On an average day, one in 10 young adults now has no in-person contact
Only occasionally in my work do I come across a statistic so astonishing that it stops me in my tracks. Earlier this week was one of those times.
While exploring data from the American Time Use Survey, which draws on detailed diaries to track how and with whom people spend every minute of a randomly selected day, I came across the following: on an average day in 2023, one in 10 young Americans aged between 23 and 29 did not spend a single minute interacting face to face with another person.
Much has been written about the decline in socialising among young people over recent years, but these analyses — including my own — have tended to focus on societal averages. Doing so misses a critical part of this story: whether we’re talking about the long shadow of pandemic lockdowns, the increasingly enthralling digital environment or intensifying academic pressure, anti-socialising forces have had radically different effects on different young people.
Waiting for an analysis of the long term costs of taxpayer supported Dane County Madison Public Health “mandates”
