Plain English with Derek Thompson - Why Americans Stopped Hanging Out—and Why It Matters

Episode Date: February 27, 2024

Today’s episode is about the extraordinary decline in face-to-face socializing in America—and the real stakes of the country’s hanging-out crisis. From 2003 to 2022, American adults reduced their average hours of face-to-face socializing by about 30 percent. For unmarried Americans, the decline was even bigger—more than 35 percent. For teenagers, it was more than 45 percent. Eric Klinenberg is a sociologist and the director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He is the author of several books on the rise of living alone and the decline of social infrastructure. His latest is _'_2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed.' And he's not afraid to challenge the popular notion of an epidemic of loneliness in America. “There is no good evidence that Americans are lonelier than ever," he has written. Today, Eric and I talk about teens and parenting, the decline of hanging out, why America sucks at building social infrastructure, and why aloneness isn’t always loneliness. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Eric Klinenberg Producer: Devon Baroldi Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/america-decline-hanging-out/677451/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Today's episode is about the extraordinary. decline in face-to-face socializing in America and the real stakes of the country's hanging out crisis. So last month, I spent several weeks going through a database called the American Time Use Survey, which is a poll done by the government on how people use their time. I wanted to understand a bit more about a subject that I've been fascinated by and that I've talked about quite a bit on this show, the decline of friendships in America and the rise of aloneness. So here are the raw numbers for my research. From 2003 to 2022, American adults reduced their average hours of face-to-face socializing by about 30%. For unmarried Americans, the decline

was even bigger, more than 35%. For teenagers, the decline was even bigger, more than 45%. Real-world socializing has declined for men and women, for every age group, for all. ethnicities for all levels of income and all levels of education. Although COVID clearly increased the time we spend alone, all of these trends predate the pandemic. It's important to state that even though when we talk about the decline of socializing, we typically immediately go to talking about teenagers and the effect that it's having on their mental health, I think that's appropriate, but very important to say that the steepest declines in face-to-face interactions have been among poor people and black people.

Americans, not just teenagers. Altogether, there is no record of any period in U.S. history when people have spent more time on their own. And no period in U.S. history when people spent less time with other people. Now, this is happening during a period when Americans, and teens especially, have never been more anxious or depressed about their own lives or the future of the country. Teen, anxiety, depression, hopelessness, or setting new every single year. And an NBC poll in 2023 wrote that, quote, we have never before seen this level of sustained pessimism in the 30-year-plus history of the poll, end quote. My favorite, quote-unquote, favorite detail about the decline of socializing in the U.S. is that Americans have seemingly

swapped pets for people in the way that they choose to spend their time. The average time that Americans spend with their pets has roughly doubled in the last 20 years. That's both because we have more adopted pets and because we spend more time with them. But that's not the best part. This is the best part. And it's something that I double checked, triple checked, quadruple checked. If you want to check me again on it, please do. But I think it is true. In 2003, the typical female pet owner spent much more time socializing with humans than playing with her cat or dog. But by 2022, the latest year, year for which we have data, this flipped, and the average woman with a pet now spends more time

actively engaged with her dog or cat or other pet than she spends hanging out face-to-face with fellow humans on any given day. That is astonishing. Any way you look at it, the hangout depression is clearly, especially bad for teenagers. Teens and young adults today not only saw some of the largest declines in socializing in the last 10 years, they are dating less than they used to, playing fewer youth sports than they used to, spending less time with their friends, and making fewer friends to begin with. We've done all sorts of episodes on the ways that social media and smartphones might be at the heart of these trends. This episode is not about smartphones and social media primarily, but if you want to hear more about that,

just please look at our episode history. Today's guest rather encourages us to see the bigger story. Eric Kleinenberg is a sociologist and the director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He's the author of several books on the rise of living alone and the decline of social infrastructure. And whereas I've written that Americans spend more time alone than ever and it's driving a mental health crisis, he has very recently written in the New York Times, quote, there is no good evidence that Americans are lonelier than ever. end quote. In fact, one of Eric's first books was called Going Solo, in which he argued that many people living on their own have richer social lives than other adults who are married. In many ways,

Eric sees this problem from an opposite vantage point from me, but I think that's what makes a conversation like this most useful. By the way, his latest book is 2020, one city, seven people, and the year everything changed. Today, Eric and I talk about team. and parenting, the decline of hanging out, why America sucks so much at building what he calls social infrastructure, and why a loneness isn't always loneliness. I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English. Eric Kleinenberg, welcome to the show. Great to be back, Derek.

In the open, I just went through all of the ways in which Americans are clearly spending less time together face-to-face in the physical world. I want us to start by talking about teenagers, and then I want to broaden the conversation to talk about adults, where I think our analysis of this situation is a little bit different and where I think you see the picture is being a little bit more complicated than I might have originally painted it. But let's start with teens. Face-to-face socializing, according to the American Time Use Survey, has declined 50% since 2003 for teenagers, and we have seen this coinciding rise in sadness, anxiety, and depression. You have a teenage son and a teenage daughter.

You're on the front lines here. You also study this as a sociologist. I want to give you a really, really wide platform here. How would you start explaining this phenomenon? Why young people are hanging out less in the physical world and whether you think that has anything to do with the surge in mental health problems we're seeing among this demographic as well? Yeah, well, I love starting with teenagers because that's basically how my life goes these days.

Every conversation starts at home. I do have a 17-year-old son and a 15-year-old daughter. Their lives are very different, but they are wrapped up in all of the issues that you've been talking about on the podcast. I'm really thrilled to be here to talk about them. I also should say, I just finished writing this book about what Americans live through in the year 2020. And a big chapter in the book is about the experience of people between 18 and 29 who made these incredible saccharacter. sacrifices so that older people and more frail people could get through this really horrible pandemic situation. And that set of sacrifices included hanging out with friends even less, going to parties even less often, not going to school, whether it's high school or college or graduate school, and really kind of closing the door on the social world. And I think they are paying a price for that. So it's a lot to discuss here.

