Americans' social activity has steeply declined in the past 30 years

> to be interesting, you must be interested.

I think thats the crux of it, most people respond positively when others are interested in them. As long as its genuine, asking about, or be interested in, others goes a really long way.

On top of meetups evaporating, the big issue is post-COVID meetups meeting 3 nights/week nearly impossible. I have 3 or 4 meetups I try to regularly go to and I'm lucky if they are run monthly.

I was recently watching a video mentioning a study that it takes ~200 hours of constant contact on average to make a "close friend" and some 40-60 hours to get go from acquaintance to "casual friend", then 80-100 to be a what you'd simply call "friend".

Meeting up for 2-4 hours a month would take years upon years to make anything out if you don't supplement it yourself.

If you are somewhere with live music, consider yourself lucky. That has declined in many countries in the last decade, as so widely reported in the music press.

You mention tabletop gaming. This is exactly the stereotype among friends and colleagues of unfulfilling meetups in a city I recently moved from: multiple games meetups sprung up around the university and public library as a way to get people meeting and talking, but most casual attendees didn't find the natural socializing they hoped for ("people just seem too desperate"), while players keen on the games and not looking for socializing per se complained about the casuals not being commited enough.

I don’t have a direct response to your zoning idea but have observed in European cities there seems to be less age segregation.

You should read actual studies on what you're suggesting rather than investing in "controversial takes" that are categorically wrong.

People are cynical about your idea, but it's not like it has never been done in society. There are in fact apartment complexes that focus on elderly demographics. Retirement homes are just that. What's a school but a bastion for a bunch of kids of similar age to socialize together (and should a random adult wander onto it, there'd be a lockdown).

Urban planning around these situations would be nice. But the very least we could do is build more third places that tries to attract that last middle demographic to come together; that mid 20's to 40's adults too old for college campuses but too young (and not on social security funds) for older gatherings. That's sort of what some bars can be, but a wide open space with less pressure to spend $15 on a "cheap" beer would be nice.

we already have it, it's called the Villages.

I've heard that everything is nihilistic. Things are funny when you're life's good. Things are serious when your life's not good but following them will to make it good. Things are nihilistic when your life's not good but gambling has a chance of making it good and that's the best option you see.

Example of past generation seriousness: investing - put all your money in housing or the stock market and you'll get rich and comfortable. Example of current generation nihilism: everyone wanting to be an influencer. Some people will become successful and some more will get by but most will fail at that, by the mathematics of it. Or literal gambling as in the rise of Kalshi - if your life's crap with $0 or $1k but wouldn't be crap with $100k, why not put it all on 100x odds? Or something like looksmaxxing: will doing xyz to your jawline somehow result in success? Probably not, but it might and you weren't going to be successful otherwise anyway.

GP is wrong anyway, comedy's always been about saying what everyone is secretly thinking.

This has been written about broadly by social historians. This book, in particular, is illuminating: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691133867/wh...

Some other links:

https://news.iu.edu/live/news/24906-research-ties-persistenc...

https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2021/10/white-flight...

https://psmag.com/news/ghosts-of-white-people-past-witnessin...

There's also this rather infamous quote by one of the most powerful Republican strategists in the 80s, Lee Atwater: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater#:~:text=Later%20in...

I won't quote it here but it's very telling.

In places like Detroit racism was very much the primary reason in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s at least. Some of it was just personal racism, pure and simple. See "blockbusting" techniques used by realtors who would hire a black mother to walk down the street with a baby carriage to give the impetus for white people to sell quickly and cheaply. Or a black family moving into a house, the white neighbors trying to push them out via lawsuit for breaking a racially restrictive covenant, then losing so that all the white people left the neighborhood (e.g. read about Orsel and Minnie McGhee in Detroit, I was the primary author of the National Register nomination for their house).

The racist pressure to move was also a structural issue supported by the Federal government. Redlining meant you couldn't get loans to buy houses in certain neighborhoods, and those neighborhoods were exactly where black people lived. Literal walls could be constructed between two similar communities of different races so that the white side could be higher rated and have better access to loans (e.g., the Birwood Wall in Detroit). A ton has been written about the topic, I can't really do it justice, but the idea that people just wanted a bigger house was not the case. A lot of Detroit actually consisted of single-family homes with yards anyhow, so it was literally white people leaving a house for a very similar one.

What they're describing is well documented, but my understanding is that the reality is a blend of what you're describing and what they're describing.

To this day there's significant social pressure to not acknowledge how much racism and racial division played a role in them growth of suburbs in the US, but ultimately it's the documented history which is revealed to those who research the topic.

