The Decline of Socialisation
Published on 17 April 2025
There’s an emerging narrative, principally pushed by Twenge and Haidt, that young people aren’t socialising due to smartphones and/or video games. I’m not sure the tacit assumptions they make stand up to much scrutiny. Let’s break it down into two parts:
- Socialising is a recreational activity. People choose how much of their leisure time they want to spend on different recreational activities, and the rise of superior alternative forms of entertainment due to technology is reducing the amount of time people choose to socialise.
- How much people socialise is, nonetheless, a key determinant of ‘happiness’. So people are choosing to socialise less, this is making them unhappy, and the resultant loneliness epidemic is a public health crisis which should be resolved by the state nudging people towards socialising more.
Firstly, consider the notion that socialising is a recreational activity. This is a very recent idea. For all of human history and prehistory everything we did was embedded in a set of social relations inseparable from the activities themselves. It is only in modern times that we’ve seen the compartmentalisation of quotidian life, so that the economic sphere, the political/civic sphere, the religious sphere, the family sphere, the romantic sphere, and the ‘friends’ sphere all become divorced from one-another. Going for drinks with your friends on the weekends is but a thin residue of a rich communal life we once all shared.
Also observe that as socialising is increasingly reduced to a source of ‘fun’, it excludes people who are bad at having fun. A generation of anhedonic SSRI zombies will be lonely when socialising equates with karaoke.
Communities have traditionally been webs of mutual interdependence. A great amount of research shows that reciprocity helps build up relationships. Now that people’s needs are met by the state or the market, their connection to their neighbours or friends is greatly reduced. This has been stated many times before by critics of liberal modernity so I’ll avoid boring the reader by going into further detail.
What perhaps has received less attention is that communities cannot easily be reduced down to agglomerations of dyadic relationships, as social scientists are wont to do. Interactions between members of a community are enriched by the social knowledge shared by the participants. E.g. imagine a school-yard (probably the only thing remotely resembling a community most people nowadays will ever be a part of). Suppose a boy approaches a girl he’s never spoken to before, he will still know of her, who her friends are, what her reputation is, etc. and vice versa. They will still have a great many things in common to speak of (teachers, subjects, etc.) Of course, in tighter-knit communities (as perhaps all our ancestors lived in) this was even more true.
Or to give a more indirect analogy. Suppose someone follows football. When they watch a game with their favourite team they know all the players’ histories, what each player is good at and how well their career is developing. They know the game-plan their coach is trying to execute, the team rivalries and so on and so forth. It’s precisely this context which creates the drama. To someone deprived of this context, it’s just a bunch of men in coloured jerseys kicking a ball around.
My point is that telling people to go to parties and talk to more strangers is much like trying to watch a game of football with no context. Only in communities do people have the social context to make their interactions rewarding.
To return to the original premises, it’s hardly clear to me that video games and social media have gotten better. By my estimation social media peaked around early facebook and video gaming before then. Haidt and co. rely a lot on showing time series where things start falling off a cliff mid-2010s. They tend to blame smartphones because it can more plausibly be linked to that timeframe but it’s not a great fit either. You can always find a technology that’s changed at the same time as some other social trend, but this isn’t even a convincing one.
This type of explanation is very common among the sort of midwits who become social scientists. Post-2008 there were a lot of young men dropping out of the labour force because it was so difficult to find a job. Economists, loathe to admit their recommendations like quantitative easing had failed to properly revitalise the economy, eagerly attributed the decline in the participation rate to improvements in video games, on the basis that many out-of-work men ended up spending their copious free-time on gaming. Needless to say, when the labour market finally did improve the participation rates for young men shot back up, thus disproving the theory. Alas no-one admitted they were in error.
On to premise 2. One tacit assumption being made is that humans are a bit like ‘Sims’, who have a social meter that gets filled while socialising (I’m convinced that the Sims has perhaps permanently altered how humanity thinks about life but I digress). The evidence for this is pretty dubious, the correlation between self-reported loneliness and number of social interactions is surprisingly weak (and tends to have more explanative power with respect to the elderly). If anything the data probably indicates that the quality of social interactions is declining much worse than the quantity.
Next the claim is that although socialising makes people happy, people are choosing not to do it. Now this is plausible, people sometimes make choices seemingly at odds with their long-term happiness and well-being, but I’m skeptical it’s the first conclusion we should jump to. For one thing younger generations are actually doing a better job of ‘taking care of themselves’, e.g. less smoking, drinking and drug abuse, more gym memberships etc. If anything, the big change nowadays is that people view socialising as a form of self-care, a chore one needs to do to prevent oneself becoming depressed. The whole idea would have been totally alien to previous generations.
I first started to doubt the official narrative during covid lockdowns. A great many people expressed relief that they no longer had to maintain their social obligations which they hated and, if anything, their mental health tended to improve. Covid is the great natural experiment of our times. Normally it’s easy to point to depressed loners staying in their homes and claim a causal connection, but everyone was outlawed from leaving their homes for extended periods where I live and the resulting mental health epidemic never eventuated.
Indeed socialising never fully bounced-back (both anecdotally and empirically), it turns out once people are forced to experience solitude they seem to prefer it. The lesson I took away from the ordeal that was that most people are already dutifully going to social events, and that these repeated bouts of painful small-talk with acquaintances is doing nothing much at all for them.
