Bowling Aloner
If we're even bowling at all.
The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson examines “Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out.”
In its earliest decades, the United States was celebrated for its citizens’ extroversion. Americans weren’t just setting out to build new churches and new cities. Their associations were, as Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “of a thousand different types … religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute.” Americans seemed adept at forming social groups: political associations, labor unions, local memberships. It was as if the continent itself had imbued its residents with a vibrant social metabolism—a verve for getting out and hanging out. “Nothing, in my view,” de Tocqueville wrote, “deserves more attention than the intellectual and moral associations in America.”
Something’s changed in the past few decades. After the 1970s, American dynamism declined. Americans moved less from place to place. They stopped showing up at their churches and temples.
This is, of course, not a new phenomenon. Indeed, Thompson acknowledges as much:
In the 1990s, the sociologist Robert Putnam recognized that America’s social metabolism was slowing down. In the book Bowling Alone, he gathered reams of statistical evidence to prove that America’s penchant for starting and joining associations appeared to be in free fall. Book clubs and bowling leagues were going bust.
But the trend has accelerated:
If Putnam felt the first raindrops of an antisocial revolution in America, the downpour is fully here, and we’re all getting washed away in the flood. From 2003 to 2022, American men reduced their average hours of face-to-face socializing by about 30 percent. For unmarried Americans, the decline was even bigger—more than 35 percent. For teenagers, it was more than 45 percent. Boys and girls ages 15 to 19 reduced their weekly social hangouts by more than three hours a week. In short, there is no statistical record of any other period in U.S. history when people have spent more time on their own.
Thompson argues that it has had dire consequences for us as a society:
And so what? one might reasonably ask. Aloneness is not loneliness. Not only that, one might point out, the texture of aloneness has changed. Solitude is less solitary than ever. With all the calling, texting, emailing, work chatting, DMing, and posting, we are producing unprecedented terabytes of interpersonal communication. If Americans were happy—about themselves, about their friends, about their country—then whining about parties of one would feel silly.
But for Americans in the 2020s, solitude, anxiety, and dissatisfaction seem to be rising in lockstep. Surveys show that Americans, and especially young Americans, have never been more anxious about their own lives or more depressed about the future of the country. Teenage depression and hopelessness are setting new annual records every year. The share of young people who say they have a close friend has plummeted. Americans have been so depressed about the state of the nation for so many consecutive years that by 2023, NBC pollsters said, “We have never before seen this level of sustained pessimism in the 30-year-plus history of the poll.”
I don’t think hanging out more will solve every problem. But I do think every social crisis in the U.S. could be helped somewhat if people spent a little more time with other people and a little less time gazing into digital content that’s designed to make us anxious and despondent about the world. This young century, Americans have collectively submitted to a national experiment to deprive ourselves of camaraderie in the world of flesh and steel, choosing instead to grow (and grow and grow) the time we spend by ourselves, gazing into screens, wherein actors and influencers often engage in the very acts of physical proximity that we deny ourselves. It’s been a weird experiment. And the results haven’t been pretty.
Now, I’m not sure some of this isn’t overblown. Social media, including blogs with comment sections, can create communities of interest that are in many ways more compelling than hanging out with people who simply happen to live in close proximity. I’d rather talk politics with smart people or talk sports with other fans of my favorite teams than engage in mundane chit-chat about things that don’t much interest me.
Then again, maybe that’s part of the problem.
Thompson circles back to the data:
Broadly, real-world socializing has declined for both men and women, for all ages, for all ethnicities, and for all levels of income and education. Although COVID-19 clearly increased time alone, these trends predate the pandemic. The steepest declines have been among young people, poor people, and Black Americans. Women and 20-somethings enjoy the most social time in a given week, and low-income, middle-aged, unmarried men seem to get together the least. For most groups, the decline was staggered before accelerating after 2015. Beyond in-person hanging, several other forms of socialization have declined by about a third in the past 20 years, including the share of Americans who volunteer and the share of Americans who attend religious services over the weekend.
