Middle aged European here. I still regularly go to parties (dinner and otherwise) and I notice that there are two kinds of people: people who throw parties, and people who don't. This sounds like a truism, but what I mean is: there are people who regularly throw a party and people who never do it.
I am solidly in the first category. I throw dinner parties, birthday parties, drinking parties, dance parties, midsummer parties, midwinter parties, game parties, etc. Yes, it costs time and money and is a lot of work. But what people (probably the ones that never bother) tend to forget is how unbelievably gratifying it is to get a bunch of people together, to feed them and to make them talk, laugh, dance, etc. Afterwards you are tired but also grateful and socially energized in a way that feels fundamental to my existence.
It varies a lot depending on people and personality type. What's energizing to you is very exhausting and unfun to others. Extraversion / introversion basically. I don't like having many people over. 3 or 4 people who I know well is optimal for me.
Making a large party could be "type 2 fun" sometimes, ie exhausting and not very fun at the time, but satisfying to look back on as a kind of hard challenge I managed to accomplish, like climbing a cold mountain or so. But few are enough of those.
> 3 or 4 people who I know well is optimal for me.
Even that is a challenge of finding the mental energy to pick the date , see that everyone can come, picking some activity (or if you're hosting - make sure with your wife that the date is fine. What about your kids - you wanna put them in bed before?) etc etc. Some of it is probably no big deal but my brain is making it look big, perhaps because I lean introvert as well. It's so much easier to just think about the idea and say 'naaa fuck it' and open Youtube instead.
Helps if your friends are uncomplicated. We just chat, drink beer, make or order pizza, cook or bake something else, talk about work and family, sit in the sun, maybe play cards or just listen to music, talk about stories at recent events like concerts, rehash old stories, or updates about other friends, etc. There is no need to make a big deal about any of this.
But this is not a networking or new-friend-making style of party of course. Not even really a party, but fits "inviting people over for dinner".
I think a big problem is that people see this also as a thing where efficiency and productivity is important and they plan complicated activities etc. Similarly to how kids don't get much free time to just play and relax, adults also try to organize activities for themselves when just being together is often enough and the rest follows naturally.
> It's so much easier to just think about the idea and say 'naaa fuck it' and open Youtube instead.
I think this gets at the heart of the concern—it’s always easier to find something else distracting to do, but what’s the real cost? I don’t really know how to measure that, other than to say that American society and culture are doing particularly poorly right now.
You're right. Since I'm an introvert myself, I enjoy organizing events and inviting people over, because as the host, I always have a reason to change locations and get some “space” when the socializing becomes too much for me.
This is my experience exactly. We used to host a monthly board gaming party before we moved and it was very energizing and exhausting at the same time.
After the two kids the games disappeared and it just became a normal party where we could talk and such and a playdate for the our and the other parents kids.
We will probably do it again when we settle into a new home at least I hope.
I'd get more energy from sitting alone in a dark room than by throwing a - or attending a - party...
That doesn't mean I don't enjoy attending (never throwing) parties on occasion, but it's exhausting to me. Whenever I come home from a social occasion I need time to recover.
I do think it’s possible to move between categories though. I used to have potlucks and house parties every month in my twenties, but now a decade later I just don’t really have much interest in the idea.
It might just be a rationalization, but the way I justify it is that as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized more what actually matters to me, and being a party host / spending time at parties doesn’t fit that category. I’d rather spend my time doing something else.
> It might just be a rationalization, but the way I justify it is that as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized more what actually matters to me, and being a party host / spending time at parties doesn’t fit that category. I’d rather spend my time doing something else.
Well it's happening to the vast majority of people all at once, I don't think it's age, at least not only that. I haven't read the whole article yet perhaps he offers ideas on why this is happening but I'm guessing - better alternatives (Netflix), increased individualism etc. Society has changed a lot.
