When did you last hang out?

Or the magic of meandering social time

Photo by Jez Timms on Unsplash

I’m doing nothing with my friend one Wednesday when it occurs to me that I can’t remember the last time I did nothing with anyone I’m not married or related to. I’ve sipped Americanos in coffee shops and put away pasta after work. But as we eat our way down to the second layer of the biscuit tin, bundle her baby into his pram and meet my nephew at the school gates, we get to the conversational core; the stuff we only skimmed the surface of in the catch-up calls that proceeded it. We’re…hanging out. That our hang was enabled by annual leave is part of the problem.

‘At what point does hanging out become catching up?’ asked Harriet Walker this week. In a piece for The Times, the fashion editor and self-described geriatric millennial examined the impact of ageing on socialising. ‘The time I spend with my friends often feels like a work meeting,’ she wrote, of the catch-up culture that’s become a by-product of busy. ‘Job stuff, house stuff, money stuff, busy kids, sick parents, then maybe a little quickfire round as we wait for the bill.’ She isn’t complaining, she notes; we do what we can with the time we have. And yet: ‘…the old version of socialising never had a cut-off. You’d go to a party, maybe stay at someone’s house afterwards…then you would all watch telly in a heap…Now I’m a grown-up I realise it’s the telly bit, rather than the party, that’s the surest sign of a deep and profoundly intimate connection.’

Last week, two things landed in my inbox that validated this particular social struggle. The first was a survey that sought to quantify hanging out’s demise; we now spend just four hours a month socialising with our friends, with millennials more likely than other age groups to be seeing less of their friends this year than last. Next, the latest edition of Culture Study – a newsletter by the journalist Anne Helen Petersen – dropped into my Gmail. In the piece, Anne landed on a label for the millennial struggle to hang out. The friendship dip, she notes, refers to the downward curve in the number of close friendships that begins in your late 20s and persists throughout your 30s before recovering in your 40s and 50s. The hurdles, as she sees them, are wide-ranging, but chief among them are calendar culture and career advancement.

Cutting slack

They’re hurdles Sheila Liming is familiar with. ‘It’s a phenomenon that started to become apparent to me when I was in my mid 30s,’ she tells me, over a WhatsApp call from Vermont, where she’s associate professor at Champlain College. ‘I was working a lot, in my first big career position and I was haunted by this feeling that I was failing to engage socially, failing to hang out.’ So she did what any connection-starved millennial (or xennial, the cusp generation to which she belongs) would do: she went online. ‘I ended up setting up my first social media account as a way to cope with that absence, not as a way to replace it. But what I’m interested in is the way that coping mechanisms have now simply become the replacement for the habits and behaviours that we originally desired.’ See: catching up in the Instagram comments section and the diligent exchange of memes.

What followed was an investigation into the magic of meandering social time – and what’s keeping us from doing more of it. In Hanging Out: The Radical Power Of Killing Time, she makes the case for the hang as a form of socialising distinct from any other; one that creates the conditions for intimacy, connection and meaning in a world that, as she puts it, is increasingly hostile to all three. Those hostilities are many and varied – the inability to put our phones down among them. But key to reclaiming the hang, she argues, is reclaiming our relationship with time, with time-thieves including the blurring of boundaries between work and leisure (the pinging Slack app on your phone) and the pursuit of productivity (the urge to fill your free time with newsletter writing). When you carve out time to hang out, she writes, you assert your right to be non-productive.

Call of duty

That I felt connected to my friend while wiping biscuit crumbs off her sofa isn’t all that surprising. There’s now reams of research to show that in-person interactions deliver a connective magic that other forms of communication can’t match. But besides being face-to-face, there’s a texture to this kind of social time that makes it particularly potent, says Sheila. ‘Improvisation is a central element of the way that humans connect with each other,’ she tells me, pointing to the ad hoc, loose way that children interact as a blueprint for creating connection. ‘It's a way of interacting that we lose touch with as we age, but also something that feels more impossible to us because the way our lives are so scheduled.’

Lately, my social life has felt more scheduled than ever. With the exception of a week of annual leave, when time took on a different quality, face time with friends has happened during allotted social hours – an approach necessitated by spending more of my free time writing. But while pencilling in plans with friends like they’re a work meeting comes with the stretched-for-time territory, it can threaten connection in two ways, says Sheila. First, it can make friendship feel like an act of duty. Next, it piles on the pressure. ‘There’s this feeling that if you’re going to make time for someone, it has to be worth it; they have to be worth it,’ she explains. ‘And that leads to additional stakes and burdens being placed on the hanging out. Because suddenly it feels like: this person made time for me, so I’ve got to make sure it’s worth it for them. That feeling is highly detrimental to the ways we interact with each other.’

Killing time

It takes being confronted with this detrimental effect myself for the message behind it to sink in. It’s only when I listen back to the recording of my interview with Sheila that I realise that the allotted time I gave our chat influenced the quality of our conversation. My questions feel hurried and rattled through and the conversational in-roads her answers create go largely unexplored. Ironically, if I’d applied the meandering magic we were talking about to our time together, it would have made for a more meaningful conversation. So I feel extremely seen when, towards the end of our call, she tells me reclaiming your relationship with time isn’t really about time at all, it’s about control.

‘I tend to be a Type A-oriented person and ceding control of social interactions is something I’ve had to work on,’ she begins. ‘I used to come at a lot of my social engagements from the perspective of: if I can’t do it right, I don’t want to do it at all. Now, if I have a small window of time in my calendar where I can go and spend some time with someone, I do it.’ The last time she hung out was two days earlier; when she found herself with a two-hour window in the middle of her working day, she messaged a friend who lives near her campus. ‘I went over to his house to hang out for a bit and then I went back to my desk. It wasn’t anything formal, but in that moment, we started talking about a dinner party we could have and other friends we could see. That small interaction set the stage for the next time we would see each other, so that’s something I’ve been actively trying to make myself do.’ Trying…because while reclaiming your relationship with time may not be quick work, it’s time well spent.