I think TV, YouTube, or even Podcasts can trigger a similar mechanism to socialization, but without any of the risk that comes from interacting with real people.

Speculating I'd guess that the low lift and reduced anxiety means more people get stuck in it as a local maximum even if they'd be happier otherwise.

I think you're looking in the right direction.

Speaking from anecdotal experience with online communities, when idling or toying at home during their free time, people actually engage socially with friends through chats, networks, games — pick your entertainment drug. They're everything but alone, and it's genuinely real if limited cognitively compared to a real physical interaction.

If you add voice chat to that, at the end of the day you really feel like you spent X hours with friend(s), there's just no other way to put it except for the physical location.

It's almost a given to me that with appropriate videoconf wall-sized (real-world size) screens in all living rooms, we'd just "invite" friends this way most of the time unless the physical interaction was necessary. Less maintenance, less friction to just spend a cool quality hour.

The 'effort' required to move out of your house is getting increasingly higher, your 'local maximum' would essentially converge to an actual maximum in a perfect virtual reality (of which the "80%" / good enough might be just around the next decade).

I haven't read it, but I think your example is closely related to the plot in The Machine Stops, which was pretty prescient. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops

It's amazing how old this story is. It feels so relevant even today

Looks interesting! Thanks for the pointer.

Chatting through text is nice but no substitute for face-to-face interaction which is getting rather sparse. We can't, at once, claim to be both lonely and socially satiated by tech, and it seems quite a few are lonely.

interesting to note that you posted this via text.

Was I talking to anyone in particular?

I don't know if it's even about the risk of interaction. I think there's just some mental equivalent of junk food going on. Junk food works by abusing our sensitivity to sweet, salty, and fatty, turning normal hunger into gluttony.

This is why you see people holding conversations in real life while still sneaking looks (or not sneaking) at their phones. They're junkies.

> But if most people have hours of free time every day, it seems hard to believe that schedules don’t line up at least several times per month.

One of the main points of the article is that many people don't know their schedules in advance. So even if schedules do line up, they may not know in enough time to schedule something. TV watching is also a done-in-the-margins activity. The tv exists in the same place they sleep and eat. I don't see anything to reconcile.

Lots of people have something on the TV just about all day long (or at least the whole time they're home—for retired folks this can actually be the entire day) and skew the numbers higher, I think. My parents do it, just leave the TV on even if they're not paying attention to it. I bet it's on 12+ hours a day at their house, on average. I have some friends whose home life was similar growing up—if someone's home, the living room TV's on, even if no-one's actually watching it.

Yes there is overlap, but it's not a predictable overlap and there's no easy way to find out if your time off overlaps with someone else without first reaching out to them (which is a whole other barrier). It's so much easier to turn on netflix or whatever. If it wasn't so easy to do that then maybe people would go through the other hurdle to test if someone they know is available.

I'm not sure what all is wrapped into "TV" in today's numbers, but average household watching as been, to my way of thinking, astoundingly high forever. It was 7 or 8 hours a day going back to the 70s and 80s.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/when-...

Is this statistic for the total hours watched each person or the whole family, meaning 4 people watching 1 hour of TV is 4 hours of viewing? Because I don’t see how anyone, even people who don’t sleep much, could have 8 hours a day for television.

That would require a person to get home from work at 5pm and watch until midnight or 1am continuously.

Those are household numbers. I assume that they are/were partially driven by people who are in the house much of the day having the TV on as more or less background.

And I'm sure that still drives the numbers. They probably seem really high to me partly because I pretty much only have the TV on if I'm actively watching something. Used to always drive me crazy if I would share a room with someone on a trip and the first they did on entering a hotel room was to turn the TV on.

In my opinion, it's not about amount of time available, it's about scheduling. There seems to be a real aversion in the current generation to committing to doing stuff at a specific date/time. Try to plan an event and get people to promise to show up. Even if they enjoy the event, and know that they will be free, they'll still balk at making that promise.

Perhaps people feel that if they commit in advance, they'll miss out if something more interesting pops up. But nothing more interesting pops up when the day comes around, and you end up watching TV because nobody would commit.

I feel like smartphones make people coordinate, not plan.

For me, a major "transaction cost" is just picking that flexible date. And after a few failed attempts, which is totally understandable (kids, jobs, eldercare, etc), friendship equity suffers.

I've tried a handful "let's make a date" apps. None really work. Worse, I can't figure out how I'd do better.

One crucial missing feature is shared calendar event updates. For example, you need to push back our lunch 30 minutes, my calendar gets auto updated.

That would be divine!

That last one is part of Office 365 as “propose new time”. Of course depends on both of you using that service. Not sure if Google, Apple et. al. have equivalents.

Part of that could also be how TV/Netflix can be in the background. I probably watch a few hours of a random Netflix show over the weekend. But I'm also doing laundry, touching up some hobby code, or just spacing out and drinking my coffee. It kind of falls into place as background noise when my brain doesn't need to be fully occupied by the task at hand.

I couldn't do those things while entertaining a guest. That requires much more mental effort.

It may depend on how they define "watch".

In my case, I have the TV on for an hour and a half to two hours, but during that time it's mostly background noise for the rest of my morning routine; maybe 20-30 minutes is actually _watching_ the local news.

When I get home, it's the same: it's _on_ for 3 hours or so, but I'm only paying attention to it about half that time.

So, 5 hours a day, but under half that time is actually watching anything.