Ep. 1851 - The Loneliness Epidemic Is Real. AI Is Making It Much Worse.

Matt Walsh (0:00)

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Tax relief advocates, real solutions for real people. If you're anything like the vast majority of Americans, the following question will be depressing to answer. In a typical month, do you ever host people, whether friends or family, in your home to spend any amount of time together? I'm talking about friends or family members from outside of your household. Do they come over and spend time with you at least once a month on average? Well, the author Derek Thompson on his Substack recently reported on the latest data on how people are answering this question and how the responses have changed over time. And you can see on your screen right now, from 1975 to 2026, the percentage of Americans who host people at their home at least once a month has dropped from 42 percent, nearly half of the country, to just 12 percent, which adds up to a decline of more than 70 percent. So in just 50 years, inviting friends and family over to your home has gone from very typical experience to extremely rare. By the same token in that period, the number of Americans who host or attend monthly dinner parties is down by 62 percent to just 6 percent overall. The number of Americans who report playing cards once a month has dropped by 67 percent to 13 percent overall. The number of Americans who finish a book every month has dropped 60 percent to just 15 percent overall. The number of Americans, of course, who attend church at least once a month is down by 58 percent to 24 percent overall. This is a decline that's been underway for some time. Take a look at this chart here. These are the trends from 1975 to the late 1990s, which are compiled by something called the DDB Needham Lifestyle Surveys, which were cited by Robert Putnam in his famous Bowling Alone book, which you've probably heard of. As you can see, even before the introduction of cell phones and the Internet, Americans were already becoming dramatically less likely to host people at their homes or go on picnics or attend church or involve themselves in social activities in general. We've been on this trajectory for some time. Now we have data through 2026, which was compiled by a separate group called Data for Progress, which replicated the methodology of the lifestyle surveys that were conducted in the 1990s. Unambiguously, the new data demonstrates that Americans are far more isolated and lonelier than they've ever been at any point in human history. It's not just dinner parties and poker we're talking about. No matter what social event you think of, odds are it's become dramatically less popular in the past few decades. This chart shows how many Americans have done these activities at least one time in the past year, so we're not even talking about monthly numbers anymore, and it's comparing 1995 numbers to 2026 numbers. According to this data, only 49 percent of people have gone to a bar or tavern one time in the past 12 months. Just 46 percent attended a sporting event. Just 32 percent have attended a class or seminar down from 54 percent in 1995 Again, this is just over the course of a year. As you'd expect, more Americans are eating alone than ever, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2023, roughly 25 percent of Americans reported eating all of their meals alone the previous day, which is an increase of 53 percent compared with 2003

The problem is particularly common among young people. Another analysis cited by the New York Times found that, for American adults under 25, there has been an 80 percent increase in dining alone. Now, think about how bizarre and unprecedented this is. Total social isolation, which is what we're talking about, wasn't even an option for humans. Aside from like hermits living in the woods, for everybody else, it wasn't even an option until very recently. I mean, you couldn't just stay in your house every day, all day, you would die.