Every single social event is a financial consideration now. Want to go out with the wife for the evening? It's going to cost $150+ for a baby sitter at $25/hour. The dinner + tip is going to cost $200. Parking is going to cost $50 - $100 if you go into a city. You could take public transportation but then you're loooking at that cost shifting back to the babysitter. Before you know it you're in for $300 - $500 just for a night off.
> The dinner + tip is going to cost $200. Parking is going to cost $50 - $100 if you go into a city.
Why are you driving into a city that costs $100 to park in and then to a restaurant that costs $100 per person if money is a consideration?
Go to a local restaurant. Go to one outside of that city. Do literally anything other than the scenario you described.
I guarantee that if you're near a city where you can find $100 parking, you can find 100 or 1000 amazing small restaurants that are affordable and interesting.
This is a type of defeatism where someone imagines the worst possible scenario, erases all other options, and then pretends it's a choice between the worst scenario or nothing at all.
I had a burger, fries and 2 beers last night at one of these small local restaurants. It was $47 with tip. I had a bbq plate the other day at a local restaurant. 2 meats, 2 sides was $26 dollars before a drink or tip was added.
Going out in the US is so expensive now, even the low end, that you might as well do something nicer.
You haven't seen "event pricing" parking in cities have you? I was in Atlanta a while back and I was unfortunate enough to need to go in to the city during some big concert. Every garage had event parking prices that were $80+.
If it's a sporting event or concert and you need to drive $50 is pretty easy to hit. Major downtowns are solidly $40 on a regular night out if you can't find a meter (which is capped at 2 hours and a parking ticket costs you $50). If you have two cars because not everyone is coming from the same place you're completely hosed.
Going to the movies costs my family $100 without concessions. The zoo $80, the aquarium $100, art museum $80. There's a decent public park system but we're often the only ones there. McDonalds doesn't have playplaces anymore, sleepovers barely exist. The nearest bowling alley is 30 minutes away and runs us about $60 an hour without food.
Add food to anything (which most places don't allow from outside) and you're sometimes doubling the price for complete trash.
Some people live on a different planet.. The last social event I did (last night) I took the train to their house which cost me $5 return, and we went out to eat at a Japanese restaurant where I got a Chicken Katsu for $17AUD. This social event cost me not much more than if I had sat at home and ate dinner normally.
When I'm visiting developing countries, I'm often in awe of the increased social activity and wondering why we don't have that in the western world anymore. One thing I think about is the cost increase like this.
Baumol's cost disease often comes to mind - in my (might be wrong) application of it - western society simply has had too much productivity and efficiency improvements. You can make more money as a software developer or as an investment banker because those jobs have gotten more efficient and have higher payouts to employers who want the best employees.
There can't be efficiency improvements in efficiency for child care, so the only way to have people want to become child care workers is to pay a competitive salary, so the efficiency increases in the other unrelated fields directly increase the cost of child care.
Developing countries don't have this problem and domestic labor and child care are still cheap.
I spend about half of every year cycling the developing world. Whatever the continent, I'm seeing more and more young people on their phones watching short-length video. I don't think they are far behind the West in the decline of socializing.
Babysitting is cheap if there are enough aunts and uncles (or trustworthy teenage neighbor girls) around, but in Western countries many of us don't have siblings or moved too far away.
Yeah definitely not something to ignore; growing up we'd have grandma and a neighbourhood friend baysit us. Now, I moved far away from where I grew up because the jobs are better, but I'm left without much of an (unpaid) support network. But that's a bigger story than a random internet comment.
I have often thought about how many movies and TV shows in my childhood (1980s) focused on plot lines of people regularly gathering at a bar after work. Did people really do that or is it just a Hollywood thing to put people in the same place? Now that I think about it, actually, I guess my department at work did this when I first started in the early 2000s, going out to the bar once or twice a week.
It's hard to imagine doing that nowadays. I have a family, so doing that instead of going home in the evening would be selfish (if done too often), but even if I were younger and had time, it would seem very extravagant now. When a beer is $8-10 or even more, it would be an expensive proposition to go to the bar every night after work. And if you order food it's even worse...
I think the answer to your question is right there in your post:
> Now that I think about it, actually, I guess my department at work did this when I first started in the early 2000s, going out to the bar once or twice a week.
> It's hard to imagine doing that nowadays. I have a family,
This still happens. Young people get together and go out after work. I don't go to pubs often, but when I meet up with someone after work the crowd is people meeting up after work with each other.
If everyone in your department is over 35 and has kids, you won't have much luck with this. If everyone is in their 20s and friendly, there's probably something going on.
I think a lot of people forgot how to be friendly with coworkers, especially if they spend a lot of time online. Online discussions about jobs mostly read like it's a cutthroat single player game where you shouldn't get too close to anyone because you can't trust anyone and you should be planning your next job hop anyway. I have to remind a lot of people younger than me that it's okay to have friends at work. You need to have friends outside of work, too, but you can be friendly with people at work.
I guess my point was that the socializing depicted in media was older people, not just young singles.
If I didn't have kids, would I want to go out multiple nights a week for a few beers with friends? I don't know. I'd certainly think about the cost of it more now than when I was 25.
Similarly for restaurants - they've gotten so expensive, and often the food isn't as good as we remember - that my wife and I don't seem to be as interested in going out to eat as we used to.
I'm afraid to have friends at work because I get attached and I feel bad when I leave after 2-5 years. I have to make career moves to get raises and progress, and it's easiest if I'm not too fond of the people around me.
This is also the same reason that companies push "culture" and try to emphasize how we're a team or a family.