In many cases individual families were not overtly racist but they were caught up in the economic effects created by racist dynamics and felt they had no choice to go along. If property prices in your neighborhood are decreasing, because neighbors are leaving, and you have the means would you not feel compelled to leave to somewhere with rising property values? Real estate firms intentionally tried to create waves of fear to get people to rush to move, selling low, and then profiting on selling to newer Black families.

It was common for suburbs to have deed restrictions limiting areas by race, and for a while federal housing guidelines would not underwrite developments that did not racially segregate.

At the same time there were massive amounts of state & federal funding pouring into suburbs and highly disruptive unpopular overhauls occurring in cities while cities were also losing tax revenue. For people with the option the future of good living seemed like it was in the suburbs independent of segregation, but part of what fueled the frenzy was the racial segregation.

People also moved to suburbs in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK.

Cars enabled people to have free standing houses and work became decentralised, which was also due to cars.

Many people prefer to live in a free standing house.

>the 20th century was overwhelmingly a flight from rural areas to cities

You're talking about an entirely different phenomena. The move from rural areas to cities and exurbs happened in the 50s/60s with cheap mortgage rates, WWII-provisioned education, and large sweeping social services being enacted. White flight is a phenomena that started in the mid-60s to 80s that specifically coincided with integration.

>The median adult is spending 5+ hours on their phone a day. This is what is exhausting people

There's much to be said about the behavioral manipulation and dark patterns in apps and devices, sure. But I don't think television inherently was employing Skinner-boxes to get people to watch and that's what I was specifically speaking to. Regardless, that dark pattern of it is class struggle related if that's the direction you want to frame it (I see it more as just MBA-brained corporate sociopathy) because it seeks to extract capital from its users while externalizing all negatives onto the users themselves.

>Maybe that's true for some people, but the data usually shows that income and free time is inversely related to community time. Poorer people are making more time for friends and family.

Obviously. And this is clearly related to the fact that the more impoverished you are, the more you need to pool resources to survive. The pain points I illuminated are for individuals who are still showing up to community organizing work and much of what we do in these spaces is effectively providing enough mutual aid for them to survive.

> A steelworker in the 1920s coming off of a 10-hour shift would still find the time and energy to go out dancing.

You have proof of this? That they wouldn't just go home and get shitfaced or otherwise incapacitated? All steelworkers, per capita, were going out dancing regularly? And even so, this wasn't because they were economically incentivized by the rise of labor unions to be in community with others, building power and fighting for better rights? The 30 years of post-Reagan neoliberal expanisionism has effectively neutered unions - and that's something that wasn't covered either by Putnam.

I suspect another thing largely missed by Putnam was the rise of online social spaces. Connecting with friends via the phone, on Discord, in video game spaces - that's community. It's just different from the community envisioned by people in more elderly generations. The fact that you're even commenting on HackerNews is effectively proof against Putnam's claims.

Nobody's commented on your most important point: "city" does not equate to "community involvement." Suburban people statistically volunteer more and join groups more than rural or urban people, and rural people are more likely to meet in person with their groups than suburban or urban people [0].

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/09/28/how-urban...

This might be controversial, and I'm not saying it has to be the case, but I believe at least part of it is due to lack of sunlight / outside movement (vs all day in office, car, train, home with stuffy air and sometimes not even openable windows) and nutrition (too much processed and fortified food, not enough protein for many people).

I'm trying to focus on both in my life, and I have become much happier as a result.

I think people are actually increasingly exhausted and disillusioned with life, but that increase is basically entirely due to spending hours doomscrolling and similar behavior.

One could argue that both parents having to work is much more difficult than when one person could support a household. Houses, healthcare and education are objectively much more expensive as well. It's not "victim mindset", it's literal exhaustion because everything is much more expensive. There's also no way to retire vs pensions and other baby boomer offramps.

Life has become increasingly expensive. Safety nets that used to be there, aren’t anymore. We’re surrounded by enshittification. Social divides, and antagonism between social groups are high.

Your contempt for humanity is blinding you to real issues people face every day. Yes, some things have gotten better over the years, but some things have gotten a lot worse.

I don't need people to tell me. My rent and paycheck are a very convincing argument in and of themselves.

>I've lived all over the place and one thing I've seem priliferate is this mindset of "I'm a victim, doing this is too hard, so I just won't for X and Y reasons" while folks order Uber eats.

There's a lot I can do by myself. But at the end of the day, someone choosing not to ghost me for a hangout or take the time to get together regularly is a 2-way street. Even pre-pandemic, it's been said people are flakier than ever.

There are systematic reasons to explain this, but on a micro level: "just work harder" is not a solution to friendship.

