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“How We Spend Time Throughout Life” Seems Pretty Logical, No?
These charts come out often, but are we just endorsing the normative narrative of adulthood?
Charts like the one above come out often. This particular chart is trying to focus your attention on how 15- to 24-year-olds spend less time these days with friends, which probably implies they’re on their phones more. I get that narrative, and I think it’s true in a majority of cases, although many discussions about “THE PHONES!!!” lack nuance ultimately.
Each cohort in this chart is going down, which could speak to the “Friendship Recession” we sometimes speak of:
If you look at 35–64, which admittedly is a very wide (three-decade) cohort, the numbers have gone down since 2003, but not massively. The main thing in that cohort is that it’s the “child-raising” years, and honestly I do believe (and have been told by a few brave souls) that many people have children simply to get out of the social rat race, I.e. appearing at parties and gatherings. Children are the ultimate…
