The great friendship collapse: Inside The Anti-Social Century | Derek Thompson

Source: The great friendship collapse: Inside The Anti-Social Century | Derek Thompson, Big Think, 12:13, uploaded 2025-06-09, Watch Later position 452.

Derek Thompson begins with the American Time Use Survey, which he says finds that the average American spends 20% less time socialising in person than 20 years ago, alongside a record amount of time spent alone. He treats this as the basic fact beneath arguments about changing American values. The change matters because people often choose the solitude that leaves them alone. Thompson calls this the Anti-Social Century.

The American Time Use Survey

Thompson traces the decline of socialising through a history of technology. He does not claim that technology explains everything, though he gives it a central role. In the 1960s, cars let people leave downtown areas and populate the suburbs. The car therefore privatised American lives by changing where people lived and how they moved through the day.

Television then privatised American leisure. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, Thompson says, the average American gained about 300 hours of leisure each year. Those hours could have gone to learning a language, reading The Odyssey, spending time with children, sewing, or pottery. Americans used almost all of that extra time to watch more television.

The smartphone extends the same movement into attention. Someone can sit in a café or stand at a party whilst giving their waking consciousness to a screen. Physical proximity remains, yet the person can choose an experience of being alone whenever they want. The car privatised life, television privatised leisure, and the smartphone privatised attention. This is Thompson’s route into the Anti-Social Century.

Loneliness and the wish to stay home

Thompson uses loneliness in a specific sense. Some sociologists define it as a gap between a person’s felt sociality and their desired sociality. A person sits on the sofa wishing they could get a drink with a friend. The discomfort carries a useful biological impulse because it can push the person to leave the sofa and seek company.

He sees a different impulse spreading through contemporary life. A TikTok trend that he calls “cancel-ation” shows people dancing when a friend cancels plans. The joke is that a cancelled invitation creates a welcome chance to stay home alone. The pleasure comes from the loss of social contact itself. Thompson treats that reaction as an anti-social decision, which gives the century its name.

He then proposes a biochemical account of the decision. People spend leisure time flicking through TikTok and Instagram for repeated dopamine hits. Thompson’s hypothesis is that a period of intense stimulation can lower the reserve, or “tonic”, level of dopamine. After putting the phone down, someone may feel too depleted to accept an invitation.

The invitation then appears as a chain of possible trouble. The person has to get ready, choose clothes, travel, find a parking space, or wait for a delayed subway. The conversation may be dull, and they may lack the emotional energy to be present for a friend. Returning to the phone feels easier. Thompson’s phrase is that people reserve their drive for glass instead of friendship.

He sees the effect across the life course. Teenagers have fewer friends and spend less time hanging out. People in their twenties date less, people in their thirties marry less, and people in their forties have fewer children. Thompson presents these patterns as the social costs of a culture that can suppress the urge to seek other people. He adds rising anxiety and social anxiety, alongside young people reporting more depression and fewer friends.

AI companions on an existing path

Thompson says he is optimistic about solving the problem, then asks how technology could make it worse. Generative AI gives people a new way to treat a machine as a friend. He points to Character.AI, which he says has tens of millions of users who develop emotional relationships with chatbots.

He expects people to compare this future with Her, the film about a man who falls in love with an operating system. Thompson calls that comparison plausible rather than predictive. His concern begins with the form of many existing friendships. Young people may conduct a relationship almost entirely through a phone, with texting and shared memes doing most of the work. At the level of experience, the relationship becomes an exchange of message bubbles.

That raises a question about the difference between texting a friend and texting an AI. Thompson imagines young people finding it easier to form an emotional relationship with a silicon-based system than with another person. Such a system could provide the things they seek from a relationship: validation, constant availability, and a responder who seems to understand their deepest fears. He worries that people are preparing a path that AI companions can follow with ease.

Values before convenience

Thompson says the antidote already exists: “the cure is us”. Social life does not need a new invention before people can start choosing what they want technology to serve.

Thompson’s answer begins with a term he attributes to Neal Stephenson: “amistics”, a way of thinking about the values people give to technology. He uses the Amish as the example. Their reputation rests on rejecting technology, yet Thompson says they accept tools such as washing machines and solar power when those tools serve an existing value. They reject televisions because they believe television could interfere with time spent together as a family.

The Amish therefore apply a narrow filter. A technology earns a place in their lives when it serves a value that existed before the technology arrived. Thompson asks whether other people could use the same filter. Romance, family life, a digital or actual Sabbath, and the ability to concentrate for longer than the time between TikTok swipes could all become reasons to refuse a convenient device or habit.

The order matters to his conclusion. When people adopt a technology and accept whatever values follow from it, convenience chooses the shape of life. When people name their values first and admit technology only when it serves them, they can protect time for other people and for sustained attention. Thompson thinks that world would be more purposeful, more social, and happier.

Limits

The video names the Bureau of Labor Statistics and its American Time Use Survey, though it gives no table, year, method, or link for the 20% decline in in-person socialising or the 300 extra leisure hours. Those figures remain Thompson’s reported evidence here. The same applies to the claims about teenagers, dating, marriage, children, anxiety, depression, and Character.AI’s user count.

The dopamine explanation is also Thompson’s account of what he thinks happens after intense screen use. The video does not establish it with a named study. Its AI section is a warning about a plausible future, and Thompson explicitly presents it as a concern rather than a prediction. The final proposal is a value judgement about how to choose technology, with Stephenson’s “amistics” and the Amish as a model, rather than a tested programme for restoring friendship.

Further reading / references

• Big Think transcript: “The great friendship collapse: inside the anti-social century”.
• American Time Use Survey overview, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.