First and foremost, as a parent, it's just become clear to me that it's difficult to organize free playtime in the world on the sidewalks and streets. And on the other hand, it is very easy to give your child a machine and let the interaction, whether it's social or educational or cultural and entertainment, happen. face to screen. And that's really challenging. I grew up in downtown Chicago in the 1970s and 80s, objectively significantly more dangerous time than the time we're living in right now. And I would say that between the hours of 3 p.m. and whenever it got dark out, no one on earth had any idea where I was. There was no cell phone, there was no play date, There was no formal, organized after-school program run by a professional with insurance and a credential. There were sidewalks and parks and libraries and streets, and we were out in the world.

And it was objectively not safe according to the standards we have by today. But nobody really worried about it. And I think first order point for us to make here is that very few American kids have an experience like that. where the sidewalks and the streets and the parks and the playgrounds are there, and nobody knows who they are, so they're governing their own social time. Big point one.

So even before the pandemic, I think it's important to point out that young people had fewer friends than they had in previous decades. They were going to fewer parties. They had less free playtime, as you've just described, there was less dating.

The pandemic, and you acknowledge this, I just want to make it absolutely clear, was not an inventive. of any of these trends, but it's rather better seen as an accelerator of these trends, which might even go so far as to prove how significant these trends are in terms of worsening teen mental health. It's like teens were already experiencing maybe several years of greater isolation, on top of which the pandemic mandated for many of them, either at the parental level or at the local government level, even more social isolation. And this is just an age that is

incredibly sensitive to peer interactions, which to me is an absolutely critical part of the story. I want to go even deeper onto this point that you're making because it's not just about rates of crime, to your point. The world was, at least if you look at homicide rates and violent crime rates, more dangerous the 1970s, 1980s than it spent in the last decade, it's about an attitude toward risk, parents' attitude toward the risk that their child engages in when he or she leaves the front door. Where did that come from? What do you see as the ingredients for parents being, the simple way to put this is more scared. I guess the more multisyllabic way to put it is more accommodating of their children and more protective of their children in such a way that they

are more fearful of them engaging in just free play in the outside world. Yeah, it's a big story. I remember years ago David Brooks had a cover story in the Atlantic, I think, about the organization kid. And it kind of gave an account of the extent to which parents got anxious about the success of their children and had decided to schedule them for all kinds of things so that, you know, this kind of idea of free open time was in his view then a direct result of anxious parents worried that they weren't using their time efficiently enough and that they needed to program their children to perform well in the world. And that involved all kinds of formal associations instead of informal associations. So that's one of the arguments out there, like,

especially true for middle class and professional families, right? Like, we're just very worried about our kids doing okay. So think about the rhetoric about selective college admissions, now, which in fact kind of affect relatively small percentage of American children. Let's be frank about that. It's like 99% of the conversation in the Atlantic and the New York Times and the New Yorker. It's a much smaller percentage of the population out there. But that is happening. I think also there is this change in the rise of what some sociologists call the culture of fear. You know, we saw crime levels drop precipitously over the last several decades, but the rhetoric about predators in our midst and the danger to your child.

and the danger of all kinds of things, not just the really truly terrifying stuff like homicide, but like, is the playground equipment safe enough? You know, what happens in youths? Are kids playing youth sports in a way that makes it unsafe for them? Are there predators in schools? Not saying any of these things are true, just like if we think about the rhetoric,

the environment for middle class children right now is different. And I think there's this anxiety the parents experience that they passed down to their children. So, you know, one of the things I really enjoyed and kind of appreciated about your writing and thinking about this is you seem to me to be less swept up in the kind of loneliness pandemic, loneliness epidemic issue and more attuned to the ways in which specifically stress and anxiety. In some cases, depression become issues.

And I think a lot of professional families in the, U.S. have passed their anxiety and parenting down to their children. And then finally, I would say, you know, there's this thing that Dana Boyd has written about so beautifully that as young people saw their free time diminish, you know, not just after school, but even in school, like fewer breaks where kids could just socialize on their own. They came to discover this, you know, this world of the internet that they could control, at least for time, without their parents intervening in the same way. And so it's not surprising in some way that the children flocked to those places. But we're definitely not talking about a post-2020 trend here.

We're talking about something that's been happening in American culture for a few decades now. You're totally right that 2020 is an accelerant, and it's an accelerant not just on the being alone and social isolation stuff. I think it's really an accelerant on the stress and anxiety stuff. We are not going to do 20 minutes on the connection between the social media smartphone phenomenon and the rise of teenage sadness. I have already done two, three, four, five, 17 podcast on that relationship. Let me just maybe do it for three minutes. The John Height theory that seems to me, John Height, the sociologist from NYU, the John Heid theory that seems

to somewhat click in to your presentation of facts goes something like, for this generation of children, we have over-regulated the physical world and under-regulated the digital world, which I would interpret to mean, we are too afraid of letting our kids go outside and play, and too eager to put them on the under-regulated pastures of the internet

where they're going to see things they shouldn't see, feel things they shouldn't necessarily feel, and develop all sorts of social anxieties that are not accommodated, are not adaptive to a healthy childhood. How do you feel, at least, about the height thesis of over-regulated social space, under-regulated digital space?

Well, so with all due respect to my colleague, John Haid, I have to call that the Dana Boyd thesis just because I think Dana made this point a long time ago and has actually gained an enormous audience for that point. So as long as we can call it the Boyd thesis, or maybe the Boyd-Height thesis, I'm okay with it because, you know, We should credit her for that insight years ago.