One of the more curious trends to jump out of the data is that many Americans have traded people for pets in our social time. The average time that Americans spend with their pets has roughly doubled in the past 20 years—both because more people have adopted pets and because they spend more time with them. In 2003, the typical female pet owner spent much more time socializing with humans than playing with her cat or dog. By 2022, this flipped, and the average woman with a pet now spends more time “actively engaged” with her pet than she spends hanging out face-to-face with fellow humans on any given day.
We have two dogs and play with them quite a bit. But, even though I’m introverted and need a lot of alone time, I spend considerably more time interacting with my family and other humans than I do with the dogs. Then again, I do see a considerable number of Facebook friends posting pics of their animals as though they were children.
The hang-out depression is particularly bad for teenagers. According to the ATUS, teens and young adults saw by far the largest dip in socializing, especially since 2010. In fact, it is genuinely difficult to find any category of play that isn’t experiencing some kind of Mayday! Mayday! descent among this group. Teens are dating less, playing fewer youth sports, spending less time with their friends, and making fewer friends to begin with. In the late 1970s, more than half of 12th graders got together with their buddies almost every day. By 2017, only 28 percent did. “There’s very clearly been a striking decline in in-person socializing among teens and young adults, whether it’s going to parties, driving around in cars, going to the mall, or just about anything that has to do with getting together in person,” says Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University.
I asked Twenge if she could identify large differences by gender or ethnicity among teenagers. She pulled data from the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future, a decades-old survey of teens, which we’ve used to make the following charts. The first shows the share of 12th-grade boys and girls who say they go out with friends two or more times a week. From 1976 to 2022, the number of socializers fell by a similar figure—about 30 percent. Hangouts declined a bit more among Black teens than white teens.
In both cases, we see a modest decline over the first three decades and then a rather precipitous one since. So, what’s the suspected explanation?
The first explanation is so obvious that it scarcely needs mentioning; in fact, I’ve already mentioned it. Americans are spending less time with other people because they’re spending more time with their screens—televisions and phones. The evidence that young people have replaced friend time with phone time is strong. As Twenge wrote in her book Generations, it’s not just that teens overall seem to have funneled their social lives into their smartphones. Even more telling, the groups with the largest increase in phone use, such as liberal 12th-grade girls, also saw the largest declines in hanging out with friends, strongly suggesting a direct relationship. For those who don’t accept that correlative evidence, we also have a 2019 randomized experiment from NYU and Stanford researchers who found that paying people to deactivate Facebook increased the time they spent socializing with friends. (It also increased the time they watch TV.)
Anecdotally, this is certainly true of my kids and stepkids, aged 12 to 24. They’re all considerably more isolated than I was at similar ages—and, again, I’m an introvert by nature. But when I was that age, the alternatives to hanging out were much more limited. I was, as you might expect, an avid reader. But there was essentially no television programming available in the era of four channels (including PBS) until Prime Time. There was no recorded video. And the Internet was a secret Pentagon project.
The second explanation is that people are hanging out less because we’re all so damn busy. As The New York Times’ Jessica Grose notes, people in their 30s and 40s have less leisure time than they did two decades ago. As Anne Helen Petersen has said, Americans have a tendency to spread out, and the built environment of the U.S. housing market forces many people to move away from friends and family, which means they ultimately buy a bit of loneliness with their money.
It’s a compelling argument, and as a new father, I can appreciate how the demands of child care and work might squeeze out the last drops of social time. But the data say this can’t be the whole story. Research by the Philadelphia Fed has found that time alone has increased most for low-income, nonwhite individuals, for whom hours worked haven’t increased much in the past 20 years. This would complicate the idea that loneliness is the price of overscheduled busyness. Twenge told me she’s also unconvinced by the argument about congested schedules, at least as it applies to teenagers. “Sometimes I’ll hear the case that teens are spending so much more time on homework, but the evidence suggests it’s just not true,” she said. “In fact, homework time has gone down in the past few years. The share of teens who have jobs has gone down. Despite some parents jam-packing their kids’ schedules, overall extracurricular time looks pretty stable in surveys. If anything, teens today have more leisure time than they used to. They just choose to spend it on their phones.”
