Comment by stego-tech

Midlife millennial American here.

I’ve sorely wanted to host folks for game nights and shared meals and movies and the like. In fact, in the 2010s I’d play host to folks on the semi-regular since having people in my space is far less energy draining than being a guest in someone else’s.

Since ~2018, I’ve hosted guests three times.

Why the change?

Well, the landlord began charging for garage parking that used to be gratis, forcing cheapskates and broke renters into the visitor spaces. Then they clawed back 25% of guest parking for premium EV charging, meaning even guests with EVs couldn’t park there once they finished charging. Then the landlord stopped enforcing that, meaning folks with EVs can’t charge them because the spots are always full of combustion vehicles. This meant public transit and cycling were the only remaining options for guest access, the former of which required an hour-long detour for my friends to catch a single, specific bus route, while the latter would see them crossing stroads and cycling on state highways with vehicular traffic.

The local logistics are fungible however, and not the sole reason for the drop off. The bigger reason, admittedly, is fatigue. We spend eight hours working, then commute one to two hours each way (~10mi). Include time to prepare for work, make meals, and decompress after, and you’re left with ~1-2hrs a day for free time before having to sleep. Most employers I’ve worked for would side-eye you with disdain for trying to leave early to host an event at home, meaning we don’t feel comfortable asking for the time off in the first place. That doesn’t even include the associated workloads of our guests, who just have to show up almost immediately after work and don’t mind using their very limited free time hanging out in my space.

Then you bake in the fiscal costs - fuel for transit, food to share or prepare, parking and transit fees - and the data harvesting costs (landlord surveillance logging your entry, advertising displays profiling you, Flock camera at the sole neighborhood entrance tracking your entry and exit, etc) and it just doesn’t make fiscal or psychological sense to host at home. That doesn’t even touch on renters having smaller spaces than homeowners making hosting more of a challenge, potential noise complaints about your jovial party from a nosey neighbor getting your lease non-renewed, or the ease of just queuing up for a game remotely (even if it lacks the payoff of a physical visit from another human).

The closest I came to hosting on the regular was that brief window where COVID was managed but before RTO came hammering down. I squeezed in two visits during that time, before mandatory RTO and the insane commutes and shitty job market just kinda sapped all the energy from my circles for anything but basic survival.

Which is all a lengthy way of saying that the problem as I see it is that these events are declining because fewer people are thriving, and more people feel barely able to survive. The excess energy I do have doesn’t go to hosting so much as enjoying social events elsewhere, but that only happens because I am privileged enough to be able to take the next day off from work for recovery without getting fussed at by my employer; nobody else in my circles has that luxury at present.