What you're missing is that the activities you're doing were not the activities people were largely doing 10-20 years ago to be social. Going to bars was probably at least 100x more popular than hiking, so even if you see a 10x growth in hiking, if going to bars goes down even 10%, it dwarfs hiking's contribution to overall social activity of the population.

> I’ve been doing some of the same activities and going on some of the same hikes, bikes, runs, trails, and parks on and off for two decades. The popularity of these activities has exploded.

Ok, interpreting "everything ... is in decline" literally by pointing to specific deviations from the broader trend is pointlessly correct. Lots of activities experience transient surges in popularity.

But also regarding the popularity of hikes/trails etc, for basically the same statistical reasons, how would you distinguish how much of this effect is due to concentration? If people gravitate towards the trails that have high ratings on AllTrails etc, because it's easier to find out about them now, even if the same proportion of the population were hiking, you'd expect to share the trail with more people. Do you ever pick a running route because it's got a lot of popular segments on Strava? Possibly that route is more pleasant than some other streets nearby ... and it's also easier for runners to discover than it used to be. I don't know whether more people are actually running than 15 years ago, but I know I'm running on routes with more other runners.

> That’s hardly equivalent to the claim above of a collapse of socialization.

I do think the overall trend gets both overstated, and also that the impacts on age-bracketed cohorts have been more substantial. Also, the study discussed is stale already and doesn't really cover post-pandemic shifts.

I do also think that any such summary statistic can only show a small part of the picture. Of the time _not_ spent alone, how much is with a single other person as you look at different screens? Of time spent not alone and outside of the home, how many people are we with at any one time? How many different people do we have social interactions with per month? I.e. is the quality of our social interaction getting worse, are we with smaller groups, do we have sparser social graphs?

I could believe that you're right that the variance has increased, but is that driven by a growing share of shutins who only interact online and who are shifting to LLM friends?