also prepare you for getting torn up as an adult. To miss out on learning how to make your way home on drunk logic before you black out seems like a crucial rite of passage has been lost.
And it shows. In our country's embrace of puritanical politics like we saw in the jingoist 2000s, regentrified for the antivax era. In the worship of unspoiled beauty, idolizing of influencers, pursuit of financial security over visceral experience. In the fanboyism, bootlicking and drinking the kool-aid for every new evolutionary tech that cements the status quo instead of freeing the human spirit in a revolutionary manner. I gotta be honest, most of what's happening today is laughable to my generation. Blah I sound like a Boomer. Ok cryable then. We're in mourning. We worry about the kids today. All work and no play and all that. It's killing our souls, and theirs.
I guess my final thought after writing this is that partying is one of the most powerful reality-shifting tools in our arsenal. All of this can't be it. This can't be how America ends. You know what to do.
I've lived in Brooklyn for about 20 years now, and while the parties still happen, most of them have become corporate. There are $50 covers and $15 beers, with wristbands you have to load a credit card onto instead of $5 covers and $2 beers in an illegal warehouse (cash only). The kids also seem to be taking ketamine a lot more than anything else, so they kinda disassociate and don't really dance that much at the clubs, whereas mdma and coke were things you ran into more when I was their age and people were not shy about grabbing someone on the dancefloor and grinding on each other for the night. They are definitely more sheltered and tame than we were as a whole, which isn't necessarily a bad thing I guess.
Humans have partied for aeons. It's not just about letting off steam, it's about building social bonds, it's about traditions and rituals and marking key points in life.
This whole thread makes me rather sad, but in the same breath, makes me feel like there is real, actionable good to be done by promoting and helping run events. Not corporate pay-to-play curated experiences, which keep you on rails and only serve to condition more consumption behaviors, but relatively low cost, volunteer-run, do-it-yourself events. The latter, from my experience, have an absolutely infectious component of wanting to contribute, volunteer, create art, and drag others into the experience. But they are also a lot of work and not everyone is cut out for it.
It really has me thinking about lowering the bar to any sort of experience that gives folks a reprieve from the default world, however fleeting.
I honestly believe social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection does a lot less damage to the current generation than partying did to my generation. I can recommend the 1995 Larry Clark movie "kids" for a more balanced view how parties often looked like and which negative side effects they could have. Real life was not like in "American Pie" at all and that is where I guess Gen Z is getting their impression from.
Zuck, is that you? :)
> movie "kids" for a more balanced view how parties often looked like
Teens (and pre-teens) having sex, doing hard drugs and drinking liquor is completely unlike "how parties often looked like" for anyone I know but YMMV.
Well, it's a normal teenage party /in the US/.
I think in Europe, partying always looked a lot different (also different from country to country, here). I also mostly was bewildered by parties in teen movies from the early 00s.
I remember being unable to comprehend how in media, people could just go somewhere without issues to met with people or even go for a walk. I knew that was a thing, but I could not imagine what it's actually like and if it's real.
If you wonder why children no longer grow up with a different outlook to life, then that’s probably it.
Here is Scott Galloway talking about the significance of asking someone out in-person vs. online dating, https://youtube.com/shorts/5sq4P5RCIrg
I think it's far better to be able to connect with acquaintances online, to this day I'm still playing games with friends I had in high school that no longer even live in the same state as me. Whereas had we been forced to only meet in-person, we likely wouldn't have talked to each other for years by this point.
Some girl's parents would leave for the weekend, and she'd quietly invite a friend or two over.
Somehow, word would get out, and 400 people would show up, with multiple kegs, and the place would get trashed.
I wasn't even aware that they don't have them, anymore.
I suspect that what they do, is have a hunk show up a couple of hours early, with a bottle of tequila.
Mostly because I never really understood the fun part.
While I agree there is a technology-driven loneliness epidemic, what is so sacred about those "basic teen parties"?
People from any time before the 70s wouldn't recognize them either. Also, they were fictional caricatures written for movies, not real life, where teen parties were considerably less interesting.
This completely changed after iPhones and Facebook became popular enough. It ruined even the regular socializing. Even the few boy bullies started doing this lame-ass cyberbullying instead. Sometimes I wondered where the cool kids were on weekdays, then I checked my Minecraft server logs.
At my high school we had several girls get pregnant. I remember a kid getting a DUI and he made a necklace out of the tube used to blow in the breathalyzer and wore it with pride. In my first class of the day the kid who sat next to me had a flask he’d be drinking from at 8am.
A couple years after I graduated news broke that the track coach was basically throwing Diddy parties (we’ll leave it at that to avoid getting graphic). He, and several others, ended up in prison.
This was all in a sleepy little Midwest town that many would describe as charming and quaint.
Though Minecraft didn’t exist until I was already in the workforce. Facebook came out when I was in college. Facebook seemed to be a thing with certain groups (sorority girls seems to have a lot of competitions to get the most friends), but no one in my group of friends in college talked about it at all. I don’t think any of them even had accounts until later. Web 1.0 didn’t really change society, but Web 2.0 shifted it massively, especially once Web 2.0 made its way into people’s pockets.
I worked at the computer help desk at my university. We would get calls from high school seniors, who got accepted, trying to get their student email address early. They wanted to sign up for Facebook. I always found these calls strange, and the sorority girls too. People were either really into it, like an addict, or they were completely indifferent; I saw very little in between in those first years. Facebook probably blew up way more with the mainstream once they dropped the edu requirement. After that, there was a lot of social pressure to join.
Social media has always felt like a proxy for actual social interaction. It scratches just enough of that itch to make people think they are connected to others, without providing any actual connection, as the whole experience is largely passive.
My kids don't know anyone or anything like that. It's so strange. They still have sleep overs where they play video games and use their phones. That's fine in a way. At their age I was in the woods getting drunk and starting bonfires. It was fun as hell, but maybe something closer to the middle would be ideal.
It's also fascinating how every generation in recorded history has similar claims about the next, yet somehow mankind has improved quality of life for so many.
Simply google (without quotes) "list of ancients bemoaning youth" and read millennia of similar claims, some of which could be used today and sound new.
I think it would be hard to argue that Gen Z has a higher quality of life than Gen X
Incomes for each income quintile at the same age shows Gen Z as having more income than Gen X did. They are also statistically much worse with money and expenses.
You can dig all this out of historical Census data. Find personal (or household) income by age group, do the same for each cohort over time, inflation adjust, and it's pretty clear.
So I can certainly argue they have higher quality of life than Gen X at each point in their lives thus far.
For example, just look at one metric: weight. Kids these days (and, obviously, adults as well) are overweight and obese in numbers that are off the charts (off the charts because you barely had any obese kids in decades past). They used to always call it "adult-onset diabetes", which now they prefer to call it Type 2 diabetes because you see so many kids getting it, which is tragic IMO. To be clear, I'm not solely blaming the childhood obesity epidemic on smartphones or social media - I'm just using it as an example of something that has changed for kids that we should be worried about, not just hand wave away as "Meh, adults have always bemoaned youth."
Rates of teenage depression, loneliness and anxiety have skyrocketed in the pass 15 years, and when you dig into the data it doesn't look like just a rate of diagnosis issue.
Teenagers themselves (as a group) are telling us they are significantly more unhappy than teenagers in years past. We should listen to them.
We? We, kemosabe?
I did not completely fuck up a lot of youth.
Don't include me in this.
People these days don’t own real estate. Wealthy people own it all. Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes. It’s kind of hard to throw a big party without a big home, a yard, a big kitchen, etc. Small apartments are for small get-togethers that probably don’t register as parties.
Likewise, the larger someone’s home is, the more likely it is to be location in an area with low population density and little to no public transportation. Congrats, you can throw a party, but who are you inviting? All your friends are far away. How can they get there? How long can they stay? Can you accommodate them sleeping there? You aren’t friends with your neighbors who can party easily. You are friends with people on the Internet who are strewn about the world.
And of course, if you live in a major city with lots of friends, small apartment strikes again.
This is part of the reason we have seen the rise of more public events like conventions. There’s a hotel involved. It’s a multi-day event worth traveling to. A lot of people you know will be there. It costs everyone some money, but it’s not out of the realm to go a few times a year. Best part, nobody’s home gets trashed!
Now I don't disagree with your point; I'm not 22 anymore and live in the burbs and have a less full social calendar, largely due to the logistical overhead of finding my way into the city or getting friends from the city out here. But I do want to say you can have a lot of fun with a lot of friends in a small space with the right attitude :)
good riddance btw. but we need to adjust because partying is nice. we are still working ad if we have a free employee taking care of half our lives.
welp, it's always a class issue.
About 2/3 of households in the US own the home they live in. Renting is the minority, not the majority.
Owning a home in an HOA area can drastically cut down on what kinds of parties you can host.
Renting honestly can be a better deal, especially if you have the discipline to stick excess money in the market consistently. In fact, your returns are likely better than just using a house as a forced savings account. In my neck of the woods, we have seen rental inversion too.
I mean you can phrase it this way. Or you can phrase it as homeowners are willing to play a premium for stability / forced savings. (And to be less generous, homeowners may be getting cheaper access to capital than otherwise available to a renter; espsecially as the homeowner locks in ~2% interest rate while a margin loan has increase to 10+% [1]).
However, for markets with low construction and strong demand I'm pretty sure home ownership comes out ahead. Like look at housing prices in the bay area historically vs current rents. That said, you need a handicap'd rental market for renting to be worse so the general situation is it's better _iff_ you invest the difference.
[1]: https://www.schwab.com/margin/margin-rates-and-requirements
I will also note, that the notion of having access to a cheap line of credit, like a HELOC, can be a fantastic tool when used correctly. But... I'm also seeing folks abuse this to keep up with the Joneses. And when times get tough, they won't be able to pivot and might end up defaulting and then losing their home in the process.
The overall state of the economy will still need another major shakedown before those elements of society get their wake-up call. It sorta started happening with Liberation Day, but we bounced back rather quickly... so who knows when that would happen.
