I don't agree that it's about people 'drifting apart', or 'finding different interests'.
In some sense those are being taken as tautologies, when I don't think they are. Why can't people with different interests hang out?
There's loads to talk about. Our interests are a tiny microscopic portion of the human experience.
In the UK people go out and get stone drunk and then anything becomes a fun topic of discussion. We call it disinhibition. But why are we 'inhibited' to begin with?
This is why I call it 'ego'. I don't think I'm using the term accurately. It's just this idea of pleasing one's self, efficiently, rather than trying to be part of some whole, or just swimming, letting life happen.
No, I'm merely making an informed guess that my experience is common enough.
Never heard about "not spending enough time with the family" as a thing of modern life, a.k.a "work/life balance" issue?
Here are some pointers: "According to a new study by Harvard and McGill University researchers, the United States lags far behind nearly all wealthy countries when it comes to family-oriented workplace policies such as maternity leave, paid sick days and support for breast feeding. Jody Heyman, founder of the Harvard-based Project on Global Working Families and director of McGill’s Institute for Health and Social Policy, states that, "More countries are providing the workplace protections that millions of Americans can only dream of. The U.S. has been a proud leader in adopting laws that provide for equal opportunity in the workplace, but our work/family protections are among the worst."
"As previously mentioned, Americans work approximately 47.1 hours each week; some employees work up to seventy hours. Therefore, it is safe to state that the average number of hours Americans presently work each week is the highest it has been in nearly seventy-five years."
"Fewer than half of working parents stay home when their children are sick, even though research shows that sick children recover more quickly when a parent is there. …54 percent of working women are not entitled to any paid leave for taking care of a sick child or other family members"
I don't even have the problem myself -- I'm only describing a general issue many people face in the context of this discussion.
There are so many (work and self-imposed) obligations and "obligations" and BS, that it's even difficult to have quality/fun time with one's spouse.
And this certainly cannot be explained away with "the spouse is a tiny part of your current experience/identity".
So I think this answer doesn't cover the actual issue.
And it's not just workload either. Someone else writes below:
>In order to have impromptu visits that fill up the empty spaces in your life, you first need to have empty spaces in your life. That is largely incompatible with filling every moment of your life with work or career advancement.
But the lack of "impromptu visits" is also apparent in people who don't fill every moment of their life with work or career advancement. The killing of community/communal spaces, the advent of 100 TV channels and 8 billion internet/"social" options etc, also kill a lot of such time.