Derek Thompson
Appearances
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
Lots of his studies, including some randomized studies, seem to find that people, even introverts, are made much happier by these brief encounters in our lives with people on a train or the clerks in the store that we're visiting than And what I think is really profound about that mistake that we're making is that, yes, maybe it's just a 15-minute conversation with someone on a train.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
Or maybe it's just a 10-minute conversation with someone in a store. And all that's improving is just the little experience of that little 10 minutes. Well, life is just one 10-minute experience after another. That's all it is. That's true. The way you live your minutes is the way you live your decades.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And I think that it's really important to remember that these little social experiments that we do, these little bits of socializing that we experience, they can be really beautiful. They can really beautifully transform our experience that day and people around us. And so I do think that you don't want to underrate the power of these small little gestures.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
This is a really big and important question, and I'll start by answering it this way. I work from home. I support working from home. I wish that more companies had more flexibility about work from home. But I try to not lie to myself about the costs of or even the effects of working from home. There are days where I just don't see people outside of my family at all.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And of course, homebound life means more time with the people that I love. It means more time with my family. It also has a cost. It means I see the world less. I'm around other people less. I feel a little bit lonely. And not lonely in a healthy way where it's easily discharged and I just go out and see people. I spend more time of chosen aloneness day after day after day.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
I recognize these own costs in my life. And I think that we need to recognize that just as offices are an invention of the 19th century that did one thing well, getting white-collar workers together, and did many other things poorly, for example, requiring long commutes. Work from home is another technology. And every technology has both the rose and the thorns.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
It does some things very well, such as reducing commute time and giving people more flexibility over their lives. But it does other things terribly, like getting people around other people with whom they might have wonderful conversations. Some companies I think that do this really wonderfully, Pure Remote, often will build into their weeks mandatory ritualistic hangouts.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
Every month, everybody gets together. Every two months, everybody gets together. I think the problem is, especially for young people who aren't established at work and really can be profoundly lonely, who need to build friends, need to build networks, if they're working from home, There's many times, I think, where the company isn't an office. It's not a building that people go into.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
The company is a group chat that happens to issue a W-2 statement every January. That's a very different phenomenon. And we should just be honest with ourselves when we're reckoning with what are the benefits of, the real benefits of, and what are the costs of, the real costs of spending so much time working hard. at home alone.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
It's really wonderful to be here, and I'm excited to talk to you as well.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
I'm researching for a piece about this right now. I think it's really interesting to think about a kind of life cycle interpretation of the antisocial century. And here's what I mean by that. Different data sources suggest all of the following.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
that teens have fewer friends than they used to, that high schoolers hang out with their friends less than they used to, that 20-somethings are less likely to date than they used to be, less likely to have sex than they used to have as well, that 30-somethings are less likely to get married than they used to be, and that 40-somethings are less likely to have children in their household than they used to be.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And so these are different trends. And I don't want to suggest that all of these things are somehow caused by one thing, like the television or the smartphone, but they're all happening at the same time. It's every station of human relationship that's in simultaneous decline. And that's really fascinating and troubling.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
Yeah, I do think that sometimes I am guilty of talking about these phenomena as if they're exclusively about digital technology and our inner world of our emotional need for private time or other people. But just as important as changes to the inner life of Americans, I think, are changes to the external world of America.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
This is a story that seems to go back at least 60 years. There was a very famous book written in 2000 called Bowling Alone by the sociologist Robert Putnam.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
Between the early 1900s and 1950, we built a ton of what the sociologist Eric Kleinberg calls social infrastructure. We built library branches and community centers and public pools, and we built places for people to spend time outside of their home and their work. In the last 50, 70 years, we haven't built nearly as much of this stuff.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
Absolutely, yeah. Third space or third place is a term that some people have for the place that's not your home and the place that's not your work. And so it's a place that you choose to be with people you're not related to and you're not financially obligated to be around them by dint of the fact that that's where you get your W-2 from.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And so they're important because these places build community. The literal structures that house these third spaces seem to be in decline, and we've simply built less of them.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
Kleinenberg was in Chicago at one point reporting for one of his books called Palaces for the People, and he was talking to a community leader in Chicago about the fact that more young men seem to spend time at home, whether it's playing video games or looking at their phones. We're working out. But he said, you're right. They're working out. They're lifting weights. They're playing video games.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
They're looking into their phone. They're not spending time outside of their home. And a community leader said, you can blame the phones if you want to, but it's just as much about the fact that look around. Where would they spend time? The social infrastructure is dilapidated compared to where it was 50 or 70 years ago.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
There's been very little ingenuity spent on building out the external world of social infrastructure. Whereas there's been an enormous amount of ingenuity spent on making our phones more compelling for us to spend time alone on our couches.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And Putnam traced the entire 20th century and showed that in the first half of the 20th century, people were significantly more social, more likely to join unions and clubs and associations, more likely to get married, more likely to have children. Just about every measure of sociality was rising as if on a single wave for the first 50 or 60 years of the 1900s.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
Something very interesting and troubling is happening for men, that's for sure. Whether it's related to the incel meme or the incel news peg that exists out there, I'm less certain of. But what's very clear in the data is that alone time has increased most for young, single, less educated men.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And there's further research that looks at all leisure time and breaks it out into a bunch of different categories with a bunch of different labels. And basically the exercise is about... How much time do people spend in sedentary leisure, watching television, versus active leisure, say working out or playing a sport?
