The Privatization of American Leisure: A Threat to our National Life?
(This summary of a recent article on the growing trend toward “aloneness” in America and its impact on our nation is an update on an earlier thought-piece on the “epidemic of loneliness” which I submitted several months ago. This more recent essay expands the idea of an “epidemic of loneliness” to a broader analysis of the way certain trends and forces which can be grouped under the overall heading “aloneness” are at work in our country undermining the social fabric and leading us down a disturbing pathway. — Fr. Greg)
To appreciate the extent of “the privatization of leisure” phenomenon, consider that between 1965 and 2023, in-person socializing in America plunged by more than 20% (and among unmarried men and people younger than 25, by 35%). Another way of framing this would be to say that during that 58-year period, alone-time spiked. This trend accelerated during the Covid crisis and continued after the pandemic ended (i.e., Americans spent even more time alone in 2023 than they did in 2021.) These statistics are based on a definition of aloneness which specifies a single person in a room even if that sole occupant has access to a phone or computer. To further refine this idea, note that men who watch television now spend seven (7) hours in front of their TVs for every hour they spend “hanging” with somebody outside the home. Females spend more time actively engaged with a pet than in face-to-face contact with “friends of their own species,” and since the early 2000s the amount of time Americans say they spend helping or caring for people outside of the nuclear family has declined by 1/3. This has led some researchers to say that “self-imposed solitude” may be the “most important social fact of the 21st century.” But solitude and loneliness are not one and the same. It is actually healthy for us to have an emotional response of loneliness, whereas that cue should be the thing to push us off our couches and into face-to-face interaction when in fact solitude levels are surging in America while many measures of loneliness are actually flat or dropping (suggesting that the notion of an “epidemic of loneliness” may be exaggerated).
When the experts are asked to explain this phenomenon, there is a common theme to the responses: “the individual preference for solitude, scaled up across society and exercised repeatedly over time, is rewiring America’s civic and psychic identity” with serious consequences. By contrast with the current time frame, the first half of the 20th century was a very social era: church membership was growing, as were labor-union participation and marriage rates. Beyond these measures, we know that book clubs and volunteer organizations were thriving then, our branch-library system was the envy of the world, and communities were busy building theaters, music venues, playgrounds and other gathering places. By contrast, active involvement in community organizations fell by nearly half.
There were any number of factors favoring these trends. The government slowed the construction of public spaces, and the ones that used to anchor community life, such as libraries, playing fields and union halls “became less accessible or were closed altogether.” At the same time, a general interest in “unbridled individualism” expanded notably, and the automobile and the television set became common to most homes. Cars permitted people to move farther and farther away from one another, so suburbs grew at the expense of the urban core which fostered the building of private pools and patios and an altogether more private way of life. It is estimated that between 1965 and 1995, most adults added six hours of leisure time to their everyday lives, but instead of using that time to expand community interaction, they used it to watch more television, and the TV set transformed home life (for example, between 1970 and 1999, the number of sixth graders having a TV set in their bedrooms grew by 77%).
Another technological advancement is now actively promoting self-imposed solitude: the smart phone. The typical person is awake for about 900 minutes a day on weekdays. American children spend on average 270 minutes on weekdays and 380 on weekends glued to their phones. In other words, we are spending about 30% of our lives in the passive viewing of images on a tiny device. Since sharing videos or texting friends don’t measure up to what we gain through face-to-face interaction, this means that our children are less likely to get a driver’s license, go on a date, or have more than one close friend or even just hang out at all with friends. This decline in “hanging out” has serious consequences, because childhood including adolescence is a particularly sensitive time in human development — actually, uniquely so among animals as a whole. These periods of growth provide a kind of “extended apprenticeship” in social learning through various forms of play. And that play is all the more important when it takes place outdoors and in an unsupervised fashion. All of this leads to serious social problems, including depression and anxiety. The bottom line is that “socially stunted childhood can lead to socially stunted adulthood. In the early stages of this development, people engage in small talk, share trivial details of their lives with others and grow in their capacity to trust others. Friendship, in fact, requires the establishment of boundaries as much as it does closeness. Just devoting time to these matters is not enough. We need to re-charge through face-to-face contact with our peers to maintain healthy relationships. Smart phones mean that solitude is more crowded than it formerly was; it means that even the lines separating being alone and being in a crowd are gradually disappearing. This is not a healthy development given the extent to which boundaries tend to help us. If one is forever considering the possibility that something more interesting is probably occurring while we’re otherwise disposed, “downtime is contaminated by the streams and posts and texts of our acquaintances” and gradually disappears.