I’m not arguing that today is the worst time to ever exist in the history of humanity.

I’m arguing there are legitimate reasons why people are exhausted and disillusioned with the current state of the world.

In the Great Depression there was community and hope. People could band together, form unions or political movements.

Today, computers allow for mass dystopian control. Cameras and algorithms everywhere with no chance of appealing to an actual human.

There are multiple kinds of suffering, and even if more people have sufficient nutrition and health than in the great depression, it's much harder to see hope for the future today.

Everything happened so quickly too. All it took was a couple of decades.

I volunteered at an old folks home from age 10-16 or so, this was back in early/mid 90s - before the Internet stole my attention - and the old people were of the Greatest Generation cohort (maybe some of the oldest from 1800s). I really enjoyed those talks and have always liked talking with old people since. I can sit with any of them and just talk for hours but rarely ever do this with younger/my aged people. They just chit chat about everything and silence is never awkward, they could talk about anything from the weather to big social/political issues with an open mind. Unfortunately, I fear this is ending soon as this latest generation of old people is kind of vile and not really seeking positive conversation (wild generalization but it's my experience). Instead they tend to want to tell you how to live, what to believe, who to vote for, etc. and then judge/ridicule you when you don't comply or voice a differing opinion.

FWIW, I also think it's largely because boomer's collectively lost their minds and started acting out when their parent/grandparent generation was gone. It's like they didn't want to disappoint them so were acting on good behavior, but now their true colors show.

When my dad does this it’s mortifying

When I do it though it’s very cool and fun!

Of course I don’t call women “girl” or try to order in languages I don’t speak

Someone commented once about the Trader Joe’s people always flirting with everyone, and a) that’s probably true but b) is just being nice to random people these days so intimate and invasive that it’s equivalent to getting hit on? That would explain people cringing

On a larger scale I think it's _a_ factor, but not the only factor.

It's partly a numbers game. There are definitely amicable cul-de-sacs but if you are in an apartment complex there's 100x more "neighbors" you could interact with.

Suburbs also come with the tradeoff of driving, at least in America. It's a lot easier to socialize when you can put on some flip flops and walk to a friend's place or an event than it is to drive.

It can be hit or miss in either case, and there's socioeconomic and cultural forces that make real world interactions more scarce. If more of my income goes to rent and inflation is too high why would I burn through money on going out when I can stay home and watch a show or be on my phone

I've had far easier experience joining my neighborhood community in a city as many of my neighbors are literally walking around. My last 2 suburban neighborhood communities were on Facebook and the groups were less "lets get coffee" and more "that car that drove by is suspicious". One of my old neighbors in a city occasionally had a TV and cooler set up outside for people to drop by to watch baseball.

The costs of a night out have definitely increased way faster than our salaries have.

The change in lifestyle expectations should be as well documented as the changes in social contact.

Those are the exact two I’ve lived in actually

Yeah, if you’re getting three drinks each and an uber sure. I don’t think it’s an insane amount to spend.

It was framed as ‘Every Activity’ costs that much though which is just not true.

That's eating at an expensive place. I paid $60 for two at a local restaurant last week, that's including an appetizer.

It's not hard to spend $200. But OP suggested that it was the standard going rate and that it's unaffordable to them.

I'm in the bay area and dinner for two is absolutely nowhere close to $200 unless you are going somewhere fancy or ordering many drinks. Looking at my transaction history, it's closer to about $40 per person.

Your friends just don't want to hangout.

There are different ways of approaching doing something:

"To do X requires me to do this and that. So heres how I'll do this and that to get to X. "

"I can't do X because it requires me to do this and that. "

There's a big difference between the 2. The latter is a lie, they just don't want to do what is required to do that. Its a way of phrasing things so people don't feel bad and they don't have to admit they don't want to do something.

Start looking for it and you'll see it in a lot of exchanges.

You don't have to go to fancy restaurants for a date you know. Maybe for your anniversary. People who insist on fancy everything are probably not worth the trouble.

That's the thing, the Internet really spoiled us. Suddenly you can hang out with complete outliers interested in whatever niche interests you share.

The unfortunate thing to me is that outside of VERY upscale or VERY downscale dive bars, every place is full of screens now. People go to bars and look at screens instead of talking as much as they used to.

I guess my point was that the socializing depicted in media was older people, not just young singles.

If I didn't have kids, would I want to go out multiple nights a week for a few beers with friends? I don't know. I'd certainly think about the cost of it more now than when I was 25.

Similarly for restaurants - they've gotten so expensive, and often the food isn't as good as we remember - that my wife and I don't seem to be as interested in going out to eat as we used to.