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And how much of each of those categories is spent with other people, say watching TV with your spouse or with a friend, or watching TV alone? And for young, less educated, unmarried men, the rise of sedentary alone time has just soared. We're talking about watching TV by yourself, playing video games by yourself. Alone active time would be like working out by yourself.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
But the one line, the one graph line that was just clearly striking in the data that I reviewed is sedentary alone time for single young men. That group clearly has something going on that is a steroidal version of what's going on for everybody else.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
That article was alarming to many people, surprising to many people. It certainly wasn't surprising to Jason Fagone, who's an author I spoke to, who's writing a book about the fact of and the rising phenomenon of people having relationships with AI. Companion AI has millions of users. Millions of people have relationships with text bots, essentially.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
Jason told me about characters from his forthcoming book, one who's A young man who, I think this is actually very similar to a Black Mirror episode, tragically lost his fiancée, instructed a chatbot to essentially have the personality of his deceased fiancée and use that chatbot in order to work through his grief. He wasn't pretending to date a silicon-based version of his dead fiancée.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
He was using the fiancée essentially as he would use an extension of a therapist to work through the traumatic grief of losing someone who you love more than anyone in the world. So things like that are happening. You know, you were born in the 1970s. I was born in the 1980s.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
There's going to be kids born in the 2010s, the 2020s who might grow up in an era where lots of people seeking friendships are balancing two different alternatives. On the one hand, there are these carbon-based life forms, otherwise known as people, that you can be friends with. But people are messy, and sometimes we talk too long, like maybe I'm doing with the answer to this question.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And then in the second half of the 20th century, something changed, and people became less likely to marry, less likely to have children, less likely to join associations, less likely to spend time with people, really less likely to do just about everything.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And we have private lives of our own. And sometimes we're selfish, and we're not very good at validating the feelings of others. And on the other hand, you have an AI that you can instruct to talk as long as you want to answer the question in exactly the way that you want, who's going to validate whatever you say, who has no life to lead of his or her own. You're saying anthropomorphizing the AI.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And they might simply decide that silicon-based friendships are superior to carbon-based friendships. I think it's a real possibility that's looking a square in the face.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And the book is really extraordinary in that it traces everything from big social phenomena like marriage to tiny social phenomena like how many – thank you cards or greeting cards you fill out every year, and finds that just as all manner of socializing was on a surging wave in the first half of the 20th century, that wave crashed and declined in the second half.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
One of the most interesting conversations I had in the reporting process for this piece was a conversation with Mark Dunkelman, who's a researcher and author at Brown University. And Mark told me that ironically and surprisingly, this age of the digitization of everything has actually made some relationships much closer.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
You know, it's possible to text your partner throughout the day hundreds of times and stay connected to them and, you know, any best friends that you have, stay connected to them in ways that are totally impossible. And so you can think of this as being the inner ring of intimacy has grown stronger or it's potentially grown stronger for some people in this age of the smartphone.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
At the same time, the fact that we have access to social media and group texts plugs us into networks of shared affinities that we could also never really experience 20 or 30 years ago. So, for example, Mark's case was he's a big Cincinnati Bengals fan living in Providence, Rhode Island.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And he said, you know, look, there's like 17 other Cincinnati Bengals fans in the entire state of Rhode Island. There's no one around me who shares my interest in the NFL. But because of the internet, I can talk to this global tribe of Bengals fans and we can stay connected with each other.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And he made this really profound point that while the inner ring of intimacy is strengthening and the outer ring of tribe is also strengthening, there's a middle ring of what he calls the village that is atrophying. In the village are our neighbors, the people who live around us.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
So I think that we are socially isolating ourselves from our neighbors, especially when our neighbors disagree with us. We're not used to talking to people outside of our family that we disagree with. And this has consequences on both sides. For the Republican side, I think it's led to the popularization of candidates like Donald Trump, who essentially are a kind of all-tribe, no-village avatar.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
He thrives in out-group animosity. He thrives in alienating the outsider and making it seem like politics and America itself is just a constant us versus them struggle. So I think that the antisocial century has clearly fed the Trump phenomenon. If you don't understand a movement that has received 200 million votes in the last nine years,
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
Perhaps it's you who've made yourself a stranger in your own land by not talking to one of the tens of millions of profound Donald Trump supporters who live in America and, more to the point, live in your neighborhood to understand where their values come from. You don't have to agree with their politics. In fact, I would expect you to violently disagree with their politics.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
But getting along with... And understanding people with whom we disagree is what a strong village is all about. Understanding someone who doesn't share your politics but also sends their daughter to the same dance class, has an issue with the same math teacher that you have an issue with, has a problem with the same falling down bridge in your community that you have a problem with,
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
A lot of people are familiar with Robert Putnam and his thesis of bowling alone, but what really startled me is that there was a tremendous acceleration of alone time in the 21st century.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
Finding ways to see people who disagree with us as full-blooded people who share some of our underlying values is a part of what living in a community is all about. And I do think that just as the antisocial century has turned parts of the right into this angry, all-tribe, no-village style of politics, it is also partly responsible for why so many progressives—
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
claim to not understand the most successful political movement of their time.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
I think it plays an enormous role. I could spend all sorts of time criticizing institutional media, but the truth is I think this is a demand problem, which is to say it's an audience problem fundamentally. I think that most people want news that makes them feel a sense of fluency. Fluency is this term from psychology that has a very specific meaning.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
It's not like being able to speak Spanish very well or English very well. Fluency refers to a style of metacognition, a feeling that we have about thinking. I have a personal theory that might be wrong, but it's just my theory, that what most people want from news is fluency. What they want from their news is a feeling that is adjacent to entertainment,
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
that the thoughts that they have when they're consuming that news make them feel good. Maybe it makes them feel a good kind of curiosity. Maybe it makes them feel a good kind of self-righteousness. Maybe it makes them feel a good kind of anger or outrage.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
But what they want is that sense of fluency, and that sense of fluency tends to come from media that we agree with, that doesn't make us feel this disfluent sense of someone who I trust to be on my side is now saying something that's not on my side. I don't like that feeling. And then I also think that the news itself, you know, we can't let ourselves off the hook.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
If the people who are reading the New York Times or reading the Atlantic or listening to NPR feel like they don't understand, you know, the most important political movement of this time, which clearly is the Donald Trump movement. He's the president. It's Republicans who control the Senate.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
Well, clearly, the media, institutional media, we have failed to teach or reflect some kind of truth about our nation to the people who rely on us to understand the truth of our nation. And I suppose to connect all of this back to the antisocial century, we all need to get out a little bit more.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And if we want to be appropriate and wise consumers of news, we want to be wise consumers of news that make us sometimes feel a little bit uncomfortable about the future.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
The answer is very straightforward. You leave your house, you hang out with people, or you invite more people to your house in order to have dinner parties, which have also declined tremendously in the last 20 years. This is an easy problem to solve on the surface. The problem is, what about the collective action issue?
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
It is easier to hang out with your friends in the physical world if your friends are already likely to or have demonstrated a willingness to hang out in the physical world. It's easier to throw a dinner party if the couple guests that you're inviting over already go to dinner parties, have already demonstrated that they want to go out on Friday night
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
Absolutely. Technology is at the heart of it. There's many things we can point to that changed in the 1960s and 1970s. But I'm very persuaded that if you want to understand the marrow of this issue, you should be looking at the most important technologies of the 20th century. which are the car and the television. And the automobile, I would say, privatized people's lives.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
go over to people's houses on Friday night in order to have wine and chicken and steak or whatever. So I do recognize there's a collective action problem here to solve. But I also think it's really important not to overcomplicate this by suggesting that it requires some enormous cultural shifts.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
I think that our little decisions, the little minute-to-minute decisions that we make about spending time with other people, these decisions can scale. They create patterns of behavior. And patterns of behavior create cultural norms. And those cultural norms can scale as well, and they can create ages. And right now, I think we're in an age of anti-socializing. We're in an age of withdrawal.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
We're in an age of it's totally fine to be at a party and look down at your phone for 30 minutes. I think that a different kind of future is possible and that future rests on, is built on these tiny little decisions. Should I text a friend when I have a little bit of time or should I go on Facebook? Should I hang out with my friend or should I just text them?
