I Want a World Where It’s Easier to Have Fun With Friends
Young people in the US seem to be drinking, dating, and hanging out less. I don’t really know why ― but I know I want to fight for a world where having a social life is easier.
It feels like every month I see a new survey or study suggesting that Americans are having less fun than they used to.
The headline of a Wall Street Journal article that came across my Twitter feed the other day read, “The Hottest New Bedtime for 20-Somethings Is 9 p.m.” The actual data backing up the claim was a bit thin, it turned out: the author cited a survey showing an 8 percent increase in the amount of sleep per night reported by Americans in their 20s, as well as “an analysis of more than two million total Sleep Number smart-bed customers” that found that the average bedtime for eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds fell from 10:18 p.m. in January 2023 to 10:06 p.m. in January of this year.
This doesn’t seem to me to be a very significant change. But there really does seem to be a broader shift, especially among young people, of drinking less, having less sex, and socializing less in general:
Gallup found in 2021–23 that 62 percent of Americans aged eighteen-to-thirty-four said they sometimes drink, compared to 72 percent twenty years ago. The frequency and amount of drinking reported by eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds also fell.
A California study found that the number of adults aged eighteen to thirty who reported not having sex in the past year shot up from 22 percent in 2011 to 38 percent in 2021. (The trend seems to have been accelerated by but predates the COVID-19 pandemic, with 29 percent reporting being celibate in the prior year in 2019.) This decline corresponds to similar trends at the national level.
In-person socializing has also been falling over the past two decades, especially among fifteen- to twenty-four-year-olds. This trend predates the pandemic as well.
Alongside these changes, rates of loneliness and depression have been rising. The US Surgeon General has even declared that we are facing an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.”
I’m sure plenty of people are happier because they are drinking less or having less sex or going to bed earlier, and so on — they’re just choosing healthier, more fulfilling lifestyles. It’s hard for me to resist the conclusion, though, that all of these trends are connected at some level.
I don’t pretend to know that, let alone to understand what’s really driving all these trends. Social media use and smartphones of course have something to do with it. But there is also evidence, for instance, that economic insecurity is causing people to have less sex, and that working too much is limiting people’s ability to enjoy time with family or friends. (Though there is conflicting data on whether Americans are actually working longer hours than they used to.) It’s hardly a stretch to see our decline in sociality as going hand-in-hand with rising economic inequality and precarity and the decline of unions and other civic associations.
In any case, one of the main reasons I’m a socialist is because I resent the oppressive demands that capitalism imposes on our time, forcing us to work for much of it and making us worry about how we’re going to make ends meet when we’re off the clock. And the near-term policy demands that I think we should fight for are, among other things, about freeing people from the grind and “hustle culture.”
We want a shorter workweek so that people have more free time to hang out with friends, or go on dates, or sleep in. We want student loan forgiveness and free college for all so people aren’t shackled by debt for decades for daring to get an education. We want universal health care so being without a full-time job for some stretch of time doesn’t mean being without health coverage (and again with the avoiding-debt-shackles thing). We want the government to guarantee that everyone who wants a job can find one, to empower people to stand up to their bosses and demand better pay and working conditions. We want rent control and abundant social housing so it’s not such a struggle just to afford a decent place to live.
In other words, we want an economy where people are less dependent on their employers and less desperate — less likely to be weighed down by debt, or to need to juggle multiple jobs, or to experience unemployment as a financial catastrophe — and where they have more time and resources for themselves. That would be a world where “grindset” is less of a necessity and we would all have greater freedom to loosen up and hang out with each other.
Not that we’d have to — people could also go to bed early and stay in watching Netflix by themselves or whatever. But I suspect that a hefty dose of social democracy would encourage a lot of us to loosen up and be more, well, social.