[HN Gopher] The death of partying in the USA
___________________________________________________________________
The death of partying in the USA
Author : tysone
Score : 308 points
Date : 2025-07-09 20:43 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.derekthompson.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.derekthompson.org)
| eplatzek wrote:
| With COVID partying meant that someone could kill you with an
| illness. That's a pretty hard lesson to unlearn. They carries a
| lot of momentum.
|
| Like with World Wars there's been a generational impact that
| changed how people relate to one another. The tribal momentum, of
| one monkey teaching the next, gets lost.
| xeromal wrote:
| I'm sure COVID had something to do with it but I think partying
| is another casualty of social media.
|
| Similar to discord for gaming, talking to your random peers has
| completely fell off
| openbankerX wrote:
| prices too, partying is expensive and should be the first
| line item cut in hard times.
| parpfish wrote:
| Partying in the article also includes "dropping by a
| friends house", which is cheap/free
| carl_dr wrote:
| Except the graph shows this was happening way before COVID. The
| internet and how that has changed how people relate is much
| more likely the reason.
| api wrote:
| One of the first things I did with the net was to connect
| with people to go out and party with. Amazing how that
| morphed into zombie doom scrolling, something I would never
| have predicted.
| luckydata wrote:
| in my opinion the largest effect is how we build cities.
| Having to drive everywhere and the separation between
| commercial, residential and industrial areas of american
| cities is very clearly a driver of this isolation.
| esseph wrote:
| Maybe.
|
| But everybody hates everyone else online.
| api wrote:
| Hate, fear, and other very basic brain stem emotional
| responses maximize engagement.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| >With COVID partying meant that someone could kill you with an
| illness.
|
| Given the mortality rate for people typically in the partying
| age group (and especially those under 30), you were more likely
| to die in a traffic accident on your way to or back from the
| party, or from alcohol poisoning, than from a case of COVID
| acquired there. Let's not exaggerate.
|
| From the NIH: The median IFR for COVID based on age groups:
| 0.0003% at 0-19 years, 0.002% at 20-29 years, 0.011% at 30-39
| years.
|
| The 1918 Flu it was certainly not.
| sltkr wrote:
| To be pedantic, it's still possible for people to modify
| their behavior based on mistaken beliefs (in this case, that
| COVID is really dangerous, when it isn't for healthy young
| people). Though I don't think this explains the actual trend
| in this case.
| watwut wrote:
| Healthy young people still do not want to spread it to
| grandma or whoever. That is something frequent forgotten by
| these arguments - not everyone is sociopath and young
| people sometimes think about other people.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Some people didn't want to get it even if they were
| guaranteed to survive, because they could pass it to others
| who were more vulnerable to it.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| This yes and a fair worry for many who lived with older
| parents, grandparents etc, but the original comment
| mentioned an illness killing "you" assuming the partygoer,
| who, given the context of the article, is probably going to
| be a lot younger than anything close to elderly (though
| elderly people should party too. Socializing should never
| be under-estimated for helping vitality)
| triceratops wrote:
| Dying isn't the only risk from catchig Covid.
| VLM wrote:
| Its the wrong statistical analysis of the situation. The
| death rate does not even remotely depend on infection source
| IIRC. Last stat I saw (from some years ago) was in excess of
| 96.7% of the population had blood antibodies for covid. You
| are going to catch covid, your only decision is when and what
| you can do WRT personal health to lower the risk (aside from
| "do not be old" there's "do not be fat" "do not be out of
| shape WRT cardio" etc) If your local hospital is swamped with
| cases it would be irresponsible to throw a rager and infect
| 100 people, at that moment. If your local hospital is empty
| and all the nurses are doing at work is posting tiktok dances
| for karma upvotes, and the odds of catching it eventually are
| 97%, you may as well have a good time; if you're going to get
| just as sick regardless if you have fun getting there or not.
| Almost all of the "lockdown time" was the latter not the
| former and only something approaching a civil rebellion ended
| the latter era. If it were not for that we would still be
| locked down today in 2025. The situation is not at all even
| remotely like smoking where not smoking means you're probably
| not going to get lung cancer. You are getting covid, and you
| have minimal but not zero control over when, if now is not a
| bad time, don't worry, if now is a bad time, out of an
| abundance of caution you might want to slow (not eliminate)
| the spread. You're getting it eventually, you can either be
| brave and happy and social on the way... or the opposite. A
| lot of people chose the latter.
| patrickthebold wrote:
| Reminds me of the Jonathan Richman classic:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6Pg9IGgQpY
| lr4444lr wrote:
| The parental part bears special mention.
|
| My spouse and I find that we are overwhelmingly the ones calling
| to organize playdates rather than vice versa. I'd like to think
| it's not that my kids are poorly socialized or misbehave -
| they've always received glowing reports at school. I give my kids
| business cards with my phone number to pass out to their friends
| to give to their parents, and there is also a class list where
| our phone numbers are listed (and where we find these other
| parents' contact info).
|
| Something happened with the culture of getting kids to play with
| each other outside of school hours, and I don't know what it was.
| COVID lockdowns definitely delayed it from starting for our kids,
| but I know these parents are mostly in my generation, and we
| certainly played more together.
|
| We live in the suburbs, so it's not a car creep problem - at
| least, no more than it was 60+ years ago when the numbers were
| better. When I ask the parents who stay, they tell me a vague mix
| of weekend junior sports leagues, visiting relatives, and just
| being really tired after working all week. They're lame excuses:
| spending time with kids constantly is _also_ really tiring.
|
| Kids having regular playdates would encourage more familiarity
| among the families and trust in letting kids play unsupervised
| with each other. Often I take them to the main playground, and
| it's virtually empty. I can't believe I'm the only one in the
| community who's unhappy enough about this to try and change it.
| lawlessone wrote:
| >I give my kids business cards with my phone number to pass out
| to their friends to give to their parents
|
| Yeah if i was a kid i'd be mortified at having to do this.
| luckydata wrote:
| it's the only way it works. It took me MONTHS to get a hold
| of the number of my son's best friend's parents so that now
| we can organize maybe an afternoon of play every 4-5 weeks.
| zoomablemind wrote:
| I thought a prime time for contacting the parents is right
| after school when picking up the kid. Everyone is there
| waiting, so it's just natural to chit chat, esp when the
| kids are friends.
| wffurr wrote:
| Except when they ride the bus or are in after school or
| the parents dash in and out from being double parked.
|
| I have certainly gotten to know some parents at pick up,
| but there's a whole bunch I have not met.
| zoomablemind wrote:
| I'd count also those memorable school talent
| shows/performances and events. Another reach out avenue
| is volunteering, these have a higher chance to match
| parents with similar availability at least.
| brewtide wrote:
| My local school killed this with COVID. Now you are no
| longer able to stand and wait, everyone has to line up in
| their cars. Viva la community!
| mock-possum wrote:
| That would require everybody get out of the car and get
| off their phones though
|
| Why do all that, when you can sit in the comfort of a
| nice warm / cool dry vehicle and play videogames and
| listen to music?
| jamiek88 wrote:
| I physically cringed reading it. The intention is great but
| if I was his kid those cards would be staying in my backpack.
| Making a kid stand out like that is risky as fuck for social
| standing.
|
| But this is likely the worst forum in the world to talk about
| typical social skills.
| jppope wrote:
| An honest attempt from a social adult to develop a sense of
| community is far from cringe. Reasonably speaking, its
| actions like that which can actually make socialization
| happen. If the old way wasn't working, so try something
| else.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| My reaction is my reaction. A cringe is involuntary. Your
| reaction is equally valid and way more mature.
|
| We are talking about school kids here though please
| remember.
| koolba wrote:
| How is this any different than a post-it note with your
| home phone number on it? It also solves the problem of
| trying to not knowing your kid's friend's parents' names.
| qualeed wrote:
| How are you communicating your contact information to your
| kids friends parents in a non-cringe way?
|
| If handing them a piece of paper with my number is too
| cringe, I'd be really happy to have a non-cringe, non-
| standout (?) way of doing that.
| cmckn wrote:
| Does your kid know your phone number?
| qualeed wrote:
| The older one, yes. The younger one, no. So I do the
| cringe method of writing my information down.
|
| But I didn't realize that it was "risky as fuck" and
| making my kids "stand out" so much to have my contact
| information on some paper to give to their closer
| friends. I must be way more socially inept than I
| thought. (I guess my eldest must be too, because she
| thinks handing a card to a friend is convenient.)
|
| So please, if you have some method that is roughly the
| same level of convenience but not "risky as fuck", I'm
| all ears.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| > contact information on some paper
|
| Is not the same as handing your dad's business card
| around to your friends (and is a borderline disingenuous
| way of summing it up, business cards have business
| implications i.e., formal implications it's kinda in the
| name of them, kids aren't business people aren't used to
| using them socially like you might and don't see it as a
| scrap of paper) if you can't see that then yes I agree
| with your conclusion on your social skills.
|
| Hey let me give you my mom's number or add her on
| Facebook / instagram (how old are these kids by the way?)
| is not the same as handing out and having handy your
| moms/dads business cards.
|
| It just isn't.
|
| It ain't rational and yes technically they are 'both
| pieces of paper' but the vibe is simply different.
|
| It ain't cool. It comes across as desperate and forced
| and it's embarrassing as a result.
|
| The tone of your reply intimates anger at my responses,
| that's unfortunate but I stand by it.
| qualeed wrote:
| > _Is not the same as handing your dad's business card_
|
| It's my general contact information on business card
| stock.
|
| Maybe it's a regional thing, but when I read the comment,
| I just assumed they meant "business cards" in the general
| sense. Like how there are "joke business cards" that say
| "yes I'm tall, the weather is fine", etc.
|
| Mine are business card size, on business card paper, made
| on a business card generation website. It simply says my
| name, my number, and my email.
|
| > _The tone of your reply intimates anger at my
| responses_
|
| Yes, I think it is wild to say that it is "cringe" and
| "risky as fuck". The dude just wants his kids to play
| with some friends. It seems to be working for everyone
| involved.
|
| I feel way more stupid litigating this over comments on
| the internet mid-day during the week than I would handing
| out business cards with my full business information on
| it, to be honest. Parents get so much flak on the
| internet for normal ass things, it's crazy. Say a little
| off-hand comment about how you're trying to get your kids
| to have a good social life and people come out of the
| woodworks to call you cringe.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Social risk is real. You have derailed this by applying
| it to your different situation but have taken on the
| emotional offense.
|
| Giving your work business card to your kids is different
| than writing your number down. Again. For the fourth
| time.
|
| Do you get it now?
|
| It is social risky whether you like it or not and getting
| angry and offended on other grown adults behalf, again
| making it about you when it wasn't when you don't even do
| that.
|
| Also it doesn't work. He was literally complaining that
| it doesn't work. We aren't talking about you.
|
| And he literally states there is a class list of numbers
| all parents have anyway! So there we go, does your mom
| have my number, yes she has all the numbers on the list,
| well give her my business card because I like to be the
| nail that gets hammered down.
| qualeed wrote:
| > _Giving your work business card to your kids is
| different than writing your number down. Again. For the
| fourth time.
|
| Do you get it now?_
|
| You must have skipped over the entire middle of my
| comment.
|
| > _making it about you_
|
| It's a conversation on a public forum, I do more or less
| the same thing, I'm chiming in with my experience, yes.
|
| But this is obviously unproductive. You're right that I'm
| defensive over it, which is probably a sign for me to
| step back.
|
| > _Also he literally states there is a class list of
| numbers all parents have anyway!_
|
| Side note, but my kids have friends in other classes and
| I'm not allowed to see those class lists because my kid
| isn't in the class. I know, I know, I'm making it about
| me again. But, _perhaps_ there are similar rules
| elsewhere.
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| I actually like the idea here. When I was a kid it was
| always give the landline number of the friend's house, or
| it's in the class list from school.
|
| Nowadays landlines are more or less gone, so the card
| approach is a good one.
| wombatpm wrote:
| I would do this. Of course I'd have cards made up that say
| "Hoopy Frood who really knows where his towel is" as a screen
| for parents with similar sense of humor.
| tclancy wrote:
| Really? While I don't do it, the alternative is having a kid
| come home with a scrawled phone number that may or may not be
| right along with a vague recollection of the name of the
| parent I am supposed to be calling. Things are a little less
| akward in our life but it may be because we are closer to
| what OP describes as grandparents I suppose.
|
| I get the idea, but I would suggest the reaction to an
| attempt at lubricating social interaction as "cringe" is part
| of the issue OP is describing.
| jemmyw wrote:
| My kids would totally be up for this. I don't have business
| cards though
| mock-possum wrote:
| It's surprisingly fast and cheap to print a 100 of them and
| have them mailed straight to your house.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| My kids asked for them. They are under 10. (They asked me to
| write down my number to give to their friends. Business card
| is just as good.)
|
| We don't have a landline, and there's no way in hell they're
| getting their own phones at that age.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| This is something I think about with my kids when they get
| to that age. I was calling my friends (on their landlines,
| using our landline) regularly by then, talking to their
| parents en route to getting them on the phone, and
| arranging visits. My kids won't grow up in a world where
| that's something that happens, and I'm not sure how to
| support their social independence in a world where (as you
| say) it seems nigh-on-negligent for them to have their own
| phones.
| hallman76 wrote:
| There is a nascent movement of families bringing back
| landlines for exactly this reason
| fundad wrote:
| It would be one thing if it worked. The OP admits that their
| kids don't initiate socializing but also claims they aren't
| poorly socialized. Blaming every parent but themselves when
| their parenting resulted in kids that don't seem to try hard
| enough.
| qualeed wrote:
| > _The OP admits that their kids don 't initiate
| socializing_
|
| Either you are I are reading it wrong, because I don't see
| anywhere in their comment where they say their own kids
| aren't initiating.
|
| What they _do_ say is that _other parents_ are rarely
| initiating play dates.
|
| Can you quote the part where they "admit that their kids
| don't initiate socializing"?
| fundad wrote:
| I did read this wrong.
|
| > My spouse and I find that we are overwhelmingly the
| ones calling to organize playdates rather than vice
| versa.
|
| I read that as his spouse and he were organizing rather
| than the kids organizing with friends when they're
| together at school or camp. That's what my kids do unless
| it's a birthday party or carpool.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| They are under 10 years old and do not have their own
| phones, nor do their single digit aged friends. They have
| zero sense of proper scheduling. While we live in a good
| neighborhood, there are more than a few reckless drivers,
| and short kids are not always visible to good drivers who
| are distracted. Finally, if the police saw them and
| decided to follow, there's a very good chance I'd get a
| knock on my door and a possible child endangerment
| charge.
|
| I didn't make this world.
| volkl48 wrote:
| I'll suggest you are thinking of the teenage years where
| anything involving your parents is mortifying.
|
| That's not really the case with elementary school age kids.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Parents just want to watch their Internet content and it's
| easier to just stick their kids in front of a video game or
| computer vs having an event that requires parenting.
|
| At least when parents are addicted to alcohol they can still be
| social and function as parents. Not so with Instagram/tiktok.
| meepmorp wrote:
| How old are your kids?
| 01100011 wrote:
| We've got a toddler. Currently bracing for the upcoming
| shit-show which will be the pre-school and beyond years.
| mtrovo wrote:
| Oh that rings true and it's so depressive. But I think it has
| more to do with this notion that everything you do socially
| is awkward in some degree and could be seeing as bad or
| hurtful, smartphones didn't help us there with the chance of
| becoming the next national meme just a tiktok away.
|
| Also social interactions nowadays have become so "one of a
| kind" and disconnected from a general contract that sometimes
| it's hard to not feel overwhelmed, I remember being 10 years
| old and just knocking on the door of my neighbourhood friends
| to check on them and kind of invite me in, depending on the
| time I would stay and grab dinner there and only come back
| home when it was getting too dark. Now as a parent I feel
| this serendipity is almost gone, you have to officially
| arrange play dates on parent groups, pick kids up, ask
| parents what kind of food should I offer, is it ok if I let
| them play videogames, is it ok to offer sugary drinks, list
| goes on and on.
|
| In that world consuming media is much easier, but I wouldn't
| say that's because it is addictive on itself, I think there's
| a big portion of people that just got tired of trying to
| navigate how to interact with others. My impression is that
| the proportion between lurkers to posters increased with time
| on different platforms including in real life.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| I think there's something to the notion that everything has
| to be overproduced now. The technology aspect is part of
| this (you have more tools to make events 'better', so if
| you don't you might look bad), and so is the culture of
| making things safer (and so necessitates more organization,
| more formalization). People get burned out easily and drop
| out from it.
| 01100011 wrote:
| When I grew up back in the 80s there was a sense of more
| stability, I think. People didn't move around as much.
| American suburbs were more of a monoculture(for better and,
| mostly, for worse, but it was what it was). That stability
| and comfort let people be more at ease and more open to
| things. I think now there's a generally higher level of
| anxiety and it spills over into the need to plan every
| social interaction.
|
| Even as someone who grew up in more spontaneous times I
| find I need more scheduling and such these days.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| I wonder if it was the Great Recession that made all the
| difference.
| api wrote:
| It was already happening before COVID. All these trends were.
| That just made it worse.
|
| A major issue is the death of independent child play. In a lot
| of places if a kid -- and we are talking up to early teens --
| is unsupervised police will be called. It's entirely the result
| of daytime TV and true crime making people think there are
| pedophile nuts hiding in every bush when in reality abductions
| by strangers are incredibly rare. If a kid is abused or worse
| it's almost always someone they know.
|
| One of the things I love about where we live is that kids do
| still play outside. It's a safe Midwestern suburb. We moved
| from SoCal and there you would definitely have some busybody
| call the cops. Of course it was perhaps more dangerous -- not
| because of crime but cars. All the suburban streets have like
| 60mph speed limits in SoCal.
| asdff wrote:
| It depends where in socal of course like anywhere else. In a
| more urban part like in la there are no busy bodies, you see
| kids out skateboarding drainage culverts during school hours
| all the time.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| During COVID, every kid in the neighborhood was at my house.
| School was short maybe 1-3 hours then it was play time. I
| didn't know all those kids lived in my neighborhood! Kids had
| no issue coming over.
|
| I don't know what the reason is for this phenomenon
| ryandrake wrote:
| Often the kids like to play together, but the parents are the
| ones that are just... weird and asocial. I hate to bring agism
| into this, but there definitely seems to be a generational gap
| with the adults.
|
| Some of my kid's friends are raised by their parents, and
| others are (apparently) raised primarily by grandparents.
|
| When my kid wants to get together with friends whose (50-60
| year old) grandparents bring them by, the grandparents come up
| to the door, socialize for a bit while the kid runs inside, and
| then we talk about when the playtime will be over and they can
| come over to pick the kid up. If it's an event where we both
| bring the kids, I find it easy to shoot the breeze with the
| grandparents, have small talk about how the week went, and so
| on.
|
| When the parents are, say, 25-35 year old range, it's a totally
| different vibe. They'll drive up, let the kid out of the car,
| and then race away without even getting out of their car. When
| playtime is at a local park or something, they sometimes hang
| around, but they go off into a corner, engrossed on their
| phone, totally ignoring the other parents (who, depending on
| their own ages are either chit chatting or locked into their
| Instagram).
|
| I remember when I was a kid in the 80s, and not only would we
| love to get together at someone's house, but the parents would
| also be happy to get together for a little socialization, maybe
| throw some steaks on the grill, put on some Sportsball, or
| whatever. This practice seems to be dead now that I'm a parent!
| lurking_swe wrote:
| context: i'm in my early 30's and i'm not a parent
|
| the behavior you described of the 25-35 year range is
| appalling. and those aren't my kids so that's saying
| something.
|
| Call it what it is, antisocial. Baffling to me...why are
| people so weird?
| Dusseldorf wrote:
| It's the phones. No one has anything to talk about anymore
| because constant scrolling leaves you with nothing to show.
| And then it's self perpetuating --easier to keep slamming
| the dopamine button than trying to make conversation with a
| completely atrophied social muscle.
| foobarian wrote:
| I think the Internet full of sewage with phones as
| delivery funnels has destroyed society. I would ban it
| all if I could
| antonymoose wrote:
| I'll endorse this heavily.
|
| We bought into a nice suburban community. Good schools, low
| crime, the dream.
|
| No one knows any neighbors. Kids rarely play with one another
| intra-neighborhood despite a very healthy blend of age
| ranges. In fact, I've loosely associate with exactly one
| neighbor in the three years. We went out of our way to try
| and meet neighbors our first month. Most treated us as if we
| head too many heads on our shoulders.
|
| Despite a heavy presence of children, no one here celebrate
| Halloween despite it being a beloved night growing up around
| here. Our first year we invested heavily in decorations and
| spent hundreds on the King size candy bars.
|
| Society feels... dead compared to me as an early 90s child.
| iamdelirium wrote:
| Have you thought maybe its your environment? I think the
| "nice suburban communities" have always been filled with
| antisocial people (as someone who grew it in them). People
| go to the suburbs for quiet and to be left alone.
|
| I barely knew anyone in the neighborhood when I was living
| with my parents in the suburbs. My friends were all from
| school and required a car to hang out.
|
| In contrast, now as an adult, I live in a dense major city
| (that's supposedly filled with crime according right wing
| news) and I see kids all the time walking around. I have a
| young kid and he interacts with his neighbors a lot more.
| My mailman knows of my kid and when we moved across the
| street.
|
| Our closest couple's friend is a 5 minute walk away and its
| nice to randomly run into them on a weekend when taking a
| walk.
|
| We regularly have wine and food on Fridays with one of my
| neighbors who have a kid close to our age and its easy and
| without friction.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's not a suburb/urban thing (though that could be
| correlated).
|
| It's an area thing. I think the biggest thing that leads
| to it is age stratification in a neighborhood - when
| every family is in the exact same "place" something weird
| happens.
|
| But looking at a neighborhood on Halloween might be a
| great way to check.
| alamortsubite wrote:
| While I don't deny there are pockets of abnormality like
| you suggest, having grown up on a dirt road in rural
| America and spent most of my adult life in cities,
| suburbia comes across as the antithesis of community. It
| was founded on the very promise of insularity. Obviously,
| that's not everyone's agenda, but it's beyond debate that
| its defining principle was segregation (followed by
| uniformity and convenience). I want to be sympathetic but
| I don't understand how people buy into it without
| accepting this. We've made some progress as a society,
| but having visited a lot of suburban neighborhoods all
| over the U.S., the remnants of the original mindset still
| come across loud and clear.
| bombcar wrote:
| I think a key component is that "suburb" has multiple
| meanings - and which one comes to mind when it's
| mentioned depends on where you were raised/lived.
|
| Some suburbs are the stereotypical miles and miles of
| identical homes with no sidewalks.
|
| Others are actual older rural towns that have been
| consumed by the nearby metropolis - and these ones feel
| quite different.
|
| There's a kind of "suburb" that is usually quite lively -
| the rural suburb, often a pocket of relatively dense
| homes in a sea of wheat.
|
| One of my indicators is lemonade stands. If they appear
| regularly, the area is alive.
| Dusseldorf wrote:
| That's really rough. We bought into a neighborhood in an
| older college town, and I think that's helped things a bit
| for us. Smaller houses and yards, so people hang out around
| the neighborhood or in parks. Everyone's out walking their
| dogs all the time, and pretty much everyone is happy to
| stop and chat. I think it's just about getting lucky and
| finding places where people prioritize the community rather
| than having giant houses, giant yards with swingsets, and
| giant cars so they never need to talk to anyone.
| dg08 wrote:
| That's tough. We also bought a house in a nice suburban
| community right outside of NYC and it's been amazing. We
| know all the neighbors, exchange gifts during holidays, and
| a ton of kids come out for Halloween. What I really liked
| about the neighborhood when house hunting was seeing kids
| ride their bikes around on the streets unsupervised. I
| don't know if it had any correlation, but the vibe felt
| right.
| HPsquared wrote:
| "Vibe" should be a top criterion when house-hunting.
| zparky wrote:
| i wish that was a search filter...