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
Should I make some date for a bunch of people who are on a group text and live in the same town but never get together to actually see each other? And so we're constantly in a state of catching up but never in a state of hanging out. These are all things that everyone listening knows how to do. My wish is that a few actions here and there could actually trigger a behavioral cascade.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
It allowed us to move into the suburbs, to move away from density, which is to say other people, spend more time alone in our backyards and alone in our houses. But then along in the 1950s, 1960s came another technology that really fit right with the automobile, and that's the television. And if the car privatized our lives, I think the television privatized our leisure.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And when you dig into the numbers, it is extraordinary just how much TV changed what it meant to be alive in the last 50 years of the 1900s. There is federal data suggesting that that between 1960 and the 1990s, the average American added about six hours of leisure time to every week. That's an extra 300 hours of leisure time every year.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And think about if you were waking up on January 1st and someone said, how do you want to spend an extra 300 hours of leisure that I'm giving you this year? Do you want to learn how to play an instrument or learn a new language or read all the books you wanted to read? We didn't do any of that. We basically spent all that time watching more television.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
So coming up to the age of the smartphone, even before you get to that infamous device, you had, I think, the automobile and the television set sort of setting the ground for what has been an enormous decline in face-to-face socializing.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
To me, this is the most important conceptual scoop of the essay. As you mentioned in your open, everyone wants to talk about loneliness these days. Vivek Murthy says that loneliness is an epidemic. You have ministers of loneliness being granted new positions in places like the UK and Japan. Everyone wants to talk about loneliness.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
But among the many people that I spoke to for this article, I talked to the NYU sociologist Eric Kleinberg, who passed along a relatively familiar within sociology definition of loneliness. Loneliness, he said, is the gap between felt social connection and desired social connection. Loneliness is a healthy thing to feel in the right doses. It's what gets us off the couch to spend time with people.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
But in fact, I think a lot of Americans don't feel lonely as we typically define that feeling. Rather than spend time alone and think to themselves, I should be around more people. I think many Americans in the last 20 years particularly are spending more time alone by choice year after year after year.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
So the reason why I think this is really important to point out is that there's a lot of very, very smart people who have read this article and read previous articles about loneliness who look at the hard data and they say, you actually can't show with a lot of survey data that loneliness is rising. Actually, loneliness seems to be very stable. My point is they might be right.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And maybe the social crisis that we have today is rising solitude without rising loneliness.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
They might feel that way, but it is not a coincidence, I think, that if you ask generation after generation how many friends do you have, it turns out to be the most phone-bound generations, young people, who have the fewest friends. If you ask people over the last 30, 40 years, how many times do you spend hanging out with your friends? That number has declined by 50% for high schoolers.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
If you ask high schoolers going back over the last 20 years, how anxious do you feel? How consistently depressed or anxious or sad do you feel? Those numbers are near all-time highs. So it's very, very hard to say for sure what people feel when they look into their phones. And I should absolutely grant the premise that a lot of time that people spend on their phones is social after a fashion.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
You have to put all of this together, that the same generation that's spending a historic amount of time on their phone has fewer friends, spends less time with their friends, feels more depressed, feels more anxious. That tells me that the phone time we have that seems to be a substitute for face-to-face socializing is a poor, poor substitute.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
It's a lovely thought and it's a spooky thought that many of these videos that we see that sometimes move us are moving us when we're alone and the person who filmed that emotional video is also alone, editing the video alone, tracking the comments alone. And so that rather than have a disclosure of emotional intimacy between two people that are there for each other, we rather have a broadcast
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
of emotional intimacy shared by one person who is alone with millions of other people who are also alone. That is an uncanny reality that we live in. And I should say, I thought when I came into this essay writing process, I felt like I had all the facts at my disposal.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
I had poured over the Federal American Time Use Survey, and I could point to the numbers and say, face-to-face socializing has declined 20% for Americans in the last 20 years, and alone time is at the highest rate that we have going back to data in the 1960s. But what I didn't have were stories. And here's where my wife was actually very helpful to me, ironically, because she's on TikTok.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And she said, there's this trend or this theme on TikTok where young people will film celebrations and funny dances when a friend cancels plans. Now, I should back up and say, we all know that feeling of having the worst, most busy, exhausting week in the world, and it's Friday night, and we're exhausted and want to go to bed at 9.30.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And a friend calls at 8.30 for the 8.45 reservation that we had, and they say, I'm sorry, I have to cancel. And we celebrate internally. I understand that feeling. I'm not a monster. I'm not a robot. However, Put the following facts together. The most socially isolated generation in recorded history has a trend of filming celebrations of when their friends cancel plans. That's a strange fact.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
That's a strange juxtaposition. And if you go back to Kleinenberg's definition of loneliness being the urge the drive to fix your alone state by being around other people. What do we do about the fact that it seems like so many young people who spend more time alone than any previous generation of recorded history celebrate and dance when they get more alone time and me time and isolation.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
Something strange is happening here, and it does a disservice to the strangeness to call it mere aloneness.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
When I was finishing edits for this essay, I was reading a book, Dopamine Nation, about the functioning of our dopamine systems. And I learned that there's two different ways of measuring dopamine. There's phasic dopamine, which is sort of the dopamine hits that we receive from certain experiences. And there's our tonic dopamine, which is the baseline level of dopamine that we have.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And without making this overcomplicated, because I might not fully understand it ourselves, sometimes when we have a really high high dopamine experience, there's less dopamine, or to be colloquial, less drive that we have left over. And what I think is happening with smartphone use is something like this.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
We pull out our phones and we're on TikTok or Instagram or we're on Twitter and we're flipping, flipping, flipping with our thumbs. And while externally it looks like nothing is happening, internally the dopamine is flowing and we are just thinking, oh my God, we're feeling outrage, we're feeling excitement, we're feeling humor, we're feeling all sorts of things. We put our phone away.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And our dopamine levels fall. And we feel kind of exhausted by that which was supposed to be our leisure time. And a friend then asks us to go out. They say, hey, do you want to come meet me for drinks? And what we think isn't, I've just been reading a book. I've been enjoying perfect quiet. I really want to be around people. I'm healthily lonely. Instead, we think, I'm exhausted.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And thinking about leaving this house, and getting my hair done, and doing my makeup, or putting on the right clothes, and maybe using the subway, and maybe the subway's broken, or getting into a car, but I don't want to call the Uber, we start imagining all the misadventures of getting out of the house. And we think, that seems like too much energy to expend. And I'm in a low energy state.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
So I'm just going to say no to the friend. And in fact, I might even celebrate if they end up canceling their plan in the first place. One way to summarize what I think is happening here is that we are donating our dopamine to our phones rather than reserving our dopamine for our friends.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And as a result, we find ourselves in this uncanny space where we simultaneously have more time to ourselves but are made so exhausted by that alone leisure time that we're pulling back from opportunities to be truly social.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
I think they are important things in our lives, and they're important things in their lives too. I talked to the psychologist Nick Epley at the University of Chicago. for this piece.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And he makes this really interesting point that there's many people, especially introverts but including some extroverts, who sometimes withhold conversation with strangers or even with people they do know because they assume that the other person just won't want to talk to them or the other person will find them uninteresting.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And he says that that's typically not true, that there's a great deal of human interaction that's governed by a principle of reciprocity, which is to say, if I'm nice to you, you'll be nice to me. If I give you a compliment, you'll say thank you. If I tell a joke, you'll smile, even if it's a terrible joke. This is how humans get along, is through this kind of reciprocal engagement.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And many times we forget that. And so we withhold conversation from other people. And in particular, we withhold deep conversation with other people, fearing that deep conversation will be found annoying by the people around us. But it's typically not. It's typically deeply enjoyed.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
