After reading a Washington Post article about American loneliness two weeks ago, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
The tl:dr is that Americans spend more alone time than ever.
This article contains some shocking statistics:
The decline is similar when “friends” are expanded to include co-workers and clients. In 2010, the average American spent 15 hour per week with friends. This number dropped to 12 hours in 2019, and 10 hours in 2021.
In general, Americans do not share their lost time with their partners, children or spouses. They chose to be alone.
This trend is not driven by a single group. The decline in time spent with other people was proportionally the same for men and women, Whites and nonwhites, wealthy and poor, rural and urban, married and single, parents and not-parents. Both remote and in person workers show the same pattern.
In 2021, the average American teenager spent approximately 11 fewer hours with friends each week than they did in 2010-2013 (a 64 percent decline) and 12 additional hours alone (a 48 percent increase). In 2021, the average American teenager will spend approximately 11 hours less with friends per week than they did in 2010-2013 (a 64 percent decrease) and 12 hours more alone (a 48 percentage increase) compared to 2010.
The new habits of Americans are and strikingly different from those in the past. A decade ago, Americans spent about the same time with their friends as they did during the 1960s and 1970s. We have begun to lose our connection to one another.
Bryce Ward of the Washington Post
You may think, “Of Course we spend more alone time.” Since the past two years, we’ve been experiencing a pandemic. This is not just a pandemic. This trend began in 2013.
Ward pointed out that those hours lost are not being redistributed in order to spend more time with . There is a net decrease in the amount of time we spend with humans, regardless of our relationship type.
Where is the time going?
The culprit is likely to be social media. Although time spent in person with others , has decreased since 2012; daily time spent using social media has increased nearly an hour per day over the past decade.
This is not a surprising revelation. What’s your go-to, default activity when you are bored? You probably keep refreshing TikTok or Instagram. You may scroll through Twitter ( , my personal vice ) for an hour. You might go down Reddit rabbit-holes.
Our time is up.
In the first episode of the second series of popular dystopic Netflix show Black Mirror our protagonist Martha is devastated by the death of Ash. Martha’s best friend Sarah offers a solution at his funeral. The service can be used to create a virtual Ash from Ash’s social media profiles, audio and video recordings. Martha, initially sceptical, agrees when she discovers that she’s pregnant.
Martha becomes more comfortable with the chatbot of her late husband over phone and text conversations. She decides to try out a new experimental stage in the service: an android programmed so that it looks and acts like Ash.
She quickly becomes disappointed when she realizes her doppelganger is not at all. It’s missing all the quirks and mannerisms that made Ash, Ash.
It seems morbid to bring back digital versions of the dead. Dystopic. Absurd, even. Social media allows us to embrace digital versions of ourselves every day.
As a Twitter addict, I’ve made a lot Twitter friends. People with whom I’ve exchanged tweets and DMs. We may have worked together on projects, or participated in Zoom calls. But we do not really understand each other. We only know each other’s Twitter versions.
The version of us that we present online is not the “real” one. It’s refined, premeditated. It’s impossible to know someone by their online persona. A fan cannot love a celebrity they haven’t met. You can only understandthe concept of someone. These online relationships have limits; they need to break out of the confinement of our phones screens to grow.
It has been amazing to move to New York because I was able to make some of my Twitter friends into real life friendships.
Liam Killingstad was in the same Twitter Spaces conversation as I was 6 month ago. We liked each other’s posts. In June, we had a Zoom call to exchange niceties (= take turns making fun at cringe people that you see on Twitter). But our relationship didn’t develop into friendship until August when he sent me a text offering to come by and help me with my move. Since then, in NYC we’ve been boys to the hilt.
Nathan Baugh and myself also connected via Twitter, but we didn’t come up with the idea to work together on an online class until we had coffee in Madrid at the end of last summer.
Nick Maggiulli, a well-established finance writer, was the first to show interest in my writing. But our relationship was hardly more than two bloggers who respected one another’s work until we went out for drinks in January.
Morgan Housel was my benchmark of success for many years in finance writing, but I didn’t realize how genuine he is until we met.
There are many more examples, but just like the Black Mirrorepisode with the android, we have limits on the kind of relationships that can be developed through only online channels. It is impossible to *know* someone unless you actually meet them and look them straight in the eye.
Don’t believe that romantic relationships are exempt from this perversion of technology. If you see someone you like while out with your friends, at a party or in a cafe, or even walking through a park, you should talk to them.
You have to be vulnerable in order to connect with them. To establish a connection, you have to be willing to take a risk, such as the possibility of being rejected.
You have to have a conversation with the person you are talking to. You have to introduce yourself, and ask them about their life. You must show genuine interest in their words and be open about your own life.
If you want to make this chance meeting into something more than just a coincidence, then you need to ask her out.
Dating apps on the other have reduced real, breathing people with dreams, goals and aspirations to binary decisions made based on six curated images and three prompts that state profound opinions, such as, “This year, I want to travel.” “
Dopamine, a cheap dating app, has replaced serendipitous meetings.
No, the digitalization of our relationships is not safe either. You can text, facetime, call or direct message your friends. Face to face communication unlocks a layer of intimacy.
Text messages, DMs and phone calls cannot exchange high-fives or kisses. These messages don’t allow for those three-drink conversations that are filled with banter and laughter.
Facetimes, phone calls and other communication tools are good for planning the future and reminiscing about the past. But you can’t live in the moment with the fluorescent light of your screen. Five-bar 5G connections don’t create any new memories. They simply recite old ones.
The pornography in social media is human interaction. It’s a cheap alternative to an authentic experience, and it gives you just enough Dopamine so you keep coming back. It works because it feels real. When you look at your friends’ photos and send back-and-forth texts with your family it feels as if you are socializing.
We can’t get enough of it. It’s just so convenient to be able to interact with the world while sitting on your couch. Day by day, we are replacing our face-to-face interaction with the supercomputers that we carry in our pockets.
As Sarah discovered with Ash’s copy, relationships built through digital channels might sound and feel authentic, but they lack that “something” that makes them real.
We are now more isolated than ever, despite the fact that our connectivity is increasing.
My suggestion is to stop using social media as a substitute for real life and instead use it to enhance real life. You might think the metaverse is cool, but you’ll actually have more fun kicking it up with real friends.
