Excerpts from an article in The Guardian about a social trend in Britain:
"I really loved hosting at home years ago, before I had kids, when my house wasn’t filled with toys and I had lots of time to plan and shop,” says Rehanna, 41, from Birmingham. Now, if she’s catching up with friends, she would rather go out... When you host, quite often it feels like you’re just a spectator to your friends’ evening,” says Simon, 37, from Glasgow. In the past, he’s found that, as host, he spends so much time making sure his guests are catered for that it can be difficult to connect with them on anything other than a superficial level...“One reason is that our social networks may have become more scattered as cities have got larger,” he says. “If we live in smaller villages and towns, it is easy to visit for casual get-togethers. There is a thing called the 30-minute rule: if someone lives more than 30 minutes away, we pretty much stop seeing them regularly. The time/effort required becomes too great.”..In May this year, the Spectator claimed the dinner party was also being killed off “by the modern curse of the ‘dietary requirement’”; both food intolerances and voluntary restrictions appear to have increased over the past 20 years, and so cooking for others might certainly feel like more of a challenge...I’d venture that the rise of tablescaping has a lot to answer for... Whereas hosts might once have simply given surfaces a quick wipe and emptied the bins, there are now tips for curating the perfect playlist, and rules for creating an aesthetically pleasing “theme”...Caz has two children under the age of 10 and says her house is therefore always “a complete nightmare zone”. Of course, her friends don’t actually care about the mess. “I know this deep in my heart,” she admits, “but it doesn’t stop me from feeling shame every time anyone comes over.”..“Until the 1960s, things like homework from school was limited, and children kind of looked after themselves – playing in the street together and turning up only when they needed to get fed. Now the little darlings are under your feet until they go away to university.” In addition, he notes that there is now an “endless stream” of extracurricular clubs and activities that children are encouraged to take part in, which means “families have to be free to do a lot of ferrying”.Thompson also touches on the idea that it’s now “too much fun to be home alone”. Whereas we might once have invited friends over to stave off boredom – and faced social pressure to attend such events, even if we did not much care for the hosts – today we are “cocooned within personalised entertainment fortresses”.
Related: a similar article in The Atlantic - Whatever Happened to Friday Night?
It's a mix of several things.
ReplyDelete* Communication has become so much easier. Due to messaging, you never really wonder what's going on with someone. Social media also provide a constant narrative of people's lives so you never wonder what someone it up to.
* Competition due to tv shows has pushed people to think they need to get fancy stuff for friends. People think you just can't put a bowl of whatever chips you have around on the table and serve some coffee or tea anymore. No you need 13.4 layer dip with special olives from the fancy olive store and eco-friendly plantane chips.
* Similarly, people have become embarrassed when others see how they live. My motto has always been that if it's good enough for me, it's good enough for guests. Ok, I'll put the laundry out of sight for ye. But few seem to agree. Your house does not need to look like a catalogue. That's not real!
* Raising kids is really become insane. I don't have any, but no, few kids are even able to take care of themselves anymore. And we wonder why kids are slowly going bonkers from anxiety. Stop helicopter-parenting. Also, you kid will be fine even if it does not get into OxBridge. You didn't either and you're fine, right?
* As cities grow, we do live further away from each other. This is true.
* And yes, it is true that hosting a party takes some of the fun away. But this is the price you pay to be able to go to other parties. You need to take the hit once in a while. Host one party for 10 people, and you should be able to go to 10 other parties hosted by them. Seems a good deal to me. Also, help out at other parties.
* As a person with celiac disease, it may feel overwhelming to deal with other people's illnesses and allergies, but it's really not that hard once you figure out what's going on. Ask your friends. They deal with it every day. They can navigate. And then listen to them. If they tell you brand X is good, buy X even if that's not your preferred brand. Most of all, do not lie about ingredients! Personally, I don't really expect people to accommodate me. I do kinda expect people to let me inspect food labeling so I can check ingredients. This is not hard and then I can sort out what I can eat and what not. Finally, do not feel bad for people if they skip something. They're used to it. They'd rather be at the party and not eat the 13.4 layer dip, than eat the 13.4 layer dip and end up sick or not be at the party.
Nicely put! There is also a trend by the younger crowd to go out on Friday nights - to a bar / bistro / cafe / etc. to hang out and party. It is still a get-to-gether, but not at anyone's house.
DeleteWhen I achieved the status of pentagenarian, I had about 15 people over. It took a lot of work to prepare. The biggest party of my life.
ReplyDeleteI do have a couple friends that I invite to lunch out when there's an opening on my calendar. It takes intentionality.
I have friends that live about 25 minutes away that I only see at their Cottage. A 5-hour drive from home when I'm on my way to my Cottage which is a 9 hour drive from home
ReplyDeleteMy social group ("the family I chose") is about 16 strong and two generations deep. I make a point of hosting what I call an at-home once a fortnight, and usually have a dozen or more people over. I've got pretty efficient at tidying the house and setting out snacks (usually cheese, dried fruit, some sort of charcuterie, pickles and olives) so the prep time isn't much. And my friends usually help with the cleanup at the end of the evening. We also tend to travel together, both in smaller subsets of the group and, once a year, a joint vacation at a fishing/hunting lodge (none of us does either) in the North Woods of north-central Ontario. We all realize we're outliers in doing this.... which may be one reason we continue to do it.
ReplyDeleteKind of related: https://www.instagram.com/p/Dd1TAzgJU4s about how your "whole world" is probably in a 10-minute radius
ReplyDeleteAh, the 15 minute city!
Deletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15-minute_city
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97ppaA0akPM
Coming from a country that consists off only 15 minute cities, the panic about it is somewhat alien to me. But if you want to be really nefarious, it is true that it's easier to suck people into the (right-wing) internet in suburbs and rural areas because they see so many fewer people and are so much more dependent on their car. It's much easier to hate trans/gay/foreign people when they're not your mundane neighbors that you see every day while walking your dog.
About a decade ago, I moved from typical American car-dependent suburbia to less car-dependent suburbia, and while it's nowhere near an ideal 15 minute city, it's so much better to be able to walk to the store and farmer's market than to have to drive it. And now I can commute by bike! Love it.
IMHO it's not that hard to change a lot of the US towards a 15-minute city. A lot of sul-de-sacs can easily be changed into woonerven. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woonerf There is plenty of space of most of suburbia to create bike lanes and side-walks that go to the nearest strip mall. However, that does require giving up a little bit of public parking and that seems too much to ask.
Furthermore, it would also require for local governments to take fundamental long-term planning decisions that they will build side-walks and bike lanes everywhere, as roads get repaved, instead of the usual American approach of treating every single change as a separate project that needs to be debated again and again. It's ok if a long bike lane gets built in parts, but it's not ok if the 1700 block of NIMBY Blvd can block the whole thing from getting finished.
Finally. People want to live in 15 minute cities. Just compare the sq ft price of real estate in places that are de-facto 15 minute cities with that in suburbia. People are speaking with their wallets. Yet local politicians are not picking up the hint and keep building wasteful suburbs, even though they can easily be designed as 15 minute cities. And no, that fenced-in "town-center" on a highway does not count.
I would be cautious of anything said in the Specator
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