Property taxes, HOA fees, maintenance, appliances randomly breaking and resulting in bills of thousands of dollars...
the ability to affix things to the walls without worrying about marks when you have to move out
If you care about the sale price you will worry about that, among many other things.
Marks on the walls from hanging pictures is not going to meaningfully change the sale price of a house, please be serious
However it could absolutely lose you your damage deposit when renting
There are shifting trends in generational home ownership rates, but these are still just initial trends we're seeing. If you look at the data [0] owner occupied has gone down from the 2000s housing bubble, but in the grand scheme of things is not even particularly low.
People also have this mistaken belief that investors like Black Rock are buying up huge swaths of property, when in reality most "investment" properties are bought by families and individuals, consider anyone who know who owns an AirBNB rental or other rental property, they would be considered "investors".
Most Americans still live in a house, and own that house (or at least, some member of their household owns it).
Like I said, I don't know about the US. It's a big place and you're probably taking too much of a "grand scheme of things" view here. Aside from geographical diversity, total % of home ownership doesn't change that fast – lots of older people already own homes, their children often inherit those homes. Houses aren't like hotdog sales and numbers change slowly.
What matters more is how much does an average 25 or 30 year old pay in housing costs? What hope does someone with a decent (but not exceptionally well-paid) job have of purchasing a house? A single % of home ownership across the entire population doesn't really capture that. Doubly so for such a large country as the US. I'm sure there are affordable homes out in the sticks, but also ... no jobs. That might work for the remote software dev, but not everyone is a software dev.
In Ireland the total housing ownership has fallen, but not dramatically. However, the reality for people not already having a home is quite bleak. Buying a house now is significantly more expensive than it was a decade or two ago, as is renting. I could buy an apartment on my own ten years ago with a salary that really wasn't all that great. I'd have no hope today. My rent today is about three and a half times what it was 15 years ago. There is a generation of working 20 and 30-year old who are still living at home because they can't really afford to move out.
This is a _really_ popular meme, but it's not true. About 50% of new homes are bought by owner-occupiers, about 25% by local authorities and approved housing bodies (https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/housing/local-authorit...), 10% pension funds and institutions (these are the 'private corporations' you refer to), and the remainder are small landlords, holiday homes etc etc.
I think sometimes people see "50% of new homes are bought by owner occupiers" and read it to mean "and thus the other 50% are bought by evil corporations" (people also tend to forget about the 'new' bit; second-hand homes are much more likely to be bought by owner-occupiers, as REITs and pension funds largely don't want to touch them, and nor do approved housing bodies; local authorities do sometimes buy individual second-hand homes, usually from private landlords), but really the bulk of the remainder is social housing.
The ridiculous rents are driven by the fact that we're just not building enough homes. Not that we're not building a lot; we have one of the highest per capital rates of homebuilding in the OECD, but there was a period of 7 or 8 years where we built almost nothing, and that's a really hard gap to bridge.
If sufficiently masochistic you can also wrestle it out of the CSO's horrible website for 2024, I think.
It's about 1/3rd AFAIR.
I do agree that Ireland has experienced a massive change in house prices from 15 years ago, but 15 years ago was the bottom of a bust after the boom so potentially not the right comparison point.
I do mostly agree with your points, and it's really bad but it's important to contextualise some of those points.
This is caused by an Irish cultural distaste for apartments - as they're generally not setup for modern living, are typified by poor soundproofing and insulation, and marred by fire insulation and other scandals - leading to a decreased stock. Include the Help-To-Buy scheme applicable only to new-build houses on greenfield estates, and the HAP social-welfare payment which set an artificial floor on rents for apartments, and its the case that the average apartment rent is 1.5-2x the cost of servicing the mortgage at a 90% LTV.
This results in an average rent in Dublin of €2,500, with Open-market rents in the capital rising at annual rate of 5.2%. The most recent median (50th percentile) salary is €43,221, which comes from a 2023 CSO report. That's a monthly net salary of €3,000 per person.
The National Asset Management Agency, set up in the recession to take on all the in-default property and babysit it till prices rose again, has a huge part to play. Combine this with a non-fit-for-purpose Planning and Appeals process, and you literally have builders suing the government for blocking developments.
As of November 1st 2024, there were just over 2,400 homes available to rent across the ENTIRE COUNTRY OF IRELAND, down 14 per cent on the same date a year previously and well below the 2015-2019 average of almost 4,400.
All of this laid the foundations for disaster. Now the increased materials and energy costs since Covid-19, combined with a relative collapse in our building sector prior, have meant that building apartments in Dublin has largely become commercially unfeasible, as construction costs are now higher than what buyers are willing to pay.
https://www.independent.ie/business/unviable-construction-st...
> In Ireland, approximately 41% of young adults aged 18 to 34 live with their parents as of 2024.
It's definitely harder to buy a house these days.
the folks in those areas, if you owned a house for the last 20 years, are now richer than ever due to that property appreciating. but the younger generation is absolutely screwed
Only if you sell it, and move somewhere with a much lower cost of housing.
There is also less need to get the maximum possible loan if house prices are lower as a ratio to income.
after corps, we have foreign buyers also coming in with cash offers. i know of one specific house that is empty for the majority of the year purchased by foreign owners specifically for their kid to live while attending college. the kid chose to not go to that school, so the house sits empty except for when some property manager comes by to "check in" on the place.
so while this thread is discussing still showing decent ownership percentages, those numbers are glossing over some of the "trends" in modern real estate.
> after corps, we have foreign buyers also coming in with cash offers
As someone mentioned earlier in the thread, these are memes that are not actually backed by data - commonly perpetuated by groups that blame most issues on billionaires/corporations/investment firms.
In my neighborhood specifically, there are homes being bought not by single families but specifically buy management companies so they can then rent the property. To deny this happens is just as much of a stick your head in the sand meme as what you are accusing me of.
I'm sure that happens occasionally. It's not nearly as significant as exclusionary zoning and other bad policies that prevent housing from being built.
In my neighborhood specifically, there are homes being bought not by single families but specifically buy management companies so they can then rent the property
Even in that case, the homes are still on the market.
That's why your anecdote is meaningless and can be dismissed immediately.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
Restrictive zoning laws preventing construction in coastal cities is also a major factor. The cities which see the greatest declines in rents have the greatest increases in supply.
https://www.nmhc.org/contentassets/f9a5ef47d06143e6b8355cfad...
Here's a size list that is commonly shared https://www.newser.com/story/225645/average-size-of-us-homes...
When you figure in # of people in such houses, the avg person has vastly more space https://www.reddit.com/r/REBubble/comments/14hayqq/average_h...
I bought my house in 2018. It was built in 1997
It is not vastly larger than it was in 1997, but I still paid 2018 prices for it
Most people aren't buying new builds
A few years back, median age of sold house was 27 years. So by that metric you bought even a newer house than the majority of house sales.
Your 1997 house is almost certainly much larger than the median 1950 house.
And, your single data point in no way invalidates aggregate statistics.
They are and the trend is there. The housing market moves slowly and it takes time to chip away enough at the larger stat. Once the boomer's age out, even with wealth and asset transfer, let's revisit this and see how it looks. I'd bet 2/3 ownership looks more like 1/2 or less by then, which is a significant drop and it probably will only continue from there.
And those old folks that took their home equity and used it to buy property for an AirBNB are in fact an example of the rich/old folks screwing the young generation hard. (Other examples: vote to reduce taxes, to increase tuition, stop the free market from building more housing, do nothing on global warming, let the economy be swallowed by health care and financialized scams). As are the people that own and rent 3 houses, while their grandkids have to move far away. (Disclaimer: I live in San Jose, and my adult kids will never be able to live near me).
How many of that 2/3 is households that have owned the home for 20+ years—ie, since before the subprime crash?
How many of that 2/3 is households of people 65+? And how many is people under 30? Partying is still largely a young people's game, and even if your "household" owns the home you live in, if that's your parents or grandparents, you're much less likely to be hosting parties there.
Also, it varies quite a lot by state. Over 3/4 of adults own their own home in West Virginia, but in New York it's a bit over 1/2.
In fact I just checked and the ratio of avg salary to real estate prices is about the same as in New York.
The article says a similar decline is seen among the wealthy.
I don't think the real estate situation helps but I think there's a deeper social problem driving both of those effects.
This is only true in some HCOL places ands big cities. Plenty of people own homes.
People travel there literally to party.
Partying in someone's apartment is a thing in probably every reasonably sized city in Europe, not just Berlin. Although you should probably alert your neighbours.
Other places had taxis (that you couldn't order ahead of time to get to work on time) and some had none until they uber/lyft. (Don't know the current situation).
I'm going to guess the other thing Berlin has is safe areas to walk. I can go to a party and walk home, safely on walking paths complete with shortcuts, without even being harassed by the police and risk getting arrested and in jail for the night (for public intoxication). None of these were luxuries I had in the states.
And I'll say that yes, I've been in some small apartments - but only some folks with small apartments can host. You probably have no clue how many would host if they only had enough space, but a small apartment with 2 adults that have hobbies limits things.
It's been years, but I hope Den Gode Nabo is still fun.
Den Gode Nabo is still about, but its been years since I've been there :)
My own personal theory? Music sucks now, ha ha.
The median new home size skyrocketed in the '80s.[1]
Many of the post-war suburbs were planned communities built with schools, churches, grocery stores, and other necessities within walking distance.[2] Compare that to developments today (and since the '90s), that are all housing, lack sidewalks, and require a car to get to necessities.
Serendipity doesn't happen when everyone's in cars. You don't pull over to invite an acquaintance over for a beer or offer to watch their kids.
1: https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/average-home-size/#smal...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levitt_%26_Sons#Construction_o...
I almost never meet people who like the same bands as I do. I can listen to new music that I love at home. If I go to a bar or a party I'm going to mostly hear music I don't like, and if I do like it, I could have already heard it at home.
