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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

I go out and do different activities that involve socialization. There are more people than ever going to the climbing gyms, meeting at the hiking trailhead, hanging out in the ski lift lines, and so on. All of the social places I’ve been going and activities I’ve been doing since a teenager are more crowded than ever, at a rate far faster than the local population growth.

Many of the people doing these activities discovers them online or met others to do it online.

I don’t buy the claim that everything social and in-person is in decline.

Though I could see how easy it would be to believe that for someone who gets caught in the internet bubble. You’re not seeing the people out and about if you’re always at home yourself.

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You're basically saying that people who aren't social mistakenly view the rest of the world as not social because of their specific experience, but doesn't that effect also cut the other way? You're seeing people being social because you're going to those situations.

But there are time use surveys etc which provide a quantitative view of a lot of people. Because they're voluntary, they can't be a perfect representative sample of the overall population. But I think the broad, systematic view is still the best view we have of the overall trend. Also note that the scale and pace of the trend is slow enough that any individual _can't_ really provide an anecdotal view of it, because their own life is in a different place.

E.g. one source [1]:

> Atalay reports that, between 2003 and 2019, people spent an increasing amount of time alone. Over this 16-year period, the portion of free time people spent alone increased, on average, from 43.5 percent to 48.7 percent, representing an increase of over 5 percentage points.

Any given individual's time-use would probably change over 16 years regardless of what the population-level trends were just because that duration might also be the difference between e.g. being in school vs being married with young children or from being a busy professional to being a retiree.

[1] https://www.philadelphiafed.org/the-economy/macroeconomics/h...

> You're seeing people being social because you're going to those situations.

No, I’m saying the same social activities are more popular now than they were 10-20 years ago.

I’ve been doing some of the same activities and going on some of the same hikes, bikes, runs, trails, and parks on and off for two decades. The popularity of these activities has exploded.

Even previously hidden trails and hikes are now very busy on Saturdays and Sundays because so many people are discovering them via social media.

If you’re just staying home and consuming doomerism news you’d think everyone else was doing the same.

> Over this 16-year period, the portion of free time people spent alone increased, on average, from 43.5 percent to 48.7 percent, representing an increase of over 5 percentage points.

That’s hardly equivalent to the claim above of a collapse of socialization.

What you're missing is that the activities you're doing were not the activities people were largely doing 10-20 years ago to be social. Going to bars was probably at least 100x more popular than hiking, so even if you see a 10x growth in hiking, if going to bars goes down even 10%, it dwarfs hiking's contribution to overall social activity of the population.

We have more bars than ever before. Existing bars have expanded a lot. Bars are crowded and some even have lines now.

This is very unique to the locale you are at, and the economic conditions of that area.

I am in a "top 20" US city and all of these things are in extreme decline.

I don’t which city you’re in where everything is in “extreme decline” but that’s not my experience traveling for work or to visit friends either.

I think it’s more likely that your experience is the unique one. Or you’re not experiencing the activities you’re not attending.

MidWest metro.

More than half of the office buildings downtown are empty, and the ones that do have something only have a business in a handful of offices on a handful of floors.

Because of that, people started moving away because of lack of nearby jobs.

As people moved away, rents increased in both commercial and residential spaces to cover losses.

Library attendance and checkouts are way down.

Public transportation use is down.

Tax revenue in the city is down, which means less support for public services.

It's fucking awful.

Yes, your city may be in decline. Time to move on to a better location, not every place is declining.

Landlords don't increase rents to "cover losses". That's not a real thing that happens. Rents are set at the market rate, with some variance and time lag for price discovery.

Commercial is in crisis

https://www.jimersonfirm.com/blog/2025/02/the-approaching-co...

I spent 3 years renting a commercial property that subsidized the rest of the property locations. As soon as my business left, the building and rest of the tenants were gone within 3 months.

It's now vacant, and has been for 2 years.

In many cases rent is set to prop up the value of the house to match the loan, not to match any market rate.

I.e. rather empty to not break the silent understanding with the bank than too make money.

Remember the stock is the product not the leases.

No, that's not how it works. You're just making things up. There's no such thing as a "silent understanding" with a bank. Either that's a covenant in the loan terms or it's not.

Cities wax and wane. A commenter a couple posts up in this chain (fwiw, they were arguing on the “there is a decline” side) shared a story with a 5% decrease. That’s not nothing, but it isn’t an extreme decline.

Visibly it looks like a 30-40% decline post-COVID.

This largely isn't true. If you talk to people who work in nightlife and have for a while, they will tell you that patronage is down significantly over the past couple decades.

If you do actually go to a bar or club, you'll even notice nobody is dancing. People don't even dance anymore.

But if you don't want to believe me, we do actually have statistics. Young people are drinking less than ever and having less sex than ever. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe not, but if people aren't fucking and drinking - why would they be going to bars? To play Scrabble?

> patronage is down significantly over the past couple decades.

More bars and restaurants over all but each sees less traffic still means more people going out than before.

Take any European city. The old core of specialized shops and people working trades has been replaced with social venues.

What social venues? We don't have clubs anymore. There's no young men's club I can go to like my grandfathers.

Where I'm sitting, there are no social places, just corporate hellscapes. You're correct, mom and pop is gone. But it's replaced by big chains, who want you in and out and give nothing to their community.,

Restaurants, cafes, bars and night clubs, courses, all styles of workout places to name a few.

Personalized and interesting is the name of the name of the game. Big chains have been stagnant or even reducing for a while now here.

