You Are No Longer Invited to Dinner

Middle aged European here. I still regularly go to parties (dinner and otherwise) and I notice that there are two kinds of people: people who throw parties, and people who don't. This sounds like a truism, but what I mean is: there are people who regularly throw a party and people who never do it.

I am solidly in the first category. I throw dinner parties, birthday parties, drinking parties, dance parties, midsummer parties, midwinter parties, game parties, etc. Yes, it costs time and money and is a lot of work. But what people (probably the ones that never bother) tend to forget is how unbelievably gratifying it is to get a bunch of people together, to feed them and to make them talk, laugh, dance, etc. Afterwards you are tired but also grateful and socially energized in a way that feels fundamental to my existence.

As others have mentioned, the decline started long before social media and the Internet. When I was a child, in the 70s, my parents often had other families and couples over for dinner, and we often attended small dinner parties, too.

As an introvert, I absolutely loathed these gatherings and was frustrated by how powerless I was in avoiding them.

Recently, I have been reading over my mother's old letters she wrote to her parents at that time, in which she described the effort and social anxiety that went with this tradition. It was not something my parents enjoyed, but rather an obligation they felt they had to uphold. Someone invites you over, then that goes into an unspoken balance sheet, and you are required to reciprocate. She often spoke of "owing" dinner to people. I don't think she enjoyed it at all, though there were a few couples I can remember who were good friends of theirs, and those meetups were always a pleasure to listen in on. The rest were simply a drag.

I should note that their life in the 70s (in a middle-class college town) was not some idyllic paradise without the Internet, either. Everyone was constantly falling ill with colds or flu, and days were spent running dreary errands to shop for boring things that we now can get with a click. The rotary-dial telephone that hung in the kitchen was the heartbeat of the house, since replaced by Facebook and smartphones. My parents were always busy and exhausted.

Blame the screens. Screens are blackholes that suck up your time, attention, awareness and senses.

Screens are evil. They wake up the dead past as if it's alive and happening now. It became so much the norm, that people are afraid to face the real world, real people, real talking. "Dinner party? OMG, real people with real faces that force us to talk to them? Noway sir".

Screens disconnected people from real world, from each other. I was trying a VR headset the other days and immediately threw it away, as it shut off my visual and audio senses completely.

How is the author of this piece going to cite a graph that shows an extreme increase in time spent at home that begins in 2020 and not mention COVID? We had social media in the 2010s. COVID made spending time outdoors/around other people an actual physical danger for over a year, and the psychological effects of that are lingering. Does anyone remember that one political cartoon where the guy is walking down the street, and everyone around him just looks like a virus particle? I think a lot of people consciously or subconsciously still see the world that way. If you don’t believe, reflect on how you would feel about attending a crowded indoor gathering in 2010 vs now, or how much unease you would feel if someone at the table next to you started coughing.

When I met my wife, I discovered very quickly that she had savant-level hosting skills. She is an amazing cook, she prioritizes space to dine in our home (we made sure to have a dining table in our NYC apartment) and she thinks carefully about the experience of her guests. It's a quality that I benefit greatly from, and I'm grateful to her for it.

Middle-aged, in the US. From my perspective, a lot of the change is due to overbooked children. My wife and I have a group of ~5 couples that we used to get together with regularly. Before any kids, it was ad-hoc, often out somewhere (dinner, bar, whatever). When the first couple had an infant, that changed to pot-lucks at their house (easy to put the kid down for the night). But now that 3 of the couples have kids, 2 of which are in middle-school, it's almost impossible to get the gang together - one of the kids always has some practice or another event. We still get tougher in smaller groups, but less frequently.

This is counter to when I was a kid - it was rare that I had a scheduled sports event on a Friday or Saturday evening. During the day, sure. But 6pm+ on Friday? Basically never. But that seems to be common now. Travel sports, so lots of weekends totally away, or specialized coaching at odd hours, or just a 3rd activity to pad that college application. It's crazy. I honestly have no idea how kids have any fun today (and I say that as somebody who played 2 varsity sports, one instrument, and was an Eagle Scout - but through middle school, I still had plenty of time for just hanging out - it was common to ride my bike for hours on a Sunday - into town, get an ice cream, across the river into DC, and back).