We all recall how the Covid crisis promoted remote working, but its impact has continued to unfold as the crisis has eased. This means that daily habits are being transformed; even after the pandemic subsided, adults were spending an additional 99 minutes at home on any given day, and the economy itself has been reoriented to allow people to inhabit their homes for longer periods of time. The result is the “totalizing” of our lives in a new direction. This leads to such unintended consequences as altered designs for construction of new housing which promote greater size and comfort. The average home has increased in size by 50% from 1973 to 2023, and central air conditioning has come to be considered an absolute necessity even for those who had acclimated over time to warmer conditions. Meanwhile, streaming services, video-game consoles and flatscreen TVs have converted many living rooms into spaces formerly found only in theaters and other public venues. In apartment design and construction the TV screen itself is highlighted: “every room is built to accommodate maximal screen time….{that is,} ‘built for Netflix and chill’ or as others have concluded, ‘we are (now) building for aloneness.’”
Other unintended consequences of the “privatization of American leisure” include very unfortunate developments for American males and our very definition of masculinity. The experts note that men seem to be forgoing marriage and fatherhood; instead of “focusing their 30s and 40s on wedding bands and diapers,” they are devoting themselves to working on their bodies, growing their bank accounts and sharpening their minds through meditation. Some have noted that young men are beginning to resemble “secular monks,” albeit in a more luxurious form. Men spend more time alone than women, and sedentary leisure is becoming more common than the “engaged” version. All of this bodes ill for men, because they increasingly feel they are not needed in this society, so instead of feeling included and wanted, they often fall into a kind of despair which can literally be life-threatening in that it is frequently accompanied by drug use, particularly that of opioids and synthetics such as fentanyl.
All of these trends are also having a negative impact on our politics as society appears to be moving toward a “weaker, meaner, and more delusional” version than we have historically known. Although “home-based, phone-based” culture has probably solidified our closest and most distant connections (“bound by blood and intimacy”), that outer ring of tribal relationships (“familiar but not intimate”) is falling by the wayside, impacting the larger society in dangerous ways, because “if families teach us love, tribes teach us loyalty.” Another way of putting it would be to say that “the village” teaches us tolerance.” The more we can foster person-to-person relationships with our neighbors, the more unlikely we are to become estranged from one another. Whatever is politically moderating is a positive for the larger society, and that is what naturally results from these exchanges with people who formerly were potential rivals threatening us rather than enhancing our natural need to socialize and expand our circle of friends. In the “village” we can practice “productive disagreement and compromise” which are otherwise becoming less and less a part of who we are as social creatures today. They also force us to “engage with the world the way it is” rather than the way we would design it if beginning from scratch. The more we do that, the more comfortable we are with disagreement even on matters of great importance. The kind of political polarization we are experiencing in America today results in part from our increasing social isolation which promotes the development of conspiracy theories and other anti-social trends. The bottom line is that the more socially disconnected we feel, the more meaningfully unhappy we become. One of the great truths we all have a tendency to acknowledge (without necessarily internalizing it) is that accumulating more and better material goods will bring us happiness. What that kind of concentration actually favors is aloneness which promotes unhappiness and in some instances even depression.
Finally, the age of Artificial Intelligence offers even more opportunity for negative consequences to grow out of a communal reliance on a new, untested technology. This is because technology’s ability to encroach on human relationships is vast. When A.I. can speak to us, it seems more real. “Digital communication has already prepared us for A.I. companionship.” People are already forming intimate relationships with machines which means that we are primed to enter into relationships with artificial partners and become deeply attached to them. If the partners we deliberately choose today are artificial it means that “they will never criticize us, never cheat on us, never have a bad day and insult us and be always interested in us.” Who wouldn’t prefer that kind of relationship to one that is fraught on a daily basis? Just imagine the kind of world we will create if we choose to favor a set of feelings (sympathy, humor, validation) over a set of relationships with all of their built-in weaknesses (as well as great strengths). It can be helpful in this context to take another look at the Amish who, instead of dismissing all technology, adopt only those innovations that support their religious and communal values.
Of course, not all of the current reality is as depressing as this analysis would suggest. There are always counter-trends which oppose the ones we view with distress. Independent bookstores are growing rather than shrinking in America. In many of them, there are regular events which encourage socializing with people we would not ordinarily come to know by means of lectures and video productions geared to that setting. Many school districts are banning smartphones even when parents object. In recent years, board-game cafes have grown up in our communities, promoting the kind of activity that favors real interactions with other people in a friendly environment. These may seem like small things, but if they catch on and become more widely used, they can have a real impact on the body politic. And, heaven knows, we do need some positive news in an environment which can seem primed to promote all of the things that are dividing us just when we so desperately need unity, clarity of purpose and the will to make a difference in the current trajectory! Perhaps other positive trends have occurred to you just reading this essay. Please share them so as to cheer the rest of us up!
Greg+