27 ms·

Who Americans spend their time with, by age

642 points by EOO_OWID 6y ago

TameAntelope 6y ago
What counts as "spending time"? I'm sure they define it somewhere in the article, but I wonder what percentage of the effects do I get to experience by commenting here. Are we "spending time" together right now? I ask because I've bugged a few healthcare professionals I randomly meet about how millennials (and younger) will age, and if their comfort with the connective nature of the Internet will help reduce mental decline due to inactivity through aging, and I've gotten positive responses (e.g. "for people who can use the Internet to stay cognitively active, aging will be a more pleasant experience generally").
- wil421 6y ago
  No I don’t think it’s the same. We are spending some time here but the amount of interaction is very low. I recently bought something from a whiskey group on FB. We spent about 30 minutes talking about whiskey after our transaction. It was probably more meaningful than a week of HN interactions.
  - offtop5 6y ago
    Lost Connections is a fantastic book on this. While it's definitely worth a read, the author's core argument is eroding community structures have led to an explosion in mental illness. He has a very interesting tale of a man in a small village who is essentially supported by everyone else there and with that is helped Compared to the typical Western solution assuming your poor or homeless neighbor is the responsibility of some outside entity. Online interactions also have a tendency to be very impersonal , and very mean. I don't really use any social media aside from this ( although that will change when I start promoting my side project game, I'll never speak outside of just promoting the game or asking for community feedback). I'm very much looking forward to a post-corona world, my hope would be that more people embrace this beautiful world of ours instead of arguing about which movie casted who on Reddit all day.
    - rabuse 6y ago
      This is why I genuinely enjoy going to this bar near me regularly. It's a very high-end place, but everyone that goes there knows one another, and we're like a giant extended family. People within the group have newborns, and they bring them all the time, and pass them around for all of us to enjoy .
  - jimmygrapes 6y ago
    I believe online interaction can be a mild substitute for real interaction, even through a forum like this, but it requires that it be the same people interacting (and for the interaction to be pleasant). Me writing this here isn't to you, person I am responding to, but to anyone who reads it. It lacks the building of interpersonal camaraderie until we have direct, frequent, and multiple interactions.
  - TameAntelope 6y ago
    I think I'm with you on the general notion that this time doesn't generally hold a candle to "real" interactive conversation, but you put it at "more than a week of HN interactions" so there is some value here, which I do find interesting, if ultimately negligible/useless.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  I don't think much true human connection is happening here -- in the sense of connections that are emotionally fulfilling and improve psychological well-being. It may work for some people but I guess for most people the monkey brain is too far from what we're doing right now.
  - rantwasp 6y ago
    I sort-of disagree. Maybe for just browsing hn in general you’re right. That changes when you engage in a conversation with someone on a thread. also, i don’t really believe in the idea of the “monkey brain”. our brain is both “hardware” and “software”. The tooling we are using is an extension of our brain.
roastytoasty 6y ago
This data makes me sad just looking at the parents, children, and coworker lines. This isn't how it should be...
- watwut 6y ago
  When frequent contact with parents is stigmatized after certain age, which it is in USA, then old people get lonely as they age and their contact with children will go down ...
- momento 6y ago
  >This isn't how it should be... What makes you say that?
  - tacocataco 6y ago
    Humans are naturally social creatures. I wonder if this graph is missing a data point of time spent with strangers. (caregivers and the like)
    - jarito 6y ago
      In many situations (daycare, elder care) the caregivers are by no means strangers. My 2 year old spends as much or more time with her daycare teachers and classmates than she does with my wife and I. They love her and she loves them. Just because they aren't blood doesn't mean they don't play a huge part in her day to day experience and growth. In fact, they play a much larger part in her world than her grandparents or other family that she only sees several times a year. It feels to easy to dismiss these folks as 'not as good as family' when, at least in my experience, they are much more than just paid baby sitters.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    Think of the people you really like, respect, or care about. Now think about the people you actually spend time with.
wing-_-nuts 6y ago
I don't even want kids. I don't know why the 'time spent with one's children' line hurts so much, but it does. It sharply rises, before plummeting at age 40. That's got to be a jarring transition. No wonder so many folks have trouble with the 'empty nest' and mid-life crisis.
- suprfnk 6y ago
  > I don't even want kids. I don't know why the 'time spent with one's children' line hurts so much, but it does. Do you maybe not want kids on a rational level, but still want kids on an emotional level?
  - mrlala 6y ago
    Probably this. Also, people are really bad at "knowing" what they want.
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  The Western nuclear family is a very unnatural social arrangement. Anthropologists have found that in most hunter-gatherers, the average infant is held at one point or another by 30+ people in a typical day. The nuclear family has the twin downsides of putting tons of stress on parents of young kids, who shoulder the entire childcare burden, and deprives a lot of grandparents, aunts, cousins, and others of meaningful childcare time. In the industrialized West, for most people it's either all babies all the time, or no babies whatsoever. Both extremes are suboptimal relative to the environment humans evolved for.
  - leesalminen 6y ago
    I’m the parent of a young child and I definitely feel some sort of internal pressure to be all babies all the time. I feel pretty guilty leaving him with anyone other than my wife. All I can think to myself is whether what I’m doing is really worth it compared to spending time with the baby.
    - 6y ago
ryanmarsh 6y ago
FTA: Older people spend more time alone, but this doesn’t necessarily mean they’re lonely Why bother saying this? We know it’s not true.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  > We know it’s not true. I'm 58, and spend a lot of time alone, but I am definitely not lonely. It's by choice. I am quite comfortable in my own company; which was not the case, when I was younger. I won't go into the nitty-gritty, but there's a lot of unusual circumstances in my life. I know that the life I lead is pretty different from most folks. But I would not be comfortable assuming that something "isn't true," simply because it doesn't apply to me.
asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
I wonder what are the strategies folks can adopt to see that they don't become victims of loneliness.
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago
  I think it’s just a matter of being proactive with your social life. Take and create opportunities to meet people.
- Xophmeister 6y ago
  Finding comfort in solitude... Don't ask me how -- I haven't figured it out yet -- but I understand it's a thing.
- baron_harkonnen 6y ago
  Somewhat ironically, I think the important thing here is to learn to be more comfortable spending time alone. The pandemic has surprised me with both how much people are unable to just be alone for awhile, and related to this, how much they have a difficult time being with partners and family without larger social distractions. Being able to be alone, at least in my experience, helps you to be with other people in a sincerely intimate way. People that struggle the most with their partners during the pandemic seem to be people who need socialization to distract from their own relationship problems. If two people can be "alone together" in a room for awhile, they can still refresh, and restore their energy. This allows them to be more supportive and close when they need socialization because they aren't exhausted. Loneliness is being forced to deal with your fear of being alone, without every taking the time to be comfortable being alone.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    I don't know if this is the sort of thing most people can use mental jiu jitsu to dodge out of. Social connection is a drive most might not be able to satisfy without actual social connection.
    - baron_harkonnen 6y ago
mirekrusin 6y ago
Missing time spent with computer.
chinhodado 6y ago
I wonder how this data changes in Asian countries. I would expect the end section (time spend in later years) to be vastly different, although that may be changing.
burlesona 6y ago
The thing that seems crazy to me is how much time alone increases with age. There are many many reasons for it, but one thing I think is especially sad is how much this is a consequence of our built environment. If you live in a village with multiple generations of a family around, it’s much easier for grandparents to be involved day too day in helping with little things in the village, especially keeping an eye on the kids roaming around. This is also true in the more traditional urban neighborhoods with walking-oriented life (safety from cars) and a wide mix of housing types etc. But (to varying degrees) most of the new construction around the world since WW2 has been oriented around driving and separation of land uses, and as a result when you age you end up living in a nice little garden home far removed from any day to day life going on. And once it gets hard for you to drive... then you really end up spending a ton of time alone. I don’t think there’s an easy fix for this, and that makes me sad.
- tcbawo 6y ago
  As the younger people alive today get older, they are more likely to remain connected with technology and spend more time socially with digital experiences (playing video games with friends, etc.). Hopefully, this will help offset loneliness that might accompany decreased mobility.
  - torgian 6y ago
    Unfortunately this is a poor substitute for real physical connection with other people.
    - kenjackson 6y ago
      Is it that poor? During the pandemic my son has stayed in touch with his friends on the phone in these big group chats and smaller chats as well. I’m amazed at how natural it has become for them. They talk, gossip, play games (Roblox, Fortnite, nba 2k), and even watch YouTube and TikTok together. I think the model they created will persist into post Covid, with the addition of physical connection.
tristor 6y ago
I think it'd be interesting to see this data split by gender as well as by age cohort. I think we'd find that men juncture towards spending time alone sooner than women, and that they start out with a higher level of being alone. Those are just my assumptions though.
- inanutshellus 6y ago
  I'm also surprised they didn't call out gender. From everything I've read, men are increasingly isolated as they age, whereas women tend to cluster together. This also has been linked to higher-by-gender suicides for isolated men. <chagrin>Granted, I guess if you're dead you don't have to worry about showing up in the list and skewing the graph inconveniently.</chagrin>
- war1025 6y ago
  > I think we'd find that men juncture towards spending time alone sooner than women This is interesting to me because my dad was far more social while I was growing up than my mom ever was. I feel like I am also much more social than my wife is. I guess there may be trends by gender, but I'd guess it's not nearly so clear cut.
_qulr 6y ago
What I find interesting is time spent with coworkers. It's about equal to time spent with partner throughout most of adulthood, and it's significantly higher than time spent with friends. Unsurprisingly, time spent with coworkers drops precipitously at retirement age, but perhaps surprisingly, time spent with friends does not then increase to compensate. A lot of people in the comments are talking about children, but coworkers seem pretty crucial according to the charts.
- hindsightbias 6y ago
  The post-Covid remote utopia so many seem to be excited about is going to be hard for a lot of workers. Work, lunch, happy hour, bowling, league sports. Now they all have is Slack.
  - intotheabyss 6y ago
    What's wrong with spending less time with co-workers? These are people you have to spend time with, regardless if you like them or not. I would personally much rather not spend time with people I didn't choose to spend time with.
    - Kalium 6y ago
      I think it may perhaps not be a question of "right" or "wrong". It will probably be a jarring change for many people as it affects major chunks of their regular social contact.
    - hindsightbias 6y ago
      IMO, most people aren‘t very good at building their own tribes outside of church, school and work. Building bubbles of “Like” only is probably not an optimal societal outcome either.
    - bradlys 6y ago
      > I would personally much rather not spend time with people I didn't choose to spend time with. Most friends are made this way. School as an example.
grumple 6y ago
Interesting. Totally anecdotal here, but here are my thoughts: As I get older, I see less value in friendships, mostly because I realize that many of my friendships didn't serve me and added a lot of stress to my life (and distracted from time that could have been spent on career / legacy). Meanwhile, time invested in my personal life, hobbies, and career pays off in spades - spending a few months getting better at algorithms helped me double my wages with my next job jump. It is interesting how social we are with friends at a young age, then most decide on a constant - but low - amount of time spent with friends.
