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In his February 2025 cover story for The Atlantic, journalist Derek Thompson dubbed our current era “the anti-social century.” He isn’t wrong. According to our recent research, the U.S. is becoming a nation of homebodies.
Using data from the American Time Use Survey, we studied how people in the U.S. spent their time before, during and after the pandemic.
The COVID-19 pandemic did spur more Americans to stay home. But this trend didn’t start or end with the pandemic. We found that Americans were already spending more and more time at home and less and less time engaged in activities away from home stretching all the way back to at least 2003.
And if you thought the end of lockdowns and the spread of vaccines led to a revival of partying and playing sports and dining out, you would be mistaken. The pandemic, it turns out, mostly accelerated ongoing trends.
All of this has major implications for traffic, public transit, real estate, the workplace, socializing and mental health.
Life inside
The trend of staying home is not new. There was a steady decline in out-of-home activities in the two decades leading up to the pandemic.
Compared with 2003, Americans in 2019 spent nearly 30 minutes less per day on out-of-home activities and eight fewer minutes a day traveling. There could be any number of reasons for this shift, but advances in technology, whether it’s smartphones, streaming services or social media, are likely culprits. You can video chat with a friend rather than meeting them for coffee; order groceries through an app instead of venturing to the supermarket; and stream a movie instead of seeing it in a theater.
Of course, there was a sharp decline in out-of-home activities during the pandemic, which dramatically accelerated many of these stay-at-home trends.
Outside of travel, time spent on out-of-home activities fell by over an hour per day, on average, from 332 minutes in 2019 to 271 minutes in 2021. Travel, excluding air travel, fell from 69 to 54 minutes per day over the same period.
But even after the pandemic lockdowns were lifted, out-of-home activities and travel through 2023 remained substantially depressed, far below 2019 levels. There was a dramatic increase in remote work, online shopping, time spent using digital entertainment, such as streaming and gaming, and even time spent sleeping.
Time spent outside of the home has rebounded since the pandemic, but only slightly. There was hardly any recovery of out-of-home activities from 2022 to 2023, meaning 2023 out-of-home activities and travel were still far below 2019 levels. On the whole, Americans are spending nearly 1.5 hours less outside their homes in 2023 than they did in 2003.
While hours worked from home in 2022 were less than half of what they were in 2021, they’re still about five times what they were ahead of the pandemic. Despite this, only about one-quarter of the overall travel time reduction is due to less commuting. The rest reflects other kinds of travel, for activities such as shopping and socializing.
Ripple effects
This shift has already had consequences.
With Americans spending more time working, playing and shopping from home, demand for office and retail space has fallen. While there have been some calls by major employers for workers to spend more time in the office, research suggests that working from home in the U.S. held steady between early 2023 and early 2025 at about 25% of paid work days. As a result, surplus office space may need to be repurposed as housing and for other uses.
There are advantages to working and playing at home, such as avoiding travel stress and expenses. But it has also boosted demand for extra space in apartments and houses, as people spend more time under their own roof. It has changed travel during the traditional morning – and, especially, afternoon – peak periods, spreading traffic more evenly throughout the day but contributing to significant public transit ridership losses. Meanwhile, more package and food delivery drivers are competing with parked cars and bus and bike lanes for curb space.
Perhaps most importantly, spending less time out and about in the world has sobering implications for Americans well beyond real estate and transportation systems.
Research we’re currently conducting suggests that more time spent at home has dovetailed with more time spent alone. Suffice it to say, this makes loneliness, which stems from a lack of meaningful connections, a more common occurrence. Loneliness and social isolation are associated with increased risk for early mortality.
Because hunkering down appears to be the new norm, we think it’s all the more important for policymakers and everyday people to find ways to cultivate connections and community in the shrinking time they do spend outside of the home.