It's really wonderful to be here, and I'm excited to talk to you as well.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
This is a story that seems to go back at least 60 years. There was a very famous book written in 2000 called Bowling Alone by the sociologist Robert Putnam.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
And Putnam traced the entire 20th century and showed that in the first half of the 20th century, people were significantly more social, more likely to join unions and clubs and associations, more likely to get married, more likely to have children. Just about every measure of sociality was rising as if on a single wave for the first 50 or 60 years of the 1900s.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
And then in the second half of the 20th century, something changed, and people became less likely to marry, less likely to have children, less likely to join associations, less likely to spend time with people, really less likely to do just about everything.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
And the book is really extraordinary in that it traces everything from big social phenomena like marriage to tiny social phenomena like how many – thank you cards or greeting cards you fill out every year, and finds that just as all manner of socializing was on a surging wave in the first half of the 20th century, that wave crashed and declined in the second half.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
A lot of people are familiar with Robert Putnam and his thesis of bowling alone, but what really startled me is that there was a tremendous acceleration of alone time in the 21st century.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
Absolutely. Technology is at the heart of it. There's many things we can point to that changed in the 1960s and 1970s. But I'm very persuaded that if you want to understand the marrow of this issue, you should be looking at the most important technologies of the 20th century. which are the car and the television. And the automobile, I would say, privatized people's lives.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
It allowed us to move into the suburbs, to move away from density, which is to say other people, spend more time alone in our backyards and alone in our houses. But then along in the 1950s, 1960s came another technology that really fit right with the automobile, and that's the television. And if the car privatized our lives, I think the television privatized our leisure.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
And when you dig into the numbers, it is extraordinary just how much TV changed what it meant to be alive in the last 50 years of the 1900s. There is federal data suggesting that between 1960 and the 1990s, the average American added about six hours of leisure time to every week. That's an extra 300 hours of leisure time every year.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
And think about like if you were waking up on January 1st and someone said, how do you want to spend an extra 300 hours of leisure that I'm giving you this year? Do you want to learn how to play an instrument or learn a new language or read all the books you wanted to read? We didn't do any of that. We basically spent all that time watching more television.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
So coming up to the age of the smartphone, even before you get to that infamous device, you had, I think, the automobile and the television set sort of setting the ground for what has been an enormous decline in face-to-face socializing.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
To me, this is the most important conceptual scoop of the essay. As you mentioned in your open, everyone wants to talk about loneliness these days. Vivek Murthy says that loneliness is an epidemic. You have ministers of loneliness being granted new positions in places like the UK and Japan. Everyone wants to talk about loneliness.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
But among the many people that I spoke to for this article, I talked to the NYU sociologist Eric Kleinberg, who passed along a relatively familiar within sociology definition of loneliness. Loneliness, he said, is the gap between felt social connection and desired social connection. Loneliness is a healthy thing to feel in the right doses. It's what gets us off the couch to spend time with people.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
But in fact, I think a lot of Americans don't feel lonely as we typically define that feeling. Rather than spend time alone and think to themselves, I should be around more people, I think many Americans in the last 20 years particularly are spending more time alone by choice year after year after year.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
So the reason why I think this is really important to point out is that there's a lot of very, very smart people who have read this article and read previous articles about loneliness who look at the hard data and they say, you actually can't show with a lot of survey data that loneliness is rising. Actually, loneliness seems to be very stable. My point is they might be right.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
And maybe the social crisis that we have today is rising solitude without rising loneliness.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
They might feel that way, but it is not a coincidence, I think, that if you ask generation after generation how many friends do you have, it turns out to be the most phone-bound generations, young people, who have the fewest friends. If you ask people over the last 30, 40 years, how many times do you spend hanging out with your friends? That number has declined by 50% for high schoolers.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
If you ask high schoolers going back over the last 20 years, how anxious do you feel? How consistently depressed or anxious or sad do you feel? Those numbers are near all-time highs. So it's very, very hard to say for sure what people feel when they look into their phones. And I should absolutely grant the premise that a lot of time that people spend on their phones is social after a fashion.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
You have to put all of this together that the same generation that's spending a historic amount of time on their phone has fewer friends, spends less time with their friends, feels more depressed, feels more anxious. That tells me that the phone time we have that seems to be a substitute for face-to-face socializing is a poor, poor substitute.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
One of the most interesting conversations I had in the reporting process for this piece was a conversation with Mark Dunkelman, who's a researcher and author at Brown University. And Mark told me that ironically and surprisingly, this age of the digitization of everything has actually made some relationships much closer.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
You know, it's possible to text your partner throughout the day hundreds of times and stay connected to them. And, you know, any best friends that you have, stay connected to them in ways that are totally impossible. And so you can think of this as being the inner ring of intimacy. It's grown stronger or it's potentially grown stronger for some people in this age of the smartphone.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
At the same time, the fact that we have access to social media and group texts plugs us into networks of shared affinities that we could also never really experience 20 or 30 years ago. So, for example, Mark's case was he's a big Cincinnati Bengals fan living in Providence, Rhode Island.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
And he said, you know, look, there's like 17 other Cincinnati Bengals fans in the entire state of Rhode Island. There's no one around me who shares my interest in the NFL. But because of the internet, I can talk to this global tribe of Bengals fans and we can stay connected with each other.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
And he made this really profound point that while the inner ring of intimacy is strengthening and the outer ring of tribe is also strengthening, there's a middle ring of what he calls the village that is atrophying. And the village are our neighbors, the people who live around us.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
So I think that we are socially isolating ourselves from our neighbors, especially when our neighbors disagree with us. We're not used to talking to people outside of our family that we disagree with. And this has consequences on both sides. For the Republican side, I think it's led to the popularization of candidates like Donald Trump. who essentially are a kind of all tribe, no village avatar.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
He thrives in outgroup animosity. He thrives in alienating the outsider and making it seem like politics and America itself is just a constant us versus them struggle. So I think that the antisocial century has clearly fed the Trump phenomenon. If you don't understand a movement that has received 200 million votes in the last nine years,
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
Perhaps it's you who've made yourself a stranger in your own land by not talking to one of the tens of millions of profound Donald Trump supporters who live in America and more to the point, live in your neighborhood to understand where their values come from. You don't have to agree with their politics. In fact, I would expect you to violently disagree with their politics.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
But getting along with... And understanding people with whom we disagree is what a strong village is all about. Understanding someone who doesn't share your politics, but also sends their daughter to the same dance class, has an issue with the same math teacher that you have an issue with, has a problem with the same falling down bridge in your community that you have a problem with,
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
Finding ways to see people who disagree with us as full-blooded people who share some of our underlying values is a part of what living in a community is all about. And I do think that just as the antisocial century has turned parts of the right into this angry, all-tribe, no-village style of politics, it is also partly responsible for why so many progressives...
