Wait, you don't want to hang out?

We're not talking as much. Now we're not hanging out, either.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a study finding that Americans are speaking about 120,000 fewer words a year than we used to — roughly the word count of an entire novel, gone every single year, compared to 14 years earlier.

I’ve been thinking about this one a lot.

Partly because there’s so much research showing that relationships are what lead to a happy, successful life. And partly because I’m the kind of person who will talk to anyone for hours, even a perfect stranger.

Now there’s another piece of data, and it points in the same direction.

According to a new analysis from Axios, drawing on the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey, Americans are spending less time socializing than we did 20 years ago — and the decline shows up in every single age group, from teenagers to retirees.

The numbers:

• Average time spent socializing per day has dropped from 45 minutes to 35 minutes over the past two decades.

• The steepest decline is among the young. Fifteen- to 24-year-olds went from an hour a day spent hanging out with other people to 35 minutes.

Put the two studies side by side, and the picture gets clearer. We’re not just talking less. We’re spending less time in the room with each other in the first place.

A lot of the reasons are familiar.

We’re on our phones instead of in front of each other. Teenagers spend an average of 4.8 hours a day on apps like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat, according to Gallup.

Remote work, which exploded during the pandemic, has stuck around. It’s kept more of us out of offices—and off the sidewalks and trains that used to force us into contact with other humans.

Homes have gotten bigger and more comfortable. Every restaurant is on a delivery app now. You can eat well without ever having to talk to anyone.

One thing I hadn’t fully considered until I read the Axios piece is that many of the places people used to gather are disappearing too.

A 2025 report from University of Colorado Boulder researchers found widespread closures of hangout spots of every kind over the past decade — libraries, coffee shops, museums. Churches are closing at unprecedented rates too.

So even when people want to be around other people, there are fewer places built for exactly that purpose.

Writer Derek Thompson called this “the Anti-Social Century” in The Atlantic last year (h/t Erica Pandey).

Nobody decided to build a quieter, more solitary version of American life. It happened through a hundred small conveniences, each one reasonable on its own.

Working from home saves a commute. Delivery saves a trip. Headphones make public spaces less awkward. Add them all up over 20 years and you get 10 fewer minutes of socializing a day, every day, for everyone.

Ten minutes doesn’t sound like much until you multiply it out the way I did with the missing words. Ten fewer minutes a day is over 60 hours a year — more than a full workweek of conversation and connection that used to just happen, and now doesn’t.

The research on weak ties — those brief, low-stakes interactions with near-strangers — already tells us those small exchanges matter more to our happiness than most of us assume.

So if both the words and the minutes are disappearing from our days, maybe the answer is not especially mysterious.

Scroll less, talk more. Better yet, do it in person.

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Other things worth knowing …

• AP: The United States conducted a new round of airstrikes against Iran on Monday after announcing the death of another American service member. Iran responded by launching attacks on American allies Kuwait and Bahrain, home of the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet. The interim deal signed last month has crumbled and shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has largely stalled. As fighting intensifies, both sides have targeted civilian infrastructure relied on by millions of people.

• NYT via ABC News: Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened state election officials on Friday with prison time if they don't comply with the Trump administration's demands to "scrub" their voter rolls ahead of November's midterms. Mullin's threats followed a primetime address by Trump resurrecting debunked claims of fraud in the 2020 election.

• AP: Influencer brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate were arrested in Miami to face rape and sex trafficking charges in the United Kingdom. Prosecutors said the new charges relate to four new victims; the brothers are already charged with rape, bodily harm, human trafficking and controlling prostitution relating to three other alleged victims in the U.K. between 2012 and 2015. Their lawyer called the charges "filth and slander."

• WSJ via US News: The IRS's acting chief counsel, Kenneth Kies, was forced out after warning White House officials that their requests would violate a federal law prohibiting the president and other officials from ordering the IRS to conduct or terminate audits of specific taxpayers.

• CBS News: Defaults on student loans have surged to record levels across the United States, with around 9.5 million people — 1 in 5 federal student loan borrowers — now more than nine months behind on their payments.

• AP: Cuba's iconic vintage cars have all but disappeared, replaced by small electric tricycles — most of them made in China — as the primary means of transportation for hundreds of thousands of Cubans grappling with a prolonged fuel crisis. Many have outfitted the vehicles with solar panels, allowing them to recharge without relying on the island's strained power grid.

• Newsweek via MSN: Garbage trucks could soon do more than collect trash. Officials in several communities are considering equipping sanitation trucks with AI-powered cameras to photograph properties during normal collection routes, flagging issues such as overgrown lawns, peeling paint, and illegal dumping for city staff to review before taking enforcement action.

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Thanks for reading. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments.