The Dispatch Podcast - All the Lonely People | Interview: Derek Thompson

Episode Date: April 28, 2024

Derek Thompson of The Atlantic joins Victoria to answer the question: Why did Americans stop hanging out? The two discuss the steep decline in face-to-face socializing, the rise of loneliness, and the fraternizing role of protests. The Agenda: —The decline of social institutions in America —Smartphones’ effect on teenagers’ lives —Women turning to pets —Challenges of raising kids in the digital age Show Notes: —Derek for The Atlantic: Meritocracy Is Killing High-School Sports —Derek for The Atlantic: Concerts? I'll Pass —Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community —Watch this episode on YouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. My name is Victoria Holmes. Today's guest is Derek Thompson, writer for the Atlantic, and we're going to talk about an article he wrote titled Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out. We explore some factors for this decline, like smartphones and exuberant fees for extracurricular activities, but also draw attention to protests and the intoxicating communal pools these have as participation in church and religious institutions decline. Hope you enjoy the conversation. Derek Thompson, welcome to the Dispatch podcast. So today's topic is about the social crisis in America and an article that you wrote back in February. But before we get into that, I kind of want to ask you a few semi-personal questions. How old are you? I'm 37. 37. And when you were a kid, were you, did you do any extra-curricular activities? Were you involved in any sports?

I did. I played sports, not particularly well, but I played soccer. I played tennis, which I was a little bit better at, and I played baseball. My biggest achievement in baseball was that I believe I set the McLean, Virginia record for hits by pitch, which might be a function less of my ability, but more my inability to get out of the way when a fastball went at my shoulder. But anyway, I got on base a lot, which was helpful to my team. And when I wasn't playing sports in a mediocre fashion, I did a lot of, theater and musical theater in particular. So I sang quite a bit and I acted quite a lot. So a lot of social activity as a kid, if you weren't doing all those things, what else would you be doing? I'd probably be reading. When I was, say, between 9, 10, and 15 years old, I was really interested in science fiction. So I read a lot of J.R. Tolkien, all the Lord of the Rings, I read The Hobbit, read the Somerillian. I was interested in Ray Bradbury. I loved sort of mid-century science fiction. I love the foundation series. The I robot. series. So I was a real science fiction nerd at the time. And then when you got to college,

were you more or less social? Did you become more social? How was that? I'd say I think I became more social in college. I had a best friend in high school that I spent all of my time with, really. I had friends outside. Lots of friends outside of that best friend, but really I had like a smallish group of very, very close friends. And then when I went to college, I'd say I had a slightly larger group of friends. And that was helped by the fact that I went to Northwestern, which had a really bustling theater and musical theater and Acapella community, Acapella being that rare activity that is sort of cool for exactly four years in a person's life. Like, it's deathly uncool before college and it's deathly uncool after college. But within college

on some campuses, it can be a little bit of a social status gainer. So did a lot of the same musical and theatery things for four years, and I made a lot of friends that way. So I want to talk about your article that you published on February 14th, why Americans suddenly stopped hanging out. But was February 14th was that on purpose? Was there a reason why you published it on Valentine's Day about that? That would imply a lot more strategy on my end that actually existed. The Atlantic Publishing Schedule and editing schedule just happened to dump it out on Valentine's Day. So I apologize if I ruined anybody's Valentine's Day by getting them into a bad romantic mood at the beginning of the day. Well, I mean, I think it's definitely one of those things that, okay, I need to get my life together.

This is the wake-up call, maybe. But did you see like any sort of overlaps or relatability with your life and what you found in your article? Do you see that like maybe if you had grew up in this era, you might have maybe something a little bit more of a similar situation of being a little bit more lonely than when you were younger? I think that I definitely would have had more alone time. I think that the smartphone and social media, in many cases, offers in a few of your substitute for hanging out with people in the real world. You are hanging out with people, I think, when you're on your phone and social media, when you are exchanging texts or when you're in a group chat or when you're on Twitter, X, when you're on Instagram and TikTok. There's something

