Face-to-face socializing in America has declined by more than 20% nationwide. Among some groups, like young adults and unmarried men, the drop is closer to 40%.
But strangely, this hasn’t led to the loneliness epidemic that you hear so much about. Instead, we’re seeing a new phenomenon: rising aloneness without rising loneliness.
Today on the show, Derek Thompson will help us understand this puzzling disconnect and its profound implications. Derek is a staff writer at The Atlantic who recently wrote a piece entitled “The Anti-Social Century.” In the first half of our conversation, Derek unpacks the cultural shifts and technological developments — and no, it’s not just the smartphone — that have created what he calls the “convenience curse.” We then get into why even self-described introverts are often happier when forced to socialize, the concerning trend of young men settling further and further into isolating, sedentary leisure, and practical ways we can strengthen our atrophied social muscles to become better, happier people.
Resources Related to the Podcast
- AoM Article: The Importance of Developing and Maintaining Your Social Fitness
- AoM Podcast #742: The Power of Talking to Strangers
- AoM Article: Introversion as an Excuse
- AoM Podcast #176: The Vanishing Neighbor & The Transformation of American Community
- AoM Article: Use Technology Like the Amish
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Read the Transcript
Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast. Face to face socializing in America has declined by more than 20% nationwide. Among some groups like young adults and unmarried men, the drop is closer to 40%. But strangely, this hasn’t led to the loneliness epidemic that you hear so much about. Instead, we’re seeing a new phenomenon, rising aloneness without rising loneliness. Today on the show, Derek Thompson will help us understand this puzzling disconnect and its profound implications.
Derek is a staff writer at The Atlantic who recently wrote a piece entitled the Anti-Social Century. In the first half of our conversation, Derek unpacks the cultural shifts and technological developments. And no, it’s not just the smartphone that have created what he calls the convenience curse. We then get into why even self described introverts are often happier when forced to socialize, the concerning trend of young men settling further and further into isolating sedentary leisure and practical way we can strengthen our atrophied social muscles to become better, happier people. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/alone.
All right, Derek Thompson, welcome to the show.
Derek Thompson: Great to be here. Thank you so much.
Brett McKay: So you recently wrote a piece for The Atlantic called the Anti-Social Century, which traces how much less time Americans are spending socializing than they used to. What are some of the numbers on this front? Like what’s been the general decline in in person socialization?
Derek Thompson: The basic story is that American socializing declined in the second half of the 20th century. And then in the early 21st century, it pretty much fell off a cliff. Overall, face to face socializing has declined by more than 20% nationwide. Among some groups like black men and teenagers, decline is more like 40%. And so almost half of the face to face socializing that people had is gone now in just 20 years. That’s a remarkable remake of human experience. And then some of the individual statistics are really jarring, like the fact that couples now by, I think, a margin of 4 to 1, spend more time watching television together than talking to each other. Women who own cats. This one got me in trouble with some people, but I’ll say it here. Women who own cats now spend more time caring for their pets than they do speaking to another person in a face to face situation. So we’ve really seen just a total transformation of how Americans spend time with each other.
Brett McKay: Yeah, you talked about how it’s particularly pronounced amongst young adults. There’s a line from the article, the share of boys and girls who say they meet up with friends almost daily outside school hours, has declined by nearly 50% since the early 1990s.
Derek Thompson: It’s pretty nuts. I don’t know what else to say. It’s incredibly depressing. It’s wild. And it’s one reason why when I found these statistics, I was like, I need to do something big on this. I write essays for The Atlantic. I have a podcast, Plain English, those outlets, those 1,000 word essays or 40 minute podcasts, those let me get a little bit into a subject like this. But I really was getting the sense that the decline in face to face socializing and its flip side, which is the rise of mere aloneness of absolute solitude, was becoming one of the most important social facts in America. And I think the implications of this decline in socializing that you’ve pointed to are just truly immense.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And besides some of the numbers we just mentioned, you talk about some of the things that Robert Putnam talked about in his book ‘Bowling Alone.’ The rate of people being involved with community organizations declined. The frequency of people entertaining at home like hosting friends for parties, games to entertain, that’s all been declining as well.
Derek Thompson: And that had been declining for a while. That’s the stuff that had been declining since the 1960s. So, brief history of ‘Bowling Alone,’ for those who haven’t read it or maybe have just heard of it or have heard of it so many times they feel like they’ve read it, here’s the upshot. Between the early 1900s, the 1960s, practically every measure of socializing was going up. People were spending more time together. They were more likely to join associations and clubs. And then somewhere around the 1960s, 1970s, the tide turned and America became much more individualistic. Our cars allowed us to drive away from each other, homes got more comfortable, entertainment got more awesome. So it became more fun just to stay at home and sit on the couch and watch TV or play video games or look at your phone. And then finally, in the 21st century, if the automobile privatized our lives and the television privatized our leisure, the smartphone privatized our attention, it meant that we could be in huge crowds of people and be essentially alone on our phone getting involved in some psychodrama millions of miles away in phone land. And so that’s the story that Putnam sort of sets up.
And what I try to do is to extend it into the 21st century. When he published his book in 2000, there were a lot of people who said, I’m not entirely sure that you’re right about this, Bob, I think maybe you’re wrong, and we might see a great surge of socializing in the world remade by the Internet. And in fact, everything just got worse from one perspective. And so that’s really where this piece picks up.
Brett McKay: How did the pandemic accelerate this trend? So this has been going on for, you say, 50, maybe 40 years, this trend of people not getting out and socializing as much. How did the pandemic accelerate this?