Maybe that is part of it
The home ownership rate has been 64%, plus or minus about 1%, for the last 45 years.
https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics/research-rep...
The median age of the population of the United States has increased from 35.3 in 2000 to 38.8 in 2020. (hmmmmm)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_Uni...
As the population pyramid of the US, which is already a "population Empire State Building", further morphs into a "Population Baseball Diamond", I expect the median age of all buyers to increase and the percentage of owners by age group in the younger cohorts to decrease.
Additionally, as the median age increases, because older people tend to have more money, I expect home prices to continue to increase.
Honestly, I expect home prices to spike by 2035-2040 as the current crop of 50–60-year-olds reach retirement realizing that their only real prospect of not starving to death in retirement is the main (and often only) asset: their home.
That will further stress younger folks, but people don't seem to care and anyone who expresses concern is denigrated as a communist so what is to be done?
Regardless, with the homeownership rate for "under 35" fluctuating between ~41% in 1982 and ~37% in 2024 "nobody owns shit no mo" is still false.
at least in canada, this would mean that 38 y/o are primarily still living in their parents basement, since theyre living with the homeowner, and that counts as home ownership. same thing if you're a roommate with the owner, paying rent.
The simple fact is that people still buy and own real estate, at pretty much the same rate for decades (a century?), and now end up owning much bigger places.
Everyone gets quick and lazy dopamine from phones. Why bother with anything else?
Think about how much time goes into phones. Who has time to plan? Who has time to coordinate?
Phones are probably why the birth rate is declining too.
You don't even need a house to party. You can use a pavilion at a park, go out in the woods like the rednecks I grew up around did, party at the trailer park. Homes are by no means a limiting factor.
It's 100% our phones.
Anecdotally is makes a lot of sense as well. Most of the people I know, including myself, spend an awful lot of time on their phones and the internet in general. All of those hours have to come at the expense of other activities.
When I was in my 20s I spent an unusual amount of time (for the era) alone on my computer, but since most people were still quite social it was easy to hop into various activities. Now that nearly everyone is spending a bunch of time alone on their phone the real life social networks have begun to fray.
Some of the changes are for the better (ie. fewer teen pregnancies) but I think these trends are quite bad overall, without a clear solution. It's probably not a coincidence that political polarization and extremism has also increased during this time. Banning smart phones in schools seems like a step in the right direction, albeit a tiny one. Hopefully we can come up with more.
> All of those hours have to come at the expense of other activities.
It all adds up. Five minutes here, thirty minutes there. It all has to come from something.
The smartphone usage takes away in subtle ways too. Time spent idle is time that the brain can subconsciously solve things and work out interdependencies and relationships. If you put that time on YouTube, Reddit, whatever, then your brain is fully consumed with the dopamine drip.
Smartphones have added a tremendous amount of value to society, but it hasn't been without cost.
Hmm I use a group chat on my phone to coordinate with my friend group where we go out on saturday evening, if we need a reservation etc.
Phones are invaluable for fun too :)
If you look at a graph of home ownership in the US by cohort at various points in time (see, e.g., https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/08/homeownership...), while the rates are somewhat lower, between the highest point and the lowest point the difference is at worst 10 percentage points.
This sentiment strikes me a lot more as people in their 20's complaining that they're poor because they don't have the financial resources of someone in their 40's, despite having more resources than the latter did at their age.
I would hope so, otherwise that would mean the country/locale is so bad that older households are packing their bags and fleeing.
So the most desirable properties, such as large SFHs, townhouses, penthouses, etc… within a short driving distance of an attractive city will likely be owned by the latter, by definition.
Not to mention Private Equity and huge real estate investment firms that vacuum up a significant (if small) number of homes. Even if that 20 something could scrape together a 20% down payment and make an offer for asking price, they're going to get beaten by some corporation buying with cash.
Home prices have doubled over the past 20 years, twice the rate of income increases
This isn't just "complaining"
In 2000 a median house would cost 3x the median income, in 2025 it's 6x (and in some cities, 8x or more)
Affordability has changed, it's well documented fact. This isn't napkin math or whinging.
I doubt it’s the only cause at all, this anti-social (“Bowling Alone”) trend has been going on for generations, and probably has multiple causes. But the US housing crunch on young people is adding to it.
And this damn attitude of “the younger generations are just entitled weenies” about housing is about the most infuriating attitude in the world. My parents bought their first house on a single earners blue collar salary at the age of 27. That house, with almost no updates, now literally needs a top 1% salary and payments for 30 years to be able to afford. Don’t tell the kids to stop whining when they’re watching older generations gobble up their future in the name of preserving property values.
Short version of the history:
Starting in the late 1990s, you had a super-concentration of both good jobs and interesting culture in a short list of cities: SF Bay, New York, LA/OC, Seattle, and a few others. I remember growing up during this period and the whole cultural zeitgeist was "if you don't live in one of those cities, you can't do anything."
These cities have always had an allure, especially creative centers like LA and NYC, but what I mean is that it got much more extreme. It fits with the general cultural zeitgeist of everything centralizing and going to the extreme right side in an increasingly tight power-law distribution.
This was followed by insane real estate hyperinflation in those cities, of course, because if you try to take all the "interesting" stuff in the world's largest economy and a nation of 300+ million people and cram it into a few metros, that happens.
The rest of the country still has a lot of affordable real estate, less so than it used to -- RE has appreciated everywhere and not just in the US -- but it's far less insane than the top-tier cities.
I post this every chance I get:
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
How old were you then?
People have a tendency to remember some time period when everything was carefree and you didn't have to worry about how much stuff cost and all this new, great stuff was happening. And then you find out they were 12 and the time where they think all that went downhill was when they were 20.
I've asked older people about this for this very reason, and they've generally agreed with me. There's always been an allure to big cities but it went into overdrive starting in the late 90s - early 2000s.
As for real estate prices, that's objective. You can easily look that up. RE prices went insane starting in the 2000s with the 2008 crash only being a brief pull-back in a long bull run. You can also clearly see the divergence with big top-tier cities appreciating at a much faster rate than smaller cities. You can see it in the numbers.
Look into the origin of early personal computers. They're from all over: Albuquerque (MITS), Dallas (TI, Tandy), Boston (DEC), Miami (IBM PC), Philadelphia (Commodore), Seattle (several), etc. In the early 2000s if we re-did the PC revolution it would all be from the SF Bay, because by then if you were doing anything cutting edge in computing it had to be in the Bay Area.
> "We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat," bin Laden said.
> He also said al Qaeda has found it "easy for us to provoke and bait this administration."
> "All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations," bin Laden said.
> As part of the "bleed-until-bankruptcy plan," bin Laden cited a British estimate that it cost al Qaeda about $500,000 to carry out the attacks of September 11, 2001, an amount that he said paled in comparison with the costs incurred by the United States.
> "Every dollar of al Qaeda defeated a million dollars, by the permission of Allah, besides the loss of a huge number of jobs," he said. "As for the economic deficit, it has reached record astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars.
> "It is true that this shows that al Qaeda has gained, but on the other hand it shows that the Bush administration has also gained, something that anyone who looks at the size of the contracts acquired by the shady Bush administration-linked mega-corporations, like Halliburton and its kind, will be convinced.
> "And it all shows that the real loser is you," he said. "It is the American people and their economy."
> As for President Bush's Iraq policy, Bin Laden said, "the darkness of black gold blurred his vision and insight, and he gave priority to private interests over the public interests of America.
> "So the war went ahead, the death toll rose, the American economy bled, and Bush became embroiled in the swamps of Iraq that threaten his future," bin Laden said.
This complaint - we don’t have nice houses so we can’t party - is unintentionally emblematic of the root issue in misaligned expectations and excuses for realigned priorities. Nobody Inknew when young had houses either.
Look, it’s not obviously bad to me that young people party less. Blame gaming, blame some resurgent conservative cultural values, blame the internet or even laziness. Maybe the youth today just have better things to do, and that okay. Binge drinking, drugs, and stupid decisions aren’t necessary good investments in time, and many, many, friends from back in the day didn’t survive it. Like less kids smoking cigarettes, maybe this is a good thing (for them and all of us).
But it’s ridiculous to try and turn this behavioral trend into some manifesto on housing inequality. Give me a break.
Note the age-group with the biggest drop is 15-24, its not like the average 18 year old owned their own home circa 1995.
This is baffling to me. Most of the parties I went to in high school, college, and my 20s were in people's tiny apartments, small rented houses, and small yards.
Maybe expectations changed? Now it seems more like people feel the need to get ready before going out, to bring something, to pre-coordinate to arrive with a group of friends, to have a lot of space, to have everything pre-cleaned and ready to be the background in photos, and maybe even to have a meat and cheese platter that gets posted to social media. It seems there's much less willingness to just go places, be cramped, and just hang out.
I’m like here’s a giant thing of ice cold booze have fun.
Why clean it thoroughly both before and after a big party? Why not just after?
Incorrect.
Gen-Z is not only completely in the right in being sheepish, their predecessors are entirely to blame, and every attempt to claim they were not a part of the increasing surveillance state is a lie.
Even the older members of Gen-Z can be blamed to a small degree.
There is no cure
Anymore this feels impossible due to neighbors, landlords, and police. I have so many anecdotes... I don't think it's "getting ready" as much as it's an intolerant society of chronically entitled people. Also, it's increasingly expensive to go out + I truly believe we're experiencing the destruction of "3rd places"
My 20's had a good amount of that too... but it was increasingly at odds with real consequence and risk. I'm just safer at home with my SO, in my space. It's getting much worse for younger generations :(
That's not what it meant in the 1980's though. That's one of the things that changed. The US in the 1970's and 1980's was much freer in that regard.
I never was much of a partier as a teen but I've been to a few, and they were all in flats ranging from much smaller than an American house to literally one room sometimes with 15 people in it. Had no problem falling asleep drunk on somebody's kitchen floor or on a couch in a room with a bunch of other people.
Even in the US a dorm room (a tiny, rented place) is a stereotyped party location.
