America’s Crisis of Social Connection, With Adam Grant

Derek Thompson (0:06)

One of the topics I find myself returning to again and again on this show and in my writing, is also going to be the subject of my next book, is the decline of social connection in the 21st century. I've called this phenomenon the anti-social century, and here are some alarming statistics.

In 2000, Robert Putnam published the famous book Bowling Alone, which documented the decline of social capital in the 20th century. Many people said he was way too pessimistic, a worrywart who would be proved wrong by the bounteous social connections provided by the Internet. Well, haha, a quarter century later, face-to-face socializing in America has fallen by another 20 percent. For unmarried men and for people younger than 25, that decline is more than 35 percent. Americans today, statistically, spend more time alone than in any period in recorded history.

Men who watch television now spend seven hours in front of the TV for every one hour they spend hanging out with someone outside of their house. The typical woman with a pet spends more time actively engaged with that animal than in face-to-face contact with friends of her own species. And since the early 2000s, the time Americans spend helping or caring for people outside of their nuclear family has fallen by a third.

When it comes to the ultimate expression of socializing, which is to say, parties, the situation is absolutely abysmal. Between 2003 and 2024, the time Americans spent attending or hosting parties fell by half. For Americans under 25, which is the age when you're supposed to be going to parties, it fell by 70 percent. The share of Americans who say they entertain people at their home on a greater than monthly basis has also declined by about 70 percent since the 1970s. So what has happened? What has gone wrong with this picture?

I think there are at least four big explanations. First, we're more harried than we used to be, or at least we feel more harried. In 1970, the share of prime-age women, the labor force, passed 50 percent for the first time. Today, it's near 80 percent. Now, I don't think there's anything wrong with working women, and I certainly don't want to be quoted or clipped out of context to suggest that we should go back to the social norms of the 1950s. But women have historically kept the family social calendar. And when they went to work, men I think never picked up the job of social planning. Dudes, step up please. We have calendars too. And if we don't make plans with our friends, plans for the family writ large will decline. Second, I think in the last two decades, parenting has become unusually intense. Between 1975 and 1998, mothers added about 200 minutes a week with their children, and married fathers added even more. That means that evenings that used to go to adult friends now go to bath time and homework and driving to the 11th extracurricular activity of the week. Third, friendship networks are shrinking, especially for Americans without a college degree. You can't throw a dinner party if you don't have friends to invite in the first place. Hosting is turning into a luxury good. Fourth, and this is the one I find both most counterintuitive and most important, the home has become too much fun to stay inside of. Between 2003 and 2022, the average American added almost two hours a day at home, as our living rooms became a riot of entertainment heaven between the phones and the TV and the streaming video.

For 200 years, some people worried that machines would ultimately make human workers unnecessary. This never happened. The unemployment rate today is still quite low. Economists call this mistake the lump of labor fallacy, and the history of work keeps proving it wrong. But in the last half century, machines have done something stranger. They have made other people unnecessary to our leisure. Compared to TikTok, a dinner party is a terrible leisure technology. You have to match all those calendars and clean the house, buy the food, remember that one kid who won't eat eggplant, the one guest who won't eat gluten, sit through some awkwardness, and accept the risk that the night just turns out mediocre when you could have just turned on television in the first place. TV, by comparison, asks nothing of you. TikTok asks even less.

On any given Wednesday at 7:45 PM, the screen wins any competition of convenience. Every one of those choices might make sense on its own. I'd rather just stay here on the couch. I'd rather not put on makeup. I'd rather not comb my hair. But if you add up 330 million of those decisions, you get a coordination failure, a country where everybody's home and nobody's coming over.