The great friendship collapse: Inside The Anti-Social Century

So the American Time Use Survey, which is a survey that's done by the Bureau of Labor Statistics

found that the average American now spends 20% less time socializing in person than they did

just 20 years ago, and a record amount of time spent alone by themselves. I think this might be

the most fundamental fact of American life that there is. You can debate all sorts of things

about how the texture of American life and American values have changed

What you can't debate is the sheer, objective, existential fact that Americans are more alone than ever

and that in many ways, we're choosing this aloneness. I'm Derek Thompson

I'm a journalist, and I'm the co-author of the book Abundance with Ezra Klein

So if you trace the decline of socializing over the last 60 years, in many ways, I think it is

a story cleanly told by technology. Technology is not the only thing that plays a role here

but it's a critical thing that plays a role here. You go back to the 1960s

And then you have the rise of the car. And the rise of the car allows people to drive away from downtown areas and populate the suburbs

In this way, you could say the car privatized American lives. But then, right after the popularization of the car, you have the invention of the television

And if the car privatized American lives, I think the television privatized American leisure

people chose to spend their leisure time just sitting on a couch watching the tube

There's this amazing statistic that between the 1960s and the 1990s, the average American gained

about 300 hours of leisure time every single year. And you sort of step back and think like

if someone told you that you had an extra 300 hours added to your waking consciousness in the

next 12 months, what would you do with it? Would you learn another language? Would you read the

Odyssey? Would you spend more time with your kids? Would you pick up sewing or pottery? Well, it turns

out that Americans actually had this gift in the second half of the 20th century, and they spent

those extra 300 hours of leisure doing almost exclusively one thing, watching more television

So then you get in the 21st century, and if the car privatized American lives and the television

privatized American leisure, the smartphone privatized our attention. Smartphones allow us to be alone even when we're around other people. You can be in a cafe

and be alone You can be at a party and be alone You can essentially choose to turn your waking consciousness into an experience of aloneness whenever you want So I called this

phenomenon the antisocial century. And I call it the antisocial century rather than the lonely

century for a very specific reason. You know, loneliness, as defined by some sociologists

is the feeling that someone has when there's a gap between their felt sociality and their desired

sociality. It's me on the couch watching TV and being like, man, I kind of want to get a drink

with that friend. Loneliness is the biological instinct that's healthy in many cases that pushes

me to get off the couch. That's not the instinct that most people feel today. Instead, the instinct

is in many cases to stay on the couch. There's this trend on TikTok that some people call

cancellation. And what happens is they'll film this little dance that they do when a friend

cancels plans. They'll say, oh my God, thank God my plans were canceled. I can spend more time at

home alone. Is that loneliness? No, that's the opposite of loneliness. That's someone celebrating

when the opportunity to socialize is canceled. That's the decision to be alone

an anti-social decision, not an expression of healthy loneliness. And what's happening here, I think

is actually really interesting. Like at a level of biochemistry, I think it's absolutely fascinating

because here's what I think is happening. I think a lot of people are experiencing their leisure time

by dumping their attention into their phone. and as they're flicking through TikTok and they're flicking through Instagram, they're thinking

dopamine hit, dopamine hit, dopamine hit. And what happens sometimes when we experience a really high

dopamine period is that our reserve levels, our so-called tonic levels of dopamine drop

And so we're spending all this time on our phones. We put our phone down. We're like a little

exhausted. Maybe a friend texts at that very moment and says, hey, you want to get a drink

Hey, you want to get dinner? Hey, you want to just hang out outside the house? And what populates in our head is all the various ways

that the adventure of leaving our home could actually be a misadventure

Ugh, I got to do my hair. Maybe I have to do my makeup. I have to find the new jeans that I want to wear

I have to travel to meet them. I might not be able to park. The subway might be delayed. It might be a boring conversation with them

I'm not so sure that I have the emotional energy to be there for my friend right now

And so we say no. And instead, we just go back to our phones

We are essentially dumping our dopamine, our drive into our screens rather than gifting it to other people

We're reserving our energy for glass rather than actual friendship. You can almost think about this

as like a total life scale effect where teenagers by record have fewer friends and spend less time hanging out 20 are dating less 30 are marrying less and 40 have fewer kids

Those are the social costs of the antisocial century. It's a world where people who might be biochemically tricked to not listen to the voice of loneliness

the biological urge to be with people, demanding too much aloneness for themselves

So much aloneness that it's actually bad for them. And the costs of this at an emotional and psychological level are obvious

Rates of anxiety are going through the roof. Rates of social anxiety are going through the roof

Young people have never been more depressed or never said they had fewer friends

We're doing this to ourselves and we don't have to. So I'm a natural optimist. I think we can fix this problem

But before we talk about how to fix this problem, I think I have to be a realist and discuss how it could get worse

So right now we're seeing the rise of generative AI. And one way that people are using AI is not just to use large language models like ChatGPT

to, say, ask questions like a search engine. Many of us are treating it like a friend

There's this company Character AI that has tens of millions of users

These are people who are essentially developing emotional relationships with chatbots. I find this future that we're sleepwalking into to be both plausible and extremely scary

And yes, people are going to hear like, oh, you're just recreating the plot line of her

This is not a prediction. This is just you reciting the summary of a movie that came out a decade ago

But I think it's worth taking seriously the fact that many young people today

have a relationship with their friends that exists almost exclusively through the phone

through texting, and maybe sometimes calls, but mostly texting and sharing memes

When you're texting with someone, like phenomenologically, what's your relationship with them? You're just exchanging bubbles. Here's my text bubble. Here's your text bubble

here's my text bubble. At a level of experience, phenomenology, what is the real difference

between texting a friend and texting an AI? And so I think about a future where young people say

you know, it's actually easier for me to develop an emotional relationship with silicon-based life forms than carbon-based life forms, as creepy as that is to say

They discover that what they want out of a relationship validation a sense of availability a sense that there a responder who understands their deepest fears they might discover that that more efficiently gleaned from silicon

than from carbon. Which is why I'm worried that it's like we're blazing a trail upon which

AI companions will easily walk. But I'm also, I'm a fundamentally optimistic person

And I think that these problems can be solved. I mean, fortunately, the antidote to the antisocial century does not have to be invented

This is not something like Alzheimer's or pancreatic cancer, where we're waiting on

scientists to invent a cure. The cure is us. There's this idea from the author, Neil Stevenson, called a mystics, which is a term that he

adopted from the Amish that he thinks of as the values that we give to technology. He points out

that the Amish are famous for rejecting all technology, but in fact, they don't reject all

technology. They sometimes have washing machines, they have solar power. Instead, what they have is

a very narrow filter for technology. They only accept technology into their lives if they believe

it is in service to a pre-existing value. So they say no to televisions because they think

televisions might interfere with hangs between families, but they say yes to solar power because

it can empower their lives. I wonder if all Americans could benefit from an amistic sensibility

You know, rather than adopt any technology that makes our lives more convenient and then just live

with the emotional and psychological consequences of that adoption, what if we instead filter technology for our values

Maybe our values are romance or family togetherness. Maybe our value is a digital or actual Sabbath

Maybe our value is maintaining our ability to concentrate on a single thing

for longer than the 15 seconds it takes to swipe between TikTok videos

What would the world look like if we had values first and technology second

rather than adopted technology first and just lived with whatever values came downstream of them

I think it would be a better world. I think it'd be a more purposeful world

I think it'd be a more social world. And I fundamentally think it'd be a happier world too

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