This was a post on the GenX subreddit (from a Gen Zer) from just a couple days ago asking about if parties as portrayed in late 90s/early 00s "teen movies" were actually a real thing:
The responses from the Gen Xers were a mix of bewilderment and sadness, stuff like "What do you mean parties like this, it's just a normal teenage party!? I feel so ancient and also so confused by this question." The whole comment section is worth a read, especially the disconnect between how the Gen Xers experienced adolescence and how the Gen Z poster does.
It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of youth with social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection. I also disagree with some of the comments here that are bringing up things like "real estate, transportation, and lodging". Sure, those are issues, but you have families and kids in the suburbs today just like you had families and kids in the suburbs in the 90s, and the fact that kids today can't even recognize "basic teen parties" and question whether they are some sort of made up fantasy can't just be waved away by the fact that real estate is more expensive today.
> It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of youth with social media, smart phones,
You have to be careful with Gen Z threads like this on Reddit and Twitter. They are inherently biased toward Gen Z people who are chronically online and deep into social media.
If you spend time with kids in the real world, you learn very rapidly that most of them aren't on platforms like Reddit and Twitter. Of those who use Reddit, few of them actually post anything or even have accounts.
The subset of Gen Z who actually post on Reddit is small and a lot of them fit the description of chronically online, so it's no wonder that Reddit Gen Z people speak as if their generation is not socially engaged at all.
That's true. However, I worked as a photographer for about 10 years (quit about 2 years ago) and high school senior photos were one of my specialties, so I got to know a lot of teenagers.
Overscheduling is, I think, the biggest issue. Most of the teens I worked with had something going on almost every night, to the point where rescheduling due to rain or heat was an absolute nightmare. Sports were the biggest offenders. They would often have gym/strength training in the morning and then practice in the evening, almost every evening. Keep in mind I'm mostly talking about summer, so the school year itself was worse. Those that had jobs would do them during the day.
It's completely different from when I graduated high school in '06. Very few sports took over your life in the summer. Football had practice in the mornings for part of the summer, and that's the only one I'm aware of. I don't get the emphasis on sports. I played some in school but never took them seriously and if they required that much time from me I would have been out.
I was a HS teacher for about a decade. The demands on kids and families around youth sports (especially private/club leagues) is out of control. I had students, 14/15-years-old, going to their school team practice then club team practice, not getting home until past 9 pm every night. Families from three states away would enroll their kids in my school half of the year to play on the hockey team (staying with local sponsor family). Tournaments across the Midwest most weekends. These weren’t even future D1 athletes.
I was a multi-sport athlete. My sibling played D1 soccer. It didn’t used to be like this.
I'd like to understand this more. Families like this that I know talk about it as though it's as unavoidable as their mortgage, but functionally isn't this entirely self-imposed? Is it a lack of vision for an alternative? Are whole families succumbing to peer pressure? I don't relate to it.
We only have a 3 year old and a baby, but my wife and I have already argued a bit about this. She's all in on the sports train - it was a large part of her life growing up for her and her siblings. I, on the other hand, did a lot with my free time as a kid/teen.
I think part of the problem is that for people like her they can't imagine their kids not being in all sorts of sports, but they don't realize just how much the time commitment has ballooned. By the time it's too late they're all in and they're effectively in a sports sunk cost fallacy.
There is a happy medium between the "hotels every other weekend year round" travel/club sports and no sports, which is sports for your school or community teams. If I ever have kids I absolutely want to enroll them in sports. It will absolutely not be the travel/club teams that means us going to hotels every other weekend. I am probably naïve in thinking that it is possible to play for your high school without club sports, but I won't be traveling 10 hours by car for a U8 baseball tournament.
Apparently in our school you straight up won't be able to play in the regular school teams unless you do the travel teams starting in elementary school, because everyone else does it. Therefore, your child won't be as good as them unless they're an absolute savant at the sport.
They'll still get to be on the team, but actually playing? Probably not.
This is why I hate the trend towards these massive high schools that's been happening for a few decades.
I went to a small school. I was able to participate in a ton of different clubs. Varsity football players had big roles in the spring musicals. If you wanted to be a part of something and were even halfway decent one could have some chance of actually being a part of it. But when it's one varsity team of 50ish players for a school of 7,000 the odds of ever actually playing are slim to none.
Ah, but here's the kicker - we are a small school. My graduating class had 140, and it's shrunk since then. I believe the grades are now about 110-120 each or so. However, we have some very successful sports programs. The girl's basketball team has won state countless times, for instance. Either way, there are only so many spots on a team and if almost everyone is doing travel teams you don't have much of a chance if you don't.
The quality of coaching is also a factor. My daughter played indoor volleyball for several years on both travel club and public school varsity teams. The high school coach lacked experience and tried to teach her inferior techniques that contradicted what she had learned from the last club coach, so she got frustrated and quit the team.
The sad thing is that kids who can't afford to play in travel clubs will usually never have a chance to develop the skills they need to make the high school varsity team. And even the club teams are sort of an escalating arms race: if you want to make the "A" team then you'll have to pay for extra private lessons and position clinics.
Having two teenage daughters who are athletes, much of this will play out for them depending on how much they really love the sport and whether they are able to play it at the highest levels. If you listen and observe your kids, you'll get a good sense of what THEY want out of the sport. Support them in THEIR journey.
And remember at the end of the day, the most important aspects of being an athlete aren't one's performance on the field. It's everything else - learning to be committed to a team, forming life-long friendships, building positive memories, living a healthy lifestyle, etc.
Yeah, I did track and field in HS (not us) in a club, had to train 4 times a week 3 to 4hs each time, but I chose to do that. I did well in some competitions, but nothing large.
I do fondly remember those times, for the friendships, for helping build discipline, for learning how to properly train and exercise, skills which I still use today, not really about winning competitions.
Have you ever considered where you would be if all the hours you channeled into the sport you hated had been channeled into something you loved? Maybe you could have had the best of both worlds? Who knows...
But I totally understand what you're saying, I can't say I ever (EVER!) enjoyed going to practice, but I stuck it out and ended up making it to the Big Ten level as a walk-on. I'm very proud of that accomplishment.
It sounds like you had innate talent or aptitude that could be honed and take you places. Not all kids have that though, and can probably take it easy with sports and focus on growing other strengths.
It was less about having talent and more about developing in a great program - and that was just dumb luck.
I grew up in a midwest farm town that just happened to have a couple incredible coaches that ran exceptional sports programs. I also had older brothers who were better than me that I learned from.
I was less good and more tough in that I was pretty much the slowest guy on the team in college, but I could absolutely hold my own in practice. Unfortunately, due to the recent NCAA roster limits, there doesn't seem to be a place for athletes like me in college anymore.
From talking to many parents they want to give them activities so their kids aren’t bored or sitting inside on their phones all day. Sports is one of those things and lets them also be with other kids.
The problem is kids being bored can be a good thing but they are never allowed to be. When I was a kid the internet didn’t even exist let alone cell phones and the only rule was “be home before sundown”. Kids now have way too many distractions and structure and are never given the ability to explore their own world on their own. It’s been manufactured for them.
> When I was a kid the internet didn’t even exist let alone cell phones
I grew up before the Internet. Boring kids just watched endless garbage cable TV before the Internet. I'm not sure which is worse; maybe neither; they are each bad in their own way.
And then, when the kid finally has a few minutes of downtime, of course they're utterly drained and just looking for quick easy entertainment, and flick through a few videos on tiktok or YT shorts, with no time for discovering and indulging in deeper interests.
I can't stress this enough to new or soon to be parents.
Hold off on giving your child a phone as long as possible. Once your kids are old enough (your choice...but it's before they are teens), send them outside, shut the door, and go about your business.
Tell them to come back for lunch. Then send them outside again and tell them to come back for dinner.
I mean this in all sincerity. Don't plan their day for them. Make them go out and plan their day on the fly. Friend's house a mile away? Walk over and see if they can come out and play. Not home? Oh well, walk back or head to a different friend's house. There is value in this friction.
Don't be the person who gives your child a frictionless youth. The hard way is the best way.
I agree with this sentiment, but there have been cases of families who have had CPS called on them for letting their kids walk home alone from a nearby park [1]. It's frustrating to know that neighbors, schools, or authorities might interpret normal childhood independence as neglect and report parents to authorities.
Sure, there will always be edge cases. That's just how the world works.
Let your kids go out and ride bikes and you may end up with one getting hit by a car. Those are the risks every parent has to manage.
But if we let the edge cases dictate how we raise our kids, we end up with what we don't want - overly managed bubble-youth kids who can't think for themselves.
Unless you have some compelling evidence to the contrary, this cannot be dismissed as "edge cases" when cultural norms have changed across the board and all it takes is one complaint...
Pre-teen walking to a friend's house a mile away, probably semi-frequently?
Is that a risk or a near certainty?
Looking for online guidelines, I find this:
> According to an American Academy of Pediatrics survey of social workers that was posted in Science Daily, children under 12 years old should not be left alone for more than four hours. The social workers who were surveyed also concluded that child neglect will likely be considered when children are injured during that time period. --- https://www.tedbakerlaw.com/child-unsupervised-neglect/
You can give your child a phone with limits so they call you and their friends so that they can more easily meet up. Just because they have a phone does not mean they have to have TikTok on it.
Yes, that can be a problem for sure. It's incredible how few kids I see outside these days where we live. It's even worse if their friends are all on devices all day and your kids are hearing about that. Parenting is hard.
cultural norms in the US have shifted so much that this becomes impractical. The parents of the friend you just went to are not expecting that behavior.
>The problem is kids being bored can be a good thing but they are never allowed to be
It's not like they'd have a chance to get creatively bored without the (physical) activities. Instead, if they're like most teens, they'd dopamine-junkie rot with their smartphone or game console.
exactly that’s how I describe it as well, this world is highly manufactured. If you opt out you are mostly alone so this also serves as a kind of social circle
My son is starting 1st grade this fall, has been at same school since he was 3 and it goes through high school so, these are and will be his peers and it starts as major FOMO/it's the main way kids socialize outside of school hours. Good way to burn off their energies, etc. But it's also, they're young, we want to expose them to everything, they can find their "thing", etc. He does tons of non-Athletic stuff too (STEM, art, music, etc). So we've been playing soccer, baseball, flag football, basketball, lacrosse, swimming, etc. the last few years. It's getting to the point where some kids dropped a few sports based on disinterest or parent's inability to keep the schedule. We have one kid so really no excuses for us, but some people with multiple kids doing this is a scheduling nightmare. Anyways, what's already started to happen is we've brought in hired coaches. In no time, they'll be club/select league aged and people will faction off to do that. When it does, it will feel like gravity/inertia to do the same. Once you do, if you skip a beat, your kid is basically giving up the sport. They can't just join the baseball team in middle school, they won't make the cut against kids that have been playing non-stop since they were <6.
It is their entire friend group and becomes their identity. It would be hard to intentionally tell my son "you're not playing sports anymore". He may come to that conclusion on his own or coaches may cut him at some point; that's life. But, for those that stay active in it, the inertia of it is strong.
> It is their entire friend group and becomes their identity.
This sounds horrific. I did little leagues, grew bored (and nearsighted), randomly played outside for hours, did videogames (sometimes obsessively), built "forts" inside and out, went to / hosted parties, got into trouble, made amends (usually), family vacations, etc. Over identifying with groups and things seems crazy to me.
Maybe I'm overcompensating for my parent's (and at times my own) religious fervor. So much emotional investment seems unhinged.
Hopefully my kids can learn to enjoy their childhood. There will be plenty of time for serious commitments when they're adults.
> So we've been playing soccer, baseball, flag football, basketball, lacrosse, swimming, etc. the last few years
Swimming is great. USA Swimming has a well-developed system. Elite kids get sorted into the serious clubs where they swim with Olympic champions, etc. But the vast majority of the clubs are rec level and focus on getting lots of people swimming and having fun. Everyone gets a USA Swimming ID number and times are entered into the national system; they get tracked no matter what. Late developers can still be sucked into the elite system if they earn it. Your local park district swim club most likely is in a conference where they compete against other park districts in your county. The only problem is that there are so many kids and races that a meet probably lasts 5 hours.
Soccer is likely to get better. MLS and NWSL teams are developing their youth training systems like in Europe, with success as young kids going through these systems are playing professionally in North America and Europe. They are going to keep sucking the air out of the "elite travel soccer" scam and hopefully what is left are the fun clubs for the kids.
Baseball is likely to get worse. MLB took over the baseball minor leagues and reduced the number of teams. With fewer professional spots available, the "elite" clubs are more and more important to getting kids into them.
Basketball and football, same deal. Lacrosse? Universities couldn't care less about it anymore. It's a dead sport, many parents haven't figured it out yet.
In my hyperlocal area, lacrosse is pretty serious. There's a lot of private schools that fuel it. And, football is our main sport in terms of popularity but a lot of parents are afraid of injuries and don't allow it so lacrosse fills that void. The NFL driving flag football has been interesting to witness, the kids love it and it's fun to watch. I think it could get pretty popular.
Interesting that lacrosse is still popular in your area. The popularity in my area is waning, which clearly has affected my viewpoint.
I like flag football a lot. There are adult leagues too, coed and men’s only. The NFL is smart to push it; kids that excel can eventually transition to the real thing while the rest enjoy it and learn the finer details of the game and likely become bigger fans of NFL teams.
To be honest, lacrosse was popular here well before it became a trend a decade or so ago. I am in the affluent part of my city and every kid goes to private schools so I think it an aspect of that subculture. The girls play field hockey, it's really popular but my middle-class public school self had never even heard of it until we moved here.
I think a lot of families are also optimizing for university admissions. Strong athletes often have an easier time with admissions (assuming they're also good academically).
I remember having an interview with an engineering professor from Tufts when I was applying to schools, and one of the first things he asked me was what team sports I played. Being a typical nerdy kid I avoided athletics -- even though I was good at them -- and was surprised that he was so adamant about team sports. I didn't even take gym class after 9th grade because I figured out how to get an exemption, which, looking back at it, probably made my college applications weaker.
This was in 2001, and I can only imagine it's gotten worse.
When my son was in high school, the whole college application business astonished me--somebody a couple of years ahead of him applied to 18 schools.
The formula that I eventually arrived at is that the college application process is a punishment of the middle and upper middle classes for aspiring to the perquisites of its betters.
Very well put. So many things about the process are set up to favor the continuity of privilege in plausibly deniable ways. Athletics, service, alumni interviews, letters of reference; everything is easier if you’re wealthy and well connected.
Exactly. My daughter was able to get admitted to a good college as a recruited athlete, which helped compensate for mediocre grades. Regardless of the financial issues, that made the entire college applications process much easier and less stressful.
I noticed a lot of (upper-middleclass) parents (moms) fear that any none organized activity results 100% in their kid sitting on their phone/computer (they are not wrong on this point).
Rather than restricting screen time, admittedly not an easy battle (stating how it is, not how it should be), they outsource/circumvent that through organized activity.
Then there is the "competitive" nature. Can't have our kid just goofing around, (and I know the next bit is a bit exagerated and sarcastic, but often not untrue), I need the wins for my fantastic parent Facebook posts.
Lastly, non organized means unsupervised. Parents, I think especially in the US, are (thaught to) regard the world as a dangerzone for kids. Hanging around without oversight or protection, it is just time before they will surely get abducted, mugged, raped or murdered. Is this pure paranoia, or a media fueled self fulfilling prophecy? Can you blame parents for being overly protective for their (often only) child?
From what I observed about these club hockey players I saw growing up, mainly the kid loves it and made it into their identity. So the parents are probably feeling pretty forced into paying for it. That being said every family I knew doing this sort of thing could easily pay for it.
Often the kids do enjoy it, but I see a lot of essentially "pay to play" - your 10-yr-old playing tier 8 basketball shouldn't be going to out of town tournaments regularly, but club & private is big business and they push an NBA experience of travel, tourneys and gear - with the associated costs.
I mean aren't there also jockeying for college opportunities through school athleticism, and also a culture of over-competitive parents using their children's sports to posture against one another?
For this kid not really. He was always going to work for his dads company so for him the purpose of college was joining a fraternity and partying. I’m sure a number of people on that team felt the same way as it was quite costly and demanded a certain amount of disposable income from the family, which from what I’ve seen leads to a certain loss of ambition from
the kids who see themselves as set early.
> For many families, the money they spend on sports is an investment in their child’s future. Roughly two in 10 youth sports parents think their child has the ability to play Division I college sports, and one in 10 thinks his or her child could reach the professional ranks or the Olympics, according to the Aspen Institute survey.
To get into the very top schools, but to get a good education it's vastly more than enough.
Honestly, to the California State University and University of California system high school GPA doesn't matter at all. All you have to do is two years at a California Community College and do well there and you'll have your pick of which CSU or UC to transfer to.
Narcissist parents competing with other narcissist parents to be the best parents in the universe. Social media caters to their twisted world view where everyone is living a polished life of perfection so why not them and their perfect high-success family.
's/narcissist/desperately insecure/', perhaps? To a lot of Americans, the future really doesn't look so good if you fall out of the top 10%...1%...0.1%...
From a number of "what people did, trying to get their kid into Harvard"-themed articles in the past few years, I think it's a pretty common belief that awesome athletic extracurriculars are a secret sauce.
Though I suspect that lizard-brain emotions play a bigger role. Both self-medication attempts to get success by proxy, and also visually demonstrating (to themselves and their peer parents) that their kid is a Success Story at something.
Narcissists are fundamentally insecure people. They have a self-esteem entirely driven by outside perception so they engage in behaviors to get external validation.
You can't even make a high school team anymore unless you start playing club & private at a very young age. Lots of primary public schools (K-6/7) which is where I learned sports and got good at a few, often don't have sports teams anymore, or if they do it's a few passionate people with limited coaching and sports skills who just want to provide any opportunity.
The natural solution would be to increase the number of teams to also accommodate people who are interested but don’t want to or are unable to dedicate their life to sports. But if schools need to cut costs, it’s tough to do.
It’s a common trend in many domains: universities, housing, jobs. An underabundance of resources means people need to gear up to fight over the things that still exist.
> natural solution would be to increase the number of teams
Reminds me of my dad (b. 1945) talking about his HS sports experience in the early ‘60s at a large (~3500) Southern California public school. Not only were there varsity, JV and frosh teams, in high-interest sports like football and basketball there were multiple teams for every grade. Competition was still high if you wanted to play at the highest level, but if you wanted to play, there was probably an option for you.
Public schools are simply not funded the same way today
That's total into the system divided by number of students though.
Is there any measure of how much of that reaches pupils and improves their education versus the amount sucked up by middle layers, consultants, prestige buildings, etc?
It might be similar to the US health spend .. high per capita spend, low outcomes per citizens (compared to, say, Australia) .. with a rich middle layer of providers, insurers, etc.
My HS spent millions on a completely new athletics complex. our math and reading scores were in the dirt, classrooms had 70s era carpet growing crap I don't want think about, the band had 30 year old uniforms...but we had a gorgeous basketball complex.
Or, given the real-world constraints schools are usually up against, pick the worst participants instead of the best. Those who are skilled in a given sport are almost certainly engaged in the sport outside of school, and thus are taking away from those who are much more likely looking to learn about a sport they otherwise don't have access to.
> How do you propose to determine the worst athletes?
Given the aforementioned process to discover the best athletes (which, I assume, means tryouts, but the exact mechanism wasn't specified, granted), the worst athletes should be revealed in that.
Sure, there is room to game that, but:
1. Who wants to be known as a poor athlete where one is already playing at a high level outside of school?
2. Who wants to keep up the ruse of being a poor athlete throughout the year? If you are suddenly amazing at the sport after making it look like you've never seen the sport before, you won't be long for the team.
If someone who is skilled is able to play up that they are weak continuously, oh well. It need not be perfect. A best effort attempt to try and give those who don't have opportunities outside of school is good enough.
> Maybe another approach would be to use a lottery among applicants.
I graduated high school in 2001. During the summer before my freshman year, I signed up for the soccer team. We trained 6-hours/day, 6-days/week during the summer. I thought it was grueling, but I also understood that was part of what made our team one of the top contenders in the state. Even still, we were very much in the shadow of the middling football team.
But I put up with it. Summer in the rural south in the 1990s could be a deeply boring affair, without something to occupy us. I was easily in the best shape of my life at the end of the summer (I could run 11-miles in about an hour without stopping). But then, after school started, I met someone else who enjoyed the same obscure punk music I did, and who owned a drum set, and quickly decided I wanted to play music much more than spend all day every day on the soccer field. So before the first game, I quit the team. I think they went on to do pretty well. My band was terrible, but we had fun.
I guess my point is that—in 1997, at a rural school in the south that very much cared mostly about the football team, playing soccer in high school was still a full-time commitment.
Was talking with a bartender at a restaurant, also a teacher. She would get home around 23:00 and have to wake up around 5:00 while tendering during week days. Her daughter just turning 16 and is signed up for all basketball teams she can be in a hour drive radius. Her daughter was going to be working as a cleaner at the local hotel this summer. As she said, "Basketball is her daughter's job and volleyball is her outlet where she can be a kid."
Most likely is she living vicariously through her daughter's basketball experience or it is seen as an economic improvement, for her daughter or both. Her daughter likely sees that being a teacher doesn't pay well and multiple jobs are needed. This helps push for this "sports is a job" mentality.
Tiger Woods a the Williams sisters promote the idea of making it big if your just work at the same sport over and over at a young age. This is often a case of Law of Small Numbers.
Others might have the worst kind of parent. One that only loves their child if their good at sports.
My son goes to what I call "the sports High School" but he is not particularly athletically gifted, which has caused a lot of friction. I personally believe to my very core that sports are over-emphasized and that we are raising a whole generation of idiots who won't be able to do math or anything particularly useful except guzzle booze and sell used cars to people.
The recent NCAA changes vis a vis roster limits is only making this worse. Want to be a collegiate athlete? You better be ELITE. Walk-ons are a thing of the past. As such, kids with those dreams (or overly involved parents) are pouring their lives into their sport(s).
the over-scheduling in this and other cases is largely due to the fact that if kids are not “somewhere” they will be watching tv or staring at some f’ing screen cause that’s what other kids are doing who are also home. I have a large network of friends with kids and every single one of them over-schedules every f’ing thing due to the lack alternative (or better said kids are better of at ____ than at home alone)
I have to wonder if what's happened in the U.S. is something akin to involution [0] where increased scarcity in what were stable middle class environments leads to seemingly endless and fruitless competition. You used to hear stories about how students at Palo Alto High School work like first year investment bankers, leading to high rates of suicide. Seems like that's ubiquitous now.
"conditions in which a society ceases to progress, and instead starts to stagnate internally. Increased output and competition intensify but yield no clear results or innovative, technological breakthroughs." "more competitive with little corresponding rewards"
I swear the more Xanax people get, the more they overschedule themselves and their kids. I think existence of anxiety prevents people from overexerting themselves, and pharmacologically removing it just lets people, and the children they live through, take on more responsibilities, beyond what is healthy.
I think drugs like Xanax are playing a huge, but under-the-radar type of role in all kind of social contagions that we are witnessing. Every time someone does something crazy or even just a bit "off" I ask myself: "Is that person on drugs?" The answer is likely "yes!" Not illegal drugs, per se, but still.
I don't overschedule my kids. It's ridiculous what I see going on and I'm not friends with those "driven" parents whose motivations I simply can't fathom. There is a total lack of respect for basic academics amongst them, too.
I graduated in '05 and some of stuff my contemporaries were doing then wrt sports and trying to get to the next level was already crazy (playing for the school and doing travel ball as well, so many practices/camps/extra workout sessions) and don't get me started on the craziness wrestlers had to go through. I've heard it's even worse now as it has become more competitive to get to the next level, whether that's trying to get a good NIL deal or trying to play professionally
Except the data repeatedly bears out that younger generations are spending more and more time online and in isolation.
The idea that the internet remains the province solely of a few loner geeks is a total fantasy. Reddit is one of the most popular websites in the world.
Also, I was a shy nerd in high school who used reddit, and I still partied. Fuck, I made my own booze to take to parties.
Meanwhile my youngest brother - who is super social - graduated high school in the last few years and reports that partying is totally dead compared to my day.
Basically, the kids who were socially marginalized in the prenetworks era also did not get to see the parties the socially active kids were having, and would have wondered at it all. It would have certainly been also 'a new experience' for them! Except back then they didn't have a place like reddit to go to and wonder out loud.
Socially marginalized kids were partying too. The only difference was, we weren’t invited to the “cool” parties. These days, there’s definitely a lot less partying overall.
I was the 'coming-of-age-in-the-late 90s' teen and went to exactly 1 party. And it wasn't even the backup party, it was the cool kids' party. Outside of that I hung out with close friends and that was enough, I wasn't interested in parties.
When its snacks and BS while everyone gets hooked up and gets files off the local share to install SC2 for the nth time. It would take hours to get set up. Then more hours of play. We'd go for 10 to 12 hours sometimes, just to get things working.
This was one reason why my crowd loved the Xbox for lan parties. Just make sure everyone bringing an Xbox had whatever game, only needed one box/TV per four friends, and the autoconfig networking meant all you needed is a switch to get a few of them taking on LAN easily. Plug everything in and you're good to go with a crowd.
Ironically, these are still the best games for a LAN party. I set up a fleet of old cheap computers running Linux, loaded with all these offline and now open-source games. We had a blast and ended up playing mostly Quake 3 until about 4-5am.
We couldn't play any modern games, because every single person at the party would have had to have a Steam account or some license to the game, and have to log into it on my computers, then sign out when they were done... what a bunch of garbage. Nobody had their Steam passwords on hand.
With Quake3, you could sit down on any free machine and jump into a game instantly. I was also really surprised because some computers had the "official" Quake 3 purchased from Steam on Windows (friends who brought their own computers), some had the open source Quake 3 engine running on Linux, and some had official Linux clients... and they all worked together flawlessly.
I never went to parties like this. I wasn't socially marginalized, I just wasn't one of the popular kids. Popularity at my school was closely tied with wealth and family status. A relatively tiny group of people lived this sort of life.
I look back at high school and see several popular groups. Did one rise above the others? Not in an obvious way.
Like you said: some were from wealthier families, some were the athletes and their groupies (no surprise). But I went to parties of all shapes and sizes - some in those groups I just mentioned and some in other groups. Didn’t really matter that there was a premier group of socialites.
Were any of the popular girls physically unattractive? I doubt it. Popular boys can be popular without good looks, but it usually requires lots of money or great humour (class clown) or skill in a popular sport like American football or basketball. Look at a few "visually appealing" Instagram accounts. That will show you what basic popularity looks like, extended from high school.
I never went to parties in high school, but based on my experience going to parties in college and as an adult, I imagine your individual experience at the parties would be very different depending on your social groups, social skills, and so on.
Although even as a non-participant, witnessing a party first-hand would be more informative than the filtered version you get from Hollywood.
> the kids who were socially marginalized in the prenetworks era also did not get to see the parties the socially active kids were having
What do you mean exactly by the distinction between "socially marginalized" and "socially active"?
There was a social hierarchy where some kids were considered "popular" and others "unpopular", though really the distinction was more accurately between the beautiful/attractive kids and the average/unattractive kids, and certainly the unattractive kids did not get invited to the parties of the attractive kids, but the unattractive kids had plenty of parties among themselves, to which the attractive kids were usually not invited either.
Perhaps there were some kids who were truly marginalized, with no friends at all, but unattractiveness by itself did not necessarily marginalize you socially.
It's also true that it's "chronically online" GenX folks who are replying to the "chronically online" GenZ folks.
Even if we assume that "chronically online" people and reddit users are nerdier, less social in the real world, tend to be more introverted, less likely to go to parties in general, etc. we're still left with teen parties being normal for the GenX nerds and alien to the GenZ nerds.
As an old, chronically online, more introverted, nerd I can say that I absolutely attended parties in my teens and early 20s (only some of which were lan parties or BBS meetups)
> If you spend time with kids in the real world, you learn very rapidly that most of them aren't on platforms like Reddit and Twitter. Of those who use Reddit, few of them actually post anything or even have accounts.
Certainly true. But it's also undeniable that a huge number of them are on TikTok, Instagram and the like. I think OP's point still stands that today's youth have been affected by that.
Yep, I believe that at this point in rich countries people who are addicted to their smartphone and social media far outnumber those who aren't, at least in all age groups that aren't small children or retired.
Yep, and people get really offended when you bring it up, because so many people are addicted. I see it a lot in threads discussing auto accidents. Nobody wants to admit that a scary amount of drivers are on the roads using their phone constantly. I see it as a motorcyclist, because I can easily look down into most people's cars. My trucker friend also says that he sees a huge portion of drivers just on their phones constantly. Again, it's super easy to see into any car from a semi truck.
The addiction is real, and such a huge portion of people have it and don't want to admit it. When you have to have your phone out while you're driving, you have a real problem.
I get the same vibe from HN and other places on Reddit. Lots of folks are online in multiple places at all times. If I bring up a random internet topic in real like people give me weird looks.
> You have to be careful with Gen Z threads like this on Reddit and Twitter. They are inherently biased toward Gen Z people who are chronically online and deep into social media.
Wouldn't Gen X responses on those threads also be inherently biased toward Gen X people who are chronically online and deep into social media?
People change. Just because a Gen X is nerdy/chronically online now, doesn't mean they didn't party in the pre-internet era. I'm one of them that fits that mold.
I've probably withdrawn more from society specifically because I had the entertainment of being online, tons of knowledge to consume, a tool to build digital things, etc. I had none of that in most of the 90s, so I went to raves and keg parties every weekend and experimented with lots of drugs and even had sex.
Yes, and also society changes people. I think that's the point, and you allude to it:
> I've probably withdrawn more from society specifically because I had the entertainment of being online, tons of knowledge to consume, a tool to build digital things, etc. I had none of that in most of the 90s
The younger generations are suprised that we used to party all the time, because they never had a chance to live under the same circumstances.
I'm not quite sure if smartphones are still all that popular. With the rise of WFH, (and for Gen-Z, having a Covid lockdown college experience), most people are on actual computers and are sitting at home.
Actual computers? People don't have those any more. Not even laptops. They have smartphones and they may have tablets.
I'm over-generalizing of course, but that's the vibe I get. It's because many, both older and younger, entirely skipped the whole personal computing thing.
Anecdotal, but my 15 and 16 year olds, along with their friends, generally dislike computers and think they're inefficient, inconvenient, and too hard to use for most purposes they associate with devices.
In other words, they have no idea what computers can do, and they just want the phone things that are easy to do on the phone.
I've tried to teach my kids about computers, but they're extremely resistant. They just don't care. Their friends don't either, except for one who is notably interested in everything.
No, the legacy social media platforms are more popular with older generations.
Facebook is the canonical example of a social media platform that arrived after Gen X was young, but it now heavily used by Gen X while nearly completely shunned by Gen Z, with millenials somewhere in the middle.
Reddit and even Twitter are legacy social media platforms for Gen Z, especially younger Gen Z. The very oldest Gen Z people would have been too young to even use the internet when Reddit was launched.
Nobody should take a Reddit thread as some kind of proof of a broad generalization. But some empirical data is given in the article, for example, Percentage of 12th graders going out with friends two or more times a week: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!lQMo!,f_auto,q_auto:...
I think the Reddit thread is just a reflection of the reality rather than an argument for accepting that reality.
You can attempt to discount the Reddit thread, but the submitted article wasn't even based on that.
In highly developed countries, I think most people under 40 have moved away from Facebook towards Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. I thought the main Facebook users are (1) those in developing countries (messenger especially) and (2) parents in highly developed countries who need to get updates for their kids' school/sports/clubs. Is this still broadly true?
I wonder how the levels of engagement compare between an extremely online GenX person, an average GenZ person, and an extremely online Gen Z person would look like.
No. The “new generation” now knows what the outcasts and the undesirables of the “old generation” felt like. The more I speak to the younger crowd the more parallels I find which just means the “default” shifted towards a society of people who don’t know a different way, but are unaware of what goes on around them. The undesirables of the old knew, but couldn’t do anything about it.
It’s like people who are bewildered when newspapers say bankers got caught having a massive orgy of some 50+ attendees in a hotel in Switzerland. There is always a party, but you’re not invited. Simple as.
I knew the Diddy party charges wouldn’t stick because the aggrieved persons descriptions sound like commonly held parties in Los Angeles with quite a lot of consent involved (and courts aren't able to parse more nuanced aspects of consent, so people are left with a reliance on mutual cooperation)
this detail isn’t as important to people as wondering if I’ve gone to an LA sex party and whatever preconception they have of that and now me
Just like those bankers, and this thread, there is always a party
The type of people posting these questions on reddit today wouldn't have been at those parties yesterday, so I don't think we can extrapolate some overarching theme here
My anecdotal experience with two children who are young adults is that there are still house-parties (nearly) every weekend at high-school, but that there's a lot less drinking, and they're a lot more open and mature (i'm not sure i would have enjoyed being a trans kid in a 90s high school)
I'm not saying the kid who posted this is a 100% representative sample, but at least in my experience of the teenagers I know, childhood has changed drastically in the last 25 years.
If you look at some of the poster's comments there, he laments that even when he does go to house parties, everyone is just sitting around on their phone. I have certainly seen that.
Over protection and coddling are definitely a cause of lower social skills. When I was a kid, parents with leave children with a babysitter who was essentially an older child, sometimes just by a couple of years. Other times the kids would just be wandering around by themselves while parents didn’t care until it was dinner time. “Parties” weren’t just alcohol induced sex fests like they show on TV. Often it was 10 kids bunched around a single computer with $5 worth of chips and soda trying to beat a boss fight. A lot of those things are not only frowned upon now, but as a parent, could land you in jail.
If you wonder why children no longer grow up with a different outlook to life, then that’s probably it.
"It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of youth with social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection."
I honestly believe social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection does a lot less damage to the current generation than partying did to my generation. I can recommend the 1995 Larry Clark movie "kids" for a more balanced view how parties often looked like and which negative side effects they could have. Real life was not like in "American Pie" at all and that is where I guess Gen Z is getting their impression from.
> I honestly believe social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection does a lot less damage to the current generation than partying did to my generation.
Zuck, is that you? :)
> movie "kids" for a more balanced view how parties often looked like
Teens (and pre-teens) having sex, doing hard drugs and drinking liquor is completely unlike "how parties often looked like" for anyone I know but YMMV.
The article title mentions partying, but there's a chart that's just about going out with 2+ friends. That's a terrible thing to lose. I was a kid in the 2000s, and the vast majority of socializing was just harmless fun, not the extreme.
Digital socialization has replaced many functions of physical parties - Discord hangouts, gaming sessions, and video calls offer connection without the logistics burden or social risks. The question isn't whether socializing has died, but whether its digital evolution provides the same developmental benefits as in-person gatherings.
I honestly am having trouble believing folks think that digital socialization is anywhere near an acceptable substitute (vs. an adjunct) for in-person socialization. And tons of research supports this. Can't remember the woman who talks about AI meaning "Artificial Intimacy", where you have 1500 "friends" but nobody to feed your cat when you go on vacation.
For dating in particular, or socialization in general?
I think it's far better to be able to connect with acquaintances online, to this day I'm still playing games with friends I had in high school that no longer even live in the same state as me. Whereas had we been forced to only meet in-person, we likely wouldn't have talked to each other for years by this point.
The economic realities shouldn't be discounted. With more competitive conditions, the youth have to work much harder to secure the same opportunities relative to previous generation. With this comes the decline of partying or other high risk or non-productive activities. It's also true of adults - nightclubs are not as much of a thing as they were in decades prior.
> The responses from the Gen Xers were a mix of bewilderment and sadness, stuff like "What do you mean parties like this, it's just a normal teenage party!?
Well, it's a normal teenage party /in the US/.
I think in Europe, partying always looked a lot different (also different from country to country, here). I also mostly was bewildered by parties in teen movies from the early 00s.
I grew up very sheltered, my mom had anxiety and I was a single child.
I remember being unable to comprehend how in media, people could just go somewhere without issues to met with people or even go for a walk. I knew that was a thing, but I could not imagine what it's actually like and if it's real.
I grew up in the 90s-2000s in a place were people were very serious about school. Very few kids were getting drunk etc, there were very few couples and 0 teen pregnancies, but there was still a healthy amount of socializing. That chart showing going out with 2+ friends was still a high % then, and it matched my experience.
This completely changed after iPhones and Facebook became popular enough. It ruined even the regular socializing. Even the few boy bullies started doing this lame-ass cyberbullying instead. Sometimes I wondered where the cool kids were on weekdays, then I checked my Minecraft server logs.
I graduated high school in 2001, which sounds like a similar era, but what I saw seemed very different. So maybe things changed pretty quickly once computers hit the mainstream and I’m just a bit older than you.
At my high school we had several girls get pregnant. I remember a kid getting a DUI and he made a necklace out of the tube used to blow in the breathalyzer and wore it with pride. In my first class of the day the kid who sat next to me had a flask he’d be drinking from at 8am.
A couple years after I graduated news broke that the track coach was basically throwing Diddy parties (we’ll leave it at that to avoid getting graphic). He, and several others, ended up in prison.
This was all in a sleepy little Midwest town that many would describe as charming and quaint.
Though Minecraft didn’t exist until I was already in the workforce. Facebook came out when I was in college. Facebook seemed to be a thing with certain groups (sorority girls seems to have a lot of competitions to get the most friends), but no one in my group of friends in college talked about it at all. I don’t think any of them even had accounts until later. Web 1.0 didn’t really change society, but Web 2.0 shifted it massively, especially once Web 2.0 made its way into people’s pockets.
I worked at the computer help desk at my university. We would get calls from high school seniors, who got accepted, trying to get their student email address early. They wanted to sign up for Facebook. I always found these calls strange, and the sorority girls too. People were either really into it, like an addict, or they were completely indifferent; I saw very little in between in those first years. Facebook probably blew up way more with the mainstream once they dropped the edu requirement. After that, there was a lot of social pressure to join.
Social media has always felt like a proxy for actual social interaction. It scratches just enough of that itch to make people think they are connected to others, without providing any actual connection, as the whole experience is largely passive.
I'm younger than that. Smartphones became popular while I was in high school. It happened pretty quickly, so we went from no smartphones to having them everywhere within a year.
I think this article was way overdone, based on what I see with my teenage kids. They don't go to any "parties", but during the summer they are at the beach around 4x per week with bonfires at night. Almost 1/3 of their class (at a somewhat small school) is there.
And with Snapchat they know where everyone is. It's typical on a Friday school night they are scanning their map to see, "this group is at the mall. this group is at the football. this group went to her house." And then pick where to go.
Honestly, the current method of social gathering seems so much better than what I did in the 80s.
This right here is emblematic of the change in culture. When Gen X were young you weren't allowed to have bonfires (in most public places) either, but that never stopped anyone. Nowadays the kids are too afraid to do anything.
It is possible. How has the punishment for being caught with a bonfire in a place where it is not permitted changed over the last number of decades?
Or is it just the reduction in lead? That is what is oft cited as the reason for why crime rates have dropped substantially over a very similar period. Which may leave my framing of the kids being fearful to be a little off, rather the reduction in lead would suggest that they have better impulse control, but I am sure you can understand that the intent there is the same either way.
> Or maybe they are less of assholes in that regard.
What's the difference? There has been nothing to suggest that the kids today are afraid of fire itself – with earlier implication that they would have bonfires in parks if allowed to – so, what else could they be afraid of other than to upset someone else? Perhaps you forgot to read the thread before replying?
> And starting them does not make one courageous, just jerks.
Now you're going off into la-la land. Did not read the thread confirmed.
> so, what else could they be afraid of other than to upset someone else?
People, including teenagers, can and do act in pro-social and non assholish ways for reasons other then fear. Simple as that.
> Now you're going off into la-la land. Did not read the thread confirmed.
I did read the thread. The thread projects fear on them, because quite a few people on HN cant explain teenagers not destroying things or not breaking the "no fire in the park rules" by anything else then the fear.
Quite a few people here assume that since they were jerks, everyone young was a jerk and everyone who is not a jerk must do so out of fear.
> People, including teenagers, can and do act in pro-social and non assholish ways for reasons other then fear.
It is unlikely a hermit living in the forest, who hasn't seen another human in years, can find ways to be an asshole. So, technically, it is possible to not be an asshole without worry for others. But it would also be unusual to call such a person an asshole given the lack of opportunities to be one.
Realistically, to be an asshole is, at least in part, to show lack of worry for others. So, no, worry is a necessary precondition here. Assholes demonstrate less-to-no worry, while "less assholes" are more afraid of how their actions affect others.
> The thread projects fear on them, because quite a few people on HN cant explain teenagers not destroying things or not breaking the "no fire in the park rules" by anything else then the fear.
Yeah. No. You just made that up. The only comment in the entire thread you could, if you squint hard enough, take to be about fear is mine. It contained the word "fearful", which is a very different concept to "fear", but I'll grant you that it shares some of the same letters. Perhaps you'd didn't bother reading the entire thing?
But even if you did somehow read the wrong word somehow, it explains that it may not be fearfulness at all, rather greater impulse control. The exact opposite of what you are suggesting.
> Realistically, to be an asshole is, at least in part, to show lack of worry for others. So, no, worry is a necessary precondition here.
Are you sure you are not a sociopath? Your reasoning here id quote off and if trulu fear and worry is the only reason for you to not be an asshole or jerk ... I dont wsmt to be around.
And yes superior impulse control can make teenagers behave better amd not do fires where they should not.
I have nothing to do with this. Ad hominem is a logical fallacy. "Read the thread", as the saying goes, doesn't just mean look at the words on the screen. It also implies understand what is written. Reaching the point of logical fallacy proves that the words were not understood. Why keep replying before reading (meaning also understanding) the thread?
> Your reasoning here id quote off and if trulu fear and worry is the only reason for you to not be an asshole or jerk ...
Fear plays no part in this discussion. It is mentioned nowhere, aside from the inane ramblings that were pointed out earlier, and is unrelated to anything being discussed.
Worry is applicable. It may also manifest as concern. But either way, it is the awareness of others (or lack thereof) that is at least a precondition, if not a defining feature, of being an asshole. Again, the hermit in the forest isn't not an asshole just by virtue of not being unable to act out his assholish ways. It is quite possible said hermit actually is an asshole. But without a situation where worry/concern is applicable, there is no way for an outsider to be able to know, and thus nobody would label said hermit as such. To meaningfully introduce the concept of being an asshole (or to not be), worry/concern about other people also must necessarily be included.
> Are you sure you are not a sociopath? Your reasoning here id quote off and if trulu fear and worry is the only reason for you to not be an asshole or jerk ... I dont wsmt to be around.
per HN rules[0]:
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Even after high school, when I moved to the city we had parties quite often. They weren't quite as large, drunk, or disorganized, but people actually got together all the time. Some places were like designated party spots, where no one had kids or demanding jobs so it was a reliable place to head and have a good time.
My kids don't know anyone or anything like that. It's so strange. They still have sleep overs where they play video games and use their phones. That's fine in a way. At their age I was in the woods getting drunk and starting bonfires. It was fun as hell, but maybe something closer to the middle would be ideal.
That's pretty funny. I was a teen in the late '80s and only attended maybe 1 party as depicted in films and it was on a college campus where a couple of buddies and I scammed our way in by acting like we were college students (actually HS Juniors at the time). It was pretty epic. I know of a couple other notorious parties during that time that I didn't attend. I think the answer is a resounding "yes"--that crazy parties were actually a thing.
> It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of youth with social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection.
It's also fascinating how every generation in recorded history has similar claims about the next, yet somehow mankind has improved quality of life for so many.
Simply google (without quotes) "list of ancients bemoaning youth" and read millennia of similar claims, some of which could be used today and sound new.
Gen Z has worked far less and is much earlier in that career than Gen X, among many other things.
Incomes for each income quintile at the same age shows Gen Z as having more income than Gen X did. They are also statistically much worse with money and expenses.
You can dig all this out of historical Census data. Find personal (or household) income by age group, do the same for each cohort over time, inflation adjust, and it's pretty clear.
So I can certainly argue they have higher quality of life than Gen X at each point in their lives thus far.
I think it's such a huge mistake to think "well, it's always been like that, this is just a continuation of what's been going on in recorded history." Especially when the data tells a very different story.
For example, just look at one metric: weight. Kids these days (and, obviously, adults as well) are overweight and obese in numbers that are off the charts (off the charts because you barely had any obese kids in decades past). They used to always call it "adult-onset diabetes", which now they prefer to call it Type 2 diabetes because you see so many kids getting it, which is tragic IMO. To be clear, I'm not solely blaming the childhood obesity epidemic on smartphones or social media - I'm just using it as an example of something that has changed for kids that we should be worried about, not just hand wave away as "Meh, adults have always bemoaned youth."
Rates of teenage depression, loneliness and anxiety have skyrocketed in the pass 15 years, and when you dig into the data it doesn't look like just a rate of diagnosis issue.
Teenagers themselves (as a group) are telling us they are significantly more unhappy than teenagers in years past. We should listen to them.
I think it's such a huge mistake to cherry pick one or two metrics out of hundreds to claim something, while ignoring all the others, especially since you had to go outside the topics in the thread so far to bring in your pet metrics.
It was my favorite activity in the world. But that also makes it tough to "let go" when your 30s approach. Even when the hangovers get worse. I'm kinda grateful for the pandemic shutting everything down for a while. Before that I had massive FOMO when I "did nothing" on the weekend. I know a bunch of guys who did nothing else with their lives.
Hold up. GenX'er here, graduated college in the mid 90s. Are you telling me that college keg parties in the basements of off-campus housing is no longer a thing?
> the fact that kids today can't even recognize "basic teen parties" and question whether they are some sort of made up fantasy
While I agree there is a technology-driven loneliness epidemic,
what is so sacred about those "basic teen parties"?
People from any time before the 70s wouldn't recognize them either. Also, they were fictional caricatures written for movies, not real life, where teen parties were considerably less interesting.
I never saw the point of those. People, alcohol, what's fun about any of that? Tripping over your own legs with a bunch of similarly incapable humans while drowning in noise and fine particulates is toddler level fun. But with potential of acquiring adult level damage.
Some people want to make everything about "walkable cities." Maybe they can come back with socialization stats for non-driving-age kids, or those in Manhattan.
Something tells me that tightly packed populations in urban settings and their landlords are way less accepting of huge parties in an apartment playing loud music than a small number of homeowners in a suburb are about someone in the cul-de-sac having a house party playing loud music.
Responsibility, the ability to respond. Since you are able to do stuff, you also share responsibility, also for things you do not act upon, even if you don’t want to take it on. You can and you were definitely able to make different choices of what you want and wanted to engage with, and what you decided to ignore. You are an active part of society, if you want that or not.
I mean normal teen parties when I was a teenager were places for teens to get blackout drunk and make bad decisions. I empathize with your position somewhat, but it wasn't all good.
Not all parties were like that. Or at least I was never invited to those. We geeks stuck to LAN parties, got drunk, and played games. Since there were no girls around, we managed to avoid making any bad decisions :)
Another day, another well-meaning internet community falling victim to the creative writing major testing water on Reddit before trying to make it in Hollywood.
Ya I'm shocked by it too, said as a Gen Xer born in the late 1970s, occasionally a Xennial.
I partied for 4 years of college which is something like 30 years in sober adult terms. Our ragers were reminiscent of Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds, all of those old party movies that didn't age well. Scenes from Hackers, Fight Club, The Matrix, Trainspotting, Go, Swingers, Made, 200 Cigarettes, SLC Punk, Dazed and Confused, PCU, even Undergrads (a cartoon) were so spot-on for campus life, living for the weekend. Can't Hardly Wait, American Pie, Varsity Blues, Waiting, Superbad, etc came later, and I almost consider those watered down versions of the feral partying that happened earlier just as the internet went mainstream, but still canon.
