
Who Americans spend their time with - hunglee2
https://www.theatlas.com/charts/HJFYm4uQ-
======
nopinsight
Longitudinal 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
I'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
Fwiw, 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.

~~~
icebraining
What kind of activities does your church organize?

~~~
brightball
Socially, the church itself doesn't do anything other than a big BBQ every
year. Other than that the churchwide events are all very much on-mission
(mission trips, charity work, youth activities).

Sunday school classes tend to be where the social aspects come from. We'll do
a day at the lake or a get together for a meal and some activity.

We've gotten together with one or two other couples to get dinner and do an
escape room, shoot targets at a guys farm, gotten the kids together to play.
Even got invited to a dueling piano bar, which caught me by surprise since I
assumed that would be frowned on. Turns out most grown adults are perfectly
content to go have a drink, just not many.

------
examancer
These 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.

~~~
rsp1984
I 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
Also, it should just be "hours per day" if I understand it correctly.

------
TheSpiceIsLife
Rigtheo, 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.

~~~
Noumenon72
_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._

I would expect them to buy more functionally useful goods, like televisions,
but fewer positional goods, like houses with lawns. Since the price of
manufactured goods is constantly being brought down by markets, but positional
goods by definition cannot be, I would expect the socially connected to spend
more. They have to drink in bars, not at home; they have to buy a car that
impresses, not one that drives; they have to buy a home to entertain in, not a
shipping container.

~~~
mclightning
As a person living alone, this is very true. I never noticed it before but
reading this, felt like reading about my own investment choices.

------
jkh1
Badly designed plots. What does the bottom axis represent ? fraction of the
population ? age ?

------
Simon_says
What 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
Age, in years. The source is noted at the bottom: "Data: American Times Use
Survey".

------
Nanite
A somewhat better article featuring this graph set:
[https://qz.com/1010901/the-data-prove-that-you-just-get-
more...](https://qz.com/1010901/the-data-prove-that-you-just-get-more-alone-
from-the-age-of-40-onward/)

------
wenc
The 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.

------
Kenji
I 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
It 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.

------
ddlatham
Would love to see this in a single stacked chart.

(Even though there can be some double counting when spending time with
multiple categories).

------
izzydata
I assume sleeping isn't counted.

~~~
quakenul
It is not: [https://qz.com/1010901/the-data-prove-that-you-just-get-
more...](https://qz.com/1010901/the-data-prove-that-you-just-get-more-alone-
from-the-age-of-40-onward/)

------
conqrr
They should have captured pets as well.

------
notadoc
Not exactly uplifting data.

------
aj7
What does the X-axis mean?

~~~
shaunlgs
Age. I thought it's percentage at first.

------
xcz
Bottom-right is sad.

------
VLM
Here'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.

------
woogiewonka
Alone and co-workers. Sad.

~~~
manmal
Do your co-workers count as friends? Then it's actually pretty good. If not -
that's a change you can make without even changing your lifestyle.

~~~
obstinate
Depends on the team, right? It was a major quality of life bump for me when I
recently transferred to a team with whose members I enjoy spending time.