Thompson glides past the “spread out” point too quickly. Yes, it means we spend more time driving. But it also means it’s harder to hang out. Throughout my childhood and young adulthood, it was easy to spend leisure time with playmates from the neighborhood, schoolmates, and work friends. Even in high school, when were weren’t in the walking distance from school and friends that I had been accustomed to, I was at least within a 15-minute drive of all my friends.
My kids have pretty much always had to be driven to “play dates,” a concept that didn’t even exist when I was younger. My workplace is a 40- to 60-minute drive, depending on traffic. While I have a handful of colleagues who live in relatively close proximity, most of them are an hour or more away from the house. Having to factor in two hours of driving time changes the calculus considerably.
A third explanation for America’s cascading social mojo is the Putnam theory described in Bowling Alone: The rise of aloneness is a part of the erosion of America’s social infrastructure. Someone once told me that the best definition of community is “where people keep showing up.” Well, where is that now, exactly? Certainly not church; each successive generation is attending less than their parents’. Not community centers, or youth sports fields. Even the dubious community-building power of the office, arguably the last community standing for many, is weakening with the popularity of hybrid and remote work. America is suffering a kind of ritual recession, with fewer community-based routines and more entertainment for, and empowerment of, individuals and the aloneness that they choose.
Again, there’s not much doubting this. Youth sports continue, of course, but it’s increasingly divorced from the community, with traveling teams and specialization replacing the old model.
When you put these three stories together, you get something like this: Face-to-face rituals and customs are pulling on our time less, and face-to-screen technologies are pulling on our attention more. The inevitable result is a hang-out depression.
This is certainly plausible.
And for young people, all this seems to clearly correlate with actual depression. Teen loneliness has surged in the past decade, alongside teen hopelessness, depression, and suicidal thinking. According to the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, the share of teenage girls who say they experience “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” increased from 36 to 57 percent, and the share of girls who said they’ve contemplated suicide increased 50 percent in the same decade. Neither the decline in socializing nor the surge in mental distress has any precedent on record.
The rise in teen depression coincides with the proliferation of smartphones and social media. “It’s very suspicious that teen anxiety and depression really started to take off around 2012, because that’s when 50 percent of Americans owned a smartphone, when social media went from optional to virtually mandatory, and when smartphones got front-facing cameras,” Twenge told me. Academics including Twenge and the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt have repeatedly argued that phones have driven an anxiety crisis among America’s youth, in part by reducing the presence of physical-world relationships that are necessary for healthy adolescent development. Swapping touches for screen taps, America’s kids are experiencing a more solitary, and melancholy, childhood than we’ve ever seen.
The evidence for that is pretty strong, I think.
During my time picking through ATUS data, I was reminded of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which is the oldest longitudinal study on happiness and well-being ever conducted. Last year, its directors said that the “simple and profound conclusion” of their work was that good relationships are the key to happiness. Just as many people are familiar with the concept of physical fitness, they said, we should be equally open to the concept of social fitness. We should care for our relationships as we’d care for our body.
Given how physically unfit we are—for some of the same reasons, come to think of it—I’m not sure that’s the answer.
Public-health experts are comfortable talking about the way several modern phenomena—such as caloric density and a built environment that discourages walking—have contributed to the surge in obesity. One interpretation of the rise in diet-related diseases is that humans are “dysevolved” for a modern food system so rich with carbs, sugars, and manufactured tastiness. Engineered to confront caloric scarcity, we’ve come up in a world of caloric abundance. The result of this mismatch is an obesity crisis and other calamities in physical fitness.