- rochak 6y ago
  Huh. My experience has been the opposite. I used to just focus on my skills but that ended up with me doing things on my own and not getting to enjoy the things I thought I would. With time, I noticed this and have started spending time with other people to look at things from their perspective and experience new things. This has been a better experience for me.
- rm445 6y ago
  I don't know how old you are, but based on the comment it seems likely you haven't travelled all the way along the journey yet. People can be retired and alone a long time - it seems such a potentially lonely existence that it's worth taking some actions earlier in life to reduce the possibility. I don't know whether the best way would be cultivating friendships or focusing on family.
- throwmylifawy 6y ago
  Yeah I agree, it is funny hearing younger people claim that all of their friends are their best friends and as they get older their relationships dwindle. I suspect that it is crucial for young people to have more relationships in order to socialize them during early development. Once you hit your 40's having too many relationships becomes a burden.
  - t-writescode 6y ago
    And yet so many people on the internet mourn the difficulty of acquiring friends in their 30s, so perhaps having too many relationships is a good problem to have, given how hard it is to find someone.
crispyporkbites 6y ago
As someone who loves being alone, this is great news!
- belly_joe 6y ago
  Heh, same. All I have to do is wait 30 years and everyone will stop bothering me!
gen220 6y ago
The underlying data here is, of course, a distribution (each with its own distinct shape). In this case, I suspect that the "average" statistic is not the best representative of that distribution. For instance, "children" is definitely a bimodal distribution. There are many people in life who never have children, and therefore drag down the average for all those who do have children. I suspect that, in reality, there are many modes for each of these dimensions, at each point in time. I think seeing the modes would be more interesting than the averages. If you believe in free will, you can probably choose which mode you'll end up closest to. You certainly aren't doomed to be in some statistically-unlikely valley in-between. There's hope you won't die alone, in spite of what the picture painted by the average might say.
- throwaway2245 6y ago
  Yes - I also didn't found the averages hard to interpret and not super full of insight. Presumably a lot of people spend 6-10 hours with their coworkers, and a lot of people spend 0 hours; a lot of people spend 8+ hours with their children, and a lot of people spend 0 hours, and pretty much the same for all of those categories. I'd have found a few 'typical' people in each age group more interesting. This is harder to calculate but maybe k-means clustering would be a good solution.
- bcherny 6y ago
  This is a great point. Can anyone find a link to the raw dataset? Happy to whip up a better visualization.
  - gen220 6y ago
    Looks like the data source is here: https://www.bls.gov/tus/datafiles-0319.htm https://www.bls.gov/tus/datafiles-0319.htm It's not a super easy to use format, but it should be fun to extract some more useful data out of it. For what it's worth, the sample size here is very small. It is hard to believe that it's representative of the distribution. This link [1] suggests the data come from 210k interviews conducted over 16 years (13ish thousand per year). And the data is longitudinal (so over those 16 years, many of the interviewees are the same person). Even if every interviewee was unique, this would represent <0.0001 (or less than .01 percent) of the ~240m americans in 2003 who were over the age of 20. [1]: https://www.bls.gov/tus/atussummary.pdf https://www.bls.gov/tus/atussummary.pdf
6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
I’m most surprised by the time with friends. I expected it to peak later and be higher. I wonder whether it counts roommates. I know that spending less time with friends has been a particularly difficult aspect of aging for me, and I expect similar for many people.
- kill-procrustes 6y ago
  I was just discussing this thread with a friend of mine and we agreed on the same thing. Taleb has a line about college being the closest thing to a natural social state in the Western world. I think our brains feel comfortable in some sort of regular, persistent social milieu, particularly one formed by close friends/family. We expect some sort of tribe to be around us. That doesn't mean some of us aren't introverts—I definitely am one—but as I get older the absence of my friend group constantly there in the background is really painful.
jvanderbot 6y ago
I cannot wait until the nursing home lan parties. During pandemic I have rekindled relationships with 2-3 friends, some out of state, and we've played games at least 2x a week. The opportunity for casual interaction (via discord) while focusing on another task (the challenging game), perfectly mimics the environment to build deep longlasting relationships through shared struggle, trust building, communication, feedback, and so on.
- jjice 6y ago
  I had this experience as well. Two friends of mine and I hop on Discord and watch a few episodes of a show or a movie once or twice a week. It's been fantastic, especially earlier in the pandemic when I was in a distant city.
  - dorkwood 6y ago
    What do you use to watch the tv show? One person share's their screen?
- ragazzina 6y ago
  >I cannot wait until the nursing home lan parties. I've seen this sentiment a lot on the internet, but after having visited many nursing homes, I don't think it will ever happen. Maybe nursing homes are different in the US, maybe I've seen the wrong kind of nursing home.
  - rement 6y ago
    I would guess nursing homes haven't developed LAN parties because the people who grew up doing LAN parties are currently in their 30s and 40s. Not quite nursing home age yet.
    - jvanderbot 6y ago
      Yes, bridge and board games and television dominate. Because those folks played bridge and board games and watched television.
durnygbur 6y ago
TIL I could easily be profiled as an >70 years old American. The society I live in is not particularly outgoing, friendly, outdoorsy, rich, or accommodating.
br_hue 6y ago
Sad data. In my opinion this is the result of a culture that optimizes for the wrong things in life. "Happiness is only real when shared.".
- stronglikedan 6y ago
  No way. I've demonstrably proven to myself that I'm happiest when I'm by myself. Social interactions are tedious, and draining, so I prefer to keep them to a minimum. I optimize for the right things in my life.
  - br_hue 6y ago
    It's my perspective, but yeah, I shouldn't have generalized. Different people have different preferences, needs and opinions.
