>from 43.5 percent to 48.7 percent, representing an increase of over 5 percentage points.
Honestly not that big of a change.
Insofar as people online talk about a big shift towards loneliness, I suspect that Aurornis is correct that self-selection has a lot to do with it.
I wonder if that small change in the average is masking a larger change in the variance. Perhaps we have more hypersocial people and more hyposocial people.
I do also think that any such summary statistic can only show a small part of the picture.
Of the time _not_ spent alone, how much is with a single other person as you look at different screens? Of time spent not alone and outside of the home, how many people are we with at any one time? How many different people do we have social interactions with per month? I.e. is the quality of our social interaction getting worse, are we with smaller groups, do we have sparser social graphs?
I could believe that you're right that the variance has increased, but is that driven by a growing share of shutins who only interact online and who are shifting to LLM friends?
Honestly not that big of a change.
Insofar as people online talk about a big shift towards loneliness, I suspect that Aurornis is correct that self-selection has a lot to do with it.
I wonder if that small change in the average is masking a larger change in the variance. Perhaps we have more hypersocial people and more hyposocial people.