Derek Thompson: Well, the pandemic accelerated it because if you’re locked down, you certainly aren’t spending a lot of time with other people outside of your home. So clearly, we know that the pandemic increased time spent at home and decreased time spent with other people. But what’s interesting to me is what happens if you compare, say the years 2021, which is when people were coming out of lockdown. What if you compare 2021 and 2023?
Well, it turns out that alone time actually increased. So even in the post pandemic era, we were spending more time alone. And if you look at time spent at home, the work from home revolution is sort of its own secular thing. There’s some people being called back to the office. There’s some people still working at home. But the Princeton sociologist Patrick Sharkey, who looked at time spent at home, concluded that in 2022, the average American was spending about 99 minutes more every single day at home. And that wasn’t just about working from home. It was about eating more at home, praying more at home, entertaining more at home, socializing more at home. We really did become more of a phone bound and home bound nation, even around the acute crisis of the pandemic.
Brett McKay: Yeah, see, I think something that the pandemic did is, it kind of built an infrastructure. Like, the infrastructure is already there to do this stuff, but it kind of forced us to do it. We’re like, oh, this is actually an option. Instead of going to a restaurant, I can just do DoorDash. Instead of going to the movie theater, I can just stream a movie to my home. I mean, I’ve noticed that in my own life.
Derek Thompson: Well, yeah, and all that’s great. I want to be very clear. That stuff is awesome. Like, sometimes you’re just exhausted and you’re like, I could cook dinner or I could go out, but damn, I really just want to order a burrito to the house and watch whatever on Netflix, right? Like, catch up on Severance, watch White Lotus. Like, we’ve all been there. Okay? I am not trying to tell people in any way that these conveniences are somehow evil. I’m trying to get them to recognize the cost of progress, the cost of convenience.
I think with television or smartphones, we’re becoming more familiar with the fact that, yeah, television is incredibly entertaining. Smartphones are ludicrously entertaining. But maybe smartphones are causing a bit of anxiety. Maybe watching too much television means being a bit of a recluse and pulling yourself out of the physical world. And in fact, I’ll just pause here to say one of my favorite statistics from this piece is that, between the 1960s and 1990s, the average American added about 300 additional hours of leisure time per year. And you’d think, like, what would you do? What would you, listener of this podcast, do with an extra 300 hours of leisure time next year? Well, it turned out that people spent almost all that extra leisure time watching television.
So we really, really love watching television. That’s for sure. What I’m trying to get us to recognize is not television’s bad, smartphone’s bad. Ordering food to eat at home is bad. No, these are conveniences. But convenience can have a cost. And the cost of what I call the convenience curse is that leaning too much into these behaviors and devices and technologies often means pulling ourselves out of the physical world.
Brett McKay: Yeah. I think that what you just said about the increase of leisure time, I think a lot of people think, oh, if I had more time, I would hang out more, I would do creative hobbies, I’d become an artist, I’d write a novel. But it seems like what we typically do is we just plow whatever time opens up into the path of least resistance activities, which is mainly screens, which is interesting.
Derek Thompson: Yeah, screens are incredibly entertaining. I mean, they’re amazingly entertaining. And they’re also super easy. I mean, I don’t remember every single thing that you just listed, but you talked about hanging out with friends, becoming an artist, writing a novel. Writing a novel is freaking hard. Okay? Becoming an artist means sucking for a while before you become an artist, that you’re not embarrassed of being. Learning a new language. I’m thinking of things that people might say if you ask them, what would you do with 300 extra hours of leisure? I think most people might imagine that they would do hard things, but we’re exhausted and simple creatures to a certain extent, and we prefer many times to do easy things. And there’s practically nothing easier than folding yourself into a comfortable couch and turning on a streaming service. That’s very easy. And that’s why I think we’ve been essentially donating our time and our dopamine to screens rather than to physical world activities.
Brett McKay: Okay, so the television increased the amount of time we spent alone in the second half of the 20th century. The smartphones in the early part of the 21st century. You also talk about the role that cars played in this. What role has the car played in us not socializing as much?
Derek Thompson: The car’s another great example of a really wonderful technology that has costs. One cost, I guess you could say, is, pollution, unless you’re driving like a plug in electric. But one social cost of cars is that they allow us to be away from other people. The vast majority of time that an American spends in a car is not carpooling. It’s alone. The vast majority of time that Americans spend in cars is alone. Which means that, if Americans overall they are increasing their car use, they’re probably increasing their time spent alone as well. And what happened in the 1950s and 1960s is that we built these ribbons of asphalt leading from cities into suburbs, and people could buy bigger houses. That’s cool. But that also meant lots more time spent in the car. It meant longer commutes, and it meant houses that were a little bit further away from other people.
And so when you put all that together, I think you have the beginning of this revolution that Putnam was talking about, where this nation of clubs and associations and people coming together became a nation of not front porches, but backyards. People pulling back into their own spaces, their private spaces, and associating the American dream, associating a sense of wealth, of having made it, as maximizing control over private spaces. And I think that sort of kicks off this revolution that I’m talking about.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And it’s even, as you mentioned earlier, it’s influenced how our homes are designed today. And it’s created what you call this idea of a remote life where we’re trying to do everything in our home. Homes, if you’re out in the suburbs, some of these homes had those giant cinema rooms in the bonus room upstairs. A lot of homes these days have garage gyms so they don’t have to go… I have a garage gym. I haven’t been to a public gym in almost a decade. And even bedrooms are being designed like, how can we maximize people being by themselves? And what’s interesting, if you look in the 70s, in the 60s, 70s, like, homes were designed for socializing. I remember 70s, there’s that trend of conversation pits, that doesn’t happen anymore.
