It's a lot of reasons. My kids are grown. My need for new customers is sharply lower.
I've decoupled my self-esteem from societal expectations. This killed the carrot for a lot of my social behavior - like the need for small talk.
My resistance to things fades with age. Like the ever increasing heat. My tolerance of traffic. My tolerance of crowds - especially when it's enhanced by cluelessness (eg:conversations in choke points).
Plus I live with my 5 adult sons (thanks 4-income economy!) and we get on well.
My socializing was lessening every year before Covid. Now society is in sync with me.
One of the big reasons is that bars are dead. They used to suck a lot of time out of the regular working populace, and the regulars at bars are almost exclusively boomers (or older), and maybe a few alcoholics. I go to a lot of local bars and it's almost always the same story from the bartenders about traffic over the past 10 years. Even the cheap ones that aren't flagrantly overpriced (and many/most are now) have very little new traffic.
I only ever knew one guy who was a regular bar patron. He lost his license for DWI and was hit by a drunk driver while bicycling home.
Our peers all had parties and crashed where we were.
Bars always felt like a TV-Only thing. Like self-cleaning houses. Like making 40k/yr in LA and affording bars and nice housing.
