That was my first intuition, although when I thought about it a bit I realized that in my life the lack of parties was a trend I was observing for several years

That was my first intuition, although when I thought about it a bit I realized that in my life the lack of parties was a trend I was observing for several years before the pandemic. I kind of attributed it to my department/institution (or in a few limited cases, even to myself) but this post has me wondering if there's sort of a broader trend. It's probably impossible to know in the absence of some kind of hard data or compelling surveys, though. I don't think it's an age thing per se, because if anything my older colleagues seemed to persist with parties, although there might be some kind of generational age thing, in that my younger colleagues didn't seem to pick that habit up.