The return-to-office battle is jeopardizing the new American Dream: staying at home

In his February 2025 cover story for The Atlantic, journalist Derek Thompson dubbed our current era “the anti-social century.”

He isn’t wrong. According to our recent research, the U.S. is becoming a nation of homebodies.

Using data from the American Time Use Survey, we studied how people in the U.S. spent their time before, during and after the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic did spur more Americans to stay home. But this trend didn’t start or end with the pandemic. We found that Americans were already spending more and more time at home and less and less time engaged in activities away from home stretching all the way back to at least 2003.

And if you thought the end of lockdowns and the spread of vaccines led to a revival of partying and playing sports and dining out, you would be mistaken. The pandemic, it turns out, mostly accelerated ongoing trends.

All of this has major implications for traffic, public transit, real estate, the workplace, socializing and mental health.

Life inside

The trend of staying home is not new.

There was a steady decline in out-of-home activities in the two decades leading up to the pandemic.

Compared with 2003, Americans in 2019 spent nearly 30 minutes less per day on out-of-home activities and eight fewer minutes a day traveling. There could be any number of reasons for this shift, but advances in technology, whether it’s smartphones, streaming services or social media, are likely culprits. You can video chat with a friend rather than meeting them for coffee; order groceries through an app instead of venturing to the supermarket; and stream a movie instead of seeing it in a theater.

Of course, there was a sharp decline in out-of-home activities during the pandemic, which dramatically accelerated many of these stay-at-home trends.

Outside of travel, time spent on out-of-home activities fell by over an hour per day, on average, from 332 minutes in 2019 to 271 minutes in 2021. Travel, excluding air travel, fell from 69 to 54 minutes per day over the same period.

But even after the pandemic lockdowns were lifted, out-of-home activities and travel through 2023 remained substantially depressed, far below 2019 levels. There was a dramatic increase in remote work, online shopping, time spent using digital entertainment, such as streaming and gaming, and even time spent sleeping.

Time spent outside of the home has rebounded since the pandemic, but only slightly. There was hardly any recovery of out-of-home activities from 2022 to 2023, meaning 2023 out-of-home activities and travel were still far below 2019 levels. On the whole, Americans are spending nearly 1.5 hours less outside their homes in 2023 than they did in 2003.

While hours worked from home in 2022 were less than half of what they were in 2021, they’re still about five times what they were ahead of the pandemic. Despite this, only about one-quarter of the overall travel time reduction is due to less commuting. The rest reflects other kinds of travel, for activities such as shopping and socializing.

Ripple effects

This shift has already had consequences.

With Americans spending more time working, playing and shopping from home, demand for officeand retail space has fallen. While there have been some calls by major employers for workers to spend more time in the office, research suggests that working from home in the U.S. held steady between early 2023 and early 2025 at about 25% of paid work days. As a result, surplus office space may need to be repurposed as housing and for other uses.

There are advantages to working and playing at home, such as avoiding travel stress and expenses. But it has also boosted demand for extra space in apartments and houses, as people spend more time under their own roof. It has changed travel during the traditional morning – and, especially, afternoon – peak periods, spreading traffic more evenly throughout the day but contributing to significant public transit ridership losses. Meanwhile, more package and food delivery drivers are competing with parked cars and bus and bike lanes for curb space.

Perhaps most importantly, spending less time out and about in the world has sobering implications for Americans well beyond real estate and transportation systems.

Research we’re currently conducting suggests that more time spent at home has dovetailed with more time spent alone. Suffice it to say, this makes loneliness, which stems from a lack of meaningful connections, a more common occurrence. Loneliness and social isolation are associated with increased risk for early mortality.

Because hunkering down appears to be the new norm, we think it’s all the more important for policymakers and everyday people to find ways to cultivate connections and community in the shrinking time they do spend outside of the home.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here:  https://theconversation.com/america-is-becoming-a-nation-of-homebodies-250350.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com