Oh and ofc numbers are wrong. The houses in the US are bigger than ever and homeownership rate is smth like 60%.
Sorry but can't agree, as do most folks here backing up with some hard data. That 'glass is half-empty' approach to daily life ain't healthy long term, ever thought about that?
My theory is that people have fewer parties because people have gotten flakier about attending larger social events. It is much easier to cancel plans at the last minute with a text or a social media DM, and people always seem to want to keep their options open. We've moved to getting together only with one other couple/family at a time b/c any time we try to have larger group events half of the invite list will cancel the day of.
Add in the odd issue of younger people not getting their drivers licenses or owning/having access to a car.
It could be anecdotal but I've seen this in a number of locales across the country. Curious if there's hard numbers on it.
Most homes in the US are mortgaged. More likely the banks, which ultimately means the depositors, who are just as likely to be everyday average people (the wealthy normally keep their wealth in things like businesses), own most of it.
My spouse and I find that we are overwhelmingly the ones calling to organize playdates rather than vice versa. I'd like to think it's not that my kids are poorly socialized or misbehave - they've always received glowing reports at school. I give my kids business cards with my phone number to pass out to their friends to give to their parents, and there is also a class list where our phone numbers are listed (and where we find these other parents' contact info).
Something happened with the culture of getting kids to play with each other outside of school hours, and I don't know what it was. COVID lockdowns definitely delayed it from starting for our kids, but I know these parents are mostly in my generation, and we certainly played more together.
We live in the suburbs, so it's not a car creep problem - at least, no more than it was 60+ years ago when the numbers were better. When I ask the parents who stay, they tell me a vague mix of weekend junior sports leagues, visiting relatives, and just being really tired after working all week. They're lame excuses: spending time with kids constantly is _also_ really tiring.
Kids having regular playdates would encourage more familiarity among the families and trust in letting kids play unsupervised with each other. Often I take them to the main playground, and it's virtually empty. I can't believe I'm the only one in the community who's unhappy enough about this to try and change it.
Yeah if i was a kid i'd be mortified at having to do this.
I have certainly gotten to know some parents at pick up, but there’s a whole bunch I have not met.
It may be a good time for some small social disobedience to push back to how things used to be
Why do all that, when you can sit in the comfort of a nice warm / cool dry vehicle and play videogames and listen to music?
But this is likely the worst forum in the world to talk about typical social skills.
We are talking about school kids here though please remember.
If handing them a piece of paper with my number is too cringe, I'd be really happy to have a non-cringe, non-standout (?) way of doing that.
But I didn't realize that it was "risky as fuck" and making my kids "stand out" so much to have my contact information on some paper to give to their closer friends. I must be way more socially inept than I thought. (I guess my eldest must be too, because she thinks handing a card to a friend is convenient.)
So please, if you have some method that is roughly the same level of convenience but not "risky as fuck", I'm all ears.
Is not the same as handing your dad’s business card around to your friends (and is a borderline disingenuous way of summing it up, business cards have business implications i.e., formal implications it’s kinda in the name of them, kids aren’t business people aren’t used to using them socially like you might and don’t see it as a scrap of paper) if you can’t see that then yes I agree with your conclusion on your social skills.
Hey let me give you my mom’s number or add her on Facebook / instagram (how old are these kids by the way?) is not the same as handing out and having handy your moms/dads business cards.
It just isn’t.
It ain’t rational and yes technically they are ‘both pieces of paper’ but the vibe is simply different.
It ain’t cool. It comes across as desperate and forced and it’s embarrassing as a result.
The tone of your reply intimates anger at my responses, that’s unfortunate but I stand by it.
It's my general contact information on business card stock.
Maybe it's a regional thing, but when I read the comment, I just assumed they meant "business cards" in the general sense. Like how there are "joke business cards" that say "yes I'm tall, the weather is fine", etc.
Mine are business card size, on business card paper, made on a business card generation website. It simply says my name, my number, and my email.
>The tone of your reply intimates anger at my responses
Yes, I think it is wild to say that it is "cringe" and "risky as fuck". The dude just wants his kids to play with some friends. It seems to be working for everyone involved.
I feel way more stupid litigating this over comments on the internet mid-day during the week than I would handing out business cards with my full business information on it, to be honest. Parents get so much flak on the internet for normal ass things, it's crazy. Say a little off-hand comment about how you're trying to get your kids to have a good social life and people come out of the woodworks to call you cringe.
Giving your work business card to your kids is different than writing your number down. Again. For the fourth time.
Do you get it now?
It is social risky whether you like it or not and getting angry and offended on other grown adults behalf, again making it about you when it wasn’t when you don’t even do that.
Also it doesn’t work. He was literally complaining that it doesn’t work. We aren’t talking about you.
And he literally states there is a class list of numbers all parents have anyway! So there we go, does your mom have my number, yes she has all the numbers on the list, well give her my business card because I like to be the nail that gets hammered down.
Do you get it now?
You must have skipped over the entire middle of my comment.
>making it about you
It's a conversation on a public forum, I do more or less the same thing, I'm chiming in with my experience, yes.
But this is obviously unproductive. You're right that I'm defensive over it, which is probably a sign for me to step back.
>Also he literally states there is a class list of numbers all parents have anyway!
Side note, but my kids have friends in other classes and I'm not allowed to see those class lists because my kid isn't in the class. I know, I know, I'm making it about me again. But, perhaps there are similar rules elsewhere.
Nowadays landlines are more or less gone, so the card approach is a good one.
I get the idea, but I would suggest the reaction to an attempt at lubricating social interaction as “cringe” is part of the issue OP is describing.
We don't have a landline, and there's no way in hell they're getting their own phones at that age.
Either you are I are reading it wrong, because I don't see anywhere in their comment where they say their own kids aren't initiating.
What they do say is that other parents are rarely initiating play dates.
Can you quote the part where they "admit that their kids don't initiate socializing"?
> My spouse and I find that we are overwhelmingly the ones calling to organize playdates rather than vice versa.
I read that as his spouse and he were organizing rather than the kids organizing with friends when they're together at school or camp. That's what my kids do unless it's a birthday party or carpool.
I didn't make this world.
That's not really the case with elementary school age kids.
At least when parents are addicted to alcohol they can still be social and function as parents. Not so with Instagram/tiktok.
Also social interactions nowadays have become so "one of a kind" and disconnected from a general contract that sometimes it's hard to not feel overwhelmed, I remember being 10 years old and just knocking on the door of my neighbourhood friends to check on them and kind of invite me in, depending on the time I would stay and grab dinner there and only come back home when it was getting too dark. Now as a parent I feel this serendipity is almost gone, you have to officially arrange play dates on parent groups, pick kids up, ask parents what kind of food should I offer, is it ok if I let them play videogames, is it ok to offer sugary drinks, list goes on and on.
In that world consuming media is much easier, but I wouldn't say that's because it is addictive on itself, I think there's a big portion of people that just got tired of trying to navigate how to interact with others. My impression is that the proportion between lurkers to posters increased with time on different platforms including in real life.
Even as someone who grew up in more spontaneous times I find I need more scheduling and such these days.
A major issue is the death of independent child play. In a lot of places if a kid — and we are talking up to early teens — is unsupervised police will be called. It’s entirely the result of daytime TV and true crime making people think there are pedophile nuts hiding in every bush when in reality abductions by strangers are incredibly rare. If a kid is abused or worse it’s almost always someone they know.
One of the things I love about where we live is that kids do still play outside. It’s a safe Midwestern suburb. We moved from SoCal and there you would definitely have some busybody call the cops. Of course it was perhaps more dangerous — not because of crime but cars. All the suburban streets have like 60mph speed limits in SoCal.
I don’t know what the reason is for this phenomenon
Some of my kid's friends are raised by their parents, and others are (apparently) raised primarily by grandparents.
When my kid wants to get together with friends whose (50-60 year old) grandparents bring them by, the grandparents come up to the door, socialize for a bit while the kid runs inside, and then we talk about when the playtime will be over and they can come over to pick the kid up. If it's an event where we both bring the kids, I find it easy to shoot the breeze with the grandparents, have small talk about how the week went, and so on.
When the parents are, say, 25-35 year old range, it's a totally different vibe. They'll drive up, let the kid out of the car, and then race away without even getting out of their car. When playtime is at a local park or something, they sometimes hang around, but they go off into a corner, engrossed on their phone, totally ignoring the other parents (who, depending on their own ages are either chit chatting or locked into their Instagram).
I remember when I was a kid in the 80s, and not only would we love to get together at someone's house, but the parents would also be happy to get together for a little socialization, maybe throw some steaks on the grill, put on some Sportsball, or whatever. This practice seems to be dead now that I'm a parent!
the behavior you described of the 25-35 year range is appalling. and those aren’t my kids so that’s saying something.
Call it what it is, antisocial. Baffling to me…why are people so weird?
We bought into a nice suburban community. Good schools, low crime, the dream.
No one knows any neighbors. Kids rarely play with one another intra-neighborhood despite a very healthy blend of age ranges. In fact, I’ve loosely associate with exactly one neighbor in the three years. We went out of our way to try and meet neighbors our first month. Most treated us as if we head too many heads on our shoulders.
Despite a heavy presence of children, no one here celebrate Halloween despite it being a beloved night growing up around here. Our first year we invested heavily in decorations and spent hundreds on the King size candy bars.
Society feels… dead compared to me as an early 90s child.
I barely knew anyone in the neighborhood when I was living with my parents in the suburbs. My friends were all from school and required a car to hang out.
In contrast, now as an adult, I live in a dense major city (that's supposedly filled with crime according right wing news) and I see kids all the time walking around. I have a young kid and he interacts with his neighbors a lot more. My mailman knows of my kid and when we moved across the street.
Our closest couple's friend is a 5 minute walk away and its nice to randomly run into them on a weekend when taking a walk.
We regularly have wine and food on Fridays with one of my neighbors who have a kid close to our age and its easy and without friction.