> Online discussions about jobs mostly read like it's a cutthroat single player game where you shouldn't get too close to anyone because you can't trust anyone and you should be planning your next job hop anyway

You don't think this is a response to corporate culture? Especially over the last few years.

I'm afraid to have friends at work because I get attached and I feel bad when I leave after 2-5 years. I have to make career moves to get raises and progress, and it's easiest if I'm not too fond of the people around me. This is also the same reason that companies push "culture" and try to emphasize how we're a team or a family.

I assume this is attributed to valet and tipping.

Whatever it is, it's nowhere near as rich as Silicon Valley.

You don't have to live this way. To begin with, drinking a six pack at night on a regular basis is absolutely terrible for your health. It disrupts your sleep and so you will always be operating well below what you could be. The social problems are harder to solve because they are society-wide and not individual, but at your age a lot can change, and I think it's really important that you don't start to give up and think of your situation as inevitable, lest you ossify.

Uphill battles are often worth fighting.

The flip side is that you have time for hobbies, regular workouts instead of beer belly dad bod, you can play sports, bike or skateboard (including socializing), play chess, whatever you like, go to concerts, walk around town photographing.

Everything young parents don't have time for or are too tired for.

You're talking like you're old. You are --25-- my friend, young. No reason to resign yourself to the idea that your friends are all too old.

I'm 32 now and met some of my current best friends when I was 26. My parents are 60 and just moved to a new country and within a year they met a dozen new people they now hang out with all the time.

It sounds cliche but it's literally true that there's always time to meet new people no matter what phase of life you're in.

Related: when I was 25 I had a depressive existential crisis and felt like my life was basically over. It's common, and therapy was a lifesaver. If you feel like you might be depressed then talking to someone can really help. Take care of yourself as best you can!

Bro you're 25. You are in the most social point of your life. Go out and do things instead of making excuses.

Mate you are only 25, those people getting married and having kids are doing it early. You have another 10+ years before you could even think about the childless uncle phase as a construct.

I re-started using meetup just a couple of weeks ago after feeling the same way. And, honestly, my interactions were great. Meetup was scheduled, people showed up, we had a good time. I live in a smaller city and found two to go to in one night(ping pong and board games)

Meetup was fine 10+ years ago, but it's my go-to example of enshittification today. It feels like they're actively trying to kill it with every new change to the app / web experience. But despite that there are some good groups.

Wait until they find out that commodities markets started off as coffee shops.

For the last century (and still today) we called them cafés (in Germany). Coffee shop was the term we used for joints in Amsterdam where you could buy ... well, joints.

> they weren't as common as they are today

We have a lot more people these days and we're a lot more urbanized.

> My point was that much of what was done "then" in one's house are now done elsewhere

Yeah, and I don't think I believe that.

legister's comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50091295 mentions it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone

Additional citations:

https://ibs.colorado.edu/new-research-on-disappearing-third-...

https://www.aei.org/domestic-policy/americas-third-places-ar...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13538...

https://esl.uchicago.edu/2023/11/01/third-places-what-are-th...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/business/third-place-mean...

NYC is a thriving city of 8.5 million people and one of the most economically active cities in the world, so your experience may be different than say, Gary, Indiana.

Does it count as a third space if you have to pay for it?

Coffee shops and such don't feel like good third spaces to me, because I don't always want to spend money just to exist

When I was a kid kids used to just hang out. We'd take a bus, ride bikes, or walk to the mall, the park, the woods, fast food restaurant, record store, dollar store, etc and just loiter. Nobody had any money to buy anything, but boy we'd browse and loiter. Sometimes we'd just walk for hours. We'd walk miles and miles and miles just to sit at a table at Burger King with a single small fry between our group and hang out there.

Children don't do that anymore; they basically don't leave the house because they have the Internet. They communicate through texting and Discord so they don't even have to "hang out." Beyond the social change, when I was a young adult most malls went 18+ (unless accompanied by parents/guardians) and most other businesses nowadays allow teens to loiter the way we use to. Businesses want people in and out once they are done.

Even if business allowed it, most parents don't allow their kids to leave the house unattended anymore.

Part of it may be high rents. I read that rents increased a lot because of fashion stores. They make so much revenue per hour that more traditional stores (like the laundry, the washing machine store, the sewing store, the tabletop games store, and maybe cheaper cafes and restaurants just can't compete.

Brooklyn isn't very representative of the majority of middle America

Dual income earners hasn't even increased that much, 44% in 1967 to 53% in 2011 - https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2014/ted_20140602.htm

This 40 hr/week need to be combined with

1) Increasing job/economic insecurity.