A Friday night at my city's bar scene today looks like what our Sunday or Monday was. People half tipsy on 2 drinks, even though they're Ubering home later. The faint scent of ganja now instead of basements filled with smoke and first timers trying laughing gas. Nobody puking or disappearing around a corner to relieve themselves. No sound of bottles shattering. I feel like a curator of a museum now, a derelict from a forgotten time.
In fairness, I went to college in the midwest, where there was nothing else to do. Now the West Coast has effectively legalized drugs, awakening much of the country to the full human experience, and people have done the trips and plant medicine and maybe realize at a young age that alcohol and tobacco are rough drugs that tear you up. Which is admirable, but they also prepare you for getting torn up as an adult. To miss out on learning how to make your way home on drunk logic before you black out seems like a crucial rite of passage has been lost.
And it shows. In our country's embrace of puritanical politics like we saw in the jingoist 2000s, regentrified for the antivax era. In the worship of unspoiled beauty, idolizing of influencers, pursuit of financial security over visceral experience. In the fanboyism, bootlicking and drinking the kool-aid for every new evolutionary tech that cements the status quo instead of freeing the human spirit in a revolutionary manner. I gotta be honest, most of what's happening today is laughable to my generation. Blah I sound like a Boomer. Ok cryable then. We're in mourning. We worry about the kids today. All work and no play and all that. It's killing our souls, and theirs.
I guess my final thought after writing this is that partying is one of the most powerful reality-shifting tools in our arsenal. All of this can't be it. This can't be how America ends. You know what to do.
I remember a friend who was going to school in Boston coming to visit me at my college in western Massachusetts freshman year. I brought him to some off campus house in the woods, probably 200 or so people there, huge bonfire in the back, bands playing in the basement. We're passing a bottle of Jameson back and forth. Probably around 1 am everyone just heard someone screaming "that's my fucking couch!" from the outside deck as a few dudes tossed her couch into the bonfire. The flames were as high as the house and 15 minutes later the fire department was there. My friend couldn't believe what was going on, which honestly was a typical Friday night (aside from the couch burning).
I've lived in Brooklyn for about 20 years now, and while the parties still happen, most of them have become corporate. There are $50 covers and $15 beers, with wristbands you have to load a credit card onto instead of $5 covers and $2 beers in an illegal warehouse (cash only). The kids also seem to be taking ketamine a lot more than anything else, so they kinda disassociate and don't really dance that much at the clubs, whereas mdma and coke were things you ran into more when I was their age and people were not shy about grabbing someone on the dancefloor and grinding on each other for the night. They are definitely more sheltered and tame than we were as a whole, which isn't necessarily a bad thing I guess.
ketamine and whippets too. The whippets are getting quite worrisome. Basement parties are still alive and well, but yes it seems most venues have been demolished, killed by zoning or private-equitied. It's a tale as old as time (or at least as old as nimbyism), regulate something out of existence and then wonder where all the money, goodwill and life went. That and the fact that whenever anything out of the ordinary happens there's always a phone out. Always something to worry about.
I had never really considered partying as a reality-shifting tool, but as someone fond of regional burn events, yeah, it totally is.
Humans have partied for aeons. It's not just about letting off steam, it's about building social bonds, it's about traditions and rituals and marking key points in life.
This whole thread makes me rather sad, but in the same breath, makes me feel like there is real, actionable good to be done by promoting and helping run events. Not corporate pay-to-play curated experiences, which keep you on rails and only serve to condition more consumption behaviors, but relatively low cost, volunteer-run, do-it-yourself events. The latter, from my experience, have an absolutely infectious component of wanting to contribute, volunteer, create art, and drag others into the experience. But they are also a lot of work and not everyone is cut out for it.
It really has me thinking about lowering the bar to any sort of experience that gives folks a reprieve from the default world, however fleeting.
I think you need some sort of youth density for that. If you live in a low-density suburb where most people no longer have kids it's hard, even if you have a tool like the internet.
That is what she gets for having weak boundaries tho. And it is a thing that if you have seen, you will actively teach your kids to avoid - by saying no soom enough.
Teenage girls have a difficult time, saying no, and teenage boys have a difficult time, accepting "no." It sucks, but that's human nature. Being a teenager is clabbered misery.
I suspect that what they do, is have a hunk show up a couple of hours early, with a bottle of tequila.
Yeah and in 30 years a thought post on brainnit will appear in everyone's head and they'll ask Gen-Zer's did you really have a brain that was isolated from everyone elses?
And someone will respond:
It's really sad to me how we fucked you guys up and you didn't even have phones...
This article isn’t wrong, but it neglects to mention real estate, transportation, and lodging. A party needs a venue, and it needs guests. And the guests need a way to get to and from the venue. If they stay a long time, they need a place to sleep.
People these days don’t own real estate. Wealthy people own it all. Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes. It’s kind of hard to throw a big party without a big home, a yard, a big kitchen, etc. Small apartments are for small get-togethers that probably don’t register as parties.
Likewise, the larger someone’s home is, the more likely it is to be location in an area with low population density and little to no public transportation. Congrats, you can throw a party, but who are you inviting? All your friends are far away. How can they get there? How long can they stay? Can you accommodate them sleeping there? You aren’t friends with your neighbors who can party easily. You are friends with people on the Internet who are strewn about the world.
And of course, if you live in a major city with lots of friends, small apartment strikes again.
This is part of the reason we have seen the rise of more public events like conventions. There’s a hotel involved. It’s a multi-day event worth traveling to. A lot of people you know will be there. It costs everyone some money, but it’s not out of the realm to go a few times a year. Best part, nobody’s home gets trashed!
> People these days don’t own real estate. Wealthy people own it all. Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes. It’s kind of hard to throw a big party without a big home, a yard, a big kitchen, etc. Small apartments are for small get-togethers that probably don’t register as parties.
This is baffling to me. Most of the parties I went to in high school, college, and my 20s were in people's tiny apartments, small rented houses, and small yards.
Maybe expectations changed? Now it seems more like people feel the need to get ready before going out, to bring something, to pre-coordinate to arrive with a group of friends, to have a lot of space, to have everything pre-cleaned and ready to be the background in photos, and maybe even to have a meat and cheese platter that gets posted to social media. It seems there's much less willingness to just go places, be cramped, and just hang out.
I agree that owning real estate doesn't seem a big issue to me, but urban design does: I lived on both sides of the pond and in the USA getting to a party usually involved driving somewhere. That means organizing to go there with a group and a designated driver to stay sober, or getting a taxi (too expensive, when I was young). In Europe, I could just get on my bike and show up by myself. That lowers the barrier to entry considerably. As far as I can tell, urban sprawl in the US has made it even more car dependent today than when I was growing up.
Gen Z in particular is deathly afraid of having an earnest but unflattering moment captured in someone else's TikTok and distributed to the entire planet.
Whenever I watch movies/TV shows set in the future but released before the invention of the camera phone, I just insert some headcanon that future society realised the evils of uploading a recording of someone to social media without permission, and decided to ban the cursed devices.
The stakes are naturally higher and harsher than at any point in history. The government, all kinds, are reinforcing it, and governments are entirely reflective of society, there is no washing your hands of this responsibility.
Gen-Z is not only completely in the right in being sheepish, their predecessors are entirely to blame, and every attempt to claim they were not a part of the increasing surveillance state is a lie.
Even the older members of Gen-Z can be blamed to a small degree.
Of course there is a cure: penalties for publishing someone's likeness without permission. No one is getting media releases when they take these videos and publish them online but they are already supposed to. Make it easier to file lawsuits and watch these non-consensual non-newsworthy published videos disappear.
there are several videos with captions like "bro is dancing" on the internet where the one person trying to be themselves at the function is recorded. It's sad really, at many bigger name venues I see fewer people dancing now, though maybe it's because the drinks aren't as cheap as they used to be.
> were in people's tiny apartments, small rented houses, and small yards
Anymore this feels impossible due to neighbors, landlords, and police. I have so many anecdotes... I don't think it's "getting ready" as much as it's an intolerant society of chronically entitled people. Also, it's increasingly expensive to go out + I truly believe we're experiencing the destruction of "3rd places"
My 20's had a good amount of that too... but it was increasingly at odds with real consequence and risk. I'm just safer at home with my SO, in my space. It's getting much worse for younger generations :(
Good insights -- people now have to have their party look good for their social feeds: insta, tiktok, whatever. I'm forever thankful that I never had to even think about that, and even if people were taking pictures, nobody gave a damn about the background.
I go through this with my wife for every party we throw. She wants the house cleaned, table set, food spread ready, seasonal cocktails mixed, furniture moved around, decorations just so, etc.
I’m like here’s a giant thing of ice cold booze have fun.
I know this struggle, and the best I've been able to do is to push every time for limited scope. Let's just get pizzas instead of cooking 3 different mains and having a cheese plate, 4 bowls of chips, etc. Social media has really done a number on people (see also those omnipresent balloon arches)
In my younger days I threw 100 person parties in a San Francisco apartment - it's standing room only for sure, but so is going to a crowded bar. And I've cooked for 15 without a dining table - you eat on the floor wherever you can find space.
Now I don't disagree with your point; I'm not 22 anymore and live in the burbs and have a less full social calendar, largely due to the logistical overhead of finding my way into the city or getting friends from the city out here. But I do want to say you can have a lot of fun with a lot of friends in a small space with the right attitude :)
Instead of "don't disagree" please say: "I agree" it is proper English and not some stylized, holier-than-thou sounding, completely logically twisted up act.
Also look at the median purchase - it's incredibly bigger than 1950s.
The simple fact is that people still buy and own real estate, at pretty much the same rate for decades (a century?), and now end up owning much bigger places.
As the population pyramid of the US, which is already a "population Empire State Building", further morphs into a "Population Baseball Diamond", I expect the median age of all buyers to increase and the percentage of owners by age group in the younger cohorts to decrease.
Additionally, as the median age increases, because older people tend to have more money, I expect home prices to continue to increase.
Honestly, I expect home prices to spike by 2035-2040 as the current crop of 50–60-year-olds reach retirement realizing that their only real prospect of not starving to death in retirement is the main (and often only) asset: their home.
That will further stress younger folks, but people don't seem to care and anyone who expresses concern is denigrated as a communist so what is to be done?
Regardless, with the homeownership rate for "under 35" fluctuating between ~41% in 1982 and ~37% in 2024 "nobody owns shit no mo" is still false.
these rates tend to be described quite awkwardly. They sure read like the owner of the house lives there, but that tends not to be the full story of what counts to the metric
at least in canada, this would mean that 38 y/o are primarily still living in their parents basement, since theyre living with the homeowner, and that counts as home ownership. same thing if you're a roommate with the owner, paying rent.
Everyone gets quick and lazy dopamine from phones. Why bother with anything else?
Think about how much time goes into phones. Who has time to plan? Who has time to coordinate?
Phones are probably why the birth rate is declining too.
You don't even need a house to party. You can use a pavilion at a park, go out in the woods like the rednecks I grew up around did, party at the trailer park. Homes are by no means a limiting factor.
The Smartphone Theory of Everything probably doesn't explain all of the recent social changes, nothing is that simple, but it sure does correlate really well with all kind of trends since they became widespread. Casual socializing, partying, friendships, drinking, and sex all began to plummet around the same time, while loneliness and depression increased.
Anecdotally is makes a lot of sense as well. Most of the people I know, including myself, spend an awful lot of time on their phones and the internet in general. All of those hours have to come at the expense of other activities.
When I was in my 20s I spent an unusual amount of time (for the era) alone on my computer, but since most people were still quite social it was easy to hop into various activities. Now that nearly everyone is spending a bunch of time alone on their phone the real life social networks have begun to fray.
Some of the changes are for the better (ie. fewer teen pregnancies) but I think these trends are quite bad overall, without a clear solution. It's probably not a coincidence that political polarization and extremism has also increased during this time. Banning smart phones in schools seems like a step in the right direction, albeit a tiny one. Hopefully we can come up with more.
> All of those hours have to come at the expense of other activities.
It all adds up. Five minutes here, thirty minutes there. It all has to come from something.
The smartphone usage takes away in subtle ways too. Time spent idle is time that the brain can subconsciously solve things and work out interdependencies and relationships. If you put that time on YouTube, Reddit, whatever, then your brain is fully consumed with the dopamine drip.
Smartphones have added a tremendous amount of value to society, but it hasn't been without cost.
> People these days don’t own real estate. Wealthy people own it all. Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes.
If you look at a graph of home ownership in the US by cohort at various points in time (see, e.g., https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/08/homeownership...), while the rates are somewhat lower, between the highest point and the lowest point the difference is at worst 10 percentage points.
This sentiment strikes me a lot more as people in their 20's complaining that they're poor because they don't have the financial resources of someone in their 40's, despite having more resources than the latter did at their age.
> This sentiment strikes me a lot more as people in their 20's complaining that they're poor because they don't have the financial resources of someone in their 40's, despite having more resources than the latter did at their age.
Home prices have doubled over the past 20 years, twice the rate of income increases
There's been 65% inflation over the past 20 years, so to properly compare housing prices you need to multiply the 20 years ago price by 1.65. A house that doubled in price in twenty years only increased by 20% in terms of actual purchasing power (2.0 / 1.65).
That’s the absolute percentage difference. Look at the under 35 category, it’s literally down 25%. That means 1/4 people that would have owned a house in that age group don’t now. Under 45 is a relative drop of ~17%, so about 1/5. One in four to one in five people is more than enough to see an effect.
I doubt it’s the only cause at all, this anti-social (“Bowling Alone”) trend has been going on for generations, and probably has multiple causes. But the US housing crunch on young people is adding to it.
And this damn attitude of “the younger generations are just entitled weenies” about housing is about the most infuriating attitude in the world. My parents bought their first house on a single earners blue collar salary at the age of 27. That house, with almost no updates, now literally needs a top 1% salary and payments for 30 years to be able to afford. Don’t tell the kids to stop whining when they’re watching older generations gobble up their future in the name of preserving property values.
That's for the whole country. This site is very heavily biased toward people who live in major cities, where real estate has in fact become the purview of only the rich.
Short version of the history:
Starting in the late 1990s, you had a super-concentration of both good jobs and interesting culture in a short list of cities: SF Bay, New York, LA/OC, Seattle, and a few others. I remember growing up during this period and the whole cultural zeitgeist was "if you don't live in one of those cities, you can't do anything."
These cities have always had an allure, especially creative centers like LA and NYC, but what I mean is that it got much more extreme. It fits with the general cultural zeitgeist of everything centralizing and going to the extreme right side in an increasingly tight power-law distribution.
This was followed by insane real estate hyperinflation in those cities, of course, because if you try to take all the "interesting" stuff in the world's largest economy and a nation of 300+ million people and cram it into a few metros, that happens.
The rest of the country still has a lot of affordable real estate, less so than it used to -- RE has appreciated everywhere and not just in the US -- but it's far less insane than the top-tier cities.
People have a tendency to remember some time period when everything was carefree and you didn't have to worry about how much stuff cost and all this new, great stuff was happening. And then you find out they were 12 and the time where they think all that went downhill was when they were 20.
I've asked older people about this for this very reason, and they've generally agreed with me. There's always been an allure to big cities but it went into overdrive starting in the late 90s - early 2000s.
As for real estate prices, that's objective. You can easily look that up. RE prices went insane starting in the 2000s with the 2008 crash only being a brief pull-back in a long bull run. You can also clearly see the divergence with big top-tier cities appreciating at a much faster rate than smaller cities. You can see it in the numbers.
Look into the origin of early personal computers. They're from all over: Albuquerque (MITS), Dallas (TI, Tandy), Boston (DEC), Miami (IBM PC), Philadelphia (Commodore), Seattle (several), etc. In the early 2000s if we re-did the PC revolution it would all be from the SF Bay, because by then if you were doing anything cutting edge in computing it had to be in the Bay Area.
The general feeling of "things were better and looking more upward in the 90s" is pretty common across generations. 9/11 was kind of the 21st century's market crash of '29
> "We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat," bin Laden said.
> He also said al Qaeda has found it "easy for us to provoke and bait this administration."
> "All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations," bin Laden said.
> As part of the "bleed-until-bankruptcy plan," bin Laden cited a British estimate that it cost al Qaeda about $500,000 to carry out the attacks of September 11, 2001, an amount that he said paled in comparison with the costs incurred by the United States.
> "Every dollar of al Qaeda defeated a million dollars, by the permission of Allah, besides the loss of a huge number of jobs," he said. "As for the economic deficit, it has reached record astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars.
> "It is true that this shows that al Qaeda has gained, but on the other hand it shows that the Bush administration has also gained, something that anyone who looks at the size of the contracts acquired by the shady Bush administration-linked mega-corporations, like Halliburton and its kind, will be convinced.
> "And it all shows that the real loser is you," he said. "It is the American people and their economy."
> As for President Bush's Iraq policy, Bin Laden said, "the darkness of black gold blurred his vision and insight, and he gave priority to private interests over the public interests of America.
> "So the war went ahead, the death toll rose, the American economy bled, and Bush became embroiled in the swamps of Iraq that threaten his future," bin Laden said.
It is really strange to read complaints that the vast vast majority of 20 somethings have no chance of competing against older established households in the housing market.
I would hope so, otherwise that would mean the country/locale is so bad that older households are packing their bags and fleeing.
So the most desirable properties, such as large SFHs, townhouses, penthouses, etc… within a short driving distance of an attractive city will likely be owned by the latter, by definition.
It's not a matter of competition around current supply, it's a complaint about policy that has lead to a decline in what a 20-something can purchase over time.
The same managers - that then require asses in seats, keeping downtown valuable as investment, also own the mansion within driving distance. Might there be the remote possibility, of a no-win-scenario for the young, which results in violence? No way.
> It is really strange to read complaints that the vast vast majority of 20 somethings have no chance of competing against older established households in the housing market.
Not to mention Private Equity and huge real estate investment firms that vacuum up a significant (if small) number of homes. Even if that 20 something could scrape together a 20% down payment and make an offer for asking price, they're going to get beaten by some corporation buying with cash.
I'm not convinced. I live in Berlin and everyone is living in a flat, yet I've had my fair share of home parties, even in small two room apartments where half the party spilled out to the stairwell.
I'm pretty sure Berlin has public transportation. I have it here in Trondheim, Norway - but only one town that I've lived in the states had busses. They didn't run all night, on Sunday, nor did they visit all areas of the somewhat small town. (I'm from the US, lived more places there than I have in Norway)
Other places had taxis (that you couldn't order ahead of time to get to work on time) and some had none until they uber/lyft. (Don't know the current situation).
I'm going to guess the other thing Berlin has is safe areas to walk. I can go to a party and walk home, safely on walking paths complete with shortcuts, without even being harassed by the police and risk getting arrested and in jail for the night (for public intoxication). None of these were luxuries I had in the states.
And I'll say that yes, I've been in some small apartments - but only some folks with small apartments can host. You probably have no clue how many would host if they only had enough space, but a small apartment with 2 adults that have hobbies limits things.
Trondheim also has a university (which increases the odds of a party happening), and one could also walk across the entire city in less than an hour :). Most cities in the US suffer from being designed around cars, but that has not changed in the last 50 years, so I don't think it explains the decline.
It's been years, but I hope Den Gode Nabo is still fun.
Part of the reason you can walk across the city in this time is because it is really walkable. I'm from the Midwest - Trondheim is the biggest city I've lived in but more walkable than any of them. I'll add that the "across the entire city in less than an hour" isn't as true as it once was, especially when you consider that places like Klæbu are part of the city now and the population has grown. Byåsen would take me over an hour to walk to.
Den Gode Nabo is still about, but its been years since I've been there :)
People travel to Berlin to go party in clubs, not for home parties.
Partying in someone's apartment is a thing in probably every reasonably sized city in Europe, not just Berlin. Although you should probably alert your neighbours.
you could alert your neighbors, or better yet, invite them. alerting them is nice, but they could still get annoyed and complain, but someone at the party isn't going be doing much complaining
I don't think Berlin life corresponds much to USA life in this regard. We mostly have suburban sprawl and many areas that would be similarly dense, are not very populated with children/teens (because parent's often move to the suburbs)
Thank you for mentioning this! There's this weird, persistent meme that large corporations are buying up all the housing and nobody owns homes anymore, which is fundamentally not supported by the data.
There are shifting trends in generational home ownership rates, but these are still just initial trends we're seeing. If you look at the data [0] owner occupied has gone down from the 2000s housing bubble, but in the grand scheme of things is not even particularly low.
People also have this mistaken belief that investors like Black Rock are buying up huge swaths of property, when in reality most "investment" properties are bought by families and individuals, consider anyone who know who owns an AirBNB rental or other rental property, they would be considered "investors".
Most Americans still live in a house, and own that house (or at least, some member of their household owns it).
I don't know about the United States, but in (parts of) Europe it is the case. "Nobody owns homes any more" is an exaggeration of course, but things are not alright in the housing market, in part because private corporations are buying up quite a large percentage of the housing stock to rent. I think in Ireland it's about half.
Like I said, I don't know about the US. It's a big place and you're probably taking too much of a "grand scheme of things" view here. Aside from geographical diversity, total % of home ownership doesn't change that fast – lots of older people already own homes, their children often inherit those homes. Houses aren't like hotdog sales and numbers change slowly.
What matters more is how much does an average 25 or 30 year old pay in housing costs? What hope does someone with a decent (but not exceptionally well-paid) job have of purchasing a house? A single % of home ownership across the entire population doesn't really capture that. Doubly so for such a large country as the US. I'm sure there are affordable homes out in the sticks, but also ... no jobs. That might work for the remote software dev, but not everyone is a software dev.
In Ireland the total housing ownership has fallen, but not dramatically. However, the reality for people not already having a home is quite bleak. Buying a house now is significantly more expensive than it was a decade or two ago, as is renting. I could buy an apartment on my own ten years ago with a salary that really wasn't all that great. I'd have no hope today. My rent today is about three and a half times what it was 15 years ago. There is a generation of working 20 and 30-year old who are still living at home because they can't really afford to move out.
> "Nobody owns homes any more" is an exaggeration of course, but things are not alright in the housing market, in part because private corporations are buying up quite a large percentage of the housing stock to rent. I think in Ireland it's about half.
This is a _really_ popular meme, but it's not true. About 50% of new homes are bought by owner-occupiers, about 25% by local authorities and approved housing bodies (https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/housing/local-authorit...), 10% pension funds and institutions (these are the 'private corporations' you refer to), and the remainder are small landlords, holiday homes etc etc.
I think sometimes people see "50% of new homes are bought by owner occupiers" and read it to mean "and thus the other 50% are bought by evil corporations" (people also tend to forget about the 'new' bit; second-hand homes are much more likely to be bought by owner-occupiers, as REITs and pension funds largely don't want to touch them, and nor do approved housing bodies; local authorities do sometimes buy individual second-hand homes, usually from private landlords), but really the bulk of the remainder is social housing.
The ridiculous rents are driven by the fact that we're just not building enough homes. Not that we're not building a lot; we have one of the highest per capital rates of homebuilding in the OECD, but there was a period of 7 or 8 years where we built almost nothing, and that's a really hard gap to bridge.
In Ireland, approximately 41% of young adults aged 18 to 34 live with their parents as of 2024. It was 32% in 2011. This is an economic abhorration that has stolen significant independent adult lifespan from an entire generation.
This is caused by an Irish cultural distaste for apartments - as they're generally not setup for modern living, are typified by poor soundproofing and insulation, and marred by fire insulation and other scandals - leading to a decreased stock. Include the Help-To-Buy scheme applicable only to new-build houses on greenfield estates, and the HAP social-welfare payment which set an artificial floor on rents for apartments, and its the case that the average apartment rent is 1.5-2x the cost of servicing the mortgage at a 90% LTV.
This results in an average rent in Dublin of €2,500, with Open-market rents in the capital rising at annual rate of 5.2%. The most recent median (50th percentile) salary is €43,221, which comes from a 2023 CSO report. That's a monthly net salary of €3,000 per person.
The National Asset Management Agency, set up in the recession to take on all the in-default property and babysit it till prices rose again, has a huge part to play. Combine this with a non-fit-for-purpose Planning and Appeals process, and you literally have builders suing the government for blocking developments.
As of November 1st 2024, there were just over 2,400 homes available to rent across the ENTIRE COUNTRY OF IRELAND, down 14 per cent on the same date a year previously and well below the 2015-2019 average of almost 4,400.
All of this laid the foundations for disaster. Now the increased materials and energy costs since Covid-19, combined with a relative collapse in our building sector prior, have meant that building apartments in Dublin has largely become commercially unfeasible, as construction costs are now higher than what buyers are willing to pay.
> In Ireland, approximately 41% of young adults aged 18 to 34 live with their parents as of 2024.
This is wild. Can I safely assume that this is inversely correlated to marriage rates (and age of first child)? I assume that it looks like Italy. "Up next: Demographic crisis!"
I do agree that Ireland has experienced a massive change in house prices from 15 years ago, but 15 years ago was the bottom of a bust after the boom so potentially not the right comparison point.
I do mostly agree with your points, and it's really bad but it's important to contextualise some of those points.
One important data point is that houses have become much more expensive compared to income in the last decades. When I lived in CA, my plumber neighbor told me he bought his house in the 70s for 80000 on a salary of 40000. Today he would probably pay 800000 for the same house but make maybe 100000 or a little more.
Houses today are vastly larger. Cost/sq ft in all but the few most expensive places has been nearly constant under inflation adjusted price for an incredibly long time. A huge majority of the population lives in such places.
Prices change due to inflation among other things, which is over 50 % from that time period. And given that the median house age (not median age of sold house!) is 40 years, you did buy a much newer house than the majority of people have.
A few years back, median age of sold house was 27 years. So by that metric you bought even a newer house than the majority of house sales.
Your 1997 house is almost certainly much larger than the median 1950 house.
And, your single data point in no way invalidates aggregate statistics.
You can't buy on the west coast for a quarter million. A house big enough to start a family will likely start at a half million, and in some communities will come with hefty tax burdens.
in 2025 anything vaguely desirable in a coastal-ish city is starting at more like 600-700k. actual decent houses will be 1MM or more.
the folks in those areas, if you owned a house for the last 20 years, are now richer than ever due to that property appreciating. but the younger generation is absolutely screwed
If there is a spare bedroom in your HCOL location, renting that out lets you get some incoming cash flow without having to move away to a LCOL location.
the higher prices are affected by the corporate buying of single family homes. for every home a corp buys, that's one less for individuals to buy. if the number of buyers remains the same but fewer homes are available, prices go up--seller's market. yes, prices go up adjusted for..., but inventory more competitively sought. the other issue is that the average buyer is looking to buy with financing while corps are paying cash. that makes for such a smoother transition for the seller that it is hard for them to turn down cash offers.
after corps, we have foreign buyers also coming in with cash offers. i know of one specific house that is empty for the majority of the year purchased by foreign owners specifically for their kid to live while attending college. the kid chose to not go to that school, so the house sits empty except for when some property manager comes by to "check in" on the place.
so while this thread is discussing still showing decent ownership percentages, those numbers are glossing over some of the "trends" in modern real estate.
Restrictive zoning laws preventing construction in coastal cities is also a major factor. The cities which see the greatest declines in rents have the greatest increases in supply.
> affected by the corporate buying of single family homes
> after corps, we have foreign buyers also coming in with cash offers
As someone mentioned earlier in the thread, these are memes that are not actually backed by data - commonly perpetuated by groups that blame most issues on billionaires/corporations/investment firms.
So you're insinuating that the specific example of a house sitting empty owned by a foreign buyer is made up?
In my neighborhood specifically, there are homes being bought not by single families but specifically buy management companies so they can then rent the property. To deny this happens is just as much of a stick your head in the sand meme as what you are accusing me of.
Management companies will only buy a house if they think they can profit on it, and the price of the house is a cost for them too. This links the affordability of both types of housing: low rents can't support expensive real estate, and vice versa. The rental payments have to pay for the management company's mortgage.
So you're insinuating that the specific example of a house sitting empty owned by a foreign buyer is made up?
I'm sure that happens occasionally. It's not nearly as significant as exclusionary zoning and other bad policies that prevent housing from being built.
In my neighborhood specifically, there are homes being bought not by single families but specifically buy management companies so they can then rent the property
Even in that case, the homes are still on the market.
High interest with low price has the advantage that you can decide to pay more into the principal, reduce the interest you are paying and so reduce the total amount you are paying. You can’t do that with high price and low interest.
At 18% interest which happened in the 70s your yearly payments would have been 14468.02 or 36% of your income. A couple years ago you could get 3% rates and so your payment on that house would be 40473.98 or 40% of your income, not much difference (and likely the house is larger). At todays 6% interest the payment is 57556.85 or 57% of your income and so not affordable, but this is a very recent thing.
Inflation is a factor in a few years but never today. Now inithe 1970s high inflation meant that a house you can barely afford becomes a small part of the budget in a couple years while the small inflation of today means a house you can barely afford today is still a big part of the budget in 5 years - but that is not a consideration of today.
It absolutely is a massive factor; because people plan a few years ahead.
Consider how much it changes what you can afford if you save one year worth of payments in each case.
There is also less need to get the maximum possible loan if house prices are lower as a ratio to income.
These are the numbers my neighbor gave me. No idea how accurate they are. I think it’s well known that the average house price to income ratio has gone up a lot in the last decades.
Yes, it’s surprised me how this meme was everywhere in the comments while the data does not support it. I’d bet it’s splashy headlines in news outlets. Important to correct it so that policy is focused on what’s most effective.
It's another example of mistaking the current trading trends for the overall asset reality. Like NFTs, TSLA, and house prices, a relatively small amount of daily trading money can move the "market cap" quite a lot.
And those old folks that took their home equity and used it to buy property for an AirBNB are in fact an example of the rich/old folks screwing the young generation hard. (Other examples: vote to reduce taxes, to increase tuition, stop the free market from building more housing, do nothing on global warming, let the economy be swallowed by health care and financialized scams). As are the people that own and rent 3 houses, while their grandkids have to move far away. (Disclaimer: I live in San Jose, and my adult kids will never be able to live near me).
> There's this weird, persistent meme that large corporations are buying up all the housing and nobody owns homes anymore, which is fundamentally not supported by the data.
They are and the trend is there. The housing market moves slowly and it takes time to chip away enough at the larger stat. Once the boomer's age out, even with wealth and asset transfer, let's revisit this and see how it looks. I'd bet 2/3 ownership looks more like 1/2 or less by then, which is a significant drop and it probably will only continue from there.
Owning an apartment isn’t materially different than renting an apartment here. It’s sometimes better as many apartments have free or rentable spaces available for parties as a selling point, but rarely can you use that space late in the evening.
Owning a home in an HOA area can drastically cut down on what kinds of parties you can host.
To some extent but there are differences. You have housing stability, a fixed price going forward, the ability to renovate most of the internals, and the ability to affix things to the walls without worrying about marks when you have to move out.
This is a detail conveniently left out by home owners justifying their purchase, especially if they overpaid and have a higher interest rate on their mortgage on top of it. With a mortgage, the amount you pay is the expected floor you'll encounter, whereas with rent, the amount you pay is the maximum you'll deal with, at least for the duration of the lease agreement.
Renting honestly can be a better deal, especially if you have the discipline to stick excess money in the market consistently. In fact, your returns are likely better than just using a house as a forced savings account. In my neck of the woods, we have seen rental inversion too.
> This is a detail conveniently left out by home owners justifying their purchase
I mean you can phrase it this way. Or you can phrase it as homeowners are willing to play a premium for stability / forced savings. (And to be less generous, homeowners may be getting cheaper access to capital than otherwise available to a renter; espsecially as the homeowner locks in ~2% interest rate while a margin loan has increase to 10+% [1]).
However, for markets with low construction and strong demand I'm pretty sure home ownership comes out ahead. Like look at housing prices in the bay area historically vs current rents. That said, you need a handicap'd rental market for renting to be worse so the general situation is it's better _iff_ you invest the difference.
I will say, one huge advantage for home ownership over renting is when you are in a dual income household and have kids. Your lifestyle isn't going to be as compatible with moving around constantly trying to find a good deal (like I'm able to as a single person). And if you do plan to stay put for 10 years or so, you will most definitely come out ahead. But you really need to be in the right mindset and phase of your life for this to truly make sense. I often times see others not really ready to settle down rush and buy a home, only to end up regretting the decision a few years down the line, sometimes even sooner.
I will also note, that the notion of having access to a cheap line of credit, like a HELOC, can be a fantastic tool when used correctly. But... I'm also seeing folks abuse this to keep up with the Joneses. And when times get tough, they won't be able to pivot and might end up defaulting and then losing their home in the process.
The overall state of the economy will still need another major shakedown before those elements of society get their wake-up call. It sorta started happening with Liberation Day, but we bounced back rather quickly... so who knows when that would happen.
How many of that 2/3 is households that have owned the home for 20+ years—ie, since before the subprime crash?
How many of that 2/3 is households of people 65+? And how many is people under 30? Partying is still largely a young people's game, and even if your "household" owns the home you live in, if that's your parents or grandparents, you're much less likely to be hosting parties there.
yeah, as an East European, it's crazy that our real estate prices are basically the same as the non-super expensive US cities, and we make like one-fifth the salary.
In fact I just checked and the ratio of avg salary to real estate prices is about the same as in New York.
My sister and her husband throw a pretty great annual Halloween party at the house they rent which is 1-2 hours from the nearest city and a good 15-20 minutes from the nearest town.
I don't think the real estate situation helps but I think there's a deeper social problem driving both of those effects.
No, owning a house does not give you more license to throw a party. Not owning a car never stopped anyone determined to go to a party. A place to sleep? What kind of party are you imagining in your head? One where people travel hundreds of miles and need a hotel? Your take is ridiculous. People party in small apartments all the time, I've been to hundreds. I took the bus there many times, or got rides from other friends going to the party, and now ride-sharing is a thing. Sleep?? That was never, ever part of the equation. I know it's a tired cliche, and usually used as a troll, but I can confidently say that you obviously don't get invited to many parties.
I'm not saying this isn't part of the problem, but my experience has been different. When I was in my 20s, my friends and I all lived in apartments and had parties fairly often. I recall that when I was a kid in the 90s my parents often went to small house parties as well. Now, in my 40s, neither I nor anyone I know ever goes to parties despite us all owning houses and cars and living fairly close to one another.
My theory is that people have fewer parties because people have gotten flakier about attending larger social events. It is much easier to cancel plans at the last minute with a text or a social media DM, and people always seem to want to keep their options open. We've moved to getting together only with one other couple/family at a time b/c any time we try to have larger group events half of the invite list will cancel the day of.
You need a home to party? News to my younger self. Parties in crowded shitty apartments, outdoors, or even in cars were the norm when we were young.
This complaint - we don’t have nice houses so we can’t party - is unintentionally emblematic of the root issue in misaligned expectations and excuses for realigned priorities. Nobody Inknew when young had houses either.
Look, it’s not obviously bad to me that young people party less. Blame gaming, blame some resurgent conservative cultural values, blame the internet or even laziness. Maybe the youth today just have better things to do, and that okay. Binge drinking, drugs, and stupid decisions aren’t necessary good investments in time, and many, many, friends from back in the day didn’t survive it. Like less kids smoking cigarettes, maybe this is a good thing (for them and all of us).
But it’s ridiculous to try and turn this behavioral trend into some manifesto on housing inequality. Give me a break.
And even if every person did live in a detached home where they could hypothetically throw a party, there are smartphone connected Ring cameras everywhere. Parents always know what's going on now.
This is such weird reasoning. When you're young and throwing parties where you're implicitly inviting a whole lot of people who you don't know, they will be bringing random chaos and you want to appear judgement proof and have it be someone else's property getting accelerated wear and tear. By the time you own a house with a yard, you're only inviting people you already know, with maybe one layer of transitive trust. Perhaps this focus on owning a house as the first step to doing anything points to the real problem though?
Not in high-density areas like cities. People own homes in low density areas (middle of nowhere), which makes them isolated, hence no communal activities like partying.
Most homes in the US are mortgaged. More likely the banks, which ultimately means the depositors, who are just as likely to be everyday average people (the wealthy normally keep their wealth in things like businesses), own most of it.
Jeez, youngish people feeling left out on investing into real estate see it as root of most of problems this world is facing now.
Sorry but can't agree, as do most folks here backing up with some hard data. That 'glass is half-empty' approach to daily life ain't healthy long term, ever thought about that?
The median new home size skyrocketed in the '80s.[1]
Many of the post-war suburbs were planned communities built with schools, churches, grocery stores, and other necessities within walking distance.[2] Compare that to developments today (and since the '90s), that are all housing, lack sidewalks, and require a car to get to necessities.
Serendipity doesn't happen when everyone's in cars. You don't pull over to invite an acquaintance over for a beer or offer to watch their kids.
Good point. Car culture was nonetheless a thing even in the 70's though where I grew up up. And those 70's suburbs are still there. So I am not sure why they are still not partying in Overland Park and Prairie Village, Kansas.
I almost never meet people who like the same bands as I do. I can listen to new music that I love at home. If I go to a bar or a party I'm going to mostly hear music I don't like, and if I do like it, I could have already heard it at home.
That reminds me of an article I can't find anymore on the plight of the American poor couple trying to raise a child in a gasp 900sqft. Uh, check real estate sqft averages around the world?
I never was much of a partier as a teen but I've been to a few, and they were all in flats ranging from much smaller than an American house to literally one room sometimes with 15 people in it. Had no problem falling asleep drunk on somebody's kitchen floor or on a couch in a room with a bunch of other people.
Even in the US a dorm room (a tiny, rented place) is a stereotyped party location.
Oh and ofc numbers are wrong. The houses in the US are bigger than ever and homeownership rate is smth like 60%.
This is just absolute total nonsense. Normal people do own real estate. Lots of people rented back then and do now. Friends were “far away” back then too, they took their cars, bummed rides, took buses, whatever. Where do they sleep? Where do you think they slept back then? The floor, the couch, the lawn, or they didn’t sleep at all and just went home in the morning.
Eh, I feel like my (and most peoples) main exposure to house parties was in HS and college when basically no one owns their own home. Rented apartments, houses and family homes seemed to work fine then, I can't really think why that wouldn't be the case now.
Note the age-group with the biggest drop is 15-24, its not like the average 18 year old owned their own home circa 1995.
You correctly blame corporate buy up of real estate as a problem but nobody ever cites upper income new immigrants as a problem. Where I live the only people purchasing $600k - $1 million residential properties are newly arrived Chinese, Eastern European, South Asian and Arab immigrants.
Makes for a very angry native population who are being pushed out of the places they were born for new arrivals. We'll never be able to build enough housing to account for the continual flow of well to do immigrants and native population.
In a twist that has multiple levels of irony, I've heard that there's protests going on in Mexico right now about this, with the wealthy immigrants/tourists being from the US.
Are you claiming that they’re already well to do (by American standards) when they arrive?
I can’t count a single immigrant in my network that was rich by American standards (which makes them filthy rich by most other nations standards) and then chose to move here.
Sure my sample size is probably 30 families (across a dozen countries) but that’s not nothing.
Every single one built their net worth here. Meaning that opportunity is also available to natives.
Where do you live? If you’re in SV or NYC, extremely easy to meet these rich families.
If you’re meeting someone who has a Masters or PhD from a US university and came from another country - often their family is well off. Certainly better off than a typical middle class family in the US that can’t pay for college for their own kids and aren’t even paying international rates.
I promise I'm not gaslighting you. The majority of individuals buying residential real estate where I'm located are new arrivals or 1st generation. The Chinese circumstance is bizarre and has been going on for over 10-15 years. So they all use Chinese banks right? The rumor for years is that the Chinese government funnels the financing somehow to new arrivals to buy up real estate. They used to go up and down Brooklyn buying properties with over a million in cash. But barely speak English! It's just bizarre.
Oh yes we have that too in the DC area. Especially from China.
It made it extremely difficult for us to buy our house because we kept losing out to all cash offers from China, and that was 10 years ago.
My point was meant more that I also knew tons of immigrants that made their money here with the same opportunities available to locals, and not some unfair advantage.
Most of these immigrants are not rich before they get here with maybe the exception of the Chinese who explicitly buy real estate as investments outside of China.
Yeah, that's a good one too. I remember reading that China was allegedly trying to curtail this by limiting money movement out of the country for large transactions, but we all know that the people with that kind of money will find a way (if those "efforts" were even really being made).
I dare say that the housing crisis is driven by people needing housing, and the number of people alive being problematically high seems like it might be related to the problem of overpopulation. Food supply has kept up, but if housing has not, isn't that still a problem driven by overpopulation?
My spouse and I find that we are overwhelmingly the ones calling to organize playdates rather than vice versa. I'd like to think it's not that my kids are poorly socialized or misbehave - they've always received glowing reports at school. I give my kids business cards with my phone number to pass out to their friends to give to their parents, and there is also a class list where our phone numbers are listed (and where we find these other parents' contact info).
Something happened with the culture of getting kids to play with each other outside of school hours, and I don't know what it was. COVID lockdowns definitely delayed it from starting for our kids, but I know these parents are mostly in my generation, and we certainly played more together.
We live in the suburbs, so it's not a car creep problem - at least, no more than it was 60+ years ago when the numbers were better. When I ask the parents who stay, they tell me a vague mix of weekend junior sports leagues, visiting relatives, and just being really tired after working all week. They're lame excuses: spending time with kids constantly is _also_ really tiring.
Kids having regular playdates would encourage more familiarity among the families and trust in letting kids play unsupervised with each other. Often I take them to the main playground, and it's virtually empty. I can't believe I'm the only one in the community who's unhappy enough about this to try and change it.
Often the kids like to play together, but the parents are the ones that are just... weird and asocial. I hate to bring agism into this, but there definitely seems to be a generational gap with the adults.
Some of my kid's friends are raised by their parents, and others are (apparently) raised primarily by grandparents.
When my kid wants to get together with friends whose (50-60 year old) grandparents bring them by, the grandparents come up to the door, socialize for a bit while the kid runs inside, and then we talk about when the playtime will be over and they can come over to pick the kid up. If it's an event where we both bring the kids, I find it easy to shoot the breeze with the grandparents, have small talk about how the week went, and so on.
When the parents are, say, 25-35 year old range, it's a totally different vibe. They'll drive up, let the kid out of the car, and then race away without even getting out of their car. When playtime is at a local park or something, they sometimes hang around, but they go off into a corner, engrossed on their phone, totally ignoring the other parents (who, depending on their own ages are either chit chatting or locked into their Instagram).
I remember when I was a kid in the 80s, and not only would we love to get together at someone's house, but the parents would also be happy to get together for a little socialization, maybe throw some steaks on the grill, put on some Sportsball, or whatever. This practice seems to be dead now that I'm a parent!
We bought into a nice suburban community. Good schools, low crime, the dream.
No one knows any neighbors. Kids rarely play with one another intra-neighborhood despite a very healthy blend of age ranges. In fact, I’ve loosely associate with exactly one neighbor in the three years. We went out of our way to try and meet neighbors our first month. Most treated us as if we head too many heads on our shoulders.
Despite a heavy presence of children, no one here celebrate Halloween despite it being a beloved night growing up around here. Our first year we invested heavily in decorations and spent hundreds on the King size candy bars.
Society feels… dead compared to me as an early 90s child.
That's really rough. We bought into a neighborhood in an older college town, and I think that's helped things a bit for us. Smaller houses and yards, so people hang out around the neighborhood or in parks. Everyone's out walking their dogs all the time, and pretty much everyone is happy to stop and chat. I think it's just about getting lucky and finding places where people prioritize the community rather than having giant houses, giant yards with swingsets, and giant cars so they never need to talk to anyone.
Have you thought maybe its your environment? I think the "nice suburban communities" have always been filled with antisocial people (as someone who grew it in them). People go to the suburbs for quiet and to be left alone.
I barely knew anyone in the neighborhood when I was living with my parents in the suburbs. My friends were all from school and required a car to hang out.
In contrast, now as an adult, I live in a dense major city (that's supposedly filled with crime according right wing news) and I see kids all the time walking around. I have a young kid and he interacts with his neighbors a lot more. My mailman knows of my kid and when we moved across the street.
Our closest couple's friend is a 5 minute walk away and its nice to randomly run into them on a weekend when taking a walk.
We regularly have wine and food on Fridays with one of my neighbors who have a kid close to our age and its easy and without friction.
It’s not a suburb/urban thing (though that could be correlated).
It’s an area thing. I think the biggest thing that leads to it is age stratification in a neighborhood - when every family is in the exact same “place” something weird happens.
But looking at a neighborhood on Halloween might be a great way to check.
While I don't deny there are pockets of abnormality like you suggest, having grown up on a dirt road in rural America and spent most of my adult life in cities, suburbia comes across as the antithesis of community. It was founded on the very promise of insularity. Obviously, that's not everyone's agenda, but it's beyond debate that its defining principle was segregation (followed by uniformity and convenience). I want to be sympathetic but I don't understand how people buy into it without accepting this. We've made some progress as a society, but having visited a lot of suburban neighborhoods all over the U.S., the remnants of the original mindset still come across loud and clear.
I think a key component is that “suburb” has multiple meanings - and which one comes to mind when it’s mentioned depends on where you were raised/lived.
Some suburbs are the stereotypical miles and miles of identical homes with no sidewalks.
Others are actual older rural towns that have been consumed by the nearby metropolis - and these ones feel quite different.
There’s a kind of “suburb” that is usually quite lively - the rural suburb, often a pocket of relatively dense homes in a sea of wheat.
One of my indicators is lemonade stands. If they appear regularly, the area is alive.
That’s tough. We also bought a house in a nice suburban community right outside of NYC and it’s been amazing. We know all the neighbors, exchange gifts during holidays, and a ton of kids come out for Halloween. What I really liked about the neighborhood when house hunting was seeing kids ride their bikes around on the streets unsupervised. I don’t know if it had any correlation, but the vibe felt right.
Why would you know them? If this were 1965, you were going to live in that house the rest of your life, and they were going to live in that house the rest of their lives right next door and so it only made sense to get to know them. But today, both you and they are only here temporarily until it becomes time to move away in 4 years when you job-hop for that raise. Will you even live in the same state afterwards? Maybe at the next place you'll settle down and stay long enough to put forth the effort, but for now you're as much a migrant as any Dust Bowl Okie.
Even just 6 or 7 years ago younger coworkers were adamant that renting was the way to go, because they didn't want to be tied down to a house that they'd have to sell in a hurry when they inevitably moved away for a new job.
Americans are moving less frequently now than they were in 1965:
Overall, when looking at both migration between U.S. states and within them, fewer Americans are moving each year. In 1948, the first year on record with the Census Bureau, more than 20 percent of the population moved in the past year. This had decreased to just 8.7 percent in 2022. While the share of Americans moving across state lines remained more stable, those moving within their state became much fewer, from between 15-17 percent of Americans per year in the 1950s and 1960s to results in the single digits in the new millennium.
Perhaps fewer move. But they definitely perceive it differently, especially the younger demographics. There are fewer young people each year too, as our population ages, so I'm not sure your statistics are particularly relevant to the group we're talking about... unless you were under the impression that all the nonagenarians were party animals or something.
I am probably that sort of parent. Truth is I dread socializing. I enjoy just hanging around with my family in the peace and quiet of my home. Not one to engage in small talk with neighbors, other parents, etc.
My daughter is still a baby, and I don't want her to become a shut-in because of my antisocial tendencies. So yeah, I will take her to the public playground, get her into the local sport activities, this sort of thing. But I would likely be the parent in the playground just sitting by himself while the daughter plays, maybe reading a book (I also hate social media in general, so no doomscrolling for me).
> I would likely be the parent in the playground just sitting by himself while the daughter plays, maybe reading a book
Just do that and don't feel bad about it. I saw a bunch of parents like that at all my kids different sports and other events and I always respected them for at least showing up. Honestly, it's worse to sit and make forced awkward smalltalk, because you feel you have to, than just relaxing and being yourself.
