Great article on increasing solitude of our societies, in this case US but same probably in EU to a lesser extent: "Derek Thompson's essay "You Are No Longer Invited to Dinner" argues that Americans have largely stopped having people over. The headline stat comes from combining the old DDB Needham Life Style surveys Robert Putnam used in *Bowling Alone* with a new replication by Data For Progress. The share of Americans who host friends or family at home at least monthly fell from 42% in 1975 to 12% in 2026, roughly a 70% drop. Most other forms of socializing also fell by double digits over the last 30 years, including cards, bars, sporting events, and volunteering. The decline in hosting was steeper than the much-discussed drop in church attendance. He rules out two comforting explanations. People haven't just moved dinners to restaurants, since solo dining is rising and face-to-face socializing is down overall. They also haven't replaced parties with other social activities. Exercise and travel are up, but exercise is mostly solitary, and time spent at home has jumped sharply since the 2010s. His explanations: 1. Harried dual-earner households. As societies get richer, leisure starts to feel like work, and planning a dinner party is basically unpaid project management. Women historically ran the family social calendar. When they moved into paid work, men didn't take over that job. He admits this can't be the whole story, because total leisure time has actually increased. 2. Intensive parenting. Parents, especially fathers, now spend far more time with their kids, and that time comes out of evenings that used to go to hosting adults. 3. Shrinking friend networks. Close friendships are declining, most sharply among people without college degrees, so hosting is becoming a luxury good. People who never host skew toward independents and non-graduates. He speculates that weaker social ties may lead to weaker party attachment, rather than the other way around. 4. Home is too comfortable. Americans spent almost two extra hours a day at home between 2003 and 2022, much of it on screens and short-form video. His closing idea is a "Lump of Leisure" theory, a twist on the Lump of Labor fallacy. Technology hasn't made human work unnecessary, but it has made other people less necessary for fun. Social leisure turns out to be finite and easy to displace. He frames this as a coordination failure rather than a personal one: a dinner party requires schedules, cleaning, food, allergies, and the risk of a dull evening, while TikTok asks nothing of you. A footnote adds that if everyone gets a bit busier, the difficulty of coordinating a get-together rises multiplicatively, so small increases in individual busyness could produce large drops in socializing overall." derekthompson.org/p/the-deat…