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >No one knows any neighbors.
|
| Why would you know them? If this were 1965, you were going
| to live in that house the rest of your life, and they were
| going to live in that house the rest of their lives _right
| next door_ and so it only made sense to get to know them.
| But today, both you and they are only here temporarily
| until it becomes time to move away in 4 years when you job-
| hop for that raise. Will you even live in the same state
| afterwards? Maybe at the next place you 'll settle down and
| stay long enough to put forth the effort, but for now
| you're as much a migrant as any Dust Bowl Okie.
|
| Even just 6 or 7 years ago younger coworkers were adamant
| that renting was the way to go, because they didn't want to
| be tied down to a house that they'd have to sell in a hurry
| when they inevitably moved away for a new job.
| philipkglass wrote:
| Americans are moving less frequently now than they were
| in 1965:
|
| _Overall, when looking at both migration between U.S.
| states and within them, fewer Americans are moving each
| year. In 1948, the first year on record with the Census
| Bureau, more than 20 percent of the population moved in
| the past year. This had decreased to just 8.7 percent in
| 2022. While the share of Americans moving across state
| lines remained more stable, those moving within their
| state became much fewer, from between 15-17 percent of
| Americans per year in the 1950s and 1960s to results in
| the single digits in the new millennium._
|
| https://www.statista.com/chart/32135/share-of-movers-and-
| non...
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Perhaps fewer move. But they definitely perceive it
| differently, especially the younger demographics. There
| are fewer young people each year too, as our population
| ages, so I'm not sure your statistics are particularly
| relevant to the group we're talking about... unless you
| were under the impression that all the nonagenarians were
| party animals or something.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| I am probably that sort of parent. Truth is I dread
| socializing. I enjoy just hanging around with my family in
| the peace and quiet of my home. Not one to engage in small
| talk with neighbors, other parents, etc.
|
| My daughter is still a baby, and I don't want her to become a
| shut-in because of my antisocial tendencies. So yeah, I will
| take her to the public playground, get her into the local
| sport activities, this sort of thing. But I would likely be
| the parent in the playground just sitting by himself while
| the daughter plays, maybe reading a book (I also hate social
| media in general, so no doomscrolling for me).
|
| It's a difficult balance.
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| It sounds like probably you're an introvert. And that's ok!
| But surely not every parent of this generation is an
| introvert...
| surgical_fire wrote:
| I think so, yeah.
|
| My concern is to not let it be an impediment to my
| daughter socializing with other children is the point.
| cortesoft wrote:
| As a parent who is an introvert married to another
| introvert, it is definitely a challenge. It is hard not to
| feel overwhelmed when our kids have friends over, and the
| desire to avoid that is strong. We have to actively tell
| ourselves that we have to sacrifice our quiet for our kids
| social lives. I don't really enjoy socializing with other
| parents while my kid plays, either, and my wife hates it
| even more than I do.
|
| It really takes active effort to make sure our kids have
| play dates.
| luckydata wrote:
| I see this SO MUCH, I wonder if you're also in California. I
| find this state particularly difficult to have a social life
| in. Everyone is "friendly" but nobody wants to be your friend,
| always chasing something else and never making time (exceptions
| apply). It's been exhausting to live here and I can't wait to
| go back to Europe where social life was not nearly as
| difficult.
| bluGill wrote:
| People are friendly everywhere, but they mostly already have
| a full friend group and so are not looking to add more. Thus
| breaking in as a new comer is hard. However there are always
| people who need new friends it is just hard to find them.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I wonder how much of this comes down to wage stagnation and the
| need for not only both parents to work, but to work more hours
| and sometimes multiple jobs, just to keep from drowning.
| Especially when childcare is so expensive, it's a situation
| that can compound and spiral.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| I wonder how the generation of latchkey kids fared.
| analog31 wrote:
| One factor may have to do with birth rates and construction. I
| grew up in a neighborhood that was all built up within the span
| of a few years, and populated by young families, in the early
| 60s. There were kids all over the place. Anybody who wanted to
| play would just go out and holler, and they'd have a few other
| kids almost instantly.
|
| Where my wife and I raised our kids, there was one neighbor
| with kids, and that's it.
|
| Also, kids are more occupied now. "Back in my day" elementary
| school kids didn't have homework, and it was pretty minimal
| even through high school. My kids had homework starting in
| first grade. Naturally you want it to get done early while the
| kids are still awake, but this cuts into the prime hours for
| play. We should simply have revolted against it. But that's
| hindsight.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| I had lots of homework 80s-90s. But still managed to get
| outside, play, do stupid stuff. My house had all the kids
| playing video games and when we got tired of that we went to
| play sports.
| taeric wrote:
| What happened is that everything turned into playdates? When we
| were kids, the general direction was GTFO, and don't be late
| for dinner. Who did you go play with? Whoever was at the park.
| When you got older, you hopefully had access to the skating
| rink. Or maybe a bowling alley. Before that, kickball at the
| park. Pretty much every day. Maybe see if you can over shoot
| the swing again.
| jppope wrote:
| Totally valid observation, but things definitely changed.
| Neighbors don't know each other as well, so the grandma
| keeping an eye out the back window doesn't exist anymore. It
| was a village watching the kids before, its not that way now.
| taeric wrote:
| I suspect they didn't know each other that well back in the
| day, either. We just tell ourselves that they did. When
| we've lived in apartment complexes, as an easy example,
| there were a lot of people we didn't know. We just also got
| to know a few that we would see on a regular basis, as
| well.
| jppope wrote:
| I think theres probably an uneven distribution on this...
| I can think back to my childhood in a small town in new
| england and I can still remember everyone on my block,
| the block across the street, and every kid's house within
| a half mile or so. I even remember some of the 4 digit
| phone numbers (b/c almost everyone had the same area code
| and city code). When we moved though we didn't know
| anywhere near that many people.
| taeric wrote:
| Agreed on the uneven distribution. I would posit that
| this is probably even uneven in the communities, as well?
| Just because you knew everyone in your block doesn't mean
| they knew each other that well.
|
| Similarly, I expect most kids in a classroom to know of
| each other, but I doubt they all know each other. If that
| makes sense. Such that, it is easy to think this is also
| a by product of how much more you can do inside your
| houses? Back when you would see folks outside more often,
| it was common for you to know of a lot of people. If you
| only had a few "shut in" type people, you knew them as
| the shut in type people. As it becomes more and more of
| us, it gets tougher.
| bombcar wrote:
| Before universal A/C you were basically forced out of
| doors in many parts of the USA.
|
| This, over time, leads to familiarity with those around
| you.
|
| Now most people would be highly suspicious if you sit in
| your front yard.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| AC is very rare in my state but I still see this
| phenomenon.
| foobarian wrote:
| Is it because of less churchgoing? Church is basically one
| large standup (and sit down, and stand up, x a few times
| :-) ) for the community.
|
| Or maybe kidnapping paranoia fueled by years of crime news
| programs?
| lbrito wrote:
| There was a line somewhere about Americans being increasingly
| unable to handle unstructured socializing.
|
| Parties typically have some sort of rules-based activity, be
| it beer pong or board games. Playdates themselves are perhaps
| the first manifestation of such phenomenon.
| udkl wrote:
| The concept of playdates is amusing to me as an immigrant. In
| Indian cities where most people live in apartments, the kids
| just go down and play around with the 10s of kids from the
| neighborhood. Adults get free time and kids get to socialize
| and enjoy.
| parpfish wrote:
| Im convinced that car seat rules have played a big role in
| shaping child socialization.
|
| When was a kid, you were done with your car seat by
| elementary school so one parent could offer to carpool a
| minivan full of kids to/from an event.
|
| But now that some kids need their car seat into _middle
| school_ carpools are gone and every kid needs their parent to
| pick them up. It requires way more planning and parental
| involvement
| miriam_catira wrote:
| This. This is definitely part of the problem. I can't even
| offer to take my kid & his friends anywhere, other than
| walk to the park after they're deposited at my house,
| because every one of them needs a car seat.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Whoa what?? I had no idea about this.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| While well intentioned, car seat laws have gotten a bit
| insane. Minnesota recently implemented some pretty
| nonsensical ones that are dependent on if they've
| outgrown their seat.
|
| How are cops supposed to know if they outgrew their seat?
| It also means that when they move to forward facing or a
| booster seat depends on the car seat you bought, not
| their height, (only their) age, or weight.
|
| For older kids, here's the new rule: "A child at least 9
| years old or has outgrown their booster seat AND the
| child can pass the "5 step test" may be restrained by a
| regular seatbelt, but they must be in a the back seat if
| possible under 13."
|
| That's not too bad because they at least have a set age,
| but you still can't expect a parent to have a set of 4
| booster seats ready to go to haul your kids friend's
| around.
| taeric wrote:
| I think a lot of this should have fallen back to
| liability setting in the laws, then? I feel safe saying
| cops should not be ticketing people for kids being in the
| seat wrong. However, I can see your rates going up if you
| are found to be in violation of some of these rules
| during an accident?
|
| Sucks, as this isn't as easy as saying it will be your
| responsibility and fault if the kid is injured. Odds are
| high this will just make a bad situation worse.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| As an addendum, my wife just messaged me about getting
| our daughter a worse child seat because ours is rated for
| 50 pounds. In Minnesota's new laws that means she needs
| to be rear facing until she's 50 pounds. She's a few
| months away from being 4 years old and she's 33 pounds or
| so. Her legs are getting incredibly scrunched up and we
| can't extend her leg room even though our car seat is
| made for that because there simply isn't room in our car
| to do so. I saw comments on a Facebook post about it from
| our county that someone's 7 year old was going to need to
| go back to rear-facing.
| taeric wrote:
| I definitely feel a bit lucky that my kids were big enough
| to be out of car seats by elementary school, already. That
| said, I thought most were out of needing car seats by the
| second or third grade? I'm surprised to hear it is at all
| common for kids to still be in seats all the way to middle
| school.
|
| I also can't offer much of a defense of car seats.
| Obviously, go for safety; but it does feel that people are
| chasing a tail end of safety that is not really measurable.
| Modern cars and using seat belts have come a long long way
| to make vehicles safer.
|
| There is also the interesting contrast with busses on this.
| Kids don't buckle up or use seat belts in school busses.
| boogieknite wrote:
| some of our common free range play places included walking to
| the dump and new home construction sites to have dirt clod
| wars. maybe some structure isnt bad. i turned out fine but
| looking back it probably would have been cool to get taken to
| a park
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I saw a reddit post where a woman was arrested for letting
| her 10 year old walk a mile alone
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| There's no way to say this without coming across as extremely
| rude, but...
|
| > I give my kids business cards with my phone number to pass
| out to their friends to give to their parents
|
| If this isn't the only thing you/your kids do that's well
| outside typical social norms, that's probably the reason nobody
| else is inviting them. This is almost on the level of parents
| accompanying their adult kids to job interviews and then
| wondering why their kid didn't get an offer.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| As I posted above, my kids literally asked for them. They are
| both under 10, and don't have their own phones.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| You might want to pause and think about why policing another
| person's behavior like this is so fervently important to you.
| Most of the parents I've met wouldn't push something like
| this on their kids but would rather treat it like a
| collaboration. Kids even at age 5 are capable of explaining
| that they don't want to do something and nothing in the
| parent implied use of fiat. We all need to assume more good
| faith on the part of parents and of our neighbors if we want
| to have a social fabric and reasonable discussions.
| conception wrote:
| Some good answers but also American parents are stretched thin
| but also perhaps want to be a larger part of their kids lives?
|
| During the week I get maybe 10-30 minutes of quality time with
| them outside of the routine of weekly life. Maybe?
|
| So if I want to do something with my children and have a
| relationship with them, the weekends are all I have.
|
| Aaaand of course,quality of life in America is generally in
| decline and parents usually have no support structure (family
| etc) so no one has interest in the extra work of doing
| playdates.
| asdff wrote:
| It is kind of paradoxical because kids would like the
| opposite honestly. I love my parents, they are great people,
| but knowing myself as a kid if I was asked if I wanted to
| spend saturday with my friends or with my parents, I'd pick
| my friends every single time no hesitation. You don't laugh
| like you do with your friends with anyone else. You don't get
| into shenanigans. You don't have to worry about "behavior" or
| anything like that. No matter how nice and open your parents
| are, friends are truly liberating.
| watwut wrote:
| In my experience, kids want to be with parents. They want
| to do their own thing when they become pre-teens. But kids
| up to 8-9 years do genuinely like their parents.
| bluGill wrote:
| Why so little time? A large part of the daily routine is
| things they should be doing with you as quality time. You
| shouldn't be cooking, eating, and dishes alone - that is a
| couple hours right there per day.
| lc9er wrote:
| Kids used to just go outside, find one another, and play. I see
| that you are attempting to solve the problem with organizing
| playdates. However, I think that playdates and structured
| EVERYTHING for kids is a contributing factor to how we got
| here.
|
| I think at some point, we need to acknowledge media
| sensationalism (traditional and social media varieties) have
| not only poisoned politics and bolstered conspiracy theory
| popularity, but have vastly overstated the dangers of every day
| life, making childhood and parenting much worse than a
| generation or two ago.
| avhception wrote:
| When I was a kid, we would always hatch a plan on what to do
| with the rest of the day while we were still at school. As
| soon as the bell rang, we hurried home to catch something to
| eat and then it was off to the woods to build that fortress
| or whatever. If there was no school, we'd call the house
| phones of our friends until we had a plan cooked up. And
| every day without fail we didn't want to go home. So much
| stuff to do!
|
| Now, watching the kids my friends have - they won't even
| leave the house if their parents didn't plan a playdate and
| brought them there. Something is completely off.
| asdff wrote:
| Kids aren't left to their own devices anymore. They are
| handed a device. It also doesn't help the cops in a lot of
| places will arrest the parent for letting the kid out.
| wffurr wrote:
| Same, it's really disappointing how few parents have reached
| out to play compared to how often I am trying to find one of my
| kids' friends who is around to play.
| bluGill wrote:
| Why are you doing this? Your kids should be able to find
| their own playmates. If you live on a farm I can see that
| kids can't get to anyone else's place without your help. The
| neighbor girl comes over to our house often to play with my
| daughter often. My son is annoyed that there are so few boys
| his age in walking distance (but we keep telling him to go
| visit the ones we know are in the neighborhood). We are lucky
| that neighbor girl is really outgoing as otherwise my
| daughter would sit at home complaining there is nobody to
| play with just like my son does...
| asdff wrote:
| Parties and kids aren't mutually exclusive. In fact some of my
| best memories growing up were from the times my parents took me
| to some house party where all the parents were talking and
| drinking and having their own adult fun, while us kids were
| running wild over the property and neighborhood until real
| late. Adults are excited, kids are excited, it just works, see
| you next weekend.
| lbrito wrote:
| As a father of 2 in Canada, I feel the same. Loving the
| discussion here.
|
| Seems like an opening to build a SaaS to encourage kids to
| socialize.
|
| /s
| bradlys wrote:
| Why do the kids need play dates? When I was a 7, you'd just
| talk to the kids down the street. I knew several kids within a
| few blocks of where I lived.
|
| It seemed like a really far distance that I went to see people
| but now I realize I never went more than a quarter mile from
| home to see someone. There were just a lot of families in my
| area that had kids.
|
| Of course, that's not true in a lot of the areas I'm in now. My
| friends experience the same where it's hard to meet people who
| have kids of similar age. There might be 50 homes and only 1-2
| will have kids near the same age. Many won't have any kids at
| all.
|
| Thinking back on it, it was surprising how many kids there were
| near me near my age growing up compared to now.
| watwut wrote:
| > We live in the suburbs, so it's not a car creep problem - at
| least, no more than it was 60+ years ago when the numbers were
| better.
|
| Kids were not driven to playdates 60+ years ago. They would
| play with other kids living nearby. Parents would not organize
| their playdates either.
|
| > When I ask the parents who stay, they tell me a vague mix of
| weekend junior sports leagues, visiting relatives, and just
| being really tired after working all week. They're lame
| excuses: spending time with kids constantly is _also_ really
| tiring.
|
| I do not seen how these are "lame excuses". Seems like valid
| things that lower your availability and also valid reasons to
| want to you remaining time for own rest.
|
| > Often I take them to the main playground, and it's virtually
| empty. I can't believe I'm the only one in the community who's
| unhappy enough about this to try and change it.
|
| 60+ years ago, 6 years old kids would go to main playground on
| their own. Partly it is that kids are much less independent
| these days ... and partly it is that their own rooms are much
| more fun. So, kids want to stay at home because it is good
| enough and parents do not want to sit bored on playground.
| empath75 wrote:
| There is a coordinated action problem here, I think. (I have
| three young kids).
|
| When I was a kid, I could be relatively sure that if I went
| outside on a random day, there would be other kids playing
| outside. So, all the kids went outside most days to play.
|
| I _could_ send my kid out to play and there _are_ other kids in
| the neighborhood, but almost all of them are inside playing
| video games. At best there might be some kids going on a walk
| with their parents.
|
| If my oldest kid wants to interact with with his friends, his
| best bet is to get on fortnite, which he does most days _and he
| doesn't even like fortnite_.
| bluGill wrote:
| Families are smaller in general. That means there are less
| kids to see in most neighborhoods even if they are outside.
| booleanbetrayal wrote:
| Every family is dual income now, so every family needs to find
| something to do with their kids once school lets out. Growing
| up in the 80's most families around were single income and kept
| kids at home over the summers. As a result, kids ruled the
| neighborhoods, bouncing around between houses all day, where
| there could be some reasonable expectation of peripheral
| oversight. Now, everyone is min-maxing camp schedule to ensure
| there is child oversight during working hours, and the
| neighborhoods are empty.
|
| We decided to break from the trend and return our kids to more
| of a free-range kid paradigm, risking the disruption to our
| working schedules, this year. It sounds good in theory, but you
| are left with the realities of every other child friend being
| wrapped in camp schedules, as well. It took a lot of proactive
| discussions with other parents to convince them to keep their
| kids at home and accessible. But you're still left with the
| dual income problem, so you find yourself hiring a sitter to
| oversee and shuttle.
|
| The result is an improvement over the 100% booked
| compartmentalized camp situation, but without the same level of
| independence that I experienced and have come to credit with
| really advancing my own personal development as a child.
| pavon wrote:
| By BLS statistics, 50% of married couples today both work[1],
| which is the same as it was in 1978, and lower than it was
| for most of the 80's and 90's[2]. There are some caveats to
| those statistics. They cover all married couples, including
| retirees, and there are more retirees today than in the 80s.
| It also doesn't differentiate between full-time and part-time
| work.
|
| However, it does show that the majority of families were
| already dual-income by the 80's. The trend away from
| supporting a family on a single income started much earlier
| than that.
|
| Anecdotally, all my friends in the 80's and 90's had both
| parents working, and we still got together to play all the
| time, either in the neighborhood for nearby friends, or
| dropped off for further ones.
|
| [1]Table 2 in https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/famee.pdf
|
| [2]https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2014/ted_20140602.htm
| mock-possum wrote:
| That's interesting to hear, because I feel like all of my
| friends who have kids have a very conscientious approach
| towards socializing their kids, setting up play dates, (plus
| finding other parents they get along with to make new friends
| with!)
|
| I really wonder what the less involved, less intentional
| approach would be - hope your kid figures it all out for
| themselves?
| Exoristos wrote:
| A lot of Millennial parents are -- paranoid. We have had
| neighbors exclaim that they don't want their children saying hi
| to us or they'll learn to talk to "strangers". Or a neighbor
| whose little boy played with my daughters for months, but when
| they moved the mother scowlingly rejected the idea of playdates
| because part of her goal in getting a bigger house was -- to
| put it in my words -- insulating him from other children. These
| tend to be the same parents who micromanage their children in
| other ways, like very limited diets and excessive summertime
| clothing, so, again, it seems like some form of paranoia.
| conductr wrote:
| Take away all those kid's iPads and on-demand cartoons and I
| bet the parents start begging for more playdates
| lawlessone wrote:
| Partying is more expensive than watching TV or playing games.
| vrc wrote:
| I was going to disagree but then realized I now shell out at
| least $100 when two families and their kids show up for 3-4
| pizzas with toppings and chips and dip and some juices.
|
| And god forbid I try and provide fresh fruit and beverages on
| that budget...
| cwoolfe wrote:
| It is if you are hosting; but if you are going to the
| party...hey, it's free food! I think a systematic analysis
| would show that it would be cheaper for all of us on the whole
| to share food at parties since it is cheaper to buy in bulk.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| A lot of parties have always been pitch-in or BYOB.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| A fifth of vodka has been like $15 for at least a decade otoh
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| This isn't a social effect at all, it's all a financial effect.
| Of course most of the HN population is isolated from those issues
| because we work in a high paying field, but nobody has any money
| to do anything anymore.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| My grandma was the head of the local Air Force wives' club. Their
| house was always stocked like a full bar and at least several
| people stopped by for a visit just about every day. They knew at
| least 10 of their neighbors well, and some former neighbors too.
|
| Find me community like this anywhere in America these days.
| Immigrant communities perhaps? Most Americans these days won't
| interact with their neighbors unless it's to complain or they
| want something transactionally.
| kulahan wrote:
| That's it - immigrant communities are wonderful in this regard,
| as are communities with lots of old people (maybe because
| they're from a different time, maybe because they're lonely,
| who knows).
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yea, our community definitely skews "over 50" and it's a
| lively, social place. We have an informal rule: If your
| garage door is fully open, then it's an invitation for anyone
| to stop by to socialize or chit chat while they're out on
| their walk or whatever. I know there are people who live in
| the neighborhood who are under 40, but you almost _never_ see
| them, even outside of traditional working hours!
| helloooooooo wrote:
| I am going to assume your grandmother probably didn't work, and
| instead took made her and her husband's social life her full
| time job.
|
| It's much easier to entertain constantly when one half of the
| relationship has the availability to do it.
|
| If I'm mistaken, then holy heck how did your grandparents do it
| lmao.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I bet that if the head of the local Air Force wives' club did
| exactly that today, they'd get the same results.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| I guess we're missing the local social super-connectors that
| were more numerous 40+ years ago. Perhaps we need to be
| mentoring, educating, subsidizing, and encouraging people on
| the little skills and techniques to bring others out of their
| hideaways.
| 01100011 wrote:
| My Southern California neighborhood used to be like this. It
| was a diverse neighborhood of white, Filipino, Viet and
| Mexicans and it felt alive. Then covid hit and the demographics
| changed. Prices went up. Now the neighborhood is as quiet at
| night as where I lived in the bay area a few years ago. No open
| garages. No music.
|
| People are generally unfriendly now and keep to themselves
| more. Sad what we've lost. We're still an immigrant community
| but the immigrants are from different places. I'm sure they
| paid too much for their houses and feel the stress. There are
| also some obvious cultural differences with respect to
| socializing and partying.
| realityfactchex wrote:
| > open garages
|
| Can you say more about open garages and community? Is that
| about car culture, music, pool tables, garage "bars", sofas,
| TVs, or something else?
|
| Would the whole local neighborhood be welcomed into open
| garages, or was open-garage-culture limited to people whom
| people already knew?
| bluGill wrote:
| Yes. Each garage is different. If you are working on your
| car in an open garage that is an invite for someone else
| interested in cars to say hi, offer advice - and possibly
| pitch in when you are working on something that needs more
| than 1 person. If you see someone playing guitar in their
| garage that is an invite to bring your fiddle and join in.
| If you see someone playing pool that is your invite to play
| the next game. And so on. Note that there is nothing in the
| above list that will appeal to everyone, so if you don't
| like cars you walk by that garage, if you don't play music
| you walk by the guitar...
| longtimelistnr wrote:
| at least in my parents neighborhood, the open garage or the
| pool with a non-privacy fence, or the front/side porch are
| all hangout spots where other neighbors will walk by and
| join you for conversation
| 01100011 wrote:
| Garages are just a good place to hang out in coastal CA.
| They cool down quicker than the rest of the house and you
| can have your friends over for beers without worrying
| they're going to mess up your house.
|
| Also, our Filipino community seems big on turning them into
| semi-livingrooms with large TVs, couches, etc.
| alexjplant wrote:
| > Americans these days won't interact with their neighbors
| unless it's to complain or they want something transactionally.
|
| It certainly depends. I had great neighbors when I lived on the
| river in a non-HOA community... many parties were had with
| sunset beer hangouts on the dock or beach. Military communities
| are also notably close-knit so what you say makes sense.
| CommenterPerson wrote:
| You got this immigrant. We have a group of a few families. Each
| hosts at least one large event per year on occasions like
| Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Years and our own festivals.
| Everyone and their kids, and other friends / relatives join.
| Three families ended up on the same street by chance. We
| regularly cook or get takeout and get together at short notice.
| Alcohol and food play a big role.
|
| That said, being an immigrant poses other kinds of challenges.
| So it's not all like the 1970s in the US, or where we came
| from.
| david422 wrote:
| > Most Americans these days won't interact with their neighbors
| unless it's to complain or they want something transactionally.
|
| My family moved into a small cul-de-sac with 5 houses total. I
| wanted to introduce myself, so I wrote a short letter with a
| little about ourselves and our contact info, and then dropped
| it into each neighbors mailbox. Only 1 neighbor wrote back, and
| 1 neighbor literally _returned the letter_ to our mailbox. So
| yea, that's the neighborhood I live in.
| bapak wrote:
| Social networks have moved online and have been drowned in ads
| and TikTok dances. No time for in-person meetups unless you're
| going to that fancy instagrammable place to take pictures of
| yourself.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| lol!!!
|
| " It seems that the original modern American swingers were
| crew-cut World War II air force pilots and their wives. Like
| elite warriors everywhere, these "top guns" often developed
| strong bonds with one another, perhaps because they suffered
| the highest casualty rate of any branch of the military.
| According to journalist Terry Gould, "key parties," like those
| later dramatized in the 1997 film The Ice Storm, originated on
| these military bases in the 1940s, where elite pilots and their
| wives intermingled sexually with one another before the men
| flew off toward Japanese antiaircraft fire."
|
| https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sex-at-dawn/201211/n...