One can imagine a similar framework to explain the deterioration of America’s social fitness. We come into this world craving the presence of others. But a few modern trends—a sprawling built environment, the decline of church, social mobility that moves people away from friends and family—spread us out as adults in a way that invites disconnection. Meanwhile, as an evolutionary hangover from a more dangerous world, we are exquisitely engineered to pay attention to spectacle and catastrophe. But screens have replaced a chunk of our physical-world experience with a digital simulacrum that has enough spectacle and catastrophe to capture hours of our greedy attention. These devices so absorb us that it’s very difficult to engage with them and be present with other people.
The sum result of these trends is that we are both pushed and pulled toward a level of aloneness for which we are dysevolved and emotionally unprepared. Sartre said hell is other people. Perhaps. But the alternative is worse.
Reversing these trends would require a rather radical reorganization of the entire society.
The graphs are very interesting. Twitter arrived in 2006 and Facebook opened up to the masses in ~2008. I know correlation =! causation, but I don’t really believe it’s coincidence. There are pros and cons to connecting with others online vs. IRL.
Regarding the pet thing…this is interesting to me in part because I was just reflecting on that topic this morning. Our pup is 13, and for most of her life, I’ve worked from home. I probably spend more time with her than I do with my husband–she’s definitely a companion. I’m introverted and don’t mind being on my own, but I do think that I will have a tough go of it when the dog passes. In short, I’m alone a lot but can’t think of a time when I’ve felt lonely–whether that’s because of the dog’s presence or social media providing ready access to people, I don’t know.
The lack of third space (something other than home and work) for much of the population has disappeared between more hours being worked and the degradation of many of the social institutions. In my late 30’s, just anecdotally, I have tried several different VFW posts over the years, and found the gatekeeping and general malaise of the “leadership” to put me off forever. I can’t speak for anyone younger, other than work colleagues who seem to be doing just fine in terms of friendships, just not romantic relationships. That is another story.
Ironically, socializing in person is more likely to bring on loneliness as there is generally someone there who will “take offense” at almost anything said. And these days, you don’t need to torture yourself with such people.
I’ve often said, here on this site, that I have more in common with an engineer from Madrid, or an architect from Paris, or a lawyer from London, than I do a truck driver from Alabama, a welder from Kansas, or a gun salesman from Wisconsin.
I’m closer to my former co-workers in London, who I see every two years or so, than I am my own neighbors, whose names I don’t even know, and with whom I’ve never spoken to.
I stay in touch with various social circles of mine with group chats, and WhatsApp groups. Given what I do for a living, and how often I’m out of town for long periods of time, my friend groups are spread out over many different cities. Works for me, but not for everyone , for sure.
Hah! I am ahead of my time.
Total number of friends: 0. Which is the number I’m happiest with. I’m very close with my wife and. . . and that’s it. I don’t interact with my parents at all. I am happy to ignore in-laws and siblings. I’ve often joked that I learned storytelling from having to constantly invent excuses why I would not hang out. I always wanted to be alone. Me and Greta Garbo. The very idea of having anyone ‘over to my place’ is anathema. The notion of having a group of friends I’d hang out with is almost nauseating, especially males. I mean, I saw value in female relationships from, oh, about age 13, because: sex, duh. Whereas men? WTF would I do with a bunch of men? Where there are men there are hierarchies and I reject any position in any hierarchy, bottom, middle or top.
My wife and I are in the bubble, the kids are bubble-adjacent, and no one else is in the bubble. And it is a fucking relief to be able to maintain that isolation with my one fellow isolationist. I am, if anything, too pleased with my life.
Here at OTB I can interact in the only way that interests me: an exchange of ideas. So this is all great for me. The world has caught up. It’s a brave new world.
@JKB:
It really has to be sad to go through life continually imagining that people will take offense to you. I mean this is essentially seeing yourself as potential victim in every interaction. Assuming that level of constant rejection has got to be absolute hell on the ego. No wonder you don’t really engage in open conversations.
