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Who Americans spend their time with
- Kenji 9y agoI think the bump just before 20 on the "Alone" graph is really interesting. I'd also like to see the data with genders separated, could be interesting too.
- mrisoli 9y agoIt seems that bump is pretty obvious, after school if you are not doing something that regularly has you around other people(college or some job), then time spent alone will increase. For me, the most interesting part here is how this actually goes down a little bit on the late 20s.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- examancer 9y agoThese are some of the worst designed charts. I had to download the CSV to figure out that the x-axis is age. Once I figured it out the bottom right chart was chilling.
- ycombdev 9y agoI thought it was years ... 1910, 1920 ...
- beloch 9y agoThese graphs are a great example of why you should always label your axes. If you submitted these to a journal they'd be sent back for correction (assuming the editor didn't rage-toss your paper at first sight). If you included these in an undergraduate lab report they'd be docked marks heavily.
- ekianjo 9y ago> These are some of the worst designed charts. Especially because there was no label on the axes... and also no n size whatsoever and no information on how the question was asked and how the data is reported (averages? if yes it's completely useless data, averages are typically the worst kind of data you can extract).
- rsp1984 9y agoI figured it out eventually but at first I thought X was percent of people. Also confusing is the "8 hours per day" subscript. Took me a while to figure out it actually is the Y axis labeling (but poorly placed and styled).
- zeep 9y agoAlso, it should just be "hours per day" if I understand it correctly.
- gms7777 9y agoAdditionally the coloring choices are bad. The purple/blue split indicates relationships between items with the same color that don't exist. Combined with the confusing axis labels, my first interpretation of the plot was this was data comparing 2003 to 2015.
- woogiewonka 9y agoAlone and co-workers. Sad.
- nopinsight 9y agoLongitudinal data would be informative. I strongly suspect people spent less time alone in the past. (Note: The X-axis is age.) My theories: * Multitude of choices given to us by technology have led to fewer things we pay attention to in common with our friends and neighbors. Thus, fewer shared loci of interaction. Career specialization is another key contributing factor. * More recently, dopamine rush generated by endless new contents tailored to our preferences has made real-world interactions and activities dull by comparison. More people choose to spend time alone with that rush. In the long run, it might result in weaker social ties and less healthy psychology for some/many people. Research has shown that strong social ties are important for mental and even physical health. How do we design technologies and social institutions to help connect people in the real world and alleviate the problems?
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y agoI'm not convinced by your argument with regard to the multitude of choices. A counter point could be that we should be more likely to have at least something in common with more people. Somebody must be consuming mass-media, problem the masses. I think a better theory to support your point is that we tend to be less religious and therefore less community oriented. I don't really know if that holds up though. We have to be careful about romanticising the past, so yes longitudinal data and cultural comparisons would make these data more informative. > How do we design technologies to help connect people in the real world and alleviate the problems? Isn't the answer to this "Social Networks"? The market has spoken, Facebook is King. Every time there's conversations about the ills of Facebook there's always people pointing out that Facebook makes organising events a lot easier. That's definitely something I miss since getting off Facebook and moving to a new city.
- brightball 9y agoFwiw, when I got off of Facebook my family decided to explore local churches and found one that has been great. We've made about the same amount of friends there in 6 months that we did living here for 13 years without going there. Plenty of activities too. When I was on Facebook I found that I was spending significantly more time chatting it up with my friends from college who are all over the country. Not that I don't want to keep in touch with them, but I'd rather be more social with people I can do things with. Facebook gives you a social crutch. You have to get rid of it and create that gap to feel the need to fill it with something else.
- Nanite 9y agoA somewhat better article featuring this graph set: https://qz.com/1010901/the-data-prove-that-you-just-get-more-alone-from-the-age-of-40-onward/ https://qz.com/1010901/the-data-prove-that-you-just-get-more...
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y agoRigtheo, so now we need to compare to other cultures and overlay the results with mental health issues, self-reported happiness, income, GDP, obesity, and all the other interesting metrics. We already know the results though: people who have strong family ties and closer and enduring friendships and sense of community live longer healthier lives than their lonely counterparts and are more productive at work and in their own pursuits. On the up side: people who are more separate, isolated, lonely, without being to far in to the pathological extremes, tend to buy more things, which is good for The Economy.
- chronic7ul 9y ago> people who have strong family ties and closer and enduring friendships and sense of community live longer healthier lives than their lonely counterparts and are more productive at work and in their own pursuits. You need to stop perpetuating this false idea that you can live a truly happy and healthy life without working hard. Many middle and lower class individuals are using this as an excuse to justify "Oh I don't work a lot and don't have as much money as the guy driving a Tesla, but it's okay, I'm having fun in life." Yet, these same individuals wish they could afford world travel and explore new cultures. They wish they had enough money to eat raw fish and fresh salads to improve their health. They wish they could buy an electric vehicle to help the environment. They wish they could have a more intellectually stimulating job instead of retail or as a restaurant waiters. No matter how you slice and dice it, work, ultimately leading to money, buys happiness; but only enough happiness to be happier than average. Even in Norway.