> But what people (probably the ones that never bother) tend to forget is how unbelievably gratifying it is to get a bunch of people together, to feed them and to make them talk, laugh, dance, etc.
Nope. Its a bunch of work and stress and thoroughly beaten by a dull night in. If I want to bring people together, I'll pay for it to be done - e.g. a restaurant.
Another challenge to hosting dinner parites today is that everybody is on a special diet, count calories, on ozempic because they need to be healthier or have a athletic goal only few people 30 years ago had.
This makes it even more difficult to host because of everybody's needs and regimes they dont buckle on.
Blame the screens. Screens are blackholes that suck up your time, attention, awareness and senses.
Screens are evil. They wake up the dead past as if it's alive and happening now. It became so much the norm, that people are afraid to face the real world, real people, real talking. "Dinner party? OMG, real people with real faces that force us to talk to them? Noway sir".
Screens disconnected people from real world, from each other. I was trying a VR headset the other days and immediately threw it away, as it shut off my visual and audio senses completely.
Spoken like someone with no friends or relatives that live far away. Screens can also be extremely connecting. They are a tool and as such value neutral. Is it evil that I can have a weekly video-call with family members on another continent when the alternative would be...simply no contact at all, super expensive phone calls or letters. I don't think so.
I agree with you general sentiment but how did you end up in a situation where you feel this way but also wanted to try a VR headset but then also decided to throw it away immediately after trying it seemingly surprised by what the experience was.
People are downvoting because the tone is a bit harsh but he has a point.
While TV has been a thing for a long time, content was limited, and more importantly curated. You couldn't manage your own playlists/subscriptions and almost infinite content on subjects that interest you.
Video games were mostly for kids.
There were no social media feeds optimize to monopolize your attention and make you doomscroll.
Hey even having a TV/widescreen at home has a direct impact on couples sex life...which magically reactivate when the light goes out.
The internet is wonderful for many things but nobody can denies it has an impact on our in person social life.
I remember a college teacher who had 9 siblings humorously answering the question of "how did your parents managed to do it" with "simple: they didn't have a TV set back then".
TVs had already affected our lives tremendously, computers and the internet just went nuts with it.
Article says "The share of adults who say they regularly have friends over has declined 70 percent since 1975", but this may not be an accurate comparison:
> Until 1985, the survey included only married households.
Doesn't that seems like a more accurate measurement? what's the percentage of adults who check "yes" for "friends i'm hoping to hook up with" versus those that say "oooh, you mean actual friends"?
Does it? It means different types of socialising a lot of the time, but couples often merges friend groups and I could definitely see a case for some subset of those friend groups ending up meeting up more regularly. I don't know. It'd be interesting to see data broken down by relationship status.
When I met my wife, I discovered very quickly that she had savant-level hosting skills. She is an amazing cook, she prioritizes space to dine in our home (we made sure to have a dining table in our NYC apartment) and she thinks carefully about the experience of her guests. It's a quality that I benefit greatly from, and I'm grateful to her for it.
This is very cultural. In Spain essentially no one throws dinner parties in the US style. It's rare to invite social acquaintances to one's home. These things are done - but mainly with family. Part of this is cultural and part reflects that homes are too small to fit many people. Most socializing is done outside, at a bar, cafe, restaurant, park, etc.
I'm surprised at this being correlated w/ intensive parenting. Modern parents ARE tired and parenting a lot. That's why on the weekends we invite our friends with kids over and the kids run around and entertain each other so we can have some "Just talk to adults" time with the other parents, maybe watch the NFL games. Even when we take turns hosting, we easily get over the 12x a year mark through this.
Feel like part of the issue is everyone’s self imposed neurosis about not intruding on others. My wife insists on not ever asking to come over to someone’s house - she only wants to be explicitly invited. We invite people over to our place when we can but this leads to us basically never visiting any of our friends because they aren’t the planning type.
I really didn't like reading your comment, but I can't argue much against it...