There’s also an endless list of non profit organizations where a good cause and the social interactions are the goal.

But I can very much see that the old school genderized social clubs are dying. That niche is dead with our less segregated modern generations, and it is good that it is.

The two of you might simply talking about different locations. This article seems very US focused, but in europe third places still exist, and it seems the US is having a severe decline in those.

I feel like some of the cultural outrages and doomerism are getting ridiculous. People do not drink as much alcohol as they used to, we are doomed! People actually avoid situation that make them drink and drive, we are doomed! Teenagers have less sex then before, take less drugs, commit less crime, we are doomed!

Cant wait for "kids play less videogames, we are doomed!" round.

Considering the video game industry contributes $66 billion to US GDP (and $184 billion globally) [1] some people would probably see it as an issue.

[1] https://www.trade.gov/media-entertainment-video-games-sector

> I’ve been doing some of the same activities and going on some of the same hikes, bikes, runs, trails, and parks on and off for two decades. The popularity of these activities has exploded.

Ok, interpreting "everything ... is in decline" literally by pointing to specific deviations from the broader trend is pointlessly correct. Lots of activities experience transient surges in popularity.

But also regarding the popularity of hikes/trails etc, for basically the same statistical reasons, how would you distinguish how much of this effect is due to concentration? If people gravitate towards the trails that have high ratings on AllTrails etc, because it's easier to find out about them now, even if the same proportion of the population were hiking, you'd expect to share the trail with more people. Do you ever pick a running route because it's got a lot of popular segments on Strava? Possibly that route is more pleasant than some other streets nearby ... and it's also easier for runners to discover than it used to be. I don't know whether more people are actually running than 15 years ago, but I know I'm running on routes with more other runners.

> That’s hardly equivalent to the claim above of a collapse of socialization.

I do think the overall trend gets both overstated, and also that the impacts on age-bracketed cohorts have been more substantial. Also, the study discussed is stale already and doesn't really cover post-pandemic shifts.

You’re missing the biggest problem with the statistic you quoted: Discussing percentage changes in free time spent seems misleading without also explaining how overall free time has changed. Do people have more free time now? With the rise of remote and hybrid work it’s expected that less time on average would be spent commuting. A percentage change in free time use seems intentionally misleading.

Nope, this isn't just an issue of percentages.

I can't link to specific query results from the American Time Use Survey, but from this page [1], you can check "Avg hrs per day - Socializing and communicating", click "Retrieve Data", then adjust the time range using the dropdowns at the top, to be up to 2003 - 2024. In absolute terms (hours, not percent) there are declines both for the whole period, and from from 2003-2019 (i.e. before the pandemic).

And you can look at the series for "Avg hrs per day for participants - Working at home" and confirm that as expected it is relatively stable through 2019 and jumps in 2020, so the decrease in socializing through 2019 is not about WFH.

[1] https://data.bls.gov/toppicks?survey=tu

>from 43.5 percent to 48.7 percent, representing an increase of over 5 percentage points.

Honestly not that big of a change.

Insofar as people online talk about a big shift towards loneliness, I suspect that Aurornis is correct that self-selection has a lot to do with it.

I wonder if that small change in the average is masking a larger change in the variance. Perhaps we have more hypersocial people and more hyposocial people.

I do also think that any such summary statistic can only show a small part of the picture. Of the time _not_ spent alone, how much is with a single other person as you look at different screens? Of time spent not alone and outside of the home, how many people are we with at any one time? How many different people do we have social interactions with per month? I.e. is the quality of our social interaction getting worse, are we with smaller groups, do we have sparser social graphs?

I could believe that you're right that the variance has increased, but is that driven by a growing share of shutins who only interact online and who are shifting to LLM friends?

One thing that not enough people realize is that the gap between haves and have-nots widen in almost everything when technology advances, and I don't mean just wealth (that is one too), but also knowledge (LLM/AI widens knowledge gap between the curious and not-curious by a lot), and in this case socialization -- the availability of technology (in both organizing activities like your example and in AI loneliness like the article) widens the socialize and not-socialize people.

In the old days, not-socialize people tend to be forced to socialize anyway; but techonology enables them to not-socialize 99% of time now. Likewise, socialize people needed to put in more effort to socialize in the old days, but now it's easier than ever.

When more people realize this, the discourse should shift from "technology creates this trend" to "technology widens the gap between X and not-X".

> In the old days, not-socialize people tend to be forced to socialize anyway; but techonology enables them to not-socialize 99% of time now. Likewise, socialize people needed to put in more effort to socialize in the old days, but now it's easier than ever.

This is my favorite point from the whole thread.

It has never been easier for someone to stay home, get a remote job, and even order grocery delivery to their door if they want.

A couple of my friends started going down that path unintentionally. Once you have a well paying remote job and your city makes it easy to get groceries and food delivered, combined with the infinite availability of entertainment on Netflix or from games, social skills and relationships can start to atrophy rapidly.

It’s even worse for people who never had much of a social life. When there are so many paths forward to continue avoiding a social life, it takes a lot of effort to break free and change your routines.

Depends on where you live. Areas that have a culture of outdoor activity and strangers talking to one another is a requirement. Here in MN, for example, outdoor activity does exist year round but strangers talking to one another is not.

Go to WI, you'll have both in abundance.

> I don’t buy the claim that everything social and in-person is in decline.

I'm pretty confident this is a well measured fact.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9811250/

keyword everything

The crowd you see is because options are dwindling faster than people willing to use them.

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