Americans Need to Party More
4 min read
This much you already know: Many Americans are alone, friendless, isolated, undersexed, sick of online dating, glued to their couches, and transfixed by their phones, their mouths starting to close over from lack of use. Our national loneliness is an “urgent public health issue,” according to the surgeon general. The time we spend socializing in person has plummeted in the past decade, and anxiety and hopelessness have increased. Roughly one in eight Americans reports having no friends; the rest of us, according to my colleague Olga Khazan, never see our friends, stymied by the logistics of scheduling in a world that has become much more frenetic and much less organized around religion and civic clubs. “You can’t,” she writes, “just show up on a Sunday and find a few hundred of your friends in the same building.”
But what if you could, at least on a smaller scale? What if there were a way to smush all your friends together in one place—maybe one with drinks and snacks and chairs? What if you could see your work friends and your childhood friends and the people you’ve chatted amiably with at school drop-off all at once instead of scheduling several different dates? What if you could introduce your pals and set them loose to flirt with one another, no apps required? What if you could create your own Elks Lodge, even for just a night?
I’m being annoying, obviously—there is a way! It’s parties, and we need more of them.
Simply put, America is in a party deficit. Only 4.1 percent of Americans attended or hosted a social event on an average weekend or holiday in 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics; this is a 35 percent decrease since 2004. Last month, Party City, the country’s largest retailer of mylar balloons, goofy disposable plates, and other complements to raging, announced that it would close after years of flagging sales and looming debt. Adolescents are engaging in markedly fewer risky behaviors than they used to; Jude Ball, a psychologist who has extensively researched this phenomenon, told me recently that a major cause is just that teenagers are having fewer parties. Six months ago on Reddit, someone asked one of the saddest questions I’ve ever seen on the social platform, which is really saying something: “Did anybody else think there would be more parties?”
“When I was a kid my parents and extended family used to have serious parties on a regular basis,” the post continues. “I remember houses and yards full of people, music all the way up, lots of food and of course free flowing alcohol. Neighbors, family, coworkers, their friends, they all showed up. And likewise my parents went to their parties. I thought that is what my adult years would be like, but they aren’t.” The post got more than 300 responses, many of them sympathetic.
A lot of other people seem to feel the same way, even if they’re not expressing it quite so plainly. Polling from the market-research and public-opinion company YouGov in 2023 showed that although 84 percent of Americans enjoy birthday parties, only 59 percent had attended one in the previous year. In a different YouGov poll from 2022, only 28 percent of respondents said they would “probably” or “definitely” throw a party for their next birthday. This is what a group psychologist would call “diffusion of responsibility,” and what I, Ellen Cushing, would call “a major bummer”: Everyone wants to attend parties, but no one wants to throw them. We just expect them to appear when we need them, like fire trucks.
My point is that we are obligated to create the social world we want. Intimacy, togetherness—the opposite of the crushing loneliness so many people seem to feel—are what parties alchemize. Warm rooms on cold nights, so many people you love thumbtacked down in the same place, the musical clank of bottles in the recycling, someone staying late to help with the dishes—these are things anyone can have, but like everything worth having, they require effort. Fire trucks, after all, don’t come from nowhere—they come because we pay taxes.
This year, pay your taxes: Resolve to throw two parties—two because two feels manageable, and chain-letter math dictates that if every party has at least 10 guests (anything less is not a party!) and everyone observes host-guest reciprocity (anything else is sociopathic!), then everyone gets 20 party invitations a year—possibly many more. Bear in mind that parties can be whatever you want: a 15-person Super Bowl party; a casual picnic in the park with 20 of your pals; an overfull house party, guest count unknown. They do not need to be expensive, or formal, or in your own home. You don’t need a theme, unless you want one. You don’t even need to buy anything, or clean up beforehand, if you’re feeling particularly punk. All you have to do is invite people in.
