YHK - yet another hacker news clone

This may not be shared by other people, but my two cents.

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

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

Plus when you have kids it’s a lot more convenient than trying to wrangle them at the end of a fun time lol

I get caught in the comparison game, the thief of joy.

I don’t want ask my rich well off friends around cause of my humble existence.

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

Article says "The share of adults who say they regularly have friends over has declined 70 percent since 1975", but this may not be an accurate comparison:

> Until 1985, the survey included only married households.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDB_Needham_Life_Style_Surveys

> Putnam acknowledged that women have historically been the keepers of the family social calendar, planning the birthday parties and neighborhood potlucks. For any number of reasons, women seem to do better than men at making and keeping adult friendships and making plans with other families. But in the 1950s and 1960s, tens of millions of women traded their unpaid household management jobs for salaried jobs, and the family social calendar frayed, as men failed to pick up the slack.

Being stay at home parent is super lonely experience, basically the most lonely occupation you can have. In most jobs, you meet people and you do talk to people without trying to. Fairly often, they are unavoidable whether you want it or not. If you are at home with a kid, you are truly absolutely alone, unless you organize something. Every other guy here on HN complains about Covid being lonely, but it was less lonely and socially easier situation than being stay at home parent.

So, alternative framing is that women stopped organizing these as their need do organize them went down. And men did not had that need in the first place, so it did not changed from their point of view.

And simultaneously, it ceased to be acceptable to be the kind of dad who spends multiple evenings a week with buddies, not really spending time with his kids.

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

Blame the screens. Screens are blackholes that suck up your time, attention, awareness and senses.

Screens are evil. They wake up the dead past as if it's alive and happening now. It became so much the norm, that people are afraid to face the real world, real people, real talking. "Dinner party? OMG, real people with real faces that force us to talk to them? Noway sir".

Screens disconnected people from real world, from each other. I was trying a VR headset the other days and immediately threw it away, as it shut off my visual and audio senses completely.

In my experience, most people are overworked, stressed and exhausted.

I don't find it surprising at all that social activities have been declining. It sounds like normal mammal behavior in fact.

Middle aged European here. I still regularly go to parties (dinner and otherwise) and I notice that there are two kinds of people: people who throw parties, and people who don't. This sounds like a truism, but what I mean is: there are people who regularly throw a party and people who never do it.

I am solidly in the first category. I throw dinner parties, birthday parties, drinking parties, dance parties, midsummer parties, midwinter parties, game parties, etc. Yes, it costs time and money and is a lot of work. But what people (probably the ones that never bother) tend to forget is how unbelievably gratifying it is to get a bunch of people together, to feed them and to make them talk, laugh, dance, etc. Afterwards you are tired but also grateful and socially energized in a way that feels fundamental to my existence.

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

Personally feels insane that people find this surprising or puzzling.

You wouldn't be surprised if everyone was smoking and smoking rate was going up massively and then we had a surge of people getting cancer.

This is obviously because of social media or other algorithmic applications. It literally herds people.

It couldn't be more obvious how unhealthy it is, yet there is no demand for it to get outlawed and there won't be any time soon. It is pretty sad.

If you think about the second/third order effects that it will have, it is massively worse than alcohol/drugs.

Not American.

One big thing I feel contributing to this is a lack of time.

And the more strange unusual thing, many folks basically have "school nights", they don't do anything because they're going to work the next day.

Perhaps work becoming more mentally intensive makes this more difficult.

I wonder if another factor is how many people move around the country.

For families with kids, forming deep friendships as an adult can be a logistical challenge.

Many people have no current relationship with friends they made in college or high school

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

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

Swede here, I used to host a lot of dinners and parties.

But then i realized that it was mostly me who hosted them and the few times i got invited there was an agreement that guest chip in on the costs or that it was a potluck kind of thing.

Made me regret spending all that time and money on the parties i hosted.

Families (mine included) are just too busy. Working, commuting, homework, trying to get some exercise in. Any spare time I try to spend it with my children.

I always look at happiness in terms of pillars, social, family, work, spiritual. Work somehow has taken over everything. It seems culturally engrained.

I know social media is a factor but while we all fall down the rabbit hole occasionally, it doesn't stop anyone organising a get together.

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

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

Another challenge to hosting dinner parites today is that everybody is on a special diet, count calories, on ozempic because they need to be healthier or have a athletic goal only few people 30 years ago had.

This makes it even more difficult to host because of everybody's needs and regimes they dont buckle on.

To me, the most obvious explanation is that people used to be able to buy houses a lot more easily than before. My wife and I were lucky that we were able to afford one, and because of that I have my friends over a couple times a year to hang out and have dinner (I would do it more often, but we're in a remote part of the city that isn't great to drive in). When we were in an apartment, we didn't even have a dining room or enough seats for anyone other than on the couch.