I moved from a rich city social life to a lonely suburban one (I have regrets, there are complicating factors). I met a fellow dad who mentioned a book as we started chatting and I was excited (someone who reads!).

As we talked about this very isolation problem he told me about his neighbors who kept inviting him over and offering to watch the kids for him and how he thought it was just weird and couldn’t trust them. It broke my heart — I could just imagine the neighbors trying to be good to their community and that very behavior is met with distrust.

(I read half the book he mentioned and asked him about it the next time I saw him. Turns out he hadn’t read the book, just heard about it on a podcast. My quest to meet someone who reads continues.)

This is very cultural. In Spain essentially no one throws dinner parties in the US style. It's rare to invite social acquaintances to one's home. These things are done - but mainly with family. Part of this is cultural and part reflects that homes are too small to fit many people. Most socializing is done outside, at a bar, cafe, restaurant, park, etc.

Article says "The share of adults who say they regularly have friends over has declined 70 percent since 1975", but this may not be an accurate comparison:

> Until 1985, the survey included only married households.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDB_Needham_Life_Style_Surveys

Overall interesting piece.

> For any number of reasons, women seem to do better than men at making and keeping adult friendships

I think it’s social pressure and necessity.

When I fail to get my kids a thing they need to school people shrug their shoulders, and I think “I tried” but the pressure on my wife seems to be higher. She judges herself and others judge her harder. Likewise, to meet that pressure she uses her friend group for utility in the same way I might reach out to programmer friends I met at a conf to get a PR merged. She has a bench of mom friends who can pickup her kids and they will expect the same favor in return.

There is a family in our school group where the dad is much more active in that role as connector and planner, but it seems harder for him. I don't think people reach out to him as much for shared favors so he has to try harder. And beyond necessity, they are forming friends. I think the other primary caregivers that are usually women just do think of him as friend material as quickly or easily as the other mothers. So overall it is harder for him (still do-able just noting a systemic weight).

I found myself taking care of a 10 year old in Taiwan for two weeks (with a group of other students/parents) and that short time was enough for me to do a 180 and really force me to be much more social. I planned things, and socialized. Both because it was fun and it was necessary. I controlled the calendar in totality, bore the risks and rewards and answered to myself. But when we rejoined as a family unit I slipped back into old patterns.

So now I know more what it feels like to have that connection and that symbiotic need. But I'm unsure what to do about it.

In my twenties I made spaghetti every Saturday night. This started as throwing some Ragu in a pot and adding some spices, and eventually morphed into crushing my own tomatoes and cooking over most of the day. I did this every week over years. A varied group of friends came to eat each week -- no plan, no notice, just come over if you have nothing else going on. It's how I met my wife -- I never would have had the courage to ask her out on a real date, but "I make spaghetti for my friends every Saturday, you should come over," was easier. It's been years and I don't often make spaghetti anymore.

Feel like part of the issue is everyone’s self imposed neurosis about not intruding on others. My wife insists on not ever asking to come over to someone’s house - she only wants to be explicitly invited. We invite people over to our place when we can but this leads to us basically never visiting any of our friends because they aren’t the planning type.

The church is a huge part of building community and relationships. Its not that you can't find community and relationships outside of church, it just makes it that much easier. I have found that unless you are seeing people at least once a week or every other week with regularity, it is hard to develop a strong friendship. Church on Sundays, community group, and the occasional group party like our annual costumes and cocktails party build a foundation for developing strong individual relationships. I think with the decline of the church a lot of people just don't have things in their life that provide that relational structure. Some definitely do though!

I wonder, does this correlate to declining home ownership?

A house party seems to me like a great idea if you actually own the house. But if you don't own the damn place (or, worse, houseshare), you are working full time, and are no longer in your 20s, having people over loses much of its appeal. Especially for larger gatherings.

Personally feels insane that people find this surprising or puzzling.

You wouldn't be surprised if everyone was smoking and smoking rate was going up massively and then we had a surge of people getting cancer.

This is obviously because of social media or other algorithmic applications. It literally herds people.

It couldn't be more obvious how unhealthy it is, yet there is no demand for it to get outlawed and there won't be any time soon. It is pretty sad.