All I can say is the consequences of a degrading mental/social health are harder to grasp than a hangover or, for the lack of a better smoking example, lung cancer.
Still I'm also puzzled by the amount of people, even in my own social circle, that "just want to wind down after work" (read: completely fry their brain)
Families (mine included) are just too busy. Working, commuting, homework, trying to get some exercise in. Any spare time I try to spend it with my children.
I always look at happiness in terms of pillars, social, family, work, spiritual.
Work somehow has taken over everything. It seems culturally engrained.
I know social media is a factor but while we all fall down the rabbit hole occasionally, it doesn't stop anyone organising a get together.
I see this as a manifestation of the loss of teaching effective communication skills. This takes a moment to explain, so please slow down and consider this: before the cultural revolutions of the 1960's, general education included more emphasis on communications conflicts and resolutions of them. For example, every school had a debate team, and the various forms and rules of debate were common knowledge. Yes, this is true. Debate and watching people skilled at argumentative discussion used to be a popular form of entertainment. Then, during the cultural revolution of the 1960s, the best or the "stars of debate" all sided with the youth culture and not the establishment. That then triggered the removal of debate from educations, from entertainment, and from public life. Now, decades later we have the situation that groups of adults cannot form without conflicts and arguments that drive the community creation aspects away. We have created a culture that cannot communicate, because we have stopped teaching basic oral conflict negotiation of any form.
I think people also forget (or don’t even know) that before mobile phones you’d often walk over to someone’s house just to knock on the door to find out if they were in or see what they were doing.
So allied to the lack of dinner parties, there’s fewer reasons to even go to someone’s house any more, you can just text them… or not even bother and check their socials to see what impression of a life they’re presenting today.
> I think people also forget (or don’t even know) that before mobile phones you’d often walk over to someone’s house just to knock on the door to find out if they were in or see what they were doing.
This may not be shared by other people, but my two cents.
I personally don't like inviting people to my house (or going to other people's houses) because I already spend a good chunk of my day indoors (I work from home). Whenever possible, I prefer to meet outside.
I remember when i was young going out on vacations with school friends and their parents for several days. Also similar to weekends at country houses. The trend was that a couple of parents liked to host the get togethers and didn’t mind 10 adults and 20 children of different ages running around the place
Swede here, I used to host a lot of dinners and parties.
But then i realized that it was mostly me who hosted them and the few times i got invited there was an agreement that guest chip in on the costs or that it was a potluck kind of thing.
Made me regret spending all that time and money on the parties i hosted.
> Putnam acknowledged that women have historically been the keepers of the family social calendar, planning the birthday parties and neighborhood potlucks. For any number of reasons, women seem to do better than men at making and keeping adult friendships and making plans with other families. But in the 1950s and 1960s, tens of millions of women traded their unpaid household management jobs for salaried jobs, and the family social calendar frayed, as men failed to pick up the slack.
Being stay at home parent is super lonely experience, basically the most lonely occupation you can have. In most jobs, you meet people and you do talk to people without trying to. Fairly often, they are unavoidable whether you want it or not. If you are at home with a kid, you are truly absolutely alone, unless you organize something. Every other guy here on HN complains about Covid being lonely, but it was less lonely and socially easier situation than being stay at home parent.
So, alternative framing is that women stopped organizing these as their need do organize them went down. And men did not had that need in the first place, so it did not changed from their point of view.
And simultaneously, it ceased to be acceptable to be the kind of dad who spends multiple evenings a week with buddies, not really spending time with his kids.
What a bummer. We have friends, family, and our friends’ families over all the time. 1-2 days a week. Now part of that is obviously we are fortunate to have the space and (barely) the time for it. Still, I want to encourage those who can to make the effort to use their home as a social hub. It’s incredibly gratifying. We get a lot of joy out of sharing our home with others. Eventually it’s really not that much work - I honestly find it’s easier/more relaxing than going elsewhere sometimes.