I think the additional piece of this that's really important is that the allure of the screen and the possibility that something exciting and surprising, new, different is going to happen to us if we click on Instagram or Snapchat or whatever puts a lot of pressure. on the face-to-face interaction to deliver something good. And the reality is a lot of time, face-to-face interaction is slow and dull. And it might be in those boring moments that people are resetting and figuring out whether to go deeper and how to go deeper and build another connection. There's a rhythm to life face-to-face.

And my concern, what I would add to that void and hate thesis, is that our intimate relationships with phones have made it very difficult for young people to be where they are, right? And not to be lured away to the screens. So one of the big problems in life is our diminished capacity to have high quality interactions with the people we're around. so that we feel less satisfied if it's just the two of us, Derek, you know, talking to each other, you know, on a walk or at a table. And I think everyone listening to this conversation has had the experience of sitting down with a good friend, feeling excited to have some time together, and then feeling this like rush of sadness when the friend like pulls out the phone and start just like texting and swiping or doing whatever. And also, let's be honest, already. in the middle of this conversation, I'm sure everyone who's gone this far, whatever we are,

nine minutes in the conversation, has probably checked their phone 17 times to see if something is going on it is again. Are you kidding? No chance, no chance. Not while you were talking. Well, I was talking. And I like the good. But it's a great point. There is a, there's a dopamine inequality between the physical and digital world, you could say. Like the real world has pockets of boredom, you know, small talk and gazing out the window. And we have, I think, developed a kind of boredom intolerance because of the extraordinary, extraordinary dopamine feedback loose. that come from the devices in our pocket. I do think it's, I do think it's an important point,

and I do think that it makes us somewhat disavolved for some kinds of physical world interaction, which do require a kind of tolerance for boredom to get through the small talk, get through the pockets of boredom where nothing is happening, and get to the real deep stuff of human interactions. It's a very fair point. I want to move on and talk about adults,

because I really do think that that's where some of our ideas most interestingly diverge. And I really think your perspective, here is somewhat counterintuitive. I think when most people hear my argument about the rise of aloneness in America, what they hear is the rise of loneliness. But a point that I very much associate with you, although maybe Dana Boyd got there first as well, is that she's everywhere good ideas before the rest of us get there, is that despite the fact that the Surgeon General of the U.S. has declared a national epidemic of loneliness.

in America. You have written in many places, actually, no, it's not obvious that American adults are lonelier than they once were. How does that make any sense that a lot of Americans are both more physically alone than they've ever been in government recorded history, but also that they're not more lonely? Yeah, so I could make this point in about 12 different ways, but I'll try to make it briefly in just a couple. First of all, let's just acknowledge that being alone, and feeling lonely are different things. And that if we see a spike in the amount of time that people spend on their own, that doesn't necessarily mean that more people are feeling lonely.

Give you a couple good reasons to think that. I interviewed hundreds of people for a book I wrote a decade ago called Going Solo, who were living alone and many had lived with other people before. And one of the most profound things that people said consistently is, as uncomfortable and occasionally lonely as I sometimes feel with my own place, for me, there was nothing lonelier than living with the wrong person. And I think a lot of people who are in committed relationships and marriages, they understand that it can feel profoundly lonely to be close to another person

with whom you also feel in some ways alienated or from whom you feel alienated or estranged. And we also know that there are a lot of people who have friends who spend time with other people and yet suffer from a lot, like a kind of existential loneliness. It's just in them. There's nothing that really makes them satisfied with the social world. They're kind of always grasping for more. And that's a reflection of the way that we're kind of made up differently psychologically. There are some people who have a very high set point for what they need in interactions.

others who spend a lot of time on their own and are pretty much okay with that. So I think just on those two counts, we can start to see that it's a mistake to jump automatically from the idea that more people are living alone or spending time alone to the idea that more people are lonely. Whether or not people are lonely is kind of an empirical question and it turns out to be a really hard one to answer. For the same reason, I think it's kind of tricky to figure out whether more people are happy, like happiness, loneliness, we can come up with ways to measure them, but there's something kind of fuzzy about those measurements. And also, unfortunately, there's lots of different people

who've been trying to measure them in lots of different ways at different times. And so it's, like, it's very hard to point to, like, one study that's asked the same questions over decades and decades of the same people in the same way and giving us consistent results. So it's kind of a data a mess. This question is not in my notes, but it occurred to me as you were talking, and I hope it comes out well. Psychologists, clinical psychologists, have formal names for conditions of anxiety or depression. We talk about generalized, we, I'm not one of them, they talk about generalized anxiety disorder. They talk about general depressive symptoms, you know, or obsessive compulsive disorder. So we have names, clinical names, for disorders or states of suffering.

from some bad feelings. But it's not clear to me that we have a very good clinical diagnosis for that which we might call loneliness. There's no general loneliness disorder. It is not in DSM4, DSM-5, whatever number DSM we're on right now. And so I do think that this is a difficult sort of methodological question to ask people about the frequency of or the depth of states of loneliness, which doesn't have the kind of diagnosis you can talk about with an expert and thereby get some kind of, you know,

word or phrase used at you or someone in authority says you suffer from capital L loneliness. I wonder how much that has to do with the fuzziness of putting our finger on exactly what we're talking about here. So, Derek, this is a huge point you're making. I'm glad it hit you now and they didn't have it in your notes because it's like one of those insights that really helps to advance the conversation. And I want to say one reason why it's so important that we don't have this kind of specific forms of loneliness measured in specific ways is because there are a lot of psychologists who and sociologists who believe that certain kinds of loneliness are actually productive and healthy for us. The great and late psychologist John Caciopo, who is really the Dean of Loneliness Studies in the American Social Science,