quasi-social about that experience, but it really is only quasi-social, despite the fact that we call it social media. In many cases, I think it is a direct replacement for time that people would otherwise be spending, just sleeping, maybe doing a little bit of homework, but often I think hanging out with friends. And that's why, you know, the major finding in this article about the decline of socializing in America, which is a 20-year decline because this data set, the American Time Use Survey, only goes back 20 years. But it basically finds that teenagers hang out with other people in the physical world 40 to 50 percent less than they did in 2003 when I was 16, 17 years old. So I think there's been an enormous change that the smartphone has introduced to general social

life, but to teenage life in particular. I understand that the smartphone may have affected like teenage social events probably the most, but what are some other demographics that are also affected? I think it's affected pretty much every demographic. I mean, every race, every, you know, gender in every part of the country, every level of education, married and unmarried, every single demographic that you can possibly find data for has less face-to-face socializing than they did 20 years ago, every single one. The decline is less for some groups. It seems to be a little bit less of a decline for, say, older women. It seems to be a larger decline for other groups, say low-income men, low-income black men in particular

those seem to have a really, really sharp decline in face-to-face socializing, similar to the decline among teenagers. So there's a different decline among different groups, but the decline is unanimous across the board. And because it's so unanimous, this is something that's more of like an opinion that I want from you, but is this like a public health emergency? So there be like policies in place? I mean, what are some, pretty little head into some of the remedies, but like who would be responsible for trying to to kind of like combat this loneliness epidemic and how could that look like? Is it an emergency?

I would say it's more like a severe chronic disease. It's not an emergency because, or at least a kind of sudden crisis, because it's not sudden. This is the proverbial frog boiling in the pot, even if that metaphor might not be exactly true when it's tested in scientific theory. But it's happening very slowly over time rather than something that is very sudden. And we're all kind of learning, I think, what kind of experiment are we running on ourselves

and running on each other when we choose to replace face-to-face socializing with phone-to-phone socializing? We don't know exactly yet what the implications of this are. There's obviously theories and people at Jonathan Haidt that say that the enormous rise,

in teen anxiety and depression and the share of teens who say they feel, quote, persistently hopeless or persistently depressed, there's been a huge increase in that number. It now stands at the highest rate of any time the CDC has asked the question of high school students. So in that case, you could say, sure, it's absolutely a crisis, but I'm still interested in learning what's going on here. Why is it that, and maybe this is giving you a sense of the larger questions I'm interested in here, but why is it that it's not just one. or another indicator of socializing that's declining, it's all of them. It'd be one thing if it was just teenagers that are hanging out less at malls and dating people less and saying they have

fewer friends and spending much more time alone with their phone. But it's also the decline of religion. And it's also the fact that people are going to temples of worship a lot less. And it's also the fact that all sorts of associations and organizations, whether it's book clubs or unions, are in decline. There's also the fact that as Americans get older, we tend to spend much more alone time as we get older. Well, and that means that an aging country will overall have more alone time. I'm interested in the fact that all of this is happening at the same time, the sort of full frontal assault on face-to-face socializing in this country. So we talked about like the social, the phone aspect of it and how that may be affecting teenage

social events and all that good stuff. But there are, yeah, like you said, there are different demographics that are also being affected, that maybe the phones aren't 100% the answer to why they're also not necessarily like spending time with other people. I mean, we kind of touched in it a little bit, but are there other factors that either have at least some explanation for this decline in social and being social with other people? or are you still exploring that? Is that something that, as part of the question you mentioned earlier, you're still just like, I don't know. Yeah, let me try to state my feelings about this, which are somewhat complex.

Let me try to state them in a simple way. Everything that I think is a theory, rather than an observed fact, I'm pretty sure that smart files and social media play an enormous role here, especially for teenagers. That said, I think that a lot of other things are happening in America that are contributing to the rise of alone time,

that have nothing to do with the phone. So Robert Putnam, a famous sociologist, wrote a famous book in the 1990s called Bowling Alone, which is about the decline in socializing and associations and organizations in America, the example in the title being the demise of bowling leagues. I mean, now the demise of bowling leagues

is like almost quaint. Like, what's a bowling league? Like, what are you been talking about? So clearly people were looking at this problem, years before, over a decade, before the smartphone even existed. So it can't be entirely the smartphone to explain the national phenomenon.