FWIW, as someone who regularly interacts with folks across a wide range of walks of life, I can tell you that if you’re honestly interested in other people and willing to understand why they might take offense to something you are saying and be willing to meet them in the middle out of politeness if for no other reason (like accepting their pronouns), most people are pretty engaging and forgiving of things. I know I’ve screwed up more times than I care to count with my more progressive friends and acquaintances and yet I’ve never worried about being cancelled.
[Heavily edited because I’m tired of trying to score points–honestly, sorry that was my initial response. I’m going to work on not doing that anymore. I think it rots the soul.]
@JKB:
If you like being alone, own it, don’t whine about it. If you don’t want to be alone, try not being such a twat.
@Bnut:
There is definitely some truth to this.
In the context of teens, danah boyd has argued pretty compellingly that part of the challenge they faced was coming to be banned from many of the third spaces that defined them for quite a while. During the 2000’s as malls began to stuggle for a variety of reasons (the rise of e-commerce being a key one), many malls began to crack down on the presence of teens. As a result a key hangout (third space) for teens of the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s (see the mall’s role in a lot popular teen media at the time) was lost. This hit teens from lower income brackets especially hard.
And I think that, in turn hasn’t made things easier.
I think that’s, unfortunately, really true. Social clubs like the VFW and others like Lions or Kiwanis used to be focused on trying to perpetuate themselves. So they were constantly actively recruiting. Then, as membership dwindled or changed, some began to focus more on protecting their existing culture which often led to exclusion of new members.
Look, you can be lonely and have good friends. In fact, people who are lonely often have worked to establish friends because being lonely and talking about being lonely is a way to establish a deeper bond with someone than gossiping about who’s in hot in your profession or talking about mainstream politics.
Phones are obviously the issue, but presenting loneliness and sadness as if they are impediments to meeting people as if lonely and sad people will be cured if they have friends is just wrong, and more of the problem. Friendship is not a strategy to hacking life. Part of the reasons phones are addictive is that the content offered up is this type of bullshit. There’s a reason why adults get into Taylor Swift or YA and why there’s so much adult emphasis on popularity and the ‘cool kids’ in our culture.
I wonder how much the two graphs about teenagers reflects the increasing restrictions on teens under age 18 driving with other teens in the car? Long ago when my friends and I were 16, one of three or four of us could borrow a car from our parents, pick up the others, and go someplace. In many states today, the teen driving in that situation loses their license.
This morning Face the Nation had a piece on social isolation and the prevalence of random acts of gun violence here in America. However likely or unlikely it is to become a victim, or worse have your child become a victim, it’s in our heads and it takes a toll on millions. I know this is a big source of anxiety for my daughter and SIL and their kids.
Weird this stressor wasn’t mentioned.
I have a whole lot of friends whom I rarely see anymore. On the few occasions when I do, it’s like old home week and I’m transported back 20 years to when I still lived in STL. I live 80 miles away now (it’s a loooong story how I got out here) and while both my neighbors are personable and easy going, I am definitely a liberal fish out of water here in the middle of red land.
I’ve always been a bit of a loner and a wall flower when in unfamiliar surroundings with unfamiliar people (such as the Crawford Co DEM meetings). The Hillbilly Haven keeps me busy tho and I don’t feel any need for human contact outside of family and even then I sometimes wish for less (not that I ever turn down an invite, family is everything).
Still, I do miss my friends.
@JKB: “Ironically, socializing in person is more likely to bring on loneliness as there is generally someone there who will “take offense” at almost anything said.”
Odd, I don’t think this is the case for something like 99% of the population. Wonder why it might be for you…
The teenage isolation sounds off to me, and here’s why in a nutshell: In the late 1970s, more than half of 12th graders got together with their buddies almost every day. By 2017, only 28 percent did.
Without knowing what they are doing with their screen time this means nothing, especially since time spent watching television has been in steep decline since 2010, except for a couple of pandemic years.
I’m just a couple of years younger than you, James, and have kids in the same age range as you and your stepkids. It really is so much different for them than it was for us.
But I wonder if it was us who had an unusual childhood.