Derek Thompson: Yeah. Right. Sunken living rooms. That’s my wife’s favorite piece of home decor. Yeah. Whenever we’re on Zillow and she sees a sunken living room, her heart goes aflutter for sure. Everything you said is very true. And when it comes to architecture, two of the more interesting conversations that I had were with Clifton Harness, who’s the co-founder of TestFit, which is a company that makes software to design layouts for new housing developments. And he told me, the cardinal rule of contemporary apartment design is that every room has to be built to accommodate maximal screen time.
So whereas in previous conversations about how do we build a beautiful space, it was like, how do we let the light in? High ceilings. How do we make it a perfect space for light? And now the question is, how do we give the most comfort to the most people? And the answer is, make sure that there is an obvious space to put the flat screen television and a couch. And Bobby Fijan, who’s a real estate developer that I also spoke to, offered up an amazing quote. He said, “For the most part, apartments are built for Netflix and chill.”
This is something that architects and developers are thinking about. They have our preferences in mind. They wouldn’t be able to make money if they didn’t. They are designing not for our stated preference of, oh, if I had an extra 300 hours of leisure, I would learn a new language with 10 new friends, and we’d all become Picasso. No, you make money by watching what people do, by watching the revealed preference. And the revealed preference of Americans is we want to spend as much time at home as we can. And I would just say here, before passing back to you, is that like, when it comes to things like, home gyms, I work at home all the time. I work out at home all the time. I definitely don’t want to give people the impression that I’m trying to stigmatize a bit of solitude or stigmatize activities done at home. What I want to do is to show people the receipt of the choices that we’re making. You can make a series of totally understandable choices and then lift up and recognize that your socializing time is declining year after year after year. That is the awareness that I want us to have. It’s more about awareness than it is about stigmatizing.
Brett McKay: Okay, so the amount of time people are spending by themselves has been increasing. You’d think since alone time is increasing, loneliness has increased. Is that the case? Is there, as we often hear in the media, a loneliness crisis going on?
Derek Thompson: No, I don’t think there is. I think the loneliness crisis is overblown. And that might seem like a very confusing record scratch moment for people if they’re like this guy talking about the surge of aloneness, doesn’t think there’s a loneliness crisis. Well, here’s what the data shows. The data shows that for young people, loneliness is up a little bit. But for people overall, there’s really not a lot of evidence that loneliness is increasing. What we have instead is rising aloneness without rising loneliness.
Now, one interpretation of those two statistics is that there’s no problem. People are absolutely thrilled being alone. That’s why they’re not lonely. But turns out when you use the same American Time Use Survey to ask people if they’re happier around other people or alone, people tend to be much happier around other people. So here’s what I think is happening. I think that loneliness in small doses is actually good. I think that loneliness is a biological cue to tell us to get off the couch and get out into the real world and to see people and be around people and touch and high five and hug. I think that what’s happening instead is that people are spending an enormous amount of time on their phones and they’re dumping their dopamine onto their phones.
They’re scrolling on TikTok, they’re scrolling on X, they’re scrolling on Instagram. They’re basically getting all of this dopamine flushed into their brains looking at their phones. Also probably a bit of cortisol if you’re on X or if you’re just made anxious by whatever you’re seeing on Instagram or these other platforms. You’ve got all of this anxiety and all this dopamine that’s being flushed into our brains. And then we put our phone away and how do we feel at the end of this leisure time? We feel exhausted. We feel like we’re absolutely spent.
Ironically, this leisure time has made us feel less inclined to want to have the drive to go out and be around other people and even risk the hazard of, I’ll drive there, but there won’t be parking. I’ll get on the subway, but it’ll be delayed. So I think that people aren’t feeling the historical biological impulse to be around other people. And it’s registering in surveys as our not feeling as lonely as we should be. And that’s why aloneness keeps rising year after year after year. I think we are quietly making ourselves miserable because we’re not feeling the healthy pinch of loneliness.
Brett McKay: Okay, so let me just recap that. So you’re saying because we’re on our phones all the time, we’re kind of getting like this pseudo socializing going on in our phones. When we actually want to spend time in real life with people, we’re like, the signal’s not there. ‘Cause we’re like, well, I already got my fill. Like, I’ve already been around people.
Derek Thompson: I think it might be that for some people. I mean, there’s so many different people in the world, and so I can’t speak for all of them, but there’s two different things that could be happening here, and I want to make sure that I’m precise about distinguishing between them. So one thing that you’re describing is that lots of people think that time spent on the phone is a sort of substitute for time spent with people. I think that’s wrong for a variety of reasons. I think it’s much harder to build intimacy by catching up over text than spending time with someone over a table.
I also think that people have a much stronger relationship with other humans in a physical world presence than they do on their phones. So I think there’s a problem of replacing sociality, hanging out with people in the real world with para-sociality, which is spending our time with people on the Internet and imagining their inner weather and their inner lives. So I absolutely agree to a certain extent with the picture that you just painted that time spent on phone is a poor substitute for time spent with other people in the physical world.