I do think it's a smartphone largely to explain what's happening to teenagers and their rise to anxiety. But this is about, in many ways, a multi-decade story about changes to Americans. infrastructure and the way we live and the fact that our entertainment devices are significantly better and more personal than they used to be. So that, for example, if you take something

like the decline in people going to the movies, right, here you have in terms of movie watching an industry that in the 1930s was a necessarily communal experience. You had no opportunity to watch a movie at home. The idea was ridiculous. You went out every other week, essentially. Americans bought like 25 to 30 movie tickets a year. You went out every other week to a movie theater and you watched moving pictures with a bunch of strangers.

Now our televisions are incredible. Well, first off, we have television. Something was invented in 1940s, I think it's called a television. Televisions are incredible. And so we'd watch much more movies alone at home rather than together with other people, which means we go out with other people. less often in order to go to the movies.

So even right there with the story of the transition of movie watching or even of television entertainment, moving from a communal experience in the middle of the 20th century to being a private experience in the 21st century, something you can do on a couch looking at the television, but also you can watch a movie on your phone in bed. Many people do.

And so even there, you see that this is something that goes, the smartphone that goes beyond even what Robert Putnam was talking about in terms of the client of social associations and organization in the 1990s, something bigger, I think, is happening. It kind of across the board, sociological conspiracy to make us spend more time alone. And also just kind of like two other observations from personal experience is that I noticed that people my age, I'm in my mid-20s, will not go to the movie theaters and groups. Sometimes they'll go alone. But often I think the most social experience that a lot of people have my age are concerts. People will, you know, plan a whole trip around a concert, or they'll plan, you know, like half the year. Like, I'm going to this concert in six months. I just always find interesting that that seems to be like the one social event that people will still, you know, take time to actually plan out and do and invest in.

Can I just stop to you right there on concerts? I wonder, maybe, you know, the answer to say that maybe you don't. I wonder whether concerts are becoming more like tent pole events than like frequent hangout events. so there's an understanding of I love music I don't love concerts it's a weird thing I wrote about it for the Atlantic ones

I'd rather not go into it because people just get mad at me but anyway I like you ironically I like listening to music alone I find it a very lovely personal experience but in any case with concerts people who love concerts

I think there used to be a feature of New York who went to concerts all the time little concerts in bars in small theaters it was like a part of their monthly life just going to concerts. And now I feel like whenever I hear about people going to concerts, I almost immediately assume they're going to a Taylor Swift, Billy Eilish, Post Malone,

Drake style conference. That is a conference concert? An enormous, enormous production where 100,000 people gather at one event rather than say 70 people gathering, in a little bar. I wonder whether the concert industry is seeing a kind of barbedele effect where more people are attending big concerts infrequently and fewer people are attending smaller concerts frequently. Because that's a way in which the concert phenomenon that you're describing might live alongside the antisocial phenomenon that I'm describing. That we see this as a once in a year kind of thing, rather as a way to hang out generally twice a month kind of I think you can see that mostly, and maybe the pandemic had something to influence this, but the shutdown, like the shutting down of a lot of, like, smaller bars and spaces because there were a couple in my hometown of Dallas, and I think here in D.C. that were shut down because people just weren't frequenting them as much, but I'm not sure if that was 100% because of the pandemic and, you know, places, social gatherings were closed.

And just another social infrastructure observation, my nephews who are six and seven, well, yeah, six, seven, they're starting to play. play sports. And one thing that I've noticed that's been a barrier for a lot of younger generations playing sports is the costs, the uniforms that kind of go along with that. And I'm not, I also wonder if that's part of the reason why it's one of, you know, just like the phones, like the fees of joining some sort of like sports event or social or extracurricular. It's just becoming too expensive. You put your finger right on one of the phenomena that I've been tracking for the last few years. According to the Aspen Institute, the share of children ages 6 to 12 who to play a teen sport.