It’s an area thing. I think the biggest thing that leads to it is age stratification in a neighborhood - when every family is in the exact same “place” something weird happens.
But looking at a neighborhood on Halloween might be a great way to check.
Some suburbs are the stereotypical miles and miles of identical homes with no sidewalks.
Others are actual older rural towns that have been consumed by the nearby metropolis - and these ones feel quite different.
There’s a kind of “suburb” that is usually quite lively - the rural suburb, often a pocket of relatively dense homes in a sea of wheat.
One of my indicators is lemonade stands. If they appear regularly, the area is alive.
Why would you know them? If this were 1965, you were going to live in that house the rest of your life, and they were going to live in that house the rest of their lives right next door and so it only made sense to get to know them. But today, both you and they are only here temporarily until it becomes time to move away in 4 years when you job-hop for that raise. Will you even live in the same state afterwards? Maybe at the next place you'll settle down and stay long enough to put forth the effort, but for now you're as much a migrant as any Dust Bowl Okie.
Even just 6 or 7 years ago younger coworkers were adamant that renting was the way to go, because they didn't want to be tied down to a house that they'd have to sell in a hurry when they inevitably moved away for a new job.
Overall, when looking at both migration between U.S. states and within them, fewer Americans are moving each year. In 1948, the first year on record with the Census Bureau, more than 20 percent of the population moved in the past year. This had decreased to just 8.7 percent in 2022. While the share of Americans moving across state lines remained more stable, those moving within their state became much fewer, from between 15-17 percent of Americans per year in the 1950s and 1960s to results in the single digits in the new millennium.
https://www.statista.com/chart/32135/share-of-movers-and-non...
My daughter is still a baby, and I don't want her to become a shut-in because of my antisocial tendencies. So yeah, I will take her to the public playground, get her into the local sport activities, this sort of thing. But I would likely be the parent in the playground just sitting by himself while the daughter plays, maybe reading a book (I also hate social media in general, so no doomscrolling for me).
It's a difficult balance.
My concern is to not let it be an impediment to my daughter socializing with other children is the point.
It really takes active effort to make sure our kids have play dates.
Just do that and don't feel bad about it. I saw a bunch of parents like that at all my kids different sports and other events and I always respected them for at least showing up. Honestly, it's worse to sit and make forced awkward smalltalk, because you feel you have to, than just relaxing and being yourself.
I moved cities in 2017 and it was an incredible move for me. Better work opportunities, I met my wife, I own a house now, life is great
But I have made zero male friends here. I have some online friends I chat with and game with, but otherwise I'm pretty isolated
No idea how to make new male friends. Any time I meet people, they seem to always have a tight knit group already and are not really interested in spending any time building new friendships
I am sure I'm not the only lonely dude looking for friends but I dunno
Where my wife and I raised our kids, there was one neighbor with kids, and that's it.
Also, kids are more occupied now. "Back in my day" elementary school kids didn't have homework, and it was pretty minimal even through high school. My kids had homework starting in first grade. Naturally you want it to get done early while the kids are still awake, but this cuts into the prime hours for play. We should simply have revolted against it. But that's hindsight.
Similarly, I expect most kids in a classroom to know of each other, but I doubt they all know each other. If that makes sense. Such that, it is easy to think this is also a by product of how much more you can do inside your houses? Back when you would see folks outside more often, it was common for you to know of a lot of people. If you only had a few "shut in" type people, you knew them as the shut in type people. As it becomes more and more of us, it gets tougher.
This, over time, leads to familiarity with those around you.
Now most people would be highly suspicious if you sit in your front yard.
Or maybe kidnapping paranoia fueled by years of crime news programs?
IME while church might be a community, it's really a very stifled one.
Right, this is what I am wondering, is the reason people were comfortable doing this the fact that there was a weekly touchpoint with the community? The church visits might be stifled but if they establish a relationship with that large group of people then that might enable more free roaming at other times.
Parties typically have some sort of rules-based activity, be it beer pong or board games. Playdates themselves are perhaps the first manifestation of such phenomenon.
When was a kid, you were done with your car seat by elementary school so one parent could offer to carpool a minivan full of kids to/from an event.
But now that some kids need their car seat into middle school carpools are gone and every kid needs their parent to pick them up. It requires way more planning and parental involvement
How are cops supposed to know if they outgrew their seat? It also means that when they move to forward facing or a booster seat depends on the car seat you bought, not their height, (only their) age, or weight.
For older kids, here's the new rule: "A child at least 9 years old or has outgrown their booster seat AND the child can pass the "5 step test" may be restrained by a regular seatbelt, but they must be in a the back seat if possible under 13."
That's not too bad because they at least have a set age, but you still can't expect a parent to have a set of 4 booster seats ready to go to haul your kids friend's around.
Sucks, as this isn't as easy as saying it will be your responsibility and fault if the kid is injured. Odds are high this will just make a bad situation worse.
I also can't offer much of a defense of car seats. Obviously, go for safety; but it does feel that people are chasing a tail end of safety that is not really measurable. Modern cars and using seat belts have come a long long way to make vehicles safer.
There is also the interesting contrast with busses on this. Kids don't buckle up or use seat belts in school busses.
Also, as an SF parent: I drool over the idea of school buses—prop 13 has basically eliminated them
> I give my kids business cards with my phone number to pass out to their friends to give to their parents
If this isn’t the only thing you/your kids do that’s well outside typical social norms, that’s probably the reason nobody else is inviting them. This is almost on the level of parents accompanying their adult kids to job interviews and then wondering why their kid didn’t get an offer.
During the week I get maybe 10-30 minutes of quality time with them outside of the routine of weekly life. Maybe?
So if I want to do something with my children and have a relationship with them, the weekends are all I have.
Aaaand of course,quality of life in America is generally in decline and parents usually have no support structure (family etc) so no one has interest in the extra work of doing playdates.
I think at some point, we need to acknowledge media sensationalism (traditional and social media varieties) have not only poisoned politics and bolstered conspiracy theory popularity, but have vastly overstated the dangers of every day life, making childhood and parenting much worse than a generation or two ago.
Now, watching the kids my friends have - they won't even leave the house if their parents didn't plan a playdate and brought them there. Something is completely off.
3 is certainly not old enough to do so.
7 is marginal. I seem to recall playing in my neighborhood at 7, but very few of my child's friends are out on their own at this age.
The local public school district allows children to self dismiss starting in 3rd grade, which is typically the year they have turned 8 and will turn 9 during the school year. That seems like a potentially reasonable time to allow them to go out unsupervised.
Seems like an opening to build a SaaS to encourage kids to socialize.
/s
that's... not actually a terrible idea
It seemed like a really far distance that I went to see people but now I realize I never went more than a quarter mile from home to see someone. There were just a lot of families in my area that had kids.
Of course, that’s not true in a lot of the areas I’m in now. My friends experience the same where it’s hard to meet people who have kids of similar age. There might be 50 homes and only 1-2 will have kids near the same age. Many won’t have any kids at all.
Thinking back on it, it was surprising how many kids there were near me near my age growing up compared to now.
Kids were not driven to playdates 60+ years ago. They would play with other kids living nearby. Parents would not organize their playdates either.
> When I ask the parents who stay, they tell me a vague mix of weekend junior sports leagues, visiting relatives, and just being really tired after working all week. They're lame excuses: spending time with kids constantly is _also_ really tiring.
I do not seen how these are "lame excuses". Seems like valid things that lower your availability and also valid reasons to want to you remaining time for own rest.
> Often I take them to the main playground, and it's virtually empty. I can't believe I'm the only one in the community who's unhappy enough about this to try and change it.
60+ years ago, 6 years old kids would go to main playground on their own. Partly it is that kids are much less independent these days ... and partly it is that their own rooms are much more fun. So, kids want to stay at home because it is good enough and parents do not want to sit bored on playground.
When I was a kid, I could be relatively sure that if I went outside on a random day, there would be other kids playing outside. So, all the kids went outside most days to play.
I _could_ send my kid out to play and there _are_ other kids in the neighborhood, but almost all of them are inside playing video games. At best there might be some kids going on a walk with their parents.
If my oldest kid wants to interact with with his friends, his best bet is to get on fortnite, which he does most days _and he doesn't even like fortnite_.
These days, the school day is longer and more parents drive their kids to and from school, so extra effort is required for kids to get back together.
We decided to break from the trend and return our kids to more of a free-range kid paradigm, risking the disruption to our working schedules, this year. It sounds good in theory, but you are left with the realities of every other child friend being wrapped in camp schedules, as well. It took a lot of proactive discussions with other parents to convince them to keep their kids at home and accessible. But you're still left with the dual income problem, so you find yourself hiring a sitter to oversee and shuttle.
The result is an improvement over the 100% booked compartmentalized camp situation, but without the same level of independence that I experienced and have come to credit with really advancing my own personal development as a child.
However, it does show that the majority of families were already dual-income by the 80's. The trend away from supporting a family on a single income started much earlier than that.
Anecdotally, all my friends in the 80's and 90's had both parents working, and we still got together to play all the time, either in the neighborhood for nearby friends, or dropped off for further ones.
[1]Table 2 in https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/famee.pdf
I really wonder what the less involved, less intentional approach would be - hope your kid figures it all out for themselves?
Why do you think this is? Because it's very true for me too -- not only play dates but also just regular socializing, like hangouts, game nights, happy hours and bar dates, cookouts, holiday, parties, etc. I feel like I'm always the first one to text or call somebody. It makes me question what other people are doing.
I kind of wonder if people have just forgot what to do after the party is over. I had hoped it would be "that was so fun, we should host one", but instead it just kinda fades away in their minds.
maybe co-host one with somebody who you think might enjoy hosting but is reticent to try
The end goal of throwing parties shouldn’t be friendship or getting invited to other people parties, it’s building a large loose network of people you’re acquaintances/shallow friends with and becoming a super connector.
If you ONLY want to make friends or get invited to parties I think focusing on finding specific people and spending time with them 1:1 is a much better way to do that.