But something else is happening that I think is biochemical. With dopamine cycles, there’s something called phasic dopamine, which is the dopamine hit. The amount of dopamine that we get when we experience something that elicits a bunch of dopamine. And there’s tonic dopamine, which is our underlying baseline levels of dopamine. And I think one thing that’s happening is that people are spending so much time on their phones that their phasic dopamine is going nuts, and it’s leaving them with lower levels of tonic dopamine, which means their baseline level of dopamine is depleted when they put down their phone. And that means when a friend reaches out to you at say, 7:00 PM on a Wednesday, when you’ve spent the last hour and a half just scrolling through TikTok, and that friend says, hey, do you want to hang out? You say, “I don’t know, man. I’m kind of beat. Work was really a lot. And also, I’m really stressed about whatever thing is happening in the world, and it’s just too much of a misadventure for me to get out of the house. I’m going to pass. I’m sorry, dude.” And we see this to a certain extent.
There’s a section of the article where I describe this TikTok trend that my wife introduced me to where you have young people who are socializing less than any young generation that we have on record celebrating when their friends cancel plans. It’s called cancellation among some folks. That makes no sense if you think about young people being lonely. It does make sense if you consider my biochemical explanation that young people are spending so much time with their phones that when a friend cancels plans, they’re happy because they’re dopaminergically exhausted by their phone experience. So I think by summary, two things are happening. Not only are our phones a poor substitute for real socialization, but also our phones are absorbing the dopamine that we should be giving to the friends in our life.
Brett McKay: Okay, so we’re spending more time alone, but we’re not necessarily lonely because of it. And that’s because while loneliness usually manifests as a signal that drives us to be be with other people, we’re not feeling that drive anymore because we’ve donated the thing that gives that drive, our dopamine, to our devices. And you point out in the article that even though studies show that alone time increases unhappiness in the long term, you say this in the article. Nonetheless, many people keep choosing to spend free time alone in their home, away from other people. Perhaps one might think they’re making the right choice. After all, they must know themselves best. But a consistent finding of modern psychology is that people often don’t know what they want or what will make them happy.
Derek Thompson: Yeah, there’s an idea. The Harvard psychologist, Dan Gilbert, I believe, called it miswanting. And it’s this idea that people aren’t very good at understanding what they’ll want. And in a way, it’s a bit of an extension of the principle that predictions are hard, especially about the future, right? Predictions are hard, especially about the future, especially about us. It’s hard to predict exactly what’s going to make us happy. So sometimes you buy a piece of furniture that you’re obsessed with or a coat that you’re obsessed with, and three months later, you never really think about it. It doesn’t really offer any additional unit of happiness to any particular day. This happens all the time. It’s what Gilbert calls miswanting.
Well, I think people might miswant aloneness as well. I think they might miswant introversion. And how would you prove this? Well, there’s a University of Chicago psychologist named Nick Epley who did a really interesting study where he asked commuter train passengers to make a prediction. How would they feel if asked to spend that train ride in Chicago talking to a stranger versus being alone? And the vast majority of participants predicted that the quiet solitude would make for a much better commute than being forced to talk to a stranger. But then Epley’s team creates this experiment and he has some people keep to themselves and other people are instructed to talk to a stranger. And those people are told the longer conversation, the better. And then afterward, you have both groups fill out a questionnaire. How do you feel in this moment? Not a prediction of the future. How do you feel right now?
And despite this broad assumption that the best commute is the most silent commute, it was the people instructed, randomly instructed, to talk to strangers who reported feeling significantly more positive than those who kept themselves. So this is a really, really fascinating and possibly fundamental paradox at the core of human life. As Epley told me, we are social animals. We are made better by being social. But we are afraid of sociality in various ways. We’re afraid of not being light, we’re afraid of boredom. We’re afraid of the awkwardness of an initial conversation with someone who we don’t know well or maybe the initial awkwardness of conversation with someone we used to know well or even do know well. There’s all sorts of social anxieties that can accrete around the social animal. But fundamentally, it does seem like in a variety of research settings, if you force most people to be social, even those that consider themselves introverts, they will tell you immediately after the experience that they’re happier than the people who were not forced to be social. So, yes, to your point, I do think that we misunderstand something very core to human nature.
Brett McKay: I liken to making the analogy of like, social life to physical fitness. Like, you cannot exercise and not eat well, and on a day to day basis, you’ll feel okay, you’ll feel fine. But then eventually you reach a point where you realize, oh man, I’m overweight, I’m really out of shape, my cholesterol’s high, I’ve just got really poor health. And it’s the same thing with socializing. If you’re not socializing very much, I mean, you feel okay on a day to day basis, but then you realize, oh, man, something’s wrong. Something’s wrong here. Like, not only have your actual social skills atrophied or you get rusty in how you interact with people, but you feel like something is wrong internally.
Derek Thompson: Yeah, I mean, I would love to hang out in this metaphor here, this equation of physical fitness and social fitness because I think it’s a really fruitful connection. How is social fitness similar to physical fitness? Well, at the highest level, modern life isn’t built for it. So why do we exercise? Why do you have a gym in your garage? Well, the answer is that you’re not a hunter gatherer. You’re not getting your exercise from the essentials of life. From day to day living. You probably spend a lot of time sitting. Maybe you’re sitting right now. You probably spend a lot of time just not walking that much by being in your house. And so we had to, in the modern world, invent this bizarre thing called a gym where we go and work out, which is not something our ancestors did. They lived. They didn’t lift weights just to get ripped.
