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Outpacing Zeno's avatar

I went to high school in the 2010s at a very good public high school. I'm not exactly sure how I would have answered these questions when I was 18, but I do know I would have been, at the very least, unsure about whether to answer that I hung out with friends just once a week or more often than that. For me, and for many, probably even most kids at my high school, the vast majority of our free time outside of homework was taken up by extracurriculars, most of which were intrinsically social to a meaningful extent. I personally had Boy Scouts, GSA, Quiz Bowl, and various music commitments, all of which (except piano lessons) doubled as social time. Granted, my close friends were not always in every club, and the activities were not as intrinsically social as time at the mall that I imagine was frequently spent by teenagers in the 80s, but I still felt like I was spending time with friends almost every weekday and was far from lonely. Almost all my friends were in more or less the same boat.

My impression is that the time spent doing extracurriculars over the past few decades has gone up, especially at "better" high schools, in large part because college admissions have become more competitive and helicopter parents have become more common. This may affect survey answers in recent years, especially because I think it was relatively common for these extracurriculars to take up the time that would have been spent going on dates for some as well.

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Thomas's avatar

Yeah, I mean, to be clear smartphones weren’t a thing in 1995, but the internet was. Video games were. (Video games largely moving online probably decreased socializing from when playing video games with your friends meant they had to physically come over to your house.)

Lots of antisocial teens are socializing, but with video gamers in Malaysia.

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