Meet on the ground floor of QNC, on or near the gray slab benches at 7:20ish, and a regular will let everyone into a room in IQC for 7:30 pm. You can see the precise location on plus.codes. The benches are near the Ring Road entrance, and across the hall from an orange-tinted lab space.

As always, vegetarian snacks will be provided.

Activity

Last week we discussed Population Decline and the general consensus was we are losing people on every part of the friendship->dating->married->kids pipeline. This week is a follow up on that discussion focusing on friendship and dating, the struggles people are having, potential solutions, and if our society is in the midst of a loneliness epidemic.

Readings

1. We've Lost the Spaces That Foster Friendship (Psychology Today)
2. Young Americans spend much more time alone than they did fifteen years ago (OWID)
3. The Myth of the Loneliness Epidemic (Asterisk) 
4. Today's Young Adults Are in a Dating Recession (IFS) 
5. I Don't Buy Your "Dating Recession" (Slow Boring) 
6. How Has Marriage in the US Changed Over Time? (USAFacts)

Supplemental Readings

1. The Great Deterioration of Local Community Was A Major Driver of The Loss of The Play-Based Childhood
2. The trouble with 'donating our dopamine' to our phones, not our friends
3. Disconnected: The Growing Class Divide in American Civic Life
4. Romantic Recession: How Politics, Pessimism, and Anxiety Shape American Courtship
5. Key findings about online dating in the U.S.
6. What I Learned From My Date-Me Experiment

Discussion Questions

1. Where and at what stage of your life did you meet most of the friends you have now? Do you think you have more, or less friends than your parents did at your age?
2. Asterisk separates aloneness (objective, rising) from loneliness (subjective, roughly flat). If people are measurably more alone but not more distressed, is there anything to fix? Is this a clash with individual preferences and the needs of our society?
3. USAFacts shows marriages are overall down and occurring later; IFS shows most young adults barely dating but 86% still expecting to marry someday. How do you reconcile high stated desire with low behaviour. Is it mostly preferences, skills, opportunity, or a coordination problem?
4. Slow Boring argues part of the "decline" is a measurement artifact; people often hang out at a partner's place instead of "going out on a date." How much of the whole friendship/dating/loneliness story is real change, versus us measuring 20th-century behaviours that simply moved?
5. If more people are living fulfilling lives alone and social skills declining, are a greater percentage of people just bad matches for each other?
6. Third places are in decline. Has the internet replaced them or just relocated them? Is a Discord server a real third place, or is it missing something that makes friendship and dating easier?
7. What's the most effective thing you've ever done to make a new friend or meet a partner as an adult? Would it generalize, or did it depend on your specific circumstances?
8. If you were designing a dating app to actually get people into lasting relationships, what would it do differently, and why doesn’t it exist?