There’s a way in which modern life has made it harder to be physically fit unless you make physical fitness a priority. And in the same way, I think modern life has made social fitness more difficult unless you make it a priority. It’s all too easy to just work from home in certain jobs, work from home, order into home, cook for yourself at home, entertain yourself at home, watch the infinitude of stuff that’s on Amazon Prime and Netflix and Max, watch a bunch of stuff on TikTok on your phone, infinitely divert yourself without ever leaving the four corners of your house. It’s very, very easy. And it’s especially easy right now, looking out in North Carolina. It’s been snowing for the last 24 hours. I don’t want to go out. So this is easy. But I would love to think about ways that we can equate physical fitness and social fitness, the same way that we purposely divert from our lives to go to the gym and work out. How can we purposely divert from the convenience curse to be more socially fit as well?
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for your word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. You also talk about the idea of introversion. I think because we live in a very therapeutic culture, we like to psychoanalyze ourselves. And people are like, well, I’m an introvert, and so I don’t need to socialize as much ’cause that doesn’t give me any energy. It drains me. Is that the case. Can introverts get away without socializing as much?
Derek Thompson: I think introversion probably exists. I definitely don’t think it exists in a binary. This is not like males and females. This is like a normal Gaussian distribution. This is like height. There’s the vast majority of people who call themselves introverts are like sort of kind of introverts. If you really put truth serum into them, then they would be introverts in some circumstances and not introverts in others. They might feel a little bit shy at a party where they didn’t know anybody, but if you put them in front of their best friends, they would open wide up.
And I would add, according to Nick Epley, the University of Chicago psychologist, if you nudged them just a bit to be more social at a party, what you would have is someone who has a slightly better experience than the wallflower who just sits in the corner of the party and looks at their phone. Yeah, that’s the evidence. I’m sure some people are listening, thinking, you know what? I hate parties. When I go or when my friends make me go, when my wife makes me go, I’m fine standing in the corner and just reading Espn.
I don’t know your life, right? Maybe that works out for you. But it does seem like for many people, introversion is a bit of a delusion. Yes. It can be nice to recharge. Yes. Of course, a bit of solitude can be a blessing, but people tend to be made happier in other people.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I think people typically… I’ve done this too. They use introversion as an excuse to not socialize. It’s like, well, that’s just my personality. It’s like, well, actually, if you did it, you’d feel good. You’d actually enjoy it.
Derek Thompson: Yeah. My colleague Olga Kazan has a great book out called ‘Me, But Better,’ which is about the science of personality and personality change and the TL;DR, I read it. It’s wonderful, is that personality change is not only possible, it’s kind of easy if you commit yourself to it. Personalities are a little bit fixed by genetics and environment, but not that much. People can absolutely change their personalities. And people’s personalities change all the time in different circumstances. Someone listening might know a friend who was really closed off and shy in high school and then just found their community in college and suddenly became like a totally more confident person. Or maybe they knew some nerd in college who went off and made a bunch of money in their 20s and 30s and now are very different in many ways, personality change happens all the time. And a part of it is the recognition that our personalities, I think, are much more elastic than we think.
And sometimes, to your point, we define ourselves in very narrow boxes in order to justify our behavior. If we don’t want to hang out with people, oh, I’m an introvert. That’s concrete unchanging behavior. If we’re a little bit mean to someone, oh, I’m just a little bit neurotic. That’s just who I am, right? If we’re too much of a hard ass, oh, you know, I’m just a conscientious person. I can’t help it. Nope, you probably can help it. Personality is incredibly, incredibly liquid. And it does seem like if people use that liquid nature of their personality to become a little bit more social, overall, it makes them happier.
Brett McKay: Okay, so in the book, you talk about how men are spending more alone time than women. And you talk about this trend in which young men on the Internet are becoming secular monks. What’s a secular monk? What’s going on here?
Derek Thompson: So, yeah, secular monk is not my term. It’s a term that I love from Andrew Taggart, who wrote an essay in the religious journal First Things in 2020. And he was describing this group of men who he said seemed to be foregoing marriage and fatherhood with gusto rather than focus their 30s and 40s on getting married and having kids. They were committed to their bodies and their bank accounts and their meditation practice and their cold plunge. And he called them secular monks because he said it’s interesting that they are, on the one hand, really committed to this idea of like, monitored self control. They want to master like the monkey within. Master the demon within. And at the same time, they aren’t particularly religious. What they believe in isn’t God, but cold plunges or intermittent fasting or meditation boot camps.
And what I thought was interesting about it is, again, not that I think cold plunges are bad or meditation’s bad, but rather that taken to an extreme, you can see how this kind of behavior is very lonesome. And when I read the essay, I really felt this shock of recognition because in the previous months, I’d been thinking a lot about this sort of TikTok Instagram trend that I’d seen where it was basically like men showing off the perfect morning routine. And these videos were always of a piece. It was always like a good looking guy wakes up alone with his eye mask and in a beautifully lit room. And he journals and he cold plunges and maybe he saunas and he meditates and he works out and all these things happen. He eats something ludicrously healthy, farmed from some algae farm in Nepal or whatever, and all these things happen alone. We see him wake up and meditate and journal all alone. There’s no people in these dioramas of a life perfectly lived.
And I just thought that was really interesting because if you look at the data, the group with the largest increases in alone time are young men and particular young men without a college education. And I was just very interested in the possibility that we were building a vision of masculinity that was a bit like caveman masculinity. It was a set of behaviors that an individual could do alone in a cave in Siberia. You can wake up, you can meditate, you can journal, you can work out, you can do push ups, you can do incline, you can do all of that alone in a cave in Siberia. But you can’t be a friend and you can’t be a dad, you can’t be a son, you can’t be a mentor or a mentee. All of these relational aspects of masculinity are wiped away in the caveman masculinity depicted in these videos.
