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Comment by eplatzek | Hacker News Reader

With COVID partying meant that someone could kill you with an illness. That's a pretty hard lesson to unlearn. They carries a lot of momentum.

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.

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Except the graph shows this was happening way before COVID. The internet and how that has changed how people relate is much more likely the reason.

One of the first things I did with the net was to connect with people to go out and party with. Amazing how that morphed into zombie doom scrolling, something I would never have predicted.

in my opinion the largest effect is how we build cities. Having to drive everywhere and the separation between commercial, residential and industrial areas of american cities is very clearly a driver of this isolation.

Maybe.

But everybody hates everyone else online.

Hate, fear, and other very basic brain stem emotional responses maximize engagement.

I'm sure COVID had something to do with it but I think partying is another casualty of social media.

Similar to discord for gaming, talking to your random peers has completely fell off

prices too, partying is expensive and should be the first line item cut in hard times.

Partying in the article also includes “dropping by a friends house”, which is cheap/free

>With COVID partying meant that someone could kill you with an illness.

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.

To be pedantic, it's still possible for people to modify their behavior based on mistaken beliefs (in this case, that COVID is really dangerous, when it isn't for healthy young people). Though I don't think this explains the actual trend in this case.

Healthy young people still do not want to spread it to grandma or whoever. That is something frequent forgotten by these arguments - not everyone is sociopath and young people sometimes think about other people.

Some people didn't want to get it even if they were guaranteed to survive, because they could pass it to others who were more vulnerable to it.

This yes and a fair worry for many who lived with older parents, grandparents etc, but the original comment mentioned an illness killing "you" assuming the partygoer, who, given the context of the article, is probably going to be a lot younger than anything close to elderly (though elderly people should party too. Socializing should never be under-estimated for helping vitality)

Dying isn't the only risk from catchig Covid.

Its the wrong statistical analysis of the situation. The death rate does not even remotely depend on infection source IIRC. Last stat I saw (from some years ago) was in excess of 96.7% of the population had blood antibodies for covid. You are going to catch covid, your only decision is when and what you can do WRT personal health to lower the risk (aside from "do not be old" there's "do not be fat" "do not be out of shape WRT cardio" etc) If your local hospital is swamped with cases it would be irresponsible to throw a rager and infect 100 people, at that moment. If your local hospital is empty and all the nurses are doing at work is posting tiktok dances for karma upvotes, and the odds of catching it eventually are 97%, you may as well have a good time; if you're going to get just as sick regardless if you have fun getting there or not. Almost all of the "lockdown time" was the latter not the former and only something approaching a civil rebellion ended the latter era. If it were not for that we would still be locked down today in 2025. The situation is not at all even remotely like smoking where not smoking means you're probably not going to get lung cancer. You are getting covid, and you have minimal but not zero control over when, if now is not a bad time, don't worry, if now is a bad time, out of an abundance of caution you might want to slow (not eliminate) the spread. You're getting it eventually, you can either be brave and happy and social on the way... or the opposite. A lot of people chose the latter.

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