Good news, America: you're not antisocial. You're just extremely loyal to your couch.
A new study reported by the New York Post finds Americans spend about 4% of their nights out with friends, and that between the early 2000s and 2024 the total time we expect to spend with friends each week fell by more than half. Somewhere a bowling alley just filed for emotional bankruptcy.
Four percent. That's roughly one night every three and a half weeks, which is also how often the average adult remembers they have a gym membership. The other 96% is spent on the sofa, phone in hand, typing "this" under a stranger's post and calling it community.
Alley Owens has a theory, and it is not complicated. In 2004 you went out with friends because the alternative was watching whatever was on channel 7. Now the alternative is 900 streaming services, DoorDash, and a feed that lets you yell at someone in Belgium about tariffs. Why meet your buddy for wings when you can pay $38 to have cold wings delivered by a guy named Brayden who leaves them at the wrong door?
And let's be honest about who drove this. The culture spent a decade telling everyone that every opinion is "harmful," every joke is "problematic," and every dinner party is a minefield where Uncle Dave might say the wrong pronoun. Then everyone acts shocked that people stopped showing up. You turned Thanksgiving into a deposition and wonder why nobody RSVPs.
Meanwhile the experts will no doubt prescribe a solution. Expect a federal Office of Friendship, a $2 billion grant program for "social connectivity hubs," and an app that matches lonely people with other lonely people so they can both cancel at the last minute. The app will be called Plans and it will have a 4% success rate, because of course it will.
Here at The Demorat we have a simpler fix. Text a friend. Go get a beer. Talk about something other than politics for twenty minutes, then talk about politics for three hours like normal Americans. Make fun of each other to your faces instead of in group chats. That's how friendships worked for 240 years.
Until then, the American social calendar looks like this: Monday, couch. Tuesday, couch. Wednesday, argue with a bot. Thursday, couch, but with a candle so it feels like an outing. Friday, maybe go out. Never mind, it's raining.
See you in about 25 days, America. Bring snacks.
The Demorat is satire. This article is a comedy roast based on real news reports; quotes and scenarios beyond the cited facts are invented for laughs.
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