A new analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Time Use Survey found that Americans are spending more time alone at home than ever — and that the amount of time has been increasing since 2003.
According to The New York Times, the analysis “shows that time spent at home increased by 1 hour 39 minutes a day, or 10 percent, from 2003 through 2022.”
This trend was hastened by the COVID-19 pandemic, but it clearly didn’t start then, the article noted. While working from home rose to 29% of all work activity in 2022, it increased from 13% to 17% between 2003 and 2019.
According to The New York Times, “Other activities followed a similar track — a gradual rise over years followed by a spike during the pandemic that was still felt sharply in the first two months of 2022.”
Americans are becoming more isolated
According to the analysis, activities that Americans once did mostly outside their homes — leisure, education, eating and drinking, education, sports and exercise, work and religion — have shifted and increasingly take place at home.
- The share of eating and drinking time spent at home rose three percentage points from 2003 to 2019, and then nine percentage points in 2022.
- The share of time socializing and “taking part in leisure activity” that was spent at home increased two percentage points from 2003 to 2019 and six percentage points in 2022.
- The share of time participating in religious activities that was spent at home increased 17 percentage points from 2003 to 2018 and 26 percentage points in 2022.
Each activity saw a significant shift in the percentage at home in 2022, but the data indicates that it was already trending upwards before the pandemic.
While spending more time at home could mean more time with family, the U.S. Census Bureau study found that — while time with family at home has slightly increased — most Americans are spending their time at home alone.
According to The New York Times, “For each additional hour spent at home, people spent an additional 7.4 minutes with family and 21 minutes alone, but five fewer minutes with friends.”
Even after COVID-19 restrictions lifted, our social lives stayed relatively the same — and pretty isolated.
According to Bloomberg, “The data also show Americans’ social lives haven’t bounced back in a measurable way from 2022 or even 2021.”
Additionally, the amount of hours per week adults spend socializing has dropped. In 2003, adults spent 5.5 hours a week socializing. That number dropped to 4.5 in 2019, according to Bloomberg.
In 2021, that number dropped again to four hours a week — unsurprising, considering 2021 was the height of the pandemic. But that number stayed the same in 2023.
Backing up the data from the the U.S. Census Bureau, a 2024 study from the American Psychiatric Association found that “one in three Americans feels lonely every week” — and a surprising “43% of American adults said their levels of loneliness had not changed” since before the pandemic.
In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General declared that we were in an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.”
The Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory found that loneliness will “increase the risk for premature death by 26% and 29% respectively,” noting that the “mortality impact” of isolation equated to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
The loneliness crisis has hit all Americans, but young adults, teens and men have felt its negative effects more acutely, according to The Atlantic.
Why are Americans spending more alone?
One of the most notable technological changes between 2003 and 2019, where a bulk of the above data comes from, is the rise of smartphones.
The development of smartphones is likely one of the reasons why Americans are spending more time alone, Derek Thompson wrote for The Atlantic. “Americans are spending less time with other people because they’re spending more time with their screens — televisions and phones,” he argued.
Another factor in the rise in alone time is the decline of community organizations. As Thompson noted, church attendance is dwindling, more people are working from home and third spaces, such as community centers, aren’t as popular as they were 20 or 30 years ago.
The phenomenon could also be explained by Americans having less free time — “but the data say this can’t be the whole story,” Thompson wrote. Research from Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Research Department found that alone time among “low-income, nonwhite individuals” has increased over the years.
Thompson concluded, “Face-to-face rituals and customs are pulling on our time less, and face-to-screen technologies are pulling on our attention more. The inevitable result is a hang-out depression.”
What’s the solution?
Thompson suggested that Americans should start working on their “social fitness.” “We should care for our relationships as we’d care for our body,” he wrote.
Research suggests that, while Americans have friends, they lack emotional closeness. A study from July found that 40% of those polled wished they were closer emotionally and “a similar number wished they had more time to spend with their friends,” according to The Atlantic.
This indicates that, as Natalie Pennington, co-author of the study, told The Atlantic, Americans are experiencing “a struggle to figure out how to communicate and connect and make time for” friends.
How can Americans improve their social fitness and foster emotional closeness with the friends they do have? As Jancee Dunn wrote for The New York Times, “Adults need to relax and do nothing together, just like kids do.”
According to Dunn, doing nothing of consequence with adult friends — she wrote that she’s joined friends for dog walks, grocery shopping and more — can be beneficial.
“When you’re a kid with limited funds and modes of transport, hanging out with friends feels natural,” Dunn wrote. But when we reach adulthood, we become used to “doing scheduled activities with one another.”
Hanging out can build the emotional intimacy that Americans crave now more than ever, as Sheila Liming, author of “Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time,” told The New York Times.
Similarly, Anna Goldfarb, author of “Modern Friendship,” told The Atlantic that you can get closer to your friends “by taking an interest in things they care about, and asking to hang out for small, specific amounts of time.”
According to the Atlantic, “Maintaining friendships in this atomized new world might require ratcheting down expectations.”
You might find smaller interactions — chatting over a cup of tea or keeping a friend company while they’re doing the laundry, for example — more fulfilling, anyway. Without the distractions of productive hangouts or our screens, what other choice do you have than to cultivate emotional intimacy?