used to make the argument that some amount of loneliness that a person experiences can be the body cue, the body's cue, that you're not getting the level of social connection that you need. And that cue is the thing that pushes you off the couch, you know, off your screen, into face-to-face interaction. So it's actually a very healthy emotional response to feel some loneliness. If you move to a new town and you've left your friends and family behind and you don't have a church or synagogue or a pickup basketball game, you know, you might feel lonely. And that loneliness might be your body saying like, hey, you've got to go join some groups. You've got to get involved in this. When we ask people on surveys, have you felt lonely in the

last week? If they say yes, it might not be because they're deeply suffering in a way. that we need to be worried about. It might be because they're in a social situation that's not satisfying their needs. And as you know from another book I wrote, I actually think one of the big problems in America right now is that we've really failed to invest in what I call social infrastructure, gathering places. And we haven't set ourselves up for collective well-being. So what's so important for us when we think about loneliness is to distinguish between the kind of routine loneliness that is our body's way of telling us we need to connect and the much more damaging kinds of chronic loneliness that, you know, lead us to withdraw from the world and become

more isolated, which can also lead to depression, which can lead to more loneliness, right? This vicious circle. And far too often in the conversation about loneliness, we present it all as if every snowflake looks the same. And reality, it just doesn't. And I think in some ways that might be true for things like happiness as well. They're just, they're hard to pin down. And we should be very cautious in the way we can treat them as pathologies. One fact to put a bow on what you said, and then I want to talk a little bit more about place and social infrastructure and the way that America might be built to encourage us to spend more time alone. There was a survey by the Cigna group that found that young adults are twice as likely as seniors to say they

are lonely. So 79% of adults between 18 and 24 said they felt lonely, and that's compared to 41% of seniors 66 and older. And that's consistent with earlier research that younger adults these days say they are lonelier than senior citizens. Now guess who has more social time, more face-to-face social time than any other group, according to the American Time You survey, it's Americans under 24. So we have evidence, at least from this Cigna survey, which is trying to tease out this difficult thing of loneliness and from the federal government, that if you put it together, it suggests that the most social age group is also the group that says it's the loneliness. I think this goes very far toward making your point that what we call loneliness might very

much be something to worry about, but it's important to see when it both increases concabinent with a loneliness and when sometimes we have a situation where young people are both the most social and the most lonely. It's a really interesting paradox. You want to jump in there before I set you up on place. I just want to say every parent of a teenager knows that there's a profound loneliness that they often feel when they feel like they're left out of some group activity that they want to be in so that even if they're spending time with friends five or six days of the week, if there's one thing that happens that they feel like they didn't know about or maybe they weren't invited to, that triggers enormous stress and a feeling of loneliness. Like, why am I not

connected in this way? There are other young people who are, you know, searching for love and romance. Their hormones are raging. They, you know, they have a physical thing that they're after in the world as well. Are they looking for like, they're looking for some kind of soulmate experience? And if they don't have that, they feel lonely. Or, you know, there's lots of drama with teenage girls, especially these days, right? I think a lot of social media stuff, you know, it accelerates that drama. And so you might have a big burnout fight with your best friend. Now you feel lonely because you don't have a best friend. So there are just so many different kinds of experiences that we're bunching together into this one category that I think, you know, if we are going to take lonely

seriously as a public health hazard. And, you know, I've obviously been critical of the Surgeon General's loneliness epidemic concept, but I do think loneliness can be a really serious problem. I'm not going to live about loneliness. It's serious stuff, and it can have serious health consequences as well. But if we're going to make progress and dealing with it and help more people, it's going maybe because we stop talking about it in these kind of like panicky, sensationalist, oh my God, terms.

And we're going to start thinking about it as carefully as we think about other kinds of conditions. Yeah, I think it's a very well-taken point. I'm just putting sort of ending this particular chapter of the conversation about loneliness and aloneness. But I think it's so important for me to remember that I'll stop using the L word. You can feel disconnection sitting alone on your couch. but somebody can feel disconnection in a long-term relationship. They can feel disconnection hanging out with their friends and feeling made fun of.

They can feel disconnected from their friends when they're talking to them and think their friends are having fun without them. Disconnection is an important social phenomenon to think about, but it's not just the same as not having a person next to you. Let's talk about place or what sociologists prefer to call social infrastructure, the libraries, the cafes, the parks, where people go to be with each other. You have a recent book, Palaces for the People, and you have the story of a lethal heat wave in Chicago in 1995. You've written about this several times.

And I think this is such a great way to look at the role of social infrastructure, because sometimes the word social infrastructure just seems to me like sociologists needed more syllables to say the word, you know, cafe or library. So we came up with social infrastructure. But this really makes it clear where the rubber hits the road. You look at two nearby neighborhoods in the south side of Chicago that were hit by this heat wave. They seemed equally at risk. They had similar demographics across the board. But elderly victims in one neighborhood died at 10 times the rate of those in a nearby neighborhood. And you say the one big difference that explains this 10x mortality difference is social infrastructure.

So take us back to 1995. Tell us the story of the Chicago heat wave. and how you think this makes the point of the importance of place? Yeah, well, this is the research that started my career as a social scientist, and it's from this work that I came to develop this concept of social infrastructure, which I now feel somewhat guilty about giving them to all these syllables to say cafe. But to be honest, there wasn't a concept that covered this. So I looked at these neighborhoods across to Chicago because I wanted to understand who lived and who died and why.

And, you know, we'll get to when we talk about 2020, this is a thing I think social science is really uniquely equipped to do, like make sense of crises so we can learn something about ourselves. And, you know, when I first looked at the maps of mortality in the Chicago heat wave, it looked like the most predictable story that's ever been told. It was like the segregated poor black neighborhoods on the south and west sides of Chicago had the most death, the more affluent neighborhoods had the least death. okay, you know, like, you want to go kick down some other open doors with me? So not interesting at all. But then I looked a little bit closer and I learned something that no one had really seen, which is that there was incredible variation among different black neighborhoods in Chicago and different poor neighborhoods.

