We’re living through the loneliest era in American history. Why are we spending so much time by ourselves, and more surprisingly, why do we seem to like it? Journalist Derek Thompson dives into what he calls the “Anti-Social Century,” a time when each new technology hasn’t just made life more convenient, but also more isolating. The real twist? We’re not just accidentally alone, we’re choosing it, and it’s changing how we relate to the world around us.
Timestamps
00:00 American Time Use Survey
00:55 The decline of socializing over 60 years
1:41 How the TV privatized leisure
2:38 How the smartphone privatized attention
3:12 The Anti-Social Century
4:40 Dopamine and smartphones
6:43 The emotional costs
7:22 Is AI replacing friendship?
9:37 What’s the antidote?
Transcript
The below is a true verbatim transcript taken directly from the video. It captures the conversation exactly as it happened.
American Time Use Survey
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.
The decline of socializing over 60 years
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's 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.
How the TV privatized leisure
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.
You can sort of step back and think, 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.
How the smartphone privatized attention
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 and be alone. You could be at a party and be alone. You can essentially choose to turn your waking consciousness into an experience of aloneness whenever you want.
The Anti-Social Century
So I've called this phenomenon the anti-social century, and I call it the anti-social 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 wanna 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 "cancel-ation," 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. At at a level of biochemistry, I think it's absolutely fascinating, because here's what I think is happening.
Dopamine and smartphones
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, and we're, like, a little exhausted.
Maybe a friend texts at that very moment and says, "Hey, you wanna get a drink? Hey, you wanna get dinner? Hey, you wanna 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 gotta do my hair. Maybe I have to do my makeup. I have to find the new jeans that I wanna 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-somethings are dating less, 30-somethings are marrying less, and 40-somethings half fewer kids.
Those are the social costs of the anti-social 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.
The emotional costs
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.
Is AI replacing friendship?
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, you know, people are gonna 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 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 then carbon-based life forms," as creepy as that is to say. They'll discover that what they want out of a relationship, validation, a sense of availability, a sense that there's a responder who understands their deepest fears, they might discover that that's 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 also, I'm a fundamentally optimistic person, and I think that these problems can be solved.
What’s the antidote?
I mean, fortunately, the antidote to the anti-social century does not have to be invented, right? 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 Neal Stephenson called "amistics" which is a term that he adopted from the Amish that he thinks of as the values that we give to technology.
And 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 preexisting 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.
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 with 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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