I know this is HN, but sometimes - maybe, hopefully, sometimes - neither R nor I is involved in an action.
If you aren't enjoying doing it then by all means stop doing it. But throwing a party isn't supposed to have deliverables or action items.
I go to "couples game nights" with my wife and her friends even though I don't really like them. But I like having friends in the neighborhood. So it's worth it to me when one of her friends husbands (who is now my friend) shows me the deck they've been building in their backyard all because I went to a somewhat painful game night.
I think you have it nearly completely backwards. Society would be far better off if more people were willing to do the "un-fun" things (like planning and hosting a party) in order to socialize. GP should be applauded.
When I was younger there were folks who were just known as "the people who threw parties", simply because they loved throwing parties. They didn't view it as some expenditure where they expected any mutual return - the party was the return.
Now, of course there were some actual expenditures for food/drinks, and also the cleanup time. But the host would simply ask people to pitch in, and people always did.
The "ROI" comment just struck me as a mindset that views relationships transactionally. Yes, relationships are and always have been at least someone transactional (not many folks are going to continue spending time and effort on a relationship they don't feel is adding to their life), but not in this "mathmatical" tabulation of it.
From this and other comments, it seems you think you didn't make friends, because you're not invited to other parties. There seems a leap here.
If the others are holding big parties and not inviting you - sure.
If they just don't throw parties, then they likely are still your friends :-)
But as another commenter said: Going to parties is not necessarily the best way to make friends. Whenever I go to a big party, the host is way too busy to spend a meaningful amount of time with me. Of course he's not going to become my friend that way! Going to big parties is for guests to make friends with other guests - not with the host.
I have some good friends who throw only big parties - I've stopped going to them. What's the point if I can't interact with them?
Of course people have all sorts of different ideas of what a party should be, what to bring, and what to do while you're there, but doing it all yourself is really hard. If you're getting it catered with cleaning staff, it's very different than having mostly the same close friends, month after month year after year.
How I would word it is younger people are generally less inclined to invest in (real/in-person?) social interaction. I suspect some bar for motivation or entertainment has changed so people don't socialise the same. Probably intertwined with rise in mental health issues too. Be less interested in socialising and it's no surprise the result is less socialising, in one form or another.
In my experience yeah people don't often reach out or reciprocate effectively when it comes to socialising. Or they stick to a very small group.
Food? A party's just booze and music, maybe even move some furniture out of the way for a dance floor.
Find me community like this anywhere in America these days. Immigrant communities perhaps? Most Americans these days won't interact with their neighbors unless it's to complain or they want something transactionally.
It’s much easier to entertain constantly when one half of the relationship has the availability to do it.
If I’m mistaken, then holy heck how did your grandparents do it lmao.
People are generally unfriendly now and keep to themselves more. Sad what we've lost. We're still an immigrant community but the immigrants are from different places. I'm sure they paid too much for their houses and feel the stress. There are also some obvious cultural differences with respect to socializing and partying.
Can you say more about open garages and community? Is that about car culture, music, pool tables, garage "bars", sofas, TVs, or something else?
Would the whole local neighborhood be welcomed into open garages, or was open-garage-culture limited to people whom people already knew?
He had his garage door open a lot but kept an eye on it most of the time. Grandpa once lamented some teenager stole beer from his garage fridge. At one point, around 2005, a 700+ lbs. decorative planter was stolen from their front yard in the daytime. He eventually installed an "electric eye" chime to alert should anyone go into the garage unexpectedly.
Also, our Filipino community seems big on turning them into semi-livingrooms with large TVs, couches, etc.
Of course it's limited to people you know but it seems like a good way to know your nieghbors and once you know them you can invite eachother to the garage or backyard.
It certainly depends. I had great neighbors when I lived on the river in a non-HOA community... many parties were had with sunset beer hangouts on the dock or beach. Military communities are also notably close-knit so what you say makes sense.
That said, being an immigrant poses other kinds of challenges. So it's not all like the 1970s in the US, or where we came from.
My family moved into a small cul-de-sac with 5 houses total. I wanted to introduce myself, so I wrote a short letter with a little about ourselves and our contact info, and then dropped it into each neighbors mailbox. Only 1 neighbor wrote back, and 1 neighbor literally _returned the letter_ to our mailbox. So yea, that's the neighborhood I live in.
Not cool. How about that other neighbor though?
“ It seems that the original modern American swingers were crew-cut World War II air force pilots and their wives. Like elite warriors everywhere, these “top guns” often developed strong bonds with one another, perhaps because they suffered the highest casualty rate of any branch of the military. According to journalist Terry Gould, “key parties,” like those later dramatized in the 1997 film The Ice Storm, originated on these military bases in the 1940s, where elite pilots and their wives intermingled sexually with one another before the men flew off toward Japanese antiaircraft fire.“
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sex-at-dawn/201211/n...
The only reason I have become a staple member of my little dead-end, working-class street is because I don't email/text, and last summer I spent outdoors building a tinyhome (that all the passersby watched/asked about).
"How do I get ahold of you?" they used to ask... "Simple," I'd say, "just knock on my door between noon through sunset" [my calling hours, to use the historic term, posted by my doorbell]. Haven't even used my phone but a handful of times this 2025 — turned off entirely since early May — & my social life is what I want it to be, I am not alone any more than I wish to be.
I moved here two years ago, and already know everybody on my street (24 dwellings, total); it's primarily rentals, so when there is a new U-Haul I make sure to bring over a beer/conversation (typically a week after moving in — so they can settle/adjust/remember).
Before living in this working-class neighborhood, I lived in the nicer parts of towns... and honestly, these working-class people are nicer and more giving/understanding/decent than anywhere else I've ever lived (e.g. Westlake Hills [near Austin]; West End [Nashville]; Barton Hills [ATX]; Lookout Mountain [Tenn]).
Stop doing everything on your phone. Start being neighborly.
Example: multiple neighbors and I have jointly-purchased a nicer lawnmower, instead of each buying our own simpler pusher.
¢¢
I miss it a little bit, like I enjoy being social for a couple of hours two or three times a week, but not much more. But a bunch of people like me makes for a poor social situation since it is hard to get everyone's social levels aligned.
That being said, most of it was "cool parents" that allowed such behavior because we didn't own anything as teens.
We would have rules like, if you're drinking there, you have to stay the night or call your parents to pick you up.
I think it was just a different time; it seemed more forgiving. Now, a cop will pull you over and give you a DUI and mess up your life for a while. But I heard stories back then ~ '70s, where cops would make sure a drunk person got home safely at night instead of throwing the book at them.
I am sure it is harder for kids today who mostly live online in their algorithmic bubbles. And harder for parents to condone such activity, because who wants to be the parent where cops come knocking on your door and charge you with supplying alcohol to minors?
Damn, I miss the late 90s/aughts. Damn, I'm old (and fat, too; I "made it", somehow!)
The root cause of this risk intolerance might be dispersed, just a cumulative result of cable news scare tactics, dropping birth rates and more investment per child, but I suspect a big aspect of it is that risk taking is no longer the only way to get a dopamine hit. Prior to the modern internet, if you avoided all the normal risk-taking behaviors associated with teenagers and young adults, you'd just be bored to death. Now the reward side of the risk-reward balance is just the difference between high-quality fun from meatspace shenanigans versus lower-quality enjoyment derived from social media and online gaming.
"The skateboarder with his Walkman, the intellectual working on his wordprocessor, the Bronx breakdancer whirling frantically in the Roxy, the jogger and the body-builder: everywhere, whether in regard to the body or the mental faculties, you find the same blank solitude, the same narcissistic refraction. This omnipresent cult of the body is extraordinary. [...] This ‘into’ is the key to everything. The point is not to be nor even to have a body, but to be into your own body. Into your sexuality, into your own desire. Into your own functions, as if they were energy differentials or video screens. The hedonism of the ‘into’ [...]"
The replacement of a genuine social life with a kind of machine like, solitary optimization, the point of American Psycho basically, is very much real, common among ordinary people. This is every "second brain" note taking fanatic who never actually does anything but collect notes.
"What people are contemplating on their word-processor screens is the operation of their own brains. It is not entrails that we try to interpret these days, nor even hearts or facial expressions; it is, quite simply, the brain. We want to expose to view its billions of connections and watch itoperating like a video-game. All this cerebral, electronic snobbery is hugely affected - far from being the sign of a superior knowledge of humanity, it is merely the mark of a simplified theory, since the human being is here reduced to the terminal excrescence of his or her spinal chord."
I still have bruises from the chain wallet. What a bad idea.
But oh yea maybe laying in bed for an hour doom scrolling on your phone before you finally get up is a more efficient use of time.
Or live in a place where you don’t drive to get around.
Most of the world's public transportation sees themselves as a way to get to work and so parties which happen off hours in places hard for transport to reach get bad or no service.
I mean... there are fewer than 2 billion total vehicles on Earth, so I'm guessing it's not THAT uncommon to not own a car.
Unless we're arguing that people simply didn't socialize before cars existed.
No, the argument is that cars changed how society is physically structured, to the point where society at large is designed to center car-based transportation.
In many countries - including the US and most of Europe - this is transparently true.
Parties are where people live and in center - public transport gets you there. Using public transport to get from bar or home party is quite normal.
Here-in lies a major problem of drunk driving. (Outside of self-responsibility.)
Also, agreeing with other posts, the onus of “sports culture” for kids (and families) in k-12 schools these days is absolutely unbelievable.
edit: Also, finding out the following Monday (in school) that a “party” to which you weren’t invited occurred over the weekend was unpleasant. Witnessing a middle-school-aged kid discover a “party” to which they weren’t invited in real-time as it is streaming live on social media is absolutely heart-breaking.
One angle I think that might be missing is that when only men worked outside the home, women would be stuck at home all day with housework and childcare which I would guess was quite isolating. So I would guess these gatherings were a lifeline.
