I didn’t use to be this way. I loved going out, loved hanging out with people, exchanging ideas, having drinks, laughing.

Now, it all just seems like so much work.

I wonder if it has to do with some combination of these things:

• Age, family: I’m lumping these together, because they kind of operate along a similar arc. I have 2 kids of my own, and 6 kids total in my blended family. There’s a lot going on, and logistically it can be tough, and there’s an attention commitment there that’s substantial.
• COVID: A lot of people talk about how COVID got everyone out of the habit of being out and about, and so everyone kinda turned into homebodies as a result. I’m actually not completely sure this is true. I think it was for awhile, but to think a couple years of being at home could undo millennia of innate desire to be with others seems maybe a little far-fetched.
• Technology Advances: Video chat is so good now, and other social platforms are so ubiquitous, that staying connected in high quality just isn’t that hard anymore. It doesn’t require physical presence

What’s interesting about the last one is that the result of cheap technology and addictive social platforms have saturated us with connection. We spend so much of our day connecting with people online through social media, online forums, and indirectly by “overhearing” conversations in comment sections, that it might be that we get kind of “socialed out”. We’re kinda over-connected in a way that we were never expected to be.

The Dunbar number is the number of connections that a human can maintain, in theory. It’s 150. It might be that this over-connection, mediated by technology, has stressed our systems. Cognitively, we’ve never had to maintain or simply manage, the thousands of connections with other humans that we now have day to day (some longer term than others). This cognitive overload of connections has to stress the brain, right? Seems obvious.

Is this why I don’t want to go out anymore? Am I so overstimulated from connection, from stressing what my body can theoretically handle in terms of connection, that the idea of expending energy to do more of it feels exhausting?

Or maybe I’m old, like my kids say.