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| >Find me community like this anywhere in America these days.
|
| The only reason I have become a staple member of my little
| dead-end, working-class street is because I don't email/text,
| and last summer I spent outdoors building a tinyhome (that all
| the passersby watched/asked about).
|
| "How do I get ahold of you?" they used to ask... "Simple," I'd
| say, "just knock on my door between noon through sunset" [my
| _calling hours_ , to use the historic term, posted by my
| doorbell]. Haven't even used my phone but a handful of times
| this 2025 -- turned off entirely since early May -- & my social
| life is what I want it to be, I am not alone any more than I
| wish to be.
|
| I moved here two years ago, and already know everybody on my
| street (24 dwellings, total); it's primarily rentals, so when
| there is a new U-Haul I make sure to bring over a
| beer/conversation (typically a week after moving in -- so they
| can settle/adjust/remember).
|
| Before living in this working-class neighborhood, I lived in
| _the nicer parts of towns_... and honestly, these working-class
| people are nicer and more giving /understanding/decent than
| anywhere else I've ever lived (e.g. Westlake Hills [near
| Austin]; West End [Nashville]; Barton Hills [ATX]; Lookout
| Mountain [Tenn]).
|
| Stop doing everything on your phone. Start being neighborly.
|
| Example: multiple neighbors and I have jointly-purchased a
| nicer lawnmower, instead of each buying our own simpler pusher.
|
| C/C/
| fundad wrote:
| I bet military service-members still socialize and get
| hammered.
| ryao wrote:
| The chart labeled Percent Decline in Hours Spent Attending or
| Hosting Social Event by Age 2003 - 2024 seems to be a bad way of
| view thing the data since it assumes that there is an inherit
| difference on how people approach this based on arbitrary age
| groups. Having it be by birth year would be better, since it
| would reflect how the people in question's habits are changing
| over time.
|
| That said, party culture had been excessive in the past and it
| was impoverishing to many people. I and others my age more wisely
| do without, which leaves us with money for things that are more
| important than one offs.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| Can't throw a party if you're living in your parents basement.
| parpfish wrote:
| I wonder whether housing plays a factor.
|
| Young people aren't becoming homeowners at the same rate, so
| there's a sense of transience to their living situations that
| make forming neighbor communities seem like a waste of time.
| luckydata wrote:
| nah, we partied plenty when we rented and not knowing someone
| for long is not a reason not to hang out. What has been eroded
| is the habit of hanging out because there's no easily
| accessible third spaces. I'll give you an example: when I lived
| in Spain I would just walk in the corner bar for a quick beer
| or a coffee or something to eat, I would very likely run into a
| neighbor and would chat. The chat would lead to "hey let's do
| something". In the USA it's almost always the case that people
| need to make plan, the lack of spontaneity kills most plans.
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| In my Midwestern US town, there are still lots of third
| spaces. The mall, bars, bowling alleys, an arcade, and even
| some new things like a trampoline place. People just aren't
| using them nearly as much, to the point that the mall is a
| tomb and the stores are going away. But the people stopped
| showing up first.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| Seems like a no-brainer to me. This is an accurate
| characterization of my entire adult life. My wife and I are
| looking at buying a house, and we've concluded that we can't
| despite living in Wisconsin and making far, _far_ more than the
| median income around here. There 's no end in sight.
|
| Our social structure isn't built around neighbors. I could name
| 2 people I've shared an apartment building with in the last 5
| years. Incidentally, they were a couple in the same 3-flat as
| me, who were there for my entire time in that building. I think
| the lower density and shared spaces (in that case, a garage)
| made the difference.
| asdff wrote:
| I kind of see this among different friend groups. I have a
| number of friends out in the midwest where a mortgage might be
| 180k. They are most all buying homes. These places have
| garages, basements, front and back yards. And they are throwing
| parties with their space.
|
| Bit different for those in the high cost of living area.
| Hanging out is usually a pregame to go to bars because you
| can't fit very many people in the apartment. Not to say it
| doesn't happen just you can't exactly throw a party and have a
| big table of food and a bbq going and cornhole and beer pong
| and three available bathrooms all at the same time like you can
| out in the flyover states. At least not without dropping
| literally 10x as much on what would be a smaller property
| anyhow with no basement and not much of a lot.
|
| In many ways it seems like the old life of yesteryear these
| sorts of articles bemoan is still in fact the current year in
| many places if the housing prices support it. And there are
| many places that fly under the radar that aren't in those top 5
| major metro regions.
| Apreche wrote:
| This article isn't wrong, but it neglects to mention real estate,
| transportation, and lodging. A party needs a venue, and it needs
| guests. And the guests need a way to get to and from the venue.
| If they stay a long time, they need a place to sleep.
|
| People these days don't own real estate. Wealthy people own it
| all. Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes.
| It's kind of hard to throw a big party without a big home, a
| yard, a big kitchen, etc. Small apartments are for small get-
| togethers that probably don't register as parties.
|
| Likewise, the larger someone's home is, the more likely it is to
| be location in an area with low population density and little to
| no public transportation. Congrats, you can throw a party, but
| who are you inviting? All your friends are far away. How can they
| get there? How long can they stay? Can you accommodate them
| sleeping there? You aren't friends with your neighbors who can
| party easily. You are friends with people on the Internet who are
| strewn about the world.
|
| And of course, if you live in a major city with lots of friends,
| small apartment strikes again.
|
| This is part of the reason we have seen the rise of more public
| events like conventions. There's a hotel involved. It's a multi-
| day event worth traveling to. A lot of people you know will be
| there. It costs everyone some money, but it's not out of the
| realm to go a few times a year. Best part, nobody's home gets
| trashed!
| amgutier wrote:
| In my younger days I threw 100 person parties in a San
| Francisco apartment - it's standing room only for sure, but so
| is going to a crowded bar. And I've cooked for 15 without a
| dining table - you eat on the floor wherever you can find
| space.
|
| Now I don't disagree with your point; I'm not 22 anymore and
| live in the burbs and have a less full social calendar, largely
| due to the logistical overhead of finding my way into the city
| or getting friends from the city out here. But I do want to say
| you can have a lot of fun with a lot of friends in a small
| space with the right attitude :)
| esafak wrote:
| That's the spirit!
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| more importantly imo: maids and housewives.
|
| good riddance btw. but we need to adjust because partying is
| nice. we are still working ad if we have a free employee taking
| care of half our lives.
|
| welp, it's always a class issue.
| sokoloff wrote:
| > Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes.
|
| About 2/3 of households in the US own the home they live in.
| Renting is the minority, not the majority.
| Retric wrote:
| Owning an apartment isn't materially different than renting
| an apartment here. It's sometimes better as many apartments
| have free or rentable spaces available for parties as a
| selling point, but rarely can you use that space late in the
| evening.
|
| Owning a home in an HOA area can drastically cut down on what
| kinds of parties you can host.
| Gigachad wrote:
| To some extent but there are differences. You have housing
| stability, a fixed price going forward, the ability to
| renovate most of the internals, and the ability to affix
| things to the walls without worrying about marks when you
| have to move out.
| Retric wrote:
| I don't disagree, my comments was about the logistics of
| throwing a party.
| BirAdam wrote:
| Well... mostly fixed price. Property taxes go up every
| single year, and are now the largest single payment I
| make every year.
| TheAmazingRace wrote:
| This is a detail conveniently left out by home owners
| justifying their purchase, especially if they overpaid
| and have a higher interest rate on their mortgage on top
| of it. With a mortgage, the amount you pay is the
| expected floor you'll encounter, whereas with rent, the
| amount you pay is the maximum you'll deal with, at least
| for the duration of the lease agreement.
|
| Renting honestly can be a better deal, especially if you
| have the discipline to stick excess money in the market
| consistently. In fact, your returns are likely better
| than just using a house as a forced savings account. In
| my neck of the woods, we have seen rental inversion too.
| lesuorac wrote:
| > This is a detail conveniently left out by home owners
| justifying their purchase
|
| I mean you can phrase it this way. Or you can phrase it
| as homeowners are willing to play a premium for stability
| / forced savings. (And to be less generous, homeowners
| may be getting cheaper access to capital than otherwise
| available to a renter; espsecially as the homeowner locks
| in ~2% interest rate while a margin loan has increase to
| 10+% [1]).
|
| However, for markets with low construction and strong
| demand I'm pretty sure home ownership comes out ahead.
| Like look at housing prices in the bay area historically
| vs current rents. That said, you need a handicap'd rental
| market for renting to be worse so the general situation
| is it's better _iff_ you invest the difference.
|
| [1]: https://www.schwab.com/margin/margin-rates-and-
| requirements
| TheAmazingRace wrote:
| I will say, one huge advantage for home ownership over
| renting is when you are in a dual income household and
| have kids. Your lifestyle isn't going to be as compatible
| with moving around constantly trying to find a good deal
| (like I'm able to as a single person). And if you do plan
| to stay put for 10 years or so, you will most definitely
| come out ahead. But you really need to be in the right
| mindset and phase of your life for this to truly make
| sense. I often times see others not really ready to
| settle down rush and buy a home, only to end up
| regretting the decision a few years down the line,
| sometimes even sooner.
|
| I will also note, that the notion of having access to a
| cheap line of credit, like a HELOC, can be a fantastic
| tool when used correctly. But... I'm also seeing folks
| abuse this to keep up with the Joneses. And when times
| get tough, they won't be able to pivot and might end up
| defaulting and then losing their home in the process.
|
| The overall state of the economy will still need another
| major shakedown before those elements of society get
| their wake-up call. It sorta started happening with
| Liberation Day, but we bounced back rather quickly... so
| who knows when that would happen.
| orangecat wrote:
| _a fixed price going forward_
|
| Property taxes, HOA fees, maintenance, appliances
| randomly breaking and resulting in bills of thousands of
| dollars...
|
| _the ability to affix things to the walls without
| worrying about marks when you have to move out_
|
| If you care about the sale price you will worry about
| that, among many other things.
| roadside_picnic wrote:
| Thank you for mentioning this! There's this weird, persistent
| meme that large corporations are buying up all the housing
| and nobody owns homes anymore, which is fundamentally not
| supported by the data.
|
| There are shifting trends in generational home ownership
| rates, but these are still just initial trends we're seeing.
| If you look at the data [0] owner occupied has gone down from
| the 2000s housing bubble, but in the grand scheme of things
| is not even particularly low.
|
| People also have this mistaken belief that investors like
| Black Rock are buying up huge swaths of property, when in
| reality most "investment" properties are bought by families
| and individuals, consider anyone who know who owns an AirBNB
| rental or other rental property, they would be considered
| "investors".
|
| Most Americans still live in a house, and own that house (or
| at least, some member of their household owns it).
|
| 0. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
| floatingtorch wrote:
| Yes, it's surprised me how this meme was everywhere in the
| comments while the data does not support it. I'd bet it's
| splashy headlines in news outlets. Important to correct it
| so that policy is focused on what's most effective.
| iwontberude wrote:
| Blackrock sounds scary
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| People absolutely also conflate it with Blackstone and
| even Blackwater.
| lesuorac wrote:
| tbh conflating blackrock and blackstone is pretty fair.
| Their named similarly because it's the same people with
| just a slightly different business.
| arp242 wrote:
| I don't know about the United States, but in (parts of)
| Europe it is the case. "Nobody owns homes any more" is an
| exaggeration of course, but things are not alright in the
| housing market, in part because private corporations are
| buying up quite a large percentage of the housing stock to
| rent. I think in Ireland it's about half.
|
| Like I said, I don't know about the US. It's a big place
| and you're probably taking too much of a "grand scheme of
| things" view here. Aside from geographical diversity, total
| % of home ownership doesn't change that fast - lots of
| older people already own homes, their children often
| inherit those homes. Houses aren't like hotdog sales and
| numbers change slowly.
|
| What matters more is how much does an average 25 or 30 year
| old pay in housing costs? What hope does someone with a
| decent (but not exceptionally well-paid) job have of
| purchasing a house? A single % of home ownership across the
| entire population doesn't really capture that. Doubly so
| for such a large country as the US. I'm sure there are
| affordable homes out in the sticks, but also ... no jobs.
| That might work for the remote software dev, but not
| everyone is a software dev.
|
| In Ireland the total housing ownership has fallen, but not
| dramatically. However, the reality for people not already
| having a home is quite bleak. Buying a house now is
| significantly more expensive than it was a decade or two
| ago, as is renting. I could buy an apartment on my own ten
| years ago with a salary that really wasn't all that great.
| I'd have no hope today. My rent today is about three and a
| half times what it was 15 years ago. There is a generation
| of working 20 and 30-year old who are still living at home
| because they can't really afford to move out.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > "Nobody owns homes any more" is an exaggeration of
| course, but things are not alright in the housing market,
| in part because private corporations are buying up quite
| a large percentage of the housing stock to rent. I think
| in Ireland it's about half.
|
| This is a _really_ popular meme, but it's not true. About
| 50% of new homes are bought by owner-occupiers, about 25%
| by local authorities and approved housing bodies
| (https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/housing/local-
| authorit...), 10% pension funds and institutions (these
| are the 'private corporations' you refer to), and the
| remainder are small landlords, holiday homes etc etc.
|
| I think sometimes people see "50% of new homes are bought
| by owner occupiers" and read it to mean "and thus the
| other 50% are bought by evil corporations" (people also
| tend to forget about the 'new' bit; second-hand homes are
| much more likely to be bought by owner-occupiers, as
| REITs and pension funds largely don't want to touch them,
| and nor do approved housing bodies; local authorities do
| sometimes buy individual second-hand homes, usually from
| private landlords), but really the bulk of the remainder
| is social housing.
|
| The ridiculous rents are driven by the fact that we're
| just not building enough homes. Not that we're not
| building a lot; we have one of the highest per capital
| rates of homebuilding in the OECD, but there was a period
| of 7 or 8 years where we built almost nothing, and that's
| a really hard gap to bridge.
| circlefavshape wrote:
| Interesting! Would love to see a reference for your
| percentages
| rsynnott wrote:
| Up to 2023 in a slightly dodgy graphical representation
| here: https://housingireland.ie/composition-of-
| purchasers-of-new-h... (note that y axis is number of
| sales, but labels are percentage of sales!)
|
| If sufficiently masochistic you can also wrestle it out
| of the CSO's horrible website for 2024, I think.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| > I think in Ireland it's about half.
|
| It's about 1/3rd AFAIR.
|
| I do agree that Ireland has experienced a massive change
| in house prices from 15 years ago, but 15 years ago was
| the bottom of a bust after the boom so potentially not
| the right comparison point.
|
| I do mostly agree with your points, and it's really bad
| but it's important to contextualise some of those points.
| piltdownman wrote:
| In Ireland, approximately 41% of young adults aged 18 to
| 34 live with their parents as of 2024. It was 32% in
| 2011. This is an economic abhorration that has stolen
| significant independent adult lifespan from an entire
| generation.
|
| This is caused by an Irish cultural distaste for
| apartments - as they're generally not setup for modern
| living, are typified by poor soundproofing and
| insulation, and marred by fire insulation and other
| scandals - leading to a decreased stock. Include the
| Help-To-Buy scheme applicable only to new-build houses on
| greenfield estates, and the HAP social-welfare payment
| which set an artificial floor on rents for apartments,
| and its the case that the average apartment rent is
| 1.5-2x the cost of servicing the mortgage at a 90% LTV.
|
| This results in an average rent in Dublin of EUR2,500,
| with Open-market rents in the capital rising at annual
| rate of 5.2%. The most recent median (50th percentile)
| salary is EUR43,221, which comes from a 2023 CSO report.
| That's a monthly net salary of EUR3,000 per person.
|
| The National Asset Management Agency, set up in the
| recession to take on all the in-default property and
| babysit it till prices rose again, has a huge part to
| play. Combine this with a non-fit-for-purpose Planning
| and Appeals process, and you literally have builders
| suing the government for blocking developments.
|
| As of November 1st 2024, there were just over 2,400 homes
| available to rent across the ENTIRE COUNTRY OF IRELAND,
| down 14 per cent on the same date a year previously and
| well below the 2015-2019 average of almost 4,400.
|
| All of this laid the foundations for disaster. Now the
| increased materials and energy costs since Covid-19,
| combined with a relative collapse in our building sector
| prior, have meant that building apartments in Dublin has
| largely become commercially unfeasible, as construction
| costs are now higher than what buyers are willing to pay.
|
| https://www.independent.ie/business/unviable-
| construction-st...
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| One important data point is that houses have become much
| more expensive compared to income in the last decades. When
| I lived in CA, my plumber neighbor told me he bought his
| house in the 70s for 80000 on a salary of 40000. Today he
| would probably pay 800000 for the same house but make maybe
| 100000 or a little more.
|
| It's definitely harder to buy a house these days.
| selectodude wrote:
| $40,000 in 1975 is over a quarter million 2025 dollars.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| You can't buy on the west coast for a quarter million. A
| house big enough to start a family will likely start at a
| half million, and in some communities will come with
| hefty tax burdens.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| in 2025 anything vaguely desirable in a coastal-ish city
| is starting at more like 600-700k. actual decent houses
| will be 1MM or more.
|
| the folks in those areas, if you owned a house for the
| last 20 years, are now richer than ever due to that
| property appreciating. but the younger generation is
| absolutely screwed
| jen20 wrote:
| > if you owned a house for the last 20 years, are now
| richer than ever due to that property appreciating.
|
| Only if you sell it, and move somewhere with a much lower
| cost of housing.
| fragmede wrote:
| If there is a spare bedroom in your HCOL location,
| renting that out lets you get some incoming cash flow
| without having to move away to a LCOL location.
| aianus wrote:
| HELOC and never pay it off until you die
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The north coast has cheap housing.
| selectodude wrote:
| Sure, but you can certainly afford a house on the West
| Coast with an income of $250k.
| technotony wrote:
| Interest rates have fallen dramatically over this period,
| which increases the ratio that is affordable.
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| High interest with low price has the advantage that you
| can decide to pay more into the principal, reduce the
| interest you are paying and so reduce the total amount
| you are paying. You can't do that with high price and low
| interest.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Yes and: You can also refinance later if rates fall.
| bluGill wrote:
| At 18% interest which happened in the 70s your yearly
| payments would have been 14468.02 or 36% of your income.
| A couple years ago you could get 3% rates and so your
| payment on that house would be 40473.98 or 40% of your
| income, not much difference (and likely the house is
| larger). At todays 6% interest the payment is 57556.85 or
| 57% of your income and so not affordable, but this is a
| very recent thing.
| typewithrhythm wrote:
| This is both ignoring inflation, and the potential to
| shorten the duration of the loan.
| bluGill wrote:
| Inflation is a factor in a few years but never today. Now
| inithe 1970s high inflation meant that a house you can
| barely afford becomes a small part of the budget in a
| couple years while the small inflation of today means a
| house you can barely afford today is still a big part of
| the budget in 5 years - but that is not a consideration
| of today.
| typewithrhythm wrote:
| It absolutely is a massive factor; because people plan a
| few years ahead. Consider how much it changes what you
| can afford if you save one year worth of payments in each
| case.
|
| There is also less need to get the maximum possible loan
| if house prices are lower as a ratio to income.
| dylan604 wrote:
| the higher prices are affected by the corporate buying of
| single family homes. for every home a corp buys, that's
| one less for individuals to buy. if the number of buyers
| remains the same but fewer homes are available, prices go
| up--seller's market. yes, prices go up adjusted for...,
| but inventory more competitively sought. the other issue
| is that the average buyer is looking to buy with
| financing while corps are paying cash. that makes for
| such a smoother transition for the seller that it is hard
| for them to turn down cash offers.
|
| after corps, we have foreign buyers also coming in with
| cash offers. i know of one specific house that is empty
| for the majority of the year purchased by foreign owners
| specifically for their kid to live while attending
| college. the kid chose to _not_ go to that school, so the
| house sits empty except for when some property manager
| comes by to "check in" on the place.
|
| so while this thread is discussing still showing decent
| ownership percentages, those numbers are glossing over
| some of the "trends" in modern real estate.
| shlant wrote:
| > affected by the corporate buying of single family homes
|
| > after corps, we have foreign buyers also coming in with
| cash offers
|
| As someone mentioned earlier in the thread, these are
| memes that are not actually backed by data - commonly
| perpetuated by groups that blame most issues on
| billionaires/corporations/investment firms.
| dylan604 wrote:
| So you're insinuating that the specific example of a
| house sitting empty owned by a foreign buyer is made up?
|
| In my neighborhood specifically, there are homes being
| bought not by single families but specifically buy
| management companies so they can then rent the property.
| To deny this happens is just as much of a stick your head
| in the sand meme as what you are accusing me of.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| They're saying it's overemphasized, which is why we don't
| rely on anecdata.
| orangecat wrote:
| _So you 're insinuating that the specific example of a
| house sitting empty owned by a foreign buyer is made up?_
|
| I'm sure that happens occasionally. It's not nearly as
| significant as exclusionary zoning and other bad policies
| that prevent housing from being built.
|
| _In my neighborhood specifically, there are homes being
| bought not by single families but specifically buy
| management companies so they can then rent the property_
|
| Even in that case, the homes are still on the market.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Management companies will only buy a house if they think
| they can profit on it, and the price of the house is a
| cost for them too. This links the affordability of both
| types of housing: low rents can't support expensive real
| estate, and vice versa. The rental payments have to pay
| for the management company's mortgage.
| bpt3 wrote:
| No one is denying that it ever happens. It happens in so
| few numbers that it has no impact on the overall real
| estate market.
|
| That's why your anecdote is meaningless and can be
| dismissed immediately.
| exoverito wrote:
| It's overwhelmingly due to monetary policy which has
| inflated assets and depreciated real wages for decades.
|
| https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
|
| Restrictive zoning laws preventing construction in
| coastal cities is also a major factor. The cities which
| see the greatest declines in rents have the greatest
| increases in supply.
|
| https://www.nmhc.org/contentassets/f9a5ef47d06143e6b8355c
| fad...
| dr-smooth wrote:
| Sorry, there's no way a plumber in the 70s made 40K.
| parineum wrote:
| A good, experienced plumber would make a lot more than
| that in CA.
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| These are the numbers my neighbor gave me. No idea how
| accurate they are. I think it's well known that the
| average house price to income ratio has gone up a lot in
| the last decades.
| conductr wrote:
| > There's this weird, persistent meme that large
| corporations are buying up all the housing and nobody owns
| homes anymore, which is fundamentally not supported by the
| data.
|
| They are and the trend is there. The housing market moves
| slowly and it takes time to chip away enough at the larger
| stat. Once the boomer's age out, even with wealth and asset
| transfer, let's revisit this and see how it looks. I'd bet
| 2/3 ownership looks more like 1/2 or less by then, which is
| a significant drop and it probably will only continue from
| there.
| hnpolicestate wrote:
| This is misleading. The trend is going in the opposite
| direction and the figure is closer to 53% https://www.reddit.
| com/r/neoliberal/comments/1ew7tp6/no_67_o...
| danaris wrote:
| But what's the demographic breakdown of this?
|
| How many of that 2/3 is households that have owned the home
| for 20+ years--ie, since before the subprime crash?
|
| How many of that 2/3 is households of people 65+? And how
| many is people under 30? Partying is still largely a young
| people's game, and even if your "household" owns the home you
| live in, if that's your parents or grandparents, you're much
| less likely to be hosting parties there.
| bethekidyouwant wrote:
| Yeah, but the 2/3 of people are old boomers that don't party.
| asdff wrote:
| That is severely overrepresented by old farts who don't
| party. Among people who party most probably rent.
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| For adults under 35, less than 38% own their own home and the
| rate is falling.
|
| Also, it varies quite a lot by state. Over 3/4 of adults own
| their own home in West Virginia, but in New York it's a bit
| over 1/2.
| BirAdam wrote:
| Population also varies wildly by state, and New York makes
| up a far larger percentage of the USA than does West
| Virginia.
| torginus wrote:
| yeah, as an East European, it's crazy that our real estate
| prices are basically the same as the non-super expensive US
| cities, and we make like one-fifth the salary.
|
| In fact I just checked and the ratio of avg salary to real
| estate prices is about the same as in New York.
| p_j_w wrote:
| >People these days don't own real estate. Wealthy people own it
| all.
|
| The article says a similar decline is seen among the wealthy.
| mathiaspoint wrote:
| My sister and her husband throw a pretty great annual Halloween
| party at the house they rent which is 1-2 hours from the
| nearest city and a good 15-20 minutes from the nearest town.
|
| I don't think the real estate situation helps but I think
| there's a deeper social problem driving both of those effects.
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| "People these days don't own real estate. Wealthy people own it
| all. Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes.
| "
|
| This is only true in some HCOL places ands big cities. Plenty
| of people own homes.
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| Not in high-density areas like cities. People own homes in
| low density areas (middle of nowhere), which makes them
| isolated, hence no communal activities like partying.
| ecshafer wrote:
| In Philadelphia everyone I knew owned a home (condo,
| townhouse, rowhome or stand alone) by 30 basically.
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| Not trying to be offensive, but I would add second and
| third tier cities as viable for home ownership. Not the
| first tier.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| I'm not convinced. I live in Berlin and everyone is living in a
| flat, yet I've had my fair share of home parties, even in small
| two room apartments where half the party spilled out to the
| stairwell.
| libertine wrote:
| I don't think Berlin is a good example because partying is
| kind of part of the city subculture.
|
| People travel there literally to party.
| Tainnor wrote:
| People travel to Berlin to go party in clubs, not for home
| parties.
|
| Partying in someone's apartment is a thing in probably
| every reasonably sized city in Europe, not just Berlin.
| Although you should probably alert your neighbours.
| dylan604 wrote:
| you could alert your neighbors, or better yet, invite
| them. alerting them is nice, but they could still get
| annoyed and complain, but someone _at_ the party isn 't
| going be doing much complaining
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Berlin has public transportation. I have it
| here in Trondheim, Norway - but only one town that I've lived
| in the states had busses. They didn't run all night, on
| Sunday, nor did they visit all areas of the somewhat small
| town. (I'm from the US, lived more places there than I have
| in Norway)
|
| Other places had taxis (that you couldn't order ahead of time
| to get to work on time) and some had none until they
| uber/lyft. (Don't know the current situation).
|
| I'm going to guess the other thing Berlin has is safe areas
| to walk. I can go to a party and walk home, safely on walking
| paths complete with shortcuts, without even being harassed by
| the police and risk getting arrested and in jail for the
| night (for public intoxication). None of these were luxuries
| I had in the states.
|
| And I'll say that yes, I've been in some small apartments -
| but only some folks with small apartments can host. You
| probably have no clue how many would host if they only had
| enough space, but a small apartment with 2 adults that have
| hobbies limits things.
| chris_va wrote:
| Trondheim also has a university (which increases the odds
| of a party happening), and one could also walk across the
| entire city in less than an hour :). Most cities in the US
| suffer from being designed around cars, but that has not
| changed in the last 50 years, so I don't think it explains
| the decline.
|
| It's been years, but I hope Den Gode Nabo is still fun.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| Part of the reason you can walk across the city in this
| time is because it is really walkable. I'm from the
| Midwest - Trondheim is the biggest city I've lived in but
| more walkable than any of them. I'll add that the "across
| the entire city in less than an hour" isn't as true as it
| once was, especially when you consider that places like
| Klaebu are part of the city now and the population has
| grown. Byasen would take me over an hour to walk to.
|
| Den Gode Nabo is still about, but its been years since
| I've been there :)
| conductr wrote:
| I don't think Berlin life corresponds much to USA life in
| this regard. We mostly have suburban sprawl and many areas
| that would be similarly dense, are not very populated with
| children/teens (because parent's often move to the suburbs)
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| US suburbs have not changed. I grew up in US suburbs (in the
| 70's and early 80's) and there was partying.
|
| My own personal theory? Music sucks now, ha ha.
| yesfitz wrote:
| US suburbs have very much changed!
|
| The median new home size skyrocketed in the '80s.[1]
|
| Many of the post-war suburbs were planned communities built
| with schools, churches, grocery stores, and other necessities
| within walking distance.[2] Compare that to developments
| today (and since the '90s), that are all housing, lack
| sidewalks, and require a car to get to necessities.
|
| Serendipity doesn't happen when everyone's in cars. You don't
| pull over to invite an acquaintance over for a beer or offer
| to watch their kids.
|
| 1: https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/average-home-
| size/#smal...
|
| 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levitt_%26_Sons#Construction
| _o...
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Good point. Car culture was nonetheless a thing even in the
| 70's though where I grew up up. And those 70's suburbs are
| still there. So I am not sure why they are still not
| partying in Overland Park and Prairie Village, Kansas.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| The consumption of music has changed.
|
| I almost never meet people who like the same bands as I do. I
| can listen to new music that I love at home. If I go to a bar
| or a party I'm going to mostly hear music I don't like, and
| if I do like it, I could have already heard it at home.
|
| Maybe that is part of it
| esafak wrote:
| People rarely like music made decades after they were young;
| tastes settle.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I like plenty of current music. Not pop music though. (My
| kids don't seem to either.)
| os2warpman wrote:
| >People these days don't own real estate.
|
| The home ownership rate has been 64%, plus or minus about 1%,
| for the last 45 years.
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S
| cantSpellSober wrote:
| The number of _first-time_ home owners has plummeted though
|
| https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics/research-
| rep...
| biker142541 wrote:
| Perhaps, but what about the median age of buyers? That tells
| a more complete story here
| https://www.axios.com/2024/11/04/home-buyer-age-older
| os2warpman wrote:
| The median age of buyers has increased from 31 in 2004 to
| 38 in 2024.
|
| The median age of the population of the United States has
| increased from 35.3 in 2000 to 38.8 in 2020. (hmmmmm)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_St
| a...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_Un
| i...
|
| As the population pyramid of the US, which is already a
| "population Empire State Building", further morphs into a
| "Population Baseball Diamond", I expect the median age of
| all buyers to increase and the percentage of owners by age
| group in the younger cohorts to decrease.
|
| Additionally, as the median age increases, because older
| people tend to have more money, I expect home prices to
| continue to increase.
|
| Honestly, I expect home prices to spike by 2035-2040 as the
| current crop of 50-60-year-olds reach retirement realizing
| that their only real prospect of not starving to death in
| retirement is the main (and often only) asset: their home.
|
| That will further stress younger folks, but people don't
| seem to care and anyone who expresses concern is denigrated
| as a communist so what is to be done?
|
| Regardless, with the homeownership rate for "under 35"
| fluctuating between ~41% in 1982 and ~37% in 2024 "nobody
| owns shit no mo" is still false.
|
| https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/charts/fig07.pdf
| neaden wrote:
| But presumably we are talking about the parents of
| teenagers who would own the homes for these parties, so
| people who are 40+
| echelon wrote:
| Phones are the reason.
|
| Everyone gets quick and lazy dopamine from phones. Why bother
| with anything else?
|
| Think about how much time goes into phones. Who has time to
| plan? Who has time to coordinate?
|
| Phones are probably why the birth rate is declining too.
|
| You don't even need a house to party. You can use a pavilion
| at a park, go out in the woods like the rednecks I grew up
| around did, party at the trailer park. Homes are by no means
| a limiting factor.
|
| It's 100% our phones.
| rurp wrote:
| The Smartphone Theory of Everything probably doesn't
| explain all of the recent social changes, nothing is that
| simple, but it sure does correlate really well with all
| kind of trends since they became widespread. Casual
| socializing, partying, friendships, drinking, and sex all
| began to plummet around the same time, while loneliness and
| depression increased.
|
| Anecdotally is makes a lot of sense as well. Most of the
| people I know, including myself, spend an awful lot of time
| on their phones and the internet in general. All of those
| hours have to come at the expense of other activities.
|
| When I was in my 20s I spent an unusual amount of time (for
| the era) alone on my computer, but since most people were
| still quite social it was easy to hop into various
| activities. Now that nearly everyone is spending a bunch of
| time alone on their phone the real life social networks
| have begun to fray.
|
| Some of the changes are for the better (ie. fewer teen
| pregnancies) but I think these trends are quite bad
| overall, without a clear solution. It's probably not a
| coincidence that political polarization and extremism has
| also increased during this time. Banning smart phones in
| schools seems like a step in the right direction, albeit a
| tiny one. Hopefully we can come up with more.
| echelon wrote:
| 100%.
|
| > All of those hours have to come at the expense of other
| activities.
|
| It all adds up. Five minutes here, thirty minutes there.
| It all has to come from something.
|
| The smartphone usage takes away in subtle ways too. Time
| spent idle is time that the brain can subconsciously
| solve things and work out interdependencies and
| relationships. If you put that time on YouTube, Reddit,
| whatever, then your brain is fully consumed with the
| dopamine drip.
|
| Smartphones have added a tremendous amount of value to
| society, but it hasn't been without cost.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > People these days don't own real estate. Wealthy people own
| it all. Normal people are renting apartments or portions of
| homes.
|
| If you look at a graph of home ownership in the US by cohort at
| various points in time (see, e.g., https://www.census.gov/libra
| ry/stories/2018/08/homeownership...), while the rates are
| somewhat lower, between the highest point and the lowest point
| the difference is at worst 10 percentage points.
|
| This sentiment strikes me a lot more as people in their 20's
| complaining that they're poor because they don't have the
| financial resources of someone in their 40's, despite having
| more resources than the latter did at their age.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| It is really strange to read complaints that the vast vast
| majority of 20 somethings have no chance of competing against
| older established households in the housing market.
|
| I would hope so, otherwise that would mean the country/locale
| is so bad that older households are packing their bags and
| fleeing.
|
| So the most desirable properties, such as large SFHs,
| townhouses, penthouses, etc... within a short driving
| distance of an attractive city will likely be owned by the
| latter, by definition.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| The same managers - that then require asses in seats,
| keeping downtown valuable as investment, also own the
| mansion within driving distance. Might there be the remote
| possibility, of a no-win-scenario for the young, which
| results in violence? No way.
| typewithrhythm wrote:
| It's not a matter of competition around current supply,
| it's a complaint about policy that has lead to a decline in
| what a 20-something can purchase over time.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > It is really strange to read complaints that the vast
| vast majority of 20 somethings have no chance of competing
| against older established households in the housing market.
|
| Not to mention Private Equity and huge real estate
| investment firms that vacuum up a significant (if small)
| number of homes. Even if that 20 something could scrape
| together a 20% down payment and make an offer for asking
| price, they're going to get beaten by some corporation
| buying with cash.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| This seems like a tautology, an offer with less
| conditions attached is more attractive than another offer
| at the same price with more conditions.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| > This sentiment strikes me a lot more as people in their
| 20's complaining that they're poor because they don't have
| the financial resources of someone in their 40's, despite
| having more resources than the latter did at their age.
|
| Home prices have doubled over the past 20 years, twice the
| rate of income increases
|
| This isn't just "complaining"
| prewett wrote:
| There's been 65% inflation over the past 20 years, so to
| properly compare housing prices you need to multiply the 20
| years ago price by 1.65. A house that doubled in price in
| twenty years only increased by 20% in terms of actual
| purchasing power (2.0 / 1.65).
|
| [1] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
| ValentinPearce wrote:
| Are wages indexed on inflation ? If they increase slower,
| wouldn't that mean the 20% increase represents more than
| that ?
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Housing prices doubling accounts for inflation.
|
| In 2000 a median house would cost 3x the median income,
| in 2025 it's 6x (and in some cities, 8x or more)
|
| Affordability _has_ changed, it 's well documented fact.
| This isn't napkin math or whinging.
| BlackjackCF wrote:
| I've seen homes double in price in some areas just during
| Covid
| esafak wrote:
| As people fleed from even more expensive cities since
| they could now work remotely.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| not the whole story, housing prices also increased in
| more expensive cities
| HEmanZ wrote:
| That's the absolute percentage difference. Look at the under
| 35 category, it's literally down 25%. That means 1/4 people
| that would have owned a house in that age group don't now.
| Under 45 is a relative drop of ~17%, so about 1/5. One in
| four to one in five people is more than enough to see an
| effect.
|
| I doubt it's the only cause at all, this anti-social
| ("Bowling Alone") trend has been going on for generations,
| and probably has multiple causes. But the US housing crunch
| on young people is adding to it.
|
| And this damn attitude of "the younger generations are just
| entitled weenies" about housing is about the most infuriating
| attitude in the world. My parents bought their first house on
| a single earners blue collar salary at the age of 27. That
| house, with almost no updates, now literally needs a top 1%
| salary and payments for 30 years to be able to afford. Don't
| tell the kids to stop whining when they're watching older
| generations gobble up their future in the name of preserving
| property values.
| torginus wrote:
| And for the under-35s, I wonder just what percentage got
| their homes from their parents, who invested in properties
| decades ago.
| api wrote:
| That's for the whole country. This site is very heavily
| biased toward people who live in major cities, where real
| estate has in fact become the purview of only the rich.
|
| Short version of the history:
|
| Starting in the late 1990s, you had a super-concentration of
| both good jobs and interesting culture in a short list of
| cities: SF Bay, New York, LA/OC, Seattle, and a few others. I
| remember growing up during this period and the whole cultural
| zeitgeist was "if you don't live in one of those cities, you
| can't do anything."
|
| These cities have always had an allure, especially creative
| centers like LA and NYC, but what I mean is that it got much
| more extreme. It fits with the general cultural zeitgeist of
| everything centralizing and going to the extreme right side
| in an increasingly tight power-law distribution.
|
| This was followed by _insane_ real estate hyperinflation in
| those cities, of course, because if you try to take all the
| "interesting" stuff in the world's largest economy and a
| nation of 300+ million people and cram it into a few metros,
| that happens.
|
| The rest of the country still has a lot of affordable real
| estate, less so than it used to -- RE has appreciated
| _everywhere_ and not just in the US -- but it 's far less
| insane than the top-tier cities.
|
| I post this every chance I get:
|
| https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-
| every...
| parineum wrote:
| > Starting in the late 1990s...
|
| How old were you then?
|
| People have a tendency to remember some time period when
| everything was carefree and you didn't have to worry about
| how much stuff cost and all this new, great stuff was
| happening. And then you find out they were 12 and the time
| where they think all that went downhill was when they were
| 20.
| api wrote:
| 18-22
|
| I've asked older people about this for this very reason,
| and they've generally agreed with me. There's always been
| an allure to big cities but it went into overdrive
| starting in the late 90s - early 2000s.
|
| As for real estate prices, that's objective. You can
| easily look that up. RE prices went _insane_ starting in
| the 2000s with the 2008 crash only being a brief pull-
| back in a long bull run. You can also clearly see the
| divergence with big top-tier cities appreciating at a
| much faster rate than smaller cities. You can see it in
| the numbers.
|
| Look into the origin of early personal computers. They're
| from all over: Albuquerque (MITS), Dallas (TI, Tandy),
| Boston (DEC), Miami (IBM PC), Philadelphia (Commodore),
| Seattle (several), etc. In the early 2000s if we re-did
| the PC revolution it would all be from the SF Bay,
| because by then if you were doing anything cutting edge
| in computing it had to be in the Bay Area.
| esafak wrote:
| PC technology consolidated, as things naturally do.
| Remote work should enable decentralization again.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| The general feeling of "things were better and looking
| more upward in the 90s" is pretty common across
| generations. 9/11 was kind of the 21st century's market
| crash of '29
| api wrote:
| The US still has not recovered from 9/11. IMHO the
| terrorists won. They got quite a bit of what they wanted.
| aksss wrote:
| You need a home to party? News to my younger self. Parties in
| crowded shitty apartments, outdoors, or even in cars were the
| norm when we were young.
|
| This complaint - we don't have nice houses so we can't party -
| is unintentionally emblematic of the root issue in misaligned
| expectations and excuses for realigned priorities. Nobody
| Inknew when young had houses either.
|
| Look, it's not obviously bad to me that young people party
| less. Blame gaming, blame some resurgent conservative cultural
| values, blame the internet or even laziness. Maybe the youth
| today just have better things to do, and that okay. Binge
| drinking, drugs, and stupid decisions aren't necessary good
| investments in time, and many, many, friends from back in the
| day didn't survive it. Like less kids smoking cigarettes, maybe
| this is a good thing (for them and all of us).
|
| But it's ridiculous to try and turn this behavioral trend into
| some manifesto on housing inequality. Give me a break.
| simplicio wrote:
| Eh, I feel like my (and most peoples) main exposure to house
| parties was in HS and college when basically no one owns their
| own home. Rented apartments, houses and family homes seemed to
| work fine then, I can't really think why that wouldn't be the
| case now.
|
| Note the age-group with the biggest drop is 15-24, its not like
| the average 18 year old owned their own home circa 1995.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > People these days don't own real estate. Wealthy people own
| it all. Normal people are renting apartments or portions of
| homes. It's kind of hard to throw a big party without a big
| home, a yard, a big kitchen, etc. Small apartments are for
| small get-togethers that probably don't register as parties.
|
| This is baffling to me. Most of the parties I went to in high
| school, college, and my 20s were in people's tiny apartments,
| small rented houses, and small yards.
|
| Maybe expectations changed? Now it seems more like people feel
| the need to get ready before going out, to bring something, to
| pre-coordinate to arrive with a group of friends, to have a lot
| of space, to have everything pre-cleaned and ready to be the
| background in photos, and maybe even to have a meat and cheese
| platter that gets posted to social media. It seems there's much
| less willingness to just go places, be cramped, and just hang
| out.
| macawfish wrote:
| People are tired
| ammanley wrote:
| always so much
| fundad wrote:
| And partying is expensive
| 98codes wrote:
| Good insights -- people now have to have their party look
| good for their social feeds: insta, tiktok, whatever. I'm
| forever thankful that I never had to even think about that,
| and even if people were taking pictures, nobody gave a damn
| about the background.
| fathomdeez wrote:
| I go through this with my wife for every party we throw.
| She wants the house cleaned, table set, food spread ready,
| seasonal cocktails mixed, furniture moved around,
| decorations just so, etc.
|
| I'm like here's a giant thing of ice cold booze have fun.
| floren wrote:
| I know this struggle, and the best I've been able to do
| is to push every time for limited scope. Let's just get
| pizzas instead of cooking 3 different mains and having a
| cheese plate, 4 bowls of chips, etc. Social media has
| really done a number on people (see also those
| omnipresent balloon arches)
| lurk2 wrote:
| People deep cleaned their houses for parties long before
| social media and smartphones came along.
| starkparker wrote:
| Gen Z in particular is deathly afraid of having an earnest
| but unflattering moment captured in someone else's TikTok and
| distributed to the entire planet.
| rgblambda wrote:
| Whenever I watch movies/TV shows set in the future but
| released before the invention of the camera phone, I just
| insert some headcanon that future society realised the
| evils of uploading a recording of someone to social media
| without permission, and decided to ban the cursed devices.
| lurk2 wrote:
| What are you basing that off of?
| WorldPeas wrote:
| there are several videos with captions like "bro is
| dancing" on the internet where the one person trying to
| be themselves at the function is recorded. It's sad
| really, at many bigger name venues I see fewer people
| dancing now, though maybe it's because the drinks aren't
| as cheap as they used to be.
| latency-guy2 wrote:
| The stakes are naturally higher and harsher than at any
| point in history. The government, all kinds, are
| reinforcing it, and governments are entirely reflective of
| society, there is no washing your hands of this
| responsibility.
|
| Gen-Z is not only completely in the right in being
| sheepish, their predecessors are entirely to blame, and
| every attempt to claim they were not a part of the
| increasing surveillance state is a lie.
|
| Even the older members of Gen-Z can be blamed to a small
| degree.
|
| There is no cure
| sershe wrote:
| That reminds me of an article I can't find anymore on the
| plight of the American poor couple trying to raise a child in a
| _gasp_ 900sqft. Uh, check real estate sqft averages around the
| world?
|
| I never was much of a partier as a teen but I've been to a few,
| and they were all in flats ranging from much smaller than an
| American house to literally one room sometimes with 15 people
| in it. Had no problem falling asleep drunk on somebody's
| kitchen floor or on a couch in a room with a bunch of other
| people.
|
| Even in the US a dorm room (a tiny, rented place) is a
| stereotyped party location.
|
| Oh and ofc numbers are wrong. The houses in the US are bigger
| than ever and homeownership rate is smth like 60%.
| mindslight wrote:
| This is such weird reasoning. When you're young and throwing
| parties where you're implicitly inviting a whole lot of people
| who you don't know, they will be bringing random chaos and you
| want to appear judgement proof and have it be someone else's
| property getting accelerated wear and tear. By the time you own
| a house with a yard, you're only inviting people you already
| know, with maybe one layer of transitive trust. Perhaps this
| focus on owning a house as the first step to doing anything
| points to the real problem though?
| jajko wrote:
| Jeez, youngish people feeling left out on investing into real
| estate see it as root of most of problems this world is facing
| now.
|
| Sorry but can't agree, as do most folks here backing up with
| some hard data. That 'glass is half-empty' approach to daily
| life ain't healthy long term, ever thought about that?
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| This is just absolute total nonsense. Normal people do own real
| estate. Lots of people rented back then and do now. Friends
| were "far away" back then too, they took their cars, bummed
| rides, took buses, whatever. Where do they sleep? Where do you
| think they slept back then? The floor, the couch, the lawn, or
| they didn't sleep at all and just went home in the morning.
| ike2792 wrote:
| I'm not saying this isn't part of the problem, but my
| experience has been different. When I was in my 20s, my friends
| and I all lived in apartments and had parties fairly often. I
| recall that when I was a kid in the 90s my parents often went
| to small house parties as well. Now, in my 40s, neither I nor
| anyone I know ever goes to parties despite us all owning houses
| and cars and living fairly close to one another.
|
| My theory is that people have fewer parties because people have
| gotten flakier about attending larger social events. It is much
| easier to cancel plans at the last minute with a text or a
| social media DM, and people always seem to want to keep their
| options open. We've moved to getting together only with one
| other couple/family at a time b/c any time we try to have
| larger group events half of the invite list will cancel the day
| of.
| leptons wrote:
| No, owning a house does not give you more license to throw a
| party. Not owning a car never stopped anyone determined to go
| to a party. A place to sleep? What kind of party are you
| imagining in your head? One where people travel hundreds of
| miles and need a hotel? Your take is ridiculous. People party
| in small apartments all the time, I've been to hundreds. I took
| the bus there many times, or got rides from other friends going
| to the party, and now ride-sharing is a thing. Sleep?? That was
| never, ever part of the equation. I know it's a tired cliche,
| and usually used as a troll, but I can confidently say that
| _you obviously don 't get invited to many parties_.
| ianferrel wrote:
| Homeownership rates in the US fluctuate, but are basically flat
| over the past ~45 years.