- 13of40 9y agoWe already know the results though: people who have strong family ties and closer and enduring friendships and sense of community live longer healthier lives than their lonely counterparts I've often wondered whether, in the absence of any action to correct the issue, it's better to promote this conclusion (which feels a little bit like loneliness-shaming) or to tell less social people that being alone is OK and doesn't mean you're less of a person.
- throwanem 9y ago
- izzydata 9y agoI assume sleeping isn't counted.
- mathgeek 9y agoThat has to be assumed, as otherwise the "time spent alone" for children would be much higher, as having your own bedroom as a teenager is still pretty common.
- quakenul 9y agoIt is not: https://qz.com/1010901/the-data-prove-that-you-just-get-more-alone-from-the-age-of-40-onward/ https://qz.com/1010901/the-data-prove-that-you-just-get-more...
- wenc 9y agoThe X-axis really ought to have been labeled. It wasn't obvious that it represented age. Age is a plausible inference from the data, but labeling the axis would have made the visualization tighter.
- xcz 9y agoBottom-right is sad.
- Simon_says 9y agoWhat are the units of the x-axis? And what is the source of the data? Such terrible graph design never should have made the front page.
- capnrefsmmat 9y agoAge, in years. The source is noted at the bottom: "Data: American Times Use Survey".
- VLM 9y agoHere's a couple reasons this is a lame article 1) It partially involves demographic and political aspects that are not permitted to be discussed on this site; that leads to a lot of echo chamber "I donno" responses. You can't have insight when discussing something you can't discuss. Whats the point of hitting the echo chamber like a tuning fork other than to verify "yes it continues to ring with only one note"? Yup that tuning fork / echo chamber is still not a hi-fi speaker in terms of expressing full bandwidth reality.. so is it more likely the article is inappropriate or that moderation standards will change? It seems more likely this is a bad article. 2) The ratios make very little sense. Mush together the "family" graph, the "children" graph and the "partner" graph for a couple ages for a specific example. Much as "coworkers" doesn't mean everyone works part time, it really means a minority of us work more than full time while the majority don't work and have no coworkers by definition. So comparing the ratios in the "children" graph with more than half unemployed with a side dish of typical breeding years it implies something like half of stay at home parent age bracket has pre-school kid at home, which would not appear to be nearly enough to maintain population. If almost no one had kids this would make sense. There's no point discussing an article that has highly questionable aspects to it. 3) There will be the usual ultra-low quality comments bashing introverts for being born that way. Time alone is only horrifying if you're horrified with yourself or who you are. Otherwise, its a lot of fun. Extroverts being a malfunctioning minority, implies its not really a problem that introverts are doing just fine as they age. Intro/Extro debate is mildly interesting yet mostly irrelevant to the article. 4) As a side dish its mostly a collection of cultural mis-beliefs that are somewhat impermissible, even with this evidence. Well, everyone knows every 20-something spends every night fashionably socializing all night long. Uh, no, almost no 20-something does that outside the echo chamber and most importantly the "everyone knows" aspect, and even the tiny minority of extreme party people are in a somewhat exponential decline to zero by age 30. For an example of an impermissible thought, how do you sell "new urbanism" to everyone, when statistically no one goes out at night? The amount of time people spend with their partner is shockingly stable for decades although everyone knows all marriages decline, except that it seems on very few actually do decline. Everyone knows that grandparents are taking care of more (grand)kids than ever before, yet the absolute number in the graph is scarcely larger than teen moms. Everyone knows the time alone graph goes up with age because friends are dying off or moving away and supposedly people forget how to make friends or similar nonsense and that's the only socially acceptable explanation, except for the friends graph shows a predictable child-bearing age decline and then actually slightly increases with age, such that people are both alone much more as they age while also spending slightly more time with friends. The problem is none of these issues are demographically or politically verboten like point #1 but are socially unacceptable to think about or express in public. So again the article cannot be discussed, making it a bad article.
- conqrr 9y agoThey should have captured pets as well.
- jkh1 9y agoBadly designed plots. What does the bottom axis represent ? fraction of the population ? age ?
- ddlatham 9y agoWould love to see this in a single stacked chart. (Even though there can be some double counting when spending time with multiple categories).
- aj7 9y agoWhat does the X-axis mean?
- shaunlgs 9y agoAge. I thought it's percentage at first.
- notadoc 9y agoNot exactly uplifting data.