And in many cases, you had neighborhoods that were demographically more or less the same, separated by a street, like neighboring neighborhoods. and the death rates very tremendously. And I selected a few pairs to examine. The ones you're talking about now, a pair of neighborhoods called Auburn Gresham and Englewood, both on the south side of Chicago. And when you spend time in the two neighborhoods,

especially if you're spending time there in the 90s, what you would see is a landscape that looked completely different. So in Englewood, the neighborhood had suffered from decades of depopulation. The factories closed down. People moved to other parts of the country. There were some fires after the Martin Luther King, in the riots after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. Place never really recovered. And as people left, so too did the grocery stores, the community organizations, the commercial life got depleted. There were all these abandoned houses, there are empty lots, and the neighborhood had lost a lot of political power. So you would

see broken sidewalks, it's like wasn't in good shape. And what that meant if you lived in Englewood is that you had fewer resources that were drawing you out of your home and into public life. You know, it wasn't necessarily that you didn't know anybody. It wasn't even that you felt scared down the streets. It was like there wasn't much in the neighborhood that would make you want to go walk to the shop. There's no coffee shop on the corner. There aren't like beautiful little pocket parks where you could hang out with friends. There's no library that's open where you could hang out. And as a consequence, people were much more likely to spend their time either outside of the neighborhood or at home alone. And unfortunately, during the heat wave, what that meant was

people were home and alone. And because there's not like a scene where everybody knows, you know, Derek is sitting on the bench at 3 o'clock every afternoon. Why isn't Derek there? Nobody came and knocked on the door. So the death rates were astronomical in Englewood. Across the street in Auburn, Gresham, very different story.

Didn't have big depopulation. They were able to maintain residential density. They did have a much more robust commercial street life. big Catholic church that had a lot of programs around there. The streets and sidewalks were intact. And as a consequence, just the routines of everyday social life meant that people hung out together in public gathering places. And there, if Eric is sitting on the bench at 3 p.m. every day, and Eric is not there at 3, the neighbors are like, huh, it's really hot. Eric's always there. I wonder what's going on. And they knock on Eric's door. Now, it's not a cultural thing in the sense that

I don't think the reason that people in Auburn Gresham survived is because the people of Auburn Gresham care more about their neighbors and the people in Englewood. It's that the social infrastructure of the two neighborhoods supported really different kinds of everyday social life and the consequences of the different social lives that Engelwood was very dangerous and isolating. Auburn Gresham was far more cohesive and integrating. And the reason I really know this is the case and this one, when I learned that, Derek had floored me.

It wasn't just that Auburn Gresham had a 10 times higher survival rate in this heat wave that lasted for a week in 1995. The life expectancy in Auburn Gresham is five years longer than an Englewood. Five years. And these are places like if you're just like the conventional kind of social scientists who looks at like the census data and the poverty numbers, the things we routinely measure to make sense of quality of life, we wouldn't see this at all.

there is no category of social infrastructure that gets an index score on the census, right? So we don't actually appreciate the extent to which it's developed unequally, but we could. And I just encourage people to think about the places where you live. Are there certain areas that are set up to encourage social life, hanging out, and gathering more than others? So there are certain places that have a robust supply of, you know, terrific libraries that are open and staffed, right? Like in New York City where I live, where they're not closing all these libraries on Sundays,

maybe on Saturdays, reduced hours, that has a direct life on your capacity to be with other people, right? What's the quality of the playground where you live? Right. To what extent are there gathering places for older adults? Like, we should really be thinking about how the places where we live are set up to encourage or discourage hanging out. They know a lot of Americans who go to other countries and they can't believe, like, how beautiful the plazas are in Spain and, you know, how terrific the market is and, you know, in Egypt.

And they love the collective life of other places. And they come home and they wonder, why aren't we doing this here? You were talking about the differences in longevity between these two adjacent neighborhoods. and it reminded me, you just went to Europe, of research showing that at practically every given age, Americans are two to three times more likely to die at that age than someone in Europe. Now, that sounds like a huge discrepancy. Because the numbers are relatively small,

it simply adds up over time that Americans have a, you know, a lifespan that's a few years shorter than the average European. but it's this incredible statistic that's always stuck with me when I found it, that it practically every given age, Americans are significantly more likely to die than just about every developed country in Europe. And it leads, I guess, to a question of, I was going to ask, are there other countries that do the social infrastructure thing better? You're saying, obviously, there are.

What is one country that you would point to? if the Surgeon General and a bunch of other people that are invested in a social infrastructure policy, right, make America hang out again, what country do you take them to to show them what is possible in terms of social infrastructural thickness to get people out of their houses and into the public sphere? So I like to poke fun of my colleagues in sociology because at the end of almost every sociology book, there's a policy chapter that compares what we're doing in the United States with what they're doing in Sweden. And it's like it's almost like before you get your degree, you have to sign a pledge to, you know, write about the Swedish welfare state at the end. So I'm going to make a radical departure and not talk about Sweden. I'm going to talk about Finland instead. Okay, I was going to say, you're staying in Northern Europe? Yeah, there we go. So, you know, I was in Helsinki in the before times, just, you know, before the pandemic started.