As a parent who is an introvert married to another introvert, it is definitely a challenge. It is hard not to feel overwhelmed when our kids have friends over, and the desire to avoid that is strong. We have to actively tell ourselves that we have to sacrifice our quiet for our kids social lives. I don’t really enjoy socializing with other parents while my kid plays, either, and my wife hates it even more than I do.
It really takes active effort to make sure our kids have play dates.
It's the phones. No one has anything to talk about anymore because constant scrolling leaves you with nothing to show. And then it's self perpetuating --easier to keep slamming the dopamine button than trying to make conversation with a completely atrophied social muscle.
Every family is dual income now, so every family needs to find something to do with their kids once school lets out. Growing up in the 80's most families around were single income and kept kids at home over the summers. As a result, kids ruled the neighborhoods, bouncing around between houses all day, where there could be some reasonable expectation of peripheral oversight. Now, everyone is min-maxing camp schedule to ensure there is child oversight during working hours, and the neighborhoods are empty.
We decided to break from the trend and return our kids to more of a free-range kid paradigm, risking the disruption to our working schedules, this year. It sounds good in theory, but you are left with the realities of every other child friend being wrapped in camp schedules, as well. It took a lot of proactive discussions with other parents to convince them to keep their kids at home and accessible. But you're still left with the dual income problem, so you find yourself hiring a sitter to oversee and shuttle.
The result is an improvement over the 100% booked compartmentalized camp situation, but without the same level of independence that I experienced and have come to credit with really advancing my own personal development as a child.
By BLS statistics, 50% of married couples today both work[1], which is the same as it was in 1978, and lower than it was for most of the 80's and 90's[2]. There are some caveats to those statistics. They cover all married couples, including retirees, and there are more retirees today than in the 80s. It also doesn't differentiate between full-time and part-time work.
However, it does show that the majority of families were already dual-income by the 80's. The trend away from supporting a family on a single income started much earlier than that.
Anecdotally, all my friends in the 80's and 90's had both parents working, and we still got together to play all the time, either in the neighborhood for nearby friends, or dropped off for further ones.
What happened is that everything turned into playdates? When we were kids, the general direction was GTFO, and don't be late for dinner. Who did you go play with? Whoever was at the park. When you got older, you hopefully had access to the skating rink. Or maybe a bowling alley. Before that, kickball at the park. Pretty much every day. Maybe see if you can over shoot the swing again.
Im convinced that car seat rules have played a big role in shaping child socialization.
When was a kid, you were done with your car seat by elementary school so one parent could offer to carpool a minivan full of kids to/from an event.
But now that some kids need their car seat into middle school carpools are gone and every kid needs their parent to pick them up. It requires way more planning and parental involvement
I definitely feel a bit lucky that my kids were big enough to be out of car seats by elementary school, already. That said, I thought most were out of needing car seats by the second or third grade? I'm surprised to hear it is at all common for kids to still be in seats all the way to middle school.
I also can't offer much of a defense of car seats. Obviously, go for safety; but it does feel that people are chasing a tail end of safety that is not really measurable. Modern cars and using seat belts have come a long long way to make vehicles safer.
There is also the interesting contrast with busses on this. Kids don't buckle up or use seat belts in school busses.
This. This is definitely part of the problem.
I can't even offer to take my kid & his friends anywhere, other than walk to the park after they're deposited at my house, because every one of them needs a car seat.
While well intentioned, car seat laws have gotten a bit insane. Minnesota recently implemented some pretty nonsensical ones that are dependent on if they've outgrown their seat.
How are cops supposed to know if they outgrew their seat? It also means that when they move to forward facing or a booster seat depends on the car seat you bought, not their height, (only their) age, or weight.
For older kids, here's the new rule:
"A child at least 9 years old or has outgrown their booster seat AND the child can pass the "5 step test" may be restrained by a regular seatbelt, but they must be in a the back seat if possible under 13."
That's not too bad because they at least have a set age, but you still can't expect a parent to have a set of 4 booster seats ready to go to haul your kids friend's around.
As an addendum, my wife just messaged me about getting our daughter a worse child seat because ours is rated for 50 pounds. In Minnesota's new laws that means she needs to be rear facing until she's 50 pounds. She's a few months away from being 4 years old and she's 33 pounds or so. Her legs are getting incredibly scrunched up and we can't extend her leg room even though our car seat is made for that because there simply isn't room in our car to do so. I saw comments on a Facebook post about it from our county that someone's 7 year old was going to need to go back to rear-facing.
I think a lot of this should have fallen back to liability setting in the laws, then? I feel safe saying cops should not be ticketing people for kids being in the seat wrong. However, I can see your rates going up if you are found to be in violation of some of these rules during an accident?
Sucks, as this isn't as easy as saying it will be your responsibility and fault if the kid is injured. Odds are high this will just make a bad situation worse.
The concept of playdates is amusing to me as an immigrant. In Indian cities where most people live in apartments, the kids just go down and play around with the 10s of kids from the neighborhood. Adults get free time and kids get to socialize and enjoy.
There was a line somewhere about Americans being increasingly unable to handle unstructured socializing.
Parties typically have some sort of rules-based activity, be it beer pong or board games. Playdates themselves are perhaps the first manifestation of such phenomenon.
Totally valid observation, but things definitely changed. Neighbors don't know each other as well, so the grandma keeping an eye out the back window doesn't exist anymore. It was a village watching the kids before, its not that way now.
I suspect they didn't know each other that well back in the day, either. We just tell ourselves that they did. When we've lived in apartment complexes, as an easy example, there were a lot of people we didn't know. We just also got to know a few that we would see on a regular basis, as well.
I think theres probably an uneven distribution on this... I can think back to my childhood in a small town in new england and I can still remember everyone on my block, the block across the street, and every kid's house within a half mile or so. I even remember some of the 4 digit phone numbers (b/c almost everyone had the same area code and city code). When we moved though we didn't know anywhere near that many people.
Agreed on the uneven distribution. I would posit that this is probably even uneven in the communities, as well? Just because you knew everyone in your block doesn't mean they knew each other that well.
Similarly, I expect most kids in a classroom to know of each other, but I doubt they all know each other. If that makes sense. Such that, it is easy to think this is also a by product of how much more you can do inside your houses? Back when you would see folks outside more often, it was common for you to know of a lot of people. If you only had a few "shut in" type people, you knew them as the shut in type people. As it becomes more and more of us, it gets tougher.
I dunno about you but I grew up Irish Catholic, had parents who very much lived by "GTFO and come back at dinner", and I never made any real friendships or relationships via church. It was a wholly useless avenue for anything - and this was in several different church communities over the years, too.
IME while church might be a community, it's really a very stifled one.
Right, this is what I am wondering, is the reason people were comfortable doing this the fact that there was a weekly touchpoint with the community? The church visits might be stifled but if they establish a relationship with that large group of people then that might enable more free roaming at other times.
Ha! Probably more than fair for a lot of folks. It also was not uncommon for this to be when parents were cleaning the house. Doing that with a kid around is unreasonably difficult.
some of our common free range play places included walking to the dump and new home construction sites to have dirt clod wars. maybe some structure isnt bad. i turned out fine but looking back it probably would have been cool to get taken to a park
It was already happening before COVID. All these trends were. That just made it worse.
A major issue is the death of independent child play. In a lot of places if a kid — and we are talking up to early teens — is unsupervised police will be called. It’s entirely the result of daytime TV and true crime making people think there are pedophile nuts hiding in every bush when in reality abductions by strangers are incredibly rare. If a kid is abused or worse it’s almost always someone they know.
One of the things I love about where we live is that kids do still play outside. It’s a safe Midwestern suburb. We moved from SoCal and there you would definitely have some busybody call the cops. Of course it was perhaps more dangerous — not because of crime but cars. All the suburban streets have like 60mph speed limits in SoCal.
It depends where in socal of course like anywhere else. In a more urban part like in la there are no busy bodies, you see kids out skateboarding drainage culverts during school hours all the time.
One factor may have to do with birth rates and construction. I grew up in a neighborhood that was all built up within the span of a few years, and populated by young families, in the early 60s. There were kids all over the place. Anybody who wanted to play would just go out and holler, and they'd have a few other kids almost instantly.
Where my wife and I raised our kids, there was one neighbor with kids, and that's it.
Also, kids are more occupied now. "Back in my day" elementary school kids didn't have homework, and it was pretty minimal even through high school. My kids had homework starting in first grade. Naturally you want it to get done early while the kids are still awake, but this cuts into the prime hours for play. We should simply have revolted against it. But that's hindsight.
I had lots of homework 80s-90s. But still managed to get outside, play, do stupid stuff. My house had all the kids playing video games and when we got tired of that we went to play sports.
I physically cringed reading it. The intention is great but if I was his kid those cards would be staying in my backpack. Making a kid stand out like that is risky as fuck for social standing.
But this is likely the worst forum in the world to talk about typical social skills.
An honest attempt from a social adult to develop a sense of community is far from cringe. Reasonably speaking, its actions like that which can actually make socialization happen. If the old way wasn't working, so try something else.
The older one, yes. The younger one, no. So I do the cringe method of writing my information down.
But I didn't realize that it was "risky as fuck" and making my kids "stand out" so much to have my contact information on some paper to give to their closer friends. I must be way more socially inept than I thought. (I guess my eldest must be too, because she thinks handing a card to a friend is convenient.)
So please, if you have some method that is roughly the same level of convenience but not "risky as fuck", I'm all ears.
Is not the same as handing your dad’s business card around to your friends (and is a borderline disingenuous way of summing it up, business cards have business implications i.e., formal implications it’s kinda in the name of them, kids aren’t business people aren’t used to using them socially like you might and don’t see it as a scrap of paper) if you can’t see that then yes I agree with your conclusion on your social skills.
Hey let me give you my mom’s number or add her on Facebook / instagram (how old are these kids by the way?) is not the same as handing out and having handy your moms/dads business cards.
It just isn’t.
It ain’t rational and yes technically they are ‘both pieces of paper’ but the vibe is simply different.
It ain’t cool. It comes across as desperate and forced and it’s embarrassing as a result.
The tone of your reply intimates anger at my responses, that’s unfortunate but I stand by it.
>Is not the same as handing your dad’s business card
It's my general contact information on business card stock.
Maybe it's a regional thing, but when I read the comment, I just assumed they meant "business cards" in the general sense. Like how there are "joke business cards" that say "yes I'm tall, the weather is fine", etc.
Mine are business card size, on business card paper, made on a business card generation website. It simply says my name, my number, and my email.
>The tone of your reply intimates anger at my responses
Yes, I think it is wild to say that it is "cringe" and "risky as fuck". The dude just wants his kids to play with some friends. It seems to be working for everyone involved.
I feel way more stupid litigating this over comments on the internet mid-day during the week than I would handing out business cards with my full business information on it, to be honest. Parents get so much flak on the internet for normal ass things, it's crazy. Say a little off-hand comment about how you're trying to get your kids to have a good social life and people come out of the woodworks to call you cringe.
Social risk is real. You have derailed this by applying it to your different situation but have taken on the emotional offense.
Giving your work business card to your kids is different than writing your number down. Again. For the fourth time.
Do you get it now?
It is social risky whether you like it or not and getting angry and offended on other grown adults behalf, again making it about you when it wasn’t when you don’t even do that.
Also it doesn’t work. He was literally complaining that it doesn’t work. We aren’t talking about you.
And he literally states there is a class list of numbers all parents have anyway! So there we go, does your mom have my number, yes she has all the numbers on the list, well give her my business card because I like to be the nail that gets hammered down.
>Giving your work business card to your kids is different than writing your number down. Again. For the fourth time.
Do you get it now?
You must have skipped over the entire middle of my comment.
>making it about you
It's a conversation on a public forum, I do more or less the same thing, I'm chiming in with my experience, yes.
But this is obviously unproductive. You're right that I'm defensive over it, which is probably a sign for me to step back.
>Also he literally states there is a class list of numbers all parents have anyway!
Side note, but my kids have friends in other classes and I'm not allowed to see those class lists because my kid isn't in the class. I know, I know, I'm making it about me again. But, perhaps there are similar rules elsewhere.
How is this any different than a post-it note with your home phone number on it? It also solves the problem of trying to not knowing your kid’s friend’s parents’ names.
This is something I think about with my kids when they get to that age. I was calling my friends (on their landlines, using our landline) regularly by then, talking to their parents en route to getting them on the phone, and arranging visits. My kids won't grow up in a world where that's something that happens, and I'm not sure how to support their social independence in a world where (as you say) it seems nigh-on-negligent for them to have their own phones.
it's the only way it works. It took me MONTHS to get a hold of the number of my son's best friend's parents so that now we can organize maybe an afternoon of play every 4-5 weeks.
I thought a prime time for contacting the parents is right after school when picking up the kid. Everyone is there waiting, so it's just natural to chit chat, esp when the kids are friends.
I'd count also those memorable school talent shows/performances and events. Another reach out avenue is volunteering, these have a higher chance to match parents with similar availability at least.
Really? While I don’t do it, the alternative is having a kid come home with a scrawled phone number that may or may not be right along with a vague recollection of the name of the parent I am supposed to be calling. Things are a little less akward in our life but it may be because we are closer to what OP describes as grandparents I suppose.
I get the idea, but I would suggest the reaction to an attempt at lubricating social interaction as “cringe” is part of the issue OP is describing.
It would be one thing if it worked. The OP admits that their kids don't initiate socializing but also claims they aren't poorly socialized. Blaming every parent but themselves when their parenting resulted in kids that don't seem to try hard enough.
> My spouse and I find that we are overwhelmingly the ones calling to organize playdates rather than vice versa.
I read that as his spouse and he were organizing rather than the kids organizing with friends when they're together at school or camp. That's what my kids do unless it's a birthday party or carpool.
They are under 10 years old and do not have their own phones, nor do their single digit aged friends. They have zero sense of proper scheduling. While we live in a good neighborhood, there are more than a few reckless drivers, and short kids are not always visible to good drivers who are distracted. Finally, if the police saw them and decided to follow, there's a very good chance I'd get a knock on my door and a possible child endangerment charge.
I would do this. Of course I’d have cards made up that say “Hoopy Frood who really knows where his towel is” as a screen for parents with similar sense of humor.
> We live in the suburbs, so it's not a car creep problem - at least, no more than it was 60+ years ago when the numbers were better.
Kids were not driven to playdates 60+ years ago. They would play with other kids living nearby. Parents would not organize their playdates either.
> When I ask the parents who stay, they tell me a vague mix of weekend junior sports leagues, visiting relatives, and just being really tired after working all week. They're lame excuses: spending time with kids constantly is _also_ really tiring.
I do not seen how these are "lame excuses". Seems like valid things that lower your availability and also valid reasons to want to you remaining time for own rest.
> Often I take them to the main playground, and it's virtually empty. I can't believe I'm the only one in the community who's unhappy enough about this to try and change it.
60+ years ago, 6 years old kids would go to main playground on their own. Partly it is that kids are much less independent these days ... and partly it is that their own rooms are much more fun. So, kids want to stay at home because it is good enough and parents do not want to sit bored on playground.
Parents just want to watch their Internet content and it's easier to just stick their kids in front of a video game or computer vs having an event that requires parenting.
At least when parents are addicted to alcohol they can still be social and function as parents. Not so with Instagram/tiktok.
Oh that rings true and it's so depressive. But I think it has more to do with this notion that everything you do socially is awkward in some degree and could be seeing as bad or hurtful, smartphones didn't help us there with the chance of becoming the next national meme just a tiktok away.
Also social interactions nowadays have become so "one of a kind" and disconnected from a general contract that sometimes it's hard to not feel overwhelmed, I remember being 10 years old and just knocking on the door of my neighbourhood friends to check on them and kind of invite me in, depending on the time I would stay and grab dinner there and only come back home when it was getting too dark. Now as a parent I feel this serendipity is almost gone, you have to officially arrange play dates on parent groups, pick kids up, ask parents what kind of food should I offer, is it ok if I let them play videogames, is it ok to offer sugary drinks, list goes on and on.
In that world consuming media is much easier, but I wouldn't say that's because it is addictive on itself, I think there's a big portion of people that just got tired of trying to navigate how to interact with others. My impression is that the proportion between lurkers to posters increased with time on different platforms including in real life.
I think there's something to the notion that everything has to be overproduced now. The technology aspect is part of this (you have more tools to make events 'better', so if you don't you might look bad), and so is the culture of making things safer (and so necessitates more organization, more formalization). People get burned out easily and drop out from it.
When I grew up back in the 80s there was a sense of more stability, I think. People didn't move around as much. American suburbs were more of a monoculture(for better and, mostly, for worse, but it was what it was). That stability and comfort let people be more at ease and more open to things. I think now there's a generally higher level of anxiety and it spills over into the need to plan every social interaction.
Even as someone who grew up in more spontaneous times I find I need more scheduling and such these days.
I wonder how much of this comes down to wage stagnation and the need for not only both parents to work, but to work more hours and sometimes multiple jobs, just to keep from drowning. Especially when childcare is so expensive, it's a situation that can compound and spiral.
Parties and kids aren't mutually exclusive. In fact some of my best memories growing up were from the times my parents took me to some house party where all the parents were talking and drinking and having their own adult fun, while us kids were running wild over the property and neighborhood until real late. Adults are excited, kids are excited, it just works, see you next weekend.
Why do the kids need play dates? When I was a 7, you’d just talk to the kids down the street. I knew several kids within a few blocks of where I lived.
It seemed like a really far distance that I went to see people but now I realize I never went more than a quarter mile from home to see someone. There were just a lot of families in my area that had kids.
Of course, that’s not true in a lot of the areas I’m in now. My friends experience the same where it’s hard to meet people who have kids of similar age. There might be 50 homes and only 1-2 will have kids near the same age. Many won’t have any kids at all.
Thinking back on it, it was surprising how many kids there were near me near my age growing up compared to now.
There is a coordinated action problem here, I think. (I have three young kids).
When I was a kid, I could be relatively sure that if I went outside on a random day, there would be other kids playing outside. So, all the kids went outside most days to play.
I _could_ send my kid out to play and there _are_ other kids in the neighborhood, but almost all of them are inside playing video games. At best there might be some kids going on a walk with their parents.
If my oldest kid wants to interact with with his friends, his best bet is to get on fortnite, which he does most days _and he doesn't even like fortnite_.
Another aspect of the coordination problem is that when I was a kid all the other children in the neighborhood rode the bus home together, and many of us got home before our parents were back from work, so playing together until dinner time was the natural thing to do.
These days, the school day is longer and more parents drive their kids to and from school, so extra effort is required for kids to get back together.
Kids used to just go outside, find one another, and play. I see that you are attempting to solve the problem with organizing playdates. However, I think that playdates and structured EVERYTHING for kids is a contributing factor to how we got here.
I think at some point, we need to acknowledge media sensationalism (traditional and social media varieties) have not only poisoned politics and bolstered conspiracy theory popularity, but have vastly overstated the dangers of every day life, making childhood and parenting much worse than a generation or two ago.
When I was a kid, we would always hatch a plan on what to do with the rest of the day while we were still at school. As soon as the bell rang, we hurried home to catch something to eat and then it was off to the woods to build that fortress or whatever.
If there was no school, we'd call the house phones of our friends until we had a plan cooked up. And every day without fail we didn't want to go home. So much stuff to do!
Now, watching the kids my friends have - they won't even leave the house if their parents didn't plan a playdate and brought them there. Something is completely off.
Kids aren't left to their own devices anymore. They are handed a device. It also doesn't help the cops in a lot of places will arrest the parent for letting the kid out.
I see this SO MUCH, I wonder if you're also in California. I find this state particularly difficult to have a social life in. Everyone is "friendly" but nobody wants to be your friend, always chasing something else and never making time (exceptions apply). It's been exhausting to live here and I can't wait to go back to Europe where social life was not nearly as difficult.
People are friendly everywhere, but they mostly already have a full friend group and so are not looking to add more. Thus breaking in as a new comer is hard. However there are always people who need new friends it is just hard to find them.
I moved cities in 2017 and it was an incredible move for me. Better work opportunities, I met my wife, I own a house now, life is great
But I have made zero male friends here. I have some online friends I chat with and game with, but otherwise I'm pretty isolated
No idea how to make new male friends. Any time I meet people, they seem to always have a tight knit group already and are not really interested in spending any time building new friendships
I am sure I'm not the only lonely dude looking for friends but I dunno
A lot of Millennial parents are -- paranoid. We have had neighbors exclaim that they don't want their children saying hi to us or they'll learn to talk to "strangers". Or a neighbor whose little boy played with my daughters for months, but when they moved the mother scowlingly rejected the idea of playdates because part of her goal in getting a bigger house was -- to put it in my words -- insulating him from other children. These tend to be the same parents who micromanage their children in other ways, like very limited diets and excessive summertime clothing, so, again, it seems like some form of paranoia.
> My spouse and I find that we are overwhelmingly the ones calling to organize playdates rather than vice versa.
Why do you think this is? Because it's very true for me too -- not only play dates but also just regular socializing, like hangouts, game nights, happy hours and bar dates, cookouts, holiday, parties, etc. I feel like I'm always the first one to text or call somebody. It makes me question what other people are doing.
That’s interesting to hear, because I feel like all of my friends who have kids have a very conscientious approach towards socializing their kids, setting up play dates, (plus finding other parents they get along with to make new friends with!)
I really wonder what the less involved, less intentional approach would be - hope your kid figures it all out for themselves?
During COVID, every kid in the neighborhood was at my house. School was short maybe 1-3 hours then it was play time. I didn’t know all those kids lived in my neighborhood! Kids had no issue coming over.
I don’t know what the reason is for this phenomenon
Some good answers but also American parents are stretched thin but also perhaps want to be a larger part of their kids lives?
During the week I get maybe 10-30 minutes of quality time with them outside of the routine of weekly life. Maybe?
So if I want to do something with my children and have a relationship with them, the weekends are all I have.
Aaaand of course,quality of life in America is generally in decline and parents usually have no support structure (family etc) so no one has interest in the extra work of doing playdates.
It is kind of paradoxical because kids would like the opposite honestly. I love my parents, they are great people, but knowing myself as a kid if I was asked if I wanted to spend saturday with my friends or with my parents, I'd pick my friends every single time no hesitation. You don't laugh like you do with your friends with anyone else. You don't get into shenanigans. You don't have to worry about "behavior" or anything like that. No matter how nice and open your parents are, friends are truly liberating.
In my experience, kids want to be with parents. They want to do their own thing when they become pre-teens. But kids up to 8-9 years do genuinely like their parents.
Why so little time? A large part of the daily routine is things they should be doing with you as quality time. You shouldn't be cooking, eating, and dishes alone - that is a couple hours right there per day.
Same, it’s really disappointing how few parents have reached out to play compared to how often I am trying to find one of my kids’ friends who is around to play.
Why are you doing this? Your kids should be able to find their own playmates. If you live on a farm I can see that kids can't get to anyone else's place without your help. The neighbor girl comes over to our house often to play with my daughter often. My son is annoyed that there are so few boys his age in walking distance (but we keep telling him to go visit the ones we know are in the neighborhood). We are lucky that neighbor girl is really outgoing as otherwise my daughter would sit at home complaining there is nobody to play with just like my son does...
7 is marginal. I seem to recall playing in my neighborhood at 7, but very few of my child's friends are out on their own at this age.
The local public school district allows children to self dismiss starting in 3rd grade, which is typically the year they have turned 8 and will turn 9 during the school year. That seems like a potentially reasonable time to allow them to go out unsupervised.
There’s no way to say this without coming across as extremely rude, but…
> I give my kids business cards with my phone number to pass out to their friends to give to their parents
If this isn’t the only thing you/your kids do that’s well outside typical social norms, that’s probably the reason nobody else is inviting them. This is almost on the level of parents accompanying their adult kids to job interviews and then wondering why their kid didn’t get an offer.
You might want to pause and think about why policing another person’s behavior like this is so fervently important to you. Most of the parents I’ve met wouldn’t push something like this on their kids but would rather treat it like a collaboration. Kids even at age 5 are capable of explaining that they don’t want to do something and nothing in the parent implied use of fiat. We all need to assume more good faith on the part of parents and of our neighbors if we want to have a social fabric and reasonable discussions.
I've been throwing moderately large parties the past 2 years (12-40 people) and the lack of partying is definitely noticeable. Most people don't reciprocate, making it disheartening to keep doing it. I wanted to build friendships out of it, and hopefully get invited to more parties myself, but so far it hasn't happened. It's a decent amount of set up (cleaning, buying food, coordinating), and a lot of clean up after too. The ROI isn't where I want it.
I kind of wonder if people have just forgot what to do after the party is over. I had hoped it would be "that was so fun, we should host one", but instead it just kinda fades away in their minds.
To each their own.. but I think throwing a party to make friends is a totally reasonable plan and expectation. And if it isn't working out, then the ROI isn't there.
I go to "couples game nights" with my wife and her friends even though I don't really like them. But I like having friends in the neighborhood. So it's worth it to me when one of her friends husbands (who is now my friend) shows me the deck they've been building in their backyard all because I went to a somewhat painful game night.
I think you have it nearly completely backwards. Society would be far better off if more people were willing to do the "un-fun" things (like planning and hosting a party) in order to socialize. GP should be applauded.
It still seemed weird to me, and I'm trying to view it in the most generous light possible.
When I was younger there were folks who were just known as "the people who threw parties", simply because they loved throwing parties. They didn't view it as some expenditure where they expected any mutual return - the party was the return.
Now, of course there were some actual expenditures for food/drinks, and also the cleanup time. But the host would simply ask people to pitch in, and people always did.
The "ROI" comment just struck me as a mindset that views relationships transactionally. Yes, relationships are and always have been at least someone transactional (not many folks are going to continue spending time and effort on a relationship they don't feel is adding to their life), but not in this "mathmatical" tabulation of it.
Very few people want to host/organize other people.
The end goal of throwing parties shouldn’t be friendship or getting invited to other people parties, it’s building a large loose network of people you’re acquaintances/shallow friends with and becoming a super connector.
If you ONLY want to make friends or get invited to parties I think focusing on finding specific people and spending time with them 1:1 is a much better way to do that.
Many commenters focusing on the ROI part of your comment but I totally agree with your premise based on my own experience as a young person.
How I would word it is younger people are generally less inclined to invest in (real/in-person?) social interaction. I suspect some bar for motivation or entertainment has changed so people don't socialise the same. Probably intertwined with rise in mental health issues too. Be less interested in socialising and it's no surprise the result is less socialising, in one form or another.
In my experience yeah people don't often reach out or reciprocate effectively when it comes to socialising. Or they stick to a very small group.
> I wanted to build friendships out of it, and hopefully get invited to more parties myself, but so far it hasn't happened.
From this and other comments, it seems you think you didn't make friends, because you're not invited to other parties. There seems a leap here.
If the others are holding big parties and not inviting you - sure.
If they just don't throw parties, then they likely are still your friends :-)
But as another commenter said: Going to parties is not necessarily the best way to make friends. Whenever I go to a big party, the host is way too busy to spend a meaningful amount of time with me. Of course he's not going to become my friend that way! Going to big parties is for guests to make friends with other guests - not with the host.
I have some good friends who throw only big parties - I've stopped going to them. What's the point if I can't interact with them?
That's about the right size for a potluck. Set a rough guide for the main and have people post what they're bringing. If they're good friends they'll put their dishes in the washer/sink and some will help clean before they leave. If they aren't good guests (bring something + fun + clean up) they don't get invited back. Have it once a month on the same day. Plan to rotate it and talk about it at the party.
Of course people have all sorts of different ideas of what a party should be, what to bring, and what to do while you're there, but doing it all yourself is really hard. If you're getting it catered with cleaning staff, it's very different than having mostly the same close friends, month after month year after year.
If you happen to live in San Diego, I'll happily invite you to my parties! They generally involve board games, making a fire, having dinner, watching a movie, or going to the beach. Alcohol optional. Not super wild, but always a good time for me :)
Also if you just want to make your own parties easier to host, you can ask the guest list if anyone will volunteer to help with specific tasks or supplies.
I was a teenager in high school around 2005 and living in the Midwest. There were lots of underage drinking and parties going on during that time.
That being said, most of it was "cool parents" that allowed such behavior because we didn't own anything as teens.
We would have rules like, if you're drinking there, you have to stay the night or call your parents to pick you up.
I think it was just a different time; it seemed more forgiving. Now, a cop will pull you over and give you a DUI and mess up your life for a while. But I heard stories back then ~ '70s, where cops would make sure a drunk person got home safely at night instead of throwing the book at them.
I am sure it is harder for kids today who mostly live online in their algorithmic bubbles. And harder for parents to condone such activity, because who wants to be the parent where cops come knocking on your door and charge you with supplying alcohol to minors?
Elaborating on this a bit, I think it's less that things are less forgiving, but that our risk tolerances have dramatically shrunk. Millennial parents are less risk tolerant with their kids' safety, and Gen Z / A kids and young adults are more careful about the rules.
The root cause of this risk intolerance might be dispersed, just a cumulative result of cable news scare tactics, dropping birth rates and more investment per child, but I suspect a big aspect of it is that risk taking is no longer the only way to get a dopamine hit. Prior to the modern internet, if you avoided all the normal risk-taking behaviors associated with teenagers and young adults, you'd just be bored to death. Now the reward side of the risk-reward balance is just the difference between high-quality fun from meatspace shenanigans versus lower-quality enjoyment derived from social media and online gaming.
Similar age (a bit older) but I always remember our core group of friends' parents would pass around a key-collection plate — "this is a safe environment to have a little bit of fun in" — the only time I ever remember a drunk peer driving home... he was then banned from all future private party invites. Sadly/predictably, he would later perish in a DUI, early 20s...
Damn, I miss the late 90s/aughts. Damn, I'm old (and fat, too; I "made it", somehow!)
My grandma was the head of the local Air Force wives' club. Their house was always stocked like a full bar and at least several people stopped by for a visit just about every day. They knew at least 10 of their neighbors well, and some former neighbors too.
Find me community like this anywhere in America these days. Immigrant communities perhaps? Most Americans these days won't interact with their neighbors unless it's to complain or they want something transactionally.
>Find me community like this anywhere in America these days.
The only reason I have become a staple member of my little dead-end, working-class street is because I don't email/text, and last summer I spent outdoors building a tinyhome (that all the passersby watched/asked about).
"How do I get ahold of you?" they used to ask... "Simple," I'd say, "just knock on my door between noon through sunset" [my calling hours, to use the historic term, posted by my doorbell]. Haven't even used my phone but a handful of times this 2025 — turned off entirely since early May — & my social life is what I want it to be, I am not alone any more than I wish to be.
I moved here two years ago, and already know everybody on my street (24 dwellings, total); it's primarily rentals, so when there is a new U-Haul I make sure to bring over a beer/conversation (typically a week after moving in — so they can settle/adjust/remember).
Before living in this working-class neighborhood, I lived in the nicer parts of towns... and honestly, these working-class people are nicer and more giving/understanding/decent than anywhere else I've ever lived (e.g. Westlake Hills [near Austin]; West End [Nashville]; Barton Hills [ATX]; Lookout Mountain [Tenn]).
Stop doing everything on your phone. Start being neighborly.
Example: multiple neighbors and I have jointly-purchased a nicer lawnmower, instead of each buying our own simpler pusher.
My Southern California neighborhood used to be like this. It was a diverse neighborhood of white, Filipino, Viet and Mexicans and it felt alive. Then covid hit and the demographics changed. Prices went up. Now the neighborhood is as quiet at night as where I lived in the bay area a few years ago. No open garages. No music.
People are generally unfriendly now and keep to themselves more. Sad what we've lost. We're still an immigrant community but the immigrants are from different places. I'm sure they paid too much for their houses and feel the stress. There are also some obvious cultural differences with respect to socializing and partying.
Garages are just a good place to hang out in coastal CA. They cool down quicker than the rest of the house and you can have your friends over for beers without worrying they're going to mess up your house.
Also, our Filipino community seems big on turning them into semi-livingrooms with large TVs, couches, etc.
Yes. Each garage is different. If you are working on your car in an open garage that is an invite for someone else interested in cars to say hi, offer advice - and possibly pitch in when you are working on something that needs more than 1 person. If you see someone playing guitar in their garage that is an invite to bring your fiddle and join in. If you see someone playing pool that is your invite to play the next game. And so on. Note that there is nothing in the above list that will appeal to everyone, so if you don't like cars you walk by that garage, if you don't play music you walk by the guitar...
Grandparents lived at the end of a T intersection facing a cul-de-sac on a secondary residential road, so perhaps that made their house seemingly more inviting. The sidewalk was perhaps 30 ft / 9m away from the garage and there were no obstructions.
He had his garage door open a lot but kept an eye on it most of the time. Grandpa once lamented some teenager stole beer from his garage fridge. At one point, around 2005, a 700+ lbs. decorative planter was stolen from their front yard in the daytime. He eventually installed an "electric eye" chime to alert should anyone go into the garage unexpectedly.
Of course it's limited to people you know but it seems like a good way to know your nieghbors and once you know them you can invite eachother to the garage or backyard.
at least in my parents neighborhood, the open garage or the pool with a non-privacy fence, or the front/side porch are all hangout spots where other neighbors will walk by and join you for conversation
> Americans these days won't interact with their neighbors unless it's to complain or they want something transactionally.
It certainly depends. I had great neighbors when I lived on the river in a non-HOA community... many parties were had with sunset beer hangouts on the dock or beach. Military communities are also notably close-knit so what you say makes sense.
> Most Americans these days won't interact with their neighbors unless it's to complain or they want something transactionally.
My family moved into a small cul-de-sac with 5 houses total. I wanted to introduce myself, so I wrote a short letter with a little about ourselves and our contact info, and then dropped it into each neighbors mailbox. Only 1 neighbor wrote back, and 1 neighbor literally _returned the letter_ to our mailbox. So yea, that's the neighborhood I live in.
That’s it - immigrant communities are wonderful in this regard, as are communities with lots of old people (maybe because they’re from a different time, maybe because they’re lonely, who knows).
Yea, our community definitely skews "over 50" and it's a lively, social place. We have an informal rule: If your garage door is fully open, then it's an invitation for anyone to stop by to socialize or chit chat while they're out on their walk or whatever. I know there are people who live in the neighborhood who are under 40, but you almost never see them, even outside of traditional working hours!
I guess we're missing the local social super-connectors that were more numerous 40+ years ago. Perhaps we need to be mentoring, educating, subsidizing, and encouraging people on the little skills and techniques to bring others out of their hideaways.
They definitely still exist, my sister, and both of my sister in laws are extremely social people and regularly hang out, "party", with their neighbors and other friends. I additionally have a couple of coworkers that have block parties, and just really social communities. But they are definitely the exception now, and are only really for people that are just inherently social and extroverted. The rest of us, where "partying" is a lot more of an effort, just kind of don't anymore.
I miss it a little bit, like I enjoy being social for a couple of hours two or three times a week, but not much more. But a bunch of people like me makes for a poor social situation since it is hard to get everyone's social levels aligned.
You got this immigrant. We have a group of a few families. Each hosts at least one large event per year on occasions like Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Years and our own festivals. Everyone and their kids, and other friends / relatives join. Three families ended up on the same street by chance. We regularly cook or get takeout and get together at short notice. Alcohol and food play a big role.
That said, being an immigrant poses other kinds of challenges. So it's not all like the 1970s in the US, or where we came from.
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It seems that the original modern American swingers were crew-cut World War II air force pilots and their wives. Like elite warriors everywhere, these “top guns” often developed strong bonds with one another, perhaps because they suffered the highest casualty rate of any branch of the military. According to journalist Terry Gould, “key parties,” like those later dramatized in the 1997 film The Ice Storm, originated on these military bases in the 1940s, where elite pilots and their wives intermingled sexually with one another before the men flew off toward Japanese antiaircraft fire.“
Social networks have moved online and have been drowned in ads and TikTok dances. No time for in-person meetups unless you're going to that fancy instagrammable place to take pictures of yourself.
Purely anecdotal, but I was recently reflecting at the current trend of people posting really extensive morning routines. Waking up, meditation, yoga, gym, shower, eating breakfast, meal-prepping,....having a whole day before your day starts. While they should impress you with their healthiness and discipline, I just thought how utterly lonely and sterile most of them look like. And you're completely done after work if this is your morning, you can just go to bed and repeat the same the next day. I found it quite sad, actually.
It's an observation that precedes likes and modern influencers, as Baudrillard noticed in his 1989 book America:
"The skateboarder with his Walkman, the intellectual working on his wordprocessor, the Bronx breakdancer whirling frantically in the Roxy, the jogger and the body-builder: everywhere, whether in regard to the body or the mental faculties, you find the same blank solitude, the same narcissistic refraction. This omnipresent cult of the body is extraordinary. [...] This ‘into’ is the key to everything. The point is not to be nor even to have a body, but to be into your own body. Into your sexuality, into your own desire. Into your own functions, as if they were energy differentials or video screens. The hedonism of the ‘into’ [...]"
The replacement of a genuine social life with a kind of machine like, solitary optimization, the point of American Psycho basically, is very much real, common among ordinary people. This is every "second brain" note taking fanatic who never actually does anything but collect notes.
"What people are contemplating on their word-processor screens is the operation of their own brains. It is not entrails that we try to interpret these days, nor even hearts or facial expressions; it is, quite simply, the brain. We want to expose to view its billions of connections and watch itoperating like a video-game. All this cerebral, electronic snobbery is hugely affected - far from being the sign of a superior knowledge of humanity, it is merely the mark of a simplified theory, since the human being is here reduced to the terminal excrescence of his or her spinal chord."
Yeah I know 0 people like this. And I'd believe it if 1-2 people are actually like that without me knowing, cause they need to manage ADHD or something, but not a large number.
No, it's real. I have AuDHD and very strictly defined routines are how I manage to function day-to-day. It's not a productivity hack or how I'll be a billionaire in 5 years though, like scrollheads often promote. It's just how my brain works. A small fraction of those influencers might also be neurodivergent and sincerely posting what works for them.
I think what OP is saying are fake are the hoards of people posting it on their social/influencer accounts. Sure, some people have very rigid and strict routines that they need to get through their day, but (I'd agree with OP) that it's likely the vast majority are "virtue-signaling".
Well, the loneliness coming through on those posts might just be from the fact that the people that are posting on social media like that are, in fact, lonely and looking for connection. I have a pretty extensive morning routine of practicing music, sitting for meditation/pranayama, food, shower all before work, and then Muay Thai or yoga or strength training in the evening. I just don't post it on social media because I don't have social media. I still go out to see music/art and friends etc, but I also live in NYC where it's easy to do that.
I mean everything you listed there could be done within 2 hours if you do it all at home. Not sure what the big deal is, you wake up at 7 and you’re ready for the day by 9.
But oh yea maybe laying in bed for an hour doom scrolling on your phone before you finally get up is a more efficient use of time.
The article mentions alcohol consumption by kids, but I think it doesn't emphasize enough the effect of efforts like Mothers Against Drunk Driving and strict DUI laws. Back in the 70s and 80s having a few drinks at a party, bar or friend's house was normal and part of the social lubrication. Even drinks during lunch was common where I worked. No more. You either need to have a designated driver, find a taxi (which doesn't exist in most rural areas), or just not drink. The first two are a pain, so people opt for the latter and that social inhibition hangs around, and folks go home early. Have to get up for work in the morning, you know.
Very few places on earth are like that. Even in Europe's dense cities there are a lot of cars, get outside of that and there is no hope of an alternative. Though Europe is somewhat likely to have a bar within walking distance of your house, but a lot of people in Europe drive to whatever bar they drink in at least sometime.
Most of the world's public transportation sees themselves as a way to get to work and so parties which happen off hours in places hard for transport to reach get bad or no service.
East Asia has lots of highly walkable cities with great public transit -- even a few you might not have heard of. Not just Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, Beijing but also Shenzhen, Chongqing, and Hangzhou to name a few.
Sure, there are small areas like that (which are dense areas meaning a lot of people live there), but they are still a minority. Even within those cities there are places that are more walkable than others.
> Unless we're arguing that people simply didn't socialize before cars existed.
No, the argument is that cars changed how society is physically structured, to the point where society at large is designed to center car-based transportation.
In many countries - including the US and most of Europe - this is transparently true.
Not really? Yes there are a lot of cars in EU cities, but young people are not driving them - they use combination of walking, biking and public transport.
Parties are where people live and in center - public transport gets you there. Using public transport to get from bar or home party is quite normal.
I feel like while there were laws against furnishing alcohol to minors and the like, I never really heard of some one's parents getting charged because some kid crashed his car after boozing it up at a party back then. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention but it seems like the enforcement of that really stepped up.
Oh, it certainly happened. Some people don't have a limit and decency isn't on their minds and when they get in trouble the law is used against them. Also bitter neighbors could call the cops on you.
One person's definition of a few is 3 over 4 hours. Another person's is 5 over 2 hours. (That's even mentioning the size of the drink. A standard can of beer or a pint? A 1 ounce shot or 1.5 ounce shot?)
Here-in lies a major problem of drunk driving. (Outside of self-responsibility.)
I see this cultural shift resulting from multiple contributing factors:
1. The increasingly litigious environment that is the US. Where people are becoming more risk-averse out of fear of being liable for whatever.
2. The fact that anything you did, be it something great or a faux pas, social or otherwise, was much more ephemeral. At best it would be captured in people’s memories for a couple of weeks or the occasional cell phone pic that was inevitably lost with the hardware. More recently, everything you do is recorded, indexed, and preserved with accompanying text, photos, and video - _forever_ - thanks to social media and the internet.
Also, agreeing with other posts, the onus of “sports culture” for kids (and families) in k-12 schools these days is absolutely unbelievable.
edit:
Also, finding out the following Monday (in school) that a “party” to which you weren’t invited occurred over the weekend was unpleasant. Witnessing a middle-school-aged kid discover a “party” to which they weren’t invited in real-time as it is streaming live on social media is absolutely heart-breaking.
This was a great read! I'm not a paid subscriber, so I'll post my thoughts here.
One angle I think that might be missing is that when only men worked outside the home, women would be stuck at home all day with housework and childcare which I would guess was quite isolating. So I would guess these gatherings were a lifeline.
When women entered the workforce, they gained the same quasi-social environment men had enjoyed all along. Work friendships might not be as deep as neighborhood ones, but they're "good enough" to take the edge off loneliness. Not only that, but now both partners would come home fatigued from a full day of work. So neither would have a strong drive to now setup these gatherings. Before, you had one exhausted partner who could be coaxed into socializing by a partner who genuinely needed it. Now you have mutual exhaustion. Even worse, planning a party starts to feel like another work project rather than something restorative.
There's a multi-generational aspect to this too. Their kids learned the lesson that home is for family and screens, not for social gatherings. Computers and smartphones arrived and provided social interaction that required minimal energy. No cleaning the house, no planning food, no getting dressed. Perfect for an already exhausted population that had been socially declining for years.
Even beyond mutual exhaustion is housework. When both partners works outside the home, they still have to do the housework when they get home or on the weekend. Previously that would have been the job of the one staying at home.
The 20-ish hours a week needed for domestic chores has to come from somewhere.
Let's be honest. A lot of previous partying was made possible by lots and lots and lots of drinking and driving. That of course still goes on today, but nearly at the levels of the past.
Your horse knows the way home and will be happy to get your there without help from you (hoping that when you are there you are sober enough to get the harness off so he can finally enjoy a rest at home)
It feels ridiculous not to mention car dependence and the things that enabled it: restrictive zoning, parking minimums, the car lobby.
In the last 50 years, the US has bulldozed dense, mixed used housing that enabled community and tight knit neighborhoods. More economically/socially viable housing (read: an apartment on top of a business) has literally been banned in much of the US. Ensuring that there's a large plot of asphalt to house personal vehicles that are ever increasing in size is baked into zoning laws (though some cities have finally banned parking minimums). Suburbia sprawls, literally requiring most of the country to own a car.
I would love to see some data on this, but my intuition is that everyone is physically farther away as a result, which weakens their general connection and likelihood to party together, and makes it harder for them to get to/from a party in the first place.
There's other feasible side effects too like less savings due to the cost of owning a car (I've seen estimates of the US average exceeding $10k/yr), or expensive housing exacerbated by all of the above - less space for housing due to roads/parking (and the cost rising as a direct result of a developer needing to include parking), and rising taxes to finance more and more infrastructure: suburban sprawl means more roads, pipes, electrical lines, while contributing significantly less economic value (Strong Towns has done some great graphics on how much dense urban areas subsidize their sprawling single family home filled counterparts).
It feels ridiculous to bring up car dependence in an article about 1980-2020 social trends, when the US was car-dependent the entire time, and the big drop was in the 2010s in particular.
It’s car dependence, but the impacts were delayed because people used to just drink and drive. Now that’s rightfully seen as unacceptable, but we are still left with car dependence. So people just don’t leave home now.
It was totally unacceptable to drink and drive in the 2000s, and the sharp decline didn't start until right after. You'd also find a similar decline in socializing among non-driving-age children.
It was totally unacceptable in the 2000s, but there still remained a lot of "...but I can probably get away with it". That has declined in the interim.
The overall "going out with friends" survey result, not just partying, dropped from like 76% to 65% within a few years. There's no way that was from people suddenly not drinking and driving.
The sprawl of suburbia isn't so much outside the top 5-10ish cities. Even "growing" places like Columbus OH in the midwest, you can go from cornfield to cornfield across the built environment in probably 25 miles and about as many minutes on the freeway network that is entirely uncongested since it is so overbuilt for the population (unlike in those top 5 places where it may be underbuilt). By and large that is how the bulk of the country looks and operates. The idea that you'd drive an hour and still be in the same metro region is this big exception that people living in that exception assume must be the norm, but really isn't.
So 75% lives outside of it. Yeah I'd say the majority lives this way and to live otherwise is an exception for the remaining 25%. And even within those top 10 some are more like what I describe. There are definitely parts of those metros where the "mile a minute" travel estimation from uncongested highways applies. Certainly true for philadelphia outside the ~50sq miles of the gridded central city. Places like Houston average home is only like 250k pretty much at parity with midwest prices.
According to the US Census Bureau, the median house age in the usa is 1980.
I live in a 1960 house of the type that is supposedly illegal, although every house in my suburb built since then has had building codes and planning regulations forcing walkability.
Cars are forced for specialization. I had a 20 mile each way commute to an absolutely horrible neighborhood but a very high paying job. I am in walking distance of some minimum wage manual labor jobs. I can't afford to work at those minimum wage manual labor jobs and live here, and a car is incredibly cheap compared to my higher income.
No one can explain why an architectural movement peaking in 1950s-1970s had no effect on socialization for decades until the smartphone era. Multiple entire generations lived in "soulless car filled suburbs" and socialized wildly according to the data in the article... until smartphones...
There's an entire mythology built around the idea that any new problem that occurs began coincidentally with the construction of suburbs in the 1950s, even if the new problem didn't appear for the first 75 years of suburban living.
But that hasn't changed much between the 80s and now. It was bad then and it is bad now. So I don't see it being a significant factor for change in socialization on that timescale.
People are introverted and have no social skills thanks to smartphones. People have no shared interests in general, because there are so many niches. People have low self-esteem and body image issues. People are afraid that they'll get drunk and their behavior will be filmed and go viral. Previously available "soft" party drugs are too dangerous. People have no place to host a party, because they're all renters (not that it matters, the HOA has a strict no-smooth-jazz-music-after-3pm policy!)
> People are afraid that they'll get drunk and their behavior will be filmed and go viral.
I think this is an underappreciated "phones killed socialization" angle. People used to post partying pics on social media. Then employers started going through social media to screen candidates. Facial recognition and automatic tagging means that it's not sufficient to not post party photos to your own social media, you need to make sure they aren't posted anywhere.
Which is a deterrent to partying as a concept once you start thinking in terms of "will this be bad for my social credit if an informant reports me to the employability police by posting me drunk?"