So far my kids seem to be doing OK, but I have concerns. My daughter (college sophomore, out of state) always was IRL social, but she’s still dealing with anxiety that manifested during Covid and sees a therapist weekly. Thankfully she’s now off of medication.
My oldest son (a college freshman who lives at home) does go and hang out with friends once every week or two, but most of his life is school, work, or video games. He’s almost 19 and has never had a romantic relationship and feels, like many young men, stuck in a situation where he’ll never get one. Beyond moral support, my advice is mostly useless.
My youngest boy is in middle school, and well, middle school is the same as it ever was – awkward and socially uncomfortable.
As for me and my wife, we both work from home and tend to be homebodies and we have each other. But we do have our best friends in the area, who we see pretty regularly and interact with daily via chat. We both have other stuff going on in the local community – my wife is involved in music activities like a church choir and the youth symphony organization my son plays for as well as the Red Cross. I do a bunch of local community and local politics stuff, which gets me out and seeing actual people. I also got wrangled into “volunteering” on our neighborhood HOA Board, which has been good and bad.
@Bnut:
I have tried a couple of VFW posts over the years and never had a good experience. It was mostly a bunch of Vietnam-era guys who wanted to sit around and drink. And while the cheap beer was nice, none of the posts I went to could ever really transition across the generation gap. I stopped trying about a decade ago and haven’t bothered with any after moving to Colorado.
” there is generally someone there who will “take offense” at almost anything said.”
Certainly not my experience. That happens on the internet. If someone wants to be an A hole and try to insist that their politics or religion is th only version that can be right that can be bad but its rare among most groups. Maybe more common with family where there is always some uncle/aunt who wants to be a jerk.
Steve
@JKB:
The internet has been wonderful in allowing niche groups of people to find each other. From model train enthusiasts to gays to furries to autistic folk… they get to be their whole self among people that will accept them for who they are.
But what if your whole self is an asshole?
Before the internet, this negative reaction tended to mold people via peer pressure to something a bit more moderate. Sometimes that’s pushing queer folks into the closet, but sometimes that’s shut to, listen, and learn to get along.
If you wanted to get into conspiracy theories, you had to seek them out, and were constantly viewed askance when you brought up that Queen Elizabeth was secretly a lizard. You would either calm down or end up under a bridge or in another spot on the edge of society. Now the internet makes it easy to find someone who will explain that Queen Elizabeth was a lizard and that every time she shed her skin she ate it, and that’s how she came to control an inter dimensional slave and drug trade.
There are some groups of people that probably shouldn’t get together easily.
Or if you’re a little down on your luck, and society is changing too fast, there will be someone there to guide you gently towards White Nationalism, 9/11 Trutherism, QAnon, Climate Doomerism or whatever. Not going down the rabbit hole of bad information has switched from avoiding eye contact with the Birchers to requiring pretty sophisticated media literacy, and not letting the little dopamine hit from outrage over X become your way of life.
Which is all my way of saying that JKB should take up bridge. It’s an older, more conservative crowd, there will always be someone there who wants to complain about college kids with their green hair and taxes and “those people.” There are decent people there too, of course, and maybe some of that will rub off on him. Or maybe they will all learn about von Mises.
There was a 10 – 15 year period in my life where I was more or less a hermit. Other than work or visiting my immediate family, I basically spent all my time at home alone. It’s hard to form relationships when you spend your entire life pretending to be someone else.
One of the weird turning points was during COVID when I was reading all these articles about how hard being stuck at home and not seeing anyone because of lockdown was, and it dawned on me on me that my life hadn’t really changed all that much. I’d been voluntarily doing to myself what it took a global catastrophe to do to other people, and I made a resolution that once the lockdown was over, I was going to make a concerted effort to be “out in the world” again. That resolution led to me finally accepting I was trans about two months later.
Since then I have, shockingly for someone who thought of themselves as an extreme introvert their entire lives, turned into something of a social butterfly, with most of my weekends crammed with doing various things with other people.