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
claim to not understand the most successful political movement of their time.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
I think it plays an enormous role. I could spend all sorts of time criticizing institutional media, but the truth is I think this is a demand problem, which is to say it's an audience problem fundamentally. I think that most people want news that makes them feel a sense of fluency. Fluency is this term from psychology that has a very specific meaning.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
It's not like being able to speak Spanish very well or English very well. Fluency refers to a style of metacognition, a feeling that we have about thinking. I have a personal theory that might be wrong, but it's just my theory, that what most people want from news is fluency. What they want from their news is a feeling that is adjacent to entertainment,
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
that the thoughts that they have when they're consuming that news make them feel good. Maybe it makes them feel a good kind of curiosity. Maybe it makes them feel a good kind of self-righteousness. Maybe it makes them feel a good kind of anger or outrage.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
But what they want is that sense of fluency, and that sense of fluency tends to come from media that we agree with, that doesn't make us feel this disfluent sense of someone who I trust to be on my side is now saying something that's not on my side. I don't like that feeling. And then I also think that the news itself, you know, we can't let ourselves off the hook.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
If the people who are reading the New York Times or reading the Atlantic or listening to NPR feel like they don't understand, you know, the most important political movement of this time, which clearly is the Donald Trump movement, he's the president, it's Republicans who control the Senate.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
Well, clearly, the media, institutional media, we have failed to teach or reflect some kind of truth about our nation to the people who rely on us to understand the truth of our nation. And I suppose to connect all of this back to the antisocial century, we all need to get out a little bit more.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
And if we want to be appropriate and wise consumers of news, we want to be wise consumers of news that make us sometimes feel a little bit uncomfortable about the future.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
The answer is very straightforward. You leave your house, you hang out with people, or you invite more people to your house in order to have dinner parties, which have also declined tremendously in the last 20 years. This is an easy problem to solve on the surface. The problem is, what about the collective action issue?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
It is easier to hang out with your friends in the physical world if your friends are already likely to or have demonstrated a willingness to hang out in the physical world. It's easier to throw a dinner party if the couple guests that you're inviting over already go to dinner parties, have already demonstrated that they want to go out on Friday night.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
go over to people's houses on Friday night in order to have wine and chicken and steak or whatever. So I do recognize there's a collective action problem here to solve. But I also think it's really important not to overcomplicate this by suggesting that it requires some enormous cultural shifts.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
I think that our little decisions, the little minute-to-minute decisions that we make about spending time with other people, these decisions can scale. They create patterns of behavior. And patterns of behavior create cultural norms. And those cultural norms can scale as well, and they can create ages. And right now, I think we're in an age of anti-socializing. We're in an age of withdrawal.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
We're in an age of, it's totally fine to be at a party and look down at your phone for 30 minutes. I think that a different kind of future is possible and that future rests on, is built on these tiny little decisions. Should I text a friend when I have a little bit of time or should I go on Facebook? Should I hang out with my friend or should I just text them?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
Should I make some date for a bunch of people who are on a group text and live in the same town but never get together to actually see each other? And so we're constantly in a state of catching up but never in a state of hanging out. These are all things that everyone listening knows how to do. My wish is that a few actions here and there could actually trigger a behavioral cascade.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century
It was a real pleasure. Thank you.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
I'm reading a book called – it's the big book about dopamine. I think it's called Dopamine Nation. But it's a book about the biochemical function of dopamine. And there's this thing where if you get a huge dopamine hit – from something, you get a sort of blast of dopamine between your neurons, and then it lowers what's called the tonic level of dopamine, as if like, kind of like with a store.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
If everyone rushes to the store and buys all of the Pottery Barn couches, there's less in inventory, and so there's just less couches in the store. It can be the same with dopamine. A rush of dopamine can reduce the amount that's available to you. And I have the following biochemical theory of what our smartphones are doing to us that I'm just going to present to you.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And maybe your biochemist listeners can tell me whether this is crazy or maybe on target. I think what's happening is something like this. I think people are sitting at home on couches and in bed. looking at TikTok or Instagram or Twitter, and dopamine is being flushed out of their system. They're going hit, hit, hit, hit, and they're putting their phones away.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And rather than feeling rejuvenated by what is definitionally leisure time, They're actually dopaminergically exhausted. So when their friends say, hey, do you want to come out? Do you want to hang out with me? They think, no, hell no. That requires an adventure in the unknown. I have to get dressed. I have to put on my makeup. I have to do my hair. I have to leave my house.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
We have never in our lifetime spent this much time alone and this little time socializing with other people. And I think that statistic needed an anchoring. It needed a naming. It needed a big picture treatment because the way we spend our minutes is the way we spend our lives. And if we're spending our minutes alone, well, that has huge implications for The economy, we can talk about that.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
I have to get in the car. I have to take the subway. That sounds like a bunch of potential misadventures. And I don't have the, what does dopamine do? Gives you drive. I don't have the available biochemical drive to hang out with you right now. So I'm going to say no. I'm actually going to feel great about saying no. And what am I going to do instead? Probably just hang out with my phone.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
So in a way, I worry that, and again, this is not fully tested, or maybe it is. I hope people can flush it out.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
This is the hypothesis that I hope they respond to. I wonder if we are essentially donating our dopamine to our screens, donating dopamine to the parasocial relationships we have with people through our phone. And as a result, we have less drive to invest in the actual social relationships in our lives, that the dopamine is flowing toward parasociality rather than toward actual sociality.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
I don't mean to keep saying to every prompt, I have two thoughts. But I, again, have exactly two thoughts. The first thought is that we know for a fact that the amount of time that teens spend on their phones has gone from, definitionally, something close to zero 30 years ago, to today, about a third of their waking hour. So the typical...
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
person, teenager, adult is consciously awake for about a thousand minutes a day. That's kind of interesting. You can think to yourself like every 10 minutes that you spend is therefore 1% of your waking day. And you can say, well, how do I want to spend the next percent? Well, over 300 minutes is is how much the typical teen spends in front of a screen, so a third of their waking life.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Just mathematically, it's inevitable that if teens are going to be spending a third of their waking life in front of a screen, the vast majority of that screen time is alone and often at home. And so they're not spending that time with friends in person. Some people could argue that that activity is social after a fashion.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
If they're texting with their friends or calling their friends, but you and I both know, and anyone who's a parent in this show knows, a lot of that time is really just spent, as you said, using the thumb to flick, flick, flick, flick. The second thing I would say is that you've pointed out that...