Plus when you have kids it’s a lot more convenient than trying to wrangle them at the end of a fun time lol
Can't speak about the USA but here in south of Spain houses tend to be small, weather good and eating outside relatively affordable so people are used to meet outside.
Most of our gatherings are actually at the beach because for most it is just a short walk from home and there are shops very close that sell super cold beers and drinks so you don't even have to carry a huge cooler.
That’s great. Wish I had a good beach nearby. Closes is about an hour but the water really isn’t fit for swimming anymore since about 10-15 years ago. We have to go three hours to get anywhere reasonable
You don’t need a big house to throw a party. After divorce I decided to relive my teenage years and thrown many parties in a 40m2 apartment. You can easily fit 30 or more people in.
Middle aged European here. I still regularly go to parties (dinner and otherwise) and I notice that there are two kinds of people: people who throw parties, and people who don't. This sounds like a truism, but what I mean is: there are people who regularly throw a party and people who never do it.
I am solidly in the first category. I throw dinner parties, birthday parties, drinking parties, dance parties, midsummer parties, midwinter parties, game parties, etc. Yes, it costs time and money and is a lot of work. But what people (probably the ones that never bother) tend to forget is how unbelievably gratifying it is to get a bunch of people together, to feed them and to make them talk, laugh, dance, etc. Afterwards you are tired but also grateful and socially energized in a way that feels fundamental to my existence.
It varies a lot depending on people and personality type. What's energizing to you is very exhausting and unfun to others. Extraversion / introversion basically. I don't like having many people over. 3 or 4 people who I know well is optimal for me.
Making a large party could be "type 2 fun" sometimes, ie exhausting and not very fun at the time, but satisfying to look back on as a kind of hard challenge I managed to accomplish, like climbing a cold mountain or so. But few are enough of those.
> 3 or 4 people who I know well is optimal for me.
Even that is a challenge of finding the mental energy to pick the date , see that everyone can come, picking some activity (or if you're hosting - make sure with your wife that the date is fine. What about your kids - you wanna put them in bed before?) etc etc. Some of it is probably no big deal but my brain is making it look big, perhaps because I lean introvert as well. It's so much easier to just think about the idea and say 'naaa fuck it' and open Youtube instead.
Helps if your friends are uncomplicated. We just chat, drink beer, make or order pizza, cook or bake something else, talk about work and family, sit in the sun, maybe play cards or just listen to music, talk about stories at recent events like concerts, rehash old stories, or updates about other friends, etc. There is no need to make a big deal about any of this.
But this is not a networking or new-friend-making style of party of course. Not even really a party, but fits "inviting people over for dinner".
I think a big problem is that people see this also as a thing where efficiency and productivity is important and they plan complicated activities etc. Similarly to how kids don't get much free time to just play and relax, adults also try to organize activities for themselves when just being together is often enough and the rest follows naturally.
> It's so much easier to just think about the idea and say 'naaa fuck it' and open Youtube instead.
I think this gets at the heart of the concern—it’s always easier to find something else distracting to do, but what’s the real cost? I don’t really know how to measure that, other than to say that American society and culture are doing particularly poorly right now.
You're right. Since I'm an introvert myself, I enjoy organizing events and inviting people over, because as the host, I always have a reason to change locations and get some “space” when the socializing becomes too much for me.
This is my experience exactly. We used to host a monthly board gaming party before we moved and it was very energizing and exhausting at the same time.
After the two kids the games disappeared and it just became a normal party where we could talk and such and a playdate for the our and the other parents kids.
We will probably do it again when we settle into a new home at least I hope.
I'd get more energy from sitting alone in a dark room than by throwing a - or attending a - party...
That doesn't mean I don't enjoy attending (never throwing) parties on occasion, but it's exhausting to me. Whenever I come home from a social occasion I need time to recover.
It's very much down to different personalities.
I do think it’s possible to move between categories though. I used to have potlucks and house parties every month in my twenties, but now a decade later I just don’t really have much interest in the idea.