1. More women work

2. More remote communication

3. Fewer friends through church

4. Fewer friends through kid’s school

5. Kids have more homework and more structure activity than they used to.

6. Less need for entertainment

Crucially too, people do not know _how_ to host anymore either, treat guests. A host needs a certain self effacing attentivess. host also needs to provide an abundance too, there always should be too much food, too muxh drink, more time to stay.

There are a few theories mentioned as to why this is happening, but not this one: throwing dinner parties takes time, and women‘s participation in the workforce has grown steadily.

There are less women with free time on their hands and the need to mingle with people they wouldn’t otherwise encounter, because they’re at home most of the time.

Humanity's revealed preferences are really, really strong here.

As basically every country on Earth gets richer, two things happen in survey results.

One is that as people get richer they spend more time apart. Household sizes get smaller, the number of social interactions per week goes down, etc.

You'll also see that as countries get richer people say that they report feeling less lonely. Loneliness is less of an issue for the rich countries who live more apart. The correlation between this and GDP is comical. As you get to poorer countries, like clockwork, people report being lonelier in surveys.

The evidence suggests that as people get more choice they decide to see people less and they also feel happier for it and less lonely. So I don't think there's a problem here.

As others have mentioned, the decline started long before social media and the Internet. When I was a child, in the 70s, my parents often had other families and couples over for dinner, and we often attended small dinner parties, too.

As an introvert, I absolutely loathed these gatherings and was frustrated by how powerless I was in avoiding them.

Recently, I have been reading over my mother's old letters she wrote to her parents at that time, in which she described the effort and social anxiety that went with this tradition. It was not something my parents enjoyed, but rather an obligation they felt they had to uphold. Someone invites you over, then that goes into an unspoken balance sheet, and you are required to reciprocate. She often spoke of "owing" dinner to people. I don't think she enjoyed it at all, though there were a few couples I can remember who were good friends of theirs, and those meetups were always a pleasure to listen in on. The rest were simply a drag.

I should note that their life in the 70s (in a middle-class college town) was not some idyllic paradise without the Internet, either. Everyone was constantly falling ill with colds or flu, and days were spent running dreary errands to shop for boring things that we now can get with a click. The rotary-dial telephone that hung in the kitchen was the heartbeat of the house, since replaced by Facebook and smartphones. My parents were always busy and exhausted.

> Everybody might prefer, in the abstract, a world of dinner parties, neighborhood friendships, and spontaneous gatherings. But on any given Wednesday at 7:45pm., it is easier to look at a screen than to host a party; easier to listen to a podcast while doing yoga than to plan a gathering. This is not so much an individual failure as a coordination failure. Modernity has shifted leisure from activities that require coordination with other people toward activities that can be consumed without the permission or participation of others. Compared to TikTok, a dinner party is a terrible leisure technology.

This extra coordination “friction” is the killer. The lesson is, if you want more dinner parties you have to reduce the extra coordination “friction” to a minimum.

My guesses:

1. Everything costs more. A lot more.

2. Wages have stagnated for decades, unless you're in that magical IT job.

3. It's now a 2 wage earner setup to afford rent or mortgage. And smaller and less hostable residences.

4. The lower your income, the worse your schedule for planning anything. Same with friends.

5. Self-entertainment is a lot cheaper.

Basically, capitalism has squeezed out being able to afford parties, and the time commitment away from "hustling".

Even with 1995-ish, we had Married with Children, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, and Friends. All these show apartments or houses that a single worker could afford, and fund house/apartment parties. And this is a single person paying for housing.

Sure, those are fictions for TV, but it also shows just how normal and common it was, that low/middle income folks had lots of options and good amount of time. That's just no longer true for most Americans.

Middle-aged, in the US. From my perspective, a lot of the change is due to overbooked children. My wife and I have a group of ~5 couples that we used to get together with regularly. Before any kids, it was ad-hoc, often out somewhere (dinner, bar, whatever). When the first couple had an infant, that changed to pot-lucks at their house (easy to put the kid down for the night). But now that 3 of the couples have kids, 2 of which are in middle-school, it's almost impossible to get the gang together - one of the kids always has some practice or another event. We still get tougher in smaller groups, but less frequently.

This is counter to when I was a kid - it was rare that I had a scheduled sports event on a Friday or Saturday evening. During the day, sure. But 6pm+ on Friday? Basically never. But that seems to be common now. Travel sports, so lots of weekends totally away, or specialized coaching at odd hours, or just a 3rd activity to pad that college application. It's crazy. I honestly have no idea how kids have any fun today (and I say that as somebody who played 2 varsity sports, one instrument, and was an Eagle Scout - but through middle school, I still had plenty of time for just hanging out - it was common to ride my bike for hours on a Sunday - into town, get an ice cream, across the river into DC, and back).

I had a slightly older Mexican neighbor who would go out of his way to invite everyone in the apartment complex to watch pay per view fights and cook.

He was actually from Mexico, I suspect from a culture that values community much more. I don’t know Hispanic culture that well, but I’ve also gotten this vibe from former partners.