Brian D. Taylor, Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy, University of California, Los Angeles; Eric Morris, Professor of City and Regional Planning, Clemson University, and Sam Speroni, PhD Student in Urban Planning, University of California, Los Angeles
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
I suggest that people and society being so divided by WOKE and not WOKE, we choose to be alone, at home, rather than chancing some random exposure to protesters or just lone trouble makers. Immigration, insane Democrats, and general lack of empathy (selfishness) is driving a lot of this for law abiding citizens. This has all been prophecied long ago by the Bible:
12Because of the multiplication of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold. Matt 24:12
2 Timothy 3:2
Verse Concepts
For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy,
Matthew 10:21
Verse Concepts
“Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child; and children will rise up against parents and cause them to be put to death.
Mark 13:12
Verse Concepts
Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child; and children will rise up against parents and have them put to death.
Romans 1:30
Verse Concepts
slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents,
Deuteronomy 21:18-21
“If any man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey his father or his mother, and when they chastise him, he will not even listen to them, then his father and mother shall seize him, and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gateway of his hometown. They shall say to the elders of his city, ‘This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey us, he is a glutton and a drunkard.’read more.
Micah 7:6
Verse Concepts
For son treats father contemptuously,
Daughter rises up against her mother,
Daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
A man’s enemies are the men of his own household.
Luke 12:53
Verse Concepts
They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”
Source: https://bible.knowing-jesus.com/topics/Disobedient-To-Parents
Social engineering is how America’s lifestyles have been defined. The article makes it sound like this living at home is somehow or rather a collective personal choice. Far from it. We have been herded to this lifestyle
When you tell a European that Americans have only 2 week vacation they just look at you with starring eyes, They have at least 4. Go take a 2 AM flight at Schiphol Airport it will be PACKED with people, PDX airport will be closed. BTW, they also receive 6% of their annual salary every year in April or so, most of it will be spend on vacation. Trips are also cheaper, we went on a 21 day
trip to Greece by bus from NL and Greek ferry via Bavaria to Lake Garda to Ancona IT. then a 16 hour ferry to Gr, with private cabin, back on the bus there to visit Athens , and on to Meteora mountains with monasteries 100 meters on top of cliffs ( a must Google), total cost for 2 Euro 3000.00 ( YES), It would have cost over $ 7000 with Viking!!!!
The population in the US are getting older, and older people tend to stay at home more often than younger people.
Part of the problem is that people simply don’t have the money to go out and do things like they did before.
The 380 drop to 260 is a deceptive graph. The line looks steeper because the range of points is zoomed. The same graph with a zero point would not be nearly as scary. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E91bGT9BjYk
This article appears written by a 4th grader.
More scare tactics. We came in this world alone. Ourfeelin6are our own. We die alone. So why claim that being alone will kill you? We go to work. We go shopping. We talk to others as we go.isn’t that NOT being alone?
just better at home got house of dragon pizza and my pup dont need anything else in life especially not you. ~steven
And yet here you are interacting with us. Strange contradiction…
Have people actually mingled with others lately? They’re crazy. Seriously. Americans have lost their minds. Everything is a conspiracy. Everything is fake news. Culture wars are killing society and how we view one another. Don’t like gay marriage then don’t gay marry. Books don’t turn kids gay. Stop banning them. It’s lunacy in this world right now. Differences are good. Being the same is boring. A good chunk is in a cult that worships a guy that craps his pants. Making gold statues of him? Buying his meme coins? Why would I ever want to mingle with people in America?
No one is banning any books, Hab. We just don’t believe that pornographic materials should be allowed on the shelves of elementary and middle schools.
We can’t afford to do anything. Everything costs too much, and even things that should be free like going to the beach require fees. Camping in state parks is more than a hotel room in cost. We are at home because the average person doing this is broke or trying to stay within their budget in a world where breathing costs too much.
100% spot on!
People too fat to move.
LOL!
Comes down to faith in the economic future of most Americans….lots of folks believe we are headed “south “as a country ..Domesticly as well as Internationally…Maga has separated the population ,into “If your not with us ..your our enemy!”…….. I have always been super proud of our countries ,back and forth with conservative ,and alternating liberal rotating politics ..its kept us balanced in each parties wants ..and always lead to needed compromises..At this point,I have to adjust my vote for the Republican party..This is NOT the Republican party I have voted for in the past..Maga..is something else entirely..Americans ,no matter how they vote..are …NOT…the enemy of other Americans.