The End of Friday Nights with Friends

Too much immediate gratification at home.

It used to be that there was nothing to do at home. And so the entire outside world was filled with people looking for something to do.

You could leave and go anywhere and you'd find all the other people. And you'd find them doing in-person stuff. The best kind of stuff. The kind of stuff that makes it easy to build a rich life filled with connection.

Now outside has to compete with inside and it's not really a competition. And so all the outside stuff starts to disappear, further reinforcing the cycle.

Soon we'll have an entire world of people who don't know anything else. Who think that being inside is just fine, even if they all keep feeling like there's something they can't quite put their finger on missing in their life.

I spend most of my nights (weeknight or or otherwise) with my friends. I'm on Discord with them right now as I write this.

It wouldn't show up in this study at all, because it's online, not in-person. These particular friends live thousands of miles from me.

I also have dedicated nights of the week for seeing my in-person friends, and the amount that I do that has stayed pretty consistent (outside of COVID), but it's never been nearly as much as my virtual friend time. I have friend groups more than a decade old that I've maintained this way.

(The mix is about 75% people I met first in the real world, 25% people I met first or have only met online, if that matters.)

Seems like COVID changed us