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S
| carabiner wrote:
| Spending all of your time studying in high school and college is
| your best hope at landing in the vanishing middle class. With
| decreasing job security as well as hyperinflation, continuing
| that work ethic into your 20s and 30s is quite reasonable.
| Everyone is too exhausted to party.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| In college we'd only study 3 or 4 days a week to make room for
| the drinking
| carabiner wrote:
| In mine, we studied 7 days a week.
| searine wrote:
| It's cause were poor.
| LeanderK wrote:
| Purely anecdotal, but I was recently reflecting at the current
| trend of people posting really extensive morning routines. Waking
| up, meditation, yoga, gym, shower, eating breakfast, meal-
| prepping,....having a whole day before your day starts. While
| they should impress you with their healthiness and discipline, I
| just thought how utterly lonely and sterile most of them look
| like. And you're completely done after work if this is your
| morning, you can just go to bed and repeat the same the next day.
| I found it quite sad, actually.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I don't believe those are real. People are simply posting that
| because it's the kind of post that gets likes. Influencer life
| is a mirage.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| No, it's real. I have AuDHD and very strictly defined
| routines are how I manage to function day-to-day. It's not a
| productivity hack or how I'll be a billionaire in 5 years
| though, like scrollheads often promote. It's just how my
| brain works. A small fraction of those influencers might also
| be neurodivergent and sincerely posting what works for them.
| noitpmeder wrote:
| I think what OP is saying are fake are the hoards of people
| posting it on their social/influencer accounts. Sure, some
| people have very rigid and strict routines that they need
| to get through their day, but (I'd agree with OP) that it's
| likely the vast majority are "virtue-signaling".
| Barrin92 wrote:
| It's an observation that precedes likes and modern
| influencers, as Baudrillard noticed in his 1989 book
| _America_ :
|
| _" The skateboarder with his Walkman, the intellectual
| working on his wordprocessor, the Bronx breakdancer whirling
| frantically in the Roxy, the jogger and the body-builder:
| everywhere, whether in regard to the body or the mental
| faculties, you find the same blank solitude, the same
| narcissistic refraction. This omnipresent cult of the body is
| extraordinary. [...] This 'into' is the key to everything.
| The point is not to be nor even to have a body, but to be
| into your own body. Into your sexuality, into your own
| desire. Into your own functions, as if they were energy
| differentials or video screens. The hedonism of the 'into'
| [...]"_
|
| The replacement of a genuine social life with a kind of
| machine like, solitary optimization, the point of American
| Psycho basically, is very much real, common among ordinary
| people. This is every "second brain" note taking fanatic who
| never actually does anything but collect notes.
|
| _" What people are contemplating on their word-processor
| screens is the operation of their own brains. It is not
| entrails that we try to interpret these days, nor even hearts
| or facial expressions; it is, quite simply, the brain. We
| want to expose to view its billions of connections and watch
| itoperating like a video-game. All this cerebral, electronic
| snobbery is hugely affected - far from being the sign of a
| superior knowledge of humanity, it is merely the mark of a
| simplified theory, since the human being is here reduced to
| the terminal excrescence of his or her spinal chord."_
| Balgair wrote:
| Sounds like a lonely cockatoo that overly preens itself to the
| point that it pulls out it's feathers.
| deadbabe wrote:
| I mean everything you listed there could be done within 2 hours
| if you do it all at home. Not sure what the big deal is, you
| wake up at 7 and you're ready for the day by 9.
|
| But oh yea maybe laying in bed for an hour doom scrolling on
| your phone before you finally get up is a more efficient use of
| time.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| Well, the loneliness coming through on those posts might just
| be from the fact that the people that are posting on social
| media like that are, in fact, lonely and looking for
| connection. I have a pretty extensive morning routine of
| practicing music, sitting for meditation/pranayama, food,
| shower all before work, and then Muay Thai or yoga or strength
| training in the evening. I just don't post it on social media
| because I don't have social media. I still go out to see
| music/art and friends etc, but I also live in NYC where it's
| easy to do that.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| What are they supposed to do instead? If you can't get together
| to drink with friends in the evening, this is a very good
| option.
| jongjong wrote:
| People don't party if their life is bad.
| avhception wrote:
| I broadly agree with the article.
|
| I'm also wondering if the rising political polarization is at
| least in part caused by the "antisocial" phenomenon. If you're
| not exposed to a spectrum of political worldviews through being
| involved with all these people you randomly met back in the day,
| it becomes easier to dehumanize the people you disagree with. You
| also never have to listen to their talking points, because you
| can just block them out online.
| strangefellow wrote:
| It's also the opposite. People are exposed to the most extreme,
| unhinged, and horrifying aspects of humanity on a continuous
| basis through every form of media and connectivity. It shapes
| your unconscious risk/reward expectations around forming
| connections. Someone invites you over to their house for
| dinner? You just saw a YouTube video about a woman who mixes
| her urine into her cooking and feeds it to unsuspecting guests
| to heal what ails them. Almost every form of engaging with the
| world these days -- except genuinely connecting with others --
| makes genuinely connecting with others feel riskier than it is.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The talking points themselves have got much worse. So many
| things are now mainstream, especially in racism, that would
| have been kept out of "polite company" previously. It's not
| that social media has made people less aware of other's
| political views, it's made them _more_ aware, which is why they
| hate each other. Entire accounts exist (libsoftiktok) for the
| purpose of exposing people to views which they will hate, so
| they can get angry and ramp up their rhetoric.
| generalenvelope wrote:
| It feels ridiculous not to mention car dependence and the things
| that enabled it: restrictive zoning, parking minimums, the car
| lobby.
|
| In the last 50 years, the US has bulldozed dense, mixed used
| housing that enabled community and tight knit neighborhoods. More
| economically/socially viable housing (read: an apartment on top
| of a business) has literally been banned in much of the US.
| Ensuring that there's a large plot of asphalt to house personal
| vehicles that are ever increasing in size is baked into zoning
| laws (though some cities have finally banned parking minimums).
| Suburbia sprawls, literally requiring most of the country to own
| a car.
|
| I would love to see some data on this, but my intuition is that
| everyone is physically farther away as a result, which weakens
| their general connection and likelihood to party together, and
| makes it harder for them to get to/from a party in the first
| place.
|
| There's other feasible side effects too like less savings due to
| the cost of owning a car (I've seen estimates of the US average
| exceeding $10k/yr), or expensive housing exacerbated by all of
| the above - less space for housing due to roads/parking (and the
| cost rising as a direct result of a developer needing to include
| parking), and rising taxes to finance more and more
| infrastructure: suburban sprawl means more roads, pipes,
| electrical lines, while contributing significantly less economic
| value (Strong Towns has done some great graphics on how much
| dense urban areas subsidize their sprawling single family home
| filled counterparts).
| Gigachad wrote:
| It's car dependence, but the impacts were delayed because
| people used to just drink and drive. Now that's rightfully seen
| as unacceptable, but we are still left with car dependence. So
| people just don't leave home now.
| frollogaston wrote:
| It was totally unacceptable to drink and drive in the 2000s,
| and the sharp decline didn't start until right after. You'd
| also find a similar decline in socializing among non-driving-
| age children.
| 9rx wrote:
| It was totally unacceptable in the 2000s, but there still
| remained a lot of "...but I can probably get away with it".
| That has declined in the interim.
| asdff wrote:
| The sprawl of suburbia isn't so much outside the top 5-10ish
| cities. Even "growing" places like Columbus OH in the midwest,
| you can go from cornfield to cornfield across the built
| environment in probably 25 miles and about as many minutes on
| the freeway network that is entirely uncongested since it is so
| overbuilt for the population (unlike in those top 5 places
| where it may be underbuilt). By and large that is how the bulk
| of the country looks and operates. The idea that you'd drive an
| hour and still be in the same metro region is this big
| exception that people living in that exception assume must be
| the norm, but really isn't.
| Roguelazer wrote:
| I mean, ~90M people live in one of the top 10 metro areas,
| which is about 1/4 of the country. Not sure that I'd
| necessarily call that an "exception".
| asdff wrote:
| So 75% lives outside of it. Yeah I'd say the majority lives
| this way and to live otherwise is an exception for the
| remaining 25%. And even within those top 10 some are more
| like what I describe. There are definitely parts of those
| metros where the "mile a minute" travel estimation from
| uncongested highways applies. Certainly true for
| philadelphia outside the ~50sq miles of the gridded central
| city. Places like Houston average home is only like 250k
| pretty much at parity with midwest prices.
| VLM wrote:
| According to the US Census Bureau, the median house age in the
| usa is 1980. I live in a 1960 house of the type that is
| supposedly illegal, although every house in my suburb built
| since then has had building codes and planning regulations
| forcing walkability. Cars are forced for specialization. I had
| a 20 mile each way commute to an absolutely horrible
| neighborhood but a very high paying job. I am in walking
| distance of some minimum wage manual labor jobs. I can't afford
| to work at those minimum wage manual labor jobs and live here,
| and a car is incredibly cheap compared to my higher income. No
| one can explain why an architectural movement peaking in
| 1950s-1970s had no effect on socialization for decades until
| the smartphone era. Multiple entire generations lived in
| "soulless car filled suburbs" and socialized wildly according
| to the data in the article... until smartphones... There's an
| entire mythology built around the idea that any new problem
| that occurs began coincidentally with the construction of
| suburbs in the 1950s, even if the new problem didn't appear for
| the first 75 years of suburban living.
| pavon wrote:
| But that hasn't changed much between the 80s and now. It was
| bad then and it is bad now. So I don't see it being a
| significant factor for change in socialization on that
| timescale.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| Is 1 in 25 bad? I am more 1 in Inf... I mean I don't know what
| counts but I am happier to do things that are not a party.
| Examples: go to events in the city, restaurants, sunday lunch at
| relatives, work socials, school parent socials.
|
| Even in my 20s I went to... the pub! Mayhe a nightclub. To me
| parties are more school age/university thing and are a great way
| to have a good time on a budget. Just some drinks and a speaker
| required.
| thisisauserid wrote:
| "The typical female pet owner spends more time actively engaged
| with her pet than she spends in face-to-face contact with friends
| of her own species."
|
| Spurious. This has likely always been true unless you live with
| said friends.
| d4nte wrote:
| Yeah. My cat sleeps next to me, sits in my lap while I work,
| and follows me around the house. That's a lot of hours every
| day.
| SimianSci wrote:
| If I were to try and pinpoint one of the leading causes of this
| issue myself, I would personally say that Americans have an
| outdated and ineffective model regarding its use of addictive
| substances or what I like to now call "Brain Hacking" systems as
| they are not necessarily just physical substances anymore.
|
| Recreational drugs cause unbelievable havok within communities
| where they are unleashed. Its well known that such drugs have
| chemical compounds capable of "hacking" our physiology and
| causing a whole host of negative effects while ensuring the user
| stays addicted. I consider these "Brain Hacking" systems just the
| same as I consider social media like TikTok and Instagram. They
| both are designed specifically in ways to entice users to be
| addicted without any concern for the harms they cause. It baffles
| me that simply because it is not a physical substance it gets
| treated as less dangerous than the harder substances.
|
| We keep seeing these issues in America when its very clear that
| similar things would occur if we made recreational substances as
| common as water and just as accessible. Revenously addicted
| people, dont party, they dont socialize, they retreat from
| society, and stop forming deeper releationships. It is no
| surprise that this is creating issues for us.
|
| Americans have always been the world's leading consumer of drugs,
| and now that we have digital drugs, they are more accessible and
| in demand than ever. So much so that the cartels desinging and
| pedeling these products, are basically the most powerful
| companies in our society.
| Liquix wrote:
| > Recreational drugs cause unbelievable havok within
| communities where they are unleashed.
|
| Like.. Stable adults indulging in pot or mushrooms? IME has
| quite the opposite effect. Addictive drugs which devastate
| communities are usually not referred to as "recreational".
|
| You're spot on about the outdated threat model and people not
| fully grasping how damaging social media/internet addiction is.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Socializing in most Western countries used to be built entirely
| around an addictive mind altering substance, alcohol. Despite
| its many flaws it was extremely pro-social. Other drugs had
| their own party scenes.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| Not to mention the stereotype of the 50's housewife using
| "diet pills" to get more done. Back then they were
| amphetamines.
| shawndrost wrote:
| Does anyone know why "Hours spent in childcare" started
| skyrocketing in the 1990s? Here is the graph from the article:
| https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2g7_!,w_1456,c_limit...
| tpmoney wrote:
| Off the cuff that coincides pretty well with the rise of
| "helicopter parenting" and "tiger mom" trends.
| Nicook wrote:
| and less children per woman. I figure thats got to be the
| main driver. China actually a really good case study with the
| one child policy and rise of little kings.
| Roguelazer wrote:
| It does seem like there's something wrong with that data; I
| find it somewhat implausible that the average parent was only
| caring for their child for 1.7 hours a day in 1985; even if you
| assume that all of the tween and teens were free-range and only
| got an hour or two of parenting a day, little kids have always
| required nonstop attention to make sure that they're not
| actively dying.
|
| Although... the infant mortality rate in the US has dropped by
| more than 50% since 1985, so who knows...
| chlodwig wrote:
| Yeah, I've wondered if there is some sort change in how
| people think about and label their activities. Would a 1950s
| parent even think of themselves as doing a defined activity
| called "childcare"? Or rather, the children are just around,
| as the parent is doing things. If I am cooking dinner while a
| toddler putters around the floor and a baby is in a high-
| chair eating scraps I give him, am I doing "childcare"? Would
| a 1950s parent think of that as doing "childcare"?
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| Toddlers don't just putter around. They want to be wherever
| you're at doing whatever you're doing and opening all the
| cabinets and boxes and pulling everything out to look at
| it. I think people were more apt to put them to work around
| the house in the past whereas now people infantilize them
| more. My son doesn't speak very well as a 19 month old but
| he understands a lot and pays attention, and right now
| we're trying to figure out how to put him to work in the
| kitchen and around the house so he feels involved and we
| get what little help he is able to contribute.
| tstrimple wrote:
| I was born in '83 and I'd say this mostly describes my
| upbringing. We were left to our own devices the vast majority
| of the time. By the time I hit my teens, most days I'd barely
| see my parents at all. At some point you've got kids raising
| other kids as the parents are absent.
| imzadi wrote:
| > Burrowing into the appendix tables of the American Time Use
| Survey, she unearthed the fact that just 4.1 percent of Americans
| said they "attended or hosted" a party or ceremony on a typical
| weekend or holiday in 2023. In other words, in any given weekend,
| just one in 25 US households had plans to attend a social event.
|
| There's a huge difference between not hosting or attending a
| party and not attending a social event. "Party" has very specific
| connotations. If I go out bowling with my friends or have a game
| night, I don't call that a party, but it is certainly a social
| event.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I agree. I was graduated from highschool around 1990. My friend
| group was very active every weekend, we just didn't do
| "parties".
| psyclobe wrote:
| Yeah. I haven't gone out in decades.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Compare to Dave Barry's "The Greatest (Party) Generation", about
| his parents who were of the _Mad Men_ era:
|
| https://archive.is/Uyrys#selection-2109.17-2109.48
| codegrappler wrote:
| Anecdotally a lot of families we see in my social circle can be
| reliably split between single income and dual income households.
| We see the single income folks far more than we see the dual
| income folks, which tracks with this article. If I come home from
| work and my wife says "Sarah and family are coming for dinner
| tonight", I know that my wife has tidied up the house,
| coordinated food and all I have to do is pour some drinks and
| maybe cook something on the grill (that has already been
| purchased and prep'd). If no one has done that? Far less likely I
| would see that same family that night.
| watwut wrote:
| Being stay at home parent is extremely isolating. It is most
| lonely thing one can do. You spend ovwrwhelming majority of the
| day completely alone. No collegues to bump into you and talking
| with you. If the stay at home parent does not actively
| organizes meetups, they are completely alone until partner
| comes home ... after he talked with people at work.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Thats another argument. The stay at home parent created a lot
| of the social parties.
| watwut wrote:
| Some did out of mental health necessity. Some did not and
| were profoundly lonely and unhappy (my case). And some did
| indeed ended up having that period to be super happy.
|
| My point is that it is profoundly unsocial way of life for
| the parent at home. The party even twice a week do not
| really make up for being completely alone with nothing
| challenging to do whole day. You can easily end up loosing
| social skills and those parties end up unfulfilling.
|
| If you go to work and then someone else organizes a party
| once in a while, it is cool effortless way to keep friends.
| But, if the stay at home person is extroverted, there is
| very little social about their lifestyle.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Sounds like my wfh job
| watwut wrote:
| Kind of depends on how much you have to call with others.
| But yes, if you do not have calls and do not need to
| coordinate, wfh can end up being isolating too.
| upheaval wrote:
| Whats there to party about
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| Anxious Generation... Anyone with kids should read it.
| anotherevan wrote:
| As an aside, did anyone else see the background start to darken
| as they scrolled down and lost interest in reading as you knew a
| "Please oh pretty please subscribe to my newsletter!" overlay was
| going to slide into view?
|
| I wish I had a ublock filter or a userscript to deal with this...
| Bradlinc wrote:
| I've stopped hosting as many dinner parties because accommodating
| diverse food preferences has become increasingly challenging.
| It's a smaller factor compared to many mentioned in the article,
| but I thought it was worth adding.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| And not just preference but allergies. I'm not sure why but it
| seems like the number and prevalence of food allergies has
| really gone up since the 1980s/1990s. Back then you didn't
| really worry much about food allergies when you were thinking
| about foods to serve at a party.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| People are introverted and have no social skills thanks to
| smartphones. People have no shared interests in general, because
| there are so many niches. People have low self-esteem and body
| image issues. People are afraid that they'll get drunk and their
| behavior will be filmed and go viral. Previously available "soft"
| party drugs are too dangerous. People have no place to host a
| party, because they're all renters (not that it matters, the HOA
| has a strict no-smooth-jazz-music-after-3pm policy!)
| pjc50 wrote:
| > People are afraid that they'll get drunk and their behavior
| will be filmed and go viral.
|
| I think this is an underappreciated "phones killed
| socialization" angle. People _used to_ post partying pics on
| social media. Then employers started going through social media
| to screen candidates. Facial recognition and automatic tagging
| means that it 's not sufficient to not post party photos to
| your own social media, you need to make sure they aren't posted
| anywhere.
|
| Which is a deterrent to partying as a concept once you start
| thinking in terms of "will this be bad for my social credit if
| an informant reports me to the employability police by posting
| me drunk?"
| ryandrake wrote:
| I don't know how this didn't become a serious taboo. People
| who post pictures and video from a private event without
| everyone's consent _should_ be shunned, but somehow this
| became normalized. I 've heard of the recent trend to hand
| out stickers for everyone to put over their cameras during
| events, and that's a really good development, but we
| shouldn't even need to do that. It should be socially
| disgusting to even take the pictures in the first place.
| pjc50 wrote:
| It used to be fine! It used to be great, even. People like
| having photos of themselves having a good time. Back in the
| film era there would always be one person who wanted a
| picture at every event.
|
| It's just that connecting it to the panopticon ruined
| everything.
| floren wrote:
| > People have no place to host a party, because they're all
| renters
|
| I've seen this repeated in several comments and I just don't
| get it -- renting a place, be it a college apartment or a full
| house as an adult, has never stopped me from throwing a party.
| Maybe if there was a "no parties" rule in the lease (which I've
| never seen, and I've rented at least a dozen different places)
| _and_ the landlord lived in the building, but otherwise rentals
| are fair game.
| tim333 wrote:
| Everyone's looking at their phones instead.
| ipnon wrote:
| As soon as the screen became marginally more interesting than
| the person next to you social life was pretty much doomed.
| chkaloon wrote:
| The article mentions alcohol consumption by kids, but I think it
| doesn't emphasize enough the effect of efforts like Mothers
| Against Drunk Driving and strict DUI laws. Back in the 70s and
| 80s having a few drinks at a party, bar or friend's house was
| normal and part of the social lubrication. Even drinks during
| lunch was common where I worked. No more. You either need to have
| a designated driver, find a taxi (which doesn't exist in most
| rural areas), or just not drink. The first two are a pain, so
| people opt for the latter and that social inhibition hangs
| around, and folks go home early. Have to get up for work in the
| morning, you know.
| dddddaviddddd wrote:
| > You either need to have a designated driver, find a taxi
| (which doesn't exist in most rural areas), or just not drink.
|
| Or live in a place where you don't drive to get around.
| bluGill wrote:
| Very few places on earth are like that. Even in Europe's
| dense cities there are a lot of cars, get outside of that and
| there is no hope of an alternative. Though Europe is somewhat
| likely to have a bar within walking distance of your house,
| but a lot of people in Europe drive to whatever bar they
| drink in at least sometime.
|
| Most of the world's public transportation sees themselves as
| a way to get to work and so parties which happen off hours in
| places hard for transport to reach get bad or no service.
| wavemode wrote:
| > Very few places on earth are like that
|
| I mean... there are fewer than 2 billion total vehicles on
| Earth, so I'm guessing it's not THAT uncommon to not own a
| car.
|
| Unless we're arguing that people simply didn't socialize
| before cars existed.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > Unless we're arguing that people simply didn't
| socialize before cars existed.
|
| No, the argument is that cars changed how society is
| physically structured, to the point where society at
| large is designed to center car-based transportation.
|
| In many countries - including the US and most of Europe -
| this is transparently true.
| watwut wrote:
| Not really? Yes there are a lot of cars in EU cities, but
| young people are not driving them - they use combination of
| walking, biking and public transport.
|
| Parties are where people live and in center - public
| transport gets you there. Using public transport to get
| from bar or home party is quite normal.
| homeless_engi wrote:
| East Asia has lots of highly walkable cities with great
| public transit -- even a few you might not have heard of.
| Not just Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, Beijing but also Shenzhen,
| Chongqing, and Hangzhou to name a few.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| or drive drunk, which if my upbringing was any indication,
| happened all the time
| tayo42 wrote:
| 0.08 allows for a few drinks
| reginald78 wrote:
| I feel like while there were laws against furnishing alcohol to
| minors and the like, I never really heard of some one's parents
| getting charged because some kid crashed his car after boozing
| it up at a party back then. Maybe I just wasn't paying
| attention but it seems like the enforcement of that really
| stepped up.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| Let's be honest. A lot of previous partying was made possible by
| lots and lots and lots of drinking and driving. That of course
| still goes on today, but nearly at the levels of the past.
| dmix wrote:
| That was before Uber...
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > That was before Uber...
|
| Get outside a major urban area and it's extremely difficult
| to find an Uber at the hours when you'd expect to be leaving
| a party to go home.
|
| Heck, this is true even in some suburbs of New York City.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| I live in a rural area. Uber is not a reliable option late at
| night.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| People were drinking and driving in 1800s New England?
| complianceowl wrote:
| I cannot speak for ze others, but as a creature of ze
| night... I must confess, I vas, I vas indeed.
| MisterTea wrote:
| I am sure there were plenty of sauced stage coach drivers and
| horsemen.
| bluGill wrote:
| Your horse knows the way home and will be happy to get your
| there without help from you (hoping that when you are there
| you are sober enough to get the harness off so he can
| finally enjoy a rest at home)
| ludicrousdispla wrote:
| Well, they had self-driving transportation back then so more
| like drinking and riding.