I don't know how this didn't become a serious taboo. People who post pictures and video from a private event without everyone's consent should be shunned, but somehow this became normalized. I've heard of the recent trend to hand out stickers for everyone to put over their cameras during events, and that's a really good development, but we shouldn't even need to do that. It should be socially disgusting to even take the pictures in the first place.
It used to be fine! It used to be great, even. People like having photos of themselves having a good time. Back in the film era there would always be one person who wanted a picture at every event.
It's just that connecting it to the panopticon ruined everything.
> People have no place to host a party, because they're all renters
I've seen this repeated in several comments and I just don't get it -- renting a place, be it a college apartment or a full house as an adult, has never stopped me from throwing a party. Maybe if there was a "no parties" rule in the lease (which I've never seen, and I've rented at least a dozen different places) and the landlord lived in the building, but otherwise rentals are fair game.
If anything, renters are more likely to throw parties. They don't care about the building or even the inside in the long-term. The likely worst case is losing a month's rent in the deposit, which you're likely to lose some of anyway even if you keep it perfectly clean.
Yeah, pretty much every college town is full of renters throwing parties. One consequence of that is how student-aimed housing tends to be lower quality.
As a zennial, there are a couple things that contribute:
1. No one has a car when you're younger unless your parents are well off. Most people I know didn't have access to a car until college. Makes it hard to get to parties when only 1 of your friends has a car that fills up instantly.
2. Most of your friends are online anyways. You're going to hang out with friends every night because they're on discord, waiting for you to get on and play your social game together. Why would you hang out in person if you can hang out online? You can't get to their house anyways.
3. Similarly to that, none of my friends live near each other anymore. We all moved to different cities for different reasons. So many people I've talked to are similar. It also makes it harder to find new friends, since everyone has their friends. They're just not near.
Young people aren’t becoming homeowners at the same rate, so there’s a sense of transience to their living situations that make forming neighbor communities seem like a waste of time.
I kind of see this among different friend groups. I have a number of friends out in the midwest where a mortgage might be 180k. They are most all buying homes. These places have garages, basements, front and back yards. And they are throwing parties with their space.
Bit different for those in the high cost of living area. Hanging out is usually a pregame to go to bars because you can't fit very many people in the apartment. Not to say it doesn't happen just you can't exactly throw a party and have a big table of food and a bbq going and cornhole and beer pong and three available bathrooms all at the same time like you can out in the flyover states. At least not without dropping literally 10x as much on what would be a smaller property anyhow with no basement and not much of a lot.
In many ways it seems like the old life of yesteryear these sorts of articles bemoan is still in fact the current year in many places if the housing prices support it. And there are many places that fly under the radar that aren't in those top 5 major metro regions.
Seems like a no-brainer to me. This is an accurate characterization of my entire adult life. My wife and I are looking at buying a house, and we've concluded that we can't despite living in Wisconsin and making far, far more than the median income around here. There's no end in sight.
Our social structure isn't built around neighbors. I could name 2 people I've shared an apartment building with in the last 5 years. Incidentally, they were a couple in the same 3-flat as me, who were there for my entire time in that building. I think the lower density and shared spaces (in that case, a garage) made the difference.
nah, we partied plenty when we rented and not knowing someone for long is not a reason not to hang out. What has been eroded is the habit of hanging out because there's no easily accessible third spaces. I'll give you an example: when I lived in Spain I would just walk in the corner bar for a quick beer or a coffee or something to eat, I would very likely run into a neighbor and would chat. The chat would lead to "hey let's do something". In the USA it's almost always the case that people need to make plan, the lack of spontaneity kills most plans.
In my Midwestern US town, there are still lots of third spaces. The mall, bars, bowling alleys, an arcade, and even some new things like a trampoline place. People just aren't using them nearly as much, to the point that the mall is a tomb and the stores are going away. But the people stopped showing up first.
My 20s were full of partying, and I wasn't a homeowner a was really introverted at the time. You just cram into whoever's apartment was having that party and have fun. Our partying dropped off after becoming a homeowner, actually.
Grouping up with the guys to play an online game wouldn't count here. Nor various other online activities that I would consider social. The drop-off in alcohol is stark, but probably good? I suppose we would see an uptick in weed in legal and probably also illegal states.
The article focuses on US because that's the data they have, but I wonder if it's a similar trend for other developed countries. Anyone sharing a personal anecdote is probably not meaningful. These are broad trends and really hard to intuit by lived experience.
When I was in high school in the late 90s/early 2000s, we'd go hang out somewhere with each other IRL and then when it got late and we got home we'd meet up in some online game (usually Starcraft or Diablo). So we'd still be hanging out at least two nights a week IRL.
If we counted only online gaming then we'd have been hanging out every night.
> Burrowing into the appendix tables of the American Time Use Survey, she unearthed the fact that just 4.1 percent of Americans said they “attended or hosted” a party or ceremony on a typical weekend or holiday in 2023. In other words, in any given weekend, just one in 25 US households had plans to attend a social event.
There's a huge difference between not hosting or attending a party and not attending a social event. "Party" has very specific connotations. If I go out bowling with my friends or have a game night, I don't call that a party, but it is certainly a social event.
Those basement dwelling computer nerds of the early '00s were way ahead of their time. We just had to dial in the content to get everyone else addicted.
Transferred to a California state college a little late (27) and wrapped up my computer science degree @ SFSU finished in 2019 so somewhat recent anecdotal experience.
I met a lot of people just like me while in college. Lot of people mid to late 20s. One of my best friends in college was in the international business club fb group and they’d always host events or pub crawls every Thursday night. I’d ping my gf (now wife) and she’d asynchronously invite all of her friends and then I’d be inviting all our college friends so by the time we arrived we’d have a merged friend group. We met so many cool folks this way and people from different majors with diverse backgrounds.
It helped to be in San Francisco of course.
Now as far as the housing discussion I’d say that the 7% rates that are historically normal feel oppressive after 15 years of low rates following the Great Recession. I bought a place in the edge of the Bay Area last year with 5% down at 7% because I didn’t have the income that I have now when rates were low. We were saving for the last 7 years delaying a bunch of major life milestones. The prices in our zip code already dropped ~15% before we bought so we saved about a 20% down payments worth off the up front cost. I barely qualified with 270k combined income and I’m not sure ppl understand how weird that feels until they experience it. The home wasn’t even a median priced SFH in fact it was well below at about 750k.
I kept a bunch of vested stock and savings but yeah not sure how things will shake out. It’s a tough market for sure.
As with many large scale social trends there will be several contributing factors, so nuance will always be the first victim of people with an axe to grind.
If you want to say that an decrease in X is the sole cause of a decrease in Y, it might be a good idea to check whether there are other places where 1) X increased but Y decreased or 2) X decreased but Y increased. Different moments in time, different countries, etc.
For myself personally I have moved around a good amount, so it is naturally harder to make social connection, and even if I’m invited to social events with friends in other places it is physically hard to attend them.
Anecdotally a lot of families we see in my social circle can be reliably split between single income and dual income households. We see the single income folks far more than we see the dual income folks, which tracks with this article. If I come home from work and my wife says “Sarah and family are coming for dinner tonight”, I know that my wife has tidied up the house, coordinated food and all I have to do is pour some drinks and maybe cook something on the grill (that has already been purchased and prep’d). If no one has done that? Far less likely I would see that same family that night.
Being stay at home parent is extremely isolating. It is most lonely thing one can do. You spend ovwrwhelming majority of the day completely alone. No collegues to bump into you and talking with you. If the stay at home parent does not actively organizes meetups, they are completely alone until partner comes home ... after he talked with people at work.
Kind of depends on how much you have to call with others. But yes, if you do not have calls and do not need to coordinate, wfh can end up being isolating too.
Some did out of mental health necessity. Some did not and were profoundly lonely and unhappy (my case). And some did indeed ended up having that period to be super happy.
My point is that it is profoundly unsocial way of life for the parent at home. The party even twice a week do not really make up for being completely alone with nothing challenging to do whole day. You can easily end up loosing social skills and those parties end up unfulfilling.
If you go to work and then someone else organizes a party once in a while, it is cool effortless way to keep friends. But, if the stay at home person is extroverted, there is very little social about their lifestyle.
I have a politically sensitive but potentially insightful question.
I live in San Francisco, where we have a desegregation busing policy. In practice, this means kids don’t attend their neighborhood schools. They’re assigned to schools across the city (Instead of investing in improving schools in underprivileged neighborhoods, we (voters) decided it is better (and cheaper) to bus those kids to schools in more affluent areas - but that is beside the point)
One theory I’ve heard is that this setup leads to less socializing (or “partying”) among teens, since their school friends often live far away. That raises an interesting question:
To what extent does busing contribute to reduced peer interaction outside school?
Also, how common are these busing policies across the U.S. today? Is San Francisco an outlier, or is this a widespread approach?
It is common and it is coupled with investment in improving schools in underprivileged neighborhoods.
A school in a poor area gets heavy investment and then can pull ("magnet") a certain percentage of their students from a much wider area. Involved parents apply for their children to go to these schools since they have the best art or theater or robotics or whatever programs.
This acknowledges that an important part of a successful school is parental involvement and a general culture of students that are interested in learning.
In practice, at least in my childhood, the schools largely self-segregated by the classes they took, i.e. AP or not, more or less challenging tracks ("honors" classes).
I still think it was a net positive. At least students in the underprivileged areas got access to these advanced programs, even if there were still social barriers. And as a kid from the suburbs, I got to meet kids outside of my suburban cohort - I think this was really valuable to me as a bit of a misfit.
Had a similar situation when I was young. Living far away only really impacts your ability to host events which can suck for things like your birthday parties, as getting a large number of people to all go out of their way is pretty much impossible. Other than that it doesn't affect your ability to socialize or attend events hosted by others.
It does seem like there's something wrong with that data; I find it somewhat implausible that the average parent was only caring for their child for 1.7 hours a day in 1985; even if you assume that all of the tween and teens were free-range and only got an hour or two of parenting a day, little kids have always required nonstop attention to make sure that they're not actively dying.
Although... the infant mortality rate in the US has dropped by more than 50% since 1985, so who knows...
Yeah, I've wondered if there is some sort change in how people think about and label their activities. Would a 1950s parent even think of themselves as doing a defined activity called "childcare"? Or rather, the children are just around, as the parent is doing things. If I am cooking dinner while a toddler putters around the floor and a baby is in a high-chair eating scraps I give him, am I doing "childcare"? Would a 1950s parent think of that as doing "childcare"?
Toddlers don’t just putter around. They want to be wherever you’re at doing whatever you’re doing and opening all the cabinets and boxes and pulling everything out to look at it. I think people were more apt to put them to work around the house in the past whereas now people infantilize them more. My son doesn’t speak very well as a 19 month old but he understands a lot and pays attention, and right now we’re trying to figure out how to put him to work in the kitchen and around the house so he feels involved and we get what little help he is able to contribute.
I was born in '83 and I'd say this mostly describes my upbringing. We were left to our own devices the vast majority of the time. By the time I hit my teens, most days I'd barely see my parents at all. At some point you've got kids raising other kids as the parents are absent.
and less children per woman. I figure thats got to be the main driver. China actually a really good case study with the one child policy and rise of little kings.
The chart labeled Percent Decline in Hours Spent Attending or Hosting Social Event by Age 2003 - 2024 seems to be a bad way of view thing the data since it assumes that there is an inherit difference on how people approach this based on arbitrary age groups. Having it be by birth year would be better, since it would reflect how the people in question’s habits are changing over time.
That said, party culture had been excessive in the past and it was impoverishing to many people. I and others my age more wisely do without, which leaves us with money for things that are more important than one offs.
Spending all of your time studying in high school and college is your best hope at landing in the vanishing middle class. With decreasing job security as well as hyperinflation, continuing that work ethic into your 20s and 30s is quite reasonable. Everyone is too exhausted to party.
This isn't a social effect at all, it's all a financial effect. Of course most of the HN population is isolated from those issues because we work in a high paying field, but nobody has any money to do anything anymore.
Parties were where you went to meet random strangers, get intoxicated, and maybe get laid. None of this is exciting anymore. People are less motivated to go out. We have other forms of socialization.
I blame a lot of the de-socialization on our constantly connected society. Since everyone is in contact with each other 24/7 via social media the idea of meeting random people is less exciting. The 24/7 news cycle also injects a lot of doom and anxiety making people more aware of dangers - intoxicated driving, overdose, violence, rape, etc. Parties might be viewed as more dangerous than exciting. Now add to that, 24/7 streaming of TV and highly addictive video games. There is plenty of distraction to fill the boredom gaps that used to motivate people to go out. And finally, I think covid drove a lot of people into a more isolationist mindset. I know a few people, including myself, who have admitted they go out far less post covid compared to pre covid.
People aren't even constantly connected via social media anymore. That was a thing in Facebook's earlier years, now most stuff is algorithmically fed from randos.
I'd argue that it's specifically the combination of social media and smartphones. 2000s era "social networks" of AIM and forums were fine; you had to actually be at your computer so it wasn't an all-consuming activity for most people.
I don't think it's right. Despite the Internet, we really aren't in a constantly connected society. In fact, I'd argue we are less connected now than we have been for a long time. Everyone's "on" Social Media, but they're not socializing on it. They're spouting into the void, promoting and advertising themselves, tunneling themselves deep into echo chambers, but it's not really social. People write and write and write, but the only things they read are what the algorithms feed to them. I guess I'm gatekeeping socialization, but this doesn't seem like socialization to me.
When someone posts a clever quip to Twitter and gets 10,000 likes, this isn't socialization. It feels more like some weird performance art.
Its not all screaming into the void. From my point of view people broadcasting their lives in real-time leaves little to catch up on. Why call/meet Joe to talk about his trip to Antigua if he already posted his trip in real-time including video? You know what all your friends are doing.
The twitter scenes is out of my wheel house. Never had an account or knew anyone on it that I cared about.
I see a lot of reasons and excuses about the decline in partying, and the internet is obviously changing society and culture, as well as every generation of parents, but at some point everyone needs to take some responsibility and make their own decisions. At least people today have amazing tools to throw parties, if that's what they want to do.
FWIW, I spent the holiday weekend raving under the stars in the forest and it was great, as always. Mostly old people though.
A an older millennial, I have been pleasantly surprised by how vibrant my social life can be as long as I put in some effort. One key is living in a reasonably dense urban area. I have friends who make art and music, fiends who do standup comedy, friends on municipal sports teams - the ways to connect with people are expansive. And people in my age group (early 40's) seem only a little less inclined to make plans and go out compared to my friends in their 30's.
Even with my oldest friends, all of whom are busy with their kids, mortgages and spouses, we still prioritize taking trips to see each other and for everyone to get to know each other's kids.
So if you're anything like me (grown, mostly single, living alone in a dense urban center) I refuse to believe any social or technological developments have ruined our chances at human companionship.
But that's millennials. I have absolutely no idea how Gen Z will navigate this world. The fact that they seem to be choosing the least useful, social or pleasurable vice in the world (vaping), which also happens to be among the most viciously addictive vices (for many people) does not bode well in my opinion, no matter how enlightened the anti-alcohol stance may appear.
If I were to try and pinpoint one of the leading causes of this issue myself, I would personally say that Americans have an outdated and ineffective model regarding its use of addictive substances or what I like to now call "Brain Hacking" systems as they are not necessarily just physical substances anymore.
Recreational drugs cause unbelievable havok within communities where they are unleashed. Its well known that such drugs have chemical compounds capable of "hacking" our physiology and causing a whole host of negative effects while ensuring the user stays addicted.
I consider these "Brain Hacking" systems just the same as I consider social media like TikTok and Instagram. They both are designed specifically in ways to entice users to be addicted without any concern for the harms they cause.
It baffles me that simply because it is not a physical substance it gets treated as less dangerous than the harder substances.
We keep seeing these issues in America when its very clear that similar things would occur if we made recreational substances as common as water and just as accessible.
Revenously addicted people, dont party, they dont socialize, they retreat from society, and stop forming deeper releationships. It is no surprise that this is creating issues for us.
Americans have always been the world's leading consumer of drugs, and now that we have digital drugs, they are more accessible and in demand than ever. So much so that the cartels desinging and pedeling these products, are basically the most powerful companies in our society.
Socializing in most Western countries used to be built entirely around an addictive mind altering substance, alcohol. Despite its many flaws it was extremely pro-social. Other drugs had their own party scenes.
> Recreational drugs cause unbelievable havok within communities where they are unleashed.
Like.. Stable adults indulging in pot or mushrooms? IME has quite the opposite effect. Addictive drugs which devastate communities are usually not referred to as "recreational".
You're spot on about the outdated threat model and people not fully grasping how damaging social media/internet addiction is.
Addictive tech in your hand is an evolutionary trap.
Much like cars are to squirrels, squirrels have evolved to run into a straight line to the nearest tree at the hint of any danger. And for all threats other than cars that is the correct thing.
But many squirrels are "trapped" by evolution to cross the path of a car when there is no need to do so.
Humanity's curiosity, sociability and OCDness have all been trapped by algorithms and smart phones.
And it is shortening lives and even more so reducing reproduction.
A faint hope is, that with all such evolutionary pressure, we can evolve our way out of them.... eventually.
I'm also wondering if the rising political polarization is at least in part caused by the "antisocial" phenomenon. If you're not exposed to a spectrum of political worldviews through being involved with all these people you randomly met back in the day, it becomes easier to dehumanize the people you disagree with. You also never have to listen to their talking points, because you can just block them out online.
It's also the opposite. People are exposed to the most extreme, unhinged, and horrifying aspects of humanity on a continuous basis through every form of media and connectivity. It shapes your unconscious risk/reward expectations around forming connections. Someone invites you over to their house for dinner? You just saw a YouTube video about a woman who mixes her urine into her cooking and feeds it to unsuspecting guests to heal what ails them. Almost every form of engaging with the world these days -- except genuinely connecting with others -- makes genuinely connecting with others feel riskier than it is.
The talking points themselves have got much worse. So many things are now mainstream, especially in racism, that would have been kept out of "polite company" previously. It's not that social media has made people less aware of other's political views, it's made them more aware, which is why they hate each other. Entire accounts exist (libsoftiktok) for the purpose of exposing people to views which they will hate, so they can get angry and ramp up their rhetoric.
The enforcement on underage drinking has really altered the equation. And I'd guess the ubiquity of cell phones is another limit. The party culture of the 50s through the 90s-early 00s wasn't the norm it was the aberration from the times before. I think dancing it self has been in decline too. I tried to get the kids (teens and middle school) dancing at a small summer community and they just wanted to stand there and take turns playing their favorites from their own Spotify lists. They seem less open to just listing to unfamiliar music and maybe using Shazam to get some leads for new listening.
As a parent, what my wife and I see is that when the kids have access to the internet, they socialize on the internet. When they don't have access to the internet, they socialize in real life. Most often it's just a question of convenience. It's a pain in the ass to get together. It used to be the only way.
Another thing is that parents just don't leave their kids alone any more. My sister's son is almost 20 and she's still thinking about his goings on even when he's at college. This might be nice in terms of feeling loved, but independence is almost required to bring partying back.
The inevitable side effect of the financialization of the human experience. People are in constant competition with each other and the amount of time they can spend not competing is proportionate to the amount of slack in the economic system. Keeping slack costs money, removing it makes money, it's very hard to almost impossible to stop something that makes money. It would take an Amish level of zealotry.
I think the focus on short term gains by sacrificing long term viability is in part due to the inability to accurately measure future prospects, whenever there is doubt shot-termism prevails. The bird in the hand wins over the two in the bush. I think maximizing long term gains would be directly tied to human flourishing so if we could accurately measure long term externalities we could align capitalist and human interests. Convincing those who gain from short-termism to agree to use more accurate metrics is impossible when not using it makes them more money.
I don't know how to fix this. A society will not allow itself to undergo 'creative destruction' in an era where we bailout corporations. And socialism certainly is not going to fix it, socialists have their own kind of rather destructive short-termism.
If anyone wants to be invited to house parties in London, UK, I'm happy to invite anyone who emails theo+hn@torchandzen.com!
Number of people ranges from 10 to 50, activities from talking and eating to picnics and dancing.
I remember seeing articles about working women doing more social managing then working men. It is one of reasons why women do not seek new partner as fast as men after divorce - they are more likely to keep friends they are content with.
I’ve stopped hosting as many dinner parties because accommodating diverse food preferences has become increasingly challenging. It’s a smaller factor compared to many mentioned in the article, but I thought it was worth adding.
And not just preference but allergies. I'm not sure why but it seems like the number and prevalence of food allergies has really gone up since the 1980s/1990s. Back then you didn't really worry much about food allergies when you were thinking about foods to serve at a party.
Holy crap, I've never seen a Janathan Richman recommendation on the Internet ever ;) I listened to him like crazy in college (1988ish) and saw him play once. My favorite still remains https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR6Ns3AcDco
I know two other people that know of Richman, four if you count my wife and son who I made listen to him!
edit: had to add Richman was a big influence on the Talking Heads :)
I like that this delves into the relationship between "helicopter parenting" and this trend, and maybe I missed it, but I find that it conspicuously lacks economic precarity and the decline of real wages over this time period as an explanation. Hosting social events does cost free time and money and most people have way less of both in real terms than the period it's comparing to
The effects of wealth on outcomes meaningful to most humans look mostly like a step functions, with some continuous-lookin' bits here and there. Anecdotally my assumption is that partying x wealth is bimodal, with peaks near the top and the middle-bottom of the wealth distributions. But homeless people and people scraping by on two minimum-wage jobs, both of which comprise a larger portion of america than when I was a child, are unlikely to be able to host or even often attend parties, like I think there's a sharp step to basically zero after a certain poverty line unless you're in a really integrated community (also less common over that time period, to be fair)
It is if you are hosting; but if you are going to the party...hey, it's free food! I think a systematic analysis would show that it would be cheaper for all of us on the whole to share food at parties since it is cheaper to buy in bulk.
I was going to disagree but then realized I now shell out at least $100 when two families and their kids show up for 3-4 pizzas with toppings and chips and dip and some juices.
And god forbid I try and provide fresh fruit and beverages on that budget…
Is 1 in 25 bad? I am more 1 in Inf... I mean I don't know what counts but I am happier to do things that are not a party. Examples: go to events in the city, restaurants, sunday lunch at relatives, work socials, school parent socials.
Even in my 20s I went to... the pub! Mayhe a nightclub. To me parties are more school age/university thing and are a great way to have a good time on a budget. Just some drinks and a speaker required.
I'd guess the biggest driver of this is a lack of boredom. There's a certain investment of time and stress to throw a party, if you're just going to be completely bored it gets you over that hurdle, if you can play games and talk in a group chat instead you might not pass the threshold for bothering a lot of the time.
There were fewer bullies. These days, if you try to get together s group of people with strong passion you're likely to be targeted by people who insist on inclusion in resource sharing or else they'll persecute the group that advantages itself.
I wouldn't ever endorse drinking, let alone underage drinking, and parties don't sound fun without drinking. Therefore, no parties. What's needed is a new class of drugs, something healthier and legal, that make people sociable like drinking does.
I used to throw loads of parties. At somepoint I realized..
1. It's expensive. I never once got a reasonable contribution from my friends. I knew this at the time, but eventually I was over it. Paying $100-250 per event just to deal with all the work and drama that comes with it.. not worth.
2. It's a lot of work. Hours of prep, hours of hosting, hours of clean up after. At the end of the day ~12 hours of effort for ~4 hours of fun is not a good ROI.
3. It frequently was an excuse to get drunk or high. Which is fun, whatever. But as I grew more health conscious, this was less and less appealing. I can drink on my own if I want.
4. There are better alternatives. I don't have to do any of the above options if I just jump on Discord for a while. Or join a rec league sport. Or spend it with my family.
I don't think the point of a party is "ROI" either in terms of the dimensions of time, effort, or money. When I decide to host one, this kind of "cost" is assumed. I don't worry about it because I can afford it (in all three dimensions), and the point of hosting a get-together is not to make a profit on any of those dimensions or break even. I look at it as: I'm spending time+effort+money, and the return, for myself and everyone who attends, is not any of those three. It's getting some much needed socialization and a fun experience. I guess your point is that you're not getting as much fun out of it to justify the spend?
Because people have lost their will to live. It's evident even in their talk about how exhaustive social interaction, parties, the outside world in general is, and how they'd rather stay cozy at home - even in their early 20s.
Not directly related to the article, but, the way we played multiplayer games on a sofa back in the 90s was way more funnier and fullfilling than what it is now through steam/discord. The sharing was not the same.
There are definitely less in high school, but has college really changed that much? I'm a student right now, and while I'm not involved with it, it definitely seems like Greek life people always have parties going on.
As an aside, did anyone else see the background start to darken as they scrolled down and lost interest in reading as you knew a "Please oh pretty please subscribe to my newsletter!" overlay was going to slide into view?
I wish I had a ublock filter or a userscript to deal with this…
No one had cameras, if one did something strange it would be funny or embarrassing for a week or two. More usually everyone was to drunk to really take notice of "strange" behavior.
Once again, they’re severely discounting socialization over the internet. Twitch, discord, et al account for massive amounts of socialization. For many kids it’s easier to chat or stream than it is to find the other 2-3 weird kids into their particular hobby. Watch the TV documentary “Social Studies” if you think Gen Z isn’t partying. “Euphoria” is definitely an exaggeration but it’s relatable to Gen Z for a reason. Anecdotally, I see Genz all the time at raves and concerts. These aren’t “animal house” style events but still.
Three issues that are important but nobody wants to discuss (why?):
Inflation in the cost of law enforcement. As an X-er I received some truly epic paint-peeling flame-throwing "angry dad-style" lectures from cops and one time I got caught and my parents were called and I paid a municipal citation (not a misdemeanor or felony) equivalent to thirteen hours of minimum wage labor (essentially, one teenage afterschool weekly paycheck...). Now a days it would be kinder if the cops just shot the kid, as they will lose their license semi-permanently which means no job and no programmed activities and no sports, forbidden from joining the military (note the GI Bill paid for my college), lose their security clearance if they are already in the .mil, expelled from college / retract admission, suspended from school, that means no college diploma, no diploma as a job ticket to get one of the very few remaining "good jobs" etc. Seems a little inflated of a punishment over "a couple beers" People like discussing the inflation rate of real estate, lack of inflation in wages, but they should discuss inflation in the punishment for having a few drinks. A general cultural trend toward absolutism where everything thats permitted is mandatory and everything thats not permitted has no limit to the resulting punishment to prevent it. Toe the line precisely, or suffer the full weight of the law, and the line does not include partying, so you'd be crazy to do that.
"In the old days" the cultural expectation was everyone works 9-5. No one is allowed that anymore, they either work 24x7 as servants on call to their feudalistic owner, or have weird hours and gig economy jobs. Most people cannot "drop by after work around 6 for a beer". Can you drink at work? I can't. Can you go to work drunk? I can't. Some people, maybe most people, are not allowed to ever be "not at work". You're not even allowed to sleep if your boss feels like texting you; you surely can't get drunk at a friends house without getting fired. Don't worry that beer (or ten) will only cost you a one year job search to get a new job. When everyone is under house arrest by their employer, nobody parties.
There's a long tradition in the USA of trashing a proper name and the following generation abandons it while doing the same thing under a new name. Every generation before gen-x loved going to malls, then a long indoctrination campaign to use security forces and police to "keep those annoying teenage kids out of malls" started in the 1980s, and here I am in the 2020s and I STILL will not go to the mall because of heavy handed security, and my generation and younger is killing the malls because malls hate me because I was once a teen that hung out at the mall a lifetime ago. So, WRT parties, post "Animal House" movie era, a party means vandalism, drunk driving accidents, police arrests, visiting the ER for alcohol (or other) intoxication, etc. The marketing has been successful and my generation and younger no longer "attend parties". We "hike at the park" or "tailgate at the (kids?) sport event" or "hang out at the festival" or "board game night" doing EXACTLY what we did when people partied, but for marketing reasons we never party anymore, its a "tailgate" sporting event. This makes the article pretty weak sauce, an entire article about doing search and replace in a word processor for "party" and "board game night" is not a significant lifestyle change.
With COVID partying meant that someone could kill you with an illness. That's a pretty hard lesson to unlearn. They carries a lot of momentum.
Like with World Wars there's been a generational impact that changed how people relate to one another. The tribal momentum, of one monkey teaching the next, gets lost.
One of the first things I did with the net was to connect with people to go out and party with. Amazing how that morphed into zombie doom scrolling, something I would never have predicted.
in my opinion the largest effect is how we build cities. Having to drive everywhere and the separation between commercial, residential and industrial areas of american cities is very clearly a driver of this isolation.
>With COVID partying meant that someone could kill you with an illness.
Given the mortality rate for people typically in the partying age group (and especially those under 30), you were more likely to die in a traffic accident on your way to or back from the party, or from alcohol poisoning, than from a case of COVID acquired there. Let's not exaggerate.
From the NIH: The median IFR for COVID based on age groups: 0.0003% at 0–19 years, 0.002% at 20–29 years, 0.011% at 30–39 years.
Its the wrong statistical analysis of the situation.
The death rate does not even remotely depend on infection source IIRC.
Last stat I saw (from some years ago) was in excess of 96.7% of the population had blood antibodies for covid.
You are going to catch covid, your only decision is when and what you can do WRT personal health to lower the risk (aside from "do not be old" there's "do not be fat" "do not be out of shape WRT cardio" etc)
If your local hospital is swamped with cases it would be irresponsible to throw a rager and infect 100 people, at that moment.
If your local hospital is empty and all the nurses are doing at work is posting tiktok dances for karma upvotes, and the odds of catching it eventually are 97%, you may as well have a good time; if you're going to get just as sick regardless if you have fun getting there or not.
Almost all of the "lockdown time" was the latter not the former and only something approaching a civil rebellion ended the latter era. If it were not for that we would still be locked down today in 2025.
The situation is not at all even remotely like smoking where not smoking means you're probably not going to get lung cancer. You are getting covid, and you have minimal but not zero control over when, if now is not a bad time, don't worry, if now is a bad time, out of an abundance of caution you might want to slow (not eliminate) the spread.
You're getting it eventually, you can either be brave and happy and social on the way... or the opposite. A lot of people chose the latter.
This yes and a fair worry for many who lived with older parents, grandparents etc, but the original comment mentioned an illness killing "you" assuming the partygoer, who, given the context of the article, is probably going to be a lot younger than anything close to elderly (though elderly people should party too. Socializing should never be under-estimated for helping vitality)
To be pedantic, it's still possible for people to modify their behavior based on mistaken beliefs (in this case, that COVID is really dangerous, when it isn't for healthy young people). Though I don't think this explains the actual trend in this case.
Healthy young people still do not want to spread it to grandma or whoever. That is something frequent forgotten by these arguments - not everyone is sociopath and young people sometimes think about other people.
Chart goes down fast soon after 2010. There's another article about a decline in young Americans' health since 2007. And, we all know what happened around that time.
"I don’t like the simplistic idea that smartphones are purely anti-social" well I do. It's in-your-face obvious any time you're in public, and especially if you were in school back when smartphones started gaining popularity. There's a longer explanation too, but same conclusion.
"women have long been the keepers of the family social calendar. Wives, not husbands, historically planned the quilting parties, the bridge games, and the neighborhood potlucks. But in the second half of the 20th century, many women swapped unpaid family jobs for salaried positions."
This is a very good observation, and I think that somewhere in the social revolutions of the 20th century, we failed to appreciate the extremely important historical roles women played that were central to traditional societies. Even today, we believe the stock caricatures of pre-feminist societies, which in a way is unsurprising, given that most people alive today never experienced anything other than the post-revolutionary world. We just accept caricature as fact, and we view history anachronistically through the lens of our present social realities.
In traditional societies, the family assumes the basic and most important social unit and social point of reference, with the married couple as the foundation for it. This already creates a network of social ties that radiate from the marriage, most conspicuously family ties which are doubled. Husbands typically gravitated toward the public sphere, securing the material well-being of the family through their participation in public life (in other words, their work was primarily for the sake of the domestic sphere). Wives typically gravitated toward the domestic sphere which was the seat of family life. So while men were heads of the family, women were heads of the household. And this was an honor, as family life was the primary business of life; the husband's career or job was primarily in service to family life. Ideally, husbands provided the means that allowed wives to be free to be mothers, unburdened by competing commitments. (Of course, this doesn't mean fathers did not participate in domestic life, nor that women did not participate in public life. It is rather a matter of emphasis and "center of gravity", so to speak.) By analogy, kings are exalted fathers, and queens are exalted mothers.
And since the family is the center of social life, and women are mistresses of the domestic sphere, it is fitting that women should have a more social orientation. Indeed, it is expected that women would be the catalysts of many of the social ties with the broader community.
In that sense, the careerism that women today are taught from an early age to pursue and prioritize not only deprives women of the opportunity to function as wives and mothers, most exalted and honored roles that they are, but it deprives society of much of its social glue, as women have a greater tendencies to care about cultivating social bonds than men do.
What we're taught today instead is that the career, not family life, is the supreme occupation of life and the primary source of our happiness. We are therefore taught that women were historically deprived of this opportunity, chained to the bleak life of being "stay-at-home moms" (a vicious term, if there ever was one), covered in baby puke and toddler shit, under the tyrannical boot of her husband like some slave. We demean motherhood as some kind of drudgery for poor, uneducated, unattractive women instead of the privilege that it is, in fact the privilege of raising the future generation. Children are no longer a wonderful gift, but a burden and an obstacle. You might be able to turn them into sources of prestige, if you can get them into the best schools or whatever. The career is the center of life; children, the family, even the spouse - these are all secondary now.
And this has downstream effects that cause a radical transformation of society and culture that affects the entire social and economic environment, like the atrophy of social ties mentioned in the article. For instance, try supporting a family on a single income today (in the 1950s, a middle class/working class man could do just that). Now women who want to live in a traditional way are constrained in that choice, as economic and social realities make that difficult. That's why I roll my eyes when someone thinks bucking demographic decline is just a matter of throwing some money at the problem. Our society and our culture has become hostile to family life. The grain and pattern of modern life, rather than supporting it, adds friction and resistance. And since family life is the foundation for the rest, the health or lack thereof of family life is a predictor of the health of the broader society.
This was a post on the GenX subreddit (from a Gen Zer) from just a couple days ago asking about if parties as portrayed in late 90s/early 00s "teen movies" were actually a real thing:
https://www.reddit.com/r/GenX/comments/1lu102v/were_parties_...
The responses from the Gen Xers were a mix of bewilderment and sadness, stuff like "What do you mean parties like this, it's just a normal teenage party!? I feel so ancient and also so confused by this question." The whole comment section is worth a read, especially the disconnect between how the Gen Xers experienced adolescence and how the Gen Z poster does.
It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of youth with social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection. I also disagree with some of the comments here that are bringing up things like "real estate, transportation, and lodging". Sure, those are issues, but you have families and kids in the suburbs today just like you had families and kids in the suburbs in the 90s, and the fact that kids today can't even recognize "basic teen parties" and question whether they are some sort of made up fantasy can't just be waved away by the fact that real estate is more expensive today.
> It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of youth with social media, smart phones,
You have to be careful with Gen Z threads like this on Reddit and Twitter. They are inherently biased toward Gen Z people who are chronically online and deep into social media.
If you spend time with kids in the real world, you learn very rapidly that most of them aren't on platforms like Reddit and Twitter. Of those who use Reddit, few of them actually post anything or even have accounts.
The subset of Gen Z who actually post on Reddit is small and a lot of them fit the description of chronically online, so it's no wonder that Reddit Gen Z people speak as if their generation is not socially engaged at all.
That's true. However, I worked as a photographer for about 10 years (quit about 2 years ago) and high school senior photos were one of my specialties, so I got to know a lot of teenagers.
Overscheduling is, I think, the biggest issue. Most of the teens I worked with had something going on almost every night, to the point where rescheduling due to rain or heat was an absolute nightmare. Sports were the biggest offenders. They would often have gym/strength training in the morning and then practice in the evening, almost every evening. Keep in mind I'm mostly talking about summer, so the school year itself was worse. Those that had jobs would do them during the day.
It's completely different from when I graduated high school in '06. Very few sports took over your life in the summer. Football had practice in the mornings for part of the summer, and that's the only one I'm aware of. I don't get the emphasis on sports. I played some in school but never took them seriously and if they required that much time from me I would have been out.
I was a HS teacher for about a decade. The demands on kids and families around youth sports (especially private/club leagues) is out of control. I had students, 14/15-years-old, going to their school team practice then club team practice, not getting home until past 9 pm every night. Families from three states away would enroll their kids in my school half of the year to play on the hockey team (staying with local sponsor family). Tournaments across the Midwest most weekends. These weren’t even future D1 athletes.
I was a multi-sport athlete. My sibling played D1 soccer. It didn’t used to be like this.
>The demands on kids and families
I'd like to understand this more. Families like this that I know talk about it as though it's as unavoidable as their mortgage, but functionally isn't this entirely self-imposed? Is it a lack of vision for an alternative? Are whole families succumbing to peer pressure? I don't relate to it.
We only have a 3 year old and a baby, but my wife and I have already argued a bit about this. She's all in on the sports train - it was a large part of her life growing up for her and her siblings. I, on the other hand, did a lot with my free time as a kid/teen.
I think part of the problem is that for people like her they can't imagine their kids not being in all sorts of sports, but they don't realize just how much the time commitment has ballooned. By the time it's too late they're all in and they're effectively in a sports sunk cost fallacy.
There is a happy medium between the "hotels every other weekend year round" travel/club sports and no sports, which is sports for your school or community teams. If I ever have kids I absolutely want to enroll them in sports. It will absolutely not be the travel/club teams that means us going to hotels every other weekend. I am probably naïve in thinking that it is possible to play for your high school without club sports, but I won't be traveling 10 hours by car for a U8 baseball tournament.
Apparently in our school you straight up won't be able to play in the regular school teams unless you do the travel teams starting in elementary school, because everyone else does it. Therefore, your child won't be as good as them unless they're an absolute savant at the sport.
They'll still get to be on the team, but actually playing? Probably not.
This is why I hate the trend towards these massive high schools that's been happening for a few decades.
I went to a small school. I was able to participate in a ton of different clubs. Varsity football players had big roles in the spring musicals. If you wanted to be a part of something and were even halfway decent one could have some chance of actually being a part of it. But when it's one varsity team of 50ish players for a school of 7,000 the odds of ever actually playing are slim to none.
Ah, but here's the kicker - we are a small school. My graduating class had 140, and it's shrunk since then. I believe the grades are now about 110-120 each or so. However, we have some very successful sports programs. The girl's basketball team has won state countless times, for instance. Either way, there are only so many spots on a team and if almost everyone is doing travel teams you don't have much of a chance if you don't.
The quality of coaching is also a factor. My daughter played indoor volleyball for several years on both travel club and public school varsity teams. The high school coach lacked experience and tried to teach her inferior techniques that contradicted what she had learned from the last club coach, so she got frustrated and quit the team.
The sad thing is that kids who can't afford to play in travel clubs will usually never have a chance to develop the skills they need to make the high school varsity team. And even the club teams are sort of an escalating arms race: if you want to make the "A" team then you'll have to pay for extra private lessons and position clinics.
Having two teenage daughters who are athletes, much of this will play out for them depending on how much they really love the sport and whether they are able to play it at the highest levels. If you listen and observe your kids, you'll get a good sense of what THEY want out of the sport. Support them in THEIR journey.
And remember at the end of the day, the most important aspects of being an athlete aren't one's performance on the field. It's everything else - learning to be committed to a team, forming life-long friendships, building positive memories, living a healthy lifestyle, etc.
Yeah, I did track and field in HS (not us) in a club, had to train 4 times a week 3 to 4hs each time, but I chose to do that. I did well in some competitions, but nothing large. I do fondly remember those times, for the friendships, for helping build discipline, for learning how to properly train and exercise, skills which I still use today, not really about winning competitions.
It depends.
My dad pushed me to play a sport I despised. Hated it from when I was young all the way to my last games.
But thank god he did. Changed my life completely. As a mediocre student, I could pick any school I wanted.
Love my dad, and he knew what was best. Even if I hated playing, it was all worth it.
Parents should set their kids up for success, and parents do know best - even if that means upsetting your child.
There’s a difference between what someone wants and what’s best for someone - and during my teens, I had that mixed up.
Have you ever considered where you would be if all the hours you channeled into the sport you hated had been channeled into something you loved? Maybe you could have had the best of both worlds? Who knows...
But I totally understand what you're saying, I can't say I ever (EVER!) enjoyed going to practice, but I stuck it out and ended up making it to the Big Ten level as a walk-on. I'm very proud of that accomplishment.
It sounds like you had innate talent or aptitude that could be honed and take you places. Not all kids have that though, and can probably take it easy with sports and focus on growing other strengths.
It was less about having talent and more about developing in a great program - and that was just dumb luck.
I grew up in a midwest farm town that just happened to have a couple incredible coaches that ran exceptional sports programs. I also had older brothers who were better than me that I learned from.
I was less good and more tough in that I was pretty much the slowest guy on the team in college, but I could absolutely hold my own in practice. Unfortunately, due to the recent NCAA roster limits, there doesn't seem to be a place for athletes like me in college anymore.
From talking to many parents they want to give them activities so their kids aren’t bored or sitting inside on their phones all day. Sports is one of those things and lets them also be with other kids.
The problem is kids being bored can be a good thing but they are never allowed to be. When I was a kid the internet didn’t even exist let alone cell phones and the only rule was “be home before sundown”. Kids now have way too many distractions and structure and are never given the ability to explore their own world on their own. It’s been manufactured for them.
And then, when the kid finally has a few minutes of downtime, of course they're utterly drained and just looking for quick easy entertainment, and flick through a few videos on tiktok or YT shorts, with no time for discovering and indulging in deeper interests.
I can't stress this enough to new or soon to be parents.
Hold off on giving your child a phone as long as possible. Once your kids are old enough (your choice...but it's before they are teens), send them outside, shut the door, and go about your business.
Tell them to come back for lunch. Then send them outside again and tell them to come back for dinner.
I mean this in all sincerity. Don't plan their day for them. Make them go out and plan their day on the fly. Friend's house a mile away? Walk over and see if they can come out and play. Not home? Oh well, walk back or head to a different friend's house. There is value in this friction.
Don't be the person who gives your child a frictionless youth. The hard way is the best way.
I agree with this sentiment, but there have been cases of families who have had CPS called on them for letting their kids walk home alone from a nearby park [1]. It's frustrating to know that neighbors, schools, or authorities might interpret normal childhood independence as neglect and report parents to authorities.
[1] https://archive.ph/ZISnH
Sure, there will always be edge cases. That's just how the world works.
Let your kids go out and ride bikes and you may end up with one getting hit by a car. Those are the risks every parent has to manage.
But if we let the edge cases dictate how we raise our kids, we end up with what we don't want - overly managed bubble-youth kids who can't think for themselves.
Unless you have some compelling evidence to the contrary, this cannot be dismissed as "edge cases" when cultural norms have changed across the board and all it takes is one complaint...
It is possible. But take a risk! Don't fall into the trap of allowing your children to be scared of everything like you are.
Pre-teen walking to a friend's house a mile away, probably semi-frequently?
Is that a risk or a near certainty?
Looking for online guidelines, I find this:
> According to an American Academy of Pediatrics survey of social workers that was posted in Science Daily, children under 12 years old should not be left alone for more than four hours. The social workers who were surveyed also concluded that child neglect will likely be considered when children are injured during that time period. --- https://www.tedbakerlaw.com/child-unsupervised-neglect/
A scraped knee might be injury enough.
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You can give your child a phone with limits so they call you and their friends so that they can more easily meet up. Just because they have a phone does not mean they have to have TikTok on it.
It’s different now if the other kids aren’t also outside.
Yes, that can be a problem for sure. It's incredible how few kids I see outside these days where we live. It's even worse if their friends are all on devices all day and your kids are hearing about that. Parenting is hard.
cultural norms in the US have shifted so much that this becomes impractical. The parents of the friend you just went to are not expecting that behavior.
>The problem is kids being bored can be a good thing but they are never allowed to be
It's not like they'd have a chance to get creatively bored without the (physical) activities. Instead, if they're like most teens, they'd dopamine-junkie rot with their smartphone or game console.
exactly that’s how I describe it as well, this world is highly manufactured. If you opt out you are mostly alone so this also serves as a kind of social circle
If you let kids today "explore their own world" they'll just end up glued to phones.
Not if you limit their screen time and have reasonable limits on extracurriculars.
My son is starting 1st grade this fall, has been at same school since he was 3 and it goes through high school so, these are and will be his peers and it starts as major FOMO/it's the main way kids socialize outside of school hours. Good way to burn off their energies, etc. But it's also, they're young, we want to expose them to everything, they can find their "thing", etc. He does tons of non-Athletic stuff too (STEM, art, music, etc). So we've been playing soccer, baseball, flag football, basketball, lacrosse, swimming, etc. the last few years. It's getting to the point where some kids dropped a few sports based on disinterest or parent's inability to keep the schedule. We have one kid so really no excuses for us, but some people with multiple kids doing this is a scheduling nightmare. Anyways, what's already started to happen is we've brought in hired coaches. In no time, they'll be club/select league aged and people will faction off to do that. When it does, it will feel like gravity/inertia to do the same. Once you do, if you skip a beat, your kid is basically giving up the sport. They can't just join the baseball team in middle school, they won't make the cut against kids that have been playing non-stop since they were <6.
It is their entire friend group and becomes their identity. It would be hard to intentionally tell my son "you're not playing sports anymore". He may come to that conclusion on his own or coaches may cut him at some point; that's life. But, for those that stay active in it, the inertia of it is strong.
> It is their entire friend group and becomes their identity.
This sounds horrific. I did little leagues, grew bored (and nearsighted), randomly played outside for hours, did videogames (sometimes obsessively), built "forts" inside and out, went to / hosted parties, got into trouble, made amends (usually), family vacations, etc. Over identifying with groups and things seems crazy to me.
Maybe I'm overcompensating for my parent's (and at times my own) religious fervor. So much emotional investment seems unhinged.
Hopefully my kids can learn to enjoy their childhood. There will be plenty of time for serious commitments when they're adults.
> So we've been playing soccer, baseball, flag football, basketball, lacrosse, swimming, etc. the last few years
Swimming is great. USA Swimming has a well-developed system. Elite kids get sorted into the serious clubs where they swim with Olympic champions, etc. But the vast majority of the clubs are rec level and focus on getting lots of people swimming and having fun. Everyone gets a USA Swimming ID number and times are entered into the national system; they get tracked no matter what. Late developers can still be sucked into the elite system if they earn it. Your local park district swim club most likely is in a conference where they compete against other park districts in your county. The only problem is that there are so many kids and races that a meet probably lasts 5 hours.
Soccer is likely to get better. MLS and NWSL teams are developing their youth training systems like in Europe, with success as young kids going through these systems are playing professionally in North America and Europe. They are going to keep sucking the air out of the "elite travel soccer" scam and hopefully what is left are the fun clubs for the kids.
Baseball is likely to get worse. MLB took over the baseball minor leagues and reduced the number of teams. With fewer professional spots available, the "elite" clubs are more and more important to getting kids into them.
Basketball and football, same deal. Lacrosse? Universities couldn't care less about it anymore. It's a dead sport, many parents haven't figured it out yet.
In my hyperlocal area, lacrosse is pretty serious. There's a lot of private schools that fuel it. And, football is our main sport in terms of popularity but a lot of parents are afraid of injuries and don't allow it so lacrosse fills that void. The NFL driving flag football has been interesting to witness, the kids love it and it's fun to watch. I think it could get pretty popular.
Interesting that lacrosse is still popular in your area. The popularity in my area is waning, which clearly has affected my viewpoint.
I like flag football a lot. There are adult leagues too, coed and men’s only. The NFL is smart to push it; kids that excel can eventually transition to the real thing while the rest enjoy it and learn the finer details of the game and likely become bigger fans of NFL teams.