When women entered the workforce, they gained the same quasi-social environment men had enjoyed all along. Work friendships might not be as deep as neighborhood ones, but they're "good enough" to take the edge off loneliness. Not only that, but now both partners would come home fatigued from a full day of work. So neither would have a strong drive to now setup these gatherings. Before, you had one exhausted partner who could be coaxed into socializing by a partner who genuinely needed it. Now you have mutual exhaustion. Even worse, planning a party starts to feel like another work project rather than something restorative.
There's a multi-generational aspect to this too. Their kids learned the lesson that home is for family and screens, not for social gatherings. Computers and smartphones arrived and provided social interaction that required minimal energy. No cleaning the house, no planning food, no getting dressed. Perfect for an already exhausted population that had been socially declining for years.
The 20-ish hours a week needed for domestic chores has to come from somewhere.
Get outside a major urban area and it's extremely difficult to find an Uber at the hours when you'd expect to be leaving a party to go home.
Heck, this is true even in some suburbs of New York City.
When I was in university we thrived on nickel drafts and dive bars.
These days it's $10/cocktail + cover charge.
In the last 50 years, the US has bulldozed dense, mixed used housing that enabled community and tight knit neighborhoods. More economically/socially viable housing (read: an apartment on top of a business) has literally been banned in much of the US. Ensuring that there's a large plot of asphalt to house personal vehicles that are ever increasing in size is baked into zoning laws (though some cities have finally banned parking minimums). Suburbia sprawls, literally requiring most of the country to own a car.
I would love to see some data on this, but my intuition is that everyone is physically farther away as a result, which weakens their general connection and likelihood to party together, and makes it harder for them to get to/from a party in the first place.
There's other feasible side effects too like less savings due to the cost of owning a car (I've seen estimates of the US average exceeding $10k/yr), or expensive housing exacerbated by all of the above - less space for housing due to roads/parking (and the cost rising as a direct result of a developer needing to include parking), and rising taxes to finance more and more infrastructure: suburban sprawl means more roads, pipes, electrical lines, while contributing significantly less economic value (Strong Towns has done some great graphics on how much dense urban areas subsidize their sprawling single family home filled counterparts).
I think this is an underappreciated "phones killed socialization" angle. People used to post partying pics on social media. Then employers started going through social media to screen candidates. Facial recognition and automatic tagging means that it's not sufficient to not post party photos to your own social media, you need to make sure they aren't posted anywhere.
Which is a deterrent to partying as a concept once you start thinking in terms of "will this be bad for my social credit if an informant reports me to the employability police by posting me drunk?"
It's just that connecting it to the panopticon ruined everything.
I've seen this repeated in several comments and I just don't get it -- renting a place, be it a college apartment or a full house as an adult, has never stopped me from throwing a party. Maybe if there was a "no parties" rule in the lease (which I've never seen, and I've rented at least a dozen different places) and the landlord lived in the building, but otherwise rentals are fair game.
Young people aren’t becoming homeowners at the same rate, so there’s a sense of transience to their living situations that make forming neighbor communities seem like a waste of time.
Our social structure isn't built around neighbors. I could name 2 people I've shared an apartment building with in the last 5 years. Incidentally, they were a couple in the same 3-flat as me, who were there for my entire time in that building. I think the lower density and shared spaces (in that case, a garage) made the difference.
Bit different for those in the high cost of living area. Hanging out is usually a pregame to go to bars because you can't fit very many people in the apartment. Not to say it doesn't happen just you can't exactly throw a party and have a big table of food and a bbq going and cornhole and beer pong and three available bathrooms all at the same time like you can out in the flyover states. At least not without dropping literally 10x as much on what would be a smaller property anyhow with no basement and not much of a lot.
In many ways it seems like the old life of yesteryear these sorts of articles bemoan is still in fact the current year in many places if the housing prices support it. And there are many places that fly under the radar that aren't in those top 5 major metro regions.
Spurious. This has likely always been true unless you live with said friends.
There's a huge difference between not hosting or attending a party and not attending a social event. "Party" has very specific connotations. If I go out bowling with my friends or have a game night, I don't call that a party, but it is certainly a social event.
The article focuses on US because that's the data they have, but I wonder if it's a similar trend for other developed countries. Anyone sharing a personal anecdote is probably not meaningful. These are broad trends and really hard to intuit by lived experience.
If we counted only online gaming then we'd have been hanging out every night.
Transferred to a California state college a little late (27) and wrapped up my computer science degree @ SFSU finished in 2019 so somewhat recent anecdotal experience.
I met a lot of people just like me while in college. Lot of people mid to late 20s. One of my best friends in college was in the international business club fb group and they’d always host events or pub crawls every Thursday night. I’d ping my gf (now wife) and she’d asynchronously invite all of her friends and then I’d be inviting all our college friends so by the time we arrived we’d have a merged friend group. We met so many cool folks this way and people from different majors with diverse backgrounds.
It helped to be in San Francisco of course.
Now as far as the housing discussion I’d say that the 7% rates that are historically normal feel oppressive after 15 years of low rates following the Great Recession. I bought a place in the edge of the Bay Area last year with 5% down at 7% because I didn’t have the income that I have now when rates were low. We were saving for the last 7 years delaying a bunch of major life milestones. The prices in our zip code already dropped ~15% before we bought so we saved about a 20% down payments worth off the up front cost. I barely qualified with 270k combined income and I’m not sure ppl understand how weird that feels until they experience it. The home wasn’t even a median priced SFH in fact it was well below at about 750k. I kept a bunch of vested stock and savings but yeah not sure how things will shake out. It’s a tough market for sure.
If you want to say that an decrease in X is the sole cause of a decrease in Y, it might be a good idea to check whether there are other places where 1) X increased but Y decreased or 2) X decreased but Y increased. Different moments in time, different countries, etc.
For myself personally I have moved around a good amount, so it is naturally harder to make social connection, and even if I’m invited to social events with friends in other places it is physically hard to attend them.
My point is that it is profoundly unsocial way of life for the parent at home. The party even twice a week do not really make up for being completely alone with nothing challenging to do whole day. You can easily end up loosing social skills and those parties end up unfulfilling.
If you go to work and then someone else organizes a party once in a while, it is cool effortless way to keep friends. But, if the stay at home person is extroverted, there is very little social about their lifestyle.
Although... the infant mortality rate in the US has dropped by more than 50% since 1985, so who knows...
I live in San Francisco, where we have a desegregation busing policy. In practice, this means kids don’t attend their neighborhood schools. They’re assigned to schools across the city (Instead of investing in improving schools in underprivileged neighborhoods, we (voters) decided it is better (and cheaper) to bus those kids to schools in more affluent areas - but that is beside the point)
One theory I’ve heard is that this setup leads to less socializing (or “partying”) among teens, since their school friends often live far away. That raises an interesting question: To what extent does busing contribute to reduced peer interaction outside school?
Also, how common are these busing policies across the U.S. today? Is San Francisco an outlier, or is this a widespread approach?
A school in a poor area gets heavy investment and then can pull ("magnet") a certain percentage of their students from a much wider area. Involved parents apply for their children to go to these schools since they have the best art or theater or robotics or whatever programs.
This acknowledges that an important part of a successful school is parental involvement and a general culture of students that are interested in learning.
In practice, at least in my childhood, the schools largely self-segregated by the classes they took, i.e. AP or not, more or less challenging tracks ("honors" classes).
I still think it was a net positive. At least students in the underprivileged areas got access to these advanced programs, even if there were still social barriers. And as a kid from the suburbs, I got to meet kids outside of my suburban cohort - I think this was really valuable to me as a bit of a misfit.
That said, party culture had been excessive in the past and it was impoverishing to many people. I and others my age more wisely do without, which leaves us with money for things that are more important than one offs.
[1] https://ntia.co.uk/nightclub-industry-struggles-with-over-10...
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk-pub-closures-beer-taxe...
[3] https://www.dw.com/en/is-berlin-in-a-club-death-spiral/a-703...
[4] https://www.latribunedelhotellerie.com/paris-society-cession...
I blame a lot of the de-socialization on our constantly connected society. Since everyone is in contact with each other 24/7 via social media the idea of meeting random people is less exciting. The 24/7 news cycle also injects a lot of doom and anxiety making people more aware of dangers - intoxicated driving, overdose, violence, rape, etc. Parties might be viewed as more dangerous than exciting. Now add to that, 24/7 streaming of TV and highly addictive video games. There is plenty of distraction to fill the boredom gaps that used to motivate people to go out. And finally, I think covid drove a lot of people into a more isolationist mindset. I know a few people, including myself, who have admitted they go out far less post covid compared to pre covid.
When someone posts a clever quip to Twitter and gets 10,000 likes, this isn't socialization. It feels more like some weird performance art.
The twitter scenes is out of my wheel house. Never had an account or knew anyone on it that I cared about.
FWIW, I spent the holiday weekend raving under the stars in the forest and it was great, as always. Mostly old people though.
Recreational drugs cause unbelievable havok within communities where they are unleashed. Its well known that such drugs have chemical compounds capable of "hacking" our physiology and causing a whole host of negative effects while ensuring the user stays addicted. I consider these "Brain Hacking" systems just the same as I consider social media like TikTok and Instagram. They both are designed specifically in ways to entice users to be addicted without any concern for the harms they cause. It baffles me that simply because it is not a physical substance it gets treated as less dangerous than the harder substances.
We keep seeing these issues in America when its very clear that similar things would occur if we made recreational substances as common as water and just as accessible. Revenously addicted people, dont party, they dont socialize, they retreat from society, and stop forming deeper releationships. It is no surprise that this is creating issues for us.
Americans have always been the world's leading consumer of drugs, and now that we have digital drugs, they are more accessible and in demand than ever. So much so that the cartels desinging and pedeling these products, are basically the most powerful companies in our society.
Like.. Stable adults indulging in pot or mushrooms? IME has quite the opposite effect. Addictive drugs which devastate communities are usually not referred to as "recreational".