  - typhon04 6y ago
    Even so, what do you do in that time? Isn't it providing some service or building a product for people... and a greater purpose? I doubt you are a hermit doing as little social interactions just to get by and only consuming without producing anything. If so... what is the meaning of it all?
    - yakubin 6y ago
      > and a greater purpose? This part is presumptuous. "Greater" for whom? > If so... what is the meaning of it all? And what is the meaning of it all in the alternative? It's up to you. Maybe you don't need one. Maybe this question is meaningless.
      - throwaway98797 6y ago
        With you there. All will be forgotten. It is freeing to know that.
    - throwaway98797 6y ago
      1. Cooking your own meals daily (2 hours) 2. Gym (2 hours with commute) 3. Midday nap (30 min) 4. Eating meals, including slowly drinking coffee (2 hours) 5. Reading (2 hours) 6. YouTube (2 hours) 7. Self reflection (1 hour) This is 11.5 hours so far of the 16 of non sleep time. This does not include any income earning activities, which I still spend time on. I also go on long walks and think. I’m not saying this is ideal, but it works for me right now.
xwdv 6y ago
This puts me more at ease about choosing to have children later in life. If I wait till late 30s, perhaps then I could push the curve a bit farther toward the end of my useful life, and spend less time alone.
- souprock 6y ago
  Having kids later in life is a good idea, but don't forget to also have children earlier in life. That may bring you great grand children and beyond.
  - xwdv 6y ago
    Too late for that, already in early thirties. Aren’t great grand children overrated anyway? My grandmother was a great grandmother and aside from the early toddler years the kids didn’t really give a fuck tbh. We don’t live in a society where a great elder is looked upon with any kind of prestige, so why aspire to it? Hell, not even most adult children care. They’d rather shovel you off somewhere where they don’t have to deal with your old people problems or antiquated views. The only thing that will keep you respected in old age is your lucidity, wealth and power, and a sharp wit. Spending more time with your young children in late life could help cultivate those things out of necessity.
  - Plestor 6y ago
    Seems like "laminar flow" would be a possible explanation here... Fluid flow near surfaces becomes a near zero vector.
darkwizard42 6y ago
This article makes me think of a waitbutwhy post about how little time you have left with certain cohorts of your life: https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html Worth reading and of course feels different with how much things have changed in the last 10 months
lambda_obrien 6y ago
I'm 38, and very lonely lately (not just COVID) and seeing that "time spent alone" increases starting at age 38 really makes me depressed.
- ketzo 6y ago
  Hey, it's an average -- be the exception! My mom has an incredibly close circle of friends, none of whom knew each other before they were 45.
strogonoff 6y ago
Starting from about age 20, most of a given day an average American spends alone (except for those who have kids, for whom for a few years the situation is different). Would be very interesting to find statistics obtained by similar methods for others locations.
ridaj 6y ago
Related: https://www.unm.edu/~reubenjthomas/xkcdHowFriendsMeet.jpg https://www.unm.edu/~reubenjthomas/xkcdHowFriendsMeet.jpg Paper: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0731121419828399 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07311214198283...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
NikolaNovak 6y ago
I find it fascinating that time with children goes up significantly while time alone stays steady 20s to 40s... that in no way mimics my life :D I've had a ton of "quality me time" when single; and a fair amount once I got married; and have absolutely zero since we got the little ones :)
tmearnest 6y ago
The end of time spent with partner curve makes me sad. It’s interesting how easy it is to read a story into this plot.
pk455 6y ago
I'd love to see this data but for men vs women
swayvil 6y ago
FTA (and I paraphrase) Old people are alone because their friends (also old) are dead. Old people are alone but they aren't lonely. ... bit of spin there
- yawaramin 6y ago
  Was just thinking that the article carefully talks about 'loneliness' and skirts around 'happiness'. It points to another article[1] that claims to show that being alone doesn't necessarily mean being lonely--but that article fails to make a case for that: - First of all, in absolute numbers it shows that a lot of older people in developed countries are lonely. It may not be a majority of people but that's kinda like saying 'don't worry, covid has a mortality rate of just 1%'. - Then the article tries to show that people in these countries self-report that they have social support--that they have someone who can help them if they get in trouble--but it fails to show the breakdown of those who have social support by age, which is kind of the critical question here: do older people have social support? - Then, the article tries to show that there's not much correlation between being alone and being lonely--but it again fails to show whether this is true for older people specifically, or just for the aggregate sample. - Then it talks about 'aggregate' statistics again, instead of focusing on older people. There seems to be quite a lot of bending over backwards trying to convince us that older people are not lonely, but no cogent argument. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/lonely-not-alone https://ourworldindata.org/lonely-not-alone
varjag 6y ago
Just 0.55% 18y.o. live alone in America? When do you folks start with college?
ekianjo 6y ago
> This is based on averages from surveys spanning 2009 to 2019. That's a bad source in a way: the situation of having widespread connected devices since early 2010s has definitely changed the situation for many people. A single point in time would be a lot more reliable.
anonu 6y ago
I'd love to see how that graph in the article changes over time. Specifically the older cohort and how much alone time they spent. I would guess that part of the graph has been steadily increasing over the years as well.
sgregnt 6y ago
What is the standard deviation on these plots? It is such a pity that standard deviation is not shown, it could add so much more to the plots.
intrasight 6y ago
As I reach the tail end of my career, I am starting to think about what retirement will look like, and who it'll be spent with. I have been researching the co-living model. I am glad to see there are more co-living developments going up.
aaccount 6y ago
Is the meant to be 'How Americans' ?
rahulpadalkar 6y ago
Is it just me or are the line colors in the chart way to similar to distinguish?
mymythisisthis 6y ago
"If a man does not make new acquaintance as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, Sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair." Samuel Johnson

