Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over

gonzalohm

This may not be shared by other people, but my two cents. I personally don't like inviting people to my house (or going to other people's houses) because I already spend a good chunk of my day indoors (I work from home). Whenever possible, I prefer to meet outside.

Forgeties79

What a bummer. We have friends, family, and our friends’ families over all the time. 1-2 days a week. Now part of that is obviously we are fortunate to have the space and (barely) the time for it. Still, I want to encourage those who can to make the effort to use their home as a social hub. It’s incredibly gratifying. We get a lot of joy out of sharing our home with others. Eventually it’s really not that much work - I honestly find it’s easier/more relaxing than going elsewhere sometimes. Plus when you have kids it’s a lot more convenient than trying to wrangle them at the end of a fun time lol

andrewstuart

I get caught in the comparison game, the thief of joy. I don’t want ask my rich well off friends around cause of my humble existence.

EDEdDNEdDYFaN

Feel like part of the issue is everyone’s self imposed neurosis about not intruding on others. My wife insists on not ever asking to come over to someone’s house - she only wants to be explicitly invited. We invite people over to our place when we can but this leads to us basically never visiting any of our friends because they aren’t the planning type.

thih9

Article says "The share of adults who say they regularly have friends over has declined 70 percent since 1975", but this may not be an accurate comparison: > Until 1985, the survey included only married households. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDB_Needham_Life_Style_Surveys

watwut

> Putnam acknowledged that women have historically been the keepers of the family social calendar, planning the birthday parties and neighborhood potlucks. For any number of reasons, women seem to do better than men at making and keeping adult friendships and making plans with other families. But in the 1950s and 1960s, tens of millions of women traded their unpaid household management jobs for salaried jobs, and the family social calendar frayed, as men failed to pick up the slack. Being stay at home parent is super lonely experience, basically the most lonely occupation you can have. In most jobs, you meet people and you do talk to people without trying to. Fairly often, they are unavoidable whether you want it or not. If you are at home with a kid, you are truly absolutely alone, unless you organize something. Every other guy here on HN complains about Covid being lonely, but it was less lonely and socially easier situation than being stay at home parent. So, alternative framing is that women stopped organizing these as their need do organize them went down. And men did not had that need in the first place, so it did not changed from their point of view. And simultaneously, it ceased to be acceptable to be the kind of dad who spends multiple evenings a week with buddies, not really spending time with his kids.

lordleft

When I met my wife, I discovered very quickly that she had savant-level hosting skills. She is an amazing cook, she prioritizes space to dine in our home (we made sure to have a dining table in our NYC apartment) and she thinks carefully about the experience of her guests. It's a quality that I benefit greatly from, and I'm grateful to her for it.

zkmon

Blame the screens. Screens are blackholes that suck up your time, attention, awareness and senses. Screens are evil. They wake up the dead past as if it's alive and happening now. It became so much the norm, that people are afraid to face the real world, real people, real talking. "Dinner party? OMG, real people with real faces that force us to talk to them? Noway sir". Screens disconnected people from real world, from each other. I was trying a VR headset the other days and immediately threw it away, as it shut off my visual and audio senses completely.

lp4v4n

In my experience, most people are overworked, stressed and exhausted. I don't find it surprising at all that social activities have been declining. It sounds like normal mammal behavior in fact.

kieckerjan

Middle aged European here. I still regularly go to parties (dinner and otherwise) and I notice that there are two kinds of people: people who throw parties, and people who don't. This sounds like a truism, but what I mean is: there are people who regularly throw a party and people who never do it. I am solidly in the first category. I throw dinner parties, birthday parties, drinking parties, dance parties, midsummer parties, midwinter parties, game parties, etc. Yes, it costs time and money and is a lot of work. But what people (probably the ones that never bother) tend to forget is how unbelievably gratifying it is to get a bunch of people together, to feed them and to make them talk, laugh, dance, etc. Afterwards you are tired but also grateful and socially energized in a way that feels fundamental to my existence.

petetnt

Maybe it helps that 50 years ago people could actually afford to buy things like big houses where to throw parties at.

ozgrakkurt

Personally feels insane that people find this surprising or puzzling. You wouldn't be surprised if everyone was smoking and smoking rate was going up massively and then we had a surge of people getting cancer. This is obviously because of social media or other algorithmic applications. It literally herds people. It couldn't be more obvious how unhealthy it is, yet there is no demand for it to get outlawed and there won't be any time soon. It is pretty sad. If you think about the second/third order effects that it will have, it is massively worse than alcohol/drugs.

KoolKat23

Not American. One big thing I feel contributing to this is a lack of time. And the more strange unusual thing, many folks basically have "school nights", they don't do anything because they're going to work the next day. Perhaps work becoming more mentally intensive makes this more difficult.

tenahu

I wonder if another factor is how many people move around the country. For families with kids, forming deep friendships as an adult can be a logistical challenge. Many people have no current relationship with friends they made in college or high school

jagged-chisel

Money. In the 70s, a single income family could afford to host. Who has money for that these days?

bsenftner

I see this as a manifestation of the loss of teaching effective communication skills. This takes a moment to explain, so please slow down and consider this: before the cultural revolutions of the 1960's, general education included more emphasis on communications conflicts and resolutions of them. For example, every school had a debate team, and the various forms and rules of debate were common knowledge. Yes, this is true. Debate and watching people skilled at argumentative discussion used to be a popular form of entertainment. Then, during the cultural revolution of the 1960s, the best or the "stars of debate" all sided with the youth culture and not the establishment. That then triggered the removal of debate from educations, from entertainment, and from public life. Now, decades later we have the situation that groups of adults cannot form without conflicts and arguments that drive the community creation aspects away. We have created a culture that cannot communicate, because we have stopped teaching basic oral conflict negotiation of any form.

blodkorv

Swede here, I used to host a lot of dinners and parties. But then i realized that it was mostly me who hosted them and the few times i got invited there was an agreement that guest chip in on the costs or that it was a potluck kind of thing. Made me regret spending all that time and money on the parties i hosted.

ilikerashers

Families (mine included) are just too busy. Working, commuting, homework, trying to get some exercise in. Any spare time I try to spend it with my children. I always look at happiness in terms of pillars, social, family, work, spiritual. Work somehow has taken over everything. It seems culturally engrained. I know social media is a factor but while we all fall down the rabbit hole occasionally, it doesn't stop anyone organising a get together.

contubernio

This is very cultural. In Spain essentially no one throws dinner parties in the US style. It's rare to invite social acquaintances to one's home. These things are done - but mainly with family. Part of this is cultural and part reflects that homes are too small to fit many people. Most socializing is done outside, at a bar, cafe, restaurant, park, etc.

stevenking86

I'm surprised at this being correlated w/ intensive parenting. Modern parents ARE tired and parenting a lot. That's why on the weekends we invite our friends with kids over and the kids run around and entertain each other so we can have some "Just talk to adults" time with the other parents, maybe watch the NFL games. Even when we take turns hosting, we easily get over the 12x a year mark through this.