To be honest, lacrosse was popular here well before it became a trend a decade or so ago. I am in the affluent part of my city and every kid goes to private schools so I think it an aspect of that subculture. The girls play field hockey, it's really popular but my middle-class public school self had never even heard of it until we moved here.
I would remark that Lou Gehrig was a soccer player in his youth, and supposedly had to be harassed into taking up baseball when in high school.
Not likely to happen today, anything is possible but just not very likely
I think a lot of families are also optimizing for university admissions. Strong athletes often have an easier time with admissions (assuming they're also good academically).
I remember having an interview with an engineering professor from Tufts when I was applying to schools, and one of the first things he asked me was what team sports I played. Being a typical nerdy kid I avoided athletics -- even though I was good at them -- and was surprised that he was so adamant about team sports. I didn't even take gym class after 9th grade because I figured out how to get an exemption, which, looking back at it, probably made my college applications weaker.
This was in 2001, and I can only imagine it's gotten worse.
When my son was in high school, the whole college application business astonished me--somebody a couple of years ahead of him applied to 18 schools.
The formula that I eventually arrived at is that the college application process is a punishment of the middle and upper middle classes for aspiring to the perquisites of its betters.
Very well put. So many things about the process are set up to favor the continuity of privilege in plausibly deniable ways. Athletics, service, alumni interviews, letters of reference; everything is easier if you’re wealthy and well connected.
Exactly. My daughter was able to get admitted to a good college as a recruited athlete, which helped compensate for mediocre grades. Regardless of the financial issues, that made the entire college applications process much easier and less stressful.
Ohh university admission another manufactured scam.
I noticed a lot of (upper-middleclass) parents (moms) fear that any none organized activity results 100% in their kid sitting on their phone/computer (they are not wrong on this point).
Rather than restricting screen time, admittedly not an easy battle (stating how it is, not how it should be), they outsource/circumvent that through organized activity.
Then there is the "competitive" nature. Can't have our kid just goofing around, (and I know the next bit is a bit exagerated and sarcastic, but often not untrue), I need the wins for my fantastic parent Facebook posts.
Lastly, non organized means unsupervised. Parents, I think especially in the US, are (thaught to) regard the world as a dangerzone for kids. Hanging around without oversight or protection, it is just time before they will surely get abducted, mugged, raped or murdered. Is this pure paranoia, or a media fueled self fulfilling prophecy? Can you blame parents for being overly protective for their (often only) child?
From what I observed about these club hockey players I saw growing up, mainly the kid loves it and made it into their identity. So the parents are probably feeling pretty forced into paying for it. That being said every family I knew doing this sort of thing could easily pay for it.
Often the kids do enjoy it, but I see a lot of essentially "pay to play" - your 10-yr-old playing tier 8 basketball shouldn't be going to out of town tournaments regularly, but club & private is big business and they push an NBA experience of travel, tourneys and gear - with the associated costs.
I mean aren't there also jockeying for college opportunities through school athleticism, and also a culture of over-competitive parents using their children's sports to posture against one another?
For this kid not really. He was always going to work for his dads company so for him the purpose of college was joining a fraternity and partying. I’m sure a number of people on that team felt the same way as it was quite costly and demanded a certain amount of disposable income from the family, which from what I’ve seen leads to a certain loss of ambition from the kids who see themselves as set early.
check out this article (gift link) from yesterday about private equity in youth sports
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/09/business/youth-sports-pri...
> For many families, the money they spend on sports is an investment in their child’s future. Roughly two in 10 youth sports parents think their child has the ability to play Division I college sports, and one in 10 thinks his or her child could reach the professional ranks or the Olympics, according to the Aspen Institute survey.
> one in 10 thinks his or her child could reach the professional ranks or the Olympics
That is properly insane. The delusion…
Agreed. For anyone thinking the above comment might be mean spirited, here's why it's not:
* In 2017, there were ~1,108,400 US high school football players.
* In 2017, there were ~67,800 US college football players.
* In 2017, 255 players were drafted into the NFL.
So from high school to playing in the NFL, odds of 0.023%, or about 1:4346.
Even then, the average tenure of a professional NFL player is 39 months.
--
Football is one of the easier sports to go pro in as well.
The pressure to get into college starts before birth. A 4.0 grade average isn’t good enough anymore.
To get into the very top schools, but to get a good education it's vastly more than enough.
Honestly, to the California State University and University of California system high school GPA doesn't matter at all. All you have to do is two years at a California Community College and do well there and you'll have your pick of which CSU or UC to transfer to.
Narcissist parents competing with other narcissist parents to be the best parents in the universe. Social media caters to their twisted world view where everyone is living a polished life of perfection so why not them and their perfect high-success family.
yeah but they don’t know that competition is for losers, you compete away all the profits while PE firms laugh all the way to the bank.
's/narcissist/desperately insecure/', perhaps? To a lot of Americans, the future really doesn't look so good if you fall out of the top 10%...1%...0.1%...
Do sports help in a bleak future world? I think if people really believed that, they'd focus more on the kid's practical skills.
From a number of "what people did, trying to get their kid into Harvard"-themed articles in the past few years, I think it's a pretty common belief that awesome athletic extracurriculars are a secret sauce.
Though I suspect that lizard-brain emotions play a bigger role. Both self-medication attempts to get success by proxy, and also visually demonstrating (to themselves and their peer parents) that their kid is a Success Story at something.
Narcissists are fundamentally insecure people. They have a self-esteem entirely driven by outside perception so they engage in behaviors to get external validation.
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You can't even make a high school team anymore unless you start playing club & private at a very young age. Lots of primary public schools (K-6/7) which is where I learned sports and got good at a few, often don't have sports teams anymore, or if they do it's a few passionate people with limited coaching and sports skills who just want to provide any opportunity.
The natural solution would be to increase the number of teams to also accommodate people who are interested but don’t want to or are unable to dedicate their life to sports. But if schools need to cut costs, it’s tough to do.
It’s a common trend in many domains: universities, housing, jobs. An underabundance of resources means people need to gear up to fight over the things that still exist.
> natural solution would be to increase the number of teams
Reminds me of my dad (b. 1945) talking about his HS sports experience in the early ‘60s at a large (~3500) Southern California public school. Not only were there varsity, JV and frosh teams, in high-interest sports like football and basketball there were multiple teams for every grade. Competition was still high if you wanted to play at the highest level, but if you wanted to play, there was probably an option for you.
Public schools are simply not funded the same way today
Per pupil spending adjusted for inflation is up significantly since 1960s.
That's total into the system divided by number of students though.
Is there any measure of how much of that reaches pupils and improves their education versus the amount sucked up by middle layers, consultants, prestige buildings, etc?
It might be similar to the US health spend .. high per capita spend, low outcomes per citizens (compared to, say, Australia) .. with a rich middle layer of providers, insurers, etc.
It's more like its being sucked up by special education, ESL, etc.
...or by sports.
My HS spent millions on a completely new athletics complex. our math and reading scores were in the dirt, classrooms had 70s era carpet growing crap I don't want think about, the band had 30 year old uniforms...but we had a gorgeous basketball complex.
Or, given the real-world constraints schools are usually up against, pick the worst participants instead of the best. Those who are skilled in a given sport are almost certainly engaged in the sport outside of school, and thus are taking away from those who are much more likely looking to learn about a sport they otherwise don't have access to.
Interesting/amusing thought. How do you propose to determine the worst athletes?
Maybe another approach would be to use a lottery among applicants.
> How do you propose to determine the worst athletes?
Given the aforementioned process to discover the best athletes (which, I assume, means tryouts, but the exact mechanism wasn't specified, granted), the worst athletes should be revealed in that.
Sure, there is room to game that, but:
1. Who wants to be known as a poor athlete where one is already playing at a high level outside of school?
2. Who wants to keep up the ruse of being a poor athlete throughout the year? If you are suddenly amazing at the sport after making it look like you've never seen the sport before, you won't be long for the team.
If someone who is skilled is able to play up that they are weak continuously, oh well. It need not be perfect. A best effort attempt to try and give those who don't have opportunities outside of school is good enough.
> Maybe another approach would be to use a lottery among applicants.
That seems reasonable as well.
I graduated high school in 2001. During the summer before my freshman year, I signed up for the soccer team. We trained 6-hours/day, 6-days/week during the summer. I thought it was grueling, but I also understood that was part of what made our team one of the top contenders in the state. Even still, we were very much in the shadow of the middling football team.
But I put up with it. Summer in the rural south in the 1990s could be a deeply boring affair, without something to occupy us. I was easily in the best shape of my life at the end of the summer (I could run 11-miles in about an hour without stopping). But then, after school started, I met someone else who enjoyed the same obscure punk music I did, and who owned a drum set, and quickly decided I wanted to play music much more than spend all day every day on the soccer field. So before the first game, I quit the team. I think they went on to do pretty well. My band was terrible, but we had fun.
I guess my point is that—in 1997, at a rural school in the south that very much cared mostly about the football team, playing soccer in high school was still a full-time commitment.
Was talking with a bartender at a restaurant, also a teacher. She would get home around 23:00 and have to wake up around 5:00 while tendering during week days. Her daughter just turning 16 and is signed up for all basketball teams she can be in a hour drive radius. Her daughter was going to be working as a cleaner at the local hotel this summer. As she said, "Basketball is her daughter's job and volleyball is her outlet where she can be a kid."
Most likely is she living vicariously through her daughter's basketball experience or it is seen as an economic improvement, for her daughter or both. Her daughter likely sees that being a teacher doesn't pay well and multiple jobs are needed. This helps push for this "sports is a job" mentality.
Tiger Woods a the Williams sisters promote the idea of making it big if your just work at the same sport over and over at a young age. This is often a case of Law of Small Numbers.
Others might have the worst kind of parent. One that only loves their child if their good at sports.
My son goes to what I call "the sports High School" but he is not particularly athletically gifted, which has caused a lot of friction. I personally believe to my very core that sports are over-emphasized and that we are raising a whole generation of idiots who won't be able to do math or anything particularly useful except guzzle booze and sell used cars to people.
The recent NCAA changes vis a vis roster limits is only making this worse. Want to be a collegiate athlete? You better be ELITE. Walk-ons are a thing of the past. As such, kids with those dreams (or overly involved parents) are pouring their lives into their sport(s).
the over-scheduling in this and other cases is largely due to the fact that if kids are not “somewhere” they will be watching tv or staring at some f’ing screen cause that’s what other kids are doing who are also home. I have a large network of friends with kids and every single one of them over-schedules every f’ing thing due to the lack alternative (or better said kids are better of at ____ than at home alone)
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I have to wonder if what's happened in the U.S. is something akin to involution [0] where increased scarcity in what were stable middle class environments leads to seemingly endless and fruitless competition. You used to hear stories about how students at Palo Alto High School work like first year investment bankers, leading to high rates of suicide. Seems like that's ubiquitous now.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26027673
"conditions in which a society ceases to progress, and instead starts to stagnate internally. Increased output and competition intensify but yield no clear results or innovative, technological breakthroughs." "more competitive with little corresponding rewards"
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10605329
Probably just look at Korea tbh
I swear the more Xanax people get, the more they overschedule themselves and their kids. I think existence of anxiety prevents people from overexerting themselves, and pharmacologically removing it just lets people, and the children they live through, take on more responsibilities, beyond what is healthy.
I think drugs like Xanax are playing a huge, but under-the-radar type of role in all kind of social contagions that we are witnessing. Every time someone does something crazy or even just a bit "off" I ask myself: "Is that person on drugs?" The answer is likely "yes!" Not illegal drugs, per se, but still.
I don't overschedule my kids. It's ridiculous what I see going on and I'm not friends with those "driven" parents whose motivations I simply can't fathom. There is a total lack of respect for basic academics amongst them, too.
I'm not saying that you're wrong, but I'm on drugs precisely to stop me from doing crazy things.
I graduated in '05 and some of stuff my contemporaries were doing then wrt sports and trying to get to the next level was already crazy (playing for the school and doing travel ball as well, so many practices/camps/extra workout sessions) and don't get me started on the craziness wrestlers had to go through. I've heard it's even worse now as it has become more competitive to get to the next level, whether that's trying to get a good NIL deal or trying to play professionally
Demands of sports was identified as a major factor harming the ability to raise kids in Family Unfriendly by Timothy Carney.
There has to be some selection bias here. Maybe a certain class of school / student?
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Except the data repeatedly bears out that younger generations are spending more and more time online and in isolation.
The idea that the internet remains the province solely of a few loner geeks is a total fantasy. Reddit is one of the most popular websites in the world.
Also, I was a shy nerd in high school who used reddit, and I still partied. Fuck, I made my own booze to take to parties.
Meanwhile my youngest brother - who is super social - graduated high school in the last few years and reports that partying is totally dead compared to my day.
Basically, the kids who were socially marginalized in the prenetworks era also did not get to see the parties the socially active kids were having, and would have wondered at it all. It would have certainly been also 'a new experience' for them! Except back then they didn't have a place like reddit to go to and wonder out loud.
Socially marginalized kids were partying too. The only difference was, we weren’t invited to the “cool” parties. These days, there’s definitely a lot less partying overall.
Well, not all of us.
I was the 'coming-of-age-in-the-late 90s' teen and went to exactly 1 party. And it wasn't even the backup party, it was the cool kids' party. Outside of that I hung out with close friends and that was enough, I wasn't interested in parties.
Me and my nerd friends had LAN parties in somebody's garage etc. I really miss those sometimes.
When its snacks and BS while everyone gets hooked up and gets files off the local share to install SC2 for the nth time. It would take hours to get set up. Then more hours of play. We'd go for 10 to 12 hours sometimes, just to get things working.
This was one reason why my crowd loved the Xbox for lan parties. Just make sure everyone bringing an Xbox had whatever game, only needed one box/TV per four friends, and the autoconfig networking meant all you needed is a switch to get a few of them taking on LAN easily. Plug everything in and you're good to go with a crowd.
If by SC2 you mean Star Craft 2, that's a bit too recent for me. We used to play Quake 2, Red Alert, Diablo 2.
Ironically, these are still the best games for a LAN party. I set up a fleet of old cheap computers running Linux, loaded with all these offline and now open-source games. We had a blast and ended up playing mostly Quake 3 until about 4-5am.
We couldn't play any modern games, because every single person at the party would have had to have a Steam account or some license to the game, and have to log into it on my computers, then sign out when they were done... what a bunch of garbage. Nobody had their Steam passwords on hand.
With Quake3, you could sit down on any free machine and jump into a game instantly. I was also really surprised because some computers had the "official" Quake 3 purchased from Steam on Windows (friends who brought their own computers), some had the open source Quake 3 engine running on Linux, and some had official Linux clients... and they all worked together flawlessly.
Red Alert was a favorite. Unreal Tournament: GOTYE was another. Also AOE2. I still play AOE2 with friends occasionally.
as a socially marginalized kid in those days, I ended up banding together with other sm kids and we had our own parties.
If playing D&D is partying, I was partying nearly every Friday night. Went to one party party in my time in high school. Did not care for it.
We called em LAN parties
I partied when i was young, never DnD'd nor LAN'd. Now in my thirties I DnD and LAN, party not so much :)
There's a lot of overlap at the LAN parties that I go to lol.
Did the "cool" parties really exist?
Like, a movie party looks impossibly cool due to scripting and choreography.
I never went to parties like this. I wasn't socially marginalized, I just wasn't one of the popular kids. Popularity at my school was closely tied with wealth and family status. A relatively tiny group of people lived this sort of life.
Popularity is also so subjective.
I look back at high school and see several popular groups. Did one rise above the others? Not in an obvious way.
Like you said: some were from wealthier families, some were the athletes and their groupies (no surprise). But I went to parties of all shapes and sizes - some in those groups I just mentioned and some in other groups. Didn’t really matter that there was a premier group of socialites.
We just had our own parties for our social group. Not as many pretty girls and alcohol stolen from parents but still a good time.
Then when the popular kids were bored occasionally they'd end up at our shindigs
Were any of the popular girls physically unattractive? I doubt it. Popular boys can be popular without good looks, but it usually requires lots of money or great humour (class clown) or skill in a popular sport like American football or basketball. Look at a few "visually appealing" Instagram accounts. That will show you what basic popularity looks like, extended from high school.
I never went to parties in high school, but based on my experience going to parties in college and as an adult, I imagine your individual experience at the parties would be very different depending on your social groups, social skills, and so on.
Although even as a non-participant, witnessing a party first-hand would be more informative than the filtered version you get from Hollywood.
> the kids who were socially marginalized in the prenetworks era also did not get to see the parties the socially active kids were having
What do you mean exactly by the distinction between "socially marginalized" and "socially active"?
There was a social hierarchy where some kids were considered "popular" and others "unpopular", though really the distinction was more accurately between the beautiful/attractive kids and the average/unattractive kids, and certainly the unattractive kids did not get invited to the parties of the attractive kids, but the unattractive kids had plenty of parties among themselves, to which the attractive kids were usually not invited either.
Perhaps there were some kids who were truly marginalized, with no friends at all, but unattractiveness by itself did not necessarily marginalize you socially.
It's also true that it's "chronically online" GenX folks who are replying to the "chronically online" GenZ folks.
Even if we assume that "chronically online" people and reddit users are nerdier, less social in the real world, tend to be more introverted, less likely to go to parties in general, etc. we're still left with teen parties being normal for the GenX nerds and alien to the GenZ nerds.
As an old, chronically online, more introverted, nerd I can say that I absolutely attended parties in my teens and early 20s (only some of which were lan parties or BBS meetups)
> If you spend time with kids in the real world, you learn very rapidly that most of them aren't on platforms like Reddit and Twitter. Of those who use Reddit, few of them actually post anything or even have accounts.
Certainly true. But it's also undeniable that a huge number of them are on TikTok, Instagram and the like. I think OP's point still stands that today's youth have been affected by that.
Yep, I believe that at this point in rich countries people who are addicted to their smartphone and social media far outnumber those who aren't, at least in all age groups that aren't small children or retired.
Yep, and people get really offended when you bring it up, because so many people are addicted. I see it a lot in threads discussing auto accidents. Nobody wants to admit that a scary amount of drivers are on the roads using their phone constantly. I see it as a motorcyclist, because I can easily look down into most people's cars. My trucker friend also says that he sees a huge portion of drivers just on their phones constantly. Again, it's super easy to see into any car from a semi truck.
The addiction is real, and such a huge portion of people have it and don't want to admit it. When you have to have your phone out while you're driving, you have a real problem.
I get the same vibe from HN and other places on Reddit. Lots of folks are online in multiple places at all times. If I bring up a random internet topic in real like people give me weird looks.
There is still a big difference between not being invited to/attending parties and not knowing if they even exist as a concept.
> You have to be careful with Gen Z threads like this on Reddit and Twitter. They are inherently biased toward Gen Z people who are chronically online and deep into social media.
Wouldn't Gen X responses on those threads also be inherently biased toward Gen X people who are chronically online and deep into social media?
Maybe but they had a pre-internet life to reference and this topic is specifically discussing it
Yes? That's the point. Even the Gen Xers with strong geeky/nerdy predilections had parties back in the day.
People change. Just because a Gen X is nerdy/chronically online now, doesn't mean they didn't party in the pre-internet era. I'm one of them that fits that mold.
I've probably withdrawn more from society specifically because I had the entertainment of being online, tons of knowledge to consume, a tool to build digital things, etc. I had none of that in most of the 90s, so I went to raves and keg parties every weekend and experimented with lots of drugs and even had sex.
> People change.
Yes, and also society changes people. I think that's the point, and you allude to it:
> I've probably withdrawn more from society specifically because I had the entertainment of being online, tons of knowledge to consume, a tool to build digital things, etc. I had none of that in most of the 90s
The younger generations are suprised that we used to party all the time, because they never had a chance to live under the same circumstances.
> Wouldn't Gen X responses on those threads also be inherently biased toward Gen X people who are chronically online and deep into social media?
Maybe now, yes, but not 20+ years ago when they were younger and going out and partying.
I don't understand the point you're trying to make?
The point: If you survey Gen-Zers on Reddit to find out how many Gen-Zers are on Reddit, you'll conclude that 100% of Gen-Zers are on Reddit.
No, that's surely not the point, and it's not clear how this is even relevant.
But let's allow the person I addressed to reply instead of imposing your own interpretation.
I'm not quite sure if smartphones are still all that popular. With the rise of WFH, (and for Gen-Z, having a Covid lockdown college experience), most people are on actual computers and are sitting at home.
Actual computers? People don't have those any more. Not even laptops. They have smartphones and they may have tablets.
I'm over-generalizing of course, but that's the vibe I get. It's because many, both older and younger, entirely skipped the whole personal computing thing.
Anecdotal, but my 15 and 16 year olds, along with their friends, generally dislike computers and think they're inefficient, inconvenient, and too hard to use for most purposes they associate with devices.
In other words, they have no idea what computers can do, and they just want the phone things that are easy to do on the phone.
I've tried to teach my kids about computers, but they're extremely resistant. They just don't care. Their friends don't either, except for one who is notably interested in everything.
The majority of web traffic has been mobile since the latter half of the 2010s.
That should also be true of the Gen Xers replying though. So I think that effectively cancels out.
No, the legacy social media platforms are more popular with older generations.
Facebook is the canonical example of a social media platform that arrived after Gen X was young, but it now heavily used by Gen X while nearly completely shunned by Gen Z, with millenials somewhere in the middle.
Reddit and even Twitter are legacy social media platforms for Gen Z, especially younger Gen Z. The very oldest Gen Z people would have been too young to even use the internet when Reddit was launched.
Nobody should take a Reddit thread as some kind of proof of a broad generalization. But some empirical data is given in the article, for example, Percentage of 12th graders going out with friends two or more times a week: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!lQMo!,f_auto,q_auto:...
I think the Reddit thread is just a reflection of the reality rather than an argument for accepting that reality.
You can attempt to discount the Reddit thread, but the submitted article wasn't even based on that.
In highly developed countries, I think most people under 40 have moved away from Facebook towards Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. I thought the main Facebook users are (1) those in developing countries (messenger especially) and (2) parents in highly developed countries who need to get updates for their kids' school/sports/clubs. Is this still broadly true?
> inherently biased toward Gen Z people who are chronically online and deep into social media
most of the Gen Z people I know fit this description
is there really a significant Gen Z cohort that isn't "chronically online and deep into social media"?
Also known as selection bias. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias
We know.
>so it's no wonder that Reddit Gen Z people speak as if their generation is not socially engaged at all.
Still one sees them even outside all glued to their screens.
I wonder how the levels of engagement compare between an extremely online GenX person, an average GenZ person, and an extremely online Gen Z person would look like.
No. The “new generation” now knows what the outcasts and the undesirables of the “old generation” felt like. The more I speak to the younger crowd the more parallels I find which just means the “default” shifted towards a society of people who don’t know a different way, but are unaware of what goes on around them. The undesirables of the old knew, but couldn’t do anything about it.
It’s like people who are bewildered when newspapers say bankers got caught having a massive orgy of some 50+ attendees in a hotel in Switzerland. There is always a party, but you’re not invited. Simple as.
I knew the Diddy party charges wouldn’t stick because the aggrieved persons descriptions sound like commonly held parties in Los Angeles with quite a lot of consent involved (and courts aren't able to parse more nuanced aspects of consent, so people are left with a reliance on mutual cooperation)
this detail isn’t as important to people as wondering if I’ve gone to an LA sex party and whatever preconception they have of that and now me
Just like those bankers, and this thread, there is always a party
Indeed.
What's newspaper? ;)
The type of people posting these questions on reddit today wouldn't have been at those parties yesterday, so I don't think we can extrapolate some overarching theme here
My anecdotal experience with two children who are young adults is that there are still house-parties (nearly) every weekend at high-school, but that there's a lot less drinking, and they're a lot more open and mature (i'm not sure i would have enjoyed being a trans kid in a 90s high school)
I'm not saying the kid who posted this is a 100% representative sample, but at least in my experience of the teenagers I know, childhood has changed drastically in the last 25 years.
If you look at some of the poster's comments there, he laments that even when he does go to house parties, everyone is just sitting around on their phone. I have certainly seen that.
> they're a lot more open and mature
Maybe in some ways but hopelessly regressed in others. For example, Scott Galloway talks about how 50% of men aged 18-24 have never asked someone out in person: https://youtube.com/shorts/5sq4P5RCIrg?si=iMVDyAU4eyzgMN2j
I think that's one minor example of the monumental shift that has happened among young people.
Over protection and coddling are definitely a cause of lower social skills. When I was a kid, parents with leave children with a babysitter who was essentially an older child, sometimes just by a couple of years. Other times the kids would just be wandering around by themselves while parents didn’t care until it was dinner time. “Parties” weren’t just alcohol induced sex fests like they show on TV. Often it was 10 kids bunched around a single computer with $5 worth of chips and soda trying to beat a boss fight. A lot of those things are not only frowned upon now, but as a parent, could land you in jail.
If you wonder why children no longer grow up with a different outlook to life, then that’s probably it.
"It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of youth with social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection."
I honestly believe social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection does a lot less damage to the current generation than partying did to my generation. I can recommend the 1995 Larry Clark movie "kids" for a more balanced view how parties often looked like and which negative side effects they could have. Real life was not like in "American Pie" at all and that is where I guess Gen Z is getting their impression from.
> I honestly believe social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection does a lot less damage to the current generation than partying did to my generation.
Zuck, is that you? :)
> movie "kids" for a more balanced view how parties often looked like
Teens (and pre-teens) having sex, doing hard drugs and drinking liquor is completely unlike "how parties often looked like" for anyone I know but YMMV.
The article title mentions partying, but there's a chart that's just about going out with 2+ friends. That's a terrible thing to lose. I was a kid in the 2000s, and the vast majority of socializing was just harmless fun, not the extreme.
Digital socialization has replaced many functions of physical parties - Discord hangouts, gaming sessions, and video calls offer connection without the logistics burden or social risks. The question isn't whether socializing has died, but whether its digital evolution provides the same developmental benefits as in-person gatherings.
I honestly am having trouble believing folks think that digital socialization is anywhere near an acceptable substitute (vs. an adjunct) for in-person socialization. And tons of research supports this. Can't remember the woman who talks about AI meaning "Artificial Intimacy", where you have 1500 "friends" but nobody to feed your cat when you go on vacation.
Here is Scott Galloway talking about the significance of asking someone out in-person vs. online dating, https://youtube.com/shorts/5sq4P5RCIrg
For dating in particular, or socialization in general?
I think it's far better to be able to connect with acquaintances online, to this day I'm still playing games with friends I had in high school that no longer even live in the same state as me. Whereas had we been forced to only meet in-person, we likely wouldn't have talked to each other for years by this point.
The economic realities shouldn't be discounted. With more competitive conditions, the youth have to work much harder to secure the same opportunities relative to previous generation. With this comes the decline of partying or other high risk or non-productive activities. It's also true of adults - nightclubs are not as much of a thing as they were in decades prior.
> The responses from the Gen Xers were a mix of bewilderment and sadness, stuff like "What do you mean parties like this, it's just a normal teenage party!?
Well, it's a normal teenage party /in the US/.
I think in Europe, partying always looked a lot different (also different from country to country, here). I also mostly was bewildered by parties in teen movies from the early 00s.
I grew up very sheltered, my mom had anxiety and I was a single child.
I remember being unable to comprehend how in media, people could just go somewhere without issues to met with people or even go for a walk. I knew that was a thing, but I could not imagine what it's actually like and if it's real.
I grew up in the 90s-2000s in a place were people were very serious about school. Very few kids were getting drunk etc, there were very few couples and 0 teen pregnancies, but there was still a healthy amount of socializing. That chart showing going out with 2+ friends was still a high % then, and it matched my experience.
This completely changed after iPhones and Facebook became popular enough. It ruined even the regular socializing. Even the few boy bullies started doing this lame-ass cyberbullying instead. Sometimes I wondered where the cool kids were on weekdays, then I checked my Minecraft server logs.
I graduated high school in 2001, which sounds like a similar era, but what I saw seemed very different. So maybe things changed pretty quickly once computers hit the mainstream and I’m just a bit older than you.
At my high school we had several girls get pregnant. I remember a kid getting a DUI and he made a necklace out of the tube used to blow in the breathalyzer and wore it with pride. In my first class of the day the kid who sat next to me had a flask he’d be drinking from at 8am.
A couple years after I graduated news broke that the track coach was basically throwing Diddy parties (we’ll leave it at that to avoid getting graphic). He, and several others, ended up in prison.
This was all in a sleepy little Midwest town that many would describe as charming and quaint.
Though Minecraft didn’t exist until I was already in the workforce. Facebook came out when I was in college. Facebook seemed to be a thing with certain groups (sorority girls seems to have a lot of competitions to get the most friends), but no one in my group of friends in college talked about it at all. I don’t think any of them even had accounts until later. Web 1.0 didn’t really change society, but Web 2.0 shifted it massively, especially once Web 2.0 made its way into people’s pockets.
I worked at the computer help desk at my university. We would get calls from high school seniors, who got accepted, trying to get their student email address early. They wanted to sign up for Facebook. I always found these calls strange, and the sorority girls too. People were either really into it, like an addict, or they were completely indifferent; I saw very little in between in those first years. Facebook probably blew up way more with the mainstream once they dropped the edu requirement. After that, there was a lot of social pressure to join.
Social media has always felt like a proxy for actual social interaction. It scratches just enough of that itch to make people think they are connected to others, without providing any actual connection, as the whole experience is largely passive.
I'm younger than that. Smartphones became popular while I was in high school. It happened pretty quickly, so we went from no smartphones to having them everywhere within a year.
I think this article was way overdone, based on what I see with my teenage kids. They don't go to any "parties", but during the summer they are at the beach around 4x per week with bonfires at night. Almost 1/3 of their class (at a somewhat small school) is there.
And with Snapchat they know where everyone is. It's typical on a Friday school night they are scanning their map to see, "this group is at the mall. this group is at the football. this group went to her house." And then pick where to go.
Honestly, the current method of social gathering seems so much better than what I did in the 80s.
Aaaahhh... You have "beach" ... with the "bonfires" option pack ... This is very nice urban furniture.
Here we have "streets" and , occasionally, "public parks".
Forget the "bonfires" option.
> Forget the "bonfires" option.
This right here is emblematic of the change in culture. When Gen X were young you weren't allowed to have bonfires (in most public places) either, but that never stopped anyone. Nowadays the kids are too afraid to do anything.
How much of that is because of the difference in how severely the legal/policing systems punish this kind of harmless activity now vs back then?
It is possible. How has the punishment for being caught with a bonfire in a place where it is not permitted changed over the last number of decades?
Or is it just the reduction in lead? That is what is oft cited as the reason for why crime rates have dropped substantially over a very similar period. Which may leave my framing of the kids being fearful to be a little off, rather the reduction in lead would suggest that they have better impulse control, but I am sure you can understand that the intent there is the same either way.
Or maybe they are less of assholes in that regard. It is actually ok to not start fires where you should not.
And starting them does not make one courageous, just jerks.
> Or maybe they are less of assholes in that regard.
What's the difference? There has been nothing to suggest that the kids today are afraid of fire itself – with earlier implication that they would have bonfires in parks if allowed to – so, what else could they be afraid of other than to upset someone else? Perhaps you forgot to read the thread before replying?
> And starting them does not make one courageous, just jerks.
Now you're going off into la-la land. Did not read the thread confirmed.
> so, what else could they be afraid of other than to upset someone else?
People, including teenagers, can and do act in pro-social and non assholish ways for reasons other then fear. Simple as that.
> Now you're going off into la-la land. Did not read the thread confirmed.
I did read the thread. The thread projects fear on them, because quite a few people on HN cant explain teenagers not destroying things or not breaking the "no fire in the park rules" by anything else then the fear.
Quite a few people here assume that since they were jerks, everyone young was a jerk and everyone who is not a jerk must do so out of fear.
> People, including teenagers, can and do act in pro-social and non assholish ways for reasons other then fear.
It is unlikely a hermit living in the forest, who hasn't seen another human in years, can find ways to be an asshole. So, technically, it is possible to not be an asshole without worry for others. But it would also be unusual to call such a person an asshole given the lack of opportunities to be one.
Realistically, to be an asshole is, at least in part, to show lack of worry for others. So, no, worry is a necessary precondition here. Assholes demonstrate less-to-no worry, while "less assholes" are more afraid of how their actions affect others.
> The thread projects fear on them, because quite a few people on HN cant explain teenagers not destroying things or not breaking the "no fire in the park rules" by anything else then the fear.
Yeah. No. You just made that up. The only comment in the entire thread you could, if you squint hard enough, take to be about fear is mine. It contained the word "fearful", which is a very different concept to "fear", but I'll grant you that it shares some of the same letters. Perhaps you'd didn't bother reading the entire thing?
But even if you did somehow read the wrong word somehow, it explains that it may not be fearfulness at all, rather greater impulse control. The exact opposite of what you are suggesting.
> Realistically, to be an asshole is, at least in part, to show lack of worry for others. So, no, worry is a necessary precondition here.
Are you sure you are not a sociopath? Your reasoning here id quote off and if trulu fear and worry is the only reason for you to not be an asshole or jerk ... I dont wsmt to be around.
And yes superior impulse control can make teenagers behave better amd not do fires where they should not.
> Are you sure you are not a sociopath?
I have nothing to do with this. Ad hominem is a logical fallacy. "Read the thread", as the saying goes, doesn't just mean look at the words on the screen. It also implies understand what is written. Reaching the point of logical fallacy proves that the words were not understood. Why keep replying before reading (meaning also understanding) the thread?
> Your reasoning here id quote off and if trulu fear and worry is the only reason for you to not be an asshole or jerk ...
Fear plays no part in this discussion. It is mentioned nowhere, aside from the inane ramblings that were pointed out earlier, and is unrelated to anything being discussed.
Worry is applicable. It may also manifest as concern. But either way, it is the awareness of others (or lack thereof) that is at least a precondition, if not a defining feature, of being an asshole. Again, the hermit in the forest isn't not an asshole just by virtue of not being unable to act out his assholish ways. It is quite possible said hermit actually is an asshole. But without a situation where worry/concern is applicable, there is no way for an outsider to be able to know, and thus nobody would label said hermit as such. To meaningfully introduce the concept of being an asshole (or to not be), worry/concern about other people also must necessarily be included.
> Are you sure you are not a sociopath? Your reasoning here id quote off and if trulu fear and worry is the only reason for you to not be an asshole or jerk ... I dont wsmt to be around.
per HN rules[0]:
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Its definitely more efficient than riding on your bike or later a car, hoping someone was home
Millennial here - they definitely were real! Even back in 2008-2010 when I was in high school.
Even after high school, when I moved to the city we had parties quite often. They weren't quite as large, drunk, or disorganized, but people actually got together all the time. Some places were like designated party spots, where no one had kids or demanding jobs so it was a reliable place to head and have a good time.
My kids don't know anyone or anything like that. It's so strange. They still have sleep overs where they play video games and use their phones. That's fine in a way. At their age I was in the woods getting drunk and starting bonfires. It was fun as hell, but maybe something closer to the middle would be ideal.
That's pretty funny. I was a teen in the late '80s and only attended maybe 1 party as depicted in films and it was on a college campus where a couple of buddies and I scammed our way in by acting like we were college students (actually HS Juniors at the time). It was pretty epic. I know of a couple other notorious parties during that time that I didn't attend. I think the answer is a resounding "yes"--that crazy parties were actually a thing.
> It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of youth with social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection.
It's also fascinating how every generation in recorded history has similar claims about the next, yet somehow mankind has improved quality of life for so many.
Simply google (without quotes) "list of ancients bemoaning youth" and read millennia of similar claims, some of which could be used today and sound new.
> yet somehow mankind has improved quality of life for so many
I think it would be hard to argue that Gen Z has a higher quality of life than Gen X
Gen Z has worked far less and is much earlier in that career than Gen X, among many other things.
Incomes for each income quintile at the same age shows Gen Z as having more income than Gen X did. They are also statistically much worse with money and expenses.
You can dig all this out of historical Census data. Find personal (or household) income by age group, do the same for each cohort over time, inflation adjust, and it's pretty clear.
So I can certainly argue they have higher quality of life than Gen X at each point in their lives thus far.
I think it's such a huge mistake to think "well, it's always been like that, this is just a continuation of what's been going on in recorded history." Especially when the data tells a very different story.
For example, just look at one metric: weight. Kids these days (and, obviously, adults as well) are overweight and obese in numbers that are off the charts (off the charts because you barely had any obese kids in decades past). They used to always call it "adult-onset diabetes", which now they prefer to call it Type 2 diabetes because you see so many kids getting it, which is tragic IMO. To be clear, I'm not solely blaming the childhood obesity epidemic on smartphones or social media - I'm just using it as an example of something that has changed for kids that we should be worried about, not just hand wave away as "Meh, adults have always bemoaned youth."
Rates of teenage depression, loneliness and anxiety have skyrocketed in the pass 15 years, and when you dig into the data it doesn't look like just a rate of diagnosis issue.
Teenagers themselves (as a group) are telling us they are significantly more unhappy than teenagers in years past. We should listen to them.
I think it's such a huge mistake to cherry pick one or two metrics out of hundreds to claim something, while ignoring all the others, especially since you had to go outside the topics in the thread so far to bring in your pet metrics.
As a millennial - I'm also amazed by these parties. Some of my peers had this kind of experience, but for me this is something from parallel universe.
Mostly because I never really understood the fun part.
It was my favorite activity in the world. But that also makes it tough to "let go" when your 30s approach. Even when the hangovers get worse. I'm kinda grateful for the pandemic shutting everything down for a while. Before that I had massive FOMO when I "did nothing" on the weekend. I know a bunch of guys who did nothing else with their lives.
Hold up. GenX'er here, graduated college in the mid 90s. Are you telling me that college keg parties in the basements of off-campus housing is no longer a thing?
still alive and well, across multiple social strata, happy to report.
> the fact that kids today can't even recognize "basic teen parties" and question whether they are some sort of made up fantasy
While I agree there is a technology-driven loneliness epidemic, what is so sacred about those "basic teen parties"?
People from any time before the 70s wouldn't recognize them either. Also, they were fictional caricatures written for movies, not real life, where teen parties were considerably less interesting.
I never saw the point of those. People, alcohol, what's fun about any of that? Tripping over your own legs with a bunch of similarly incapable humans while drowning in noise and fine particulates is toddler level fun. But with potential of acquiring adult level damage.
It was always mostly people trying to recreate what they had seen in movies a party should be.
Some people want to make everything about "walkable cities." Maybe they can come back with socialization stats for non-driving-age kids, or those in Manhattan.
Something tells me that tightly packed populations in urban settings and their landlords are way less accepting of huge parties in an apartment playing loud music than a small number of homeowners in a suburb are about someone in the cul-de-sac having a house party playing loud music.
>> It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of youth
We? We, kemosabe?
I did not completely fuck up a lot of youth.
Don't include me in this.
Responsibility, the ability to respond. Since you are able to do stuff, you also share responsibility, also for things you do not act upon, even if you don’t want to take it on. You can and you were definitely able to make different choices of what you want and wanted to engage with, and what you decided to ignore. You are an active part of society, if you want that or not.
I mean normal teen parties when I was a teenager were places for teens to get blackout drunk and make bad decisions. I empathize with your position somewhat, but it wasn't all good.
Not all parties were like that. Or at least I was never invited to those. We geeks stuck to LAN parties, got drunk, and played games. Since there were no girls around, we managed to avoid making any bad decisions :)
But we did party way more than kids today.
The majority of the bad decisions we made, was when there were no girls around. It's sheer luck that no one was seriously injured or arrested
Reminds me that some of the hardest partiers/most adventurous kids were not popular: theater kids!
Getting drunk and making bad decisions (within reason) is:
a) fun
b) how you learn
One aspect to consider is that the vast proportion of content in automated feeds isn't even sincere - it's just engagement farming.
I feel like this article was spawned by that reddit post and subsequent related tweets.
Another day, another well-meaning internet community falling victim to the creative writing major testing water on Reddit before trying to make it in Hollywood.
Ya I'm shocked by it too, said as a Gen Xer born in the late 1970s, occasionally a Xennial.
I partied for 4 years of college which is something like 30 years in sober adult terms. Our ragers were reminiscent of Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds, all of those old party movies that didn't age well. Scenes from Hackers, Fight Club, The Matrix, Trainspotting, Go, Swingers, Made, 200 Cigarettes, SLC Punk, Dazed and Confused, PCU, even Undergrads (a cartoon) were so spot-on for campus life, living for the weekend. Can't Hardly Wait, American Pie, Varsity Blues, Waiting, Superbad, etc came later, and I almost consider those watered down versions of the feral partying that happened earlier just as the internet went mainstream, but still canon.
A Friday night at my city's bar scene today looks like what our Sunday or Monday was. People half tipsy on 2 drinks, even though they're Ubering home later. The faint scent of ganja now instead of basements filled with smoke and first timers trying laughing gas. Nobody puking or disappearing around a corner to relieve themselves. No sound of bottles shattering. I feel like a curator of a museum now, a derelict from a forgotten time.
In fairness, I went to college in the midwest, where there was nothing else to do. Now the West Coast has effectively legalized drugs, awakening much of the country to the full human experience, and people have done the trips and plant medicine and maybe realize at a young age that alcohol and tobacco are rough drugs that tear you up. Which is admirable, but they also prepare you for getting torn up as an adult. To miss out on learning how to make your way home on drunk logic before you black out seems like a crucial rite of passage has been lost.
And it shows. In our country's embrace of puritanical politics like we saw in the jingoist 2000s, regentrified for the antivax era. In the worship of unspoiled beauty, idolizing of influencers, pursuit of financial security over visceral experience. In the fanboyism, bootlicking and drinking the kool-aid for every new evolutionary tech that cements the status quo instead of freeing the human spirit in a revolutionary manner. I gotta be honest, most of what's happening today is laughable to my generation. Blah I sound like a Boomer. Ok cryable then. We're in mourning. We worry about the kids today. All work and no play and all that. It's killing our souls, and theirs.
I guess my final thought after writing this is that partying is one of the most powerful reality-shifting tools in our arsenal. All of this can't be it. This can't be how America ends. You know what to do.
I remember a friend who was going to school in Boston coming to visit me at my college in western Massachusetts freshman year. I brought him to some off campus house in the woods, probably 200 or so people there, huge bonfire in the back, bands playing in the basement. We're passing a bottle of Jameson back and forth. Probably around 1 am everyone just heard someone screaming "that's my fucking couch!" from the outside deck as a few dudes tossed her couch into the bonfire. The flames were as high as the house and 15 minutes later the fire department was there. My friend couldn't believe what was going on, which honestly was a typical Friday night (aside from the couch burning).
I've lived in Brooklyn for about 20 years now, and while the parties still happen, most of them have become corporate. There are $50 covers and $15 beers, with wristbands you have to load a credit card onto instead of $5 covers and $2 beers in an illegal warehouse (cash only). The kids also seem to be taking ketamine a lot more than anything else, so they kinda disassociate and don't really dance that much at the clubs, whereas mdma and coke were things you ran into more when I was their age and people were not shy about grabbing someone on the dancefloor and grinding on each other for the night. They are definitely more sheltered and tame than we were as a whole, which isn't necessarily a bad thing I guess.
ketamine and whippets too. The whippets are getting quite worrisome. Basement parties are still alive and well, but yes it seems most venues have been demolished, killed by zoning or private-equitied. It's a tale as old as time (or at least as old as nimbyism), regulate something out of existence and then wonder where all the money, goodwill and life went. That and the fact that whenever anything out of the ordinary happens there's always a phone out. Always something to worry about.
I had never really considered partying as a reality-shifting tool, but as someone fond of regional burn events, yeah, it totally is.
Humans have partied for aeons. It's not just about letting off steam, it's about building social bonds, it's about traditions and rituals and marking key points in life.
This whole thread makes me rather sad, but in the same breath, makes me feel like there is real, actionable good to be done by promoting and helping run events. Not corporate pay-to-play curated experiences, which keep you on rails and only serve to condition more consumption behaviors, but relatively low cost, volunteer-run, do-it-yourself events. The latter, from my experience, have an absolutely infectious component of wanting to contribute, volunteer, create art, and drag others into the experience. But they are also a lot of work and not everyone is cut out for it.
It really has me thinking about lowering the bar to any sort of experience that gives folks a reprieve from the default world, however fleeting.
The old "boomer" parties were even wilder.
Some girl's parents would leave for the weekend, and she'd quietly invite a friend or two over.
Somehow, word would get out, and 400 people would show up, with multiple kegs, and the place would get trashed.
I think you need some sort of youth density for that. If you live in a low-density suburb where most people no longer have kids it's hard, even if you have a tool like the internet.
That is what she gets for having weak boundaries tho. And it is a thing that if you have seen, you will actively teach your kids to avoid - by saying no soom enough.
Teenage girls have a difficult time, saying no, and teenage boys have a difficult time, accepting "no." It sucks, but that's human nature. Being a teenager is clabbered misery.
I suspect that what they do, is have a hunk show up a couple of hours early, with a bottle of tequila.
That's not a boomer thing. It more or less happened to me too.
Fair 'nuff.
I wasn't even aware that they don't have them, anymore.
Yeah and in 30 years a thought post on brainnit will appear in everyone's head and they'll ask Gen-Zer's did you really have a brain that was isolated from everyone elses?
And someone will respond:
It's really sad to me how we fucked you guys up and you didn't even have phones...
[dead]
This article isn’t wrong, but it neglects to mention real estate, transportation, and lodging. A party needs a venue, and it needs guests. And the guests need a way to get to and from the venue. If they stay a long time, they need a place to sleep.
People these days don’t own real estate. Wealthy people own it all. Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes. It’s kind of hard to throw a big party without a big home, a yard, a big kitchen, etc. Small apartments are for small get-togethers that probably don’t register as parties.
Likewise, the larger someone’s home is, the more likely it is to be location in an area with low population density and little to no public transportation. Congrats, you can throw a party, but who are you inviting? All your friends are far away. How can they get there? How long can they stay? Can you accommodate them sleeping there? You aren’t friends with your neighbors who can party easily. You are friends with people on the Internet who are strewn about the world.
And of course, if you live in a major city with lots of friends, small apartment strikes again.
This is part of the reason we have seen the rise of more public events like conventions. There’s a hotel involved. It’s a multi-day event worth traveling to. A lot of people you know will be there. It costs everyone some money, but it’s not out of the realm to go a few times a year. Best part, nobody’s home gets trashed!
> People these days don’t own real estate. Wealthy people own it all. Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes. It’s kind of hard to throw a big party without a big home, a yard, a big kitchen, etc. Small apartments are for small get-togethers that probably don’t register as parties.
This is baffling to me. Most of the parties I went to in high school, college, and my 20s were in people's tiny apartments, small rented houses, and small yards.
Maybe expectations changed? Now it seems more like people feel the need to get ready before going out, to bring something, to pre-coordinate to arrive with a group of friends, to have a lot of space, to have everything pre-cleaned and ready to be the background in photos, and maybe even to have a meat and cheese platter that gets posted to social media. It seems there's much less willingness to just go places, be cramped, and just hang out.
I agree that owning real estate doesn't seem a big issue to me, but urban design does: I lived on both sides of the pond and in the USA getting to a party usually involved driving somewhere. That means organizing to go there with a group and a designated driver to stay sober, or getting a taxi (too expensive, when I was young). In Europe, I could just get on my bike and show up by myself. That lowers the barrier to entry considerably. As far as I can tell, urban sprawl in the US has made it even more car dependent today than when I was growing up.
>> That means organizing to go there with a group and a designated driver to stay sober
That's not what it meant in the 1980's though. That's one of the things that changed. The US in the 1970's and 1980's was much freer in that regard.
Gen Z in particular is deathly afraid of having an earnest but unflattering moment captured in someone else's TikTok and distributed to the entire planet.
Whenever I watch movies/TV shows set in the future but released before the invention of the camera phone, I just insert some headcanon that future society realised the evils of uploading a recording of someone to social media without permission, and decided to ban the cursed devices.