642 points by EOO_OWID 6y ago

What counts as "spending time"? I'm sure they define it somewhere in the article, but I wonder what percentage of the effects do I get to experience by commenting here. Are we "spending time" together right now? I ask because I've bugged a few healthcare professionals I randomly meet about how millennials (and younger) will age, and if their comfort with the connective nature of the Internet will help reduce mental decline due to inactivity through aging, and I've gotten positive responses (e.g. "for people who can use the Internet to stay cognitively active, aging will be a more pleasant experience generally").

wil421 6y ago
No I don’t think it’s the same. We are spending some time here but the amount of interaction is very low. I recently bought something from a whiskey group on FB. We spent about 30 minutes talking about whiskey after our transaction. It was probably more meaningful than a week of HN interactions.
- offtop5 6y ago
  Lost Connections is a fantastic book on this. While it's definitely worth a read, the author's core argument is eroding community structures have led to an explosion in mental illness. He has a very interesting tale of a man in a small village who is essentially supported by everyone else there and with that is helped Compared to the typical Western solution assuming your poor or homeless neighbor is the responsibility of some outside entity. Online interactions also have a tendency to be very impersonal , and very mean. I don't really use any social media aside from this ( although that will change when I start promoting my side project game, I'll never speak outside of just promoting the game or asking for community feedback). I'm very much looking forward to a post-corona world, my hope would be that more people embrace this beautiful world of ours instead of arguing about which movie casted who on Reddit all day.
  - rabuse 6y ago
    This is why I genuinely enjoy going to this bar near me regularly. It's a very high-end place, but everyone that goes there knows one another, and we're like a giant extended family. People within the group have newborns, and they bring them all the time, and pass them around for all of us to enjoy .
- jimmygrapes 6y ago
  I believe online interaction can be a mild substitute for real interaction, even through a forum like this, but it requires that it be the same people interacting (and for the interaction to be pleasant). Me writing this here isn't to you, person I am responding to, but to anyone who reads it. It lacks the building of interpersonal camaraderie until we have direct, frequent, and multiple interactions.
- TameAntelope 6y ago
  I think I'm with you on the general notion that this time doesn't generally hold a candle to "real" interactive conversation, but you put it at "more than a week of HN interactions" so there is some value here, which I do find interesting, if ultimately negligible/useless.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
I don't think much true human connection is happening here -- in the sense of connections that are emotionally fulfilling and improve psychological well-being. It may work for some people but I guess for most people the monkey brain is too far from what we're doing right now.
- rantwasp 6y ago
  I sort-of disagree. Maybe for just browsing hn in general you’re right. That changes when you engage in a conversation with someone on a thread. also, i don’t really believe in the idea of the “monkey brain”. our brain is both “hardware” and “software”. The tooling we are using is an extension of our brain.

roastytoasty 6y ago

This data makes me sad just looking at the parents, children, and coworker lines. This isn't how it should be...

watwut 6y ago
When frequent contact with parents is stigmatized after certain age, which it is in USA, then old people get lonely as they age and their contact with children will go down ...
momento 6y ago
>This isn't how it should be... What makes you say that?
- tacocataco 6y ago
  Humans are naturally social creatures. I wonder if this graph is missing a data point of time spent with strangers. (caregivers and the like)
  - jarito 6y ago
    In many situations (daycare, elder care) the caregivers are by no means strangers. My 2 year old spends as much or more time with her daycare teachers and classmates than she does with my wife and I. They love her and she loves them. Just because they aren't blood doesn't mean they don't play a huge part in her day to day experience and growth. In fact, they play a much larger part in her world than her grandparents or other family that she only sees several times a year. It feels to easy to dismiss these folks as 'not as good as family' when, at least in my experience, they are much more than just paid baby sitters.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Think of the people you really like, respect, or care about. Now think about the people you actually spend time with.

wing-_-nuts 6y ago

I don't even want kids. I don't know why the 'time spent with one's children' line hurts so much, but it does. It sharply rises, before plummeting at age 40. That's got to be a jarring transition. No wonder so many folks have trouble with the 'empty nest' and mid-life crisis.

suprfnk 6y ago
> I don't even want kids. I don't know why the 'time spent with one's children' line hurts so much, but it does. Do you maybe not want kids on a rational level, but still want kids on an emotional level?
- mrlala 6y ago
  Probably this. Also, people are really bad at "knowing" what they want.
dcolkitt 6y ago
The Western nuclear family is a very unnatural social arrangement. Anthropologists have found that in most hunter-gatherers, the average infant is held at one point or another by 30+ people in a typical day. The nuclear family has the twin downsides of putting tons of stress on parents of young kids, who shoulder the entire childcare burden, and deprives a lot of grandparents, aunts, cousins, and others of meaningful childcare time. In the industrialized West, for most people it's either all babies all the time, or no babies whatsoever. Both extremes are suboptimal relative to the environment humans evolved for.
- leesalminen 6y ago
  I’m the parent of a young child and I definitely feel some sort of internal pressure to be all babies all the time. I feel pretty guilty leaving him with anyone other than my wife. All I can think to myself is whether what I’m doing is really worth it compared to spending time with the baby.
  - 6y ago

ryanmarsh 6y ago

FTA: Older people spend more time alone, but this doesn’t necessarily mean they’re lonely Why bother saying this? We know it’s not true.

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
> We know it’s not true. I'm 58, and spend a lot of time alone, but I am definitely not lonely. It's by choice. I am quite comfortable in my own company; which was not the case, when I was younger. I won't go into the nitty-gritty, but there's a lot of unusual circumstances in my life. I know that the life I lead is pretty different from most folks. But I would not be comfortable assuming that something "isn't true," simply because it doesn't apply to me.