2) Prices rising faster then income for majority of population.

3) increasing commute time around employment, activity hubs

4) kids activities/sports are now taken as seriously as work project deliverables. Previously it could be just gifted kids in school teams now with pay-to-play a lot more kids are involved in "serious sports".

The constant aggregate dopamine demand and chasing activities is certainly not helping, imho. "Work, home, doomscroll, repeat."

> In North America it seems the vast majority of "pubs" are gastro pubs

To be fair, at least in the US, anything calling itself a "pub" is already going down a marketing/branding road and it almost certainly means they're going to try to evoke an Irish or British sensibility.

Have you looked into a local makerspace (e.g. Maker Nexus)?

The primary focus is on RE, of course, but the folks there are generally curious, and a large minority of the talks are about forward engineering.

I gave a talk on work I had done with the Signal Foundation on building a binary->binary rewriting tool to secure their Intel SGX1 enclaves against the various Spectre and LVI vulnerabilities.

Is that the type of "culture" that this statement is referring to?

> As long as you don’t have a common culture and a common understanding of the basic rules that everyone agrees on, no one can spend time with each other comfortably.

Doesn't seem so to me.

Society is going bimodal on the 1% of issues that bisect people. Those 1% of issues are consuming 99% of our mass-media airtime.

Talk to your neighbors and you'll find that everyone just cares about decent roads, decent schools, decent jobs, and decent healthcare.

The central part of their identity is to assume that they're the vast majority of people. It allows them not to have to think about stuff too hard - it's all settled, and it's settled on what the people I'm exposed to (i.e. friends, family, and the television) think. I'm safe just repeating that and reporting people who deviate from that.

They don't realize how much the "moral majority" differs in town as opposed to the city, the coasts as opposed to the bulk of the country, in small private liberal arts colleges in the east and at Mormon universities in Utah, or in China, Russia, or Bulgaria as compared to the suburb they grew up in.

If all of those people simply follow the central tendency, and give mass media the same (or greater) weight as they give their neighbors, that guarantees war all the time. It will always be better to listen and try to understand points of view that you aren't familiar with, rather than to hide in the safe (and always untrue depending on the shape of the border you draw) assumption that you represent the vast majority. This, without even considering whether the vast majority are right or wrong.

I mean, some people are so impervious to reality with this that they can lose election after election and believe that they are still 95% of people. Then they start theorizing about mind control and supernatural entities, just to keep from opening their eyes and ears.

The center is mostly offline, thinks both extremes are very small portions of the population, and doesn't post on social media. So they seem small but really there are a lot of people like this who aren't shouting into the internet 24/7, so you just remember that what you hear is all the extremists shouting, not the people you saw during the course of a week who weren't.

You are missing the point.

"Political issues" are by definition things that people disagree on. Saying people "disagree on political issues" is equivalent to saying "people disagree on things they disagree on."

But the vast majority of daily life is not driven by or meaningfully affected by any of these "issues on which people disagree." If you go and talk to your neighbors, even ones who you disagree with on disagreement-creating-topics, you will find you actually agree on nearly everything. The set of things you agree on is called "our culture."

I may be incorrectly inferring that you think this is a good thing, but "traditionally tribal humanity" were constantly at war with one another. I'm not sure that's something we want to go back to.

I’ll take more of that homogenization of culture please.

It's not just social media, it's all solo entertainment - streaming, cable, 24 hour news, video games, everything.

I think turning off all social media would help if others do that as well but as an individual action it's likely to cut you off even more.

I guess we are different then. A non-stop state of panic/fear does not make me feel like procreating.

I don't think so. Everyone was a lot happier 10-15 years ago when the culture felt less fucked. I think people can't feel happy if they don't feel basically safe, and the world's problems are so incomprehensible, and solutions to them see so impossible to imagine, that there is a background unsafety overlaid on everything, even if one's immediate conditions are pretty good.

Both sides are at fault. Here in the Midwest many a supporter of the Democratic party are legitimately afraid of being fired if their support became public knowledge, while on the other hand in California (or other "Blue" states) it's the exact opposite. It's astonishing to see how much Americans relish oppressing their fellow citizens.

The internet is awash with seething tribal hatred. It's impossible to honestly believe this is only an issue with the right. The "demon-crat" attack is roughly analogous to the left's "nazi" attack (nazis, after all, are the secular-progressive equivalent of demons, with Adolf Hitler being their Satan), and the latter attack is infinitely more common than the former, even on HN.

You are getting a lot of downvotes but I 100% agree with you. These are the types of conversations where someone's cultural background / bias is evident and its obvious to me most of your responders have never spent time outside the US.