I read something a few weeks ago that I think explained what happened to me pretty well: based on the clinical definitions, there should be roughly equal number of introverts and extroverts, yet almost 80% of people describe themselves as introverts. A group of psychologists looked into this and, after bunch of different experiments, determined that the reason is that a lot of people who consider themselves introverts are actually extroverts with untreated social anxiety.
I thought of this while reading at the above and wonder how much of this problem is actually the loss of social capital that has resulted from a refusal to invest in our communities for anything other than short term economic productivity?
@Michael Cain:
This makes a lot of sense. When I was in high school, cars played a huge part in our social lives, going to games, concerts, record stores, the beach, etc. When there was nothing to do, you would drive around with your friends, smoke a joint, and listen to music. We knew all the places in town where you could park & have a few beers with your buddies with little likelihood of the police showing up. It was a bit like “Happy Days” with the addition of drugs, alcohol, and rock & roll shows.
@wr:
In psychology, you quickly see how difficult it is for us with serious and persistent social difficulties to admit we are the common denominator, rather than insisting everybody else is flawed.
Yes, sometimes we are poorly situated amongst emotional, intellectual, or demographic strangers — and we can improve our social standing with a change of place. Although not everyone can move or travel — or switch schools or jobs etc.
But if person is offensive to nearly everyone everywhere, they probably have a stimulus value that is very alienating and negative.
Some people are loners and iconoclasts, and they are fine with that. Those who are not fine should make an effort to improve themselves, not to blame everybody else.
It reminds me of a teacher who was constantly in the faculty lounge complaining about how nasty and unruly our 7th and 8th grade students were, during my stint in education. Challenged one day, she turned to me for backup. I shrugged and replied, “Sorry, I don’t have any issues with those kids. They’re angels with me.”
Translation: the problem is you, babes. Try a career change.
@DK: “Translation: the problem is you, babes.”
As they say, if one guy you run into in a day is an asshole, it’s probably him. If everyone you run into is an asshole, it’s probably you.
@Stormy Dragon:
I had a very similar experience. Thought I was an introvert or had social anxiety. Nope. Turns out that once you set aside the giant secret and your life doesn’t automatically crumble, you get to find out who you really are. Turns out I’m an extrovert’s extrovert. Whole world’s full of friends I haven’t met yet.
This is starting to create a problem for my family as my kids and I are all extroverted people, my partner is a, uh, curmudgeon.
We were talking about what we would do if the other one died. She said she would get a light house and a giant dog in Scotland and see people once a year for supplies. I told her that I would grab my friend Michael (loud gay man) and we would open a B&B someplace loud and warm.
Good question!!
As always, what we’re “seeing” in kids is more of a representation of what already happened to the parents.
This seems to me just the new generation of whining about The Kidz Just Want Participation Trophies…. when the kid actually wants a popsicle and the Republican un-athletic parent who wants to relive their own childhood wants the $1.99 trophy.
I want to see that “lack of spending time” broken out by political party. Funny how people who think hanging out is rewarding learn how to negotiate to achieve the best shared outcome for entire groups of people. It’s almost like actual practical government of any size requires both personal buy-in and an appreciation that a final outcome will invariably never be Our Personal First Take.
Back when Bowling Alone came out, I was single and was sometimes going bowling alone (but would also go with friends sometimes). Now when I go, I usually go with my family, and usually another family too, so that the kids can play together. I might start going bowling alone again sometimes, it’s kind of nice actually.
@DMA: The Bowling Alone parable was that people used to join bowling leagues, thus committing to go out every Friday night with the same team, and had mostly abandoned that practice (along with joining civic clubs, churches, etc.) in favor of going out occasionally to bowl with friends.
One of the downsides to online-communities is that they can be destroyed – completely erased – by a whim of the host, or a change in somebody’s business plan. Basically by the decisions of people who are not part of the group.
I grew up in a family with regular family picnics. We still sort of do them (we paused for covid). I come from a place where the expectation is that you will know people for your entire life. This can be limiting, but it’s also valuable.