And it was kind of fascinating place, again, place with very high life expectancy, high quality of life. And one reason I went there is because the government in the teens and 20 teens decided that They wanted to create a symbol for the nation's commitment to social infrastructure and social democracy. They wanted to create more places that were accessible and welcoming and healthy for the promotion of cohesion. Because you can't really have a good society or you can't support things like benefits to poor people or democratic institutions or programs to curb climate change if you don't have some sense of social cohesion. You know, you have to care about the whole. Otherwise, it's everyone on their own, right? It's like a war of all against all. And so in Finland, they invested in this place called the Ude

Library, which is like a new central urban library, downtown Helsinki, not too far from the train station. and it's this amazing place in the sense that it looks like a spaceship has landed in the middle of the Nordic Society. It's beautifully designed with incredible gathering places for different kinds of people in different stages of life, including gathering places set up specifically for people who don't have homes, knowing that a lot of people who wind up in libraries are people who don't have homes, and they'll have specific use for the library. They said, like, instead of, like, building a library as if that didn't exist, and then being surprised when that becomes a problem,

like, what are the things that people who don't have homes might need to feel more welcome and to take care of things that they need to have taken care of? And how could that be organized so that you could have another room that's got little children and another room with teenagers and another room with professionals? So that all, like, amazing amenities. And I hope you'll, like, look it up online O-O-D-I, library, but the most amazing thing for me that symbolizes the commitment to not just the library, but to social infrastructure generally, is there's a little sign right by the front door,

and on the sign you can see the opening hours, the hours in which the library is open. And the library is open from something like 7 or 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. 5 or 6 days a. week. And on the weekends, it's open like 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. And that's unheard of, right? I mean, in New York City, which is on the generous side for these kinds of things, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on the weekdays. And then, you know, now closed on Sunday and reduced hours on Saturday. These is a branch libraries, the lifeblood of the system. And what Finland is basically saying is, no matter how beautiful something is, it doesn't matter if the doors are closed. And, And so we're going to make a commitment to building beautiful things, parks, playgrounds, biking paths, walking paths, outdoor exercise facilities for older people and for younger people, fields, libraries.

And we're also going to do everything we possibly can to make them accessible so that you feel welcome here, so that you feel like you're being dignified when you walk in. And that's extraordinary. I just looked it up. The hours are 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on weekends. Just want to make sure that we don't have finished listeners that are trying to get into the library at 10.30 p.m. on a Tuesday and being shut down. So help me out here. If I decide that as an Atlantic writer, I really want to get on the Kleinenberg beat. This is what I want to write about for the next year. And I want to work

on a big piece on why America has thinner, social infrastructure than so many European countries of similar and even less GDP per capita. And I say, okay, well, maybe it's geography. Like, America does have a lot of livable space. We spread out. People want to spread out. We have a culture spreading out. Maybe it's geography. I'd say, maybe it's culture. We have a notable culture of individualism. Maybe this is really a cultural difference rather than a geographical deterministic difference. I say, no, maybe it's politics. Maybe it's conservatives, not being invested in public infrastructure. It could be liberals, being unable to build new projects because of a culture of over-permitting, or maybe it's economic. Maybe it's just

higher inequality in America, cashes out as rich people refusing to build around themselves and poor people not having enough local tax dollars to build the kind of palaces for the people that you think are really critical for building social and structural cohesion. Where do you, where would you begin with an explanation here? Obviously, it's multi-causal. Where would you begin with an explanation? Well, I think that our history points towards the big shift as being one around social policy. And probably I'd add race to this and the power of racism in shaping American social policy. Because one could argue that for a big chunk of the 20th century, the United States became a leader in the production of social infrastructure. So, for instance, starting with the New Deal and moving forward.

forward for several decades. Like, we built libraries, right? We built branch libraries. And I should be clear, the branch library system in the United States is the envy of the world. And it's very, you're very impressed to find another society that built libraries in every neighborhood of every city and kept them open as long as we did in the U.S. Right. We made a big investment in parks and public works, right? We, like, part of the New Deal that's not discussed much is like the supportive cultural institutions, theaters, right, music venues, playgrounds, all kinds of gathering places. Our national parks are the envy of the world. So if it's like a deeply embedded cultural thing and if it's just geography, we wouldn't

really be able to explain how, in fact, we did once build all the stuff in the United States, but our policies really shifted starting in the 1970s and accelerating into the 80s where I think we pulled back from public goods and public resources. And we said, you know, if you want to have these good things, the market is going to deliver it to you. And so we have in the U.S. a proliferation of gathering places, you know, in certain places. And I couldn't help but notice, you know,

in your big article about the decline in Americans hanging out that one of the demographic groups that's experienced the largest decrease in hangout is black Americans. And of course, I really like right away is, oh, well, America has developed a social policy of, you know, malign neglect, you know, towards black communities. And the country has, you know, really forced horrible social infrastructure. compared to what other communities have into these areas. And so it's no surprise at all to me that we see these diminished levels of hanging out.

So I think, you know, you asked about these different forces. Obviously, I haven't studied in quite this way, but my hypothesis going in would be that our shift in social policy, which is connected to our kind of economic thinking, like let's have a market society, and good things will trickle down to everyone, has not made things turn out. way and that by stopping our investments in libraries, in parks, in play spaces for kids, and building up school infrastructure, we have really diminished the quality of life here in the United States on a daily basis. And I guess one intervention that I have tried to make into this debate about why the phones are killing everything and making

it's dumber and worse off is like it's not just about the phones. Now there's there's something more to the story. It's about the kind of America that we built. And you know, again, this is this is a thing that I really was able to observe in an acute way when I started looking at the year 2020 and what went wrong in America during this pandemic where you know, we really did fare much worse than most of the pure nations that we like to compare ourselves to. Let's close on 2020, your book and the year, because in so many ways, this year just seems to epitomize the Faulkner quote about how the past is never dead. It's not even past. I mean, obviously, we are reliving 2020 in a very literal way in electoral politics. We're getting another,

in all likelihood, Biden-Trump rematch. We're not going to go into that one. Another is that, you know, I feel like in this conversation, there's really two themes that we're talking about. And sometimes they come together and sometimes they pull apart. One is the theme of the decline of face-to-face interactions, which is the increase in physical world isolation between people. And another is disconnection.