And I’ve done a bunch of episodes for my podcast, Plain English, about how I think the ultimate expression of 21st masculinity needs to be a more relational masculinity. It’s not about being strong for yourself. It’s about being strong for other people. And, yeah, that can mean, bench pressing your body weight times 2.5, but ultimately, the expression of masculinity should be for other people, because life is about other people. I mean, like, I don’t think that we want to represent the ultimate expression of happiness and strength in the 2020s as being a ripped person who journals perfectly, masters the interior weather of their psychology and basically doesn’t use it to help anyone other than himself. That seems like a really impoverished version of masculinity.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I mean, I think if you go back into history, even like a couple hundred years ago, that was the ideal of masculinity. Like, to be a man was like to be useful to your family, to your wider community. It’s about giving back, giving more than you take. But, yeah, something about our culture, the hyper individualized culture, we’ve gotten away from that. And I’ve seen those videos you mentioned. They give off very Patrick Bateman vibes whenever I watch them. I’m like, this is weird. And I think it’s interesting. What’s ironic about this whole, like, you know, some of these guys call themselves secular monks or they’re going into monk mode. Is that monks, they do have… There’s solitude plays. I’m talking about real monks. Solitude is a spiritual practice, but most monks live in communities because they’re looking for that friction and accountability that other people can provide to help them live a disciplined and holy life. So, yeah, if you really want to go into monk mode, you need to be with a bunch of other guys or people who are helping you. You need to be in a community if you want to be a real monk.
Derek Thompson: Yeah, totally.
Brett McKay: And then you also talk about how, even with these men are spending time alone with self improvement, there still is a lot of depression, anxiety, despair. And something you talk about is men, I think all people need this, but I think men, in particular, young men, they want to feel needed. They want to feel like a group needs them. And because they’re spending so much time alone and not within a group or community, they’re not getting that.
Derek Thompson: Yeah, I think neededness is incredibly important. And this is what Richard Reeves, who’s the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, told me. He says this is what men need. They want to feel essential to their families, to their community, to their office, to their work. He said… The quote that I loved in the piece is, “I think at some level, we all need to feel like we’re a jigsaw piece that’s going to fit into a jigsaw somewhere.” And it can come from… This neededness can come from all kinds of directions, friends, children, partners, colleagues, religious congregations. But it is, again, about moving away from this sort of caveman sense of what a man is for and toward a more relational sense of how can I use the strength that I’m building to help other people?
Brett McKay: Continuing on young men. For every secular monk out there using his alone time to work on his body and productivity, there are many more guys out there using their free time alone to engage in sedentary leisure. What is sedentary leisure?
Derek Thompson: Yeah. So the sociologist, Liana Sayer, who is at the University of Maryland, shared analysis with me about how leisure time in the 21st century has changed for men and women. And the most important, most interesting thing is that she divides leisure between engaged, which is stuff like socializing or going to a concert or playing a sport, and sedentary leisure. And sedentary just means like sitting down, watching TV, playing video games. And the largest increase, the largest increase, the most dramatic thing she found is that single men without kids who have the most leisure time are overwhelmingly likely to spend their leisure time by themselves in solo, sedentary leisure. So playing video games, watching TV, looking at your phone.
And again, that’s just kind of sad. I mean, I just think that I don’t know these guys, so I don’t want to be this writer who hops on the horn and just tells people how to live their lives. I don’t know them. I don’t know what makes them tick. But it really does seem, from the best evidence that we have, like a life spent alone is a bit of a life wasted. We really are made into happier, more meaningful people through relationships with others. And if young guys without kids are going to spend most of their time watching TV alone, that really does seem like a wasted decade.
Brett McKay: Yeah, and I imagine there’s consequences of that. Psychosocial, physical consequences. If you’re sitting around doing nothing, playing video games, you’re going to have health consequences, obviously, psychology. You’re probably going to be depressed. And yeah, I mean, all the things we talk about, deaths of despair, drug abuse, et cetera.
Derek Thompson: Right. All of that serious stuff. And this is serious, but it’s also a little bit… Has a little bit levity to it. You’re also not going to get laid if you spend all of your time at home playing video games and watching TV. You do, in fact, have to go out into the physical world to meet other people at some point. And I’m very interested, separate from this article, in the decline of coupling that we’re seeing throughout the world. It’s not just that teens have fewer friends or that teens, as you said at the top of the show, have reduced their face to face socializing with friends by 50%. People in their 20s are dating less. People in their 30s are getting married less. And then people in their 40s, consequently, are having fewer kids. Something really big is happening here in terms of the pulling away of people. Not just the pulling away of sexes, but the pulling away of people. And I do wonder, to your point, whether the behavior of today’s young men who are maxing out on solo sedentary time is going to create all sorts of problems for these guys in their 30s and 40s.
Brett McKay: And it could. It’ll probably have consequences on a society level eventually.
Derek Thompson: Yeah, yeah, right. I agree. I think it could. I mean, I don’t… I can’t say exactly what those consequences will be. But we talked briefly about the political consequences here, and it does seem like from research by Michael Bang Petersen, who’s a Danish political scientist, people who spend more time alone and who have more social isolation are more likely to look to politics as a place of entertainment. And he calls these voters need for chaos voters, because what they want most from politics, isn’t any particular outcome for any particular group. What they want is the feeling of chaotic entertainment. So that’s just one flavor, I think, of how we could absolutely see some of the changes happening today have real repercussions in the future.
Brett McKay: You say that while some of our social ties are getting weaker, some are getting stronger. Which bonds are getting stronger and which ones are getting weaker?
