Why Americans Stopped Hanging Out—and Why It Matters

Today’s episode is about the extraordinary decline in face-to-face socializing in America—and the real stakes of the country’s hanging-out crisis.

From 2003 to 2022, American adults 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.

Eric Klinenberg is a sociologist and the director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He is the author of several books on the rise of living alone and the decline of social infrastructure. His latest is 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed. And he’s not afraid to challenge the popular notion of an epidemic of loneliness in America. “There is no good evidence that Americans are lonelier than ever,” he has written. Today, Eric and I talk about teens and parenting, the decline of hanging out, why America sucks at building social infrastructure, and why aloneness isn’t always loneliness.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

In the following excerpt, Derek and Eric Klinenberg look back on the past two decades to examine why face-to-face socialization has decreased so dramatically and why younger people have fewer friends today.

Derek Thompson: In the open, I just went through all of the ways in which Americans are clearly spending less time together face-to-face in the physical world. I want us to start by talking about teenagers, and then I want to broaden the conversation to talk about adults, where I think our analysis of the situation is a little bit different and where I think you see the pictures being a little bit more complicated than I might have originally painted it. But let’s start with teens. Face-to-face socializing, according to the American Time Use Survey, has declined 50 percent since 2003 for teenagers, and we have seen this coinciding rise in sadness, anxiety, and depression. You have a teenage son and a teenage daughter. You are on the front lines here. You also study this as a sociologist. I want to give you a really, really wide platform here. How would you start explaining this phenomenon [of] why young people are hanging out less in the physical world and whether you think that has anything to do with the surge in mental health problems we’re seeing among this demographic as well?

Eric Klinenberg: Yeah, well, I love starting with teenagers because that’s basically how my life goes these days. Every conversation starts at home. I do have a 17-year-old son and a 15-year-old daughter. Their lives are very different. But they are wrapped up in all of the issues that you’ve been talking about on the podcast, and I’m really thrilled to be here to talk about them. I also should say I just finished writing this book about what Americans lived through in the year 2020, and a big chapter in the book is about the experience of people between 18 and 29 who made these incredible sacrifices so that older people and more frail people could get through this really horrible pandemic situation. And that set of sacrifices included hanging out with friends even less, going to parties even less often, not going to school—whether it’s high school or college or graduate school—and really closing the door on the social world.

And I think they are paying a price for that. So there’s a lot to discuss here. First and foremost, as a parent, it’s just become clear to me that it’s difficult to organize free playtime in the world on the sidewalks and streets. And on the other hand, it is very easy to give your child a machine and let the interaction, whether it’s social or educational or cultural and entertainment, happen face-to-screen. And that’s really challenging. I grew up in downtown Chicago in the 1970s and ’80s: objectively significantly more dangerous time than the time we’re living in right now. And I would say that between the hours of 3 p.m. and whenever it got dark out, no one on earth had any idea where I was.

There was no cell phone, there was no playdate. There was no formal, organized, after-school program run by a professional with insurance and a credential. There were sidewalks and parks and libraries and streets, and we were out in the world, and it was objectively not safe, according to the standards we have today. But nobody really worried about it. And I think the first-order point for us to make here is that very few American kids have an experience like that where the sidewalks and the streets and the parks and the playgrounds are there, and nobody knows who they are, so they’re governing their own social time. Big point [no. 1].

Thompson: So even before the pandemic, I think it’s important to point out that young people had fewer friends than they had in previous decades. They were going to fewer parties. They had less free playtime, as you’ve just described. There was less dating. The pandemic—and you acknowledge this, I just want to make it absolutely clear—was not an inventor of any of these trends, but it’s rather better seen as an accelerator of these trends, which might even go so far as to prove how significant these trends are in terms of worsening teen mental health. It’s like teens were already experiencing maybe several years of greater isolation, on top of which the pandemic mandated, for many of them, either at the parental level or at the local government level, even more social isolation. And this is just an age that is incredibly sensitive to peer interactions, which to me is an absolutely critical part of the story.

I want to go even deeper into this point that you’re making because it’s not just about rates of crime, to your point. The world was—at least if you look at homicide rates and violent crime rates—more dangerous in the 1970s, 1980s than it has been the last decade. It’s about an attitude toward risk, parents’ attitude toward the risk that their child engages in when he or she leaves the front door. Where did that come from? What do you see as the ingredients for parents being—the simple way to put this is—more scared? I guess the more multisyllabic way to put it is more accommodating of their children and more protective of their children in such a way that they are more fearful of them engaging in just free play in the outside world.

Klinenberg: Yeah, it’s a big story. I remember years ago, David Brooks had a cover story in The Atlantic, I think about “The Organization Kid.” And it kind of gave an account of the extent to which parents got anxious about the success of their children and had decided to schedule them for all kinds of things, so that this kind of idea of free, open time was, in his view then, a direct result of anxious parents worried that they weren’t using their time efficiently enough and that they needed to program their children to perform well in the world. And that involved all kinds of formal associations instead of informal associations. So that’s one of the arguments out there, especially true for middle-class and professional families. We’re just very worried about our kids doing OK. So think about the rhetoric about selective college admissions, which in fact affects a relatively small percentage of American children. Let’s be frank about that.

It’s like 99 percent of the conversation in The Atlantic and The New York Times and The New Yorker, and it’s a much smaller percentage of the population out there, but that is happening. I think also there is this change in the rise of what some sociologists call “the culture of fear.” We saw crime levels drop precipitously over the last several decades, but the rhetoric about predators in our midst and the danger to your child and the danger of all kinds of things [increased]. Not just the really truly terrifying stuff like homicide, but: Is the playground equipment safe enough? … Are kids playing youth sports in a way that makes it unsafe for them? Are there predators in schools? I’m not saying any of these things are true, just if we think about the rhetoric, the environment for middle-class children right now is different.

And I think there’s this anxiety that parents experience that they pass down to their children. So one of the things I really enjoyed and appreciated about your writing and thinking about this is you seem, to me, to be less swept up in the loneliness pandemic, loneliness epidemic issue and more attuned to the ways in which specifically stress and anxiety and, in some cases, depression become issues. And I think a lot of professional families in the U.S. have passed their anxiety of parenting down to their children. And then finally, I would say, there’s this thing that danah boyd has written about so beautifully, that as young people saw their free time diminish—not just after school, but even in school, fewer breaks where kids could just socialize on their own—they came to discover this world of the internet that they could control, at least for a time, without their parents intervening in the same way.

And so it’s not surprising in some way that children flocked to those places. But we’re definitely not talking about a post-2020 trend here. We’re talking about something that’s been happening in American culture for a few decades now. You’re totally right that 2020 is an accelerant, and it’s an accelerant not just on the being alone and social isolation stuff. I think it’s really an accelerant on the stress and anxiety stuff.

This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Eric Klinenberg
Producer: Devon Baroldi

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