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago

I wonder what are the strategies folks can adopt to see that they don't become victims of loneliness.

read_if_gay_ 6y ago
I think it’s just a matter of being proactive with your social life. Take and create opportunities to meet people.
Xophmeister 6y ago
Finding comfort in solitude... Don't ask me how -- I haven't figured it out yet -- but I understand it's a thing.
baron_harkonnen 6y ago
Somewhat ironically, I think the important thing here is to learn to be more comfortable spending time alone. The pandemic has surprised me with both how much people are unable to just be alone for awhile, and related to this, how much they have a difficult time being with partners and family without larger social distractions. Being able to be alone, at least in my experience, helps you to be with other people in a sincerely intimate way. People that struggle the most with their partners during the pandemic seem to be people who need socialization to distract from their own relationship problems. If two people can be "alone together" in a room for awhile, they can still refresh, and restore their energy. This allows them to be more supportive and close when they need socialization because they aren't exhausted. Loneliness is being forced to deal with your fear of being alone, without every taking the time to be comfortable being alone.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  I don't know if this is the sort of thing most people can use mental jiu jitsu to dodge out of. Social connection is a drive most might not be able to satisfy without actual social connection.
  - baron_harkonnen 6y ago

mirekrusin 6y ago

Missing time spent with computer.

chinhodado 6y ago

I wonder how this data changes in Asian countries. I would expect the end section (time spend in later years) to be vastly different, although that may be changing.

burlesona 6y ago

The thing that seems crazy to me is how much time alone increases with age. There are many many reasons for it, but one thing I think is especially sad is how much this is a consequence of our built environment. If you live in a village with multiple generations of a family around, it’s much easier for grandparents to be involved day too day in helping with little things in the village, especially keeping an eye on the kids roaming around. This is also true in the more traditional urban neighborhoods with walking-oriented life (safety from cars) and a wide mix of housing types etc. But (to varying degrees) most of the new construction around the world since WW2 has been oriented around driving and separation of land uses, and as a result when you age you end up living in a nice little garden home far removed from any day to day life going on. And once it gets hard for you to drive... then you really end up spending a ton of time alone. I don’t think there’s an easy fix for this, and that makes me sad.

tcbawo 6y ago
As the younger people alive today get older, they are more likely to remain connected with technology and spend more time socially with digital experiences (playing video games with friends, etc.). Hopefully, this will help offset loneliness that might accompany decreased mobility.
- torgian 6y ago
  Unfortunately this is a poor substitute for real physical connection with other people.
  - kenjackson 6y ago
    Is it that poor? During the pandemic my son has stayed in touch with his friends on the phone in these big group chats and smaller chats as well. I’m amazed at how natural it has become for them. They talk, gossip, play games (Roblox, Fortnite, nba 2k), and even watch YouTube and TikTok together. I think the model they created will persist into post Covid, with the addition of physical connection.

tristor 6y ago

I think it'd be interesting to see this data split by gender as well as by age cohort. I think we'd find that men juncture towards spending time alone sooner than women, and that they start out with a higher level of being alone. Those are just my assumptions though.

inanutshellus 6y ago
I'm also surprised they didn't call out gender. From everything I've read, men are increasingly isolated as they age, whereas women tend to cluster together. This also has been linked to higher-by-gender suicides for isolated men. <chagrin>Granted, I guess if you're dead you don't have to worry about showing up in the list and skewing the graph inconveniently.</chagrin>
war1025 6y ago
> I think we'd find that men juncture towards spending time alone sooner than women This is interesting to me because my dad was far more social while I was growing up than my mom ever was. I feel like I am also much more social than my wife is. I guess there may be trends by gender, but I'd guess it's not nearly so clear cut.

_qulr 6y ago

What I find interesting is time spent with coworkers. It's about equal to time spent with partner throughout most of adulthood, and it's significantly higher than time spent with friends. Unsurprisingly, time spent with coworkers drops precipitously at retirement age, but perhaps surprisingly, time spent with friends does not then increase to compensate. A lot of people in the comments are talking about children, but coworkers seem pretty crucial according to the charts.

hindsightbias 6y ago
The post-Covid remote utopia so many seem to be excited about is going to be hard for a lot of workers. Work, lunch, happy hour, bowling, league sports. Now they all have is Slack.
- intotheabyss 6y ago
  What's wrong with spending less time with co-workers? These are people you have to spend time with, regardless if you like them or not. I would personally much rather not spend time with people I didn't choose to spend time with.
  - Kalium 6y ago
    I think it may perhaps not be a question of "right" or "wrong". It will probably be a jarring change for many people as it affects major chunks of their regular social contact.
  - hindsightbias 6y ago
    IMO, most people aren‘t very good at building their own tribes outside of church, school and work. Building bubbles of “Like” only is probably not an optimal societal outcome either.
  - bradlys 6y ago
    > I would personally much rather not spend time with people I didn't choose to spend time with. Most friends are made this way. School as an example.

grumple 6y ago

Interesting. Totally anecdotal here, but here are my thoughts: As I get older, I see less value in friendships, mostly because I realize that many of my friendships didn't serve me and added a lot of stress to my life (and distracted from time that could have been spent on career / legacy). Meanwhile, time invested in my personal life, hobbies, and career pays off in spades - spending a few months getting better at algorithms helped me double my wages with my next job jump. It is interesting how social we are with friends at a young age, then most decide on a constant - but low - amount of time spent with friends.