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| I would gamble that people were drinking and driving hours
| after the invention of the wheel.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| In point of fact people kept alcohol in their cars to be
| drank while driving back then.
| ratg13 wrote:
| I would say prices and economy play as large of a role.
|
| When I was in university we thrived on nickel drafts and dive
| bars.
|
| These days it's $10/cocktail + cover charge.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Yeah it's just the prices honestly
| dddddaviddddd wrote:
| Or walkable neighbourhoods, or public transportation.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| I live in a rural area. Neither of those things were ever an
| option. It was always drinking and driving out here.
| frollogaston wrote:
| The chart still shows a good amount of partying around 2009.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| 8bit Vibes Party in Amsterdam this Saturday, swing by!
| https://lu.ma/l4074pxg?locale=en-GB
| flerchin wrote:
| Grouping up with the guys to play an online game wouldn't count
| here. Nor various other online activities that I would consider
| social. The drop-off in alcohol is stark, but probably good? I
| suppose we would see an uptick in weed in legal and probably also
| illegal states.
|
| The article focuses on US because that's the data they have, but
| I wonder if it's a similar trend for other developed countries.
| Anyone sharing a personal anecdote is probably not meaningful.
| These are broad trends and really hard to intuit by lived
| experience.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| When I was in high school in the late 90s/early 2000s, we'd go
| hang out somewhere with each other IRL and then when it got
| late and we got home we'd meet up in some online game (usually
| Starcraft or Diablo). So we'd still be hanging out at least two
| nights a week IRL.
|
| If we counted only online gaming then we'd have been hanging
| out every night.
| frollogaston wrote:
| Yeah, there are good reasons that doesn't count. Maaybe if it
| were in-person and not over headsets.
| MisterTea wrote:
| Parties were where you went to meet random strangers, get
| intoxicated, and maybe get laid. None of this is exciting
| anymore. People are less motivated to go out. We have other forms
| of socialization.
|
| I blame a lot of the de-socialization on our constantly connected
| society. Since everyone is in contact with each other 24/7 via
| social media the idea of meeting random people is less exciting.
| The 24/7 news cycle also injects a lot of doom and anxiety making
| people more aware of dangers - intoxicated driving, overdose,
| violence, rape, etc. Parties might be viewed as more dangerous
| than exciting. Now add to that, 24/7 streaming of TV and highly
| addictive video games. There is plenty of distraction to fill the
| boredom gaps that used to motivate people to go out. And finally,
| I think covid drove a lot of people into a more isolationist
| mindset. I know a few people, including myself, who have admitted
| they go out far less post covid compared to pre covid.
| efields wrote:
| This feels right. More than anything, it's the function of the
| Internet.
| orangecat wrote:
| I'd argue that it's specifically the combination of social
| media and smartphones. 2000s era "social networks" of AIM and
| forums were fine; you had to actually be at your computer so
| it wasn't an all-consuming activity for most people.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I don't think it's right. Despite the Internet, we really
| aren't in a constantly connected society. In fact, I'd argue
| we are less connected now than we have been for a long time.
| Everyone's "on" Social Media, but they're not socializing on
| it. They're spouting into the void, promoting and advertising
| themselves, tunneling themselves deep into echo chambers, but
| it's not really social. People write and write and write, but
| the only things they read are what the algorithms feed to
| them. I guess I'm gatekeeping socialization, but this doesn't
| seem like socialization to me.
|
| When someone posts a clever quip to Twitter and gets 10,000
| likes, this isn't socialization. It feels more like some
| weird performance art.
| MisterTea wrote:
| Its not all screaming into the void. From my point of view
| people broadcasting their lives in real-time leaves little
| to catch up on. Why call/meet Joe to talk about his trip to
| Antigua if he already posted his trip in real-time
| including video? You know what all your friends are doing.
|
| The twitter scenes is out of my wheel house. Never had an
| account or knew anyone on it that I cared about.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Those basement dwelling computer nerds of the early '00s were way
| ahead of their time. We just had to dial in the content to get
| everyone else addicted.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| This was a post on the GenX subreddit (from a Gen Zer) from just
| a couple days ago asking about if parties as portrayed in late
| 90s/early 00s "teen movies" were actually a real thing:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/GenX/comments/1lu102v/were_parties_...
|
| The responses from the Gen Xers were a mix of bewilderment and
| sadness, stuff like "What do you mean parties like this, it's
| just a normal teenage party!? I feel so ancient and also so
| confused by this question." The whole comment section is worth a
| read, especially the disconnect between how the Gen Xers
| experienced adolescence and how the Gen Z poster does.
|
| It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of
| youth with social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-
| protection. I also disagree with some of the comments here that
| are bringing up things like "real estate, transportation, and
| lodging". Sure, those are issues, but you have families and kids
| in the suburbs today just like you had families and kids in the
| suburbs in the 90s, and the fact that kids today can't even
| recognize "basic teen parties" and question whether they are some
| sort of made up fantasy can't just be waved away by the fact that
| real estate is more expensive today.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of
| youth with social media, smart phones,
|
| You have to be careful with Gen Z threads like this on Reddit
| and Twitter. They are inherently biased toward Gen Z people who
| are chronically online and deep into social media.
|
| If you spend time with kids in the real world, you learn very
| rapidly that most of them aren't on platforms like Reddit and
| Twitter. Of those who use Reddit, few of them actually post
| anything or even have accounts.
|
| The subset of Gen Z who actually post on Reddit is small and a
| lot of them fit the description of chronically online, so it's
| no wonder that Reddit Gen Z people speak as if their generation
| is not socially engaged at all.
| yubblegum wrote:
| Basically, the kids who were socially marginalized in the
| prenetworks era also did not get to see the parties the
| socially active kids were having, and would have wondered at
| it all. It would have certainly been also 'a new experience'
| for them! Except back then they didn't have a place like
| reddit to go to and wonder out loud.
| snozolli wrote:
| I never went to parties like this. I wasn't socially
| marginalized, I just wasn't one of the popular kids.
| Popularity at my school was closely tied with wealth and
| family status. A relatively tiny group of people lived this
| sort of life.
| anton-c wrote:
| We just had our own parties for our social group. Not as
| many pretty girls and alcohol stolen from parents but
| still a good time.
|
| Then when the popular kids were bored occasionally they'd
| end up at our shindigs
| grvdrm wrote:
| Popularity is also so subjective.
|
| I look back at high school and see several popular
| groups. Did one rise above the others? Not in an obvious
| way.
|
| Like you said: some were from wealthier families, some
| were the athletes and their groupies (no surprise). But I
| went to parties of all shapes and sizes - some in those
| groups I just mentioned and some in other groups. Didn't
| really matter that there was a premier group of
| socialites.
| tlogan wrote:
| Socially marginalized kids were partying too. The only
| difference was, we weren't invited to the "cool" parties.
| These days, there's definitely a lot less partying overall.
| preachermon wrote:
| as a socially marginalized kid in those days, I ended up
| banding together with other sm kids and we had our own
| parties.
| ssutch3 wrote:
| We called em LAN parties
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| If playing D&D is partying, I was partying nearly every
| Friday night. Went to one party party in my time in high
| school. Did not care for it.
| ronjakoi wrote:
| Me and my nerd friends had LAN parties in somebody's
| garage etc. I really miss those sometimes.
| all2 wrote:
| When its snacks and BS while everyone gets hooked up and
| gets files off the local share to install SC2 for the nth
| time. It would take hours to get set up. Then more hours
| of play. We'd go for 10 to 12 hours sometimes, just to
| get things working.
| vel0city wrote:
| This was one reason why my crowd loved the Xbox for lan
| parties. Just make sure everyone bringing an Xbox had
| whatever game, only needed one box/TV per four friends,
| and the autoconfig networking meant all you needed is a
| switch to get a few of them taking on LAN easily. Plug
| everything in and you're good to go with a crowd.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Did the "cool" parties really exist?
|
| Like, a movie party looks impossibly cool due to
| scripting and choreography.
| lapcat wrote:
| > the kids who were socially marginalized in the
| prenetworks era also did not get to see the parties the
| socially active kids were having
|
| What do you mean exactly by the distinction between
| "socially marginalized" and "socially active"?
|
| There was a social hierarchy where some kids were
| considered "popular" and others "unpopular", though really
| the distinction was more accurately between the
| beautiful/attractive kids and the average/unattractive
| kids, and certainly the unattractive kids did not get
| invited to the parties of the attractive kids, but the
| unattractive kids had plenty of parties among themselves,
| to which the attractive kids were usually not invited
| either.
|
| Perhaps there were some kids who were truly marginalized,
| with no friends at all, but unattractiveness by itself did
| not necessarily marginalize you socially.
| generalizations wrote:
| That should also be true of the Gen Xers replying though. So
| I think that effectively cancels out.
| Aurornis wrote:
| No, the legacy social media platforms are more popular with
| older generations.
|
| Facebook is the canonical example of a social media
| platform that arrived after Gen X was young, but it now
| heavily used by Gen X while nearly completely shunned by
| Gen Z, with millenials somewhere in the middle.
|
| Reddit and even Twitter are legacy social media platforms
| for Gen Z, especially younger Gen Z. The very oldest Gen Z
| people would have been too young to even use the internet
| when Reddit was launched.
| lapcat wrote:
| Nobody should take a Reddit thread as some kind of proof
| of a broad generalization. But some empirical data is
| given in the article, for example, Percentage of 12th
| graders going out with friends two or more times a week:
| https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!lQMo!,f_auto,q_au
| to:...
|
| I think the Reddit thread is just a reflection of the
| reality rather than an argument for accepting that
| reality.
|
| You can attempt to discount the Reddit thread, but the
| submitted article wasn't even based on that.
| esafak wrote:
| Also known as _selection bias_.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias
| tines wrote:
| We know.
| afavour wrote:
| > If you spend time with kids in the real world, you learn
| very rapidly that most of them aren't on platforms like
| Reddit and Twitter. Of those who use Reddit, few of them
| actually post anything or even have accounts.
|
| Certainly true. But it's also undeniable that a huge number
| of them are on TikTok, Instagram and the like. I think OP's
| point still stands that today's youth have been affected by
| that.
| rwyinuse wrote:
| Yep, I believe that at this point in rich countries people
| who are addicted to their smartphone and social media far
| outnumber those who aren't, at least in all age groups that
| aren't small children or retired.
| 98codes wrote:
| I wonder how the levels of engagement compare between an
| extremely online GenX person, an average GenZ person, and an
| extremely online Gen Z person would look like.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| That's true. However, I worked as a photographer for about 10
| years (quit about 2 years ago) and high school senior photos
| were one of my specialties, so I got to know a lot of
| teenagers.
|
| Overscheduling is, I think, the biggest issue. Most of the
| teens I worked with had something going on almost every
| night, to the point where rescheduling due to rain or heat
| was an absolute nightmare. Sports were the biggest offenders.
| They would often have gym/strength training in the morning
| and then practice in the evening, almost every evening. Keep
| in mind I'm mostly talking about summer, so the school year
| itself was worse. Those that had jobs would do them during
| the day.
|
| It's completely different from when I graduated high school
| in '06. Very few sports took over your life in the summer.
| Football had practice in the mornings for part of the summer,
| and that's the only one I'm aware of. I don't get the
| emphasis on sports. I played some in school but never took
| them seriously and if they required that much time from me I
| would have been out.
| ilikecakeandpie wrote:
| I graduated in '05 and some of stuff my contemporaries were
| doing then wrt sports and trying to get to the next level
| was already crazy (playing for the school and doing travel
| ball as well, so many practices/camps/extra workout
| sessions) and don't get me started on the craziness
| wrestlers had to go through. I've heard it's even worse now
| as it has become more competitive to get to the next level,
| whether that's trying to get a good NIL deal or trying to
| play professionally
| germinalphrase wrote:
| I was a HS teacher for about a decade. The demands on kids
| and families around youth sports (especially private/club
| leagues) is out of control. I had students, 14/15-years-
| old, going to their school team practice then club team
| practice, not getting home until past 9 pm every night.
| Families from three states away would enroll their kids in
| my school half of the year to play on the hockey team
| (staying with local sponsor family). Tournaments across the
| Midwest most weekends. These weren't even future D1
| athletes.
|
| I was a multi-sport athlete. My sibling played D1 soccer.
| It didn't used to be like this.
| 1shooner wrote:
| >The demands on kids and families
|
| I'd like to understand this more. Families like this that
| I know talk about it as though it's as unavoidable as
| their mortgage, but functionally isn't this entirely
| self-imposed? Is it a lack of vision for an alternative?
| Are whole families succumbing to peer pressure? I don't
| relate to it.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| From what I observed about these club hockey players I
| saw growing up, mainly the kid loves it and made it into
| their identity. So the parents are probably feeling
| pretty forced into paying for it. That being said every
| family I knew doing this sort of thing could easily pay
| for it.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| I mean aren't there also jockeying for college
| opportunities through school athleticism, and also a
| culture of over-competitive parents using their
| children's sports to posture against one another?
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Often the kids do enjoy it, but I see a lot of
| essentially "pay to play" - your 10-yr-old playing tier 8
| basketball shouldn't be going to out of town tournaments
| regularly, but club & private is big business and they
| push an NBA experience of travel, tourneys and gear -
| with the associated costs.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Narcissist parents competing with other narcissist
| parents to be the best parents in the universe. Social
| media caters to their twisted world view where everyone
| is living a polished life of perfection so why not them
| and their perfect high-success family.
| bell-cot wrote:
| 's/narcissist/desperately insecure/', perhaps? To a lot
| of Americans, the future _really_ doesn 't look so good
| if you fall out of the top 10%...1%...0.1%...
| HPsquared wrote:
| Do sports help in a bleak future world? I think if people
| really believed that, they'd focus more on the kid's
| practical skills.
| bell-cot wrote:
| From a number of "what people did, trying to get their
| kid into Harvard"-themed articles in the past few years,
| I think it's a pretty common belief that awesome athletic
| extracurriculars are a secret sauce.
|
| Though I suspect that lizard-brain emotions play a bigger
| role. Both self-medication attempts to get success by
| proxy, and also visually demonstrating (to themselves and
| their peer parents) that their kid is a Success Story at
| _something_.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| We only have a 3 year old and a baby, but my wife and I
| have already argued a bit about this. She's all in on the
| sports train - it was a large part of her life growing up
| for her and her siblings. I, on the other hand, did a lot
| with my free time as a kid/teen.
|
| I think part of the problem is that for people like her
| they can't imagine their kids not being in all sorts of
| sports, but they don't realize just how much the time
| commitment has ballooned. By the time it's too late
| they're all in and they're effectively in a sports sunk
| cost fallacy.
| mcgrath_sh wrote:
| There is a happy medium between the "hotels every other
| weekend year round" travel/club sports and no sports,
| which is sports for your school or community teams. If I
| ever have kids I absolutely want to enroll them in
| sports. It will absolutely not be the travel/club teams
| that means us going to hotels every other weekend. I am
| probably naive in thinking that it is possible to play
| for your high school without club sports, but I won't be
| traveling 10 hours by car for a U8 baseball tournament.
| RyanOD wrote:
| Having two teenage daughters who are athletes, much of
| this will play out for them depending on how much they
| really love the sport and whether they are able to play
| it at the highest levels. If you listen and observe your
| kids, you'll get a good sense of what THEY want out of
| the sport. Support them in THEIR journey.
|
| And remember at the end of the day, the most important
| aspects of being an athlete aren't one's performance on
| the field. It's everything else - learning to be
| committed to a team, forming life-long friendships,
| building positive memories, living a healthy lifestyle,
| etc.
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| Yeah, I did track and field in HS (not us) in a club, had
| to train 4 times a week 3 to 4hs each time, but I chose
| to do that. I did well in some competitions, but nothing
| large. I do fondly remember those times, for the
| friendships, for helping build discipline, for learning
| how to properly train and exercise, skills which I still
| use today, not really about winning competitions.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| Apparently in our school you straight up won't be able to
| play in the regular school teams unless you do the travel
| teams starting in elementary school, because everyone
| else does it. Therefore, your child won't be as good as
| them unless they're an absolute savant at the sport.
|
| They'll still get to be on the team, but actually
| playing? Probably not.
| vel0city wrote:
| This is why I hate the trend towards these massive high
| schools that's been happening for a few decades.
|
| I went to a small school. I was able to participate in a
| ton of different clubs. Varsity football players had big
| roles in the spring musicals. If you wanted to be a part
| of something and were even halfway decent one could have
| some chance of actually being a part of it. But when it's
| one varsity team of 50ish players for a school of 7,000
| the odds of ever actually playing are slim to none.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| Ah, but here's the kicker - we are a small school. My
| graduating class had 140, and it's shrunk since then. I
| believe the grades are now about 110-120 each or so.
| However, we have some very successful sports programs.
| The girl's basketball team has won state countless times,
| for instance. Either way, there are only so many spots on
| a team and if almost everyone is doing travel teams you
| don't have much of a chance if you don't.
| conductr wrote:
| My son is starting 1st grade this fall, has been at same
| school since he was 3 and it goes through high school so,
| these are and will be his peers and it starts as major
| FOMO/it's the main way kids socialize outside of school
| hours. Good way to burn off their energies, etc. But it's
| also, they're young, we want to expose them to
| everything, they can find their "thing", etc. He does
| tons of non-Athletic stuff too (STEM, art, music, etc).
| So we've been playing soccer, baseball, flag football,
| basketball, lacrosse, swimming, etc. the last few years.
| It's getting to the point where some kids dropped a few
| sports based on disinterest or parent's inability to keep
| the schedule. We have one kid so really no excuses for
| us, but some people with multiple kids doing this is a
| scheduling nightmare. Anyways, what's already started to
| happen is we've brought in hired coaches. In no time,
| they'll be club/select league aged and people will
| faction off to do that. When it does, it will feel like
| gravity/inertia to do the same. Once you do, if you skip
| a beat, your kid is basically giving up the sport. They
| can't just join the baseball team in middle school, they
| won't make the cut against kids that have been playing
| non-stop since they were <6.
|
| It is their entire friend group and becomes their
| identity. It would be hard to intentionally tell my son
| "you're not playing sports anymore". He may come to that
| conclusion on his own or coaches may cut him at some
| point; that's life. But, for those that stay active in
| it, the inertia of it is strong.
| stockresearcher wrote:
| > So we've been playing soccer, baseball, flag football,
| basketball, lacrosse, swimming, etc. the last few years
|
| Swimming is great. USA Swimming has a well-developed
| system. Elite kids get sorted into the serious clubs
| where they swim with Olympic champions, etc. But the vast
| majority of the clubs are rec level and focus on getting
| lots of people swimming and having fun. Everyone gets a
| USA Swimming ID number and times are entered into the
| national system; they get tracked no matter what. Late
| developers can still be sucked into the elite system if
| they earn it. Your local park district swim club most
| likely is in a conference where they compete against
| other park districts in your county. The only problem is
| that there are so many kids and races that a meet
| probably lasts 5 hours.
|
| Soccer is likely to get better. MLS and NWSL teams are
| developing their youth training systems like in Europe,
| with success as young kids going through these systems
| are playing professionally in North America and Europe.
| They are going to keep sucking the air out of the "elite
| travel soccer" scam and hopefully what is left are the
| fun clubs for the kids.
|
| Baseball is likely to get worse. MLB took over the
| baseball minor leagues and reduced the number of teams.
| With fewer professional spots available, the "elite"
| clubs are more and more important to getting kids into
| them.
|
| Basketball and football, same deal. Lacrosse?
| Universities couldn't care less about it anymore. It's a
| dead sport, many parents haven't figured it out yet.
| conductr wrote:
| In my hyperlocal area, lacrosse is pretty serious.
| There's a lot of private schools that fuel it. And,
| football is our main sport in terms of popularity but a
| lot of parents are afraid of injuries and don't allow it
| so lacrosse fills that void. The NFL driving flag
| football has been interesting to witness, the kids love
| it and it's fun to watch. I think it could get pretty
| popular.
| cafard wrote:
| I would remark that Lou Gehrig was a soccer player in his
| youth, and supposedly had to be harassed into taking up
| baseball when in high school.
| conductr wrote:
| Not likely to happen today, anything is possible but just
| not very likely
| vitaflo wrote:
| From talking to many parents they want to give them
| activities so their kids aren't bored or sitting inside
| on their phones all day. Sports is one of those things
| and lets them also be with other kids.
|
| The problem is kids being bored can be a good thing but
| they are never allowed to be. When I was a kid the
| internet didn't even exist let alone cell phones and the
| only rule was "be home before sundown". Kids now have way
| too many distractions and structure and are never given
| the ability to explore their own world on their own. It's
| been manufactured for them.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| And then, when the kid finally has a few minutes of
| downtime, of course they're utterly drained and just
| looking for quick easy entertainment, and flick through a
| few videos on tiktok or YT shorts, with no time for
| discovering and indulging in deeper interests.
| RyanOD wrote:
| I can't stress this enough to new or soon to be parents.
|
| Hold off on giving your child a phone as long as
| possible. Once your kids are old enough (your
| choice...but it's before they are teens), send them
| outside, shut the door, and go about your business.
|
| Tell them to come back for lunch. Then send them outside
| again and tell them to come back for dinner.
|
| I mean this in all sincerity. Don't plan their day for
| them. Make them go out and plan their day on the fly.
| Friend's house a mile away? Walk over and see if they can
| come out and play. Not home? Oh well, walk back or head
| to a different friend's house. There is value in this
| friction.
|
| Don't be the person who gives your child a frictionless
| youth. The hard way is the best way.
| jonathanlb wrote:
| I agree with this sentiment, but there have been cases of
| families who have had CPS called on them for letting
| their kids walk home alone from a nearby park [1]. It's
| frustrating to know that neighbors, schools, or
| authorities might interpret normal childhood independence
| as neglect and report parents to authorities.
|
| [1] https://archive.ph/ZISnH
| RyanOD wrote:
| Sure, there will always be edge cases. That's just how
| the world works.
|
| Let your kids go out and ride bikes and you may end up
| with one getting hit by a car. Those are the risks every
| parent has to manage.
|
| But if we let the edge cases dictate how we raise our
| kids, we end up with what we don't want - overly managed
| bubble-youth kids who can't think for themselves.
| JSteph22 wrote:
| Unless you have some compelling evidence to the contrary,
| this cannot be dismissed as "edge cases" when cultural
| norms have changed across the board and all it takes is
| one complaint...
| JSteph22 wrote:
| If you let kids today "explore their own world" they'll
| just end up glued to phones.
| broost3r wrote:
| check out this article (gift link) from yesterday about
| private equity in youth sports
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/09/business/youth-sports-
| pri...
|
| > For many families, the money they spend on sports is an
| investment in their child's future. Roughly two in 10
| youth sports parents think their child has the ability to
| play Division I college sports, and one in 10 thinks his
| or her child could reach the professional ranks or the
| Olympics, according to the Aspen Institute survey.
| kergonath wrote:
| > one in 10 thinks his or her child could reach the
| professional ranks or the Olympics
|
| That is properly insane. The delusion...
| mtalantikite wrote:
| I think a lot of families are also optimizing for
| university admissions. Strong athletes often have an
| easier time with admissions (assuming they're also good
| academically).
|
| I remember having an interview with an engineering
| professor from Tufts when I was applying to schools, and
| one of the first things he asked me was what team sports
| I played. Being a typical nerdy kid I avoided athletics
| -- even though I was good at them -- and was surprised
| that he was so adamant about team sports. I didn't even
| take gym class after 9th grade because I figured out how
| to get an exemption, which, looking back at it, probably
| made my college applications weaker.
|
| This was in 2001, and I can only imagine it's gotten
| worse.
| cafard wrote:
| When my son was in high school, the whole college
| application business astonished me--somebody a couple of
| years ahead of him applied to 18 schools.
|
| The formula that I eventually arrived at is that the
| college application process is a punishment of the middle
| and upper middle classes for aspiring to the perquisites
| of its betters.
| sevensor wrote:
| Very well put. So many things about the process are set
| up to favor the continuity of privilege in plausibly
| deniable ways. Athletics, service, alumni interviews,
| letters of reference; everything is easier if you're
| wealthy and well connected.
| supportengineer wrote:
| The pressure to get into college starts before birth. A
| 4.0 grade average isn't good enough anymore.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| You can't even make a high school team anymore unless you
| start playing club & private at a very young age. Lots of
| primary public schools (K-6/7) which is where I learned
| sports and got good at a few, often don't have sports
| teams anymore, or if they do it's a few passionate people
| with limited coaching and sports skills who just want to
| provide any opportunity.
| janalsncm wrote:
| The natural solution would be to increase the number of
| teams to also accommodate people who are interested but
| don't want to or are unable to dedicate their life to
| sports. But if schools need to cut costs, it's tough to
| do.