You're spot on about the outdated threat model and people not fully grasping how damaging social media/internet addiction is.
Even with my oldest friends, all of whom are busy with their kids, mortgages and spouses, we still prioritize taking trips to see each other and for everyone to get to know each other's kids.
So if you're anything like me (grown, mostly single, living alone in a dense urban center) I refuse to believe any social or technological developments have ruined our chances at human companionship.
But that's millennials. I have absolutely no idea how Gen Z will navigate this world. The fact that they seem to be choosing the least useful, social or pleasurable vice in the world (vaping), which also happens to be among the most viciously addictive vices (for many people) does not bode well in my opinion, no matter how enlightened the anti-alcohol stance may appear.
I'm also wondering if the rising political polarization is at least in part caused by the "antisocial" phenomenon. If you're not exposed to a spectrum of political worldviews through being involved with all these people you randomly met back in the day, it becomes easier to dehumanize the people you disagree with. You also never have to listen to their talking points, because you can just block them out online.
Much like cars are to squirrels, squirrels have evolved to run into a straight line to the nearest tree at the hint of any danger. And for all threats other than cars that is the correct thing.
But many squirrels are "trapped" by evolution to cross the path of a car when there is no need to do so.
Humanity's curiosity, sociability and OCDness have all been trapped by algorithms and smart phones.
And it is shortening lives and even more so reducing reproduction. A faint hope is, that with all such evolutionary pressure, we can evolve our way out of them.... eventually.
I think the focus on short term gains by sacrificing long term viability is in part due to the inability to accurately measure future prospects, whenever there is doubt shot-termism prevails. The bird in the hand wins over the two in the bush. I think maximizing long term gains would be directly tied to human flourishing so if we could accurately measure long term externalities we could align capitalist and human interests. Convincing those who gain from short-termism to agree to use more accurate metrics is impossible when not using it makes them more money.
I don't know how to fix this. A society will not allow itself to undergo 'creative destruction' in an era where we bailout corporations. And socialism certainly is not going to fix it, socialists have their own kind of rather destructive short-termism.
Another thing is that parents just don't leave their kids alone any more. My sister's son is almost 20 and she's still thinking about his goings on even when he's at college. This might be nice in terms of feeling loved, but independence is almost required to bring partying back.
LOL. The men were working too, as they always were, which is why women used to do most of the social planning. They didn't "fail to take over."
I know two other people that know of Richman, four if you count my wife and son who I made listen to him!
edit: had to add Richman was a big influence on the Talking Heads :)
And god forbid I try and provide fresh fruit and beverages on that budget…
Personally I observe that social events seem to be most common among students who also are quite poor.
However mental energy and free time is surely correlated with wealth.
Even in my 20s I went to... the pub! Mayhe a nightclub. To me parties are more school age/university thing and are a great way to have a good time on a budget. Just some drinks and a speaker required.
1. It's expensive. I never once got a reasonable contribution from my friends. I knew this at the time, but eventually I was over it. Paying $100-250 per event just to deal with all the work and drama that comes with it.. not worth.
2. It's a lot of work. Hours of prep, hours of hosting, hours of clean up after. At the end of the day ~12 hours of effort for ~4 hours of fun is not a good ROI.
3. It frequently was an excuse to get drunk or high. Which is fun, whatever. But as I grew more health conscious, this was less and less appealing. I can drink on my own if I want.
4. There are better alternatives. I don't have to do any of the above options if I just jump on Discord for a while. Or join a rec league sport. Or spend it with my family.
I wish I had a ublock filter or a userscript to deal with this…
Like with World Wars there's been a generational impact that changed how people relate to one another. The tribal momentum, of one monkey teaching the next, gets lost.
Similar to discord for gaming, talking to your random peers has completely fell off
But everybody hates everyone else online.
Given the mortality rate for people typically in the partying age group (and especially those under 30), you were more likely to die in a traffic accident on your way to or back from the party, or from alcohol poisoning, than from a case of COVID acquired there. Let's not exaggerate.
From the NIH: The median IFR for COVID based on age groups: 0.0003% at 0–19 years, 0.002% at 20–29 years, 0.011% at 30–39 years.
The 1918 Flu it was certainly not.
Inflation in the cost of law enforcement. As an X-er I received some truly epic paint-peeling flame-throwing "angry dad-style" lectures from cops and one time I got caught and my parents were called and I paid a municipal citation (not a misdemeanor or felony) equivalent to thirteen hours of minimum wage labor (essentially, one teenage afterschool weekly paycheck...). Now a days it would be kinder if the cops just shot the kid, as they will lose their license semi-permanently which means no job and no programmed activities and no sports, forbidden from joining the military (note the GI Bill paid for my college), lose their security clearance if they are already in the .mil, expelled from college / retract admission, suspended from school, that means no college diploma, no diploma as a job ticket to get one of the very few remaining "good jobs" etc. Seems a little inflated of a punishment over "a couple beers" People like discussing the inflation rate of real estate, lack of inflation in wages, but they should discuss inflation in the punishment for having a few drinks. A general cultural trend toward absolutism where everything thats permitted is mandatory and everything thats not permitted has no limit to the resulting punishment to prevent it. Toe the line precisely, or suffer the full weight of the law, and the line does not include partying, so you'd be crazy to do that.
"In the old days" the cultural expectation was everyone works 9-5. No one is allowed that anymore, they either work 24x7 as servants on call to their feudalistic owner, or have weird hours and gig economy jobs. Most people cannot "drop by after work around 6 for a beer". Can you drink at work? I can't. Can you go to work drunk? I can't. Some people, maybe most people, are not allowed to ever be "not at work". You're not even allowed to sleep if your boss feels like texting you; you surely can't get drunk at a friends house without getting fired. Don't worry that beer (or ten) will only cost you a one year job search to get a new job. When everyone is under house arrest by their employer, nobody parties.
There's a long tradition in the USA of trashing a proper name and the following generation abandons it while doing the same thing under a new name. Every generation before gen-x loved going to malls, then a long indoctrination campaign to use security forces and police to "keep those annoying teenage kids out of malls" started in the 1980s, and here I am in the 2020s and I STILL will not go to the mall because of heavy handed security, and my generation and younger is killing the malls because malls hate me because I was once a teen that hung out at the mall a lifetime ago. So, WRT parties, post "Animal House" movie era, a party means vandalism, drunk driving accidents, police arrests, visiting the ER for alcohol (or other) intoxication, etc. The marketing has been successful and my generation and younger no longer "attend parties". We "hike at the park" or "tailgate at the (kids?) sport event" or "hang out at the festival" or "board game night" doing EXACTLY what we did when people partied, but for marketing reasons we never party anymore, its a "tailgate" sporting event. This makes the article pretty weak sauce, an entire article about doing search and replace in a word processor for "party" and "board game night" is not a significant lifestyle change.
"I don’t like the simplistic idea that smartphones are purely anti-social" well I do. It's in-your-face obvious any time you're in public, and especially if you were in school back when smartphones started gaining popularity. There's a longer explanation too, but same conclusion.
What teenager has $60 to spend at the movies?
This is a very good observation, and I think that somewhere in the social revolutions of the 20th century, we failed to appreciate the extremely important historical roles women played that were central to traditional societies. Even today, we believe the stock caricatures of pre-feminist societies, which in a way is unsurprising, given that most people alive today never experienced anything other than the post-revolutionary world. We just accept caricature as fact, and we view history anachronistically through the lens of our present social realities.
In traditional societies, the family assumes the basic and most important social unit and social point of reference, with the married couple as the foundation for it. This already creates a network of social ties that radiate from the marriage, most conspicuously family ties which are doubled. Husbands typically gravitated toward the public sphere, securing the material well-being of the family through their participation in public life (in other words, their work was primarily for the sake of the domestic sphere). Wives typically gravitated toward the domestic sphere which was the seat of family life. So while men were heads of the family, women were heads of the household. And this was an honor, as family life was the primary business of life; the husband's career or job was primarily in service to family life. Ideally, husbands provided the means that allowed wives to be free to be mothers, unburdened by competing commitments. (Of course, this doesn't mean fathers did not participate in domestic life, nor that women did not participate in public life. It is rather a matter of emphasis and "center of gravity", so to speak.) By analogy, kings are exalted fathers, and queens are exalted mothers.
And since the family is the center of social life, and women are mistresses of the domestic sphere, it is fitting that women should have a more social orientation. Indeed, it is expected that women would be the catalysts of many of the social ties with the broader community.
In that sense, the careerism that women today are taught from an early age to pursue and prioritize not only deprives women of the opportunity to function as wives and mothers, most exalted and honored roles that they are, but it deprives society of much of its social glue, as women have a greater tendencies to care about cultivating social bonds than men do.
What we're taught today instead is that the career, not family life, is the supreme occupation of life and the primary source of our happiness. We are therefore taught that women were historically deprived of this opportunity, chained to the bleak life of being "stay-at-home moms" (a vicious term, if there ever was one), covered in baby puke and toddler shit, under the tyrannical boot of her husband like some slave. We demean motherhood as some kind of drudgery for poor, uneducated, unattractive women instead of the privilege that it is, in fact the privilege of raising the future generation. Children are no longer a wonderful gift, but a burden and an obstacle. You might be able to turn them into sources of prestige, if you can get them into the best schools or whatever. The career is the center of life; children, the family, even the spouse - these are all secondary now.
And this has downstream effects that cause a radical transformation of society and culture that affects the entire social and economic environment, like the atrophy of social ties mentioned in the article. For instance, try supporting a family on a single income today (in the 1950s, a middle class/working class man could do just that). Now women who want to live in a traditional way are constrained in that choice, as economic and social realities make that difficult. That's why I roll my eyes when someone thinks bucking demographic decline is just a matter of throwing some money at the problem. Our society and our culture has become hostile to family life. The grain and pattern of modern life, rather than supporting it, adds friction and resistance. And since family life is the foundation for the rest, the health or lack thereof of family life is a predictor of the health of the broader society.