If you think about the second/third order effects that it will have, it is massively worse than alcohol/drugs.

I'm surprised at this being correlated w/ intensive parenting. Modern parents ARE tired and parenting a lot. That's why on the weekends we invite our friends with kids over and the kids run around and entertain each other so we can have some "Just talk to adults" time with the other parents, maybe watch the NFL games. Even when we take turns hosting, we easily get over the 12x a year mark through this.

> Everybody might prefer, in the abstract, a world of dinner parties, neighborhood friendships, and spontaneous gatherings. But on any given Wednesday at 7:45pm., it is easier to look at a screen than to host a party; easier to listen to a podcast while doing yoga than to plan a gathering. This is not so much an individual failure as a coordination failure. Modernity has shifted leisure from activities that require coordination with other people toward activities that can be consumed without the permission or participation of others. Compared to TikTok, a dinner party is a terrible leisure technology.

This extra coordination “friction” is the killer. The lesson is, if you want more dinner parties you have to reduce the extra coordination “friction” to a minimum.

A few years ago I came across a HN comment by a guy who wrote "The 2-Hour Cocktail Party". I read his comments and then got the book, and it seemed fantastic, smoothing over all the painful issues that happen when you host.

I really wanted to try it out, but moved from the city just after reading it and haven't yet.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32879851

I see this as a manifestation of the loss of teaching effective communication skills. This takes a moment to explain, so please slow down and consider this: before the cultural revolutions of the 1960's, general education included more emphasis on communications conflicts and resolutions of them. For example, every school had a debate team, and the various forms and rules of debate were common knowledge. Yes, this is true. Debate and watching people skilled at argumentative discussion used to be a popular form of entertainment. Then, during the cultural revolution of the 1960s, the best or the "stars of debate" all sided with the youth culture and not the establishment. That then triggered the removal of debate from educations, from entertainment, and from public life. Now, decades later we have the situation that groups of adults cannot form without conflicts and arguments that drive the community creation aspects away. We have created a culture that cannot communicate, because we have stopped teaching basic oral conflict negotiation of any form.

This summer I went to every pagan group I could and came to the conclusion that, for people who are settled in householder mode, the basic things you can do are (1) have a potluck and (2) have a fire, in that order. Martin Prechtel says "The feast is the only ritual" and even the Christian ministers I know won't argue about it, I mean https://four12global.com/articles/breaking-bread/

In my experience, most people are overworked, stressed and exhausted.

I don't find it surprising at all that social activities have been declining. It sounds like normal mammal behavior in fact.

American here married with 2 children. When my kids were young < 10 we would host several parties a year, bbq's in the summer, birthdays and holidays were always at our place. After about 10+ years of this my wife and I realized we were now dreading whatever upcoming party. We felt like a catering company serving food/drinks/entertainment while everyone else enjoyed it. What made it worse was almost always there would be that one person would mistake this for an all night feast and never leave. I hated having to kick people out but I can't sleep the next day away. Thus we stopped. I know this will vary wildly with the kinds of guests you have and yes we stopped inviting the problem people. Now we do very low-key parties usually less than 5 people and are very selective on who we invite. No regrets here.

Swede here, I used to host a lot of dinners and parties.

But then i realized that it was mostly me who hosted them and the few times i got invited there was an agreement that guest chip in on the costs or that it was a potluck kind of thing.

Made me regret spending all that time and money on the parties i hosted.

Not American.

One big thing I feel contributing to this is a lack of time.

And the more strange unusual thing, many folks basically have "school nights", they don't do anything because they're going to work the next day.

Perhaps work becoming more mentally intensive makes this more difficult.

This may not be shared by other people, but my two cents.

I personally don't like inviting people to my house (or going to other people's houses) because I already spend a good chunk of my day indoors (I work from home). Whenever possible, I prefer to meet outside.

> Something quite deep in the human psyche seems to want desperately to turn off our self-talk and silence our nattering internal monologues by turning up the volume of other characters’ voices.

Over the past few years, rather than seeking to drown out that internal monologue with external entertainment, I've found myself feeding that monologue into Claude to have what I know is an ersatz conversation. And sometimes I work with Claude to write stories around whatever I'm thinking about, basically a form of escapism and sometimes wish fulfillment through personalized fiction. How weird does this make me? Is it inherently unhealthy?