Derek Thompson: Yeah, so this is probably the part of the essay that was quoted most often back to me. Marc Dunkelman, who is a researcher at Brown University, has a great book that just came out called Why Nothing Works. I talked to him a couple months ago, and he said, the irony here is that the Internet has actually made some of our relationships much stronger. I am texting… This is Marc talking. I’m texting my wife all day long. When my daughter buys butterfingers, I know the moment she’s bought that butterfingers from CVS because of the credit card data that I have on my phone.
So in many ways, our most intimate relationships are tighter than they used to be. And then you think of that as the inner ring of socializing, and there’s an outer ring of socializing that’s sort of like the tribe, not the family, but the tribe, the people in the world who share your affinities and interests. So maybe if you have a favorite sports team in basketball or football, it’s everyone in the country who’s a fan of that team. And you’re probably following people across the country, maybe even across the world, who are fans of that particular team, certainly if you’re a fan of English Premier League.
So that’s sort of the outer ring of tribe. There’s a middle ring, though, of village. It’s not the people related to or are best friends, and it’s not the people we just find online and form groups with. It’s the people who live around us. It’s the village, it’s our neighbors. It’s the people we know when we walk around the street. And it’s there that our relationships have really atrophied. We really know our neighbors worse than we used to. And one good question is like, okay, who cares? What if you just have friends who aren’t your neighbors? Totally fair question. I would say that if the inner circle of family teaches us love and the outer circle of tribe teaches us loyalty, the middle ring of village teaches us tolerance. It is naturally tolerating to be around people you’re not related to who you disagree with a little bit because you’re not already best friends. And I think that we are losing touch with that village layer, and I think it is showing up in a variety of ways in our politics and in sort of the social fabric.
Brett McKay: Yeah, we had Marc Dunkelman on the podcast a long time. It was like nine years ago is episode 176. So, yeah, he wrote that book the Vanishing Neighbor.
Derek Thompson: That’s right.
Brett McKay: Where he introduces those three rings. And ever since I read that book, I think about that all the time, that sort of concept about the three rings. And I think he’s right. Like, that middle ring of village has gotten weaker, and you see it in just declines in people participating in PTA, volunteering for organizations. And even when you do get in those sorts of things, people don’t know how to interact. Like, they just yell at each other because, like you said, they haven’t practiced the virtue of tolerance. And you can see this play out, like on Nextdoor, the app. Have you used Nextdoor before?
Derek Thompson: I have, and I stopped very quickly because I realized what a cesspool it was.
Brett McKay: Well, yeah, I think it’s a perfect example of how we no longer have the skills to handle how to live in a village. So if you have a problem. Used to be if it was like 1985 and you had a problem with your neighbor, say your neighbor was blowing leaves into your yard. Well, you’d have to go over to your neighbor and calmly say, I understand you’re trying to clean your yard out, but can you not blow in my yard? People don’t do that anymore. What they do now is they’ll just post it up on next door and just put the person on blast. Like, look at this idiot. He’s just so inconsiderate. And then people are chiming in. Yeah, what a dummy. And the middle ring is gone.
Derek Thompson: I have a question about Nextdoor. The people who are commenting, what a dummy. Are they all direct neighbors or are they in some like… Like, where are they?
Brett McKay: It’s like in your sort of an area. So when you sign up for Nextdoor, you can sign up to only get updates within a certain Geographic radius. So like maybe the neighborhoods around you.
Derek Thompson: I see.
Brett McKay: And so, yeah, it becomes very polarized. Some people will just be like, yeah, the guy blowing leaves is dumb. You’re like, oh, you’re a dumb. You shouldn’t care. And it’s just like, oh my gosh.
Derek Thompson: And what’s interesting about that is you’re taking like the village, you’re turning it into the tribe. You’re essentially taking the relations that would theoretically be neighborly, but you’re turning them into a social network which creates in groups and out groups, which is not what you want in any pleasant neighborhood. Yeah. It’s been a while since I did a full ethnography of Nextdoor, but sounds no good.
Brett McKay: It is no good at all. I get on there every now and then when I have to sell something. I’ll get on there and then I’ll just kind of check in what’s going on. Like, oh, no, I don’t want to go to that feed anymore. So, yeah, the middle ring, the skills of socializing of dealing with people we’re not really close with, don’t have a lot in common with. Those are atrophying. And there’s some consequences that you’re just… Neighborhood life isn’t as pleasant, isn’t as productive. It has consequences for civic life in your town, your city, and also you can even say our national level with our politics. What can be done as individuals to restore a richer social life? Because it seems like we have all these external factors that are kind of nudging us towards spending more time alone. So what can we do to restore a richer social life in our lives?
Derek Thompson: Yeah, fortunately, this is easy. You know, you don’t need any medical invention to spend time with other people. You don’t need any kind of invention at all. You just need to choose. You need to make different choices. You choose to spend the next 15 minutes not looking at your phone, but texting a friend to meet up. And then you choose to spend the next 15 minutes not looking at your phone, but texting another friend to meet up. And then you spend the next 15 minutes not looking at your phone, but rather thinking about how can I create a new habit in my life that puts me around other people rather than puts me on my couch at 7:30 PM. Every single night.
It’s really easy on the one hand, unfortunately, it’s not so easily done because a lot of these issues are collective action problems, and I totally recognize that. So if you’re a couple and you want to have dinner parties with your couple friends. Well, it’s much easier to do that if there’s already a habit of dinner parties. If there’s not a habit of dinner parties, then you’re going to have a harder time getting people to come over. You’re going to feel a little bit more embarrassed about making the ask and maybe being turned down because people aren’t in the habit of going over to each other’s houses on Thursday nights or Friday nights.