Fun comment and I didn't know the word headcanon so, thanks.
The stakes are naturally higher and harsher than at any point in history. The government, all kinds, are reinforcing it, and governments are entirely reflective of society, there is no washing your hands of this responsibility.
Gen-Z is not only completely in the right in being sheepish, their predecessors are entirely to blame, and every attempt to claim they were not a part of the increasing surveillance state is a lie.
Even the older members of Gen-Z can be blamed to a small degree.
There is no cure
Of course there is a cure: penalties for publishing someone's likeness without permission. No one is getting media releases when they take these videos and publish them online but they are already supposed to. Make it easier to file lawsuits and watch these non-consensual non-newsworthy published videos disappear.
What are you basing that off of?
there are several videos with captions like "bro is dancing" on the internet where the one person trying to be themselves at the function is recorded. It's sad really, at many bigger name venues I see fewer people dancing now, though maybe it's because the drinks aren't as cheap as they used to be.
> were in people's tiny apartments, small rented houses, and small yards
Anymore this feels impossible due to neighbors, landlords, and police. I have so many anecdotes... I don't think it's "getting ready" as much as it's an intolerant society of chronically entitled people. Also, it's increasingly expensive to go out + I truly believe we're experiencing the destruction of "3rd places"
My 20's had a good amount of that too... but it was increasingly at odds with real consequence and risk. I'm just safer at home with my SO, in my space. It's getting much worse for younger generations :(
Good insights -- people now have to have their party look good for their social feeds: insta, tiktok, whatever. I'm forever thankful that I never had to even think about that, and even if people were taking pictures, nobody gave a damn about the background.
I go through this with my wife for every party we throw. She wants the house cleaned, table set, food spread ready, seasonal cocktails mixed, furniture moved around, decorations just so, etc.
I’m like here’s a giant thing of ice cold booze have fun.
I know this struggle, and the best I've been able to do is to push every time for limited scope. Let's just get pizzas instead of cooking 3 different mains and having a cheese plate, 4 bowls of chips, etc. Social media has really done a number on people (see also those omnipresent balloon arches)
Cleaning your house before a party is a reasonable ask.
It reallllllly depends on how dirty the place is
Why clean it thoroughly both before and after a big party? Why not just after?
People deep cleaned their houses for parties long before social media and smartphones came along.
Only if they were rich or OCD. Plenty of parties were thrown with little prep when there weren't insta/tok/snaps showing off perfection 24/7.
> Only if they were rich or OCD
Incorrect.
Yea only the rich people clean their house lol.
Not what I said. IME, the only people who "deep clean" before every party are either rich or are obsessed with cleanliness.
People are tired
And partying is expensive
always so much
In my younger days I threw 100 person parties in a San Francisco apartment - it's standing room only for sure, but so is going to a crowded bar. And I've cooked for 15 without a dining table - you eat on the floor wherever you can find space.
Now I don't disagree with your point; I'm not 22 anymore and live in the burbs and have a less full social calendar, largely due to the logistical overhead of finding my way into the city or getting friends from the city out here. But I do want to say you can have a lot of fun with a lot of friends in a small space with the right attitude :)
That's the spirit!
Instead of "don't disagree" please say: "I agree" it is proper English and not some stylized, holier-than-thou sounding, completely logically twisted up act.
I disagree with being downvoted for making such a simple request.
>People these days don’t own real estate.
The home ownership rate has been 64%, plus or minus about 1%, for the last 45 years.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S
The number of first-time home owners has plummeted though
https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics/research-rep...
Perhaps, but what about the median age of buyers? That tells a more complete story here https://www.axios.com/2024/11/04/home-buyer-age-older
But presumably we are talking about the parents of teenagers who would own the homes for these parties, so people who are 40+
Also look at the median purchase - it's incredibly bigger than 1950s.
The simple fact is that people still buy and own real estate, at pretty much the same rate for decades (a century?), and now end up owning much bigger places.
The median age of buyers has increased from 31 in 2004 to 38 in 2024.
The median age of the population of the United States has increased from 35.3 in 2000 to 38.8 in 2020. (hmmmmm)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_Uni...
As the population pyramid of the US, which is already a "population Empire State Building", further morphs into a "Population Baseball Diamond", I expect the median age of all buyers to increase and the percentage of owners by age group in the younger cohorts to decrease.
Additionally, as the median age increases, because older people tend to have more money, I expect home prices to continue to increase.
Honestly, I expect home prices to spike by 2035-2040 as the current crop of 50–60-year-olds reach retirement realizing that their only real prospect of not starving to death in retirement is the main (and often only) asset: their home.
That will further stress younger folks, but people don't seem to care and anyone who expresses concern is denigrated as a communist so what is to be done?
Regardless, with the homeownership rate for "under 35" fluctuating between ~41% in 1982 and ~37% in 2024 "nobody owns shit no mo" is still false.
https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/charts/fig07.pdf
these rates tend to be described quite awkwardly. They sure read like the owner of the house lives there, but that tends not to be the full story of what counts to the metric
at least in canada, this would mean that 38 y/o are primarily still living in their parents basement, since theyre living with the homeowner, and that counts as home ownership. same thing if you're a roommate with the owner, paying rent.
Phones are the reason.
Everyone gets quick and lazy dopamine from phones. Why bother with anything else?
Think about how much time goes into phones. Who has time to plan? Who has time to coordinate?
Phones are probably why the birth rate is declining too.
You don't even need a house to party. You can use a pavilion at a park, go out in the woods like the rednecks I grew up around did, party at the trailer park. Homes are by no means a limiting factor.
It's 100% our phones.
The Smartphone Theory of Everything probably doesn't explain all of the recent social changes, nothing is that simple, but it sure does correlate really well with all kind of trends since they became widespread. Casual socializing, partying, friendships, drinking, and sex all began to plummet around the same time, while loneliness and depression increased.
Anecdotally is makes a lot of sense as well. Most of the people I know, including myself, spend an awful lot of time on their phones and the internet in general. All of those hours have to come at the expense of other activities.
When I was in my 20s I spent an unusual amount of time (for the era) alone on my computer, but since most people were still quite social it was easy to hop into various activities. Now that nearly everyone is spending a bunch of time alone on their phone the real life social networks have begun to fray.
Some of the changes are for the better (ie. fewer teen pregnancies) but I think these trends are quite bad overall, without a clear solution. It's probably not a coincidence that political polarization and extremism has also increased during this time. Banning smart phones in schools seems like a step in the right direction, albeit a tiny one. Hopefully we can come up with more.
100%.
> All of those hours have to come at the expense of other activities.
It all adds up. Five minutes here, thirty minutes there. It all has to come from something.
The smartphone usage takes away in subtle ways too. Time spent idle is time that the brain can subconsciously solve things and work out interdependencies and relationships. If you put that time on YouTube, Reddit, whatever, then your brain is fully consumed with the dopamine drip.
Smartphones have added a tremendous amount of value to society, but it hasn't been without cost.
> Think about how much time goes into phones. Who has time to plan? Who has time to coordinate?
Hmm I use a group chat on my phone to coordinate with my friend group where we go out on saturday evening, if we need a reservation etc.
Phones are invaluable for fun too :)
> People these days don’t own real estate. Wealthy people own it all. Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes.
If you look at a graph of home ownership in the US by cohort at various points in time (see, e.g., https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/08/homeownership...), while the rates are somewhat lower, between the highest point and the lowest point the difference is at worst 10 percentage points.
This sentiment strikes me a lot more as people in their 20's complaining that they're poor because they don't have the financial resources of someone in their 40's, despite having more resources than the latter did at their age.
> This sentiment strikes me a lot more as people in their 20's complaining that they're poor because they don't have the financial resources of someone in their 40's, despite having more resources than the latter did at their age.
Home prices have doubled over the past 20 years, twice the rate of income increases
This isn't just "complaining"
There's been 65% inflation over the past 20 years, so to properly compare housing prices you need to multiply the 20 years ago price by 1.65. A house that doubled in price in twenty years only increased by 20% in terms of actual purchasing power (2.0 / 1.65).
[1] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
Housing prices doubling accounts for inflation.
In 2000 a median house would cost 3x the median income, in 2025 it's 6x (and in some cities, 8x or more)
Affordability has changed, it's well documented fact. This isn't napkin math or whinging.
Are wages indexed on inflation ? If they increase slower, wouldn't that mean the 20% increase represents more than that ?
I’ve seen homes double in price in some areas just during Covid
As people fleed from even more expensive cities since they could now work remotely.
not the whole story, housing prices also increased in more expensive cities
That’s the absolute percentage difference. Look at the under 35 category, it’s literally down 25%. That means 1/4 people that would have owned a house in that age group don’t now. Under 45 is a relative drop of ~17%, so about 1/5. One in four to one in five people is more than enough to see an effect.
I doubt it’s the only cause at all, this anti-social (“Bowling Alone”) trend has been going on for generations, and probably has multiple causes. But the US housing crunch on young people is adding to it.
And this damn attitude of “the younger generations are just entitled weenies” about housing is about the most infuriating attitude in the world. My parents bought their first house on a single earners blue collar salary at the age of 27. That house, with almost no updates, now literally needs a top 1% salary and payments for 30 years to be able to afford. Don’t tell the kids to stop whining when they’re watching older generations gobble up their future in the name of preserving property values.
And for the under-35s, I wonder just what percentage got their homes from their parents, who invested in properties decades ago.
That's for the whole country. This site is very heavily biased toward people who live in major cities, where real estate has in fact become the purview of only the rich.
Short version of the history:
Starting in the late 1990s, you had a super-concentration of both good jobs and interesting culture in a short list of cities: SF Bay, New York, LA/OC, Seattle, and a few others. I remember growing up during this period and the whole cultural zeitgeist was "if you don't live in one of those cities, you can't do anything."
These cities have always had an allure, especially creative centers like LA and NYC, but what I mean is that it got much more extreme. It fits with the general cultural zeitgeist of everything centralizing and going to the extreme right side in an increasingly tight power-law distribution.
This was followed by insane real estate hyperinflation in those cities, of course, because if you try to take all the "interesting" stuff in the world's largest economy and a nation of 300+ million people and cram it into a few metros, that happens.
The rest of the country still has a lot of affordable real estate, less so than it used to -- RE has appreciated everywhere and not just in the US -- but it's far less insane than the top-tier cities.
I post this every chance I get:
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
> Starting in the late 1990s...
How old were you then?
People have a tendency to remember some time period when everything was carefree and you didn't have to worry about how much stuff cost and all this new, great stuff was happening. And then you find out they were 12 and the time where they think all that went downhill was when they were 20.
18-22
I've asked older people about this for this very reason, and they've generally agreed with me. There's always been an allure to big cities but it went into overdrive starting in the late 90s - early 2000s.
As for real estate prices, that's objective. You can easily look that up. RE prices went insane starting in the 2000s with the 2008 crash only being a brief pull-back in a long bull run. You can also clearly see the divergence with big top-tier cities appreciating at a much faster rate than smaller cities. You can see it in the numbers.
Look into the origin of early personal computers. They're from all over: Albuquerque (MITS), Dallas (TI, Tandy), Boston (DEC), Miami (IBM PC), Philadelphia (Commodore), Seattle (several), etc. In the early 2000s if we re-did the PC revolution it would all be from the SF Bay, because by then if you were doing anything cutting edge in computing it had to be in the Bay Area.
PC technology consolidated, as things naturally do. Remote work should enable decentralization again.
The general feeling of "things were better and looking more upward in the 90s" is pretty common across generations. 9/11 was kind of the 21st century's market crash of '29
The US still has not recovered from 9/11. IMHO the terrorists won. They got quite a bit of what they wanted.
Osama bin Laden:
> "We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat," bin Laden said.
> He also said al Qaeda has found it "easy for us to provoke and bait this administration."
> "All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations," bin Laden said.
> As part of the "bleed-until-bankruptcy plan," bin Laden cited a British estimate that it cost al Qaeda about $500,000 to carry out the attacks of September 11, 2001, an amount that he said paled in comparison with the costs incurred by the United States.
> "Every dollar of al Qaeda defeated a million dollars, by the permission of Allah, besides the loss of a huge number of jobs," he said. "As for the economic deficit, it has reached record astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars.
> "It is true that this shows that al Qaeda has gained, but on the other hand it shows that the Bush administration has also gained, something that anyone who looks at the size of the contracts acquired by the shady Bush administration-linked mega-corporations, like Halliburton and its kind, will be convinced.
> "And it all shows that the real loser is you," he said. "It is the American people and their economy."
> As for President Bush's Iraq policy, Bin Laden said, "the darkness of black gold blurred his vision and insight, and he gave priority to private interests over the public interests of America.
> "So the war went ahead, the death toll rose, the American economy bled, and Bush became embroiled in the swamps of Iraq that threaten his future," bin Laden said.
It is really strange to read complaints that the vast vast majority of 20 somethings have no chance of competing against older established households in the housing market.
I would hope so, otherwise that would mean the country/locale is so bad that older households are packing their bags and fleeing.
So the most desirable properties, such as large SFHs, townhouses, penthouses, etc… within a short driving distance of an attractive city will likely be owned by the latter, by definition.
It's not a matter of competition around current supply, it's a complaint about policy that has lead to a decline in what a 20-something can purchase over time.
The same managers - that then require asses in seats, keeping downtown valuable as investment, also own the mansion within driving distance. Might there be the remote possibility, of a no-win-scenario for the young, which results in violence? No way.
> It is really strange to read complaints that the vast vast majority of 20 somethings have no chance of competing against older established households in the housing market.
Not to mention Private Equity and huge real estate investment firms that vacuum up a significant (if small) number of homes. Even if that 20 something could scrape together a 20% down payment and make an offer for asking price, they're going to get beaten by some corporation buying with cash.
This seems like a tautology, an offer with less conditions attached is more attractive than another offer at the same price with more conditions.
I'm not convinced. I live in Berlin and everyone is living in a flat, yet I've had my fair share of home parties, even in small two room apartments where half the party spilled out to the stairwell.
I'm pretty sure Berlin has public transportation. I have it here in Trondheim, Norway - but only one town that I've lived in the states had busses. They didn't run all night, on Sunday, nor did they visit all areas of the somewhat small town. (I'm from the US, lived more places there than I have in Norway)
Other places had taxis (that you couldn't order ahead of time to get to work on time) and some had none until they uber/lyft. (Don't know the current situation).
I'm going to guess the other thing Berlin has is safe areas to walk. I can go to a party and walk home, safely on walking paths complete with shortcuts, without even being harassed by the police and risk getting arrested and in jail for the night (for public intoxication). None of these were luxuries I had in the states.
And I'll say that yes, I've been in some small apartments - but only some folks with small apartments can host. You probably have no clue how many would host if they only had enough space, but a small apartment with 2 adults that have hobbies limits things.
Trondheim also has a university (which increases the odds of a party happening), and one could also walk across the entire city in less than an hour :). Most cities in the US suffer from being designed around cars, but that has not changed in the last 50 years, so I don't think it explains the decline.
It's been years, but I hope Den Gode Nabo is still fun.
Part of the reason you can walk across the city in this time is because it is really walkable. I'm from the Midwest - Trondheim is the biggest city I've lived in but more walkable than any of them. I'll add that the "across the entire city in less than an hour" isn't as true as it once was, especially when you consider that places like Klæbu are part of the city now and the population has grown. Byåsen would take me over an hour to walk to.
Den Gode Nabo is still about, but its been years since I've been there :)
I don't think Berlin is a good example because partying is kind of part of the city subculture.
People travel there literally to party.
People travel to Berlin to go party in clubs, not for home parties.
Partying in someone's apartment is a thing in probably every reasonably sized city in Europe, not just Berlin. Although you should probably alert your neighbours.
you could alert your neighbors, or better yet, invite them. alerting them is nice, but they could still get annoyed and complain, but someone at the party isn't going be doing much complaining
I don't think Berlin life corresponds much to USA life in this regard. We mostly have suburban sprawl and many areas that would be similarly dense, are not very populated with children/teens (because parent's often move to the suburbs)
> Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes.
About 2/3 of households in the US own the home they live in. Renting is the minority, not the majority.
Thank you for mentioning this! There's this weird, persistent meme that large corporations are buying up all the housing and nobody owns homes anymore, which is fundamentally not supported by the data.
There are shifting trends in generational home ownership rates, but these are still just initial trends we're seeing. If you look at the data [0] owner occupied has gone down from the 2000s housing bubble, but in the grand scheme of things is not even particularly low.
People also have this mistaken belief that investors like Black Rock are buying up huge swaths of property, when in reality most "investment" properties are bought by families and individuals, consider anyone who know who owns an AirBNB rental or other rental property, they would be considered "investors".
Most Americans still live in a house, and own that house (or at least, some member of their household owns it).
0. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
I don't know about the United States, but in (parts of) Europe it is the case. "Nobody owns homes any more" is an exaggeration of course, but things are not alright in the housing market, in part because private corporations are buying up quite a large percentage of the housing stock to rent. I think in Ireland it's about half.
Like I said, I don't know about the US. It's a big place and you're probably taking too much of a "grand scheme of things" view here. Aside from geographical diversity, total % of home ownership doesn't change that fast – lots of older people already own homes, their children often inherit those homes. Houses aren't like hotdog sales and numbers change slowly.
What matters more is how much does an average 25 or 30 year old pay in housing costs? What hope does someone with a decent (but not exceptionally well-paid) job have of purchasing a house? A single % of home ownership across the entire population doesn't really capture that. Doubly so for such a large country as the US. I'm sure there are affordable homes out in the sticks, but also ... no jobs. That might work for the remote software dev, but not everyone is a software dev.
In Ireland the total housing ownership has fallen, but not dramatically. However, the reality for people not already having a home is quite bleak. Buying a house now is significantly more expensive than it was a decade or two ago, as is renting. I could buy an apartment on my own ten years ago with a salary that really wasn't all that great. I'd have no hope today. My rent today is about three and a half times what it was 15 years ago. There is a generation of working 20 and 30-year old who are still living at home because they can't really afford to move out.
> "Nobody owns homes any more" is an exaggeration of course, but things are not alright in the housing market, in part because private corporations are buying up quite a large percentage of the housing stock to rent. I think in Ireland it's about half.
This is a _really_ popular meme, but it's not true. About 50% of new homes are bought by owner-occupiers, about 25% by local authorities and approved housing bodies (https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/housing/local-authorit...), 10% pension funds and institutions (these are the 'private corporations' you refer to), and the remainder are small landlords, holiday homes etc etc.
I think sometimes people see "50% of new homes are bought by owner occupiers" and read it to mean "and thus the other 50% are bought by evil corporations" (people also tend to forget about the 'new' bit; second-hand homes are much more likely to be bought by owner-occupiers, as REITs and pension funds largely don't want to touch them, and nor do approved housing bodies; local authorities do sometimes buy individual second-hand homes, usually from private landlords), but really the bulk of the remainder is social housing.
The ridiculous rents are driven by the fact that we're just not building enough homes. Not that we're not building a lot; we have one of the highest per capital rates of homebuilding in the OECD, but there was a period of 7 or 8 years where we built almost nothing, and that's a really hard gap to bridge.
Interesting! Would love to see a reference for your percentages
Up to 2023 in a slightly dodgy graphical representation here: https://housingireland.ie/composition-of-purchasers-of-new-h... (note that y axis is number of sales, but labels are percentage of sales!)
If sufficiently masochistic you can also wrestle it out of the CSO's horrible website for 2024, I think.
In Ireland, approximately 41% of young adults aged 18 to 34 live with their parents as of 2024. It was 32% in 2011. This is an economic abhorration that has stolen significant independent adult lifespan from an entire generation.
This is caused by an Irish cultural distaste for apartments - as they're generally not setup for modern living, are typified by poor soundproofing and insulation, and marred by fire insulation and other scandals - leading to a decreased stock. Include the Help-To-Buy scheme applicable only to new-build houses on greenfield estates, and the HAP social-welfare payment which set an artificial floor on rents for apartments, and its the case that the average apartment rent is 1.5-2x the cost of servicing the mortgage at a 90% LTV.
This results in an average rent in Dublin of €2,500, with Open-market rents in the capital rising at annual rate of 5.2%. The most recent median (50th percentile) salary is €43,221, which comes from a 2023 CSO report. That's a monthly net salary of €3,000 per person.
The National Asset Management Agency, set up in the recession to take on all the in-default property and babysit it till prices rose again, has a huge part to play. Combine this with a non-fit-for-purpose Planning and Appeals process, and you literally have builders suing the government for blocking developments.
As of November 1st 2024, there were just over 2,400 homes available to rent across the ENTIRE COUNTRY OF IRELAND, down 14 per cent on the same date a year previously and well below the 2015-2019 average of almost 4,400.
All of this laid the foundations for disaster. Now the increased materials and energy costs since Covid-19, combined with a relative collapse in our building sector prior, have meant that building apartments in Dublin has largely become commercially unfeasible, as construction costs are now higher than what buyers are willing to pay.
https://www.independent.ie/business/unviable-construction-st...
> I think in Ireland it's about half.
It's about 1/3rd AFAIR.
I do agree that Ireland has experienced a massive change in house prices from 15 years ago, but 15 years ago was the bottom of a bust after the boom so potentially not the right comparison point.
I do mostly agree with your points, and it's really bad but it's important to contextualise some of those points.
One important data point is that houses have become much more expensive compared to income in the last decades. When I lived in CA, my plumber neighbor told me he bought his house in the 70s for 80000 on a salary of 40000. Today he would probably pay 800000 for the same house but make maybe 100000 or a little more.
It's definitely harder to buy a house these days.
Houses today are vastly larger. Cost/sq ft in all but the few most expensive places has been nearly constant under inflation adjusted price for an incredibly long time. A huge majority of the population lives in such places.
Here's a size list that is commonly shared https://www.newser.com/story/225645/average-size-of-us-homes...
When you figure in # of people in such houses, the avg person has vastly more space https://www.reddit.com/r/REBubble/comments/14hayqq/average_h...
New builds may be larger today but the vast majority of real estate on the market are not new builds
I bought my house in 2018. It was built in 1997
It is not vastly larger than it was in 1997, but I still paid 2018 prices for it
Most people aren't buying new builds
Prices change due to inflation among other things, which is over 50 % from that time period. And given that the median house age (not median age of sold house!) is 40 years, you did buy a much newer house than the majority of people have.
A few years back, median age of sold house was 27 years. So by that metric you bought even a newer house than the majority of house sales.
Your 1997 house is almost certainly much larger than the median 1950 house.
And, your single data point in no way invalidates aggregate statistics.
$40,000 in 1975 is over a quarter million 2025 dollars.
You can't buy on the west coast for a quarter million. A house big enough to start a family will likely start at a half million, and in some communities will come with hefty tax burdens.
in 2025 anything vaguely desirable in a coastal-ish city is starting at more like 600-700k. actual decent houses will be 1MM or more.
the folks in those areas, if you owned a house for the last 20 years, are now richer than ever due to that property appreciating. but the younger generation is absolutely screwed
> if you owned a house for the last 20 years, are now richer than ever due to that property appreciating.
Only if you sell it, and move somewhere with a much lower cost of housing.
If there is a spare bedroom in your HCOL location, renting that out lets you get some incoming cash flow without having to move away to a LCOL location.
You don't get "rich" from renting out a spare bedroom.
HELOC and never pay it off until you die
The north coast has cheap housing.
Sure, but you can certainly afford a house on the West Coast with an income of $250k.
the higher prices are affected by the corporate buying of single family homes. for every home a corp buys, that's one less for individuals to buy. if the number of buyers remains the same but fewer homes are available, prices go up--seller's market. yes, prices go up adjusted for..., but inventory more competitively sought. the other issue is that the average buyer is looking to buy with financing while corps are paying cash. that makes for such a smoother transition for the seller that it is hard for them to turn down cash offers.
after corps, we have foreign buyers also coming in with cash offers. i know of one specific house that is empty for the majority of the year purchased by foreign owners specifically for their kid to live while attending college. the kid chose to not go to that school, so the house sits empty except for when some property manager comes by to "check in" on the place.
so while this thread is discussing still showing decent ownership percentages, those numbers are glossing over some of the "trends" in modern real estate.
It's overwhelmingly due to monetary policy which has inflated assets and depreciated real wages for decades.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
Restrictive zoning laws preventing construction in coastal cities is also a major factor. The cities which see the greatest declines in rents have the greatest increases in supply.
https://www.nmhc.org/contentassets/f9a5ef47d06143e6b8355cfad...
> affected by the corporate buying of single family homes
> after corps, we have foreign buyers also coming in with cash offers
As someone mentioned earlier in the thread, these are memes that are not actually backed by data - commonly perpetuated by groups that blame most issues on billionaires/corporations/investment firms.
So you're insinuating that the specific example of a house sitting empty owned by a foreign buyer is made up?
In my neighborhood specifically, there are homes being bought not by single families but specifically buy management companies so they can then rent the property. To deny this happens is just as much of a stick your head in the sand meme as what you are accusing me of.
Management companies will only buy a house if they think they can profit on it, and the price of the house is a cost for them too. This links the affordability of both types of housing: low rents can't support expensive real estate, and vice versa. The rental payments have to pay for the management company's mortgage.
No one is denying that it ever happens. It happens in so few numbers that it has no impact on the overall real estate market.
That's why your anecdote is meaningless and can be dismissed immediately.
So you're insinuating that the specific example of a house sitting empty owned by a foreign buyer is made up?
I'm sure that happens occasionally. It's not nearly as significant as exclusionary zoning and other bad policies that prevent housing from being built.
In my neighborhood specifically, there are homes being bought not by single families but specifically buy management companies so they can then rent the property
Even in that case, the homes are still on the market.
They're saying it's overemphasized, which is why we don't rely on anecdata.
bring the data to back your claims or be ignored like you are ignoring all the responses to you
Interest rates have fallen dramatically over this period, which increases the ratio that is affordable.
High interest with low price has the advantage that you can decide to pay more into the principal, reduce the interest you are paying and so reduce the total amount you are paying. You can’t do that with high price and low interest.
Yes and: You can also refinance later if rates fall.
At 18% interest which happened in the 70s your yearly payments would have been 14468.02 or 36% of your income. A couple years ago you could get 3% rates and so your payment on that house would be 40473.98 or 40% of your income, not much difference (and likely the house is larger). At todays 6% interest the payment is 57556.85 or 57% of your income and so not affordable, but this is a very recent thing.
This is both ignoring inflation, and the potential to shorten the duration of the loan.
Inflation is a factor in a few years but never today. Now inithe 1970s high inflation meant that a house you can barely afford becomes a small part of the budget in a couple years while the small inflation of today means a house you can barely afford today is still a big part of the budget in 5 years - but that is not a consideration of today.
It absolutely is a massive factor; because people plan a few years ahead. Consider how much it changes what you can afford if you save one year worth of payments in each case.
There is also less need to get the maximum possible loan if house prices are lower as a ratio to income.
A good, experienced plumber would make a lot more than that in CA.
These are the numbers my neighbor gave me. No idea how accurate they are. I think it’s well known that the average house price to income ratio has gone up a lot in the last decades.
Sorry, there's no way a plumber in the 70s made 40K.
Yes, it’s surprised me how this meme was everywhere in the comments while the data does not support it. I’d bet it’s splashy headlines in news outlets. Important to correct it so that policy is focused on what’s most effective.
Blackrock sounds scary
People absolutely also conflate it with Blackstone and even Blackwater.
tbh conflating blackrock and blackstone is pretty fair. Their named similarly because it's the same people with just a slightly different business.
It's another example of mistaking the current trading trends for the overall asset reality. Like NFTs, TSLA, and house prices, a relatively small amount of daily trading money can move the "market cap" quite a lot.
And those old folks that took their home equity and used it to buy property for an AirBNB are in fact an example of the rich/old folks screwing the young generation hard. (Other examples: vote to reduce taxes, to increase tuition, stop the free market from building more housing, do nothing on global warming, let the economy be swallowed by health care and financialized scams). As are the people that own and rent 3 houses, while their grandkids have to move far away. (Disclaimer: I live in San Jose, and my adult kids will never be able to live near me).
> There's this weird, persistent meme that large corporations are buying up all the housing and nobody owns homes anymore, which is fundamentally not supported by the data.
They are and the trend is there. The housing market moves slowly and it takes time to chip away enough at the larger stat. Once the boomer's age out, even with wealth and asset transfer, let's revisit this and see how it looks. I'd bet 2/3 ownership looks more like 1/2 or less by then, which is a significant drop and it probably will only continue from there.
For adults under 35, less than 38% own their own home and the rate is falling.
Also, it varies quite a lot by state. Over 3/4 of adults own their own home in West Virginia, but in New York it's a bit over 1/2.
Population also varies wildly by state, and New York makes up a far larger percentage of the USA than does West Virginia.
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Owning an apartment isn’t materially different than renting an apartment here. It’s sometimes better as many apartments have free or rentable spaces available for parties as a selling point, but rarely can you use that space late in the evening.
Owning a home in an HOA area can drastically cut down on what kinds of parties you can host.
To some extent but there are differences. You have housing stability, a fixed price going forward, the ability to renovate most of the internals, and the ability to affix things to the walls without worrying about marks when you have to move out.
I don’t disagree, my comments was about the logistics of throwing a party.
Well… mostly fixed price. Property taxes go up every single year, and are now the largest single payment I make every year.
This is a detail conveniently left out by home owners justifying their purchase, especially if they overpaid and have a higher interest rate on their mortgage on top of it. With a mortgage, the amount you pay is the expected floor you'll encounter, whereas with rent, the amount you pay is the maximum you'll deal with, at least for the duration of the lease agreement.
Renting honestly can be a better deal, especially if you have the discipline to stick excess money in the market consistently. In fact, your returns are likely better than just using a house as a forced savings account. In my neck of the woods, we have seen rental inversion too.
> This is a detail conveniently left out by home owners justifying their purchase
I mean you can phrase it this way. Or you can phrase it as homeowners are willing to play a premium for stability / forced savings. (And to be less generous, homeowners may be getting cheaper access to capital than otherwise available to a renter; espsecially as the homeowner locks in ~2% interest rate while a margin loan has increase to 10+% [1]).
However, for markets with low construction and strong demand I'm pretty sure home ownership comes out ahead. Like look at housing prices in the bay area historically vs current rents. That said, you need a handicap'd rental market for renting to be worse so the general situation is it's better _iff_ you invest the difference.
[1]: https://www.schwab.com/margin/margin-rates-and-requirements
I will say, one huge advantage for home ownership over renting is when you are in a dual income household and have kids. Your lifestyle isn't going to be as compatible with moving around constantly trying to find a good deal (like I'm able to as a single person). And if you do plan to stay put for 10 years or so, you will most definitely come out ahead. But you really need to be in the right mindset and phase of your life for this to truly make sense. I often times see others not really ready to settle down rush and buy a home, only to end up regretting the decision a few years down the line, sometimes even sooner.
I will also note, that the notion of having access to a cheap line of credit, like a HELOC, can be a fantastic tool when used correctly. But... I'm also seeing folks abuse this to keep up with the Joneses. And when times get tough, they won't be able to pivot and might end up defaulting and then losing their home in the process.
The overall state of the economy will still need another major shakedown before those elements of society get their wake-up call. It sorta started happening with Liberation Day, but we bounced back rather quickly... so who knows when that would happen.
a fixed price going forward
Property taxes, HOA fees, maintenance, appliances randomly breaking and resulting in bills of thousands of dollars...
the ability to affix things to the walls without worrying about marks when you have to move out
If you care about the sale price you will worry about that, among many other things.
> If you care about the sale price you will worry about that,
Marks on the walls from hanging pictures is not going to meaningfully change the sale price of a house, please be serious
However it could absolutely lose you your damage deposit when renting
But what's the demographic breakdown of this?
How many of that 2/3 is households that have owned the home for 20+ years—ie, since before the subprime crash?
How many of that 2/3 is households of people 65+? And how many is people under 30? Partying is still largely a young people's game, and even if your "household" owns the home you live in, if that's your parents or grandparents, you're much less likely to be hosting parties there.
That is severely overrepresented by old farts who don't party. Among people who party most probably rent.
yeah, as an East European, it's crazy that our real estate prices are basically the same as the non-super expensive US cities, and we make like one-fifth the salary.
In fact I just checked and the ratio of avg salary to real estate prices is about the same as in New York.
This is misleading. The trend is going in the opposite direction and the figure is closer to 53% https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1ew7tp6/no_67_o...
Yeah, but the 2/3 of people are old boomers that don’t party.
My sister and her husband throw a pretty great annual Halloween party at the house they rent which is 1-2 hours from the nearest city and a good 15-20 minutes from the nearest town.
I don't think the real estate situation helps but I think there's a deeper social problem driving both of those effects.
No, owning a house does not give you more license to throw a party. Not owning a car never stopped anyone determined to go to a party. A place to sleep? What kind of party are you imagining in your head? One where people travel hundreds of miles and need a hotel? Your take is ridiculous. People party in small apartments all the time, I've been to hundreds. I took the bus there many times, or got rides from other friends going to the party, and now ride-sharing is a thing. Sleep?? That was never, ever part of the equation. I know it's a tired cliche, and usually used as a troll, but I can confidently say that you obviously don't get invited to many parties.
I'm not saying this isn't part of the problem, but my experience has been different. When I was in my 20s, my friends and I all lived in apartments and had parties fairly often. I recall that when I was a kid in the 90s my parents often went to small house parties as well. Now, in my 40s, neither I nor anyone I know ever goes to parties despite us all owning houses and cars and living fairly close to one another.
My theory is that people have fewer parties because people have gotten flakier about attending larger social events. It is much easier to cancel plans at the last minute with a text or a social media DM, and people always seem to want to keep their options open. We've moved to getting together only with one other couple/family at a time b/c any time we try to have larger group events half of the invite list will cancel the day of.
You need a home to party? News to my younger self. Parties in crowded shitty apartments, outdoors, or even in cars were the norm when we were young.
This complaint - we don’t have nice houses so we can’t party - is unintentionally emblematic of the root issue in misaligned expectations and excuses for realigned priorities. Nobody Inknew when young had houses either.
Look, it’s not obviously bad to me that young people party less. Blame gaming, blame some resurgent conservative cultural values, blame the internet or even laziness. Maybe the youth today just have better things to do, and that okay. Binge drinking, drugs, and stupid decisions aren’t necessary good investments in time, and many, many, friends from back in the day didn’t survive it. Like less kids smoking cigarettes, maybe this is a good thing (for them and all of us).
But it’s ridiculous to try and turn this behavioral trend into some manifesto on housing inequality. Give me a break.
And even if every person did live in a detached home where they could hypothetically throw a party, there are smartphone connected Ring cameras everywhere. Parents always know what's going on now.
This is such weird reasoning. When you're young and throwing parties where you're implicitly inviting a whole lot of people who you don't know, they will be bringing random chaos and you want to appear judgement proof and have it be someone else's property getting accelerated wear and tear. By the time you own a house with a yard, you're only inviting people you already know, with maybe one layer of transitive trust. Perhaps this focus on owning a house as the first step to doing anything points to the real problem though?
"People these days don’t own real estate. Wealthy people own it all. Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes. "
This is only true in some HCOL places ands big cities. Plenty of people own homes.
Not in high-density areas like cities. People own homes in low density areas (middle of nowhere), which makes them isolated, hence no communal activities like partying.
In Philadelphia everyone I knew owned a home (condo, townhouse, rowhome or stand alone) by 30 basically.
Not trying to be offensive, but I would add second and third tier cities as viable for home ownership. Not the first tier.
>People these days don’t own real estate. Wealthy people own it all.
The article says a similar decline is seen among the wealthy.
Homeownership rates in the US fluctuate, but are basically flat over the past ~45 years.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S
> Wealthy people own it all.
Most homes in the US are mortgaged. More likely the banks, which ultimately means the depositors, who are just as likely to be everyday average people (the wealthy normally keep their wealth in things like businesses), own most of it.
> And the guests need a way to get to and from the venue.
Add in the odd issue of younger people not getting their drivers licenses or owning/having access to a car.
It could be anecdotal but I've seen this in a number of locales across the country. Curious if there's hard numbers on it.
Jeez, youngish people feeling left out on investing into real estate see it as root of most of problems this world is facing now.
Sorry but can't agree, as do most folks here backing up with some hard data. That 'glass is half-empty' approach to daily life ain't healthy long term, ever thought about that?
US suburbs have not changed. I grew up in US suburbs (in the 70's and early 80's) and there was partying.
My own personal theory? Music sucks now, ha ha.
US suburbs have very much changed!
The median new home size skyrocketed in the '80s.[1]
Many of the post-war suburbs were planned communities built with schools, churches, grocery stores, and other necessities within walking distance.[2] Compare that to developments today (and since the '90s), that are all housing, lack sidewalks, and require a car to get to necessities.
Serendipity doesn't happen when everyone's in cars. You don't pull over to invite an acquaintance over for a beer or offer to watch their kids.
1: https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/average-home-size/#smal...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levitt_%26_Sons#Construction_o...
Good point. Car culture was nonetheless a thing even in the 70's though where I grew up up. And those 70's suburbs are still there. So I am not sure why they are still not partying in Overland Park and Prairie Village, Kansas.
The consumption of music has changed.
I almost never meet people who like the same bands as I do. I can listen to new music that I love at home. If I go to a bar or a party I'm going to mostly hear music I don't like, and if I do like it, I could have already heard it at home.
Maybe that is part of it
People rarely like music made decades after they were young; tastes settle.
I like plenty of current music. Not pop music though. (My kids don't seem to either.)
That reminds me of an article I can't find anymore on the plight of the American poor couple trying to raise a child in a gasp 900sqft. Uh, check real estate sqft averages around the world?
I never was much of a partier as a teen but I've been to a few, and they were all in flats ranging from much smaller than an American house to literally one room sometimes with 15 people in it. Had no problem falling asleep drunk on somebody's kitchen floor or on a couch in a room with a bunch of other people.
Even in the US a dorm room (a tiny, rented place) is a stereotyped party location.
Oh and ofc numbers are wrong. The houses in the US are bigger than ever and homeownership rate is smth like 60%.
This is just absolute total nonsense. Normal people do own real estate. Lots of people rented back then and do now. Friends were “far away” back then too, they took their cars, bummed rides, took buses, whatever. Where do they sleep? Where do you think they slept back then? The floor, the couch, the lawn, or they didn’t sleep at all and just went home in the morning.
Eh, I feel like my (and most peoples) main exposure to house parties was in HS and college when basically no one owns their own home. Rented apartments, houses and family homes seemed to work fine then, I can't really think why that wouldn't be the case now.
Note the age-group with the biggest drop is 15-24, its not like the average 18 year old owned their own home circa 1995.
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You correctly blame corporate buy up of real estate as a problem but nobody ever cites upper income new immigrants as a problem. Where I live the only people purchasing $600k - $1 million residential properties are newly arrived Chinese, Eastern European, South Asian and Arab immigrants.
Makes for a very angry native population who are being pushed out of the places they were born for new arrivals. We'll never be able to build enough housing to account for the continual flow of well to do immigrants and native population.
In a twist that has multiple levels of irony, I've heard that there's protests going on in Mexico right now about this, with the wealthy immigrants/tourists being from the US.
I feel like Portugal had the same problem with wealthy foreigners purchasing all the real estate.
Are you claiming that they’re already well to do (by American standards) when they arrive?
I can’t count a single immigrant in my network that was rich by American standards (which makes them filthy rich by most other nations standards) and then chose to move here.
Sure my sample size is probably 30 families (across a dozen countries) but that’s not nothing.
Every single one built their net worth here. Meaning that opportunity is also available to natives.
> immigrant in my network
These people are too rich to talk to you.
https://www.benhams.com/news/london-property-market/foreign-...
"almost 27% of the total London properties sold in Q1 2024 were acquired by foreign buyers, recording a 3% YoY rise."
Note that "foreign buyer" and "immigrant" aren't precisely the same thing; you can buy property in the UK without having to be resident.
Where do you live? If you’re in SV or NYC, extremely easy to meet these rich families.
If you’re meeting someone who has a Masters or PhD from a US university and came from another country - often their family is well off. Certainly better off than a typical middle class family in the US that can’t pay for college for their own kids and aren’t even paying international rates.
I promise I'm not gaslighting you. The majority of individuals buying residential real estate where I'm located are new arrivals or 1st generation. The Chinese circumstance is bizarre and has been going on for over 10-15 years. So they all use Chinese banks right? The rumor for years is that the Chinese government funnels the financing somehow to new arrivals to buy up real estate. They used to go up and down Brooklyn buying properties with over a million in cash. But barely speak English! It's just bizarre.
Oh yes we have that too in the DC area. Especially from China.
It made it extremely difficult for us to buy our house because we kept losing out to all cash offers from China, and that was 10 years ago.
My point was meant more that I also knew tons of immigrants that made their money here with the same opportunities available to locals, and not some unfair advantage.
Most of these immigrants are not rich before they get here with maybe the exception of the Chinese who explicitly buy real estate as investments outside of China.
Yeah, that's a good one too. I remember reading that China was allegedly trying to curtail this by limiting money movement out of the country for large transactions, but we all know that the people with that kind of money will find a way (if those "efforts" were even really being made).
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The biggest bias to watch out for is to assume what has happened in the past on the same trajectory.
It wasn’t long ago when the experts were warning about over population.
I dare say that the housing crisis is driven by people needing housing, and the number of people alive being problematically high seems like it might be related to the problem of overpopulation. Food supply has kept up, but if housing has not, isn't that still a problem driven by overpopulation?
You seemed to have ignored my point entirely.
more importantly imo: maids and housewives.
good riddance btw. but we need to adjust because partying is nice. we are still working ad if we have a free employee taking care of half our lives.
welp, it's always a class issue.
The parental part bears special mention.
My spouse and I find that we are overwhelmingly the ones calling to organize playdates rather than vice versa. I'd like to think it's not that my kids are poorly socialized or misbehave - they've always received glowing reports at school. I give my kids business cards with my phone number to pass out to their friends to give to their parents, and there is also a class list where our phone numbers are listed (and where we find these other parents' contact info).
Something happened with the culture of getting kids to play with each other outside of school hours, and I don't know what it was. COVID lockdowns definitely delayed it from starting for our kids, but I know these parents are mostly in my generation, and we certainly played more together.
We live in the suburbs, so it's not a car creep problem - at least, no more than it was 60+ years ago when the numbers were better. When I ask the parents who stay, they tell me a vague mix of weekend junior sports leagues, visiting relatives, and just being really tired after working all week. They're lame excuses: spending time with kids constantly is _also_ really tiring.
Kids having regular playdates would encourage more familiarity among the families and trust in letting kids play unsupervised with each other. Often I take them to the main playground, and it's virtually empty. I can't believe I'm the only one in the community who's unhappy enough about this to try and change it.
Often the kids like to play together, but the parents are the ones that are just... weird and asocial. I hate to bring agism into this, but there definitely seems to be a generational gap with the adults.
Some of my kid's friends are raised by their parents, and others are (apparently) raised primarily by grandparents.
When my kid wants to get together with friends whose (50-60 year old) grandparents bring them by, the grandparents come up to the door, socialize for a bit while the kid runs inside, and then we talk about when the playtime will be over and they can come over to pick the kid up. If it's an event where we both bring the kids, I find it easy to shoot the breeze with the grandparents, have small talk about how the week went, and so on.
When the parents are, say, 25-35 year old range, it's a totally different vibe. They'll drive up, let the kid out of the car, and then race away without even getting out of their car. When playtime is at a local park or something, they sometimes hang around, but they go off into a corner, engrossed on their phone, totally ignoring the other parents (who, depending on their own ages are either chit chatting or locked into their Instagram).
I remember when I was a kid in the 80s, and not only would we love to get together at someone's house, but the parents would also be happy to get together for a little socialization, maybe throw some steaks on the grill, put on some Sportsball, or whatever. This practice seems to be dead now that I'm a parent!
I’ll endorse this heavily.
We bought into a nice suburban community. Good schools, low crime, the dream.
No one knows any neighbors. Kids rarely play with one another intra-neighborhood despite a very healthy blend of age ranges. In fact, I’ve loosely associate with exactly one neighbor in the three years. We went out of our way to try and meet neighbors our first month. Most treated us as if we head too many heads on our shoulders.
Despite a heavy presence of children, no one here celebrate Halloween despite it being a beloved night growing up around here. Our first year we invested heavily in decorations and spent hundreds on the King size candy bars.
Society feels… dead compared to me as an early 90s child.
That's really rough. We bought into a neighborhood in an older college town, and I think that's helped things a bit for us. Smaller houses and yards, so people hang out around the neighborhood or in parks. Everyone's out walking their dogs all the time, and pretty much everyone is happy to stop and chat. I think it's just about getting lucky and finding places where people prioritize the community rather than having giant houses, giant yards with swingsets, and giant cars so they never need to talk to anyone.
Have you thought maybe its your environment? I think the "nice suburban communities" have always been filled with antisocial people (as someone who grew it in them). People go to the suburbs for quiet and to be left alone.
I barely knew anyone in the neighborhood when I was living with my parents in the suburbs. My friends were all from school and required a car to hang out.
In contrast, now as an adult, I live in a dense major city (that's supposedly filled with crime according right wing news) and I see kids all the time walking around. I have a young kid and he interacts with his neighbors a lot more. My mailman knows of my kid and when we moved across the street.
Our closest couple's friend is a 5 minute walk away and its nice to randomly run into them on a weekend when taking a walk.
We regularly have wine and food on Fridays with one of my neighbors who have a kid close to our age and its easy and without friction.
It’s not a suburb/urban thing (though that could be correlated).
It’s an area thing. I think the biggest thing that leads to it is age stratification in a neighborhood - when every family is in the exact same “place” something weird happens.
But looking at a neighborhood on Halloween might be a great way to check.
While I don't deny there are pockets of abnormality like you suggest, having grown up on a dirt road in rural America and spent most of my adult life in cities, suburbia comes across as the antithesis of community. It was founded on the very promise of insularity. Obviously, that's not everyone's agenda, but it's beyond debate that its defining principle was segregation (followed by uniformity and convenience). I want to be sympathetic but I don't understand how people buy into it without accepting this. We've made some progress as a society, but having visited a lot of suburban neighborhoods all over the U.S., the remnants of the original mindset still come across loud and clear.
I think a key component is that “suburb” has multiple meanings - and which one comes to mind when it’s mentioned depends on where you were raised/lived.
Some suburbs are the stereotypical miles and miles of identical homes with no sidewalks.
Others are actual older rural towns that have been consumed by the nearby metropolis - and these ones feel quite different.
There’s a kind of “suburb” that is usually quite lively - the rural suburb, often a pocket of relatively dense homes in a sea of wheat.
One of my indicators is lemonade stands. If they appear regularly, the area is alive.
That’s tough. We also bought a house in a nice suburban community right outside of NYC and it’s been amazing. We know all the neighbors, exchange gifts during holidays, and a ton of kids come out for Halloween. What I really liked about the neighborhood when house hunting was seeing kids ride their bikes around on the streets unsupervised. I don’t know if it had any correlation, but the vibe felt right.
"Vibe" should be a top criterion when house-hunting.
i wish that was a search filter...
TBH this kind of fuzzy criteria could be a nice AI application.
>No one knows any neighbors.
Why would you know them? If this were 1965, you were going to live in that house the rest of your life, and they were going to live in that house the rest of their lives right next door and so it only made sense to get to know them. But today, both you and they are only here temporarily until it becomes time to move away in 4 years when you job-hop for that raise. Will you even live in the same state afterwards? Maybe at the next place you'll settle down and stay long enough to put forth the effort, but for now you're as much a migrant as any Dust Bowl Okie.
Even just 6 or 7 years ago younger coworkers were adamant that renting was the way to go, because they didn't want to be tied down to a house that they'd have to sell in a hurry when they inevitably moved away for a new job.