Long long ago when my black family first moved to California they made sure to co locate in the same area. This was partially due to the realities of segregation, but it also made making dinner for your nephew much easier.

Now the community is obsolete. Replaced by insta validation loops.

> It's too much fun to be home alone

This reminded me of the insurance company TV ad:

https://www.ispot.tv/ad/S7KX/geico-cancelled-plans

> Americans are unhappier than ever

For a slightly different take, the great Experimental History blog wrote about this (in a way...) too:

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/there-is-no-epidemic-...

> More recent data suggests that teenage loneliness might have ticked back up to where it was in the 1980s, and the evidence here is mixed overall, depending on which data sets and cohorts you look at. We don’t yet have enough data to be sure which way the effects go on average, but we do have enough to be sure that those effects are neither large nor universal.

It’s just too much work for big dinners. How is that possible for a family of two workers to prepare a big dinner once for maybe 8-10 people once for a while? If I had the time I’d rather spend on sleeping or something else.

There are probably people who are good at this and love to do this, but I think there are fewer and fewer families who are into big dinners.

Not US, under 40. The depiction of dinner parties makes me think not much was lost.

What I gleam from TV shows is: The wife invited people over to brag about her husband's recent promotion or her children's achievements. Once over, they gossiped about a perceived fault in the other family (did you see the son's long hair? I heard he smokes weed!

Sounds like a suburban nightmare. There surely are other socializing events that were more beneficial; like a weekly bowling club meeting.

Another reason is nowadays with all the variety of dietary restrictions in vogue, it’s much harder for a host to prepare a meal everyone can share. Potlucks or a bland collection of help-yourself dishes (which often are nothing more than an odd collection of appetizers) is standard fare.

I’m fortunate to have friends in their 60s and 70s where I can still enjoy the traditional dinner experience.

I actually love and fancy about big breakfasts.

Just imagine that your family and a friend's family are going to camping today. You tell the other guy, hey, tomorrow morning we are going to prepare a big breakfast for everyone. If you don't mind spending an extra 5 minutes diverting into our driveway (mine is 5 mins away from the freeway), you can have a full breakfast before we go camping. The other guy says Yes that's perfect, and the next morning the whole family roll in, smelling sausage, bacon and fried eggs.

Damn that's something I'd like to do once I get rid of my hemmorhoids.

I moved from a rich city social life to a lonely suburban one (I have regrets, there are complicating factors). I met a fellow dad who mentioned a book as we started chatting and I was excited (someone who reads!).

As we talked about this very isolation problem he told me about his neighbors who kept inviting him over and offering to watch the kids for him and how he thought it was just weird and couldn’t trust them. It broke my heart — I could just imagine the neighbors trying to be good to their community and that very behavior is met with distrust.

(I read half the book he mentioned and asked him about it the next time I saw him. Turns out he hadn’t read the book, just heard about it on a podcast. My quest to meet someone who reads continues.)

In my twenties I made spaghetti every Saturday night. This started as throwing some Ragu in a pot and adding some spices, and eventually morphed into crushing my own tomatoes and cooking over most of the day. I did this every week over years. A varied group of friends came to eat each week -- no plan, no notice, just come over if you have nothing else going on. It's how I met my wife -- I never would have had the courage to ask her out on a real date, but "I make spaghetti for my friends every Saturday, you should come over," was easier. It's been years and I don't often make spaghetti anymore.

How is the author of this piece going to cite a graph that shows an extreme increase in time spent at home that begins in 2020 and not mention COVID? We had social media in the 2010s. COVID made spending time outdoors/around other people an actual physical danger for over a year, and the psychological effects of that are lingering. Does anyone remember that one political cartoon where the guy is walking down the street, and everyone around him just looks like a virus particle? I think a lot of people consciously or subconsciously still see the world that way. If you don’t believe, reflect on how you would feel about attending a crowded indoor gathering in 2010 vs now, or how much unease you would feel if someone at the table next to you started coughing.

May I suggest a thing my wife and I started doing a couple years ago: the monthly brunch.

First Sunday of the month or whatever, we send out a reminder text, we provide coffee and a little food, people bring way more food than we can eat, and we invite everyone we know, from our different social circles. No pressure.

It’s a moderate amount of work, but it’s very gratifying to bring people together. People have made good friends at our brunch that they hang out with all the time now. It’s been interesting to see how hungry people are for social interaction, some people have driven or taken the subway more than an hour to come. People bring their kids or babies if they have them, age range is from 20s to 60s, it’s very chill.

It’s also a great “next step” when I meet someone I’d like to be friends with: “hey, my wife and I do a monthly brunch, it’s really low-key, you should come!”

For the record, I’m an introvert, but I can tell this is really good for me.

Not all of it, but Americans are working significantly more now than they did in 1975[1]. One would expect compromises to be made to clear space for more work hours.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060

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