|
| It's a common trend in many domains: universities,
| housing, jobs. An underabundance of resources means
| people need to gear up to fight over the things that
| still exist.
| 9rx wrote:
| Or, given the real-world constraints schools are usually
| up against, pick the _worst_ participants instead of the
| best. Those who are skilled in a given sport are almost
| certainly engaged in the sport outside of school, and
| thus are taking away from those who are much more likely
| looking to learn about a sport they otherwise don 't have
| access to.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Interesting/amusing thought. How do you propose to
| determine the worst athletes?
|
| Maybe another approach would be to use a lottery among
| applicants.
| scelerat wrote:
| > natural solution would be to increase the number of
| teams
|
| Reminds me of my dad (b. 1945) talking about his HS
| sports experience in the early '60s at a large (~3500)
| Southern California public school. Not only were there
| varsity, JV and frosh teams, in high-interest sports like
| football and basketball there were multiple teams for
| every grade. Competition was still high if you wanted to
| play at the highest level, but if you wanted to play,
| there was probably an option for you.
|
| Public schools are simply not funded the same way today
| RyanOD wrote:
| The recent NCAA changes vis a vis roster limits is only
| making this worse. Want to be a collegiate athlete? You
| better be ELITE. Walk-ons are a thing of the past. As
| such, kids with those dreams (or overly involved parents)
| are pouring their lives into their sport(s).
| yndoendo wrote:
| Was talking with a bartender at a restaurant, also a
| teacher. She would get home around 23:00 and have to wake
| up around 5:00 while tendering during week days. Her
| daughter just turning 16 and is signed up for all
| basketball teams she can be in a hour drive radius. Her
| daughter was going to be working as a cleaner at the
| local hotel this summer. As she said, "Basketball is her
| daughter's job and volleyball is her outlet where she can
| be a kid."
|
| Most likely is she living vicariously through her
| daughter's basketball experience or it is seen as an
| economic improvement, for her daughter or both. Her
| daughter likely sees that being a teacher doesn't pay
| well and multiple jobs are needed. This helps push for
| this "sports is a job" mentality.
|
| Tiger Woods a the Williams sisters promote the idea of
| making it big if your just work at the same sport over
| and over at a young age. This is often a case of Law of
| Small Numbers.
|
| Others might have the worst kind of parent. One that only
| loves their child if their good at sports.
| bdangubic wrote:
| the over-scheduling in this and other cases is largely
| due to the fact that if kids are not "somewhere" they
| will be watching tv or staring at some f'ing screen cause
| that's what other kids are doing who are also home. I
| have a large network of friends with kids and _every
| single one of them_ over-schedules every f'ing thing due
| to the lack alternative (or better said kids are better
| of at ____ than at home alone)
| hexyl_C_gut wrote:
| Demands of sports was identified as a major factor harming
| the ability to raise kids in Family Unfriendly by Timothy
| Carney.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| I have to wonder if what's happened in the U.S. is
| something akin to involution [0] where increased scarcity
| in what were stable middle class environments leads to
| seemingly endless and fruitless competition. You used to
| hear stories about how students at Palo Alto High School
| work like first year investment bankers, leading to high
| rates of suicide. Seems like that's ubiquitous now.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26027673
|
| "conditions in which a society ceases to progress, and
| instead starts to stagnate internally. Increased output and
| competition intensify but yield no clear results or
| innovative, technological breakthroughs." "more competitive
| with little corresponding rewards"
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10605329
| HPsquared wrote:
| There has to be some selection bias here. Maybe a certain
| class of school / student?
| slg wrote:
| There is still a big difference between not being invited
| to/attending parties and not knowing if they even exist as a
| concept.
| torginus wrote:
| I'm not quite sure if smartphones are still all that popular.
| With the rise of WFH, (and for Gen-Z, having a Covid lockdown
| college experience), most people are on actual computers and
| are sitting at home.
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| Actual computers? People don't have those any more. Not
| even laptops. They have smartphones and they may have
| tablets.
|
| I'm over-generalizing of course, but that's the vibe I get.
| It's because many, both older and younger, entirely skipped
| the whole personal computing thing.
| lurk2 wrote:
| The majority of web traffic has been mobile since the
| latter half of the 2010s.
| wil421 wrote:
| I get the same vibe from HN and other places on Reddit. Lots
| of folks are online in multiple places at all times. If I
| bring up a random internet topic in real like people give me
| weird looks.
| SubmarineClub wrote:
| Except the data _repeatedly_ bears out that younger
| generations are spending more and more time online and in
| isolation.
|
| The idea that the internet remains the province solely of a
| few loner geeks is a total fantasy. Reddit is one of the most
| popular websites in the world.
|
| Also, I was a shy nerd in high school who used reddit, and I
| still partied. Fuck, I made my own booze to take to parties.
|
| Meanwhile my youngest brother - who is super social -
| graduated high school in the last few years and reports that
| partying is totally dead compared to my day.
| lapcat wrote:
| > You have to be careful with Gen Z threads like this on
| Reddit and Twitter. They are inherently biased toward Gen Z
| people who are chronically online and deep into social media.
|
| Wouldn't Gen X responses on those threads also be inherently
| biased toward Gen X people who are chronically online and
| deep into social media?
| conductr wrote:
| Maybe but they had a pre-internet life to reference and
| this topic is specifically discussing it
| lapcat wrote:
| Yes? That's the point. Even the Gen Xers with strong
| geeky/nerdy predilections had parties back in the day.
| conductr wrote:
| People change. Just because a Gen X is nerdy/chronically
| online now, doesn't mean they didn't party in the pre-
| internet era. I'm one of them that fits that mold.
|
| I've probably withdrawn more from society specifically
| because I had the entertainment of being online, tons of
| knowledge to consume, a tool to build digital things,
| etc. I had none of that in most of the 90s, so I went to
| raves and keg parties every weekend and experimented with
| lots of drugs and even had sex.
| lapcat wrote:
| > People change.
|
| Yes, and also society changes people. I think that's the
| point, and you allude to it:
|
| > I've probably withdrawn more from society specifically
| because I had the entertainment of being online, tons of
| knowledge to consume, a tool to build digital things,
| etc. I had none of that in most of the 90s
|
| The younger generations are suprised that we used to
| party all the time, because they never had a chance to
| live under the same circumstances.
| glxxyz wrote:
| > Wouldn't Gen X responses on those threads also be
| inherently biased toward Gen X people who are chronically
| online and deep into social media?
|
| Maybe now, yes, but not 20+ years ago when they were
| younger and going out and partying.
| lapcat wrote:
| I don't understand the point you're trying to make?
| spiderice wrote:
| The point: If you survey Gen-Zers on Reddit to find out
| how many Gen-Zers are on Reddit, you'll conclude that
| 100% of Gen-Zers are on Reddit.
| lapcat wrote:
| No, that's surely not the point, and it's not clear how
| this is even relevant.
|
| But let's allow the person I addressed to reply instead
| of imposing your own interpretation.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > inherently biased toward Gen Z people who are chronically
| online and deep into social media
|
| most of the Gen Z people I know fit this description
|
| is there really a significant Gen Z cohort that isn't
| "chronically online and deep into social media"?
| autoexec wrote:
| It's also true that it's "chronically online" GenX folks who
| are replying to the "chronically online" GenZ folks.
|
| Even if we assume that "chronically online" people and reddit
| users are nerdier, less social in the real world, tend to be
| more introverted, less likely to go to parties in general,
| etc. we're still left with teen parties being normal for the
| GenX nerds and alien to the GenZ nerds.
|
| As an old, chronically online, more introverted, nerd I can
| say that I absolutely attended parties in my teens and early
| 20s (only some of which were lan parties or BBS meetups)
| acquiesce wrote:
| No. The "new generation" now knows what the outcasts and the
| undesirables of the "old generation" felt like. The more I
| speak to the younger crowd the more parallels I find which just
| means the "default" shifted towards a society of people who
| don't know a different way, but are unaware of what goes on
| around them. The undesirables of the old knew, but couldn't do
| anything about it.
|
| It's like people who are bewildered when newspapers say bankers
| got caught having a massive orgy of some 50+ attendees in a
| hotel in Switzerland. There is always a party, but you're not
| invited. Simple as.
| colinwilyb wrote:
| What's newspaper? ;)
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I knew the Diddy party charges wouldn't stick because the
| aggrieved persons descriptions sound like commonly held
| parties in Los Angeles with quite a lot of consent involved
| (and courts aren't able to parse more nuanced aspects of
| consent, so people are left with a reliance on mutual
| cooperation)
|
| this detail isn't as important to people as wondering if I've
| gone to an LA sex party and whatever preconception they have
| of that and now me
|
| Just like those bankers, and this thread, there is always a
| party
| snctm wrote:
| Indeed.
| breakyerself wrote:
| I mean normal teen parties when I was a teenager were places
| for teens to get blackout drunk and make bad decisions. I
| empathize with your position somewhat, but it wasn't all good.
| tlogan wrote:
| Not all parties were like that. Or at least I was never
| invited to those. We geeks stuck to LAN parties, got drunk,
| and played games. Since there were no girls around, we
| managed to avoid making any bad decisions :)
|
| But we did party way more than kids today.
| grvdrm wrote:
| Reminds me that some of the hardest partiers/most
| adventurous kids were not popular: theater kids!
| jalk wrote:
| The majority of the bad decisions we made, was when there
| were no girls around. It's sheer luck that no one was
| seriously injured or arrested
| basisword wrote:
| Getting drunk and making bad decisions (within reason) is:
|
| a) fun
|
| b) how you learn
| namdnay wrote:
| The type of people posting these questions on reddit today
| wouldn't have been at those parties yesterday, so I don't think
| we can extrapolate some overarching theme here
|
| My anecdotal experience with two children who are young adults
| is that there are still house-parties (nearly) every weekend at
| high-school, but that there's a lot less drinking, and they're
| a lot more open and mature (i'm not sure i would have enjoyed
| being a trans kid in a 90s high school)
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I'm not saying the kid who posted this is a 100%
| representative sample, but at least in my experience of the
| teenagers I know, childhood has changed drastically in the
| last 25 years.
|
| If you look at some of the poster's comments there, he
| laments that even when he _does_ go to house parties,
| everyone is just sitting around on their phone. I have
| certainly seen that.
|
| > they're a lot more open and mature
|
| Maybe in some ways but hopelessly regressed in others. For
| example, Scott Galloway talks about how 50% of men aged 18-24
| have never asked someone out in person:
| https://youtube.com/shorts/5sq4P5RCIrg?si=iMVDyAU4eyzgMN2j
|
| I think that's one minor example of the monumental shift that
| has happened among young people.
| fnord77 wrote:
| I feel like this article was spawned by that reddit post and
| subsequent related tweets.
| kenjackson wrote:
| I think this article was way overdone, based on what I see with
| my teenage kids. They don't go to any "parties", but during the
| summer they are at the beach around 4x per week with bonfires
| at night. Almost 1/3 of their class (at a somewhat small
| school) is there.
|
| And with Snapchat they know where everyone is. It's typical on
| a Friday school night they are scanning their map to see, "this
| group is at the mall. this group is at the football. this group
| went to her house." And then pick where to go.
|
| Honestly, the current method of social gathering seems so much
| better than what I did in the 80s.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Its definitely more efficient than riding on your bike or
| later a car, hoping someone was home
| realo wrote:
| Aaaahhh... You have "beach" ... with the "bonfires" option
| pack ... This is very nice urban furniture.
|
| Here we have "streets" and , occasionally, "public parks".
|
| Forget the "bonfires" option.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> Forget the "bonfires" option._
|
| This right here is emblematic of the change in culture.
| When Gen X were young you weren't allowed to have bonfires
| (in most public places) either, but that never stopped
| anyone. Nowadays the kids are too afraid to do anything.
| almosthere wrote:
| Yeah and in 30 years a thought post on brainnit will appear in
| everyone's head and they'll ask Gen-Zer's did you really have a
| brain that was isolated from everyone elses?
|
| And someone will respond:
|
| It's really sad to me how we fucked you guys up and you didn't
| even have phones...
| zackmorris wrote:
| Ya I'm shocked by it too, said as a Gen Xer born in the late
| 1970s, occasionally a Xennial.
|
| I partied for 4 years of college which is something like 30
| years in sober adult terms. Our ragers were reminiscent of
| Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds, all of those old party
| movies that didn't age well. Scenes from Hackers, Fight Club,
| The Matrix, Trainspotting, Go, Swingers, Made, 200 Cigarettes,
| SLC Punk, Dazed and Confused, PCU, even Undergrads (a cartoon)
| were so spot-on for campus life, living for the weekend. Can't
| Hardly Wait, American Pie, Varsity Blues, Waiting, Superbad,
| etc came later, and I almost consider those watered down
| versions of the feral partying that happened earlier just as
| the internet went mainstream, but still canon.
|
| A Friday night at my city's bar scene today looks like what our
| Sunday or Monday was. People half tipsy on 2 drinks, even
| though they're Ubering home later. The faint scent of ganja now
| instead of basements filled with smoke and first timers trying
| laughing gas. Nobody puking or disappearing around a corner to
| relieve themselves. No sound of bottles shattering. I feel like
| a curator of a museum now, a derelict from a forgotten time.
|
| In fairness, I went to college in the midwest, where there was
| nothing else to do. Now the West Coast has effectively
| legalized drugs, awakening much of the country to the full
| human experience, and people have done the trips and plant
| medicine and maybe realize at a young age that alcohol and
| tobacco are rough drugs that tear you up. Which is admirable,
| but they also prepare you for getting torn up as an adult. To
| miss out on learning how to make your way home on drunk logic
| before you black out seems like a crucial rite of passage has
| been lost.
|
| And it shows. In our country's embrace of puritanical politics
| like we saw in the jingoist 2000s, regentrified for the antivax
| era. In the worship of unspoiled beauty, idolizing of
| influencers, pursuit of financial security over visceral
| experience. In the fanboyism, bootlicking and drinking the
| kool-aid for every new evolutionary tech that cements the
| status quo instead of freeing the human spirit in a
| revolutionary manner. I gotta be honest, most of what's
| happening today is laughable to my generation. Blah I sound
| like a Boomer. Ok cryable then. We're in mourning. We worry
| about the kids today. All work and no play and all that. It's
| killing our souls, and theirs.
|
| I guess my final thought after writing this is that partying is
| one of the most powerful reality-shifting tools in our arsenal.
| All of this can't be it. This can't be how America ends. You
| know what to do.
| throwforfeds wrote:
| I remember a friend who was going to school in Boston coming
| to visit me at my college in western Massachusetts freshman
| year. I brought him to some off campus house in the woods,
| probably 200 or so people there, huge bonfire in the back,
| bands playing in the basement. We're passing a bottle of
| Jameson back and forth. Probably around 1 am everyone just
| heard someone screaming "that's my fucking couch!" from the
| outside deck as a few dudes tossed her couch into the
| bonfire. The flames were as high as the house and 15 minutes
| later the fire department was there. My friend couldn't
| believe what was going on, which honestly was a typical
| Friday night (aside from the couch burning).
|
| I've lived in Brooklyn for about 20 years now, and while the
| parties still happen, most of them have become corporate.
| There are $50 covers and $15 beers, with wristbands you have
| to load a credit card onto instead of $5 covers and $2 beers
| in an illegal warehouse (cash only). The kids also seem to be
| taking ketamine a lot more than anything else, so they kinda
| disassociate and don't really dance that much at the clubs,
| whereas mdma and coke were things you ran into more when I
| was their age and people were not shy about grabbing someone
| on the dancefloor and grinding on each other for the night.
| They are definitely more sheltered and tame than we were as a
| whole, which isn't necessarily a bad thing I guess.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| ketamine and whippets too. The whippets are getting quite
| worrisome. Basement parties are still alive and well, but
| yes it seems most venues have been demolished, killed by
| zoning or private-equitied. It's a tale as old as time (or
| at least as old as nimbyism), regulate something out of
| existence and then wonder where all the money, goodwill and
| life went. That and the fact that whenever anything out of
| the ordinary happens there's always a phone out. Always
| something to worry about.
| kortex wrote:
| I had never really considered partying as a reality-shifting
| tool, but as someone fond of regional burn events, yeah, it
| totally is.
|
| Humans have partied for aeons. It's not just about letting
| off steam, it's about building social bonds, it's about
| traditions and rituals and marking key points in life.
|
| This whole thread makes me rather sad, but in the same
| breath, makes me feel like there is real, actionable good to
| be done by promoting and helping run events. Not corporate
| pay-to-play curated experiences, which keep you on rails and
| only serve to condition more consumption behaviors, but
| relatively low cost, volunteer-run, do-it-yourself events.
| The latter, from my experience, have an absolutely infectious
| component of wanting to contribute, volunteer, create art,
| and drag others into the experience. But they are also a lot
| of work and not everyone is cut out for it.
|
| It really has me thinking about lowering the bar to any sort
| of _experience_ that gives folks a reprieve from the default
| world, however fleeting.
| jollyllama wrote:
| The economic realities shouldn't be discounted. With more
| competitive conditions, the youth have to work much harder to
| secure the same opportunities relative to previous generation.
| With this comes the decline of partying or other high risk or
| non-productive activities. It's also true of adults -
| nightclubs are not as much of a thing as they were in decades
| prior.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| Hold up. GenX'er here, graduated college in the mid 90s. Are
| you telling me that college keg parties in the basements of
| off-campus housing is no longer a thing?
| WorldPeas wrote:
| still alive and well, across multiple social strata, happy to
| report.
| weinzierl wrote:
| _" It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of
| youth with social media, smart phones, and over-
| scheduling/over-protection."_
|
| I honestly believe social media, smart phones, and over-
| scheduling/over-protection does a lot less damage to the
| current generation than partying did to my generation. I can
| recommend the 1995 Larry Clark movie _" kids"_ for a more
| balanced view how parties often looked like and which negative
| side effects they could have. Real life was not like in _"
| American Pie"_ at all and that is where I guess Gen Z is
| getting their impression from.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > I honestly believe social media, smart phones, and over-
| scheduling/over-protection does a lot less damage to the
| current generation than partying did to my generation.
|
| Zuck, is that you? :)
|
| > movie "kids" for a more balanced view how parties often
| looked like
|
| Teens (and pre-teens) having sex, doing hard drugs and
| drinking liquor is completely unlike "how parties often
| looked like" for anyone I know but YMMV.
| frollogaston wrote:
| The article title mentions partying, but there's a chart
| that's just about going out with 2+ friends. That's a
| terrible thing to lose. I was a kid in the 2000s, and the
| vast majority of socializing was just harmless fun, not the
| extreme.
| danjc wrote:
| One aspect to consider is that the vast proportion of content
| in automated feeds isn't even sincere - it's just engagement
| farming.
| zygentoma wrote:
| > The responses from the Gen Xers were a mix of bewilderment
| and sadness, stuff like "What do you mean parties like this,
| it's just a normal teenage party!?
|
| Well, it's a normal teenage party /in the US/.
|
| I think in Europe, partying always looked a lot different (also
| different from country to country, here). I also mostly was
| bewildered by parties in teen movies from the early 00s.
| whoisyc wrote:
| Another day, another well-meaning internet community falling
| victim to the creative writing major testing water on Reddit
| before trying to make it in Hollywood.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| I grew up very sheltered, my mom had anxiety and I was a single
| child.
|
| I remember being unable to comprehend how in media, people
| could just go somewhere without issues to met with people or
| even go for a walk. I knew that was a thing, but I could not
| imagine what it's actually like and if it's real.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Over protection and coddling are definitely a cause of lower
| social skills. When I was a kid, parents with leave children
| with a babysitter who was essentially an older child, sometimes
| just by a couple of years. Other times the kids would just be
| wandering around by themselves while parents didn't care until
| it was dinner time. "Parties" weren't just alcohol induced sex
| fests like they show on TV. Often it was 10 kids bunched around
| a single computer with $5 worth of chips and soda trying to
| beat a boss fight. A lot of those things are not only frowned
| upon now, but as a parent, could land you in jail.
|
| If you wonder why children no longer grow up with a different
| outlook to life, then that's probably it.
| ethan_smith wrote:
| Digital socialization has replaced many functions of physical
| parties - Discord hangouts, gaming sessions, and video calls
| offer connection without the logistics burden or social risks.
| The question isn't whether socializing has died, but whether
| its digital evolution provides the same developmental benefits
| as in-person gatherings.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I honestly am having trouble believing folks think that
| digital socialization is anywhere near an acceptable
| substitute (vs. an adjunct) for in-person socialization. And
| tons of research supports this. Can't remember the woman who
| talks about AI meaning "Artificial Intimacy", where you have
| 1500 "friends" but nobody to feed your cat when you go on
| vacation.
|
| Here is Scott Galloway talking about the significance of
| asking someone out in-person vs. online dating,
| https://youtube.com/shorts/5sq4P5RCIrg
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| The old "boomer" parties were even wilder.
|
| Some girl's parents would leave for the weekend, and she'd
| quietly invite a friend or two over.
|
| Somehow, word would get out, and 400 people would show up, with
| multiple kegs, and the place would get trashed.
| lapcat wrote:
| That's not a boomer thing. It more or less happened to me
| too.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Fair 'nuff.
|
| I wasn't even aware that they don't have them, anymore.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| I think you need some sort of youth density for that. If you
| live in a low-density suburb where most people no longer have
| kids it's hard, even if you have a tool like the internet.
| frollogaston wrote:
| Some people want to make everything about "walkable cities."
| Maybe they can come back with socialization stats for non-
| driving-age kids, or those in Manhattan.
| autoexec wrote:
| Something tells me that tightly packed populations in urban
| settings and their landlords are way less accepting of huge
| parties in an apartment playing loud music than a small
| number of homeowners in a suburb are about someone in the
| cul-de-sac having a house party playing loud music.
| konart wrote:
| As a millennial - I'm also amazed by these parties. Some of my
| peers had this kind of experience, but for me this is something
| from parallel universe.
|
| Mostly because I never really understood the fun part.
| ngruhn wrote:
| It was my favorite activity in the world. But that also makes
| it tough to "let go" when your 30s approach. Even when the
| hangovers get worse. I'm kinda grateful for the pandemic
| shutting everything down for a while. Before that I had
| massive FOMO when I "did nothing" on the weekend. I know a
| bunch of guys who did nothing else with their lives.
| danans wrote:
| > the fact that kids today can't even recognize "basic teen
| parties" and question whether they are some sort of made up
| fantasy
|
| While I agree there is a technology-driven loneliness epidemic,
| what is so sacred about those "basic teen parties"?
|
| People from any time before the 70s wouldn't recognize them
| either. Also, they were fictional caricatures written for
| movies, not real life, where teen parties were considerably
| less interesting.
| frollogaston wrote:
| I grew up in the 90s-2000s in a place were people were very
| serious about school. Very few kids were getting drunk etc,
| there were very few couples and 0 teen pregnancies, but there
| was still a healthy amount of socializing. That chart showing
| going out with 2+ friends was still a high % then, and it
| matched my experience.
|
| This completely changed after iPhones and Facebook became
| popular enough. It ruined even the regular socializing. Even
| the few boy bullies started doing this lame-ass cyberbullying
| instead. Sometimes I wondered where the cool kids were on
| weekdays, then I checked my Minecraft server logs.
| scotty79 wrote:
| I never saw the point of those. People, alcohol, what's fun
| about any of that? Tripping over your own legs with a bunch of
| similarly incapable humans while drowning in noise and fine
| particulates is toddler level fun. But with potential of
| acquiring adult level damage.
| arkwin wrote:
| I was a teenager in high school around 2005 and living in the
| Midwest. There were lots of underage drinking and parties going
| on during that time.
|
| That being said, most of it was "cool parents" that allowed such
| behavior because we didn't own anything as teens.
|
| We would have rules like, if you're drinking there, you have to
| stay the night or call your parents to pick you up.
|
| I think it was just a different time; it seemed more forgiving.
| Now, a cop will pull you over and give you a DUI and mess up your
| life for a while. But I heard stories back then ~ '70s, where
| cops would make sure a drunk person got home safely at night
| instead of throwing the book at them.
|
| I am sure it is harder for kids today who mostly live online in
| their algorithmic bubbles. And harder for parents to condone such
| activity, because who wants to be the parent where cops come
| knocking on your door and charge you with supplying alcohol to
| minors?