And I would say that both of those trends went through a particle accelerator in the year 2020. Not only did so many people, especially teenagers, spend much less time around their peers in this year, especially when there were local lockdowns,

but also this is a year where our trust in institutions saw a depression within a recession. Our trust institutions has been declining for decades, and something fell off a cliff in 2020. I think I'm using borrowing your language here, which is that the loss of trust institutions in 2020 went from relatively commonplace to totally endemic. Maybe just talk a little bit about the degree to which you think 2020 has played a critical role in increasing the kind of disconnection that we care about here.

Yeah, I think it has been a much greater force in American public life than we have acknowledged. And the reason I wrote this book is because I think it deserves our critical attention. And, you know, we ignore it at our peril. It's like the argument I've been making is it's like we're suffering from not just long COVID as a medical problem, but as a kind of social disease. And we're going to continue if we don't acknowledge, you know, what it did to us. So the first thing to note is just the absolutely chaotic leadership in this country during this horrible period, 2020, meant that Americans were scrambling to figure out what was reliable information, who they could trust, what they should do, what they would get in terms of social supports. You know, I did interviews with people living alone in the first stage of the pandemic, you know, April, May 2020. when it wasn't clear what kind of stimulus money would be there, what kind of health response

we would get. And it was so striking because, you know, back to the loneliness thing, people, even people living alone in New York, which was really, you know, relatively locked down compared to other places, said, it's not that I feel like ordinary loneliness. Like I'm talking to my friends and family more than I ever have. And also, like, we're all going through this thing together. Like, we've never been so much in sync. You know, there's like one conversation that we're all having. But what they describe to me like what I've come to call structural loneliness. They said they were structurally lonely. They felt they felt on their own. Like how would they make ends meet? Would they have a job when they got back? What would happen to their savings? Like where should they go if they needed

healthcare? How could they connect with the community and local support? There was very little reliable information. And in New York, what was striking is like there was a message from the president and there was a message from the governor and there was a message from the mayor. And there were like three really different messages about what was going on. So it was disorienting. And for young people, the sense was, you know, everyone is asking us to make these sacrifices, which, you know, for the most part, you know, they made, especially during the early stages. But it wasn't clear that, and anyone really appreciated that those were sacrifices? You know, like they weren't thanked for withdrawing from school and not going to parties. No one registered that they were experiencing an even deeper spike in anxiety or higher spike in anxiety than they were before. And the feeling, again, is like the kind of the grownups in the room, not only did they not have a plan for how to get us through this, but they're not even noticing what we're doing. What a good reason to feel, you know, skeptical or distrustful.

And then I think that the chief of all of these experiences is the fact that when 2020 hit, we did this amazing thing. Like we said, there's certain people who are so important to our economy and society, we're going to call them essential workers. And one would imagine a good society saying, like, this is honorific, and you go and you'll put yourself on the line, and we'll do everything to get PPE for you. and we'll guarantee you the best health care, and maybe we'll give you a bonus afterwards, and you will be an esteemed member of the American family, like we'll treat you like a military veteran from now on. And instead, to be called essential in America in 2020,

was to be deemed expendable and put out to suffer far higher exposure to COVID and far greater risk of death than anyone else. And so the thing for me that's so powerful about 2020 in the U.S. is that other societies, including very polarized ones with right-wing governments, like Australia features prominently in my book, like Australia became more trusting during 2020. It became more cohesive. They had protests.

They had fights about lockdowns in Victoria. Turned out the prime minister did a power grab. A lot of bad things happened there. But like at the end of 2020, Australians trusted government, science, and other people more. In the United States, all of those things limited. And it's like whatever was left of our social fabric got hacked to pieces that year. And so I think one reason why a lot of people who voted for Biden in 2020 are having a hard time, you know, getting excited about this election in 2024. We're not going to go too deep into this.

but like, there's still a lot of Americans who said, like, we hit this critical moment where we needed a hand, we needed support. We wanted to be able to come together and feel like we had each other's back. And instead, we were brawling in the aisles of supermarkets over masks and watching it the next day on social media. You know, we're fighting about whether one medication or another medication is right along ideological grounds. We've started fighting about vaccines. like we've been pulled apart. And as we have these conversations about anxiety and stress and disconnection,

I hope we'll also return to those like the big fundamental disconnections that became so visible in this crucial year. That's a really great bit. I think there's so much to agree with there. One thing I just thought of as you were talking is that there's a way in which Americans were not uniquely, but importantly,

unprepared at a social level for the kind of crisis that we went through in 2020. There's a lot of reasons for that, from political polarization to the big sort. But one thing that I thought a lot about when I connect this story of 2020 to the phenomenon that I'm talking about of less physical world interactions

is I think about it through the lens of the news media, right? How does a person learn about the world. Well, there's a couple ways to do it. You can get out and talk to your friends. You can have interactions. You can get out and see your local culture.

You can read local news about what's going on down the street. Or another thing you can do is read national news stories about what's happening in the world. And one thing that a couple different studies have suggested is that national news in the last 20 years

has become significantly more negative and has consistently produced a little bit more distrust in institutions. And a part of this just comes from the fact that there's a scramble for people's attention in national media, and a great way to get someone's attention is to catastrophize the world. And so when you have a crisis and you have a lot of people who have lost that texture, that thick connection to where they live, and they get their news from social media feeds or national news that is often conspiratorial, often unbelievably distrustful, often.

