Best Of: The ‘Quiet Catastrophe’ Brewing in Our Social Lives
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, I'm Juliette from New York Times Games, and I'm here talking to fans about our games. You play New York Times Games? Yes, every day. There's this little tab down here called Friends, so you can add your friend. That feels new to me. It is. It's nice to have the social aspect. Oh, my God, and you have all the times. That's crazy. Right? You can look at Spelling Bee, Wordle, Connections. Oh, my God, amazing. Love that. I'll have to get the app.
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Today, I want to share an episode from 2023. One I still find myself thinking about. It's with the writer Sheila Liming about a topic that just keeps getting more relevant. How we've created social structures that make us more lonely, that make hanging out, just being around each other harder. And then how we might get better at this lost art of hanging out. I hope it sheds some light for you too.
So it's cliche at this point to say Americans are getting lonelier. And you've heard numbers like these. Between 1990 and 2021, there was a decrease of 25 percentage points in the number of Americans who say they have five or more close friends. 25 percentage points. And that can just collapse into common wisdom. But man, that's a big drop. Young adults feel lonelier than the elderly. You should look at data like that and not just say, oh, that's too bad. It should make us say, where did we go wrong? As a country, we got richer and we got much more lonely. There's been this effort to get us to take loneliness seriously. And so you get a lot of conversation about loneliness as a malady, as a public health problem, a look at its neuroscience, what it does to our bodies.
But it's also an outcome. It is the result of a structure. It is imposed in some ways by a culture. We make choices as a society about what we value. We chase our jobs. We live far from our families. We move away from our friends. We spread out into suburbs and into single-family homes set back behind fences and lawns. We sprawl out with automobiles. We design for atomization and isolation. And so no wonder we get lonely. But that raises this deeper question of why did we choose that? And what would it then look like to choose otherwise, not just as individuals, but as a society? What would it mean to structure for community? Sheila Liming is the author of the new book, Hanging Out, which diagnoses what she calls a quiet catastrophe.
Her view, we're just having a lot of trouble hanging out, being in the presence of others. And that might sound small, but to lose the skill, to have so much difficulty just spending open time with people we love or even like, that's actually a profound problem. And so the book is kind of a manifesto for hanging out, a recollection of what hanging out is like. But I wanted to go upstream of it a bit because I don't want to just say that hanging out is something you should solve by doing more hanging out, though maybe. But we are losing these capacities as a consequence of the structure. And so I want to think about the structure of social isolation. I wanted to have a conversation about what would make hanging out easy?
What would make it so we never lost that skill because we were doing it all the time? What would make that kind of community the default rather than a complicated dance of free time and synced Google calendars? As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com.
Sheila Liming, welcome to the show. Hi. So you write that, quote, it's no secret that modern life is isolating and that, if anything, it looks to be headed in the direction of increased, not decreased, isolation. Why do you think that's the case?
Well, there's a number of factors, I think, that affect the increasing circumstances of our isolation. Factors such as time, decreased amounts of time that can be spent freely, especially freely in social scenarios where we are just hanging out with other people, interacting with them, having conversation with no set agenda or real sort of like goal that's supposed to guide that situation.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–7:48
2
What does the episode say about America’s growing loneliness crisis?
7:48–34:16
3
How does Sheila Liming define “hanging out” and why is it a lost skill?
34:16–1:01:11
4
What structural factors (time, space, housing) make modern socializing harder?
1:01:11–1:12:33
5
How do class and wealth affect people’s ability to build community?
1:12:33–1:17:25