We used to have multi-generational households where older adults would take care of the little tots as the younger adults went out to work. In the Middle Ages all the way through the immigrant diaspora era of the 1920s, this was the role of the so-called “village” where the young would go to work and the old would take care of the next generation. In 2026, the idea of a village is all but nonexistent, and that’s because we’re choosing to avoid conversations with our neighbors.
In fact, only 40% of Americans say they talk to their neighbors regularly today. In 2012, nearly six in 10 did. And that lack of socializing leads to fewer personal interactions, which in turn, is making our society very home-bound and reclusive, all because we don’t want to exit our comfort zone.
“People don’t dance as much anymore at clubs because they’re worried they may do something stupid, they may fall, they may look silly, and they know that everyone has a recording and broadcasting device in their pocket,” said Daniel Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute and lead author of a new report on the decline titled “Strangers Next Door.”
Among young adults, regular contact with neighbors has fallen from 51% to about one in four in a little over a decade, the sharpest decline of any age group. Among older Americans, 56% still talk to neighbors weekly, down just seven points.
“We’ve lost an appreciation for those kinds of interactions,” Cox told Fortune. “Our sense of belonging, our sense of community, our sense of security and safety are derived in part by those regular, routinized interactions.”
Cox has a book coming out in October, Generation Uncoupled, that looks at the gap opening between young men and young women in American life. But the neighbor data, he said, fits a pattern he has tracked for years: a steady erosion of the interactions that once held communities together, replaced by a quiet fear of being seen.
Any misstep in public can now be filmed and shared without context. “I can remember so many dumb things my friends and I used to say and do, and it never left that kind of circle of folks, and was forgotten usually, like the next day,” he said, describing his adolescence. “I feel like young people cannot rely on that forgetting-ness.”
That pattern is evident in a recent study which found Americans speak roughly 28% fewer words per day than they did in 2007. It’s a pattern that also shows up in the disappearance of bars, bowling alleys, and movie theaters: the everyday gathering spots that used to put people in a room together without anyone having to plan it.
Not wanting to ask for help
Cox found young adults are far less comfortable asking a neighbor for help than people over 30 are. The gap is widest on something as small as holding a spare set of keys: 60% of older adults say they’d be comfortable with that, compared with 36% of young adults. Fewer than four in 10 parents without a college degree say they’d feel comfortable asking a neighbor to watch their child in an emergency.
Cox pointed to several forces layered on top of each other, starting with convenience. Apps have replaced the errands and small transactions that once put people in contact with each other. “We can order something on Amazon. We can order something on DoorDash, and we don’t ever have to talk to anyone,” Cox said.
Hiring out a task, calling a rideshare instead of asking for a lift, ordering coffee before reaching the counter: each one removes a small interaction that used to happen by default. Cox said this has changed what people believe they’re allowed to ask of others. “It changes the expectation that you can ask for those things, or that it’s appropriate to ask someone.”
The surveillance fear compounds that shift. If a stumble or an awkward exchange can be recorded and broadcast, asking a neighbor for a favor carries a kind of exposure it never used to. Cox said this weighs most heavily on young people, for whom peer approval matters most. “That can really forestall people from engaging in the way that they otherwise normally would,” he said.
A third factor is less visible but Cox said it’s just as important: how children are raised. The center’s surveys have found a generational split in how people describe their own upbringing. Americans over 50 are far more likely to say their parents viewed them as average growing up. Younger Americans are more likely to say their parents viewed them as exceptional.
Cox connects that shift to smaller families, more competitive college admissions, and a rise in enrichment activities aimed at the individual child rather than the family or community. “It’s less about you’re contributing to the family, you’re contributing to your community, you’re contributing to your church or denomination,” he said. “It gives you kind of a skewed sense of who you are and how you matter.”
Trust in neighbors tracks closely with education: 81% of college graduates say they trust the people in their neighborhood a fair amount or a great deal, compared with 64% of Americans with a high school education or less. Homeowners report far more trust than renters, and people in detached houses report more than people in apartments.
The same divide shows up in whether people feel they can rely on anyone nearby, representing the loss of a basic safety net. Fewer than four in 10 parents without a college degree say they’d be comfortable asking a neighbor to watch their child for a few hours in an emergency, compared with a majority of college-educated parents.
Cox attributed part of that gap to trust and part of it to rootedness—college graduates are more likely to be homeowners, more likely to have lived in a neighborhood long enough to know people, and more likely to be connected through overlapping memberships, like a shared school or youth sports league. “They’re not strangers,” he said. “You’re connected not only by geography but by shared membership in a denser web of organizations.”
The report also documents a shift in what Americans think a good neighbor even owes another person, describing “a backdrop of rising social isolation.” Nearly two-thirds now say being a good neighbor means staying out of others’ business, rather than offering help unasked, a view held even more strongly by young adults than by seniors.
The institutions stopped doing the work
Cox argued that the decline isn’t only about new habits. It’s about the disappearance of structures that used to organize social life without anyone having to plan it.
“Individuals are taking on roles and responsibilities that once were the domain of institutions,” he said. Regular religious worship, for instance, used to guarantee that the same group of people showed up in the same place every week, with no organizing required. “It required no effort, no planning, no WhatsApp text chain,” Cox said. Today, seeing the same group of friends takes deliberate coordination, and increasingly, it doesn’t happen.
He drew a parallel to remote work. Employees gained flexibility after the pandemic, but lost the daily, unplanned contact with colleagues that used to come built in. “The workplace is a really important part of our social life,” Cox said. “If we don’t have these umbrella structures that are organizing our lives together, we can often go off and be doing our own thing… but it often leads to kind of a lonely place.”
The report also found a consistent class gap. Nearly six in 10 college graduates spent an evening socializing with a neighbor in the past year, compared with fewer than half of Americans with a high school education or less. The gap holds regardless of whether people live in cities, suburbs, or rural areas.
“Places where labor unions or churches or veterans groups were important for the social and civic lives of working-class Americans are far less prominent,” he said. “They’re smaller. They’re serving fewer people.” College graduates have stepped in to do some of that organizing themselves—book clubs, parent groups, informal networks—in ways that require time, money, and social capital that not everyone has.
Get a dog and take a hike
Two things in the data cut across class and age lines: walking, and access to physical gathering places.
Americans who walk or run through their neighborhood at least once a week are far more likely to talk with neighbors regularly than those who rarely leave the house. Cox connects this directly to the built environment. “It has to be feasible,” he said. “It has to be something that people can reasonably do regularly.”
That’s consistent with what researchers have found in studying the decline of America’s third places more broadly: when the everyday spots where people used to run into each other disappear or stop functioning as gathering places, the low-stakes interactions that build a sense of belonging disappear with them.
Cox described a small grocery store near his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, across the street from an elementary school, as an example of what that kind of infrastructure produces. “You just go there, you’re going to see someone that you know,” he said. “Almost no one’s driving there. Almost all of us are walking.” Encounters that turn into playdates or plans, he said, tend to start in places like that because the space made them nearly unavoidable.
