In the early 2000s, time with friends followed a familiar weekly rhythm in the US: steady evening gatherings after work, then larger peaks on Friday and Saturday nights. Neal Caren, a sociologist in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, found that pattern has thinned dramatically in an analysis built from the American Time Use Survey.
Expected weekly time with friends fell from roughly 350 minutes per week in 2003–2005 to about 170 minutes in 2022–2024. The decline amounts to more than half of the time Americans once expected to spend with friends.
Evenings show the change particularly clearly. Americans now spend just 4% of their evenings with their friends, Caren’s study found. Friday evening time with friends fell from 9% in 2003–2005 to 7% in 2017–2019, before reaching 4% during 2022–24. Saturday night social time fell from 12% in 2003–2005 to 7% in 2022–2024.
The steep fall in Friday night socialising began in the mid-2010s. Late-night gatherings have become especially rare, with socialising after midnight accounting for below 1% of Americans’ time.
The retreat extended across social life rather than one particular kind of outing. Time declined for socialising and social events, relaxing and watching TV with friends, arts and entertainment, sports and exercise, and other social activities.
Caren described a “homeward retreat” that was strongest among younger, more-educated and unmarried adults, with single adults affected disproportionately. More than 80% of the lost time with friends came from people who did not go out at all, the study found.
The trend began well before the isolation of the coronavirus pandemic and persisted after restrictions were lifted. The study does not identify the specific forces behind the shift from face-to-face time to screens.
Separate figures point to a changing balance in leisure. In 2025, Americans spent more time on games and computers than on face-to-face socialising for the first time. The average American aged 15 or over spent 37 minutes a day on games and computer use for leisure, compared with 35 on in-person socialising.
Other measures of communal life have also declined. The American Perspectives Survey found that the share of Americans with five or more close friends dropped by 25 points, from 63% in 1990 to 38% in 2021. Church attendance fell from 74% in 1995 to 54% in 2026, while the proportion of adults who had entertained people at home in the past year declined from 88% in 1995 to 67% in 2026.
Over the same period, internet use increased by 90 points from 1995 to 2026. The Surgeon General’s advisory says the mortality impact of social disconnection is “similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day”.
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