Americans are moving less frequently now than they were in 1965:
Overall, when looking at both migration between U.S. states and within them, fewer Americans are moving each year. In 1948, the first year on record with the Census Bureau, more than 20 percent of the population moved in the past year. This had decreased to just 8.7 percent in 2022. While the share of Americans moving across state lines remained more stable, those moving within their state became much fewer, from between 15-17 percent of Americans per year in the 1950s and 1960s to results in the single digits in the new millennium.
https://www.statista.com/chart/32135/share-of-movers-and-non...
Perhaps fewer move. But they definitely perceive it differently, especially the younger demographics. There are fewer young people each year too, as our population ages, so I'm not sure your statistics are particularly relevant to the group we're talking about... unless you were under the impression that all the nonagenarians were party animals or something.
I am probably that sort of parent. Truth is I dread socializing. I enjoy just hanging around with my family in the peace and quiet of my home. Not one to engage in small talk with neighbors, other parents, etc.
My daughter is still a baby, and I don't want her to become a shut-in because of my antisocial tendencies. So yeah, I will take her to the public playground, get her into the local sport activities, this sort of thing. But I would likely be the parent in the playground just sitting by himself while the daughter plays, maybe reading a book (I also hate social media in general, so no doomscrolling for me).
It's a difficult balance.
> I would likely be the parent in the playground just sitting by himself while the daughter plays, maybe reading a book
Just do that and don't feel bad about it. I saw a bunch of parents like that at all my kids different sports and other events and I always respected them for at least showing up. Honestly, it's worse to sit and make forced awkward smalltalk, because you feel you have to, than just relaxing and being yourself.
As a parent who is an introvert married to another introvert, it is definitely a challenge. It is hard not to feel overwhelmed when our kids have friends over, and the desire to avoid that is strong. We have to actively tell ourselves that we have to sacrifice our quiet for our kids social lives. I don’t really enjoy socializing with other parents while my kid plays, either, and my wife hates it even more than I do.
It really takes active effort to make sure our kids have play dates.
It sounds like probably you're an introvert. And that's ok! But surely not every parent of this generation is an introvert...
I think so, yeah.
My concern is to not let it be an impediment to my daughter socializing with other children is the point.
context: i’m in my early 30’s and i’m not a parent
the behavior you described of the 25-35 year range is appalling. and those aren’t my kids so that’s saying something.
Call it what it is, antisocial. Baffling to me…why are people so weird?
It's the phones. No one has anything to talk about anymore because constant scrolling leaves you with nothing to show. And then it's self perpetuating --easier to keep slamming the dopamine button than trying to make conversation with a completely atrophied social muscle.
I think the Internet full of sewage with phones as delivery funnels has destroyed society. I would ban it all if I could
Every family is dual income now, so every family needs to find something to do with their kids once school lets out. Growing up in the 80's most families around were single income and kept kids at home over the summers. As a result, kids ruled the neighborhoods, bouncing around between houses all day, where there could be some reasonable expectation of peripheral oversight. Now, everyone is min-maxing camp schedule to ensure there is child oversight during working hours, and the neighborhoods are empty.
We decided to break from the trend and return our kids to more of a free-range kid paradigm, risking the disruption to our working schedules, this year. It sounds good in theory, but you are left with the realities of every other child friend being wrapped in camp schedules, as well. It took a lot of proactive discussions with other parents to convince them to keep their kids at home and accessible. But you're still left with the dual income problem, so you find yourself hiring a sitter to oversee and shuttle.
The result is an improvement over the 100% booked compartmentalized camp situation, but without the same level of independence that I experienced and have come to credit with really advancing my own personal development as a child.
By BLS statistics, 50% of married couples today both work[1], which is the same as it was in 1978, and lower than it was for most of the 80's and 90's[2]. There are some caveats to those statistics. They cover all married couples, including retirees, and there are more retirees today than in the 80s. It also doesn't differentiate between full-time and part-time work.
However, it does show that the majority of families were already dual-income by the 80's. The trend away from supporting a family on a single income started much earlier than that.
Anecdotally, all my friends in the 80's and 90's had both parents working, and we still got together to play all the time, either in the neighborhood for nearby friends, or dropped off for further ones.
[1]Table 2 in https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/famee.pdf
[2]https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2014/ted_20140602.htm
What happened is that everything turned into playdates? When we were kids, the general direction was GTFO, and don't be late for dinner. Who did you go play with? Whoever was at the park. When you got older, you hopefully had access to the skating rink. Or maybe a bowling alley. Before that, kickball at the park. Pretty much every day. Maybe see if you can over shoot the swing again.
Im convinced that car seat rules have played a big role in shaping child socialization.
When was a kid, you were done with your car seat by elementary school so one parent could offer to carpool a minivan full of kids to/from an event.
But now that some kids need their car seat into middle school carpools are gone and every kid needs their parent to pick them up. It requires way more planning and parental involvement
I definitely feel a bit lucky that my kids were big enough to be out of car seats by elementary school, already. That said, I thought most were out of needing car seats by the second or third grade? I'm surprised to hear it is at all common for kids to still be in seats all the way to middle school.
I also can't offer much of a defense of car seats. Obviously, go for safety; but it does feel that people are chasing a tail end of safety that is not really measurable. Modern cars and using seat belts have come a long long way to make vehicles safer.
There is also the interesting contrast with busses on this. Kids don't buckle up or use seat belts in school busses.
School buses have inertia on their side
Also, as an SF parent: I drool over the idea of school buses—prop 13 has basically eliminated them
This. This is definitely part of the problem. I can't even offer to take my kid & his friends anywhere, other than walk to the park after they're deposited at my house, because every one of them needs a car seat.
Whoa what?? I had no idea about this.
While well intentioned, car seat laws have gotten a bit insane. Minnesota recently implemented some pretty nonsensical ones that are dependent on if they've outgrown their seat.
How are cops supposed to know if they outgrew their seat? It also means that when they move to forward facing or a booster seat depends on the car seat you bought, not their height, (only their) age, or weight.
For older kids, here's the new rule: "A child at least 9 years old or has outgrown their booster seat AND the child can pass the "5 step test" may be restrained by a regular seatbelt, but they must be in a the back seat if possible under 13."
That's not too bad because they at least have a set age, but you still can't expect a parent to have a set of 4 booster seats ready to go to haul your kids friend's around.
As an addendum, my wife just messaged me about getting our daughter a worse child seat because ours is rated for 50 pounds. In Minnesota's new laws that means she needs to be rear facing until she's 50 pounds. She's a few months away from being 4 years old and she's 33 pounds or so. Her legs are getting incredibly scrunched up and we can't extend her leg room even though our car seat is made for that because there simply isn't room in our car to do so. I saw comments on a Facebook post about it from our county that someone's 7 year old was going to need to go back to rear-facing.
I think a lot of this should have fallen back to liability setting in the laws, then? I feel safe saying cops should not be ticketing people for kids being in the seat wrong. However, I can see your rates going up if you are found to be in violation of some of these rules during an accident?
Sucks, as this isn't as easy as saying it will be your responsibility and fault if the kid is injured. Odds are high this will just make a bad situation worse.
The concept of playdates is amusing to me as an immigrant. In Indian cities where most people live in apartments, the kids just go down and play around with the 10s of kids from the neighborhood. Adults get free time and kids get to socialize and enjoy.
From which ages? Would you let out your 3-year old kid unsupervised?
There was a line somewhere about Americans being increasingly unable to handle unstructured socializing.
Parties typically have some sort of rules-based activity, be it beer pong or board games. Playdates themselves are perhaps the first manifestation of such phenomenon.
Totally valid observation, but things definitely changed. Neighbors don't know each other as well, so the grandma keeping an eye out the back window doesn't exist anymore. It was a village watching the kids before, its not that way now.
I suspect they didn't know each other that well back in the day, either. We just tell ourselves that they did. When we've lived in apartment complexes, as an easy example, there were a lot of people we didn't know. We just also got to know a few that we would see on a regular basis, as well.
I think theres probably an uneven distribution on this... I can think back to my childhood in a small town in new england and I can still remember everyone on my block, the block across the street, and every kid's house within a half mile or so. I even remember some of the 4 digit phone numbers (b/c almost everyone had the same area code and city code). When we moved though we didn't know anywhere near that many people.
Agreed on the uneven distribution. I would posit that this is probably even uneven in the communities, as well? Just because you knew everyone in your block doesn't mean they knew each other that well.
Similarly, I expect most kids in a classroom to know of each other, but I doubt they all know each other. If that makes sense. Such that, it is easy to think this is also a by product of how much more you can do inside your houses? Back when you would see folks outside more often, it was common for you to know of a lot of people. If you only had a few "shut in" type people, you knew them as the shut in type people. As it becomes more and more of us, it gets tougher.
Before universal A/C you were basically forced out of doors in many parts of the USA.
This, over time, leads to familiarity with those around you.
Now most people would be highly suspicious if you sit in your front yard.
AC is very rare in my state but I still see this phenomenon.
Is it because of less churchgoing? Church is basically one large standup (and sit down, and stand up, x a few times :-) ) for the community.
Or maybe kidnapping paranoia fueled by years of crime news programs?
I dunno about you but I grew up Irish Catholic, had parents who very much lived by "GTFO and come back at dinner", and I never made any real friendships or relationships via church. It was a wholly useless avenue for anything - and this was in several different church communities over the years, too.
IME while church might be a community, it's really a very stifled one.
> "GTFO and come back at dinner"
Right, this is what I am wondering, is the reason people were comfortable doing this the fact that there was a weekly touchpoint with the community? The church visits might be stifled but if they establish a relationship with that large group of people then that might enable more free roaming at other times.
No. They did it because they were alcoholics and didn't really give a shit what we got in to as long as we didn't bring the cops home with us.
Ha! Probably more than fair for a lot of folks. It also was not uncommon for this to be when parents were cleaning the house. Doing that with a kid around is unreasonably difficult.
some of our common free range play places included walking to the dump and new home construction sites to have dirt clod wars. maybe some structure isnt bad. i turned out fine but looking back it probably would have been cool to get taken to a park
I saw a reddit post where a woman was arrested for letting her 10 year old walk a mile alone
What country was that in?
It was already happening before COVID. All these trends were. That just made it worse.
A major issue is the death of independent child play. In a lot of places if a kid — and we are talking up to early teens — is unsupervised police will be called. It’s entirely the result of daytime TV and true crime making people think there are pedophile nuts hiding in every bush when in reality abductions by strangers are incredibly rare. If a kid is abused or worse it’s almost always someone they know.
One of the things I love about where we live is that kids do still play outside. It’s a safe Midwestern suburb. We moved from SoCal and there you would definitely have some busybody call the cops. Of course it was perhaps more dangerous — not because of crime but cars. All the suburban streets have like 60mph speed limits in SoCal.
It depends where in socal of course like anywhere else. In a more urban part like in la there are no busy bodies, you see kids out skateboarding drainage culverts during school hours all the time.
One factor may have to do with birth rates and construction. I grew up in a neighborhood that was all built up within the span of a few years, and populated by young families, in the early 60s. There were kids all over the place. Anybody who wanted to play would just go out and holler, and they'd have a few other kids almost instantly.
Where my wife and I raised our kids, there was one neighbor with kids, and that's it.
Also, kids are more occupied now. "Back in my day" elementary school kids didn't have homework, and it was pretty minimal even through high school. My kids had homework starting in first grade. Naturally you want it to get done early while the kids are still awake, but this cuts into the prime hours for play. We should simply have revolted against it. But that's hindsight.
I had lots of homework 80s-90s. But still managed to get outside, play, do stupid stuff. My house had all the kids playing video games and when we got tired of that we went to play sports.
>I give my kids business cards with my phone number to pass out to their friends to give to their parents
Yeah if i was a kid i'd be mortified at having to do this.
I physically cringed reading it. The intention is great but if I was his kid those cards would be staying in my backpack. Making a kid stand out like that is risky as fuck for social standing.
But this is likely the worst forum in the world to talk about typical social skills.
An honest attempt from a social adult to develop a sense of community is far from cringe. Reasonably speaking, its actions like that which can actually make socialization happen. If the old way wasn't working, so try something else.
My reaction is my reaction. A cringe is involuntary. Your reaction is equally valid and way more mature.
We are talking about school kids here though please remember.
How are you communicating your contact information to your kids friends parents in a non-cringe way?
If handing them a piece of paper with my number is too cringe, I'd be really happy to have a non-cringe, non-standout (?) way of doing that.
Does your kid know your phone number?
The older one, yes. The younger one, no. So I do the cringe method of writing my information down.
But I didn't realize that it was "risky as fuck" and making my kids "stand out" so much to have my contact information on some paper to give to their closer friends. I must be way more socially inept than I thought. (I guess my eldest must be too, because she thinks handing a card to a friend is convenient.)
So please, if you have some method that is roughly the same level of convenience but not "risky as fuck", I'm all ears.
> contact information on some paper
Is not the same as handing your dad’s business card around to your friends (and is a borderline disingenuous way of summing it up, business cards have business implications i.e., formal implications it’s kinda in the name of them, kids aren’t business people aren’t used to using them socially like you might and don’t see it as a scrap of paper) if you can’t see that then yes I agree with your conclusion on your social skills.
Hey let me give you my mom’s number or add her on Facebook / instagram (how old are these kids by the way?) is not the same as handing out and having handy your moms/dads business cards.
It just isn’t.
It ain’t rational and yes technically they are ‘both pieces of paper’ but the vibe is simply different.
It ain’t cool. It comes across as desperate and forced and it’s embarrassing as a result.
The tone of your reply intimates anger at my responses, that’s unfortunate but I stand by it.
>Is not the same as handing your dad’s business card
It's my general contact information on business card stock.
Maybe it's a regional thing, but when I read the comment, I just assumed they meant "business cards" in the general sense. Like how there are "joke business cards" that say "yes I'm tall, the weather is fine", etc.
Mine are business card size, on business card paper, made on a business card generation website. It simply says my name, my number, and my email.
>The tone of your reply intimates anger at my responses
Yes, I think it is wild to say that it is "cringe" and "risky as fuck". The dude just wants his kids to play with some friends. It seems to be working for everyone involved.
I feel way more stupid litigating this over comments on the internet mid-day during the week than I would handing out business cards with my full business information on it, to be honest. Parents get so much flak on the internet for normal ass things, it's crazy. Say a little off-hand comment about how you're trying to get your kids to have a good social life and people come out of the woodworks to call you cringe.
Social risk is real. You have derailed this by applying it to your different situation but have taken on the emotional offense.
Giving your work business card to your kids is different than writing your number down. Again. For the fourth time.
Do you get it now?
It is social risky whether you like it or not and getting angry and offended on other grown adults behalf, again making it about you when it wasn’t when you don’t even do that.
Also it doesn’t work. He was literally complaining that it doesn’t work. We aren’t talking about you.
And he literally states there is a class list of numbers all parents have anyway! So there we go, does your mom have my number, yes she has all the numbers on the list, well give her my business card because I like to be the nail that gets hammered down.
>Giving your work business card to your kids is different than writing your number down. Again. For the fourth time.
Do you get it now?
You must have skipped over the entire middle of my comment.
>making it about you
It's a conversation on a public forum, I do more or less the same thing, I'm chiming in with my experience, yes.
But this is obviously unproductive. You're right that I'm defensive over it, which is probably a sign for me to step back.
>Also he literally states there is a class list of numbers all parents have anyway!
Side note, but my kids have friends in other classes and I'm not allowed to see those class lists because my kid isn't in the class. I know, I know, I'm making it about me again. But, perhaps there are similar rules elsewhere.
I actually like the idea here. When I was a kid it was always give the landline number of the friend's house, or it's in the class list from school.
Nowadays landlines are more or less gone, so the card approach is a good one.
How is this any different than a post-it note with your home phone number on it? It also solves the problem of trying to not knowing your kid’s friend’s parents’ names.
My kids asked for them. They are under 10. (They asked me to write down my number to give to their friends. Business card is just as good.)
We don't have a landline, and there's no way in hell they're getting their own phones at that age.
This is something I think about with my kids when they get to that age. I was calling my friends (on their landlines, using our landline) regularly by then, talking to their parents en route to getting them on the phone, and arranging visits. My kids won't grow up in a world where that's something that happens, and I'm not sure how to support their social independence in a world where (as you say) it seems nigh-on-negligent for them to have their own phones.
There is a nascent movement of families bringing back landlines for exactly this reason
it's the only way it works. It took me MONTHS to get a hold of the number of my son's best friend's parents so that now we can organize maybe an afternoon of play every 4-5 weeks.
I thought a prime time for contacting the parents is right after school when picking up the kid. Everyone is there waiting, so it's just natural to chit chat, esp when the kids are friends.
Except when they ride the bus or are in after school or the parents dash in and out from being double parked.
I have certainly gotten to know some parents at pick up, but there’s a whole bunch I have not met.
I'd count also those memorable school talent shows/performances and events. Another reach out avenue is volunteering, these have a higher chance to match parents with similar availability at least.
My local school killed this with COVID. Now you are no longer able to stand and wait, everyone has to line up in their cars. Viva la community!
What are they going to do if you ignore this, out of curiosity?
It may be a good time for some small social disobedience to push back to how things used to be
That would require everybody get out of the car and get off their phones though
Why do all that, when you can sit in the comfort of a nice warm / cool dry vehicle and play videogames and listen to music?
Really? While I don’t do it, the alternative is having a kid come home with a scrawled phone number that may or may not be right along with a vague recollection of the name of the parent I am supposed to be calling. Things are a little less akward in our life but it may be because we are closer to what OP describes as grandparents I suppose.
I get the idea, but I would suggest the reaction to an attempt at lubricating social interaction as “cringe” is part of the issue OP is describing.
It would be one thing if it worked. The OP admits that their kids don't initiate socializing but also claims they aren't poorly socialized. Blaming every parent but themselves when their parenting resulted in kids that don't seem to try hard enough.
>The OP admits that their kids don't initiate socializing
Either you are I are reading it wrong, because I don't see anywhere in their comment where they say their own kids aren't initiating.
What they do say is that other parents are rarely initiating play dates.
Can you quote the part where they "admit that their kids don't initiate socializing"?
I did read this wrong.
> My spouse and I find that we are overwhelmingly the ones calling to organize playdates rather than vice versa.
I read that as his spouse and he were organizing rather than the kids organizing with friends when they're together at school or camp. That's what my kids do unless it's a birthday party or carpool.
They are under 10 years old and do not have their own phones, nor do their single digit aged friends. They have zero sense of proper scheduling. While we live in a good neighborhood, there are more than a few reckless drivers, and short kids are not always visible to good drivers who are distracted. Finally, if the police saw them and decided to follow, there's a very good chance I'd get a knock on my door and a possible child endangerment charge.
I didn't make this world.
My kids would totally be up for this. I don't have business cards though
It’s surprisingly fast and cheap to print a 100 of them and have them mailed straight to your house.
I'll suggest you are thinking of the teenage years where anything involving your parents is mortifying.
That's not really the case with elementary school age kids.
If you are 5 year old it would most probably feel strange.
I would do this. Of course I’d have cards made up that say “Hoopy Frood who really knows where his towel is” as a screen for parents with similar sense of humor.
> We live in the suburbs, so it's not a car creep problem - at least, no more than it was 60+ years ago when the numbers were better.
Kids were not driven to playdates 60+ years ago. They would play with other kids living nearby. Parents would not organize their playdates either.
> When I ask the parents who stay, they tell me a vague mix of weekend junior sports leagues, visiting relatives, and just being really tired after working all week. They're lame excuses: spending time with kids constantly is _also_ really tiring.
I do not seen how these are "lame excuses". Seems like valid things that lower your availability and also valid reasons to want to you remaining time for own rest.
> Often I take them to the main playground, and it's virtually empty. I can't believe I'm the only one in the community who's unhappy enough about this to try and change it.
60+ years ago, 6 years old kids would go to main playground on their own. Partly it is that kids are much less independent these days ... and partly it is that their own rooms are much more fun. So, kids want to stay at home because it is good enough and parents do not want to sit bored on playground.
Parents just want to watch their Internet content and it's easier to just stick their kids in front of a video game or computer vs having an event that requires parenting.
At least when parents are addicted to alcohol they can still be social and function as parents. Not so with Instagram/tiktok.
Oh that rings true and it's so depressive. But I think it has more to do with this notion that everything you do socially is awkward in some degree and could be seeing as bad or hurtful, smartphones didn't help us there with the chance of becoming the next national meme just a tiktok away.
Also social interactions nowadays have become so "one of a kind" and disconnected from a general contract that sometimes it's hard to not feel overwhelmed, I remember being 10 years old and just knocking on the door of my neighbourhood friends to check on them and kind of invite me in, depending on the time I would stay and grab dinner there and only come back home when it was getting too dark. Now as a parent I feel this serendipity is almost gone, you have to officially arrange play dates on parent groups, pick kids up, ask parents what kind of food should I offer, is it ok if I let them play videogames, is it ok to offer sugary drinks, list goes on and on.
In that world consuming media is much easier, but I wouldn't say that's because it is addictive on itself, I think there's a big portion of people that just got tired of trying to navigate how to interact with others. My impression is that the proportion between lurkers to posters increased with time on different platforms including in real life.
I think there's something to the notion that everything has to be overproduced now. The technology aspect is part of this (you have more tools to make events 'better', so if you don't you might look bad), and so is the culture of making things safer (and so necessitates more organization, more formalization). People get burned out easily and drop out from it.
When I grew up back in the 80s there was a sense of more stability, I think. People didn't move around as much. American suburbs were more of a monoculture(for better and, mostly, for worse, but it was what it was). That stability and comfort let people be more at ease and more open to things. I think now there's a generally higher level of anxiety and it spills over into the need to plan every social interaction.
Even as someone who grew up in more spontaneous times I find I need more scheduling and such these days.
I wonder if it was the Great Recession that made all the difference.
How old are your kids?
We've got a toddler. Currently bracing for the upcoming shit-show which will be the pre-school and beyond years.
I wonder how much of this comes down to wage stagnation and the need for not only both parents to work, but to work more hours and sometimes multiple jobs, just to keep from drowning. Especially when childcare is so expensive, it's a situation that can compound and spiral.
I wonder how the generation of latchkey kids fared.
Parties and kids aren't mutually exclusive. In fact some of my best memories growing up were from the times my parents took me to some house party where all the parents were talking and drinking and having their own adult fun, while us kids were running wild over the property and neighborhood until real late. Adults are excited, kids are excited, it just works, see you next weekend.
Why do the kids need play dates? When I was a 7, you’d just talk to the kids down the street. I knew several kids within a few blocks of where I lived.
It seemed like a really far distance that I went to see people but now I realize I never went more than a quarter mile from home to see someone. There were just a lot of families in my area that had kids.
Of course, that’s not true in a lot of the areas I’m in now. My friends experience the same where it’s hard to meet people who have kids of similar age. There might be 50 homes and only 1-2 will have kids near the same age. Many won’t have any kids at all.
Thinking back on it, it was surprising how many kids there were near me near my age growing up compared to now.
There is a coordinated action problem here, I think. (I have three young kids).
When I was a kid, I could be relatively sure that if I went outside on a random day, there would be other kids playing outside. So, all the kids went outside most days to play.
I _could_ send my kid out to play and there _are_ other kids in the neighborhood, but almost all of them are inside playing video games. At best there might be some kids going on a walk with their parents.
If my oldest kid wants to interact with with his friends, his best bet is to get on fortnite, which he does most days _and he doesn't even like fortnite_.
Families are smaller in general. That means there are less kids to see in most neighborhoods even if they are outside.
Another aspect of the coordination problem is that when I was a kid all the other children in the neighborhood rode the bus home together, and many of us got home before our parents were back from work, so playing together until dinner time was the natural thing to do.
These days, the school day is longer and more parents drive their kids to and from school, so extra effort is required for kids to get back together.
Kids used to just go outside, find one another, and play. I see that you are attempting to solve the problem with organizing playdates. However, I think that playdates and structured EVERYTHING for kids is a contributing factor to how we got here.
I think at some point, we need to acknowledge media sensationalism (traditional and social media varieties) have not only poisoned politics and bolstered conspiracy theory popularity, but have vastly overstated the dangers of every day life, making childhood and parenting much worse than a generation or two ago.
When I was a kid, we would always hatch a plan on what to do with the rest of the day while we were still at school. As soon as the bell rang, we hurried home to catch something to eat and then it was off to the woods to build that fortress or whatever. If there was no school, we'd call the house phones of our friends until we had a plan cooked up. And every day without fail we didn't want to go home. So much stuff to do!
Now, watching the kids my friends have - they won't even leave the house if their parents didn't plan a playdate and brought them there. Something is completely off.
Kids aren't left to their own devices anymore. They are handed a device. It also doesn't help the cops in a lot of places will arrest the parent for letting the kid out.
I see this SO MUCH, I wonder if you're also in California. I find this state particularly difficult to have a social life in. Everyone is "friendly" but nobody wants to be your friend, always chasing something else and never making time (exceptions apply). It's been exhausting to live here and I can't wait to go back to Europe where social life was not nearly as difficult.
People are friendly everywhere, but they mostly already have a full friend group and so are not looking to add more. Thus breaking in as a new comer is hard. However there are always people who need new friends it is just hard to find them.
According to data nobody has friends anymore, especially men.
It's tough out there
I moved cities in 2017 and it was an incredible move for me. Better work opportunities, I met my wife, I own a house now, life is great
But I have made zero male friends here. I have some online friends I chat with and game with, but otherwise I'm pretty isolated
No idea how to make new male friends. Any time I meet people, they seem to always have a tight knit group already and are not really interested in spending any time building new friendships
I am sure I'm not the only lonely dude looking for friends but I dunno
A lot of Millennial parents are -- paranoid. We have had neighbors exclaim that they don't want their children saying hi to us or they'll learn to talk to "strangers". Or a neighbor whose little boy played with my daughters for months, but when they moved the mother scowlingly rejected the idea of playdates because part of her goal in getting a bigger house was -- to put it in my words -- insulating him from other children. These tend to be the same parents who micromanage their children in other ways, like very limited diets and excessive summertime clothing, so, again, it seems like some form of paranoia.
> My spouse and I find that we are overwhelmingly the ones calling to organize playdates rather than vice versa.
Why do you think this is? Because it's very true for me too -- not only play dates but also just regular socializing, like hangouts, game nights, happy hours and bar dates, cookouts, holiday, parties, etc. I feel like I'm always the first one to text or call somebody. It makes me question what other people are doing.
That’s interesting to hear, because I feel like all of my friends who have kids have a very conscientious approach towards socializing their kids, setting up play dates, (plus finding other parents they get along with to make new friends with!)
I really wonder what the less involved, less intentional approach would be - hope your kid figures it all out for themselves?
Take away all those kid's iPads and on-demand cartoons and I bet the parents start begging for more playdates
During COVID, every kid in the neighborhood was at my house. School was short maybe 1-3 hours then it was play time. I didn’t know all those kids lived in my neighborhood! Kids had no issue coming over.
I don’t know what the reason is for this phenomenon
Some good answers but also American parents are stretched thin but also perhaps want to be a larger part of their kids lives?
During the week I get maybe 10-30 minutes of quality time with them outside of the routine of weekly life. Maybe?
So if I want to do something with my children and have a relationship with them, the weekends are all I have.
Aaaand of course,quality of life in America is generally in decline and parents usually have no support structure (family etc) so no one has interest in the extra work of doing playdates.
It is kind of paradoxical because kids would like the opposite honestly. I love my parents, they are great people, but knowing myself as a kid if I was asked if I wanted to spend saturday with my friends or with my parents, I'd pick my friends every single time no hesitation. You don't laugh like you do with your friends with anyone else. You don't get into shenanigans. You don't have to worry about "behavior" or anything like that. No matter how nice and open your parents are, friends are truly liberating.
In my experience, kids want to be with parents. They want to do their own thing when they become pre-teens. But kids up to 8-9 years do genuinely like their parents.
Why so little time? A large part of the daily routine is things they should be doing with you as quality time. You shouldn't be cooking, eating, and dishes alone - that is a couple hours right there per day.
Same, it’s really disappointing how few parents have reached out to play compared to how often I am trying to find one of my kids’ friends who is around to play.
Why are you doing this? Your kids should be able to find their own playmates. If you live on a farm I can see that kids can't get to anyone else's place without your help. The neighbor girl comes over to our house often to play with my daughter often. My son is annoyed that there are so few boys his age in walking distance (but we keep telling him to go visit the ones we know are in the neighborhood). We are lucky that neighbor girl is really outgoing as otherwise my daughter would sit at home complaining there is nobody to play with just like my son does...
My children are 3 and 7.
3 is certainly not old enough to do so.
7 is marginal. I seem to recall playing in my neighborhood at 7, but very few of my child's friends are out on their own at this age.
The local public school district allows children to self dismiss starting in 3rd grade, which is typically the year they have turned 8 and will turn 9 during the school year. That seems like a potentially reasonable time to allow them to go out unsupervised.
As a father of 2 in Canada, I feel the same. Loving the discussion here.
Seems like an opening to build a SaaS to encourage kids to socialize.
/s
> Seems like an opening to build a SaaS to encourage kids to socialize.
that's... not actually a terrible idea
SaaSifying every single part of life has honestly been building a pretty bad society so I have to disagree
I have to imagine it would turn out better than than what we currently have, which is an increasingly negative trend to nothingness.
[dead]
There’s no way to say this without coming across as extremely rude, but…
> I give my kids business cards with my phone number to pass out to their friends to give to their parents
If this isn’t the only thing you/your kids do that’s well outside typical social norms, that’s probably the reason nobody else is inviting them. This is almost on the level of parents accompanying their adult kids to job interviews and then wondering why their kid didn’t get an offer.
You might want to pause and think about why policing another person’s behavior like this is so fervently important to you. Most of the parents I’ve met wouldn’t push something like this on their kids but would rather treat it like a collaboration. Kids even at age 5 are capable of explaining that they don’t want to do something and nothing in the parent implied use of fiat. We all need to assume more good faith on the part of parents and of our neighbors if we want to have a social fabric and reasonable discussions.
As I posted above, my kids literally asked for them. They are both under 10, and don't have their own phones.
I've been throwing moderately large parties the past 2 years (12-40 people) and the lack of partying is definitely noticeable. Most people don't reciprocate, making it disheartening to keep doing it. I wanted to build friendships out of it, and hopefully get invited to more parties myself, but so far it hasn't happened. It's a decent amount of set up (cleaning, buying food, coordinating), and a lot of clean up after too. The ROI isn't where I want it.
I kind of wonder if people have just forgot what to do after the party is over. I had hoped it would be "that was so fun, we should host one", but instead it just kinda fades away in their minds.
> The ROI isn't where I want it.
I know this is HN, but sometimes - maybe, hopefully, sometimes - neither R nor I is involved in an action.
If you aren't enjoying doing it then by all means stop doing it. But throwing a party isn't supposed to have deliverables or action items.
To each their own.. but I think throwing a party to make friends is a totally reasonable plan and expectation. And if it isn't working out, then the ROI isn't there.
I go to "couples game nights" with my wife and her friends even though I don't really like them. But I like having friends in the neighborhood. So it's worth it to me when one of her friends husbands (who is now my friend) shows me the deck they've been building in their backyard all because I went to a somewhat painful game night.
I think you have it nearly completely backwards. Society would be far better off if more people were willing to do the "un-fun" things (like planning and hosting a party) in order to socialize. GP should be applauded.
It's a slightly jargony way to say "it isn't worth it to me", which is totally fine. Come on.
It still seemed weird to me, and I'm trying to view it in the most generous light possible.
When I was younger there were folks who were just known as "the people who threw parties", simply because they loved throwing parties. They didn't view it as some expenditure where they expected any mutual return - the party was the return.
Now, of course there were some actual expenditures for food/drinks, and also the cleanup time. But the host would simply ask people to pitch in, and people always did.
The "ROI" comment just struck me as a mindset that views relationships transactionally. Yes, relationships are and always have been at least someone transactional (not many folks are going to continue spending time and effort on a relationship they don't feel is adding to their life), but not in this "mathmatical" tabulation of it.
Right, when OKRs and KPIs and other startup bullshit jargon are applied to parties, maybe it’s not really the spirit of a party at all, is it?
Very few people want to host/organize other people.
The end goal of throwing parties shouldn’t be friendship or getting invited to other people parties, it’s building a large loose network of people you’re acquaintances/shallow friends with and becoming a super connector.
If you ONLY want to make friends or get invited to parties I think focusing on finding specific people and spending time with them 1:1 is a much better way to do that.
Damn, I always thought the end goal of throwing a party was to get buzzed and have a good time with friends.
Many commenters focusing on the ROI part of your comment but I totally agree with your premise based on my own experience as a young person.
How I would word it is younger people are generally less inclined to invest in (real/in-person?) social interaction. I suspect some bar for motivation or entertainment has changed so people don't socialise the same. Probably intertwined with rise in mental health issues too. Be less interested in socialising and it's no surprise the result is less socialising, in one form or another.
In my experience yeah people don't often reach out or reciprocate effectively when it comes to socialising. Or they stick to a very small group.
> I wanted to build friendships out of it, and hopefully get invited to more parties myself, but so far it hasn't happened.
From this and other comments, it seems you think you didn't make friends, because you're not invited to other parties. There seems a leap here.
If the others are holding big parties and not inviting you - sure.
If they just don't throw parties, then they likely are still your friends :-)
But as another commenter said: Going to parties is not necessarily the best way to make friends. Whenever I go to a big party, the host is way too busy to spend a meaningful amount of time with me. Of course he's not going to become my friend that way! Going to big parties is for guests to make friends with other guests - not with the host.
I have some good friends who throw only big parties - I've stopped going to them. What's the point if I can't interact with them?
That's about the right size for a potluck. Set a rough guide for the main and have people post what they're bringing. If they're good friends they'll put their dishes in the washer/sink and some will help clean before they leave. If they aren't good guests (bring something + fun + clean up) they don't get invited back. Have it once a month on the same day. Plan to rotate it and talk about it at the party.
Of course people have all sorts of different ideas of what a party should be, what to bring, and what to do while you're there, but doing it all yourself is really hard. If you're getting it catered with cleaning staff, it's very different than having mostly the same close friends, month after month year after year.
If you happen to live in San Diego, I'll happily invite you to my parties! They generally involve board games, making a fire, having dinner, watching a movie, or going to the beach. Alcohol optional. Not super wild, but always a good time for me :)
I am in SD and would love an invite. I am keep thinking about uniting more like minded people for a while. My email is r@seslu.com
>cleaning, buying food, coordinating
Food? A party's just booze and music, maybe even move some furniture out of the way for a dance floor.
going to a party is less intimidating (particularly effort-wise) than hosting one
maybe co-host one with somebody who you think might enjoy hosting but is reticent to try
Also if you just want to make your own parties easier to host, you can ask the guest list if anyone will volunteer to help with specific tasks or supplies.
I was a teenager in high school around 2005 and living in the Midwest. There were lots of underage drinking and parties going on during that time.
That being said, most of it was "cool parents" that allowed such behavior because we didn't own anything as teens.
We would have rules like, if you're drinking there, you have to stay the night or call your parents to pick you up.
I think it was just a different time; it seemed more forgiving. Now, a cop will pull you over and give you a DUI and mess up your life for a while. But I heard stories back then ~ '70s, where cops would make sure a drunk person got home safely at night instead of throwing the book at them.
I am sure it is harder for kids today who mostly live online in their algorithmic bubbles. And harder for parents to condone such activity, because who wants to be the parent where cops come knocking on your door and charge you with supplying alcohol to minors?
Elaborating on this a bit, I think it's less that things are less forgiving, but that our risk tolerances have dramatically shrunk. Millennial parents are less risk tolerant with their kids' safety, and Gen Z / A kids and young adults are more careful about the rules.
The root cause of this risk intolerance might be dispersed, just a cumulative result of cable news scare tactics, dropping birth rates and more investment per child, but I suspect a big aspect of it is that risk taking is no longer the only way to get a dopamine hit. Prior to the modern internet, if you avoided all the normal risk-taking behaviors associated with teenagers and young adults, you'd just be bored to death. Now the reward side of the risk-reward balance is just the difference between high-quality fun from meatspace shenanigans versus lower-quality enjoyment derived from social media and online gaming.
Similar age (a bit older) but I always remember our core group of friends' parents would pass around a key-collection plate — "this is a safe environment to have a little bit of fun in" — the only time I ever remember a drunk peer driving home... he was then banned from all future private party invites. Sadly/predictably, he would later perish in a DUI, early 20s...
Damn, I miss the late 90s/aughts. Damn, I'm old (and fat, too; I "made it", somehow!)
there are deep reasons for why society is not like this anymore
Care to list them?
My grandma was the head of the local Air Force wives' club. Their house was always stocked like a full bar and at least several people stopped by for a visit just about every day. They knew at least 10 of their neighbors well, and some former neighbors too.
Find me community like this anywhere in America these days. Immigrant communities perhaps? Most Americans these days won't interact with their neighbors unless it's to complain or they want something transactionally.
>Find me community like this anywhere in America these days.
The only reason I have become a staple member of my little dead-end, working-class street is because I don't email/text, and last summer I spent outdoors building a tinyhome (that all the passersby watched/asked about).
"How do I get ahold of you?" they used to ask... "Simple," I'd say, "just knock on my door between noon through sunset" [my calling hours, to use the historic term, posted by my doorbell]. Haven't even used my phone but a handful of times this 2025 — turned off entirely since early May — & my social life is what I want it to be, I am not alone any more than I wish to be.
I moved here two years ago, and already know everybody on my street (24 dwellings, total); it's primarily rentals, so when there is a new U-Haul I make sure to bring over a beer/conversation (typically a week after moving in — so they can settle/adjust/remember).
Before living in this working-class neighborhood, I lived in the nicer parts of towns... and honestly, these working-class people are nicer and more giving/understanding/decent than anywhere else I've ever lived (e.g. Westlake Hills [near Austin]; West End [Nashville]; Barton Hills [ATX]; Lookout Mountain [Tenn]).
Stop doing everything on your phone. Start being neighborly.
Example: multiple neighbors and I have jointly-purchased a nicer lawnmower, instead of each buying our own simpler pusher.
¢¢
My Southern California neighborhood used to be like this. It was a diverse neighborhood of white, Filipino, Viet and Mexicans and it felt alive. Then covid hit and the demographics changed. Prices went up. Now the neighborhood is as quiet at night as where I lived in the bay area a few years ago. No open garages. No music.
People are generally unfriendly now and keep to themselves more. Sad what we've lost. We're still an immigrant community but the immigrants are from different places. I'm sure they paid too much for their houses and feel the stress. There are also some obvious cultural differences with respect to socializing and partying.
> open garages
Can you say more about open garages and community? Is that about car culture, music, pool tables, garage "bars", sofas, TVs, or something else?
Would the whole local neighborhood be welcomed into open garages, or was open-garage-culture limited to people whom people already knew?
Garages are just a good place to hang out in coastal CA. They cool down quicker than the rest of the house and you can have your friends over for beers without worrying they're going to mess up your house.
Also, our Filipino community seems big on turning them into semi-livingrooms with large TVs, couches, etc.
Yes. Each garage is different. If you are working on your car in an open garage that is an invite for someone else interested in cars to say hi, offer advice - and possibly pitch in when you are working on something that needs more than 1 person. If you see someone playing guitar in their garage that is an invite to bring your fiddle and join in. If you see someone playing pool that is your invite to play the next game. And so on. Note that there is nothing in the above list that will appeal to everyone, so if you don't like cars you walk by that garage, if you don't play music you walk by the guitar...
Grandparents lived at the end of a T intersection facing a cul-de-sac on a secondary residential road, so perhaps that made their house seemingly more inviting. The sidewalk was perhaps 30 ft / 9m away from the garage and there were no obstructions.
He had his garage door open a lot but kept an eye on it most of the time. Grandpa once lamented some teenager stole beer from his garage fridge. At one point, around 2005, a 700+ lbs. decorative planter was stolen from their front yard in the daytime. He eventually installed an "electric eye" chime to alert should anyone go into the garage unexpectedly.
My comment was about when the owner is in the garage and thus watching things. Security when you are not there is a different consideration.
> limited to people whom people already knew?
Of course it's limited to people you know but it seems like a good way to know your nieghbors and once you know them you can invite eachother to the garage or backyard.
at least in my parents neighborhood, the open garage or the pool with a non-privacy fence, or the front/side porch are all hangout spots where other neighbors will walk by and join you for conversation
> Americans these days won't interact with their neighbors unless it's to complain or they want something transactionally.
It certainly depends. I had great neighbors when I lived on the river in a non-HOA community... many parties were had with sunset beer hangouts on the dock or beach. Military communities are also notably close-knit so what you say makes sense.
> Most Americans these days won't interact with their neighbors unless it's to complain or they want something transactionally.
My family moved into a small cul-de-sac with 5 houses total. I wanted to introduce myself, so I wrote a short letter with a little about ourselves and our contact info, and then dropped it into each neighbors mailbox. Only 1 neighbor wrote back, and 1 neighbor literally _returned the letter_ to our mailbox. So yea, that's the neighborhood I live in.
> 1 neighbor literally _returned the letter_ to our mailbox.
Not cool. How about that other neighbor though?
That’s it - immigrant communities are wonderful in this regard, as are communities with lots of old people (maybe because they’re from a different time, maybe because they’re lonely, who knows).
Yea, our community definitely skews "over 50" and it's a lively, social place. We have an informal rule: If your garage door is fully open, then it's an invitation for anyone to stop by to socialize or chit chat while they're out on their walk or whatever. I know there are people who live in the neighborhood who are under 40, but you almost never see them, even outside of traditional working hours!
I bet that if the head of the local Air Force wives' club did exactly that today, they'd get the same results.
I guess we're missing the local social super-connectors that were more numerous 40+ years ago. Perhaps we need to be mentoring, educating, subsidizing, and encouraging people on the little skills and techniques to bring others out of their hideaways.
They definitely still exist, my sister, and both of my sister in laws are extremely social people and regularly hang out, "party", with their neighbors and other friends. I additionally have a couple of coworkers that have block parties, and just really social communities. But they are definitely the exception now, and are only really for people that are just inherently social and extroverted. The rest of us, where "partying" is a lot more of an effort, just kind of don't anymore.
I miss it a little bit, like I enjoy being social for a couple of hours two or three times a week, but not much more. But a bunch of people like me makes for a poor social situation since it is hard to get everyone's social levels aligned.
You got this immigrant. We have a group of a few families. Each hosts at least one large event per year on occasions like Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Years and our own festivals. Everyone and their kids, and other friends / relatives join. Three families ended up on the same street by chance. We regularly cook or get takeout and get together at short notice. Alcohol and food play a big role.
That said, being an immigrant poses other kinds of challenges. So it's not all like the 1970s in the US, or where we came from.
lol!!!
“ It seems that the original modern American swingers were crew-cut World War II air force pilots and their wives. Like elite warriors everywhere, these “top guns” often developed strong bonds with one another, perhaps because they suffered the highest casualty rate of any branch of the military. According to journalist Terry Gould, “key parties,” like those later dramatized in the 1997 film The Ice Storm, originated on these military bases in the 1940s, where elite pilots and their wives intermingled sexually with one another before the men flew off toward Japanese antiaircraft fire.“
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sex-at-dawn/201211/n...
Social networks have moved online and have been drowned in ads and TikTok dances. No time for in-person meetups unless you're going to that fancy instagrammable place to take pictures of yourself.
I bet military service-members still socialize and get hammered.
I am going to assume your grandmother probably didn’t work, and instead took made her and her husband’s social life her full time job.
It’s much easier to entertain constantly when one half of the relationship has the availability to do it.
If I’m mistaken, then holy heck how did your grandparents do it lmao.
Purely anecdotal, but I was recently reflecting at the current trend of people posting really extensive morning routines. Waking up, meditation, yoga, gym, shower, eating breakfast, meal-prepping,....having a whole day before your day starts. While they should impress you with their healthiness and discipline, I just thought how utterly lonely and sterile most of them look like. And you're completely done after work if this is your morning, you can just go to bed and repeat the same the next day. I found it quite sad, actually.
I don't believe those are real. People are simply posting that because it's the kind of post that gets likes. Influencer life is a mirage.
It's an observation that precedes likes and modern influencers, as Baudrillard noticed in his 1989 book America:
"The skateboarder with his Walkman, the intellectual working on his wordprocessor, the Bronx breakdancer whirling frantically in the Roxy, the jogger and the body-builder: everywhere, whether in regard to the body or the mental faculties, you find the same blank solitude, the same narcissistic refraction. This omnipresent cult of the body is extraordinary. [...] This ‘into’ is the key to everything. The point is not to be nor even to have a body, but to be into your own body. Into your sexuality, into your own desire. Into your own functions, as if they were energy differentials or video screens. The hedonism of the ‘into’ [...]"
The replacement of a genuine social life with a kind of machine like, solitary optimization, the point of American Psycho basically, is very much real, common among ordinary people. This is every "second brain" note taking fanatic who never actually does anything but collect notes.
"What people are contemplating on their word-processor screens is the operation of their own brains. It is not entrails that we try to interpret these days, nor even hearts or facial expressions; it is, quite simply, the brain. We want to expose to view its billions of connections and watch itoperating like a video-game. All this cerebral, electronic snobbery is hugely affected - far from being the sign of a superior knowledge of humanity, it is merely the mark of a simplified theory, since the human being is here reduced to the terminal excrescence of his or her spinal chord."
Who skateboarded with a Walkman? That's an even worse idea than the chain wallet thing.
I still have bruises from the chain wallet. What a bad idea.
Yeah I know 0 people like this. And I'd believe it if 1-2 people are actually like that without me knowing, cause they need to manage ADHD or something, but not a large number.
No, it's real. I have AuDHD and very strictly defined routines are how I manage to function day-to-day. It's not a productivity hack or how I'll be a billionaire in 5 years though, like scrollheads often promote. It's just how my brain works. A small fraction of those influencers might also be neurodivergent and sincerely posting what works for them.
I think what OP is saying are fake are the hoards of people posting it on their social/influencer accounts. Sure, some people have very rigid and strict routines that they need to get through their day, but (I'd agree with OP) that it's likely the vast majority are "virtue-signaling".
Well, the loneliness coming through on those posts might just be from the fact that the people that are posting on social media like that are, in fact, lonely and looking for connection. I have a pretty extensive morning routine of practicing music, sitting for meditation/pranayama, food, shower all before work, and then Muay Thai or yoga or strength training in the evening. I just don't post it on social media because I don't have social media. I still go out to see music/art and friends etc, but I also live in NYC where it's easy to do that.
Sounds like a lonely cockatoo that overly preens itself to the point that it pulls out it's feathers.
What are they supposed to do instead? If you can't get together to drink with friends in the evening, this is a very good option.
I mean everything you listed there could be done within 2 hours if you do it all at home. Not sure what the big deal is, you wake up at 7 and you’re ready for the day by 9.
But oh yea maybe laying in bed for an hour doom scrolling on your phone before you finally get up is a more efficient use of time.
The article mentions alcohol consumption by kids, but I think it doesn't emphasize enough the effect of efforts like Mothers Against Drunk Driving and strict DUI laws. Back in the 70s and 80s having a few drinks at a party, bar or friend's house was normal and part of the social lubrication. Even drinks during lunch was common where I worked. No more. You either need to have a designated driver, find a taxi (which doesn't exist in most rural areas), or just not drink. The first two are a pain, so people opt for the latter and that social inhibition hangs around, and folks go home early. Have to get up for work in the morning, you know.
> You either need to have a designated driver, find a taxi (which doesn't exist in most rural areas), or just not drink.
Or live in a place where you don’t drive to get around.
Very few places on earth are like that. Even in Europe's dense cities there are a lot of cars, get outside of that and there is no hope of an alternative. Though Europe is somewhat likely to have a bar within walking distance of your house, but a lot of people in Europe drive to whatever bar they drink in at least sometime.
