Who do we spend time with across our lifetime? (2020)

Whenever I have a family vacation, I can’t help but think how unnatural our present lives are. For thousands of years, we essentially just lived with and around family.<p>Yet now I get to see my entire family for a few days every year. Some cousins I haven’t met in years.<p>The people I spend the most time with everyday are also the people I care the least for - colleagues and acquaintances.<p>I don’t have a solution. But I just know innately that this isn’t how things are supposed be.

One thing I have noticed now, and I&#x27;m not sure if its a function of myself and my family being older, is that we feel much less compelled to get together for holidays and other events even though the travel time has remained mostly the same. When I was younger, my family would make it a habit of getting together at least on Christmas and Easter and usually also the 4th of July for a big party. Not everybody lived super close but most were within a 45-60 minute drive.<p>Now, not only is that drive seen as a barrier, but nobody actually wants to host these events and deal with the preparation, the hosting duties, and the cleanup that comes afterwards. I realize that as people get older they don&#x27;t have the time&#x2F;energy for these types of activities as much, but I also feel like people were more amenable to these types of gatherings back before social media and smartphones in every pocket happened. There was just less going on and less demand of your time, so a big family party was something that could knock out a big chunk of the day and you would look forward to it.

Not sure if I missed it but this only count in-person interactions as spending time?<p>It&#x27;s not that I feel 100% like I&#x27;m spending time alone if I&#x27;m on voice chat with friends, or even chatting or playing games. Maybe it&#x27;s an edge case of the people who grew up on IRC but... sure I am home alone but I&#x27;m still interacting with people for most of my awake time after work (Interestingly I never counted texts as that, maybe because it was too shortened, and not supported with other media like posting links, images, videos, articles). Why would I not count that? (I am not saying this is or isn&#x27;t a complete replacement for meeting people, I&#x27;m just not sure if it would not highly skew my answers for this graph, but I&#x27;m not American anyway :P)

We have essentially replaced being with each other in many different ways. People used to play music to us, now we listen to it digitally, we used to laugh, cry, get scared by the stories people told us, now we watch tv shows &amp; social media. Not saying that&#x27;s bad but we have replaced the need for each other. We have become more atomised and alienated to each other. Much of chemicals in our body (perhaps that helped us bond)are fired for content consumed from digital devices.

I think something not measured here but potentially important is the amount of acquaintance contact people have.<p>If you imagine living in a time before high-speed travel and big cities, the people you interacted with day-to-day were basically the same throughout your life. Maybe you weren&#x27;t &quot;friends&quot; with these people, but just in order to live your life, you would inevitably be bumping into people that you had known in some capacity for years.<p>Nowadays when we go shopping or for a haircut or whatever, we are mostly interacting with basically anonymous people that we are unlikely to remember even if we do ever see them again.<p>The level of loneliness we can manage to achieve now seems quite a bit higher than when no matter what you do, just to get food to eat, you&#x27;re going to have to go see someone who&#x27;ve you known for a decade and make small talk.<p>Probably not saying this well, but when I imagine day-to-day life in a small village, this seems like one of the most significant differences. It seems like it would be hard to ever go a day not interacting with other people that you knew in some capacity. Now it&#x27;s so easy you might not even notice when you do it.

This graph is why I don&#x27;t like in the USA. When my parents got their green-cards after my dad finished his post-doc in California he spoke to all his researcher friends and noticed that in the US it&#x27;s common for family to move away to other states so they returned back to our country.<p>Since I live in a small country - I see my parents (and my in-laws) almost every week and they help (considerably) with child-care and see their grand-kid a lot more.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t hold a grudge if they helped less but seeing the joy they have when they&#x27;re with him probably makes it worth giving up living in the US for them.<p>Family members do live for a year or two abroad at times (for work) but always return.

The real wisdom of this graph is that for people who aren&#x27;t friends with their coworkers, they are spending 4x as much time with not friends as friends. For people who <i>are</i> friends with their coworkers they&#x27;re just cheating on that play, boosting their friend time.

As a parent to a seemingly quickly aging child that I wish I could freeze in time forever, the green line makes me rather sad :(.

I’ve seen this graph before and it always makes me very sad - friends and family fade after 40, and everyone ends up spending the vast majority of time alone past 60.

Personally I&#x27;m terrified of having to spend a portion of my life alone. I&#x27;ve spent my adult life (25 years) with a romantic&#x2F;domestic partner, doing everything together. I don&#x27;t spend time with friends in the absence of my romantic&#x2F;domestic partner. Once, during those 25 years, that relationship ended and I lived alone for a while. You should feel free to laugh at me and say this paragraph is hysterical or lacks perspective, seeing I was perfectly free, but it felt like prison. I completely failed to handle it. It is very hard to contemplate the idea of my partner&#x27;s death in the future, and attempting to live beyond it.

You, not the average graph of all people&#x27;s choices, are in control of your life major turns.

Shit man, who are these people getting so much alone time? I struggle to find 5 minutes to myself these days (34 years old).

Dang I just turned 30 and according to this graph, I will be looking to spend even more time alone each year although I have two kids and a partner.<p>I think this could also be related to our culture shaping around modern technology such as the internet and social media. We&#x27;re more connected than ever, but even more alone.<p>This isn&#x27;t to say we&#x27;re &quot;lonely&quot; in terms of community, but rather we experience our respective communities &quot;alone&quot;.<p>I think our culture needs more people who point out that their love can be misplaced. When you&#x27;re desperately in love with someone, it&#x27;s almost impossible to see their failings. When you get enough distance however, you can see how problematic something can be. I think that applies to family, friends, coworkers, and even the technology we use every day.<p>It&#x27;s a sad realization, but a realization nonetheless.

I don&#x27;t like these kinds of analyses. They make me depressed.

People’s desire to hangout or seek relationship is dropping in countries like China and Japan. First cause is the high cost of living&#x2F;dating or raising a child. Also they can get low cost entertainment from apps like TikTok or mobile games. A lot of things can be done online that they would rather be alone after a day of hard work

Love it when “data” people take the time to get the hard numbers for the things that the rest of us wouldn’t question once.

What would explain the dip in alone time for 75yo, while for the 60yo and 89yo it increased steadily over the last decades?

I don&#x27;t understand this data. How is the average 15 year old spending 23 minutes a day with their children?

It would be interesting to see how Covid impacted this.

I wonder if this is similar in other countries.

Hacker News and navel gazing about your own mortality - name a better combo