// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
You Are No Longer Invited to Dinner
Mid-century Americans knew how to throw a party, for better or worse. In some of the most famous titles of the 1950s and 1960s—Couples, by John Updike; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee; Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates—the drama (and martini-soaked melodrama) took place in middle-class living rooms.
The stories were fictional, but the setting was realistic. Until 1975, half of Americans said they entertained guests at their home every month.
But then something changed. Americans stopped throwing parties. Even more fundamentally, they stopped visiting each other. Between 1975 and 1998, the share of Americans who gave or attended a monthly dinner party declined by half. The share of Americans saying they never entertained people at home tripled. [See charts below] While cultural critics often bemoan the decline of organized religion, the dip in church attendance was downright modest compared to the collapse in hosting, according to data gathered by the DDB Needham Life Style survey.
In his 2000 book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam wrote that if these trends continued, the ancient practice of visiting with friends “might entirely disappear from American life in less than a generation.” Well, check your calendars. One generation and change later, Putnam’s prediction needs an update.
So, what’s the state of hosting in the 21st century?
To get an apples-to-apples answer to that question, the polling group Data For Progress replicated the DDB Needham Life Style surveys cited by Putnam. Fortunately, they were kind enough to exclusively share their findings with me. Unfortunately, the upshot is about as brutal as you’d imagine.
In the last 30 years, Americans have seen double-digit declines in practically every measure of socializing. They are less likely to play cards; attend a sporting event; go to the bar; volunteer; or work on a community project.
When it comes to hosting people at home, the declines are particularly stark. Since 1995, the share of Americans who say they’ve hosted guests or attended a dinner party has declined by about 20 percent—and that’s in addition to the whopping declines that Putnam bemoaned a quarter-century ago.
Combining the two surveys, we get this astonishing fact: The share of Americans who say they host friends or family at their home at least monthly has fallen from 42 percent in 1975 to 12 percent in 2026—a 70 percent collapse in a half-century.
So, what’s going on? Let’s first reject a few stories that don’t entirely fit the data.