Edit to add: To tie it back to the theme of the article, the result is, of course, the same; I spend more time alone, less time talking with real people.

Humanity's revealed preferences are really, really strong here.

As basically every country on Earth gets richer, two things happen in survey results.

One is that as people get richer they spend more time apart. Household sizes get smaller, the number of social interactions per week goes down, etc.

You'll also see that as countries get richer people say that they report feeling less lonely. Loneliness is less of an issue for the rich countries who live more apart. The correlation between this and GDP is comical. As you get to poorer countries, like clockwork, people report being lonelier in surveys.

The evidence suggests that as people get more choice they decide to see people less and they also feel happier for it and less lonely. So I don't think there's a problem here.

A graph about social changes that cuts off at 2022 is beyond worthless.

I love inviting friends and their partners to my place for parties, board games, movie nights, or just hanging out and listening to music. But over time, I’ve witnessed a huge decline in these gatherings. As soon as someone had a kid, they stopped coming to almost 99% of events - maybe showing up once a year, if that. Getting older didn't help either; once people hit 30, everyone started double - checking if they actually had the time or energy to go out.

Finally, as soon as I had my own kid, parties ended for me too. I stopped hosting and attending altogether (I've only organized one and visited one in the last four years). So yes, I can see this shift happening, and it’s sad. But honestly, I have no idea where I’d even find the time or energy to start doing it again.

Beyond that, I value the time I spend with my child more than any other social interaction. Maybe it's just me, but as a Millennial, the warmth, love, and comfort I have at home with my kid completely fulfill my social needs. I’m simply no longer looking for those warm feelings elsewhere.

Crucially too, people do not know _how_ to host anymore either, treat guests. A host needs a certain self effacing attentivess. host also needs to provide an abundance too, there always should be too much food, too muxh drink, more time to stay.

I had a slightly older Mexican neighbor who would go out of his way to invite everyone in the apartment complex to watch pay per view fights and cook.

He was actually from Mexico, I suspect from a culture that values community much more. I don’t know Hispanic culture that well, but I’ve also gotten this vibe from former partners.

Long long ago when my black family first moved to California they made sure to co locate in the same area. This was partially due to the realities of segregation, but it also made making dinner for your nephew much easier.

Now the community is obsolete. Replaced by insta validation loops.

1. More women work

2. More remote communication

3. Fewer friends through church

4. Fewer friends through kid’s school

5. Kids have more homework and more structure activity than they used to.

6. Less need for entertainment

They missed two big causes.

#1 Hording: If you've got a house full of crap, and you're deeply ashamed of it, you're not going to be having visitors over, ever. You're also not going to mention it on surveys.

We, the American public, have been collecting shit at a prodigious rate. Many of us pay rent for stuff that won't fit in our home. It's why the storage industry is so reliably profitable.

#2 Paranoia: Otis Toole[1] kidnapped then killed Adam Walsh. His father publicised his kidnapping, and fueled a moral panic that sent American parents deep into paranoia. Kids used to be free range, and were often collectively instructed to "go outside to play, and come inside when the street lights come on". After that event, we're afraid to even let them walk to a friends house a few doors over.

The end of the fairness rule, and the rise of fear based media like Fox news certainly didn't help in the rise of distrust.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottis_Toole#Murder_of_Adam_Wal...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-by-one_error

Families (mine included) are just too busy. Working, commuting, homework, trying to get some exercise in. Any spare time I try to spend it with my children.

I always look at happiness in terms of pillars, social, family, work, spiritual. Work somehow has taken over everything. It seems culturally engrained.

I know social media is a factor but while we all fall down the rabbit hole occasionally, it doesn't stop anyone organising a get together.

This is an interesting article and I think it touches on something I've observed as well across my generation which is a lack of participation in society, institutions, and more. This generation and the one after that prefers to "like" a "post" and maybe go vote. Civic institutions? Maybe a token $5 that they were guilt tripped into contributing. By the way why does Europe have all these great museums and nice gardens? Someone paid for it. You spend 10s of thousands of dollars to go look at their stuff. Maybe you should spend that money locally instead so you have your own stuff at home to look at.