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
For our politics, I hope we talk about that. And really, for our personalities. I think that our personalities change when we spend less and less time around other people with every passing year.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Children today, especially teenagers today, and especially, especially teenagers of middle and upper middle and even upper class families are overscheduled under intensive parenting in order to burnish extracurriculars so that they can maximize their chances to get into a top 20 college. Right. Those extracurricular activities are not necessarily, or often not entirely, social activities.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
If you ask teens, for example, as the Monitoring the Future study does, how much time do you spend actually going out with friends a week? Or what percent of, say, 12th graders go out with friends two or more times a week? In the 1980s, it was 75, 80% of boys and girls who were 17, 18 years old going out with friends two or more times a week. Now it's closer to 50%.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
from 80% to 50%, an absolute collapse in going out with friends. So it's possible that what you see is attention. And I acknowledge that parts of it might be attention because if kids see their extracurricular activities as being highly social, well then maybe you're just getting, you know, you're killing two birds with one stone there.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
What you're actually seeing maybe is that intensive parenting is squeezing social time out of teenagers' lives because they are so highly pressured to think of the 1,000 minutes in every day as an exercise in maximizing their chance of getting into the best possible college rather than thinking about some of those 1,000 minutes as being about social leisure time.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
spending time, whether it's sedentary, hanging out on the couch or active playing sports with friends in a social fashion.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
So the most important fact in the article is that according to a famous book by Robert Putnam called Bowling Alone, between the 1960s and 1990s, Americans participated in associations and clubs, bowling leagues and union clubs, less and less and less. And when the book came out in 2000, it caused a huge debate. Was Robert Putnam just lying with statistics? Did he have this all wrong?
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
I'm really glad you brought that up. Eric Kleinberg's a sociologist at New York University who's been incredibly influential broadly, but specifically to me. And I leaned on him a lot for this article.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And he made a point that I think is so, so important that as much as people like me want to focus on changes to the, let's call it internal world of screens and television and smartphones and dopamine dumping toward TikTok, a lot of this is about changes to the external world. It's about changes to the physical world.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
This is a theme of the book that I wrote with Ezra to a certain extent, but America built a lot of social infrastructure in the first half of the 20th century, not only through the New Deal, but also up through the 1950s. We didn't just build roads and bridges. We built a lot of libraries. We built a lot of rec centers. We built a lot of community centers. We built physical places.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
for people to go when they left their homes and weren't at work. And sometimes these are sometimes clichédly called third places, but it can be useful to think of that sort of third place outside of your one home and two office. We don't build these places. anymore, especially in low-income areas.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Eric's written a lovely book, Palaces for the People, about this precise phenomenon that America in particular has really gotten out of the habit of building public physical places for people to spend time in when they can't afford to spend time in multimillion-dollar homes and multimillion-dollar schools and multimillion-dollar something else.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And so it is really important to remember that these trends are worse for low income Americans, even though the fears of too much solitude sometimes seem like an upper middle class complaint. In a weird way, this is a lower middle and lower class problem first and foremost.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
It is poor men and poor single men in particular, poor young single men in particular, who have the fastest growing rise in pure aloneness and solitude these days.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Was America really at the beginning of a golden age of hanging out? But in the last 20 years, socializing has declined another 20% for all Americans and more than 40%, or roughly 40%, for teenagers and the poorest Americans. We're in a social depression, and it has enormous implications, I think, for just about every station of human life.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
So Mark Dunkelman, who's a wonderful writer and researcher at Brown University, has this really lovely schema where he says that, ironically, this era of social isolation has actually deepened our relationships in two specific ways. In the so-called inner ring of family and friends, you know, you have—we were just talking about intensive parenting—
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Intensive parenting is, to a certain extent, kind of extremely social if you consider sociality spending time with your kids and obsessing with your partner over how your kids should spend their time. We're much closer to our families, spend more time with our families than we used to. That's the inner ring. And there's a far outer ring that I think of as sort of tribe. It's easier for you.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
You're a Nuggets fan. Is that right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Yeah. Okay. It's easier for you.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Right. It's easier for you to follow other Nuggets fans. It's easier for you to contact reporters in Denver to ask, you know, what can the team do in order to build more talent around Jokic, who's just this generational star. You can follow the sport and follow people who share your ideological preferences in a dozen other ways or your aesthetic preferences.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
You know, I don't know what kind of music you like, but I'll bet it's easier for you to follow people who listen to your type of music in a way you never could 40 or 50 years ago, right? You're like... You could DM writers at The Athletic to be like, I think you should write this about Jokic. These are relationships that weren't possible 50 years ago. So where does that leave us?
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Where the inner ring of sociality for many people is stronger, that is close family, and the outer ring of sociality is stronger, of tribe. Well, it means that what's atrophying is the middle ring. And the middle ring, if we call the inner ring family and the outer ring tribe, that middle ring is village, right? We know our neighbors less. We know our cities less.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
We know the people who live around us less. And one reason why I think that matters a lot for politics is being around people who aren't our family and don't share all of our ideological preferences like our echo chambers do, being around people that are around us but different I think, is a naturally moderating instinct.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
It allows us to see people who are different than us as human and reasonable and having their own set of interests and sometimes even sharing our own interests, recognizing that the person who's voting for a candidate you consider heinous actually shares many of your key priorities. That's moderating.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
In a world without that cooling agent, you get people like Donald Trump, who I think is a classic all-tribe, no-village avatar.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
I also think that as long as we're just trying to diagnose evenly across the board, I think that you have some progressives who struggle to see how half the country could like Donald Trump in the first place when their neighbors, in many cases, are voting for Donald Trump. People can say, no, well, Derek, there's this theory of the big sort.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
We tend to live around people who agree with us about everything. Well, a third of Brooklyn voted for Donald Trump, right? In a room of 18 people, six of them voted for Donald Trump in Brooklyn. So I do think that the cold medicine that I do have for progressives like me or liberals like me is that
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
If we feel like we're living in a country that's alien to us, when half the country, roughly speaking, every four years votes for this guy, maybe it's because we have made ourselves strangers in our own land. And maybe we should try to reach out and understand people who seem like ideological aliens to us.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
So many thoughts came to mind as you were saying that, which I agree so much with. Let me try to rank them in my head. Arlie Russell Hochschild was a sociologist, I believe, at UCLA. I don't know if you've spoken to her.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
She wrote a great book called Strangers Who Own Land. And she just wrote another one. I think it was Stolen Valor, I think is what it's called. And I was emailing with her for this essay. And her comments did not make it into the final draft. But I'll tell you this right now.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
She said that in a lot of the homes, a lot of the mobile homes that she was visiting in these deep red areas in rural Kentucky, a couple of things were true. Number one, the largest piece of furniture was the television set. People were spending a ton of time in front of Fox News. and they were spending less time outside of their homes.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And that had an interesting effect, where among this group, one of the most important issues to them was fears of migrants. But if you look at census data, one of the areas with the lowest share of immigrants in America is rural Kentucky. So people living in villages or villages, people living in cities and rural towns,
