Social life · Time use
Warm Humanist Editorial
Young adults spend about 70% less time with friends than in 2003.
For 15-to-24-year-olds, in-person time with friends fell from about 150 minutes a day in 2003 to about 40 in 2020. The time alone went up to meet it.
The finding
Among 15-to-24-year-olds, in-person time with friends fell from about 150 minutes a day in 2003 to about 40 in 2020, an almost 70% drop, while average time spent alone rose to meet it.
The breakdown
- 1The numbers are from the U.S. Surgeon General's 2023 advisory, built on the Bureau of Labor Statistics' American Time Use Survey. People write down what they actually did each day, so this is measured behavior, not a poll about how lonely you feel.
- 2It is not just the young. Across all adults, daily time with friends fell from about 60 minutes in 2003 to 20 in 2020. Over the same years, time spent alone rose from 4h45m a day to 5h33m. One line fell, the other climbed to meet it.
- 32020 makes the drop look sharper, and the pandemic is real. But the slide was already there in 2019, before anyone had heard of COVID. The trend is older than the lockdowns.
- 4I read this as a supply problem, not a willpower problem. A lot of the cheap places to just run into people closed. The fix is the boring one: build more reasons to be in the same room. What's your third place?
How it's built
- 1Source the figures from the U.S. Surgeon General's 2023 advisory, which plots them from the BLS American Time Use Survey (ATUS), a diary study where respondents log how they spent the prior day.
- 2Hero line: average minutes/day with friends for ages 15-24, anchored at the advisory's points of ~150 (2003) and ~40 (2020).
- 3Companion line: average minutes/day spent alone for all adults, 285 (2003), 309 (2019), 333 (2020).
- 4The two lines use separate y-axes on purpose (tens of minutes vs hundreds). They are positioned to show direction and crossing, not to imply equal scale. Read each against its own labeled axis.
- 5Small-multiple uses the all-ages friends series (60 -> 20) to show young adults fell harder than the average.
Sources
Caveats
- —The two lines sit on separate y-axes (minutes with friends is in the tens, minutes alone is in the hundreds). They show direction and a crossing shape, not equal magnitudes. Each has its own labeled axis.
- —2020 is the COVID year, which deepens the drop. The decline was already visible in 2019, so the trend predates the pandemic, but the 2020 endpoint reads sharper than a normal year would.
- —ATUS is a time-diary, so it measures in-person, same-place time. It does not count calls, texts, or video, which softens but does not erase the picture.
- —The 15-24 figures are read from the advisory's chart and are approximate (~150 and ~40 min/day), not exact-to-the-minute values.
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