And I get that it’s a collective action problem, but I also think that it’s important to give people this sense of agency. Like the topics that I’m writing about here are huge. We’re talking about national politics and things that exist. The level of nationwide and planet wide technologies. The automobile and the television set and the smartphone. These are big, big things. And it’s ridiculous to ask people to be absolutely Amish and just reject all technology. But the truth is the Amish have a very interesting way of thinking about technology that I learned when I was reporting for this piece. They don’t just reject all technology that’s modern. They reject technology that isn’t in keeping with their values. So they look at a technology and then evaluate it and then choose to accept or reject it, depending on whether their virtues are amplified by the use of that technology. And that’s very interesting. I think that the Amish probably go way too far.
I’m not interested in becoming Amish anytime in the near future. But it is very interesting to think about a sort of a mystic approach to one’s own life. Which is to say, what if rather than embrace every technology that made our life a little more convenient, we instead were really explicit about the values that we had. Maybe even we wrote them down and said, the most important things in my life are my family, my child, spending time with friends, work that’s meaningful to me, a fitness routine that keeps me healthy as long as possible. What if you wrote down your values and then only embraced the technology that furthered those values rather than took away from them? That might be a way for people who are not Amish to inject their lives with just enough Amishness that they reorient their living around a set of values rather than a set of dopamine giving devices?
Brett McKay: I love that idea that you can change the social texture of your life in just 15 minute blocks. So instead of using 15 minutes to just to surf Instagram mindlessly, use that 15 minutes to connect with a friend or make plans to get together. And I really like the idea of just being intentional and going back to that, the fitness analogy. We need to get out of this habit of thinking that I’m only going to hang out or socialize when I feel like it before you socialize?
Derek Thompson: Absolutely. Yeah, we’ve all been there.
Brett McKay: Yeah, yeah. Just make it like working out. It’s like, well, it’s 6 o’clock. I don’t feel like working out, but this is my workout time, so I’m gonna go work out anyway. And it’s the same thing with socializing. It’s like, well, there’s a party tonight. I don’t feel like going out tonight, but my social muscles need exercising, so I’m gonna go anyway.
Derek Thompson: This is why I love this analogy of physical fitness to social fitness. Because what you said, I think is really slyly subversive. Like, it’s common among people who work out to say, you need to commit to the habit because there’s going to be days you don’t want to do it and you should do it anyway. So this sense that essentially working out is a little bit like a vegetable, you should eat it even when you don’t want to. I don’t think we think of socializing like a vegetable. I think we think of socializing like a fruit. Something that tastes delicious. And if you don’t want to have a blueberry that day, no one cares. No one’s going to scream at you for not having a strawberry on a Wednesday. But what if we thought of socializing as more like a vegetable, more like something that was good for us, more like something we should commit to even when we didn’t feel like it. I think it’s a very clever way of subtly recasting this activity that we think of as being sort of frivolous and extraneous, as being actually fundamentally core to a healthy life well lived.
Brett McKay: So we talked about some individual things we can do. You mentioned that this is also a collective action problem. Are there any communal rituals or maybe some new things, some things we can implement into our culture to help this along? Have you seen anything in your research where there are groups, communities, towns who are cultivating more in person socializing?
Derek Thompson: Yeah, there’s definitely new trends that I’m following. You know, independent bookstores are booming. I think they’ve had more than 50% growth since 2009. And a lot of them are basically like miniature theaters. They’ve got author talks every night. And so that’s sort of a new ritual that’s starting. Here where I live near Chapel Hill, North Carolina, there’s a ton of board game cafes. And I know that board game cafes are sort of flowering across the country. And this is sort of an interesting inversion of the typical trend of American entertainment.
Typically, it’s like movie theaters where you used to have to drive to the movie theater, and now you can just stay home and do the activity. With board games, they’re invented to stay at home and do the activity. But these new board game cafes mean you actually drive to a third place in order to play board games to other people. I think that’s really interesting, and it gets people out of their house and around other people. But I’m most interested in really, really humble rituals. I’m interested in rituals that are essentially the equivalent of Friday night Sabbath, where in the Jewish tradition, you say a prayer, you break the bread, you pour some wine, you have a meal.
And that sounds just about fantastic to me. And I hope that it’d be, I think, really lovely to have a renaissance in dinner parties. This is a trend that we actually have data on it. The number of dinner parties in America or at least the number of dinner parties people say they go to, has been collapsing, not just for the last 20 years, but really for the last 60 years. I mean, the cocktail party is practically extinct compared to where it was the 1950s, 1960s. I think it’d be absolutely beautiful to bring that stuff back. And that’s simple. You don’t need another building. You don’t need any other infrastructure. All you need is an email and a person willing to send it.
Brett McKay: Well, Derek, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about you and your work?
Derek Thompson: Well, there’s three places they can find me. I’m a staff writer for The Atlantic. I host a podcast, Plain English with Derek Thompson, with the Ringer Podcast Network. And March 18th, I have a book coming out called ‘Abundance,’ co-written with Ezra Klein, about the future of American progress. And if you like some of what you heard today, I think you’d love the book.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Derek Thompson, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Derek Thompson: Thank you.
Brett McKay: My guest today is Derek Thompson. He recently wrote a piece for The Atlantic called the Anti-Social Century. You can find that at The Atlantic. Check out our shownotes at aom.is/alone where you find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify, it helps a lot, and if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it? As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.
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