Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over

> Between 1975 and 1998, the share of Americans who gave or attended a monthly dinner party declined by half.

Interesting. I would have assumed the correlation is with the rise of the internt and smartphones, but it looks like the drop precedes that.

Another factor is alcohol consumption and the tolerance for drinking and driving. DUI citations were rare when I was young. I rarely see people drinking at parties I go to now.

In the end you get tired of always hosting and never getting invited back.

Too many people are passive and have a follower or consumer attitude to everything in life. Anything outside of the routine is impossible to consider.

I still host dinner parties. I even had one last night! But this article does touch on many things

I like hosting. People like attending. But they never do. I'll host several a year, and there are constantly people who say they'll come, and then never do

I'm not at the point no longer inviting people, but I've thought about it before

Why is church in there?

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

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

> Intensive parenting leaves less time for hosting

How do you successfully get your time back from your toddler?

It's well known among urban design researchers that the average number of other people one is interacting with on a daily basis has been decreasing ever since the move to the suburbs that started 100 years ago. The movr to the suburbs has been turning Americans into asocial people, generation after generation, in a vicious cycle. If you look at other countries that are still social because they live in denser environments, there's a certain amount of people "naturally" introvert, but much fewer than in the US, where most of it is learned.

I don't particularly like hosting, although I will do so, but I do enjoy gatherings of friends and interesting people over good food and good wine. What my wife and I did was join a dinner club. There are all variety of dinner clubs in almost every major city in the world. We are in our 40s and are the youngest members, because it seems most of the folks who join dinner clubs are older retirees that no longer have large families at home to host dinners with/for, but nonetheless we've found it rewarding.

Given that, though, I do see a bit of a generational divide. It definitely seems like the social circles of people in my generation and younger are larger, but not as deep. I have very good friends who have all moved to different places across the country, I fly to visit them, but the last time all of us were together was at someone's wedding. Contrast this with older generations who often have nearby lifelong friends and close by family, that provides them a smaller but deeper social circle with more opportunities for in-person interaction.

Dinner clubs are great, but not a replacement for the fact my closest friends are spread out all over the country. I don't really have a solve for that. If I were rich, I'd convince everyone to take remote jobs so we could build a "compound" with a bunch of houses all together and be near each other, but the economic realities don't make that possible for any of us.

Midlife millennial American here.

I’ve sorely wanted to host folks for game nights and shared meals and movies and the like. In fact, in the 2010s I’d play host to folks on the semi-regular since having people in my space is far less energy draining than being a guest in someone else’s.

Since ~2018, I’ve hosted guests three times.

Why the change?

Well, the landlord began charging for garage parking that used to be gratis, forcing cheapskates and broke renters into the visitor spaces. Then they clawed back 25% of guest parking for premium EV charging, meaning even guests with EVs couldn’t park there once they finished charging. Then the landlord stopped enforcing that, meaning folks with EVs can’t charge them because the spots are always full of combustion vehicles. This meant public transit and cycling were the only remaining options for guest access, the former of which required an hour-long detour for my friends to catch a single, specific bus route, while the latter would see them crossing stroads and cycling on state highways with vehicular traffic.

The local logistics are fungible however, and not the sole reason for the drop off. The bigger reason, admittedly, is fatigue. We spend eight hours working, then commute one to two hours each way (~10mi). Include time to prepare for work, make meals, and decompress after, and you’re left with ~1-2hrs a day for free time before having to sleep. Most employers I’ve worked for would side-eye you with disdain for trying to leave early to host an event at home, meaning we don’t feel comfortable asking for the time off in the first place. That doesn’t even include the associated workloads of our guests, who just have to show up almost immediately after work and don’t mind using their very limited free time hanging out in my space.

Then you bake in the fiscal costs - fuel for transit, food to share or prepare, parking and transit fees - and the data harvesting costs (landlord surveillance logging your entry, advertising displays profiling you, Flock camera at the sole neighborhood entrance tracking your entry and exit, etc) and it just doesn’t make fiscal or psychological sense to host at home. That doesn’t even touch on renters having smaller spaces than homeowners making hosting more of a challenge, potential noise complaints about your jovial party from a nosey neighbor getting your lease non-renewed, or the ease of just queuing up for a game remotely (even if it lacks the payoff of a physical visit from another human).

The closest I came to hosting on the regular was that brief window where COVID was managed but before RTO came hammering down. I squeezed in two visits during that time, before mandatory RTO and the insane commutes and shitty job market just kinda sapped all the energy from my circles for anything but basic survival.

