Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over

大家都在家，但没人来做客

You Are No Longer Invited to Dinner 你不再被邀请参加晚宴了

We’re witnessing the death of hosting in America. The share of adults who say they regularly have friends over has declined 70 percent since 1975. 我们正在见证美国“待客之道”的消亡。自1975年以来，表示会定期邀请朋友到家做客的成年人比例下降了70%。

Mid-century Americans knew how to throw a party, for better or worse. In some of the most famous titles of the 1950s and 1960s—Couples, by John Updike; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee; Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates—the drama (and martini-soaked melodrama) took place in middle-class living rooms. The stories were fictional, but the setting was realistic. Until 1975, half of Americans said they entertained guests at their home every month. 20世纪中叶的美国人很懂得如何举办派对，无论好坏。在20世纪50年代和60年代一些最著名的小说中——如约翰·厄普代克的《夫妇们》、爱德华·阿尔比的《谁害怕弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫？》以及理查德·耶茨的《革命之路》——戏剧冲突（以及浸透了马提尼酒的通俗剧）都发生在典型的中产阶级客厅里。故事虽是虚构的，但背景却很写实。直到1975年，仍有一半的美国人表示他们每月都会在家中招待客人。

But then something changed. Americans stopped throwing parties. Even more fundamentally, they stopped visiting each other. Between 1975 and 1998, the share of Americans who gave or attended a monthly dinner party declined by half. The share of Americans saying they never entertained people at home tripled. While cultural critics often bemoan the decline of organized religion, the dip in church attendance was downright modest compared to the collapse in hosting, according to data gathered by the DDB Needham Life Style survey. 但后来情况发生了变化。美国人不再举办派对。更根本的是，他们停止了互相走动。在1975年至1998年间，每月举办或参加晚宴的美国人比例下降了一半。表示从不在家招待客人的美国人比例则增加了两倍。根据DDB Needham生活方式调查收集的数据，虽然文化评论家经常哀叹有组织宗教的衰落，但与“待客之道”的崩溃相比，教堂出席率的下降简直微不足道。

In his 2000 book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam wrote that if these trends continued, the ancient practice of visiting with friends “might entirely disappear from American life in less than a generation.” Well, check your calendars. One generation and change later, Putnam’s prediction needs an update. So, what’s the state of hosting in the 21st century? 罗伯特·普特南在2000年的著作《独自打保龄球》中写道，如果这些趋势持续下去，这种与朋友往来的古老习俗“可能在不到一代人的时间里从美国生活中完全消失”。好吧，看看日历吧。一代人多一点的时间过去了，普特南的预测需要更新了。那么，21世纪的“待客之道”现状如何呢？

Everybody’s Home. No One’s Coming Over. 大家都在家，但没人来做客。

To get an apples-to-apples answer to that question, the polling group Data For Progress replicated the DDB Needham Life Style surveys cited by Putnam. Fortunately, they were kind enough to exclusively share their findings with me. Unfortunately, the upshot is about as brutal as you’d imagine. 为了得到一个可比的答案，民调机构“进步数据”（Data For Progress）复制了普特南所引用的DDB Needham生活方式调查。幸运的是，他们很慷慨地与我独家分享了调查结果。不幸的是，结论和你想象的一样残酷。

In the last 30 years, Americans have seen double-digit declines in practically every measure of socializing. They are less likely to play cards; attend a sporting event; go to the bar; volunteer; or work on a community project. 在过去的30年里，美国人在几乎每一项社交指标上都出现了两位数的下降。他们打牌、参加体育赛事、去酒吧、做志愿者或参与社区项目的可能性都降低了。

When it comes to hosting people at home, the declines are particularly stark. Since 1995, the share of Americans who say they’ve hosted guests or attended a dinner party has declined by about 20 percent—and that’s in addition to the whopping declines that Putnam bemoaned a quarter-century ago. 在居家待客方面，这种下降尤为明显。自1995年以来，表示曾招待过客人或参加过晚宴的美国人比例下降了约20%——这还是在普特南25年前所哀叹的巨大跌幅之上的进一步下滑。

Combining the two surveys, we get this astonishing fact: The share of Americans who say they host friends or family at their home at least monthly has fallen from 42 percent in 1975 to 12 percent in 2026—a 70 percent collapse in a half-century. 综合这两项调查，我们得出了一个惊人的事实：表示每月至少在家招待一次亲友的美国人比例，已从1975年的42%下降到2026年的12%——半个世纪内崩塌了70%。

So, what’s going on? Let’s first reject a few stories that don’t entirely fit the data. 那么，到底发生了什么？首先，让我们排除掉一些与数据不太吻合的说法。