rochak 6y ago
Huh. My experience has been the opposite. I used to just focus on my skills but that ended up with me doing things on my own and not getting to enjoy the things I thought I would. With time, I noticed this and have started spending time with other people to look at things from their perspective and experience new things. This has been a better experience for me.
rm445 6y ago
I don't know how old you are, but based on the comment it seems likely you haven't travelled all the way along the journey yet. People can be retired and alone a long time - it seems such a potentially lonely existence that it's worth taking some actions earlier in life to reduce the possibility. I don't know whether the best way would be cultivating friendships or focusing on family.
throwmylifawy 6y ago
Yeah I agree, it is funny hearing younger people claim that all of their friends are their best friends and as they get older their relationships dwindle. I suspect that it is crucial for young people to have more relationships in order to socialize them during early development. Once you hit your 40's having too many relationships becomes a burden.
- t-writescode 6y ago
  And yet so many people on the internet mourn the difficulty of acquiring friends in their 30s, so perhaps having too many relationships is a good problem to have, given how hard it is to find someone.

crispyporkbites 6y ago

As someone who loves being alone, this is great news!

belly_joe 6y ago
Heh, same. All I have to do is wait 30 years and everyone will stop bothering me!

gen220 6y ago

The underlying data here is, of course, a distribution (each with its own distinct shape). In this case, I suspect that the "average" statistic is not the best representative of that distribution. For instance, "children" is definitely a bimodal distribution. There are many people in life who never have children, and therefore drag down the average for all those who do have children. I suspect that, in reality, there are many modes for each of these dimensions, at each point in time. I think seeing the modes would be more interesting than the averages. If you believe in free will, you can probably choose which mode you'll end up closest to. You certainly aren't doomed to be in some statistically-unlikely valley in-between. There's hope you won't die alone, in spite of what the picture painted by the average might say.

throwaway2245 6y ago
Yes - I also didn't found the averages hard to interpret and not super full of insight. Presumably a lot of people spend 6-10 hours with their coworkers, and a lot of people spend 0 hours; a lot of people spend 8+ hours with their children, and a lot of people spend 0 hours, and pretty much the same for all of those categories. I'd have found a few 'typical' people in each age group more interesting. This is harder to calculate but maybe k-means clustering would be a good solution.
bcherny 6y ago
This is a great point. Can anyone find a link to the raw dataset? Happy to whip up a better visualization.
- gen220 6y ago
  Looks like the data source is here: https://www.bls.gov/tus/datafiles-0319.htm https://www.bls.gov/tus/datafiles-0319.htm It's not a super easy to use format, but it should be fun to extract some more useful data out of it. For what it's worth, the sample size here is very small. It is hard to believe that it's representative of the distribution. This link [1] suggests the data come from 210k interviews conducted over 16 years (13ish thousand per year). And the data is longitudinal (so over those 16 years, many of the interviewees are the same person). Even if every interviewee was unique, this would represent <0.0001 (or less than .01 percent) of the ~240m americans in 2003 who were over the age of 20. [1]: https://www.bls.gov/tus/atussummary.pdf https://www.bls.gov/tus/atussummary.pdf

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago

I’m most surprised by the time with friends. I expected it to peak later and be higher. I wonder whether it counts roommates. I know that spending less time with friends has been a particularly difficult aspect of aging for me, and I expect similar for many people.

kill-procrustes 6y ago
I was just discussing this thread with a friend of mine and we agreed on the same thing. Taleb has a line about college being the closest thing to a natural social state in the Western world. I think our brains feel comfortable in some sort of regular, persistent social milieu, particularly one formed by close friends/family. We expect some sort of tribe to be around us. That doesn't mean some of us aren't introverts—I definitely am one—but as I get older the absence of my friend group constantly there in the background is really painful.

jvanderbot 6y ago

I cannot wait until the nursing home lan parties. During pandemic I have rekindled relationships with 2-3 friends, some out of state, and we've played games at least 2x a week. The opportunity for casual interaction (via discord) while focusing on another task (the challenging game), perfectly mimics the environment to build deep longlasting relationships through shared struggle, trust building, communication, feedback, and so on.

jjice 6y ago
I had this experience as well. Two friends of mine and I hop on Discord and watch a few episodes of a show or a movie once or twice a week. It's been fantastic, especially earlier in the pandemic when I was in a distant city.
- dorkwood 6y ago
  What do you use to watch the tv show? One person share's their screen?
ragazzina 6y ago
>I cannot wait until the nursing home lan parties. I've seen this sentiment a lot on the internet, but after having visited many nursing homes, I don't think it will ever happen. Maybe nursing homes are different in the US, maybe I've seen the wrong kind of nursing home.
- rement 6y ago
  I would guess nursing homes haven't developed LAN parties because the people who grew up doing LAN parties are currently in their 30s and 40s. Not quite nursing home age yet.
  - jvanderbot 6y ago
    Yes, bridge and board games and television dominate. Because those folks played bridge and board games and watched television.

durnygbur 6y ago

TIL I could easily be profiled as an >70 years old American. The society I live in is not particularly outgoing, friendly, outdoorsy, rich, or accommodating.

br_hue 6y ago

Sad data. In my opinion this is the result of a culture that optimizes for the wrong things in life. "Happiness is only real when shared.".

