Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude
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Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We got a doubleheader today. The news out of Los Angeles is just so horrifying. We've added Liz Weil, who's been reporting on California fires for years, to segment two. So stick around for that. But first, he's a staff writer at The Atlantic, author of the Work in Progress newsletter, host to one of my favorite pods, Plain English. You can go subscribe to that now. And he's got an upcoming book with Ezra Klein called Abundance. You can pre-order now. Maybe we'll have a three-way. That was unintentional when that book comes out, but you never know. It's Derek Thompson. How are you doing, brother? Tim, what a generous open. Thank you so much. It's great to be here. Brother, I don't blow smoke, and so it's a generous intro because it's true. It's a great pod, but we've got a lot to get to. You have a cover story that we're here to talk about. The Atlantic Magazine about solitude.
And so I want to spend a bunch of time on that and then a few other things you've been writing about lately. I had this exclamation point in my notes as I was reading it. You wrote, study show Americans spent even more time alone in 2023 than they did in 2021. when we didn't even have the vaccine all of 2021, and we were forcibly at home in 2021, many of us for at least a few months, that is a pretty alarming stat in an article that is filled with alarming stats. So talk to us just about the biggest picture trajectory and what you are reporting on.
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. 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.
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. 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? 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.
Yeah, I looked at that Putnam book, Blowing Alone, and Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death. You go back and look at the years, and it's like, wait, Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1985? When there were only three networked news channels? Fox News didn't exist. Yeah, right. I mean, barely. Was Rush even on in 85? Just the whole thing is crazy. No Howard Stern yet, or very proto. And then this, you know, in 2000, just like the dramatic change. You didn't feel it in 2000, I guess, right? Right. I don't know. At least I was what, in high school in 2000. And I did not like there wasn't this sense that this was a big problem. You know, I think living day to day lives for most people, but the trajectory was happening.
And, you know, the observation not to undermine the value of your article, but it feels almost like mundane now. Like the interesting thing about your article is just like it's maybe even more dramatic than we realize, like living through it.
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