Sounds like your nephew's nieces are right in that zone. The share of children ages 6 to 12 who play a teen sport on a regular basis declined 41% in 2011. Sorry, declined from 41% 2011 to 37% in 2017. Going back to 2008, I'm reading from an article that I wrote six years ago, going back to 2008, participation in youth sports

is lower across all categories, where most categories, including baseball, basketball, slack footballs, and soccer, Baseball in particular is down 20%. So you are seeing, again, it's not just the decline of one thing or another. It's the decline of a lot of different avenues of socializing at the same time. New sports is a huge driver, I think, of teaching young people how to compete with strangers in a healthy way, which I think is such an important thing to learn because so much of life is a kind of weird at distance

competition with strangers. It's really important that we have institutions that bring people together and teach them how to participate and collaborate and even compete together. But if you're seeing U-Sports decline, while New Siders decline, wild bowling leaves decline, while church is declining, it just seems like a pretty big story. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain on top of everything else is why

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college back in 2020 is that there is this communal fun sort of like fever that you get caught up in when you're doing protests because you're if you're coming from if you were isolated before because of the pandemic and didn't really create any friends out to the pandemic because it was kind of hard to and now you're in this like social environment where you're living with other people and there's this community it's so easy to like get caught up in this fever and to get excited about a cause that you that you think is just and and I'm wondering if the reason why these protests are so massive is because there's just this like swing from one extreme end to the other and something that I'm personally finding fascinating because it's like I was just in this environment so I understand how intoxicating it can be to feel as if you are doing something for the right cause and these chance and you're a part of something which is somewhat kind of scary too but having also been a part of protests or two when I was younger just kind of being cooled into that and so I feel like you know there's a lot of hatred towards these kids, but I also feel like, well, this is the first time that maybe

some of them have been a part of something in a very, very long time. And so it's a very intoxicating. I think it's a really interesting way to look at it. To be honest, I haven't thought much about the intersection between protesting and socializing. The thing that occurred to me as you were talking was that in a way, protests while they feel like in your description, a kind of religious experience, a kind of ritual akin to Sunday Mass, you know, people being swept up in a feeling that's bigger than themselves. I mean, what is religion for except if not feeling like you are part of a community participating in a ritual that tells a compelling story about where you came from, where you're going, what the purpose of life is, and reminding you that

there is a mission and meaning that's larger than your individual life. Many of these things, things are at work in a protest. But the thing that really occurred to me as you were talking was that in a way, a protest is the opposite of a church. Because a church stays. And protests, almost by definition, do not. A protest can succeed, but it is designed to end. The 1970s protests don't continue. The 1960s protests aren't continuing. protest movements tend to happen and then end. The Black Lives Matter protests were incredibly influential in all sorts of ways, both obvious and unobvious, but they are over as a national movement.

No religion could possibly survive if it had the half-life of a protest. And so there's a way in which protests are an example of how even the most church-like and religious-like things that we can point. our finger to and described in the 2020s actually aren't like churches or religions at all. They don't last thousands of years. In most cases, they barely last 100 hours. And so, like, that's, I think, an important distinction between the kind of social institutions that I think are most important for building a sense of community and building a sense of personal well-being and the kinds of social institutions like protests

that I don't think serve that kind of role. You can have an incredibly important protest, but it doesn't seem like we can or ought to expect protests to fill the role of religion. It just never has. Protest movements end, and religions are supposed to not end. And the most successful ones clearly last for thousands of years.

And I think that's also kind of why you have these, like, for example, you have Occupy Wall Street when my brother was in college and then you have like the Black Lives Matter movement and then you have these protests going on right now. People sometimes just need another event. Right. And this is, I want to be clear,

this is nothing to do with evaluating the quality of the arguments of Black Lives Matter, the quality of the arguments at Occupy Wall Street, the quality of the arguments, certainly in the Palestinian protest. I agree with elements of all of these protests. You name the protest from the last 50 years and I can tell you all sorts of ways in which I think there was extraordinary validity.

the protest movements. I think lots of protests historically have had a lot of sense behind them, even when there's been radicalism within them. My point is, if we are evaluating these movements as akin to social institutions, I think they do utterly fail the central test of are the institution, do they actually last? The definition of institution is something that lasts, right? A book club that only lasts for one book is not a social institution. A book club that makes great friends over 30 years, that's a social institution. Protest movements don't last 30 years. At least not the ones I was familiar

with. Let's talk about pets. You wrote in 2000, this is from your article, in 2003, the typical female pet owner spent much more time socializing with humans and playing with her cat or dog. By 2020, this flipped, and the average woman with a pet now spends more time actively engaged with her

pet than she spends hanging out face to face with fellow humans on any given day. Okay. I felt kind of attacked. I don't have a pet, but my parents have a dog, and I love that dog, and I just love hanging out with pets. But I mean, do you have sort of like any insight to why maybe, like, there's been an increase in women wanting to hang out with their pets than socializing with other people? I think several things are happening here, and I want to be clear that I am describing facts that reveal themselves in the American Time Use survey and not trying to tell people to not hang out with their dogs. I love my dog.

