A long read last week from The Atlantic offered this viral headline – Why Americans Stopped Hanging Out. Around the same time, I came across a leisure study from a bunch of marketers about how people are spending less time at bars and pubs, even as they spend more time running marathons. All of it seems to point to yet another depressing statistic about why we’re unlikely to emerge from our pandemic of loneliness anytime soon.
The more disturbing element of these stories is that the erosion of moments for us to hang out may be also leading to a crisis of “social fitness” – a term increasingly being used by researchers and business coaches alike to describe the habit of getting along with and being around more people.
You can name any social trend from the rise of virtual work to the increase of anxiety among young people and they all point to the fact that this crisis is real. What’s the solution? According to this article, it might start with hanging out more. Actually, that could pretty much solve the problem.