"Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America," writes Derek Thompson of The Atlantic.
It's a strange and troubling phenomenon. Social activities we used to do in groups, like movie-going and eating out, are now being enjoyed in solitude.
Social scientists have been studying the related phenomena of loneliness. But there's a difference between self-isolation and loneliness. Bisden's outgoing surgeon general published an 81-page warning about America’s “epidemic of loneliness," citing the effects on our mental and physical health.
Indeed, the UK has a "Minister of Loneliness" as does Japan. Some public health officials think that loneliness is the next big public health issue.
But is "solitude" and "loneliness" the same thing?
“It is actually a very healthy emotional response to feel some loneliness,” the NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg told Thompson. “That cue is the thing that pushes you off the couch and into face-to-face interaction.”
For Americans, their level of solitude is growing while the "loneliness factors" are diminishing. Although young people are lonelier than they once were, there is no evidence that loneliness is rising in the general population.
While the pandemic had some effect on this self-imposed solitude, the metrics show it has actually gotten worse since 2022. Washington, D.C., restaurateur Steve Salis told Thompson, “I think people feel uncomfortable in the world today. They’ve decided that their home is their sanctuary. It’s not easy to get them to leave.”
The privatization of American leisure is one part of a much bigger story. Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data, going back to 1965. Between that year and the end of the 20th century, in-person socializing slowly declined. From 2003 to 2023, it plunged by more than 20 percent, according to the American Time Use Survey, an annual study conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among unmarried men and people younger than 25, the decline was more than 35 percent. Alone time predictably spiked during the pandemic. But the trend had started long before most people had ever heard of a novel coronavirus and continued after the pandemic was declared over. According to Enghin Atalay, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Americans spent even more time alone in 2023 than they did in 2021. (He categorized a person as “alone,” as I will throughout this article, if they are “the only person in the room, even if they are on the phone” or in front of a computer.)
No need to go to a movie theater if you can rent first-run movies a few weeks after they're in the theaters. Why sit in a restaurant and wait for bad service when you can pick up your food and take it home to eat at your leisure?
"Men who watch television now spend seven hours in front of the TV for every hour they spend hanging out with somebody outside their home," writes Thompson. American females spend more time engaged with their pets than they do with friends.
Perhaps one of the problems is that we judge our self-imposed solitude based on a comparison to the first half of the 20th century. From 1900 to 1960, membership in churches and labor unions surged, there were more marriages than ever, and the biggest baby boom in history took place.
All kinds of gathering places were built: theaters, museums, concert halls, and playgrounds. But then something happened that gave us an excuse to withdraw. "From 1985 to 1994, active involvement in community organizations fell by nearly half," reports Thompson.
What happened in the 1970s? Klinenberg, the sociologist, notes a shift in political priorities: The government dramatically slowed its construction of public spaces. “Places that used to anchor community life, like libraries and school gyms and union halls, have become less accessible or shuttered altogether,” he told me. Putnam points, among other things, to new moral values, such as the embrace of unbridled individualism. But he found that two of the most important factors were by then ubiquitous technologies: the automobile and the television set.
The construction of highways and interstates enabled the growth of the suburbs. The exodus was spurred by rising crime and racial tensions in the urban areas. As people moved farther away from each other, their only connection to reality became the television set.
Later, through smartphones and the internet, our children may have connected to others but not on the vital person-to-person level that leads to a healthy, adult psyche.
Essentially, we're setting today's children up to fail as adults by not encouraging their socialization.
The decline of hanging out can’t be shrugged off as a benign generational change, something akin to a preference for bell-bottoms over skinny jeans. Human childhood—including adolescence—is a uniquely sensitive period in the whole of the animal kingdom, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in The Anxious Generation. Although the human brain grows to 90 percent of its full size by age 5, its neural circuitry takes a long time to mature. Our lengthy childhood might be evolution’s way of scheduling an extended apprenticeship in social learning through play. The best kind of play is physical, outdoors, with other kids, and unsupervised, allowing children to press the limits of their abilities while figuring out how to manage conflict and tolerate pain. But now young people’s attention is funneled into devices that take them out of their body, denying them the physical-world education they need.
We are, at our core, social animals. Denying our social side, voluntarily or otherwise, leads to depression and even physical ailments. What will it take to get us off the couch and off to engage with friends and acquaintances?
Self-awareness is a good start.