It might just be a rationalization, but the way I justify it is that as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized more what actually matters to me, and being a party host / spending time at parties doesn’t fit that category. I’d rather spend my time doing something else.
> It might just be a rationalization, but the way I justify it is that as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized more what actually matters to me, and being a party host / spending time at parties doesn’t fit that category. I’d rather spend my time doing something else.
Well it's happening to the vast majority of people all at once, I don't think it's age, at least not only that. I haven't read the whole article yet perhaps he offers ideas on why this is happening but I'm guessing - better alternatives (Netflix), increased individualism etc. Society has changed a lot.
> But what people (probably the ones that never bother) tend to forget is how unbelievably gratifying it is to get a bunch of people together, to feed them and to make them talk, laugh, dance, etc.
Nope. Its a bunch of work and stress and thoroughly beaten by a dull night in. If I want to bring people together, I'll pay for it to be done - e.g. a restaurant.
Another challenge to hosting dinner parites today is that everybody is on a special diet, count calories, on ozempic because they need to be healthier or have a athletic goal only few people 30 years ago had.
This makes it even more difficult to host because of everybody's needs and regimes they dont buckle on.
Blame the screens. Screens are blackholes that suck up your time, attention, awareness and senses.
Screens are evil. They wake up the dead past as if it's alive and happening now. It became so much the norm, that people are afraid to face the real world, real people, real talking. "Dinner party? OMG, real people with real faces that force us to talk to them? Noway sir".
Screens disconnected people from real world, from each other. I was trying a VR headset the other days and immediately threw it away, as it shut off my visual and audio senses completely.
Spoken like someone with no friends or relatives that live far away. Screens can also be extremely connecting. They are a tool and as such value neutral. Is it evil that I can have a weekly video-call with family members on another continent when the alternative would be...simply no contact at all, super expensive phone calls or letters. I don't think so.
I agree with you general sentiment but how did you end up in a situation where you feel this way but also wanted to try a VR headset but then also decided to throw it away immediately after trying it seemingly surprised by what the experience was.
He might have started feeling that way only after trying the VR headset.
Why, then, do you look at the speck in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the log in your own eye?
People are downvoting because the tone is a bit harsh but he has a point.
While TV has been a thing for a long time, content was limited, and more importantly curated. You couldn't manage your own playlists/subscriptions and almost infinite content on subjects that interest you.
Video games were mostly for kids.
There were no social media feeds optimize to monopolize your attention and make you doomscroll.
Hey even having a TV/widescreen at home has a direct impact on couples sex life...which magically reactivate when the light goes out.
The internet is wonderful for many things but nobody can denies it has an impact on our in person social life.
I would say that TV is the same in concept, just to a different degree.
I remember a college teacher who had 9 siblings humorously answering the question of "how did your parents managed to do it" with "simple: they didn't have a TV set back then".
TVs had already affected our lives tremendously, computers and the internet just went nuts with it.
Article says "The share of adults who say they regularly have friends over has declined 70 percent since 1975", but this may not be an accurate comparison:
> Until 1985, the survey included only married households.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDB_Needham_Life_Style_Surveys
Doesn't that seems like a more accurate measurement? what's the percentage of adults who check "yes" for "friends i'm hoping to hook up with" versus those that say "oooh, you mean actual friends"?
Does it? It means different types of socialising a lot of the time, but couples often merges friend groups and I could definitely see a case for some subset of those friend groups ending up meeting up more regularly. I don't know. It'd be interesting to see data broken down by relationship status.
Someone is projecting.
When I met my wife, I discovered very quickly that she had savant-level hosting skills. She is an amazing cook, she prioritizes space to dine in our home (we made sure to have a dining table in our NYC apartment) and she thinks carefully about the experience of her guests. It's a quality that I benefit greatly from, and I'm grateful to her for it.