In university, I made a few friends who went to different international schools growing up. Their parents were diplomats or executives who moved cities/countries every couple of years, and they'd switch schools to go with them. They were charismatic and personable, and quick to make friends.
But at the same time, after our natural relationship ran its course (due to graduations or leaving a student team), it felt like they disappeared. My relationship with them wouldn't linger like with other friends (even if weakened).
Another friend of mine directly described this view that "friendships have a time and place" in life. I thought about that perspective and didn't fully agree, but it still taught me that it's perfectly possible and even healthy to make friends quickly even if circumstances are temporary.
My view is that even if you become good friends with someone (at work or elsewhere) and they leave, you still end up with a network of friends across the country in different workplaces. Even when the nature of the friendship changes, you can still catch up with many of your old friends on occasion (like around the holidays).
And even if relationships completely fade, I believe that genuine relationships will always be a nice experience.
I can, but it probably won't work out, and I don't want to dump my old projects off on them and make them suffer, and I don't want to disappoint them, etc.
> Online discussions about jobs mostly read like it's a cutthroat single player game where you shouldn't get too close to anyone because you can't trust anyone and you should be planning your next job hop anyway
You don't think this is a response to corporate culture? Especially over the last few years.
People really did that regularly. It does seem to be economically related, for a lot of reasons.
One aspect is that a single income really was enough to not feel extravagant to have a home, a family, and afford to go to the bar a few nights a week. (Part of this was there wasn't as much random other stuff to buy, it wasn't being marketed to you nearly as aggressively either.)
I certainly did this quite a bit in the 1990's, and in the early 1980's I definitely remember my father going out at least twice a week and then the weekends also being for going out and doing something as a family at least 2/3 weekends per month - like trips to a nearby city, or to a sports game, or visit other family, or whatnot.
It used to be fairly common in smaller but densely populated areas in the United States, not so long ago (pre-2020). A lot of breweries were setup so that there were even outdoor areas that kids could be in. Usually one of the drafts was priced drastically lower than the others, and there were many unspoken relationship-based discounts or "try this" from the bartender or owner.
The unfortunate thing to me is that outside of VERY upscale or VERY downscale dive bars, every place is full of screens now. People go to bars and look at screens instead of talking as much as they used to.
I live in an urban area. Most bars in the area have a decent crowd after work into the night. The demographics of the crowd varies based on the bar. Based on your description we're roughly the same age, as a data point I wind up out after work usually 2-3x a week.
There's one bar I go to regularly where there's a couple of guys who I've literally never seen absent over the years.
It was mostly a fiction to advance the plot. Going to bars after work has always been a thing for young singles or old alcoholics, but pretty rare for parents/married people to do routinely.
In my experience this is not true. People of all ages would pop off for a pint after work or cut out a little early at many places I've worked. It was never hanging out for hours. It would be like an hour and you would usually just talk about the stuff at work that you're frustrated about. Not everyone would go, but high performers were usually well represented.
I think the demographics of HN would explain why this seems like hollywood fiction when it is/was very normal behavior.
Interestingly, "went to a bar in the past year" is one of the few questions in the survey whose answer basically didn't budge (52% in 1995 vs. 49% in 2026).
I went first time with office team this year a couple of weeks back. Needless to say whole experience was atrocious. No common reference, movies, sports, TV and so on to talk about besides work. It was just: "Oh, what do you do on weekend? I do x,y,z " in a round-robbin manner.
It was definitely not good time, or even bad time one can remember, just an insipid gathering for 3 hours of doing nothing. $8 for a beer and $15-20 per person for lukewarm food not sure I'll be excited for another meet any time soon.
Babysitting is the big one for me. I can eat cheaper, but I can't really get a cheaper babysitter. My wife used to babysit for 5 bucks an hour just 10 years ago, and high school aged girls now want 20 an hour minimum. We're not talking "professionals" and my cost of going out is now at least 60-80 bucks without acting else.
This is also caused by the decline in social activity and community. People in the past didnt have this problem as much because they had tons of trusted family members, friends, neighbors, who also had children and could thus look after theirs for an evening.
I think the friction is a much bigger issue than the cost. People are stuck in a trap of scrolling short form video because it provides no friction. While organizing a picnic is extremely high friction relative to social media scrolling.
I think to solve this we are going to have to blow up social media and make going out in public more convenient and friendly. Otherwise we are going to end up in a WALL-E society where people spend all day with their meta glasses streaming AI generated micro dramas.
See that's the problem, you live IN the city, and you're not afraid of the city, so you know how it really is.
I've gotten the "Parking is too expensive and hard to find" from friends when I try and get them to come into the city to hang out. No, come to my apartment, park in the plentiful free protected street parking right out front, and then we'll walk the 5 minutes to the center of downtown.
There are different ways of approaching doing something:
"To do X requires me to do this and that. So heres how I'll do this and that to get to X. "
"I can't do X because it requires me to do this and that. "
There's a big difference between the 2. The latter is a lie, they just don't want to do what is required to do that. Its a way of phrasing things so people don't feel bad and they don't have to admit they don't want to do something.
Start looking for it and you'll see it in a lot of exchanges.
Dinner + tip can easily reach $200 if you're talking about a fancy restaurant for date night, even with just a single drink each. $50 for parking is crazy, that's like a music festival price or something.
Of course, if you live in the kind of city where the above is true, then a very delicious dinner + tip can usually be had for $50-75, it just won't be as fancy.
You don't have to go to fancy restaurants for a date you know. Maybe for your anniversary. People who insist on fancy everything are probably not worth the trouble.
