[wikfwikf]

This is a catalogue of irrational scare-mongering.

Do you honestly believe that "housewarmings, birthdays, holidays, sports games, barbecuing, karaoke, ... parties ... for people joining the team, for people leaving, for projects kicking off or finishing" have decreased because of the prevalence of false sexual accusations, allergies, smartphones, or intense goal-driven schooling?

Do you have a credible reason to think that poverty of young adults, narcissism, or lack of patience, is materially different and has a material effect on the number of parties in the present day compared to 10 or 20 years ago?

Would you also claim that there haven't been other prior time periods where people were just as poor, self-centered or impatient as they are now, and there were more parties? Or is the claim only based on interpolation of specific, correlated changes in the recent past?

[paweladamczuk]

What is your standard for a "credible" reason?

What should the parent comment's claim be based on?

The last paragraph of your comment is hard for me to understand.

[wikfwikf]

It's difficult to explain credibility beyond the definition of the word, but if you have any purported reason "to think that poverty of young adults, narcissism, or lack of patience, is materially different and has a material effect on the number of parties in the present day compared to 10 or 20 years ago", I can tell you whether or not I think it's credible.

[wikfwikf]

On the last par: suppose that it is true that a) 10 years ago people were less self-centered, impatient or poor than they are now and b) 10 years ago there were more parties.

Does this form the basis of a well-evidenced claim that there are fewer parties because of increased poverty, narcissism or impatience? Of course not, because there are lots of other time periods we can easily look at.

For example, in the 1950s young people were probably on average poorer than they are now. Perhaps they were also more narcissistic, or equally narcissistic as they are now. Were there also fewer parties? If not, this suggests there is something wrong with the theory.

My question to the GP is: do they believe that there are no time periods like the 1950s in my example, which might raise doubt about their theories? If they think there aren't any, is it because we have never been so poor and narcissistic as we are now? Or is it because there have never been so many parties at any prior time period, as there were in the golden age they identified where we were at our least poor and narcissistic (whenever that might be)? If there are such periods, why isn't that part of their theory? If 'the 1950s' were different, what is it that makes them different, and is that reflected in the theory?

It should be clear here, that any variable which has moved monotonically in one direction for ever and so is currently at a global extreme, is correlated with every other, especially if it is a phenomenon which can't be measured in formal units (like narcissism or fear of strangers). Saying that (satirizing the GP here) 'we have never had so many smartphones, and we have also never had so many allergies, therefore allergies are caused by smartphones', is laughably easy to dismiss, for a number of reasons.

[wkat4242]

Hmm in the 50s people were poorer yes but everyone could buy a house with a garden and actually on one wage only because the wife wouldn't work.

I totally agree hosting parties at home is much more problematic as people live closer together and get annoyed. I can see it around me a lot. I live in a major partying neighborhood (50m from the most infamous square in town for noise) and I don't care about the noise because it makes me feel good hearing people having fun. But my neighbors hate it. And most of them have moved here in the last decade knowing full well what they were getting into.

When you have a free standing house it's really a different story.

[wikfwikf]

I think this phenomenon is actually something else: in the 1950s people who were commonly depicted as being part of society tended to have a house with a garden and a nuclear family structure where the husband, but not the wife, worked.

There were plenty of people who couldn't afford a house with a garden, or who didn't have one for other reasons, or who were not married or had a different type of family structure, or men who didn't work, or women who did work. But they were made invisible by the lack of portrayal, both in that society's image of itself, and in our image of that society.

(Or by a different mechanism: when people outside of that structure were portrayed, it was as outsiders and aberrations, whereas married couples with children who lived in houses were portrayed as the norm. For example, the protagonist of 'On the Road', commonly associated with that era, does not have a fixed address or a job, nor a wife, nor children. The protagonist of 'Invisible Man', a book central to the discourse of who does and does not get represented in media, lives in a basement apartment alone without a wife or family. The protagonist of 'The Bell Jar' is a woman who lives alone in an apartment in New York while working at a job, then in her mother's house, then in a mental asylum.)