This is very cultural. In Spain essentially no one throws dinner parties in the US style. It's rare to invite social acquaintances to one's home. These things are done - but mainly with family. Part of this is cultural and part reflects that homes are too small to fit many people. Most socializing is done outside, at a bar, cafe, restaurant, park, etc.
I'm surprised at this being correlated w/ intensive parenting. Modern parents ARE tired and parenting a lot. That's why on the weekends we invite our friends with kids over and the kids run around and entertain each other so we can have some "Just talk to adults" time with the other parents, maybe watch the NFL games. Even when we take turns hosting, we easily get over the 12x a year mark through this.
Feel like part of the issue is everyone’s self imposed neurosis about not intruding on others. My wife insists on not ever asking to come over to someone’s house - she only wants to be explicitly invited. We invite people over to our place when we can but this leads to us basically never visiting any of our friends because they aren’t the planning type.
Personally feels insane that people find this surprising or puzzling.
You wouldn't be surprised if everyone was smoking and smoking rate was going up massively and then we had a surge of people getting cancer.
This is obviously because of social media or other algorithmic applications. It literally herds people.
It couldn't be more obvious how unhealthy it is, yet there is no demand for it to get outlawed and there won't be any time soon. It is pretty sad.
If you think about the second/third order effects that it will have, it is massively worse than alcohol/drugs.
I really didn't like reading your comment, but I can't argue much against it...
All I can say is the consequences of a degrading mental/social health are harder to grasp than a hangover or, for the lack of a better smoking example, lung cancer.
Still I'm also puzzled by the amount of people, even in my own social circle, that "just want to wind down after work" (read: completely fry their brain)
Social Media brought a decline between 1975 and 1995? It surely plays a role (at least as a confounder), but can't be the sole cause.
> Personally feels insane that people find this surprising or puzzling.
Who finds this surprising or puzzling? I do not see this sentiment in the article or in the comments here.
That doesn't explain the declines before that. It requires a lot of domestic skills and time to host a good party.
and energy which a lot of people in my social groups always seem too exhausted for
yeah the time is a big one, in a double career household who is doing all the prep work?
Families (mine included) are just too busy. Working, commuting, homework, trying to get some exercise in. Any spare time I try to spend it with my children.
I always look at happiness in terms of pillars, social, family, work, spiritual. Work somehow has taken over everything. It seems culturally engrained.
I know social media is a factor but while we all fall down the rabbit hole occasionally, it doesn't stop anyone organising a get together.
In my experience, most people are overworked, stressed and exhausted.
I don't find it surprising at all that social activities have been declining. It sounds like normal mammal behavior in fact.
I see this as a manifestation of the loss of teaching effective communication skills. This takes a moment to explain, so please slow down and consider this: before the cultural revolutions of the 1960's, general education included more emphasis on communications conflicts and resolutions of them. For example, every school had a debate team, and the various forms and rules of debate were common knowledge. Yes, this is true. Debate and watching people skilled at argumentative discussion used to be a popular form of entertainment. Then, during the cultural revolution of the 1960s, the best or the "stars of debate" all sided with the youth culture and not the establishment. That then triggered the removal of debate from educations, from entertainment, and from public life. Now, decades later we have the situation that groups of adults cannot form without conflicts and arguments that drive the community creation aspects away. We have created a culture that cannot communicate, because we have stopped teaching basic oral conflict negotiation of any form.
I think people also forget (or don’t even know) that before mobile phones you’d often walk over to someone’s house just to knock on the door to find out if they were in or see what they were doing.
So allied to the lack of dinner parties, there’s fewer reasons to even go to someone’s house any more, you can just text them… or not even bother and check their socials to see what impression of a life they’re presenting today.
> I think people also forget (or don’t even know) that before mobile phones you’d often walk over to someone’s house just to knock on the door to find out if they were in or see what they were doing.
Um, we had phones before mobile phones.
I know.
