alt Hacker NewsAs others have mentioned, the decline started long before social media and the Internet. When I was a child, in the 70s, my parents often had other families and couples over for dinner, and we often attended small dinner parties, too.
As an introvert, I absolutely loathed these gatherings and was frustrated by how powerless I was in avoiding them.
Recently, I have been reading over my mother's old letters she wrote to her parents at that time, in which she described the effort and social anxiety that went with this tradition. It was not something my parents enjoyed, but rather an obligation they felt they had to uphold. Someone invites you over, then that goes into an unspoken balance sheet, and you are required to reciprocate. She often spoke of "owing" dinner to people. I don't think she enjoyed it at all, though there were a few couples I can remember who were good friends of theirs, and those meetups were always a pleasure to listen in on. The rest were simply a drag.
I should note that their life in the 70s (in a middle-class college town) was not some idyllic paradise without the Internet, either. Everyone was constantly falling ill with colds or flu, and days were spent running dreary errands to shop for boring things that we now can get with a click. The rotary-dial telephone that hung in the kitchen was the heartbeat of the house, since replaced by Facebook and smartphones. My parents were always busy and exhausted.
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Back in the 80s/90s, when my grandma was alive, we used to have big holiday dinners for the whole big family (I think in total of 10+ people) in her small apartment (about 20 m^2, perhaps even less). It was extremely crowdy and some people used to eat standing outside and chat with each other. But it was also one of my best memories.
30+ years forward, I moved to a new country, and we only have one kid. We haven't had this kind of big dinner for decades since my grandma passed away in the late 90s.
The families are getting smaller and more atomized, so only people who are VERY into big dinners throw them.
> Everyone was constantly falling ill with colds or flu
That’s just anyone who has small kids. Or works in healthcare, childcare, or any service industry really. It has nothing to do with 1975 vs 2025 (unless you’re one of the small amount of people who work remotely, and you don’t have kids or a spouse who falls into one of the above categories).
Also after a few years you stop getting so many colds.
There also used to be pretty strong social expectations to host and visit such parties. That was essentially gone by like 1990, for my area, and I always kind of got the feel that everyone was glad to see the expectation disappear.
They can be fun, but I and almost everyone that I'm friends with much prefer to simply visit and hang out with no plans at all. Just be there, maybe chat a bit, maybe ignore each other and read a book for a few hours, maybe find something to eat / do a lightweight potluck. Which rather sucked that COVID ended up shutting down almost all of our communal places to visit for that.
All of that sounds many times better than just being alone without a community.
Pretty much my experience. My pre-teen childhood was the 1970s. My parents had dinner parties or cocktail parties at home at least a few times a year, and so did most of their friends. We often had a sitter for the night while they went to these gatherings. Some time towards the end of the decade, and certainly in the 1980s, this pretty much stopped. I asked about it once and my mother said that hosting these gatherings was a lot of work and fewer and fewer of their guests ever reciprocated, so they just stopped hosting as well. I do think that they did it mostly out of obligation or "just the proper thing to do" and not because they particulary enjoyed it.
Thanks for sharing that intimate anecdote. I see that phone on the wall in my own parent's house.
> It was not something my parents enjoyed, but rather an obligation they felt they had to uphold.
understandable, but if you think about it, it's kinda the price of keeping your "social network" alive. people nowadays understand that romantic relationships need maintenance and effort, but don't (yet?) understand that friendship require at least some maintenance as well. i guess that was even true-r before social media when you weren't constantly updated about what happened in friend X, Y and Z's lives.
most people nowadays don't really want to pay that price to keep relationships alive... and it's showing.
> My parents were always busy and exhausted.
what i'm about to write is absolutely anecdotical, but: i don't see people my age (30-40 years old) like super-relaxed either.
Same for me in the 80s. We'd always have the extended family together multiple times a year and frequently at my house. My mom always stressed out over it and it's the only time she yelled at my brother and I for not cleaning enough. I occasionally enjoyed playing with cousins but mostly found it annoying that all these people were using my house.
Nowadays, we definitely get together much less often but also it's usually at a restaurant.
This is such a sad and pathetic interpretation. Please consider you might just be depressed or lazy person and reading this wrong.
> It was not something my parents enjoyed, but rather an obligation they felt they had to uphold. ... I don't think she enjoyed it at all, though there were a few couples I can remember who were good friends of theirs, and those meetups were always a pleasure to listen in on. The rest were simply a drag.
It's worth noting that not everything that's good for you is enjoyable, especially in the moment.
Avoiding everything that's a "drag" means staying alone, passively consuming easy media, not exercising, eating hyper-palatble junk food, getting obese and probably depressed, etc.
> I should note that their life in the 70s (in a middle-class college town) was not some idyllic paradise without the Internet, either. Everyone was constantly falling ill with colds or flu, and days were spent running dreary errands to shop for boring things that we now can get with a click. The rotary-dial telephone that hung in the kitchen was the heartbeat of the house, since replaced by Facebook and smartphones.
While I agree that those cloying clickbait articles/videos idealizing random pre-smartphone teen photos and videos are obnoxious (as someone who grew up in that era). I think the modern emphasis on mindlessly reducing "friction" is going to prove ultimately unwise, though probably uncorrected as generational turnover causes people to forget what was lost, and certain degradation gets redefined as "normal" and accepted.
> My parents were always busy and exhausted.
So are modern parents, and all indications are they are more exhausted.