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
that had the lowest share of immigrants thought that the most important problem facing this country was immigration. That to me is at least a suggestive sign of a world where people aren't prioritizing the issues in their so-called village, that middle ring, because the middle ring is atrophied. What they're prioritizing is the outer ring of tribe.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
The national political becomes the local story, right? The classic, you know, All politics is local? No. All politics is focal. All politics is whatever Fox News or Ben Shapiro or whatever can get you to pay attention to that is a national storyline. That's politics today in the age of the internet.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
The other point that I want to make, and you on-ramped me to this, is that there's a Danish political scientist named Michael Bank-Peterson. who's found that among people who are socially isolated, they tend to become more nihilistic, and they adopt a political attitude that he calls the need for chaos.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
These are people who have lost faith in the political process entirely, and they're disconnected from the knotty and complex politics politics and processes of the world around them.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And so they tend to be much more likely to agree with pronouncements like, I need chaos all around me. When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking, just let them all burn. They tend to see politics as as a kind of at an arm's length, distant show, a kind of post-manesque reality show that affects their lives, but is also in some way bigger than their lives.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
It's a story for them to participate in more than a set of policies that can affect their day-to-day experience. And as a result, what they demand is entertainment. What they demand is chaos. And that to me is absolutely scary.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Let me challenge myself to be relatively brisk for these, which is rather than write small essays over audio. The most important breakthrough is a kind of half vaccine that's been developed for HIV. HIV kills hundreds of thousands of people a year, tens of millions of people around the world. suffer from HIV.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
We haven't developed a vaccine for HIV, but we've developed a shot that people can take twice a year that seems to protect them 98 to 100% from HIV. I mean, that's very close to what we have with the COVID shots. We call those vaccines, which I, of course, think we should. It's extraordinary that we've developed this drug.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And if we can scale it like we scaled the COVID vaccines, it's possible that we really could take a dent out of this disease that's killed millions and millions of people. So, you know, I think the news is biased toward negativity. And I like writing this article because it forced us to see the positive. And this is an amazing, amazing therapeutic.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Well, yeah, first on whether it was people pulling out of voting entirely versus being persuaded, the numbers are still coming in. But just looking at Wikipedia right now, Trump received 74 million votes in 2020. He received 77 million votes in 2024. Harris received 75 million votes in 2024 versus Biden's 81 million.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
We're going to end up very, very close to where we were in terms of total votes cast. So I'm not... as persuaded by the idea that this was about people not voting for Harris, I frankly think there were a lot of people who voted for Joe Biden, who then voted for Donald Trump. And we should be curious then why that happened.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And this clearly, I think, especially happened among people who lived, who are Hispanic, number one. And the swings among metro areas was absolutely extraordinary. I mean, just reading from the reporting that I did, this was back in November, excuse me, In the New York metro area alone, Manhattan shifted nine points right. Brooklyn shifted 12 points right. Queens shifted 21 points right.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And I really wanted this piece to be very specific about the thing I was talking about. So Robert Putnam was famous and in some quarters controversial for talking about a concept that he called social capital. So the idea was that people have literal capital.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
The Bronx shifted 22 points right. In Florida, Orlando, and Miami, and Houston, and San Antonio, and Dallas, all these places shifted about 10 points to the right. So did Wayne County, Detroit, Cook County, Chicago, all of them about 10 points to the right. This is not a 10-point shift. is not just about Biden folks sitting out. This is about people who wanted to vote for Donald Trump showing up.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And I think people on the left and liberals need to look at liberal governance in liberal states and blue states and in blue cities to ask the question, Why in the states that we run and in the cities that we run, did Donald Trump move the electorate double digit percentage points to the right? That's a big, big question.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Yeah, and the truth is, I don't know exactly how to bake and slice the blame pie right now. I think that we're in a moment.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
I just mean as a product. I take that. Look, the pie will have to be baked and sliced. I mean, if these are policy errors, then we should know what they are so that we don't make them again. Like, the Western U.S. is not going to turn into Brazil in the next 10 years, right? This is no forthcoming rainforest. It's going to get drier and drier and hotter and hotter.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And pressure gradient differences between the Pacific Ocean and the inland California Nevada desert, which was what causes the Santa Ana winds, these factors aren't going away. So if we're going to live in nature, we ultimately have to live in nature and that requires technology and it requires smart public policy.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
I think at the moment, there's probably a lot of conflation happening right now around how much of this is just The Santa Ana winds are an incredibly strong force of topographical fact. How much of this is the fact that there hadn't been a fire here for a long time? And so the so-called fuel, the vegetation and the housing simply created a lot of kindling. How much of this was the fact that
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
They have financial capital where you can just look at someone's W-2 or tax returns and you can say, all right, well, Michael is rich and Nathan is poor. But there's also something that you can call social capital. Are you rich in relationships? Are you rich in friendship? Are you rich in the kind of community networks that you live in?
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
California or Southern California had received an astonishingly low amount of rain, which again made the kindling perfect for fire. And then how much of this is a public policy failure, whether it's on the housing development side, the brush clearing side, or
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
after the fact, because there's a lot of people angry right now about the insurance policies, which again, I think it's important, but insurance doesn't cause fire. So it's important to talk about what part of the blame pie we're looking at here. So there's a lot that we don't know and a lot to disentangle on the cause front and then on the response front.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And I just, I really want people to be specific when they're describing the how and assigning blame, but there's no question that we're looking at an event right now. I have family that's dramatically affected by these fires. We're looking at an event right now that is going to, I think, I don't think this is alarmist. I think it's going to reshape California for the next few years.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
I mean, if you have parts of that city where people are spending millions of dollars on homes and those homes are uninsurable, what's that going to do to the Palisades? What's that going to do to Malibu? What's it going to do to Pasadena?
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
What's it going to do by ripple effect to other parts of Los Angeles and Southern California and even parts of Northern California if this state becomes uninsurable? It's just huge, huge questions.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And that's what Putnam was really scrutinizing is, is social capital for Americans declining? Can we say that social capital is declining for America the same way that we could say in a recession that income is declining for America? I'm trying to identify and pinpoint an even more specific and objective statistic
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
The American Time Use Survey, which is run by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is a government survey that every year asks Americans, how much time do you spend doing all the stuff you do? How much time do you spend eating dinner? How much time do you spend sleeping? How much time do you spend filling out greeting cards? And they also ask, how much time do you spend alone?
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And how much time do you spend in face-to-face socializing? And those numbers are at their respective historic points, right? We've never spent so little time socializing face to face. We've never spent so much time alone. So what I felt I had here was an absolutely objective fact that I wanted to sort of dig into. What else can I discover that's truly historic about this moment?