I spend lots of time with my dog. Nothing wrong with pets. But several things are happening here. Number one, let's go back to the first fundamental thing that I observed. People are socializing a lot less, which means that almost any other activity, if it stays stable, is going to become more competitive with face-to-face socializing.

Number two, as people are socializing less, they're also having fewer children. That's going to come back into play in just a second. Number three, while people have less children, they are also more likely to have pets. of pets has increased a lot in the last few decades, but it's especially increased since the pandemic. I think a lot of people increasingly treat their pets like children,

which is number four more time spent with and more money spent on individual pets. And so when you put all of this together, less socializing, fewer children, more pets, and more time spent with pets, you just mechanically get the result of people are spending, there's a certain large for people. that are now spending more time with their pets than they're spending socialized with people outside of their household. Is that good or bad?

I don't want to get hate mail by saying that people shouldn't hang out with their pets. But I also think that while I think Sartra said hell is other people, Heaven is also other people. And I don't think that the ideal way for a community to be, is for the people in that community

to spend more time with their domesticated mammals than with each other. I think people are pretty great and people should hang out with people probably overall a little bit more than they hang out with their dogs or cats. That said, if there are people listening

who are like, you know what, all the people that I know are incredibly annoying and my dog is incredibly fluffy and adorable and I love him, fine. I'm certainly not telling you that your life is a waste. And I really don't want to hit me from you. But this is a really interesting fact. And when I found it, I was like, well,

obviously, I had to report this. Yeah, it's interesting because there's that famous shot shot trip quote. I have trouble saying this name. I apologize. And then you said, heaven is other people, but like from the Catholic perspective, the definition of heaven is communion with others. And so this is my last question. So you're a new father. Congratulations. Sorry. Thank you. Really new. With this information in mind, how are you going to go about, you know, raising your kid? Is there going to be a smartphone. Have you had these, like, thoughts as you're going through this kind of stuff? Like, as someone who also has, um, I don't have any kids, but I'm saying like as someone who is also

concerned about like my nieces and my nephews and stuff like that. I, I am an advocate of, hey, you know, my sisters, like, maybe not get a phone for your kid right away, whatever, whatever, but do you have any kind of personal thoughts? Being a new father, most of my personal thoughts are about the immediate emergencies of her life. I haven't thought, she's eight months old. So she has several years to go before she is going to understand, before she's going to get her own phone. I was going to say before she understands what to do with the phone, but the truth is she is incredibly drawn to phones, which might unfortunately be an indication of the amount of attention that my wife and I pay to our phone, this teaching my daughter, how valuable these

these instruments are. I would say two things. Number one, I'm a huge fan of early socialization. I want her to be around other kids as much as possible. I want her to feel comfortable around people who are

who are difficult, who are pushing, who are like infants, you know, who act like babies. And I want her to feel comfortable around babies that act like babies.

And then on this smartphone issue, it's really important to me that people can just be in the world and I think that what from the smartphones do is that they blot out any possibility of boredom the second you feel

a moment's pinch of boredom you can reach into your phone and entertain yourself with some controversy some clip, some song someone saying something that's funny about something else and I do think that

something subtle and maybe hard to quantify or even qualify is lost when we lose the capacity for a moment's boredom. And I loved being a daydreamy kid, and I would love to raise a daydreamy kid. And it's hard to truly daydream at the highest levels

if you have a device in your pocket that can basically extinguish the flame of any daydream at a moment's button pushing. So I would like you or not have a phone for as long as possible, I suppose. All right. Well, Derek, thank you for much for during the Dispatch Podcast.

Thank you. Thank you.