When I was growing up, my parents were always having friends over for dinner, usually followed by free-wheeling games of bridge. And when their friends were not at our place, they invited us to their place for dinner and cards. Kids were always dragged along, so we socialized with our parents’ friends’ kids and usually a good time was had by all.
We went to movies as a family, sometimes with other families. My father went to Lion’s Club and sometimes brought me along. We’d go out to the lake with my parents’ church group for picnics and boat rides. On Sundays we would go both to church and to “night church,” with me complaining because that always made us miss the end of the Ed Sullivan Show or once a year The Wizard of Oz. After night church, everybody went to someone’s house for the “After Glow” party. In college, I did quite a bit of hanging out and doing things with friends. We even played bridge.
But once I grew up, got married, and we had children of our own, we never did things with other people on the scale that my parents did. Sometimes we had people over, were invited to their place for dinner, or did things with people from church or work. We enjoyed that. But mostly we were happy to just stay home.
In today’s culture, though, doing things with other people has become rarer and rarer. People are spending more and more time home alone, by choice. Americans are increasingly anti-social, to the point that it’s becoming harder and harder to have a sense of society.
These reflections came to me while reading Derek Thompson’s article in The Atlantic entitled The Anti-Social Century with the deck, “Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality.” (That article is behind a paywall, but it’s available from MSN here.)
Thompson points out that as of 2023, 74% of restaurant traffic was either takeout or delivery. And when people do dine in, they often eat by themselves. In just the last two years, dining solo has increased by 29%. He quotes a restaurateur: “There’s an isolationist dynamic that’s taking place in the restaurant business. . . I think people feel uncomfortable in the world today. They’ve decided that their home is their sanctuary. It’s not easy to get them to leave.”
Thompson cites other data points: In the 1930s, Americans went out to the movies several times per month. Today, the average American goes to three movies per year, but watches the equivalent of eight movies per week on home screens. Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data,” he writes. That rate has been declining since 1965, but between 2002 and 2023, it has dropped by over 20%. For people younger than 25 and unmarried men, the amount of time spent with others has dropped 35%. “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.”
Thompson quotes an array of experts who refer to “the privatization of American leisure” and our “century of solitude.” He quotes Andrew Taggart in First Things about the phenomenon of “secular monks”; that is, men who say “no” to marriage and fatherhood (like religious monks), and embracing the asceticism not of prayer, fasting, and spiritual disciplines but the subjugation of the body by means of working out, dieting, and self-improvement exercises.
Thompson concludes, “Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America.”
Why is this? The COVID shutdowns no doubt played a role, as some people realized they liked staying at home. But the anti-social trend started long before that. Is this part of the plague of loneliness we keep hearing so much about? To a degree, but many solitary people say they do not feel lonely. They like being by themselves.
Is it our technology? Certainly, that has been enabling. “Americans are more likely to take meetings from home, to shop from home, to be entertained at home, to eat at home, and even to worship at home.”
I wonder if this phenomenon accounts for other things we are seeing in the culture, such as the decline of marriage, the decline of parenthood, and the decline of church attendance. An increasing number of people just want to be by themselves.
I also wonder if this “self-imposed solitude” is the whole story. Thompson quotes researcher Enghin Atalay: “He categorized a person as “alone,” as I will throughout this article, if they are “the only person in the room, even if they are on the phone” or in front of a computer.”
Well, interacting with other people on a computer is a type of socializing. Even though you might not have ever met some of your Facebook “friends,” you are still conversing with them using language, still sharing your thoughts and feelings with another human being. That is not as good as knowing someone in the flesh, to be sure, but there is a reason it is called “social media.” And even just watching TV, though a solitary escape, engages us with human characters and their problems.
Thompson brings up the paradox that in some ways, our social bonds are getting stronger. Parents spend more time with their children than they used to, and married couples are spending more time with each other. Technology is even helping with that, as cell phones and texts allow us to stay in closer contact.
He says that while all this time alone is “making society weaker, meaner, and more delusional,”
Home-based, phone-based culture has arguably solidified our closest and most distant connections, the inner ring of family and best friends (bound by blood and intimacy) and the outer ring of tribe (linked by shared affinities). But it’s wreaking havoc on the middle ring of “familiar but not intimate” relationships with the people who live around us, which Dunkelman calls the village. “These are your neighbors, the people in your town,” he said. We used to know them well; now we don’t. The middle ring is key to social cohesion.
Maybe so, but the inner ring and the outer ring are arguably the most important relationships that we have.
I can relate to all of this. I like to spend time by myself, by which I mean with my wife, children, and grandchildren. And when they are not around, I can still enjoy my solitude. Part of me sees this new trend as the triumph of the introverts. And as I’ve said before, we can use more introversion. Yet, I am well aware that cultivating too much solitude is like being pulled into a black hole, from which not even light can escape. I need not only people outside myself but the world outside myself. That includes most importantly the God outside myself, who, in turn, pulls me outside of myself by giving me multiple vocations and thus multiple neighbors to love and serve.
Photo: “Solitude at Sea,” AI generated not by me but by Stockcake. Public domain.