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| Similar age (a bit older) but I always remember our core group
| of friends' parents would pass around a key-collection plate --
| "this is a safe environment to have a little bit of fun in" --
| the only time I ever remember a drunk peer driving home... he
| was then banned from all future private party invites.
| Sadly/predictably, he would later perish in a DUI, early 20s...
|
| Damn, I miss the late 90s/aughts. Damn, I'm old (and fat, too;
| I "made it", somehow!)
| codingwagie wrote:
| there are deep reasons for why society is not like this anymore
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Care to list them?
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Elaborating on this a bit, I think it's less that things are
| less forgiving, but that our risk tolerances have dramatically
| shrunk. Millennial parents are less risk tolerant with their
| kids' safety, and Gen Z / A kids and young adults are more
| careful about the rules.
|
| The root cause of this risk intolerance might be dispersed,
| just a cumulative result of cable news scare tactics, dropping
| birth rates and more investment per child, but I suspect a big
| aspect of it is that risk taking is no longer the only way to
| get a dopamine hit. Prior to the modern internet, if you
| avoided all the normal risk-taking behaviors associated with
| teenagers and young adults, you'd just be bored to death. Now
| the reward side of the risk-reward balance is just the
| difference between high-quality fun from meatspace shenanigans
| versus lower-quality enjoyment derived from social media and
| online gaming.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > As more women poured their weekdays into 9-to-5 work, men
| failed to take over the logistical labor required to fill out the
| social calendar
|
| LOL. The men were working too, as they always were, which is why
| women used to do most of the social planning. They didn't "fail
| to take over."
| watwut wrote:
| I remember seeing articles about working women doing more
| social managing then working men. It is one of reasons why
| women do not seek new partner as fast as men after divorce -
| they are more likely to keep friends they are content with.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| The inevitable side effect of the financialization of the human
| experience. People are in constant competition with each other
| and the amount of time they can spend not competing is
| proportionate to the amount of slack in the economic system.
| Keeping slack costs money, removing it makes money, it's very
| hard to almost impossible to stop something that makes money. It
| would take an Amish level of zealotry.
|
| I think the focus on short term gains by sacrificing long term
| viability is in part due to the inability to accurately measure
| future prospects, whenever there is doubt shot-termism prevails.
| The bird in the hand wins over the two in the bush. I think
| maximizing long term gains would be directly tied to human
| flourishing so if we could accurately measure long term
| externalities we could align capitalist and human interests.
| Convincing those who gain from short-termism to agree to use more
| accurate metrics is impossible when not using it makes them more
| money.
|
| I don't know how to fix this. A society will not allow itself to
| undergo 'creative destruction' in an era where we bailout
| corporations. And socialism certainly is not going to fix it,
| socialists have their own kind of rather destructive short-
| termism.
| NotAnOtter wrote:
| I used to throw loads of parties. At somepoint I realized..
|
| 1. It's expensive. I never once got a reasonable contribution
| from my friends. I knew this at the time, but eventually I was
| over it. Paying $100-250 per event just to deal with all the work
| and drama that comes with it.. not worth.
|
| 2. It's a lot of work. Hours of prep, hours of hosting, hours of
| clean up after. At the end of the day ~12 hours of effort for ~4
| hours of fun is not a good ROI.
|
| 3. It frequently was an excuse to get drunk or high. Which is
| fun, whatever. But as I grew more health conscious, this was less
| and less appealing. I can drink on my own if I want.
|
| 4. There are better alternatives. I don't have to do any of the
| above options if I just jump on Discord for a while. Or join a
| rec league sport. Or spend it with my family.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I don't think the point of a party is "ROI" either in terms of
| the dimensions of time, effort, or money. When I decide to host
| one, this kind of "cost" is assumed. I don't worry about it
| because I can afford it (in all three dimensions), and the
| point of hosting a get-together is not to make a profit on any
| of those dimensions or break even. I look at it as: I'm
| spending time+effort+money, and the return, for myself and
| everyone who attends, is not any of those three. It's getting
| some much needed socialization and a fun experience. I guess
| your point is that you're not getting as much fun out of it to
| justify the spend?
| laszlograves wrote:
| 1991 millennial here offering some perspective.
|
| Transferred to a California state college a little late (27) and
| wrapped up my computer science degree @ SFSU finished in 2019 so
| somewhat recent anecdotal experience.
|
| I met a lot of people just like me while in college. Lot of
| people mid to late 20s. One of my best friends in college was in
| the international business club fb group and they'd always host
| events or pub crawls every Thursday night. I'd ping my gf (now
| wife) and she'd asynchronously invite all of her friends and then
| I'd be inviting all our college friends so by the time we arrived
| we'd have a merged friend group. We met so many cool folks this
| way and people from different majors with diverse backgrounds.
|
| It helped to be in San Francisco of course.
|
| Now as far as the housing discussion I'd say that the 7% rates
| that are historically normal feel oppressive after 15 years of
| low rates following the Great Recession. I bought a place in the
| edge of the Bay Area last year with 5% down at 7% because I
| didn't have the income that I have now when rates were low. We
| were saving for the last 7 years delaying a bunch of major life
| milestones. The prices in our zip code already dropped ~15%
| before we bought so we saved about a 20% down payments worth off
| the up front cost. I barely qualified with 270k combined income
| and I'm not sure ppl understand how weird that feels until they
| experience it. The home wasn't even a median priced SFH in fact
| it was well below at about 750k. I kept a bunch of vested stock
| and savings but yeah not sure how things will shake out. It's a
| tough market for sure.
| tlogan wrote:
| I have a politically sensitive but potentially insightful
| question.
|
| I live in San Francisco, where we have a desegregation busing
| policy. In practice, this means kids don't attend their
| neighborhood schools. They're assigned to schools across the city
| (Instead of investing in improving schools in underprivileged
| neighborhoods, we (voters) decided it is better (and cheaper) to
| bus those kids to schools in more affluent areas - but that is
| beside the point)
|
| One theory I've heard is that this setup leads to less
| socializing (or "partying") among teens, since their school
| friends often live far away. That raises an interesting question:
| To what extent does busing contribute to reduced peer interaction
| outside school?
|
| Also, how common are these busing policies across the U.S. today?
| Is San Francisco an outlier, or is this a widespread approach?
| verall wrote:
| It is common and it is coupled with investment in improving
| schools in underprivileged neighborhoods.
|
| A school in a poor area gets heavy investment and then can pull
| ("magnet") a certain percentage of their students from a much
| wider area. Involved parents apply for their children to go to
| these schools since they have the best art or theater or
| robotics or whatever programs.
|
| This acknowledges that an important part of a successful school
| is parental involvement and a general culture of students that
| are interested in learning.
|
| In practice, at least in my childhood, the schools largely
| self-segregated by the classes they took, i.e. AP or not, more
| or less challenging tracks ("honors" classes).
|
| I still think it was a net positive. At least students in the
| underprivileged areas got access to these advanced programs,
| even if there were still social barriers. And as a kid from the
| suburbs, I got to meet kids outside of my suburban cohort - I
| think this was really valuable to me as a bit of a misfit.
| skeaker wrote:
| Had a similar situation when I was young. Living far away only
| really impacts your ability to host events which can suck for
| things like your birthday parties, as getting a large number of
| people to all go out of their way is pretty much impossible.
| Other than that it doesn't affect your ability to socialize or
| attend events hosted by others.
| VLM wrote:
| Three issues that are important but nobody wants to discuss
| (why?):
|
| Inflation in the cost of law enforcement. As an X-er I received
| some truly epic paint-peeling flame-throwing "angry dad-style"
| lectures from cops and one time I got caught and my parents were
| called and I paid a municipal citation (not a misdemeanor or
| felony) equivalent to thirteen hours of minimum wage labor
| (essentially, one teenage afterschool weekly paycheck...). Now a
| days it would be kinder if the cops just shot the kid, as they
| will lose their license semi-permanently which means no job and
| no programmed activities and no sports, forbidden from joining
| the military (note the GI Bill paid for my college), lose their
| security clearance if they are already in the .mil, expelled from
| college / retract admission, suspended from school, that means no
| college diploma, no diploma as a job ticket to get one of the
| very few remaining "good jobs" etc. Seems a little inflated of a
| punishment over "a couple beers" People like discussing the
| inflation rate of real estate, lack of inflation in wages, but
| they should discuss inflation in the punishment for having a few
| drinks. A general cultural trend toward absolutism where
| everything thats permitted is mandatory and everything thats not
| permitted has no limit to the resulting punishment to prevent it.
| Toe the line precisely, or suffer the full weight of the law, and
| the line does not include partying, so you'd be crazy to do that.
|
| "In the old days" the cultural expectation was everyone works
| 9-5. No one is allowed that anymore, they either work 24x7 as
| servants on call to their feudalistic owner, or have weird hours
| and gig economy jobs. Most people cannot "drop by after work
| around 6 for a beer". Can you drink at work? I can't. Can you go
| to work drunk? I can't. Some people, maybe most people, are not
| allowed to ever be "not at work". You're not even allowed to
| sleep if your boss feels like texting you; you surely can't get
| drunk at a friends house without getting fired. Don't worry that
| beer (or ten) will only cost you a one year job search to get a
| new job. When everyone is under house arrest by their employer,
| nobody parties.
|
| There's a long tradition in the USA of trashing a proper name and
| the following generation abandons it while doing the same thing
| under a new name. Every generation before gen-x loved going to
| malls, then a long indoctrination campaign to use security forces
| and police to "keep those annoying teenage kids out of malls"
| started in the 1980s, and here I am in the 2020s and I STILL will
| not go to the mall because of heavy handed security, and my
| generation and younger is killing the malls because malls hate me
| because I was once a teen that hung out at the mall a lifetime
| ago. So, WRT parties, post "Animal House" movie era, a party
| means vandalism, drunk driving accidents, police arrests,
| visiting the ER for alcohol (or other) intoxication, etc. The
| marketing has been successful and my generation and younger no
| longer "attend parties". We "hike at the park" or "tailgate at
| the (kids?) sport event" or "hang out at the festival" or "board
| game night" doing EXACTLY what we did when people partied, but
| for marketing reasons we never party anymore, its a "tailgate"
| sporting event. This makes the article pretty weak sauce, an
| entire article about doing search and replace in a word processor
| for "party" and "board game night" is not a significant lifestyle
| change.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| "women have long been the keepers of the family social calendar.
| Wives, not husbands, historically planned the quilting parties,
| the bridge games, and the neighborhood potlucks. But in the
| second half of the 20th century, many women swapped unpaid family
| jobs for salaried positions."
|
| This is a very good observation, and I think that somewhere in
| the social revolutions of the 20th century, we failed to
| appreciate the extremely important historical roles women played
| that were central to traditional societies. Even today, we
| believe the stock caricatures of pre-feminist societies, which in
| a way is unsurprising, given that most people alive today never
| experienced anything other than the post-revolutionary world. We
| just accept caricature as fact, and we view history
| anachronistically through the lens of our present social
| realities.
|
| In traditional societies, the family assumes the basic and most
| important social unit and social point of reference, with the
| married couple as the foundation for it. This already creates a
| network of social ties that radiate from the marriage, most
| conspicuously family ties which are doubled. Husbands typically
| gravitated toward the public sphere, securing the material well-
| being of the family through their participation in public life
| (in other words, their work was primarily for the sake of the
| domestic sphere). Wives typically gravitated toward the domestic
| sphere which was the seat of family life. So while men were heads
| of the family, women were heads of the household. And this was an
| honor, as family life was the primary business of life; the
| husband's career or job was primarily in service to family life.
| Ideally, husbands provided the means that allowed wives to be
| free to be mothers, unburdened by competing commitments. (Of
| course, this doesn't mean fathers did not participate in domestic
| life, nor that women did not participate in public life. It is
| rather a matter of emphasis and "center of gravity", so to
| speak.) By analogy, kings are exalted fathers, and queens are
| exalted mothers.
|
| And since the family is the center of social life, and women are
| mistresses of the domestic sphere, it is fitting that women
| should have a more social orientation. Indeed, it is expected
| that women would be the catalysts of many of the social ties with
| the broader community.
|
| In that sense, the careerism that women today are taught from an
| early age to pursue and prioritize not only deprives women of the
| opportunity to function as wives and mothers, most exalted and
| honored roles that they are, but it deprives society of much of
| its social glue, as women have a greater tendencies to care about
| cultivating social bonds than men do.
|
| What we're taught today instead is that the career, not family
| life, is the supreme occupation of life and the primary source of
| our happiness. We are therefore taught that women were
| historically deprived of this opportunity, chained to the bleak
| life of being "stay-at-home moms" (a vicious term, if there ever
| was one), covered in baby puke and toddler shit, under the
| tyrannical boot of her husband like some slave. We demean
| motherhood as some kind of drudgery for poor, uneducated,
| unattractive women instead of the privilege that it is, in fact
| the privilege of raising the future generation. Children are no
| longer a wonderful gift, but a burden and an obstacle. You
| _might_ be able to turn them into sources of prestige, if you can
| get them into the best schools or whatever. The career is the
| center of life; children, the family, even the spouse - these are
| all secondary now.
|
| And this has downstream effects that cause a radical
| transformation of society and culture that affects the entire
| social and economic environment, like the atrophy of social ties
| mentioned in the article. For instance, try supporting a family
| on a single income today (in the 1950s, a middle class/working
| class man could do just that). Now women who want to live in a
| traditional way are constrained in that choice, as economic and
| social realities make that difficult. That's why I roll my eyes
| when someone thinks bucking demographic decline is just a matter
| of throwing some money at the problem. Our society and our
| culture has become hostile to family life. The grain and pattern
| of modern life, rather than supporting it, adds friction and
| resistance. And since family life is the foundation for the rest,
| the health or lack thereof of family life is a predictor of the
| health of the broader society.
| rwl4 wrote:
| This was a great read! I'm not a paid subscriber, so I'll post my
| thoughts here.
|
| One angle I think that might be missing is that when only men
| worked outside the home, women would be stuck at home all day
| with housework and childcare which I would guess was quite
| isolating. So I would guess these gatherings were a lifeline.
|
| When women entered the workforce, they gained the same quasi-
| social environment men had enjoyed all along. Work friendships
| might not be as deep as neighborhood ones, but they're "good
| enough" to take the edge off loneliness. Not only that, but now
| both partners would come home fatigued from a full day of work.
| So neither would have a strong drive to now setup these
| gatherings. Before, you had one exhausted partner who could be
| coaxed into socializing by a partner who genuinely needed it. Now
| you have mutual exhaustion. Even worse, planning a party starts
| to feel like another work project rather than something
| restorative.
|
| There's a multi-generational aspect to this too. Their kids
| learned the lesson that home is for family and screens, not for
| social gatherings. Computers and smartphones arrived and provided
| social interaction that required minimal energy. No cleaning the
| house, no planning food, no getting dressed. Perfect for an
| already exhausted population that had been socially declining for
| years.
| travisb wrote:
| Even beyond mutual exhaustion is housework. When both partners
| works outside the home, they still have to do the housework
| when they get home or on the weekend. Previously that would
| have been the job of the one staying at home.
|
| The 20-ish hours a week needed for domestic chores has to come
| from somewhere.
| millipede wrote:
| I've been throwing moderately large parties the past 2 years
| (12-40 people) and the lack of partying is definitely noticeable.
| Most people don't reciprocate, making it disheartening to keep
| doing it. I wanted to build friendships out of it, and hopefully
| get invited to more parties myself, but so far it hasn't
| happened. It's a decent amount of set up (cleaning, buying food,
| coordinating), and a lot of clean up after too. The ROI isn't
| where I want it.
|
| I kind of wonder if people have just forgot what to do after the
| party is over. I had hoped it would be "that was so fun, we
| should host one", but instead it just kinda fades away in their
| minds.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| going to a party is less intimidating (particularly effort-
| wise) than hosting one
|
| maybe co-host one with somebody who you think might enjoy
| hosting but is reticent to try
| ashdksnndck wrote:
| Also if you just want to make your own parties easier to
| host, you can ask the guest list if anyone will volunteer to
| help with specific tasks or supplies.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| If you happen to live in San Diego, I'll happily invite you to
| my parties! They generally involve board games, making a fire,
| having dinner, watching a movie, or going to the beach. Alcohol
| optional. Not super wild, but always a good time for me :)
| doh wrote:
| I am in SD and would love an invite. I am keep thinking about
| uniting more like minded people for a while. My email is
| r@seslu.com
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Very few people want to host/organize other people.
|
| The end goal of throwing parties shouldn't be friendship or
| getting invited to other people parties, it's building a large
| loose network of people you're acquaintances/shallow friends
| with and becoming a super connector.
|
| If you ONLY want to make friends or get invited to parties I
| think focusing on finding specific people and spending time
| with them 1:1 is a much better way to do that.
| starkparker wrote:
| > The ROI isn't where I want it.
|
| I know this is HN, but sometimes - maybe, hopefully, sometimes
| - neither R nor I is involved in an action.
|
| If you aren't enjoying doing it then by all means stop doing
| it. But throwing a party isn't supposed to have deliverables or
| action items.
| spiderice wrote:
| To each their own.. but I think throwing a party to make
| friends is a totally reasonable plan and expectation. And if
| it isn't working out, then the ROI isn't there.
|
| I go to "couples game nights" with my wife and her friends
| even though I don't really like them. But I like having
| friends in the neighborhood. So it's worth it to me when one
| of her friends husbands (who is now my friend) shows me the
| deck they've been building in their backyard all because I
| went to a somewhat painful game night.
|
| I think you have it nearly completely backwards. Society
| would be far better off if _more_ people were willing to do
| the "un-fun" things (like planning and hosting a party) in
| order to socialize. GP should be applauded.
| unstatusthequo wrote:
| Right, when OKRs and KPIs and other startup bullshit jargon
| are applied to parties, maybe it's not really the spirit of a
| party at all, is it?
| amenhotep wrote:
| It's a slightly jargony way to say "it isn't worth it to me",
| which is totally fine. Come on.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > I wanted to build friendships out of it, and hopefully get
| invited to more parties myself, but so far it hasn't happened.
|
| From this and other comments, it seems you think you didn't
| make friends, because you're not invited to other parties.
| There seems a leap here.
|
| If the others are holding big parties and not inviting you -
| sure.
|
| If they just don't throw parties, then they likely are still
| your friends :-)
|
| But as another commenter said: Going to parties is not
| necessarily the best way to make friends. Whenever I go to a
| big party, the host is way too busy to spend a meaningful
| amount of time with me. Of course he's not going to become my
| friend that way! Going to big parties is for guests to make
| friends with other guests - not with the host.
|
| I have some good friends who throw only big parties - I've
| stopped going to them. What's the point if I can't interact
| with them?
| kurthr wrote:
| That's about the right size for a potluck. Set a rough guide
| for the main and have people post what they're bringing. If
| they're good friends they'll put their dishes in the
| washer/sink and some will help clean before they leave. If they
| aren't good guests (bring something + fun + clean up) they
| don't get invited back. Have it once a month on the same day.
| Plan to rotate it and talk about it at the party.
|
| Of course people have all sorts of different ideas of what a
| party should be, what to bring, and what to do while you're
| there, but doing it all yourself is really hard. If you're
| getting it catered with cleaning staff, it's very different
| than having mostly the same close friends, month after month
| year after year.
| frollogaston wrote:
| Chart goes down fast soon after 2010. There's another article
| about a decline in young Americans' health since 2007. And, we
| all know what happened around that time.
|
| "I don't like the simplistic idea that smartphones are purely
| anti-social" well I do. It's in-your-face obvious any time you're
| in public, and especially if you were in school back when
| smartphones started gaining popularity. There's a longer
| explanation too, but same conclusion.
| gdsdfe wrote:
| I bet you anything this is related to wage growth or lack thereof
| ... I mean why would you party if you have no disposable income
| ?!
| janalsncm wrote:
| As with many large scale social trends there will be several
| contributing factors, so nuance will always be the first victim
| of people with an axe to grind.
|
| If you want to say that an decrease in X is the sole cause of a
| decrease in Y, it might be a good idea to check whether there are
| other places where 1) X increased but Y decreased or 2) X
| decreased but Y increased. Different moments in time, different
| countries, etc.
|
| For myself personally I have moved around a good amount, so it is
| naturally harder to make social connection, and even if I'm
| invited to social events with friends in other places it is
| physically hard to attend them.
| bagacrap wrote:
| I feel like it would be more worrisome if partying had doubled in
| the last XX years.
| advael wrote:
| I like that this delves into the relationship between "helicopter
| parenting" and this trend, and maybe I missed it, but I find that
| it conspicuously lacks economic precarity and the decline of real
| wages over this time period as an explanation. Hosting social
| events does cost free time and money and most people have way
| less of both in real terms than the period it's comparing to
| sota_pop wrote:
| I see this cultural shift resulting from multiple contributing
| factors: 1. The increasingly litigious environment that is the
| US. Where people are becoming more risk-averse out of fear of
| being liable for _whatever_. 2. The fact that anything you did,
| be it something great or a faux pas, social or otherwise, was
| much more ephemeral. At best it would be captured in people's
| memories for a couple of weeks or the occasional cell phone pic
| that was inevitably lost with the hardware. More recently,
| everything you do is recorded, indexed, and preserved with
| accompanying text, photos, and video - _forever_ - thanks to
| social media and the internet.
|
| Also, agreeing with other posts, the onus of "sports culture" for
| kids (and families) in k-12 schools these days is absolutely
| unbelievable.
|
| edit: Also, finding out the following Monday (in school) that a
| "party" to which you weren't invited occurred over the weekend
| was unpleasant. Witnessing a middle-school-aged kid discover a
| "party" to which they weren't invited in real-time as it is
| streaming live on social media is absolutely heart-breaking.
| sailfast wrote:
| Shit's expensive. Period.
|
| What teenager has $60 to spend at the movies?
| standardUser wrote:
| A an older millennial, I have been pleasantly surprised by how
| vibrant my social life can be as long as I put in some effort.
| One key is living in a reasonably dense urban area. I have
| friends who make art and music, fiends who do standup comedy,
| friends on municipal sports teams - the ways to connect with
| people are expansive. And people in my age group (early 40's)
| seem only a little less inclined to make plans and go out
| compared to my friends in their 30's.
|
| Even with my oldest friends, all of whom are busy with their
| kids, mortgages and spouses, we still prioritize taking trips to
| see each other and for everyone to get to know each other's kids.
|
| So if you're anything like me (grown, mostly single, living alone
| in a dense urban center) I refuse to believe any social or
| technological developments have ruined our chances at human
| companionship.
|
| But that's millennials. I have absolutely no idea how Gen Z will
| navigate this world. The fact that they seem to be choosing the
| least useful, social or pleasurable vice in the world (vaping),
| which also happens to be among the most viciously addictive vices
| (for many people) does not bode well in my opinion, no matter how
| enlightened the anti-alcohol stance may appear.
| sirodoht wrote:
| If anyone wants to be invited to house parties in London, UK, I'm
| happy to invite anyone who emails theo+hn@torchandzen.com! Number
| of people ranges from 10 to 50, activities from talking and
| eating to picnics and dancing.
| Animats wrote:
| It's not just the US. The nightclub and bar industry is tanking
| in the UK and Europe, too. UK: [1][2] Berlin.[3] Paris.[4]
|
| [1] https://ntia.co.uk/nightclub-industry-struggles-with-
| over-10...
|
| [2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk-pub-closures-beer-
| taxe...
|
| [3] https://www.dw.com/en/is-berlin-in-a-club-death-
| spiral/a-703...
|
| [4] https://www.latribunedelhotellerie.com/paris-society-
| cession...
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| I'd guess the biggest driver of this is a lack of boredom.
| There's a certain investment of time and stress to throw a party,
| if you're just going to be completely bored it gets you over that
| hurdle, if you can play games and talk in a group chat instead
| you might not pass the threshold for bothering a lot of the time.
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