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And I mean, Tim, the statistics are just unbelievable. I mean, like the amount, for example, that people spend hosting dinner parties, for example, has declined by 30% in the last 20 years. I mean, it's just remarkable.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
It's exactly right. It's an accumulating story. And there's a way to tell the story. You mentioned Postman and Putnam. There's a way to tell the story that's a technological story. And I don't think this is the only way to tell it, but I think it's a compelling way to tell it. You say the first half of the 20th century was really remarkably social. Marriage rates were up. Fertility went up.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Union rates were up. The amount of time that people spent socializing between the early 1900s and about 1950 was just up, up, up across the board. What happened then in the 1960s, 1970s? And the technological answer is that first we got the car. And cars are wonderful. Our family has two cars, right? I'm not criticizing cars as a product.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
But one thing they allow you to do is to move away from other people. It allows people to move to the suburbs. They can privatize their leisure time, spend more time alone in their own backyards, less time around other people. Okay, maybe not a huge, enormous crisis. But then comes the television set. And when you add the car and the television set, then the following thing happens.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Between the 1960s and 1990s, the average American adds about six hours of leisure time per week. We work a little bit less. Which is awesome. Think about all the things you could do at that time. So what could you do at that time? You could learn a new language. You could read books. You could go out with friends more. You could watch more movies in movie theaters.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
You could learn how to play pickup basketball with your friends more. What did we do instead? We devoted basically all that time to TV. I think something like 90% of that time was spent just watching TV. It was almost as if we invented a technology that tapped into human beings' latent desire to become audience members.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
As if underneath everything that there is in a human being, at the very bottom of it is, we just want entertainment. I mean, I guess we're just going to keep plagiarizing Neil Postman here. We just want to be entertained. And so the television just served this enormous need for the typical American to relax into their leisure time, to have sedentary rather than active leisure time.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
So you have this force of the car, followed by the force of the television set. And then in many ways, I think the digital revolution, for all of its wonders, and there are true wonders, many of them that it has, it made it even easier for us to choose, select the conveniences of solitude. I could go out to dinner with friends, or let's be honest, I could order in.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
I could go out to a movie with friends, or let's be honest, I could watch Netflix. And there's nothing wrong with DoorDash. And there's nothing wrong with Netflix. But scaled over time and throughout the country, decision by decision, Americans are spending more and more of their time and more of their choices are to privatize their leisure.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And that's brought us to this point, this mountain of forces with the car and then the television set and then the digital revolution.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Let me break it into two. And I'll start with a preamble. There's nothing wrong with people being introverted. I am introverted. There's nothing wrong with enjoying a moment's quiet. I love quiet time. I mean, I think I say in the article, you know, I'm the father to a 17 month old who is wonderful and extremely loud.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
So I know firsthand that there is nothing closer to heaven than a glass of wine at a hotel bar in a city that is not my home. Yeah.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
There we go. Well, look, a glass of wine in a hotel room can be wonderful. I prefer the sort of the swirling bustle around me, like the sort of buzz of anonymity that comes with being alone drinking in a bar in a city that I don't live in.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
I find something lovely about that, but different strokes for different folks, and I do not want, and I really hope this comes across both in the essay and I can say it very explicitly here in the podcast. This is not the case against introversion. This is not the case against some solitude or the case against quiet. This is...
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
a realization of what happens when we lean too much into introversion, even agoraphobia, a refusal to leave our home, too much quiet, too much solitude. What if the dose goes up and up and up? It's the same with any therapeutic. Lots of drugs are good in short supply and very dangerous in large supply. What are some of the bad things about this? Well, number one,
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Researchers have found again and again that solitude does not correlate with life satisfaction. In fact, people who spend more time alone consistently say that they're less happy with their lives. This is partly because people who spend more time alone often tend to be lower income people and income also seems to correlate with happiness. That's the first thing.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
Maybe the deeper and more complicated idea here is that I think that many people mistakenly seek too much solitude because they believe that it's good for them. So here's what I mean. There was a study that was done, one of my favorite studies in the piece, by Nick Epley, who's a psychologist at the University of Chicago.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And he did this fascinating study where he asked commuter train passengers to make a prediction. How would they feel if they were asked to spend the ride talking to a stranger? And like, you know, think to yourself, how would you feel? Well, a lot of people said like, you know, no, wait, quiet solitude is going to make for a much better commute than having a long chat with someone I don't know.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
They might not be interested in me. They might be awkward and weird. I don't want to do it. So we ran an experiment. And some people were asked to keep to themselves, and some people were instructed to talk to a stranger. And they were told the longer the conversation, the better. The deeper the conversation, the better. And afterward, people filled out a questionnaire. How did they feel?
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And despite this strong assumption that the best commute is a silent one, Two things were found. Number one, that people instructed to talk to strangers reported feeling significantly more positive than those that kept to themselves. And maybe most importantly, that effect size was just as strong for introverts versus extroverts.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And what Epley says, the title of this paper is called Mistakenly Seeking Solitude, is that many people, especially in an economy that allows us to keep to ourselves, assume that we'll be happier keeping to ourselves. But in a weird way, if we were forced by external forces, essentially, if we were forced to pretend as if we were a little bit more extroverted than we feel, we might be happier.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
And that might be the central social tragedy of our time, that we live in a world that allows us to pretend as if we are deep, deep introverts. But we might be happier if external forces forced us to pretend as if we were a little bit more extroverted than came naturally.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
The big picture here is that this is a long, long, long article that really pivots around one simple statistic, just one fact. And that fact is that Americans spend more time alone and less time in face-to-face socializing than we ever have going back at least 60 years in official government data and maybe going back 100, 150 years, given how social the first half of the 20th century was.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
I have two things to say about this. And I also found this part of reporting incredibly interesting. I have to give a shout out to my wife because I am basically not on TikTok. And while I was deep in the weeds reporting out this essay, she says, do you know about this trend?
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
where these 20-somethings or teens will celebrate in creative ways to music when a friend cancels plans, often because they're too tired or anxious to leave the house. And it's them wrapping themselves in a huge, comfy blanket and being like, oh, thank God my plans are canceled. Again, just as with introversion, some sympathy is due here.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
We've all been in the position of having a dramatically overscheduled week, and then the friend cancels for Friday night, and we're like, oh, Jesus, I wanted to get to bed by 9.30 p.m. This is fantastic. But the sheer number of these videos, I think, is a little bit alarming, because this is, statistically, the most socially isolated generation ever.
The Bulwark Podcast
Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
in recorded history, and you see people responding to their isolation by celebrating not hanging out. What is that about? And in the piece, I talk about how I think, in many ways, our smartphones have stunted our social development. But while I encourage people to read the piece, I actually want to work out a theory that's not in the piece but that I've thought about more with you.