Most of the world's public transportation sees themselves as a way to get to work and so parties which happen off hours in places hard for transport to reach get bad or no service.
East Asia has lots of highly walkable cities with great public transit -- even a few you might not have heard of. Not just Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, Beijing but also Shenzhen, Chongqing, and Hangzhou to name a few.
Sure, there are small areas like that (which are dense areas meaning a lot of people live there), but they are still a minority. Even within those cities there are places that are more walkable than others.
> Very few places on earth are like that
I mean... there are fewer than 2 billion total vehicles on Earth, so I'm guessing it's not THAT uncommon to not own a car.
Unless we're arguing that people simply didn't socialize before cars existed.
> Unless we're arguing that people simply didn't socialize before cars existed.
No, the argument is that cars changed how society is physically structured, to the point where society at large is designed to center car-based transportation.
In many countries - including the US and most of Europe - this is transparently true.
Not really? Yes there are a lot of cars in EU cities, but young people are not driving them - they use combination of walking, biking and public transport.
Parties are where people live and in center - public transport gets you there. Using public transport to get from bar or home party is quite normal.
or drive drunk, which if my upbringing was any indication, happened all the time
I feel like while there were laws against furnishing alcohol to minors and the like, I never really heard of some one's parents getting charged because some kid crashed his car after boozing it up at a party back then. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention but it seems like the enforcement of that really stepped up.
Oh, it certainly happened. Some people don't have a limit and decency isn't on their minds and when they get in trouble the law is used against them. Also bitter neighbors could call the cops on you.
0.08 allows for a few drinks
One person's definition of a few is 3 over 4 hours. Another person's is 5 over 2 hours. (That's even mentioning the size of the drink. A standard can of beer or a pint? A 1 ounce shot or 1.5 ounce shot?)
Here-in lies a major problem of drunk driving. (Outside of self-responsibility.)
I see this cultural shift resulting from multiple contributing factors: 1. The increasingly litigious environment that is the US. Where people are becoming more risk-averse out of fear of being liable for whatever. 2. The fact that anything you did, be it something great or a faux pas, social or otherwise, was much more ephemeral. At best it would be captured in people’s memories for a couple of weeks or the occasional cell phone pic that was inevitably lost with the hardware. More recently, everything you do is recorded, indexed, and preserved with accompanying text, photos, and video - _forever_ - thanks to social media and the internet.
Also, agreeing with other posts, the onus of “sports culture” for kids (and families) in k-12 schools these days is absolutely unbelievable.
edit: Also, finding out the following Monday (in school) that a “party” to which you weren’t invited occurred over the weekend was unpleasant. Witnessing a middle-school-aged kid discover a “party” to which they weren’t invited in real-time as it is streaming live on social media is absolutely heart-breaking.
This was a great read! I'm not a paid subscriber, so I'll post my thoughts here.
One angle I think that might be missing is that when only men worked outside the home, women would be stuck at home all day with housework and childcare which I would guess was quite isolating. So I would guess these gatherings were a lifeline.
When women entered the workforce, they gained the same quasi-social environment men had enjoyed all along. Work friendships might not be as deep as neighborhood ones, but they're "good enough" to take the edge off loneliness. Not only that, but now both partners would come home fatigued from a full day of work. So neither would have a strong drive to now setup these gatherings. Before, you had one exhausted partner who could be coaxed into socializing by a partner who genuinely needed it. Now you have mutual exhaustion. Even worse, planning a party starts to feel like another work project rather than something restorative.
There's a multi-generational aspect to this too. Their kids learned the lesson that home is for family and screens, not for social gatherings. Computers and smartphones arrived and provided social interaction that required minimal energy. No cleaning the house, no planning food, no getting dressed. Perfect for an already exhausted population that had been socially declining for years.
Even beyond mutual exhaustion is housework. When both partners works outside the home, they still have to do the housework when they get home or on the weekend. Previously that would have been the job of the one staying at home.
The 20-ish hours a week needed for domestic chores has to come from somewhere.
Let's be honest. A lot of previous partying was made possible by lots and lots and lots of drinking and driving. That of course still goes on today, but nearly at the levels of the past.
Or walkable neighbourhoods, or public transportation.
I live in a rural area. Neither of those things were ever an option. It was always drinking and driving out here.
I would say prices and economy play as large of a role.
When I was in university we thrived on nickel drafts and dive bars.
These days it's $10/cocktail + cover charge.
Yeah it’s just the prices honestly
That was before Uber...
I live in a rural area. Uber is not a reliable option late at night.
> That was before Uber...
Get outside a major urban area and it's extremely difficult to find an Uber at the hours when you'd expect to be leaving a party to go home.
Heck, this is true even in some suburbs of New York City.
The chart still shows a good amount of partying around 2009.
People were drinking and driving in 1800s New England?
I would gamble that people were drinking and driving hours after the invention of the wheel.
In point of fact people kept alcohol in their cars to be drank while driving back then.
Well, they had self-driving transportation back then so more like drinking and riding.
I am sure there were plenty of sauced stage coach drivers and horsemen.
Your horse knows the way home and will be happy to get your there without help from you (hoping that when you are there you are sober enough to get the harness off so he can finally enjoy a rest at home)
I cannot speak for ze others, but as a creature of ze night… I must confess, I vas, I vas indeed.
It feels ridiculous not to mention car dependence and the things that enabled it: restrictive zoning, parking minimums, the car lobby.
In the last 50 years, the US has bulldozed dense, mixed used housing that enabled community and tight knit neighborhoods. More economically/socially viable housing (read: an apartment on top of a business) has literally been banned in much of the US. Ensuring that there's a large plot of asphalt to house personal vehicles that are ever increasing in size is baked into zoning laws (though some cities have finally banned parking minimums). Suburbia sprawls, literally requiring most of the country to own a car.
I would love to see some data on this, but my intuition is that everyone is physically farther away as a result, which weakens their general connection and likelihood to party together, and makes it harder for them to get to/from a party in the first place.
There's other feasible side effects too like less savings due to the cost of owning a car (I've seen estimates of the US average exceeding $10k/yr), or expensive housing exacerbated by all of the above - less space for housing due to roads/parking (and the cost rising as a direct result of a developer needing to include parking), and rising taxes to finance more and more infrastructure: suburban sprawl means more roads, pipes, electrical lines, while contributing significantly less economic value (Strong Towns has done some great graphics on how much dense urban areas subsidize their sprawling single family home filled counterparts).
It feels ridiculous to bring up car dependence in an article about 1980-2020 social trends, when the US was car-dependent the entire time, and the big drop was in the 2010s in particular.
It’s car dependence, but the impacts were delayed because people used to just drink and drive. Now that’s rightfully seen as unacceptable, but we are still left with car dependence. So people just don’t leave home now.
It was totally unacceptable to drink and drive in the 2000s, and the sharp decline didn't start until right after. You'd also find a similar decline in socializing among non-driving-age children.
It was totally unacceptable in the 2000s, but there still remained a lot of "...but I can probably get away with it". That has declined in the interim.
The overall "going out with friends" survey result, not just partying, dropped from like 76% to 65% within a few years. There's no way that was from people suddenly not drinking and driving.
The sprawl of suburbia isn't so much outside the top 5-10ish cities. Even "growing" places like Columbus OH in the midwest, you can go from cornfield to cornfield across the built environment in probably 25 miles and about as many minutes on the freeway network that is entirely uncongested since it is so overbuilt for the population (unlike in those top 5 places where it may be underbuilt). By and large that is how the bulk of the country looks and operates. The idea that you'd drive an hour and still be in the same metro region is this big exception that people living in that exception assume must be the norm, but really isn't.
I mean, ~90M people live in one of the top 10 metro areas, which is about ¼ of the country. Not sure that I'd necessarily call that an "exception".
So 75% lives outside of it. Yeah I'd say the majority lives this way and to live otherwise is an exception for the remaining 25%. And even within those top 10 some are more like what I describe. There are definitely parts of those metros where the "mile a minute" travel estimation from uncongested highways applies. Certainly true for philadelphia outside the ~50sq miles of the gridded central city. Places like Houston average home is only like 250k pretty much at parity with midwest prices.
According to the US Census Bureau, the median house age in the usa is 1980. I live in a 1960 house of the type that is supposedly illegal, although every house in my suburb built since then has had building codes and planning regulations forcing walkability. Cars are forced for specialization. I had a 20 mile each way commute to an absolutely horrible neighborhood but a very high paying job. I am in walking distance of some minimum wage manual labor jobs. I can't afford to work at those minimum wage manual labor jobs and live here, and a car is incredibly cheap compared to my higher income. No one can explain why an architectural movement peaking in 1950s-1970s had no effect on socialization for decades until the smartphone era. Multiple entire generations lived in "soulless car filled suburbs" and socialized wildly according to the data in the article... until smartphones... There's an entire mythology built around the idea that any new problem that occurs began coincidentally with the construction of suburbs in the 1950s, even if the new problem didn't appear for the first 75 years of suburban living.
But that hasn't changed much between the 80s and now. It was bad then and it is bad now. So I don't see it being a significant factor for change in socialization on that timescale.
People are introverted and have no social skills thanks to smartphones. People have no shared interests in general, because there are so many niches. People have low self-esteem and body image issues. People are afraid that they'll get drunk and their behavior will be filmed and go viral. Previously available "soft" party drugs are too dangerous. People have no place to host a party, because they're all renters (not that it matters, the HOA has a strict no-smooth-jazz-music-after-3pm policy!)
> People are afraid that they'll get drunk and their behavior will be filmed and go viral.
I think this is an underappreciated "phones killed socialization" angle. People used to post partying pics on social media. Then employers started going through social media to screen candidates. Facial recognition and automatic tagging means that it's not sufficient to not post party photos to your own social media, you need to make sure they aren't posted anywhere.
Which is a deterrent to partying as a concept once you start thinking in terms of "will this be bad for my social credit if an informant reports me to the employability police by posting me drunk?"
I don't know how this didn't become a serious taboo. People who post pictures and video from a private event without everyone's consent should be shunned, but somehow this became normalized. I've heard of the recent trend to hand out stickers for everyone to put over their cameras during events, and that's a really good development, but we shouldn't even need to do that. It should be socially disgusting to even take the pictures in the first place.
It used to be fine! It used to be great, even. People like having photos of themselves having a good time. Back in the film era there would always be one person who wanted a picture at every event.
It's just that connecting it to the panopticon ruined everything.
> People have no place to host a party, because they're all renters
I've seen this repeated in several comments and I just don't get it -- renting a place, be it a college apartment or a full house as an adult, has never stopped me from throwing a party. Maybe if there was a "no parties" rule in the lease (which I've never seen, and I've rented at least a dozen different places) and the landlord lived in the building, but otherwise rentals are fair game.
If anything, renters are more likely to throw parties. They don't care about the building or even the inside in the long-term. The likely worst case is losing a month's rent in the deposit, which you're likely to lose some of anyway even if you keep it perfectly clean.
Yeah, pretty much every college town is full of renters throwing parties. One consequence of that is how student-aimed housing tends to be lower quality.
The no shared interests / too many niches thing doesn't go mentioned enough.
As a zennial, there are a couple things that contribute: 1. No one has a car when you're younger unless your parents are well off. Most people I know didn't have access to a car until college. Makes it hard to get to parties when only 1 of your friends has a car that fills up instantly. 2. Most of your friends are online anyways. You're going to hang out with friends every night because they're on discord, waiting for you to get on and play your social game together. Why would you hang out in person if you can hang out online? You can't get to their house anyways. 3. Similarly to that, none of my friends live near each other anymore. We all moved to different cities for different reasons. So many people I've talked to are similar. It also makes it harder to find new friends, since everyone has their friends. They're just not near.
I wonder whether housing plays a factor.
Young people aren’t becoming homeowners at the same rate, so there’s a sense of transience to their living situations that make forming neighbor communities seem like a waste of time.
I kind of see this among different friend groups. I have a number of friends out in the midwest where a mortgage might be 180k. They are most all buying homes. These places have garages, basements, front and back yards. And they are throwing parties with their space.
Bit different for those in the high cost of living area. Hanging out is usually a pregame to go to bars because you can't fit very many people in the apartment. Not to say it doesn't happen just you can't exactly throw a party and have a big table of food and a bbq going and cornhole and beer pong and three available bathrooms all at the same time like you can out in the flyover states. At least not without dropping literally 10x as much on what would be a smaller property anyhow with no basement and not much of a lot.
In many ways it seems like the old life of yesteryear these sorts of articles bemoan is still in fact the current year in many places if the housing prices support it. And there are many places that fly under the radar that aren't in those top 5 major metro regions.
Seems like a no-brainer to me. This is an accurate characterization of my entire adult life. My wife and I are looking at buying a house, and we've concluded that we can't despite living in Wisconsin and making far, far more than the median income around here. There's no end in sight.
Our social structure isn't built around neighbors. I could name 2 people I've shared an apartment building with in the last 5 years. Incidentally, they were a couple in the same 3-flat as me, who were there for my entire time in that building. I think the lower density and shared spaces (in that case, a garage) made the difference.
nah, we partied plenty when we rented and not knowing someone for long is not a reason not to hang out. What has been eroded is the habit of hanging out because there's no easily accessible third spaces. I'll give you an example: when I lived in Spain I would just walk in the corner bar for a quick beer or a coffee or something to eat, I would very likely run into a neighbor and would chat. The chat would lead to "hey let's do something". In the USA it's almost always the case that people need to make plan, the lack of spontaneity kills most plans.
In my Midwestern US town, there are still lots of third spaces. The mall, bars, bowling alleys, an arcade, and even some new things like a trampoline place. People just aren't using them nearly as much, to the point that the mall is a tomb and the stores are going away. But the people stopped showing up first.
My 20s were full of partying, and I wasn't a homeowner a was really introverted at the time. You just cram into whoever's apartment was having that party and have fun. Our partying dropped off after becoming a homeowner, actually.
"The typical female pet owner spends more time actively engaged with her pet than she spends in face-to-face contact with friends of her own species."
Spurious. This has likely always been true unless you live with said friends.
Yeah. My cat sleeps next to me, sits in my lap while I work, and follows me around the house. That’s a lot of hours every day.
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Grouping up with the guys to play an online game wouldn't count here. Nor various other online activities that I would consider social. The drop-off in alcohol is stark, but probably good? I suppose we would see an uptick in weed in legal and probably also illegal states.
The article focuses on US because that's the data they have, but I wonder if it's a similar trend for other developed countries. Anyone sharing a personal anecdote is probably not meaningful. These are broad trends and really hard to intuit by lived experience.
When I was in high school in the late 90s/early 2000s, we'd go hang out somewhere with each other IRL and then when it got late and we got home we'd meet up in some online game (usually Starcraft or Diablo). So we'd still be hanging out at least two nights a week IRL.
If we counted only online gaming then we'd have been hanging out every night.
Yeah, there are good reasons that doesn't count. Maaybe if it were in-person and not over headsets.
> Burrowing into the appendix tables of the American Time Use Survey, she unearthed the fact that just 4.1 percent of Americans said they “attended or hosted” a party or ceremony on a typical weekend or holiday in 2023. In other words, in any given weekend, just one in 25 US households had plans to attend a social event.
There's a huge difference between not hosting or attending a party and not attending a social event. "Party" has very specific connotations. If I go out bowling with my friends or have a game night, I don't call that a party, but it is certainly a social event.
I agree. I was graduated from highschool around 1990. My friend group was very active every weekend, we just didn't do "parties".
Those basement dwelling computer nerds of the early '00s were way ahead of their time. We just had to dial in the content to get everyone else addicted.
I remember the exact moment I saw our star football player log into Minecraft in class
1991 millennial here offering some perspective.
Transferred to a California state college a little late (27) and wrapped up my computer science degree @ SFSU finished in 2019 so somewhat recent anecdotal experience.
I met a lot of people just like me while in college. Lot of people mid to late 20s. One of my best friends in college was in the international business club fb group and they’d always host events or pub crawls every Thursday night. I’d ping my gf (now wife) and she’d asynchronously invite all of her friends and then I’d be inviting all our college friends so by the time we arrived we’d have a merged friend group. We met so many cool folks this way and people from different majors with diverse backgrounds.
It helped to be in San Francisco of course.
Now as far as the housing discussion I’d say that the 7% rates that are historically normal feel oppressive after 15 years of low rates following the Great Recession. I bought a place in the edge of the Bay Area last year with 5% down at 7% because I didn’t have the income that I have now when rates were low. We were saving for the last 7 years delaying a bunch of major life milestones. The prices in our zip code already dropped ~15% before we bought so we saved about a 20% down payments worth off the up front cost. I barely qualified with 270k combined income and I’m not sure ppl understand how weird that feels until they experience it. The home wasn’t even a median priced SFH in fact it was well below at about 750k. I kept a bunch of vested stock and savings but yeah not sure how things will shake out. It’s a tough market for sure.
As with many large scale social trends there will be several contributing factors, so nuance will always be the first victim of people with an axe to grind.
If you want to say that an decrease in X is the sole cause of a decrease in Y, it might be a good idea to check whether there are other places where 1) X increased but Y decreased or 2) X decreased but Y increased. Different moments in time, different countries, etc.
For myself personally I have moved around a good amount, so it is naturally harder to make social connection, and even if I’m invited to social events with friends in other places it is physically hard to attend them.
Anecdotally a lot of families we see in my social circle can be reliably split between single income and dual income households. We see the single income folks far more than we see the dual income folks, which tracks with this article. If I come home from work and my wife says “Sarah and family are coming for dinner tonight”, I know that my wife has tidied up the house, coordinated food and all I have to do is pour some drinks and maybe cook something on the grill (that has already been purchased and prep’d). If no one has done that? Far less likely I would see that same family that night.
Being stay at home parent is extremely isolating. It is most lonely thing one can do. You spend ovwrwhelming majority of the day completely alone. No collegues to bump into you and talking with you. If the stay at home parent does not actively organizes meetups, they are completely alone until partner comes home ... after he talked with people at work.
Sounds like my wfh job
Kind of depends on how much you have to call with others. But yes, if you do not have calls and do not need to coordinate, wfh can end up being isolating too.
Thats another argument. The stay at home parent created a lot of the social parties.
Some did out of mental health necessity. Some did not and were profoundly lonely and unhappy (my case). And some did indeed ended up having that period to be super happy.
My point is that it is profoundly unsocial way of life for the parent at home. The party even twice a week do not really make up for being completely alone with nothing challenging to do whole day. You can easily end up loosing social skills and those parties end up unfulfilling.
If you go to work and then someone else organizes a party once in a while, it is cool effortless way to keep friends. But, if the stay at home person is extroverted, there is very little social about their lifestyle.
I have a politically sensitive but potentially insightful question.
I live in San Francisco, where we have a desegregation busing policy. In practice, this means kids don’t attend their neighborhood schools. They’re assigned to schools across the city (Instead of investing in improving schools in underprivileged neighborhoods, we (voters) decided it is better (and cheaper) to bus those kids to schools in more affluent areas - but that is beside the point)
One theory I’ve heard is that this setup leads to less socializing (or “partying”) among teens, since their school friends often live far away. That raises an interesting question: To what extent does busing contribute to reduced peer interaction outside school?
Also, how common are these busing policies across the U.S. today? Is San Francisco an outlier, or is this a widespread approach?
It is common and it is coupled with investment in improving schools in underprivileged neighborhoods.
A school in a poor area gets heavy investment and then can pull ("magnet") a certain percentage of their students from a much wider area. Involved parents apply for their children to go to these schools since they have the best art or theater or robotics or whatever programs.
This acknowledges that an important part of a successful school is parental involvement and a general culture of students that are interested in learning.
In practice, at least in my childhood, the schools largely self-segregated by the classes they took, i.e. AP or not, more or less challenging tracks ("honors" classes).
I still think it was a net positive. At least students in the underprivileged areas got access to these advanced programs, even if there were still social barriers. And as a kid from the suburbs, I got to meet kids outside of my suburban cohort - I think this was really valuable to me as a bit of a misfit.
Had a similar situation when I was young. Living far away only really impacts your ability to host events which can suck for things like your birthday parties, as getting a large number of people to all go out of their way is pretty much impossible. Other than that it doesn't affect your ability to socialize or attend events hosted by others.
Does anyone know why "Hours spent in childcare" started skyrocketing in the 1990s? Here is the graph from the article: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2g7_!,w_1456,c_limit...
It does seem like there's something wrong with that data; I find it somewhat implausible that the average parent was only caring for their child for 1.7 hours a day in 1985; even if you assume that all of the tween and teens were free-range and only got an hour or two of parenting a day, little kids have always required nonstop attention to make sure that they're not actively dying.
Although... the infant mortality rate in the US has dropped by more than 50% since 1985, so who knows...
Yeah, I've wondered if there is some sort change in how people think about and label their activities. Would a 1950s parent even think of themselves as doing a defined activity called "childcare"? Or rather, the children are just around, as the parent is doing things. If I am cooking dinner while a toddler putters around the floor and a baby is in a high-chair eating scraps I give him, am I doing "childcare"? Would a 1950s parent think of that as doing "childcare"?
Toddlers don’t just putter around. They want to be wherever you’re at doing whatever you’re doing and opening all the cabinets and boxes and pulling everything out to look at it. I think people were more apt to put them to work around the house in the past whereas now people infantilize them more. My son doesn’t speak very well as a 19 month old but he understands a lot and pays attention, and right now we’re trying to figure out how to put him to work in the kitchen and around the house so he feels involved and we get what little help he is able to contribute.
I was born in '83 and I'd say this mostly describes my upbringing. We were left to our own devices the vast majority of the time. By the time I hit my teens, most days I'd barely see my parents at all. At some point you've got kids raising other kids as the parents are absent.
Off the cuff that coincides pretty well with the rise of “helicopter parenting” and “tiger mom” trends.
and less children per woman. I figure thats got to be the main driver. China actually a really good case study with the one child policy and rise of little kings.
8bit Vibes Party in Amsterdam this Saturday, swing by! https://lu.ma/l4074pxg?locale=en-GB
The chart labeled Percent Decline in Hours Spent Attending or Hosting Social Event by Age 2003 - 2024 seems to be a bad way of view thing the data since it assumes that there is an inherit difference on how people approach this based on arbitrary age groups. Having it be by birth year would be better, since it would reflect how the people in question’s habits are changing over time.
That said, party culture had been excessive in the past and it was impoverishing to many people. I and others my age more wisely do without, which leaves us with money for things that are more important than one offs.
Spending all of your time studying in high school and college is your best hope at landing in the vanishing middle class. With decreasing job security as well as hyperinflation, continuing that work ethic into your 20s and 30s is quite reasonable. Everyone is too exhausted to party.
In college we’d only study 3 or 4 days a week to make room for the drinking
In mine, we studied 7 days a week.
It's not just the US. The nightclub and bar industry is tanking in the UK and Europe, too. UK: [1][2] Berlin.[3] Paris.[4]
[1] https://ntia.co.uk/nightclub-industry-struggles-with-over-10...
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk-pub-closures-beer-taxe...
[3] https://www.dw.com/en/is-berlin-in-a-club-death-spiral/a-703...
[4] https://www.latribunedelhotellerie.com/paris-society-cession...
This isn't a social effect at all, it's all a financial effect. Of course most of the HN population is isolated from those issues because we work in a high paying field, but nobody has any money to do anything anymore.
Parties were where you went to meet random strangers, get intoxicated, and maybe get laid. None of this is exciting anymore. People are less motivated to go out. We have other forms of socialization.
I blame a lot of the de-socialization on our constantly connected society. Since everyone is in contact with each other 24/7 via social media the idea of meeting random people is less exciting. The 24/7 news cycle also injects a lot of doom and anxiety making people more aware of dangers - intoxicated driving, overdose, violence, rape, etc. Parties might be viewed as more dangerous than exciting. Now add to that, 24/7 streaming of TV and highly addictive video games. There is plenty of distraction to fill the boredom gaps that used to motivate people to go out. And finally, I think covid drove a lot of people into a more isolationist mindset. I know a few people, including myself, who have admitted they go out far less post covid compared to pre covid.
People aren't even constantly connected via social media anymore. That was a thing in Facebook's earlier years, now most stuff is algorithmically fed from randos.
This feels right. More than anything, it's the function of the Internet.
I'd argue that it's specifically the combination of social media and smartphones. 2000s era "social networks" of AIM and forums were fine; you had to actually be at your computer so it wasn't an all-consuming activity for most people.
I don't think it's right. Despite the Internet, we really aren't in a constantly connected society. In fact, I'd argue we are less connected now than we have been for a long time. Everyone's "on" Social Media, but they're not socializing on it. They're spouting into the void, promoting and advertising themselves, tunneling themselves deep into echo chambers, but it's not really social. People write and write and write, but the only things they read are what the algorithms feed to them. I guess I'm gatekeeping socialization, but this doesn't seem like socialization to me.
When someone posts a clever quip to Twitter and gets 10,000 likes, this isn't socialization. It feels more like some weird performance art.
Its not all screaming into the void. From my point of view people broadcasting their lives in real-time leaves little to catch up on. Why call/meet Joe to talk about his trip to Antigua if he already posted his trip in real-time including video? You know what all your friends are doing.
The twitter scenes is out of my wheel house. Never had an account or knew anyone on it that I cared about.
I see a lot of reasons and excuses about the decline in partying, and the internet is obviously changing society and culture, as well as every generation of parents, but at some point everyone needs to take some responsibility and make their own decisions. At least people today have amazing tools to throw parties, if that's what they want to do.
FWIW, I spent the holiday weekend raving under the stars in the forest and it was great, as always. Mostly old people though.
A an older millennial, I have been pleasantly surprised by how vibrant my social life can be as long as I put in some effort. One key is living in a reasonably dense urban area. I have friends who make art and music, fiends who do standup comedy, friends on municipal sports teams - the ways to connect with people are expansive. And people in my age group (early 40's) seem only a little less inclined to make plans and go out compared to my friends in their 30's.
Even with my oldest friends, all of whom are busy with their kids, mortgages and spouses, we still prioritize taking trips to see each other and for everyone to get to know each other's kids.
So if you're anything like me (grown, mostly single, living alone in a dense urban center) I refuse to believe any social or technological developments have ruined our chances at human companionship.
But that's millennials. I have absolutely no idea how Gen Z will navigate this world. The fact that they seem to be choosing the least useful, social or pleasurable vice in the world (vaping), which also happens to be among the most viciously addictive vices (for many people) does not bode well in my opinion, no matter how enlightened the anti-alcohol stance may appear.
If I were to try and pinpoint one of the leading causes of this issue myself, I would personally say that Americans have an outdated and ineffective model regarding its use of addictive substances or what I like to now call "Brain Hacking" systems as they are not necessarily just physical substances anymore.
Recreational drugs cause unbelievable havok within communities where they are unleashed. Its well known that such drugs have chemical compounds capable of "hacking" our physiology and causing a whole host of negative effects while ensuring the user stays addicted. I consider these "Brain Hacking" systems just the same as I consider social media like TikTok and Instagram. They both are designed specifically in ways to entice users to be addicted without any concern for the harms they cause. It baffles me that simply because it is not a physical substance it gets treated as less dangerous than the harder substances.
We keep seeing these issues in America when its very clear that similar things would occur if we made recreational substances as common as water and just as accessible. Revenously addicted people, dont party, they dont socialize, they retreat from society, and stop forming deeper releationships. It is no surprise that this is creating issues for us.
Americans have always been the world's leading consumer of drugs, and now that we have digital drugs, they are more accessible and in demand than ever. So much so that the cartels desinging and pedeling these products, are basically the most powerful companies in our society.
Socializing in most Western countries used to be built entirely around an addictive mind altering substance, alcohol. Despite its many flaws it was extremely pro-social. Other drugs had their own party scenes.
Not to mention the stereotype of the 50’s housewife using “diet pills” to get more done. Back then they were amphetamines.
> Recreational drugs cause unbelievable havok within communities where they are unleashed.
Like.. Stable adults indulging in pot or mushrooms? IME has quite the opposite effect. Addictive drugs which devastate communities are usually not referred to as "recreational".
You're spot on about the outdated threat model and people not fully grasping how damaging social media/internet addiction is.
Addictive tech in your hand is an evolutionary trap.
Much like cars are to squirrels, squirrels have evolved to run into a straight line to the nearest tree at the hint of any danger. And for all threats other than cars that is the correct thing.
But many squirrels are "trapped" by evolution to cross the path of a car when there is no need to do so.
Humanity's curiosity, sociability and OCDness have all been trapped by algorithms and smart phones.
And it is shortening lives and even more so reducing reproduction. A faint hope is, that with all such evolutionary pressure, we can evolve our way out of them.... eventually.
I broadly agree with the article.
I'm also wondering if the rising political polarization is at least in part caused by the "antisocial" phenomenon. If you're not exposed to a spectrum of political worldviews through being involved with all these people you randomly met back in the day, it becomes easier to dehumanize the people you disagree with. You also never have to listen to their talking points, because you can just block them out online.
It's also the opposite. People are exposed to the most extreme, unhinged, and horrifying aspects of humanity on a continuous basis through every form of media and connectivity. It shapes your unconscious risk/reward expectations around forming connections. Someone invites you over to their house for dinner? You just saw a YouTube video about a woman who mixes her urine into her cooking and feeds it to unsuspecting guests to heal what ails them. Almost every form of engaging with the world these days -- except genuinely connecting with others -- makes genuinely connecting with others feel riskier than it is.
The talking points themselves have got much worse. So many things are now mainstream, especially in racism, that would have been kept out of "polite company" previously. It's not that social media has made people less aware of other's political views, it's made them more aware, which is why they hate each other. Entire accounts exist (libsoftiktok) for the purpose of exposing people to views which they will hate, so they can get angry and ramp up their rhetoric.
The enforcement on underage drinking has really altered the equation. And I'd guess the ubiquity of cell phones is another limit. The party culture of the 50s through the 90s-early 00s wasn't the norm it was the aberration from the times before. I think dancing it self has been in decline too. I tried to get the kids (teens and middle school) dancing at a small summer community and they just wanted to stand there and take turns playing their favorites from their own Spotify lists. They seem less open to just listing to unfamiliar music and maybe using Shazam to get some leads for new listening.
As a parent, what my wife and I see is that when the kids have access to the internet, they socialize on the internet. When they don't have access to the internet, they socialize in real life. Most often it's just a question of convenience. It's a pain in the ass to get together. It used to be the only way.
Another thing is that parents just don't leave their kids alone any more. My sister's son is almost 20 and she's still thinking about his goings on even when he's at college. This might be nice in terms of feeling loved, but independence is almost required to bring partying back.
The inevitable side effect of the financialization of the human experience. People are in constant competition with each other and the amount of time they can spend not competing is proportionate to the amount of slack in the economic system. Keeping slack costs money, removing it makes money, it's very hard to almost impossible to stop something that makes money. It would take an Amish level of zealotry.
I think the focus on short term gains by sacrificing long term viability is in part due to the inability to accurately measure future prospects, whenever there is doubt shot-termism prevails. The bird in the hand wins over the two in the bush. I think maximizing long term gains would be directly tied to human flourishing so if we could accurately measure long term externalities we could align capitalist and human interests. Convincing those who gain from short-termism to agree to use more accurate metrics is impossible when not using it makes them more money.
I don't know how to fix this. A society will not allow itself to undergo 'creative destruction' in an era where we bailout corporations. And socialism certainly is not going to fix it, socialists have their own kind of rather destructive short-termism.
Compare to Dave Barry's "The Greatest (Party) Generation", about his parents who were of the Mad Men era:
https://archive.is/Uyrys#selection-2109.17-2109.48
If anyone wants to be invited to house parties in London, UK, I'm happy to invite anyone who emails theo+hn@torchandzen.com! Number of people ranges from 10 to 50, activities from talking and eating to picnics and dancing.
> As more women poured their weekdays into 9-to-5 work, men failed to take over the logistical labor required to fill out the social calendar
LOL. The men were working too, as they always were, which is why women used to do most of the social planning. They didn't "fail to take over."
I remember seeing articles about working women doing more social managing then working men. It is one of reasons why women do not seek new partner as fast as men after divorce - they are more likely to keep friends they are content with.
Beware of the "Less-Social Teens" chart using a nonzero Y axis.
I’ve stopped hosting as many dinner parties because accommodating diverse food preferences has become increasingly challenging. It’s a smaller factor compared to many mentioned in the article, but I thought it was worth adding.
And not just preference but allergies. I'm not sure why but it seems like the number and prevalence of food allergies has really gone up since the 1980s/1990s. Back then you didn't really worry much about food allergies when you were thinking about foods to serve at a party.
Searches article text for mention of the words pandemic, covid, video games or even the word concert. Nothing. This isn't a serious piece. Moving on.
Reminds me of the Jonathan Richman classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6Pg9IGgQpY
Holy crap, I've never seen a Janathan Richman recommendation on the Internet ever ;) I listened to him like crazy in college (1988ish) and saw him play once. My favorite still remains https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR6Ns3AcDco
I know two other people that know of Richman, four if you count my wife and son who I made listen to him!
edit: had to add Richman was a big influence on the Talking Heads :)
I like that this delves into the relationship between "helicopter parenting" and this trend, and maybe I missed it, but I find that it conspicuously lacks economic precarity and the decline of real wages over this time period as an explanation. Hosting social events does cost free time and money and most people have way less of both in real terms than the period it's comparing to
Free time and mental energy is the limiting factor I think.
Personally I observe that social events seem to be most common among students who also are quite poor.
However mental energy and free time is surely correlated with wealth.
The effects of wealth on outcomes meaningful to most humans look mostly like a step functions, with some continuous-lookin' bits here and there. Anecdotally my assumption is that partying x wealth is bimodal, with peaks near the top and the middle-bottom of the wealth distributions. But homeless people and people scraping by on two minimum-wage jobs, both of which comprise a larger portion of america than when I was a child, are unlikely to be able to host or even often attend parties, like I think there's a sharp step to basically zero after a certain poverty line unless you're in a really integrated community (also less common over that time period, to be fair)
Partying is more expensive than watching TV or playing games.
It is if you are hosting; but if you are going to the party...hey, it's free food! I think a systematic analysis would show that it would be cheaper for all of us on the whole to share food at parties since it is cheaper to buy in bulk.
A lot of parties have always been pitch-in or BYOB.
I was going to disagree but then realized I now shell out at least $100 when two families and their kids show up for 3-4 pizzas with toppings and chips and dip and some juices.
And god forbid I try and provide fresh fruit and beverages on that budget…
A fifth of vodka has been like $15 for at least a decade otoh
Is 1 in 25 bad? I am more 1 in Inf... I mean I don't know what counts but I am happier to do things that are not a party. Examples: go to events in the city, restaurants, sunday lunch at relatives, work socials, school parent socials.
Even in my 20s I went to... the pub! Mayhe a nightclub. To me parties are more school age/university thing and are a great way to have a good time on a budget. Just some drinks and a speaker required.
Perhaps the ultimate form of human existence is to be physically expressionless yet intensely passionate on the internet.
I'd guess the biggest driver of this is a lack of boredom. There's a certain investment of time and stress to throw a party, if you're just going to be completely bored it gets you over that hurdle, if you can play games and talk in a group chat instead you might not pass the threshold for bothering a lot of the time.
There were fewer bullies. These days, if you try to get together s group of people with strong passion you're likely to be targeted by people who insist on inclusion in resource sharing or else they'll persecute the group that advantages itself.
I wouldn't ever endorse drinking, let alone underage drinking, and parties don't sound fun without drinking. Therefore, no parties. What's needed is a new class of drugs, something healthier and legal, that make people sociable like drinking does.
I used to throw loads of parties. At somepoint I realized..
1. It's expensive. I never once got a reasonable contribution from my friends. I knew this at the time, but eventually I was over it. Paying $100-250 per event just to deal with all the work and drama that comes with it.. not worth.
2. It's a lot of work. Hours of prep, hours of hosting, hours of clean up after. At the end of the day ~12 hours of effort for ~4 hours of fun is not a good ROI.
3. It frequently was an excuse to get drunk or high. Which is fun, whatever. But as I grew more health conscious, this was less and less appealing. I can drink on my own if I want.
4. There are better alternatives. I don't have to do any of the above options if I just jump on Discord for a while. Or join a rec league sport. Or spend it with my family.
I don't think the point of a party is "ROI" either in terms of the dimensions of time, effort, or money. When I decide to host one, this kind of "cost" is assumed. I don't worry about it because I can afford it (in all three dimensions), and the point of hosting a get-together is not to make a profit on any of those dimensions or break even. I look at it as: I'm spending time+effort+money, and the return, for myself and everyone who attends, is not any of those three. It's getting some much needed socialization and a fun experience. I guess your point is that you're not getting as much fun out of it to justify the spend?
Because people have lost their will to live. It's evident even in their talk about how exhaustive social interaction, parties, the outside world in general is, and how they'd rather stay cozy at home - even in their early 20s.
Not directly related to the article, but, the way we played multiplayer games on a sofa back in the 90s was way more funnier and fullfilling than what it is now through steam/discord. The sharing was not the same.
There are definitely less in high school, but has college really changed that much? I'm a student right now, and while I'm not involved with it, it definitely seems like Greek life people always have parties going on.
As an aside, did anyone else see the background start to darken as they scrolled down and lost interest in reading as you knew a "Please oh pretty please subscribe to my newsletter!" overlay was going to slide into view?
I wish I had a ublock filter or a userscript to deal with this…
I feel like it would be more worrisome if partying had doubled in the last XX years.
No one had cameras, if one did something strange it would be funny or embarrassing for a week or two. More usually everyone was to drunk to really take notice of "strange" behavior.
Once again, they’re severely discounting socialization over the internet. Twitch, discord, et al account for massive amounts of socialization. For many kids it’s easier to chat or stream than it is to find the other 2-3 weird kids into their particular hobby. Watch the TV documentary “Social Studies” if you think Gen Z isn’t partying. “Euphoria” is definitely an exaggeration but it’s relatable to Gen Z for a reason. Anecdotally, I see Genz all the time at raves and concerts. These aren’t “animal house” style events but still.
I bet you anything this is related to wage growth or lack thereof ... I mean why would you party if you have no disposable income ?!
Anxious Generation... Anyone with kids should read it.
Three issues that are important but nobody wants to discuss (why?):
Inflation in the cost of law enforcement. As an X-er I received some truly epic paint-peeling flame-throwing "angry dad-style" lectures from cops and one time I got caught and my parents were called and I paid a municipal citation (not a misdemeanor or felony) equivalent to thirteen hours of minimum wage labor (essentially, one teenage afterschool weekly paycheck...). Now a days it would be kinder if the cops just shot the kid, as they will lose their license semi-permanently which means no job and no programmed activities and no sports, forbidden from joining the military (note the GI Bill paid for my college), lose their security clearance if they are already in the .mil, expelled from college / retract admission, suspended from school, that means no college diploma, no diploma as a job ticket to get one of the very few remaining "good jobs" etc. Seems a little inflated of a punishment over "a couple beers" People like discussing the inflation rate of real estate, lack of inflation in wages, but they should discuss inflation in the punishment for having a few drinks. A general cultural trend toward absolutism where everything thats permitted is mandatory and everything thats not permitted has no limit to the resulting punishment to prevent it. Toe the line precisely, or suffer the full weight of the law, and the line does not include partying, so you'd be crazy to do that.
"In the old days" the cultural expectation was everyone works 9-5. No one is allowed that anymore, they either work 24x7 as servants on call to their feudalistic owner, or have weird hours and gig economy jobs. Most people cannot "drop by after work around 6 for a beer". Can you drink at work? I can't. Can you go to work drunk? I can't. Some people, maybe most people, are not allowed to ever be "not at work". You're not even allowed to sleep if your boss feels like texting you; you surely can't get drunk at a friends house without getting fired. Don't worry that beer (or ten) will only cost you a one year job search to get a new job. When everyone is under house arrest by their employer, nobody parties.
There's a long tradition in the USA of trashing a proper name and the following generation abandons it while doing the same thing under a new name. Every generation before gen-x loved going to malls, then a long indoctrination campaign to use security forces and police to "keep those annoying teenage kids out of malls" started in the 1980s, and here I am in the 2020s and I STILL will not go to the mall because of heavy handed security, and my generation and younger is killing the malls because malls hate me because I was once a teen that hung out at the mall a lifetime ago. So, WRT parties, post "Animal House" movie era, a party means vandalism, drunk driving accidents, police arrests, visiting the ER for alcohol (or other) intoxication, etc. The marketing has been successful and my generation and younger no longer "attend parties". We "hike at the park" or "tailgate at the (kids?) sport event" or "hang out at the festival" or "board game night" doing EXACTLY what we did when people partied, but for marketing reasons we never party anymore, its a "tailgate" sporting event. This makes the article pretty weak sauce, an entire article about doing search and replace in a word processor for "party" and "board game night" is not a significant lifestyle change.
With COVID partying meant that someone could kill you with an illness. That's a pretty hard lesson to unlearn. They carries a lot of momentum.
Like with World Wars there's been a generational impact that changed how people relate to one another. The tribal momentum, of one monkey teaching the next, gets lost.
Except the graph shows this was happening way before COVID. The internet and how that has changed how people relate is much more likely the reason.
One of the first things I did with the net was to connect with people to go out and party with. Amazing how that morphed into zombie doom scrolling, something I would never have predicted.
in my opinion the largest effect is how we build cities. Having to drive everywhere and the separation between commercial, residential and industrial areas of american cities is very clearly a driver of this isolation.
Maybe.
But everybody hates everyone else online.
Hate, fear, and other very basic brain stem emotional responses maximize engagement.
I'm sure COVID had something to do with it but I think partying is another casualty of social media.
Similar to discord for gaming, talking to your random peers has completely fell off
prices too, partying is expensive and should be the first line item cut in hard times.
Partying in the article also includes “dropping by a friends house”, which is cheap/free
>With COVID partying meant that someone could kill you with an illness.
Given the mortality rate for people typically in the partying age group (and especially those under 30), you were more likely to die in a traffic accident on your way to or back from the party, or from alcohol poisoning, than from a case of COVID acquired there. Let's not exaggerate.
From the NIH: The median IFR for COVID based on age groups: 0.0003% at 0–19 years, 0.002% at 20–29 years, 0.011% at 30–39 years.
The 1918 Flu it was certainly not.
Its the wrong statistical analysis of the situation. The death rate does not even remotely depend on infection source IIRC. Last stat I saw (from some years ago) was in excess of 96.7% of the population had blood antibodies for covid. You are going to catch covid, your only decision is when and what you can do WRT personal health to lower the risk (aside from "do not be old" there's "do not be fat" "do not be out of shape WRT cardio" etc) If your local hospital is swamped with cases it would be irresponsible to throw a rager and infect 100 people, at that moment. If your local hospital is empty and all the nurses are doing at work is posting tiktok dances for karma upvotes, and the odds of catching it eventually are 97%, you may as well have a good time; if you're going to get just as sick regardless if you have fun getting there or not. Almost all of the "lockdown time" was the latter not the former and only something approaching a civil rebellion ended the latter era. If it were not for that we would still be locked down today in 2025. The situation is not at all even remotely like smoking where not smoking means you're probably not going to get lung cancer. You are getting covid, and you have minimal but not zero control over when, if now is not a bad time, don't worry, if now is a bad time, out of an abundance of caution you might want to slow (not eliminate) the spread. You're getting it eventually, you can either be brave and happy and social on the way... or the opposite. A lot of people chose the latter.
Dying isn't the only risk from catchig Covid.
Some people didn't want to get it even if they were guaranteed to survive, because they could pass it to others who were more vulnerable to it.
This yes and a fair worry for many who lived with older parents, grandparents etc, but the original comment mentioned an illness killing "you" assuming the partygoer, who, given the context of the article, is probably going to be a lot younger than anything close to elderly (though elderly people should party too. Socializing should never be under-estimated for helping vitality)
To be pedantic, it's still possible for people to modify their behavior based on mistaken beliefs (in this case, that COVID is really dangerous, when it isn't for healthy young people). Though I don't think this explains the actual trend in this case.
Healthy young people still do not want to spread it to grandma or whoever. That is something frequent forgotten by these arguments - not everyone is sociopath and young people sometimes think about other people.
Whats there to party about
Can’t throw a party if you’re living in your parents basement.
Everyone's looking at their phones instead.
As soon as the screen became marginally more interesting than the person next to you social life was pretty much doomed.
Yeah. I haven't gone out in decades.
Chart goes down fast soon after 2010. There's another article about a decline in young Americans' health since 2007. And, we all know what happened around that time.
"I don’t like the simplistic idea that smartphones are purely anti-social" well I do. It's in-your-face obvious any time you're in public, and especially if you were in school back when smartphones started gaining popularity. There's a longer explanation too, but same conclusion.
It's cause were poor.
Shit’s expensive. Period.
What teenager has $60 to spend at the movies?
"women have long been the keepers of the family social calendar. Wives, not husbands, historically planned the quilting parties, the bridge games, and the neighborhood potlucks. But in the second half of the 20th century, many women swapped unpaid family jobs for salaried positions."
This is a very good observation, and I think that somewhere in the social revolutions of the 20th century, we failed to appreciate the extremely important historical roles women played that were central to traditional societies. Even today, we believe the stock caricatures of pre-feminist societies, which in a way is unsurprising, given that most people alive today never experienced anything other than the post-revolutionary world. We just accept caricature as fact, and we view history anachronistically through the lens of our present social realities.
In traditional societies, the family assumes the basic and most important social unit and social point of reference, with the married couple as the foundation for it. This already creates a network of social ties that radiate from the marriage, most conspicuously family ties which are doubled. Husbands typically gravitated toward the public sphere, securing the material well-being of the family through their participation in public life (in other words, their work was primarily for the sake of the domestic sphere). Wives typically gravitated toward the domestic sphere which was the seat of family life. So while men were heads of the family, women were heads of the household. And this was an honor, as family life was the primary business of life; the husband's career or job was primarily in service to family life. Ideally, husbands provided the means that allowed wives to be free to be mothers, unburdened by competing commitments. (Of course, this doesn't mean fathers did not participate in domestic life, nor that women did not participate in public life. It is rather a matter of emphasis and "center of gravity", so to speak.) By analogy, kings are exalted fathers, and queens are exalted mothers.
And since the family is the center of social life, and women are mistresses of the domestic sphere, it is fitting that women should have a more social orientation. Indeed, it is expected that women would be the catalysts of many of the social ties with the broader community.
In that sense, the careerism that women today are taught from an early age to pursue and prioritize not only deprives women of the opportunity to function as wives and mothers, most exalted and honored roles that they are, but it deprives society of much of its social glue, as women have a greater tendencies to care about cultivating social bonds than men do.
What we're taught today instead is that the career, not family life, is the supreme occupation of life and the primary source of our happiness. We are therefore taught that women were historically deprived of this opportunity, chained to the bleak life of being "stay-at-home moms" (a vicious term, if there ever was one), covered in baby puke and toddler shit, under the tyrannical boot of her husband like some slave. We demean motherhood as some kind of drudgery for poor, uneducated, unattractive women instead of the privilege that it is, in fact the privilege of raising the future generation. Children are no longer a wonderful gift, but a burden and an obstacle. You might be able to turn them into sources of prestige, if you can get them into the best schools or whatever. The career is the center of life; children, the family, even the spouse - these are all secondary now.
And this has downstream effects that cause a radical transformation of society and culture that affects the entire social and economic environment, like the atrophy of social ties mentioned in the article. For instance, try supporting a family on a single income today (in the 1950s, a middle class/working class man could do just that). Now women who want to live in a traditional way are constrained in that choice, as economic and social realities make that difficult. That's why I roll my eyes when someone thinks bucking demographic decline is just a matter of throwing some money at the problem. Our society and our culture has become hostile to family life. The grain and pattern of modern life, rather than supporting it, adds friction and resistance. And since family life is the foundation for the rest, the health or lack thereof of family life is a predictor of the health of the broader society.
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People don't party if their life is bad.