Take a stroll down Kinross High Street on a Friday or Saturday night, as I often do walking the dog, and you’ll observe a carousel of cars stopping outside the town hall to pick up takeaway pizzas and chippies. Walk further down the street and you’ll come across an Indian restaurant that is largely empty despite a stream of customers walking in the door. Where patrons would once have sat to await a table becoming free, they now wait silently for their takeaway, fiddling on smartphones, before disappearing into the night.

Before the pandemic, around a third of the calories we eat out of home were consumed in pubs and restaurants, with slightly less than that accounted for by takeaways. Since the end of the pandemic, takeaways have accounted for just under half of those calories, at the expense of eating in pubs, restaurants, or coffee shops. We’re consuming just as many calories from these establishments but we’re choosing to do so alone.

A similar shift is happening across society. The Office for National Statistics has been experimenting since the start of 2020 with a new time-use survey designed to estimate how many minutes each day adults in the UK spend on a range of activities, from sleeping to gardening. Between 2020 and 2024, the share of our time spent socialising fell by 18%.

Read more by Mark McGeoghegan

This shift is not unique to the UK. In the US, which has much longer-running and reliable time-use measures, in-person socialising has declined by over 20% since 2003. As Derek Thomson argued persuasively in his recent essay, The Anti-Social Century, “solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America”. In fact, social isolation is quickly becoming a defining........

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