Here I want to state my alternative hypothesis which I’ve already hinted at: people are socialising less because socialising is getting worse. It is both less enjoyable and less useful. This is certainly a simpler explanation than the original one. However it’s more aimed at the general decline in sociality over the post-war period (popularised by Putnam), rather than the acceleration over the last decade.
This is not a serious short-coming. Haidt and Twenge are committing a serious error by presuming that any trend must be concomitant and proportionate with some other trend which is causing it. Most social phenomena are non-linear and defy such explanation. For instance there’s no similar explanation for the ‘great awokening’ in Obama’s second term, or why the dating market is still in free-fall some 13 years after Tinder was launched.
Imagine a simple model of the dating market: men are willing to tolerate dating up to a point, which varies slightly by individual. And men are less-willing to tolerate bad dates when they can see other men opting out. Such a simple model predicts that dating can get worse for decades with no readily-apparent effects, only to collapse in a short time-span once it reaches the limit of what men are generally willing to tolerate. These preference cascades are endemic in sociology, it would be more surprising if the recent precipitate decline in socialising wasn’t operating in this fashion.
Without wishing to go full ad-hominem, I suspect Twenge is so happy to overlay time-series because she’s a pop-psychologist par-excellence and the mass-media don’t understand causality or any argument more sophisticated. She shot into the public limelight claiming millennials were all narcissists and by the time it had been discredited in the literature she’d already moved on to claiming phones were destroying gen-z.
Another pop-psych phenomenon is the new framing of introverts as people who ‘deplete energy’ when socialising. While the idea itself has no merit, it does raise a much more interesting question, why are ideas like this gaining currency now? It extends far beyond people self-identifying as introverts, from skyrocketing diagnoses of social anxiety to high-functioning autism, everyone is eager to find an explanation for why their social interactions are so unrewarding. It’s easy to glibly dismiss these trends as therapy-culture gone mad, but I suspect there is a real basis for these trends. People are having a worse time socialising.
The claim that socialising requires too much effort is not entirely without antecedents: aspiring socialites among the gentry made similar complaints over a century ago. Status in that leisure class was largely determined by social graces rather than power or money, a sort of giant popularity contest played out at balls and dinner parties. Socialising was high-stakes, as your status might be irreparably harmed by a faux-pas. Consequently socialising became highly ritualised with etiquette manuals and all sorts of informal rules learnt in prep schools in a social arms race.
My contention is that this dynamic is steadily reasserting itself, as we’ve reached a level of affluence where money doesn’t matter and many traditional status markers like education have lost value. In this new world, people are engaged in a perpetual popularity contest (aided but not caused by social media) as socialising becomes an end-unto-itself. Consider that the worst insults nowadays are ‘incel’ and ‘loser’, i.e. to accuse someone of being a social failure.
To compete in this new high-stakes social environment, people are learning conversational scripts which they can adhere to and refine over time, so that they can make conversation with perfect strangers fluently without embarrassing pauses in the dialogue. The result is that conversation feels forced and lacks spontaneity, it’s a performance akin to a job-interview and so, like a job interview, it leaves people feeling exhausted.
Another way of looking at high-stakes vs low-stakes socialising might be to consider how teenagers interact with technology. As Twenge and co. have also noted, social media seems to be having a more baleful impact on teenage girls than video gaming is on teenage boys. At first glance this is a curious result, as a call of duty lobby is more toxic than social media. But the difference is that in video gaming the social component is low-stakes. What really matters is how good you are at the game, boys/men tend to produce competence hierarchies, so they can sling insults at one another way with gay abandon without any causing serious hardship. Conversely teenage girls are engaged in a popularity contest, their ego is tied to how well received they are by their peers, and this inevitably leads to neuroticism, being easily-triggered by invisible slights, and so on and so forth.
As social interactions become high-stakes, people adopt strategies to derisk it. By sticking to a conversational script they not only reduce the possibility of causing a negative reaction, but even if social disapproval does result it can be blamed on the script itself. In this way one’s ego is less directly tied to one’s social performances. People are presenting a façade and so can always console themselves that if only others knew the ‘true’ person underneath maybe they’d be more popular (a hypothesis they’ll never test due to the psychological harm it would cause if it were proven false). This emotional distancing is a response to the fact that people don’t feel ‘safe’ in ordinary social settings, because they’re not in a community of peers they know well. The much-derided workplace water-cooler small-talk is now the norm even outside the workplace.
By high-stakes I merely mean that people feel it’s high-stakes, because it’s linked to status. As I mentioned earlier, as social life has become detached from other aspects of life, it’s arguably less important vis-à-vis doing well in your career or getting married or other concrete life goals. This is what covid revealed to a lot of people, you can avoid being wracked with FOMO by simply opting-out of the social rat-race. There’s nothing forcing you to try to outdo your friends on Instagram showing off what a great life you have. This is why I expect subsequent generations to opt-out of having a social life entirely, not because gaming has gotten so good, but because having a social life is increasingly taxing with little reward. As this explanation inculpates society broadly it won’t be nearly as popular as one which scapegoats new technologies and claims the problem can be solved with smartphone bans.