How Solitude Is Rewiring American Identity
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Americans are spending more and more time alone. Some are lonely. But many people—young men in particular—are actively choosing to spend much of their time in isolation, in front of screens. That proclivity is having a profound effect on individual well-being and on American’s “civic and psychic identity,” my colleague Derek Thompson writes in our new cover story. I spoke with Derek about what he calls our anti-social century.
Lora Kelley: The pandemic was obviously very disruptive to people’s social lives. How much is it to blame for this trend toward aloneness?
Derek Thompson: I never would have written this story if the data showed that Americans were hanging out and socializing more and more with every passing year and decade—until the pandemic happened, and we went inside of our homes, and now we’re just slowly getting back out. That’s not a story about America. That’s a story about a health emergency causing people to retreat from the physical world.
The anti-social century is the opposite of that story. Every single demographic of Americans now spends significantly less time socializing than they did at the beginning of the 21st century, when some people already thought we were in a socializing crisis. Overall, Americans spend about 20 percent less time socializing than they did at the beginning of the century. For teenagers and for young Black men, it’s closer to 40 percent less time. This trend seems, by some accounts, to have accelerated during the pandemic. But as one economist pointed out to me, we were more alone in 2023 than we were in 2021.
Lora: We’ve talked a bit about shifts in isolation for young people. Where do older Americans fit into this? Are we seeing similar dynamics play out for that cohort?
Derek: Aloneness is rising across the board—for every age group and for every ethnicity and for every type of education—but it’s rising slower for old people and faster for young people.
Older people have always spent more time alone than young people. They don’t go to school from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.; they’re not legally forced to be around people the same way that many young people are. They aren’t in college, and they are often unemployed, so they aren’t in offices.
The solitude inequality that used to exist between different age groups—where old people were very alone, and young people were very social—is shrinking. You could say young people are acting more like old people.
Lora: What would you say to someone who thinks: Well, what’s wrong with spending time alone? If people are doing what they want to do, and pursuing their idea of a good life, why not spend more time in the house?
Derek: I don’t want this article to be a criticism of introversion, and I certainly don’t want this article to be a criticism of quiet. I myself am somewhat introverted and love a bit of quiet time. But what’s happening in America today is not a healthy trend of people simply spending more time being happy by themselves. Many researchers who looked at the rise of alone time have come to the conclusion that Americans self-report less satisfaction when they spend lots of time alone or in their house.
I think a certain amount of alone time is not only acceptable; it’s absolutely essential. But as with any therapeutic, the dosage matters, and people who spend a little bit of time taking moments by themselves, meditating, or decompressing are very different from people who are spending more hours, year after year, isolated.
Lora: To what extent is the rise of isolated lifestyles an individual issue—one that’s concerning because it’s making people sadder—versus a civic issue that’s causing a shift in American politics?
Derek: This pullback from public life started with technology, with cars and television, and ultimately smartphones, allowing Americans to privatize their leisure. But I absolutely think it’s becoming a political story.
I think we don’t understand one another for a reason that’s mathematical, almost tautological: Americans understand Americans less because we see Americans less. More and more, the way we confront people we don’t know is on social media, and we present an entirely different face online—one that tends to be more extreme and more negative and more hateful of the “out” group. I don’t think there should be any confusion about why an anti-social century has coincided with a polarized century.
Lora: You write in your article that “nothing has proved as adept at inscribing ritual into our calendars as faith.” How do you think about the way that so many Americans use technology—things like phone reminders and calendar tools and self-improvement apps—to inscribe rituals into their personal routines?
Derek: We haven’t just privatized leisure. We’ve privatized ritual. Modern rituals are more likely to bind us to ourselves than to other people: Meditate at this time alone. Remember to work out alone, or around other people with noise-canceling headphones.
It’s profoundly ironic that a lot of people are optimizing themselves toward solitude. The anti-social century is about accretion. It’s about many small decisions that we make minute to minute and hour to hour in our life, leading to a massive national trend of steadily rising overall aloneness.
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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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