We by and large seem to not understand that nobody is going to do these things for us. I'm not sure if it was a parenting failure or just changes in how society prefers to function, but when you look around and see nobody is inviting you to dinner you should conclude that you should be the one to initiate the change. It's the same mentality I see when folks just want the government to do something, or some corporation to do something about climate change for example, but they are unwilling to also simultaneously take their own personal actions. Change starts with you. Nobody is coming to save you. You have to run for office. You have to volunteer at your local community center. You have to take on the leadership role at your church or other place of worship. You have to spend the money and host dinner parties. You have to coordinate these things and yes you have to do it on top of your other responsibilities. Alternatively, you just don't have these things anymore and social media isn't going to replace them.

Also kids - hard to get people together with kids. Not just time constraints (some seem quite strange to me - kids go to bed at 7PM? My parents just let me go to sleep whenever) but also inability to locate, to engage in conversation - mid conversation they stop some kid is doing something and now you kind of realize whatever you were talking about wasn't important to begin with, and more. I'm not criticizing folks for having kids or anything and I think "childfree" movements are extremely cringe and stupid, but having kids in lieu of extra effort, leads to some social isolation from what I've observed.

Then next thing you know you are in your late 40s and you don't have friends anymore.

Of course these are very broad strokes I'm painting. But I think there's quite a bit of truth to it.

> It's too much fun to be home alone

This reminded me of the insurance company TV ad:

https://www.ispot.tv/ad/S7KX/geico-cancelled-plans

> Americans are unhappier than ever

For a slightly different take, the great Experimental History blog wrote about this (in a way...) too:

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/there-is-no-epidemic-...

> More recent data suggests that teenage loneliness might have ticked back up to where it was in the 1980s, and the evidence here is mixed overall, depending on which data sets and cohorts you look at. We don’t yet have enough data to be sure which way the effects go on average, but we do have enough to be sure that those effects are neither large nor universal.

I still do this once a month a more frequently, I think Oslo being a small city allows me and my friends to afford this with ease of public transport.

Me and a pal talked about this problem exactly a week ago, we chatted how we just invite more and more friends but sheldomly get invited ourselves, and our conclusion was some people just are not good at hosting. I say that because they never hesitate to attend.

hwoever, my phone contact is fileld with peoples allergies notes, likes/dislikes and similar so I keep the party fit for all. Catering to everyones allergy and everyone seems to have one here in West is mad challenging.

Year 3626 Edward Gibbon II picks this up like a case study in late Roman Empire decline. He would likely not blame screen overuse, burnout, rising costs/inflation, shyness, loss of communication skills (as mentioned in this chat). These things are symptoms rather than primary causes.

I actually love and fancy about big breakfasts.

Just imagine that your family and a friend's family are going to camping today. You tell the other guy, hey, tomorrow morning we are going to prepare a big breakfast for everyone. If you don't mind spending an extra 5 minutes diverting into our driveway (mine is 5 mins away from the freeway), you can have a full breakfast before we go camping. The other guy says Yes that's perfect, and the next morning the whole family roll in, smelling sausage, bacon and fried eggs.

Damn that's something I'd like to do once I get rid of my hemmorhoids.

I actually went to a dinner party this past Saturday. It was planned and coordinated by my best friend's wife (of course). It was the only one this year. I'm sure they will be holiday parties, thanks to my sister-in-law, but that was the one dinner party in 2026. My cohort is mostly retired, so it's not from a lack of spare time.

root cause: young generation wants to rent, not own. Young generation wants high density living and a shift of ownership towards landlords and private equity. As such, entertaining in a walnut sized apartment is a little less practical.

Getting people to buy (their first and only) home is a really important issue. Creating more landlords doesn't not solve housing problems.

Money. In the 70s, a single income family could afford to host. Who has money for that these days?

I wonder if another factor is how many people move around the country.

For families with kids, forming deep friendships as an adult can be a logistical challenge.

Many people have no current relationship with friends they made in college or high school

To me, the most obvious explanation is that people used to be able to buy houses a lot more easily than before. My wife and I were lucky that we were able to afford one, and because of that I have my friends over a couple times a year to hang out and have dinner (I would do it more often, but we're in a remote part of the city that isn't great to drive in). When we were in an apartment, we didn't even have a dining room or enough seats for anyone other than on the couch.