and highly catastrophizing, it's a slightly berserking experience for a country. And I do, so I do think that we, the media, also played an often negative role here in terms of failing to help people work together and also failing to make it clear to people what some of the big truths were about the pandemic. I mean, one of the stories that I worked on

that I'm probably still most proud of is maybe six, seven months into the pandemic, still all of these reports of restaurants scrubbing down their tables and the New York subway blasting the poles with antimicrobial spray. When all of these researchers were saying, this thing moves through the air,

it's not fomites, it's not contact, it's people talking to each other and little microbial, tiny little spittle droplets floating into people's noses and mouths. And I wrote about what I called hygiene theater. We have a totally distorted sense of how this disease actually works. And I just do think that maybe an angle that we don't have enough time to explore here, but one that I keep thinking about is how does the combination of the decline of face-to-face socializing

multiplied by the increase of catastrophizing national news create a really distorted, weird, berserked sense of reality for a lot of people? Why don't you take that and this can be our final thought? Well, I think that's great, and I'm not going to, you know, pass up the chance to bash the media. But instead of bashing like the big media, I actually want to talk about social media. Let's, let's end kind of where we start this conversation in some way. Because here I think we see social media play such an important role at a time when people are disconnected and grasping for a reliable story. And the way I want to get into this is like for me, the most powerful example of how we came apart as a country and how we shredded the social fabric. when we could have achieved solidarity.

That's what we needed anyway, is the story of the masks because the thing about the United States is like this little piece of fabric took on the weight of all of our ideological outrage. And so just really quickly, in early April, the U.S. Center for Disease Control issues this change in the guidelines.

They now, for the first time, say, we want everyone wearing a mask in public because we've discovered what you just said, little aerosols are going to pass this virus. It's going to come through spit and it's going to come through the air. So the person who announces this decision is the previous president. And he gets on the air and he says, today the CDC's got these new guidelines, wear a mask in public. And then he says, personally, I'm not going to do it.

Talk about a confusing message from a leader. And then it becomes clear that everyone in Trump's cabinet in orbit can't wear a mask because for Trump, the mask is a sign of weakness and fear. And so Mike Pence, the vice president, goes to the male clinic of all places and refuses to wear a mask. And suddenly, if you're on the right, to, wear a mask means to be docile and frayed and to bear your face in public is a sign of strength, right? So now I've got this new symbol. But if you're a liberal or progressive, the opposite is the case.

So you change your photograph on Facebook to Derek Thompson in a mask. And you change your name to Derek hashtag wears a mask Thompson on Twitter. And now all the Democrats running for office have advertisements of themselves with masks on. And when you're walking down the streets of New York City in April and May, if you see people who are wearing a mask, you're like, oh, hey, you're on my team. You know, you're like high-fiving in the streets. And if you see someone who's not wearing a mask, you are like, your blood is boiling. You're feeling like, how are you doing this? You're going to kill me and my family and everyone around you. You're a horrible person. And that's when in the U.S. we start to see these viral videos of people brawling in supermarkets, right, in Walmarts,

and in some cases, homicides. And it's like for me, it's such a little thing. Something that in most countries you're able to just do because it's good for the public. It's good for the collective good, suddenly becomes this symbol. You're on one team or another team. It's not even about the health issue. It's what team are you on. And then there's the medication, right?

And then it's about the vaccine. And then it's about the election, right? And the election results are there. And now people are going on to social media, and they're finding communities of people who share their perspective on this. So you can have a very different experience of the pandemic if you're in a right-wing Facebook group than if you're in a left-wing or liberal Facebook group. And so that sorting starts to happen.

And as I think about where we're heading in the future, one of the things I worry about, I guess more than I worry about whether we're lonelier than ever is how are we going to find some common ground where we can see each other as members of a shared democratic society with common goals and a sense of collective purpose and good. because if we don't have that, we'll have no chance of dealing with the next pandemic. We'll have no chance of dealing with the looming climate crisis. And I'm not even sure that we can hold together as a society in a meaningful way. And the reason I think it's important is because if you think the problem with why we're feeling off right now, if the root of why we're feeling off right now is like, we've never been so lonely, then the prescription is like put your phones away when you go into that. the house. The surgeon general will say, like, answer the phone. If someone calls you and you're

really busy, the surgeon general likes to say, like, don't just send it to voicemail. Pick it up. It's a, hey, Derek, it's great that you're calling. I'm really busy right now. I'm a son's soccer turn, but I call you back later. There's that interaction. Well, my view is like, we could do that all we want. It's not going to solve what's really ailing the country right now. The deeper thing, the deeper problem of disconnection has a much more social and political tenor to it. And I think it's time for us to pay attention to that too. On the masks, the mask literature is really complex. And I think that partisan team making, to your point, is totally anathema to complex science. My read in the situation is that liberals, well,

conservatives to start with were clearly slow to absorb the science that high quality mask usage could play a role in reducing aerosol spread. But I also think in a weird twist that because of exactly the social coding that you described, liberals were slow to absorb the science that a lot of the masks they were using, like a lot of the cloth masks probably weren't doing very much, that once they became I'm team mask, any new piece of information that even punctured the efficacy of anything you could call a mask became difficult to absorb because they had already categorized themselves in the masks equal good all the time, don't tell me any different.

And so as science evolves, and science does just evolve, we hadn't studied mask usage that deeply in the previous 100 years to a lot of people's satisfaction. As science evolved, I do think that a lot of liberals were slow to update their sense

of what kind of masks work when you wear them well. So I think your point is very well taken. When people are wondering, maybe at the end of this conversation, you know, so what? Where does disconnection and loneliness and lack of social cohesion.

Where does that rubber hit the road? Well, here is where it hits the road. We had a pandemic, and I think that our lack of social trust, made it really difficult for scientists to talk to people and for people to talk to each other. So when life was on the line, we couldn't get our shit together, and that really sucks. That's my conclusion.

Eric Linenberg, thank you so much for this. This is really, really educational. I appreciate it, man. It's been a pleasure to speak with you and wish you well. Thank you for listening, plain English, is produced by Devin Biroldi. We've got new episodes every Tuesday and Friday. If you like what you're hearing, give us five stars and a nice review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcast.

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