Which is all a lengthy way of saying that the problem as I see it is that these events are declining because fewer people are thriving, and more people feel barely able to survive. The excess energy I do have doesn’t go to hosting so much as enjoying social events elsewhere, but that only happens because I am privileged enough to be able to take the next day off from work for recovery without getting fussed at by my employer; nobody else in my circles has that luxury at present.

That other Abundance guy writes convincingly that our abundant present isn’t that satisfying. This is also self-consciously a bit tilted towards the author’s milieu. Even the Abundant Class are overworked, undersocialized, and too preoccupied with cheap technological thrills.

Material conditions certainly affect this too.

For example, if you're younger, it's a lot harder to throw a dinner party in your tiny overpriced apartment than it might have been for a previous generation of people who already owned homes in their twenties.

It is also harder to throw a party when both partners in a relationship need to work full time to make ends meet.

It is also harder to throw parties when invitees also are overworked and tired and are habituated to netflix, rather than going out.

If you live in a city, going to a public space is inevitably easier. If you live in a suburb, staying home is inevitably easier.

It's much more plausible to me that these trends are due to underlying material conditions more than they are to some fundamental change in the social attitudes of people (though obviously both can play a role).

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

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

My guesses:

1. Everything costs more. A lot more.

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

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

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

5. Self-entertainment is a lot cheaper.

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

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

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

Many people seem too pent up in presenting some version of themselves to actually relax (social anxiety), which I partially put down to the decline of drinking, the traditional equalizer. Many people just aren't comfortable in themselves, and alcohol therefore represents a threat to their carefully constructed cardboard cut-out caricature.

Then there's the 'all about me' meme, where people are horrid conversationalists who can't entertain an idea unrelated to self-reporting, with personalization expectations on consumption: little Bobby needs X, little Harry has to Y, little Prescilla can't Z, and woe betide anyone who doesn't do the done diet. Another element of conversation failure is the distinct lack of experience and interests in such a great swathe of the population, who seem to vacillate between survival mode and televisual fiction forays. I've also noticed many people hit their 40s and seem to decide celebrating the bands and foods they followed in their youth may be their most persistent wont and love, with seemingly zero ambition to explore further. Woe betide anyone who would wish to continue learning and exploring, contemplate art, find echoes in history, or seek to discuss pressing global issues and their potential future trajectories.

I always try to teach the young'uns Eleanore Roosevelt's quip: Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.

Other good quotes here (fortune implementation): https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

The narcissism of food restrictions— and in general— has contributed to this. I love to cook, but it’s dreadful to have to assemble everyone’s restrictions into a meal. How can I make a vegan, gluten free, organic, global , etc meal ?

It’s emblematic of the me-first attitude. Instead of deferential guests , grateful to be welcomed over, everyone demands they are catered to on their terms.

I politely asked my neighbor to take her shoes off before entering, and she complained that I should have warned her of my no shoes policy before coming over.

I offer my guests unopened slippers to wear while they are here, too .

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

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

> In Bowling Alone, Putnam acknowledged that women have historically been the keepers of the family social calendar, planning the birthday parties and neighborhood potlucks. For any number of reasons, women seem to do better than men at making and keeping adult friendships and making plans with other families.

Well yeah, no surprise. Planning takes time and executing even more. Get the house and garden cleaned up, buy supplies, prep and cook/grill everything, clean up everything, restore "normal" functionality of the house again.

> The trouble with going all in on this explanation—beyond the fact that it embraces a version of learned helplessness for men—is that leisure time has increased overall since the 1950s.

Leisure time maybe, but any decent party takes hours of work. Host a dozen people, they're there until at least 2200 if not longer, and then it's hours worth of cleanup work. In ye olde times, that fell under the responsibility of the housewife during the next day, but nowadays? Oh hell no.

On top of that, workloads have gone extremely compressed over the last decades "thanks" to surveillance capitalism squeezing every tiny sliver of time. No more downtimes at the water cooler and coffee machine, it's work work work work work. When you arrive home, you are completely and utterly drained.

Personally, I need my weekend just to recover.

yeah because capitalists left no time for middle class.

I can't believe noone has been discussing cost of living as a reason. Food is more expensive, owning a place big enough to invite people over is more expensive, even free time is more expensive. To me, this seems pretty straightforward: people are getting priced out of fun.