Perhaps, an optimist might think, Americans are hosting fewer dinner parties because they’ve simply moved all their hangouts to restaurants and bars. Nice idea, but almost certainly wrong. As Putnam writes in his book, “the practice of entertaining friends has not simply moved outside the home, but seems to be vanishing entirely.” Overall face-to-face socializing has declined significantly in the last few decades, and the restaurant industry has actually noted a sharp increase in people eating alone. 也许乐观主义者会认为，美国人举办的晚宴少了，是因为他们把聚会地点转移到了餐馆和酒吧。想法不错，但几乎可以肯定是错的。正如普特南在书中所写：“招待朋友的习俗并没有简单地转移到户外，而是似乎正在完全消失。”总体而言，面对面的社交在过去几十年里显著减少，餐饮业实际上也注意到独自用餐的人数急剧增加。

Another plausible theory is that Americans have replaced dinner parties with other forms of healthy socialization. It is absolutely true that there are some activities that Americans do much more often than in 1975, such as going to concerts, traveling, and exercising. All very good. 另一种合理的理论是，美国人用其他健康的社交形式取代了晚宴。确实，有些活动美国人现在做得比1975年频繁得多，比如听音乐会、旅行和锻炼。这些都很好。

But as I wrote in an essay last year on the “great American exercise boom,” the evidence suggests that, despite the increase in running clubs, the surge in exercise time seems to be mostly solo. A lot of people are going to the gym with a podcast to keep them company (e.g., me) or rolling out a yoga mat in the basement by herself (e.g., my wife). Most importantly, it is impossible to assert that Americans are getting out of the house to socialize in new ways when time spent at home has certifiably exploded since the 2010s. 但正如我去年在一篇关于“美国健身热潮”的文章中所写，证据表明，尽管跑步俱乐部增加了，但锻炼时间的激增似乎大多是独自进行的。许多人去健身房时会听播客陪伴（比如我），或者独自在地下室铺开瑜伽垫（比如我妻子）。最重要的是，自2010年代以来，人们居家的时间确实大幅增加，因此很难断言美国人正在走出家门以新的方式进行社交。

In short, the great disinvitation is real, and we can’t wish or explain it away by arguing that Americans are just finding new ways to be with friends. Here are fourish explanations: 简而言之，“大拒绝邀请”时代是真实的，我们不能通过辩称“美国人只是在寻找与朋友相处的新方式”来掩盖或解释这一现象。以下是四个左右的解释：

People are more harried, especially dual-earner households.
人们更加忙乱，尤其是双职工家庭。

In the 1970 book The Harried Leisure Class, the Swedish economist Staffan Burenstam Linder wrote that as a society gets richer, leisure time takes on the frantic quality of work. As rich people feel like their downtime is scarce—as each non-working hour practically shouts, “excuse me! you could be making money, right now!” —the experience of leisure time speeds up. We multitask and pack various downtime activities into short periods. Firing up a Netflix show at 9pm that you can half-ignore while you answer email is a perfect activity for people who need their leisure time to feel like half-productive box-checking. Taking several hours to coordinate with other busy people to set up a lengthy dinner party is a tougher sell for the harried leisure class. 在1970年的著作《忙乱的休闲阶层》中，瑞典经济学家斯塔凡·林德写道，随着社会变得富裕，休闲时间带上了工作的狂乱色彩。当富人感到闲暇时间稀缺时——当每一个非工作小时都在大喊“打扰一下！你现在本可以去赚钱的！”——休闲体验就加速了。我们进行多任务处理，将各种闲暇活动压缩在短时间内。晚上9点打开Netflix，一边回复邮件一边心不在焉地看，这对那些需要让休闲时间感觉像是在完成生产性任务的人来说，是完美的活动。对于忙乱的休闲阶层来说，花几个小时与其他忙碌的人协调并筹备一场漫长的晚宴，是一件更难推销的事情。

That’s a sociological explanation, but I think the decline of hosting is also about macroeconomic trends. In Bowling Alone, Putnam acknowledged that women have historically been the keepers of the family social calendar, planning the birthday parties and neighborhood potlucks. For any number of reasons, women seem to do better than men at making and keeping adult friendships and making plans with other families. But in the 1950s and 1960s, tens of millions of women traded their unpaid household management jobs for salaried jobs, and the family social calendar frayed, as men failed to pick up the slack. 这是一种社会学解释，但我认为“待客之道”的衰落也与宏观经济趋势有关。在《独自打保龄球》中，普特南承认，女性历来是家庭社交日程的守护者，负责策划生日派对和邻里聚餐。出于各种原因，女性在建立和维持成年友谊以及与其他家庭制定计划方面似乎比男性做得更好。但在20世纪50年代和60年代，数千万女性用无薪的家庭管理工作换取了有薪工作，而由于男性未能填补这一空缺，家庭社交日程便逐渐瓦解。