Not all of it, but Americans are working significantly more now than they did in 1975[1]. One would expect compromises to be made to clear space for more work hours.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060

How do gender roles and sexism figure into this? I'm sure it's not the only reason, but it wouldn't surprise me if most of the 'party' work ended up falling on the wife more often than not.

It’s just too much work for big dinners. How is that possible for a family of two workers to prepare a big dinner once for maybe 8-10 people once for a while? If I had the time I’d rather spend on sleeping or something else.

There are probably people who are good at this and love to do this, but I think there are fewer and fewer families who are into big dinners.

Inviting friends over for dinner is the ONLY way I can get my wife and daughter to clear their stuff from the common areas.

A party with 10 guests is even better.

All three of us are hoarders, to an extent, but I alone am able to go into a cleaning frenzy approximately once or twice a year and get rid of mega-junk. Unfortunately, they don't seem able to do so.

So, I consider dinners still to be a useful tradition, though perhaps the motivations have shifted a bit.

Why is church in there?

Its a pain in the ass to host something and id rather see my friends at a bar/restaurant.

Not US, under 40. The depiction of dinner parties makes me think not much was lost.

What I gleam from TV shows is: The wife invited people over to brag about her husband's recent promotion or her children's achievements. Once over, they gossiped about a perceived fault in the other family (did you see the son's long hair? I heard he smokes weed!

Sounds like a suburban nightmare. There surely are other socializing events that were more beneficial; like a weekly bowling club meeting.

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

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

Don't take a percent change of a percent change.

Another challenge to hosting dinner parites today is that everybody is on a special diet, count calories, on ozempic because they need to be healthier or have a athletic goal only few people 30 years ago had.

This makes it even more difficult to host because of everybody's needs and regimes they dont buckle on.

May I suggest a thing my wife and I started doing a couple years ago: the monthly brunch.

First Sunday of the month or whatever, we send out a reminder text, we provide coffee and a little food, people bring way more food than we can eat, and we invite everyone we know, from our different social circles. No pressure.

It’s a moderate amount of work, but it’s very gratifying to bring people together. People have made good friends at our brunch that they hang out with all the time now. It’s been interesting to see how hungry people are for social interaction, some people have driven or taken the subway more than an hour to come. People bring their kids or babies if they have them, age range is from 20s to 60s, it’s very chill.

It’s also a great “next step” when I meet someone I’d like to be friends with: “hey, my wife and I do a monthly brunch, it’s really low-key, you should come!”

For the record, I’m an introvert, but I can tell this is really good for me.

> Putnam acknowledged that women have historically been the keepers of the family social calendar, planning the birthday parties and neighborhood potlucks. For any number of reasons, women seem to do better than men at making and keeping adult friendships and making plans with other families. But in the 1950s and 1960s, tens of millions of women traded their unpaid household management jobs for salaried jobs, and the family social calendar frayed, as men failed to pick up the slack.

Being stay at home parent is super lonely experience, basically the most lonely occupation you can have. In most jobs, you meet people and you do talk to people without trying to. Fairly often, they are unavoidable whether you want it or not. If you are at home with a kid, you are truly absolutely alone, unless you organize something. Every other guy here on HN complains about Covid being lonely, but it was less lonely and socially easier situation than being stay at home parent.

So, alternative framing is that women stopped organizing these as their need do organize them went down. And men did not had that need in the first place, so it did not changed from their point of view.

And simultaneously, it ceased to be acceptable to be the kind of dad who spends multiple evenings a week with buddies, not really spending time with his kids.

I get caught in the comparison game, the thief of joy.

I don’t want ask my rich well off friends around cause of my humble existence.

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

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

Midlife millennial American here.

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

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

Why the change?

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe it helps that 50 years ago people could actually afford to buy things like big houses where to throw parties at.

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

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

Material conditions certainly affect this too.

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

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

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

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

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

My guesses:

1. Everything costs more. A lot more.

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

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

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

5. Self-entertainment is a lot cheaper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Personally, I need my weekend just to recover.