stronglikedan 6y ago
No way. I've demonstrably proven to myself that I'm happiest when I'm by myself. Social interactions are tedious, and draining, so I prefer to keep them to a minimum. I optimize for the right things in my life.
- br_hue 6y ago
  It's my perspective, but yeah, I shouldn't have generalized. Different people have different preferences, needs and opinions.
- typhon04 6y ago
  Even so, what do you do in that time? Isn't it providing some service or building a product for people... and a greater purpose? I doubt you are a hermit doing as little social interactions just to get by and only consuming without producing anything. If so... what is the meaning of it all?
  - yakubin 6y ago
    > and a greater purpose? This part is presumptuous. "Greater" for whom? > If so... what is the meaning of it all? And what is the meaning of it all in the alternative? It's up to you. Maybe you don't need one. Maybe this question is meaningless.
    - throwaway98797 6y ago
      With you there. All will be forgotten. It is freeing to know that.
  - throwaway98797 6y ago
    1. Cooking your own meals daily (2 hours) 2. Gym (2 hours with commute) 3. Midday nap (30 min) 4. Eating meals, including slowly drinking coffee (2 hours) 5. Reading (2 hours) 6. YouTube (2 hours) 7. Self reflection (1 hour) This is 11.5 hours so far of the 16 of non sleep time. This does not include any income earning activities, which I still spend time on. I also go on long walks and think. I’m not saying this is ideal, but it works for me right now.

xwdv 6y ago

This puts me more at ease about choosing to have children later in life. If I wait till late 30s, perhaps then I could push the curve a bit farther toward the end of my useful life, and spend less time alone.

souprock 6y ago
Having kids later in life is a good idea, but don't forget to also have children earlier in life. That may bring you great grand children and beyond.
- xwdv 6y ago
  Too late for that, already in early thirties. Aren’t great grand children overrated anyway? My grandmother was a great grandmother and aside from the early toddler years the kids didn’t really give a fuck tbh. We don’t live in a society where a great elder is looked upon with any kind of prestige, so why aspire to it? Hell, not even most adult children care. They’d rather shovel you off somewhere where they don’t have to deal with your old people problems or antiquated views. The only thing that will keep you respected in old age is your lucidity, wealth and power, and a sharp wit. Spending more time with your young children in late life could help cultivate those things out of necessity.
- Plestor 6y ago
  Seems like "laminar flow" would be a possible explanation here... Fluid flow near surfaces becomes a near zero vector.

darkwizard42 6y ago

This article makes me think of a waitbutwhy post about how little time you have left with certain cohorts of your life: https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html Worth reading and of course feels different with how much things have changed in the last 10 months

lambda_obrien 6y ago

I'm 38, and very lonely lately (not just COVID) and seeing that "time spent alone" increases starting at age 38 really makes me depressed.

ketzo 6y ago
Hey, it's an average -- be the exception! My mom has an incredibly close circle of friends, none of whom knew each other before they were 45.

strogonoff 6y ago

Starting from about age 20, most of a given day an average American spends alone (except for those who have kids, for whom for a few years the situation is different). Would be very interesting to find statistics obtained by similar methods for others locations.

ridaj 6y ago

Related: https://www.unm.edu/~reubenjthomas/xkcdHowFriendsMeet.jpg https://www.unm.edu/~reubenjthomas/xkcdHowFriendsMeet.jpg Paper: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0731121419828399 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07311214198283...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

NikolaNovak 6y ago

I find it fascinating that time with children goes up significantly while time alone stays steady 20s to 40s... that in no way mimics my life :D I've had a ton of "quality me time" when single; and a fair amount once I got married; and have absolutely zero since we got the little ones :)

tmearnest 6y ago

The end of time spent with partner curve makes me sad. It’s interesting how easy it is to read a story into this plot.

pk455 6y ago

I'd love to see this data but for men vs women

swayvil 6y ago

FTA (and I paraphrase) Old people are alone because their friends (also old) are dead. Old people are alone but they aren't lonely. ... bit of spin there

yawaramin 6y ago
Was just thinking that the article carefully talks about 'loneliness' and skirts around 'happiness'. It points to another article[1] that claims to show that being alone doesn't necessarily mean being lonely--but that article fails to make a case for that: - First of all, in absolute numbers it shows that a lot of older people in developed countries are lonely. It may not be a majority of people but that's kinda like saying 'don't worry, covid has a mortality rate of just 1%'. - Then the article tries to show that people in these countries self-report that they have social support--that they have someone who can help them if they get in trouble--but it fails to show the breakdown of those who have social support by age, which is kind of the critical question here: do older people have social support? - Then, the article tries to show that there's not much correlation between being alone and being lonely--but it again fails to show whether this is true for older people specifically, or just for the aggregate sample. - Then it talks about 'aggregate' statistics again, instead of focusing on older people. There seems to be quite a lot of bending over backwards trying to convince us that older people are not lonely, but no cogent argument. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/lonely-not-alone https://ourworldindata.org/lonely-not-alone

varjag 6y ago

Just 0.55% 18y.o. live alone in America? When do you folks start with college?

ekianjo 6y ago

> This is based on averages from surveys spanning 2009 to 2019. That's a bad source in a way: the situation of having widespread connected devices since early 2010s has definitely changed the situation for many people. A single point in time would be a lot more reliable.

anonu 6y ago

I'd love to see how that graph in the article changes over time. Specifically the older cohort and how much alone time they spent. I would guess that part of the graph has been steadily increasing over the years as well.

sgregnt 6y ago

What is the standard deviation on these plots? It is such a pity that standard deviation is not shown, it could add so much more to the plots.

intrasight 6y ago

As I reach the tail end of my career, I am starting to think about what retirement will look like, and who it'll be spent with. I have been researching the co-living model. I am glad to see there are more co-living developments going up.

aaccount 6y ago

Is the meant to be 'How Americans' ?

rahulpadalkar 6y ago

Is it just me or are the line colors in the chart way to similar to distinguish?

mymythisisthis 6y ago

"If a man does not make new acquaintance as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, Sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair." Samuel Johnson