It's not just you: Americans are still not hanging out

That's especially true for teens and young adults. Can parents help?

In the deep, dark early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, all many of us wanted was to see each other in person again. If only we had vaccines. If only it was safe.

A year later, we had those vaccines, and by 2023 the worst of the pandemic was squarely in the rear-view mirror: Schools were back in-person full-time, conferences had returned, face masks were rarely seen any more in the U.S., and the COVID death rate finally fell for good. By 2024, most of us thought about social distancing only when we spotted the occasional “stay 6 feet apart” sign someone hadn’t yet gotten around to removing.

Finally, we could get back to socializing with each other in person. But did we?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently released the 2024 data from the American Time Use Survey, which – as the name suggests -- has tracked how U.S. residents use their time since 2003. That data shows that socializing with other people in person was on a decades-long decline even before the pandemic, especially among young people (ages 15 to 25), where it plummeted from 61 minutes a day in 2003 to 39 minutes a day in 2019. As Derek Thompson put it, Americans – particularly the young -- stopped hanging out.

Then came the pandemic. The survey wasn’t fielded in 2020, but we can compare 2019 (before COVID) to 2021, a time of high case numbers when many events were still cancelled. Not surprisingly, in-person socializing dropped between 2019 and 2021, though by only 4 minutes a day – not as much as you might think.

More surprising: Our social lives never fully came back. The average American spent 38 minutes a day socializing in 2019 and 35 minutes in 2024 (see figure). Four years after the first COVID cases hit the U.S., our social muscles were still not at full strength. As a friend of mine put it, “We stopped having friends over during the pandemic – and then it was like we forgot how to do it.”