This may not be shared by other people, but my two cents.
I personally don't like inviting people to my house (or going to other people's houses) because I already spend a good chunk of my day indoors (I work from home). Whenever possible, I prefer to meet outside.
When I was growing up, a good deal of these sorts of parties involved backyards, barbecues, and swimming pools. Rarely did we spend time indoors.
I remember when i was young going out on vacations with school friends and their parents for several days. Also similar to weekends at country houses. The trend was that a couple of parents liked to host the get togethers and didn’t mind 10 adults and 20 children of different ages running around the place
This might explain the decline then, as with the price of housing going up less people can afford a place that has a backyard (let alone a pool!)
None of my friends have a backyard big enough to host a BBQ
Swede here, I used to host a lot of dinners and parties.
But then i realized that it was mostly me who hosted them and the few times i got invited there was an agreement that guest chip in on the costs or that it was a potluck kind of thing.
Made me regret spending all that time and money on the parties i hosted.
Not American.
One big thing I feel contributing to this is a lack of time.
And the more strange unusual thing, many folks basically have "school nights", they don't do anything because they're going to work the next day.
Perhaps work becoming more mentally intensive makes this more difficult.
Money. In the 70s, a single income family could afford to host. Who has money for that these days?
I wonder if another factor is how many people move around the country.
For families with kids, forming deep friendships as an adult can be a logistical challenge.
Many people have no current relationship with friends they made in college or high school
> Putnam acknowledged that women have historically been the keepers of the family social calendar, planning the birthday parties and neighborhood potlucks. For any number of reasons, women seem to do better than men at making and keeping adult friendships and making plans with other families. But in the 1950s and 1960s, tens of millions of women traded their unpaid household management jobs for salaried jobs, and the family social calendar frayed, as men failed to pick up the slack.
Being stay at home parent is super lonely experience, basically the most lonely occupation you can have. In most jobs, you meet people and you do talk to people without trying to. Fairly often, they are unavoidable whether you want it or not. If you are at home with a kid, you are truly absolutely alone, unless you organize something. Every other guy here on HN complains about Covid being lonely, but it was less lonely and socially easier situation than being stay at home parent.
So, alternative framing is that women stopped organizing these as their need do organize them went down. And men did not had that need in the first place, so it did not changed from their point of view.
And simultaneously, it ceased to be acceptable to be the kind of dad who spends multiple evenings a week with buddies, not really spending time with his kids.
I get caught in the comparison game, the thief of joy.
I don’t want ask my rich well off friends around cause of my humble existence.
What a bummer. We have friends, family, and our friends’ families over all the time. 1-2 days a week. Now part of that is obviously we are fortunate to have the space and (barely) the time for it. Still, I want to encourage those who can to make the effort to use their home as a social hub. It’s incredibly gratifying. We get a lot of joy out of sharing our home with others. Eventually it’s really not that much work - I honestly find it’s easier/more relaxing than going elsewhere sometimes.
Plus when you have kids it’s a lot more convenient than trying to wrangle them at the end of a fun time lol
Can't speak about the USA but here in south of Spain houses tend to be small, weather good and eating outside relatively affordable so people are used to meet outside.
Most of our gatherings are actually at the beach because for most it is just a short walk from home and there are shops very close that sell super cold beers and drinks so you don't even have to carry a huge cooler.
That’s great. Wish I had a good beach nearby. Closes is about an hour but the water really isn’t fit for swimming anymore since about 10-15 years ago. We have to go three hours to get anywhere reasonable
Maybe it helps that 50 years ago people could actually afford to buy things like big houses where to throw parties at.
Take a look at this graph https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/housing1.png?...
Housing prices also more than doubled in real terms in the period of that graph https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/QUSR628BIS
Says nothing about affordability
You don’t need a big house to throw a party. After divorce I decided to relive my teenage years and thrown many parties in a 40m2 apartment. You can easily fit 30 or more people in.