Idk if this is specific to my generation, but us young people suck at hanging out. People never confirm whether or not they're going to an event. They flake all the time, often without warning. If they're not flaking, they're perpetually late, often absurdly (nothing like getting to a place and getting a text about just leaving). It drives me nuts. But it's so ubiquitous, it's hard to take a stand against it. It's like people forgot how to hang out with friends.
When I was a kid we had relatives who were always late by half an hour or more. I remember my parents planning event with sometimes hours of buffer to account for people being late with no mean to check if they'll even be there in the end.
I think we are more sensitive to these issues because there's less excuses (even 'traffic was bad' is less and less an excuse as we get ETAs, it needs to be something really bad happening to get sympathy).
We are more used to things being in sync (pre-checking shop opening hours or having average wait times for instance) and moving generally fast.
When I was a kid, which is getting to be a long time ago, we never really scheduled anything. People in our peer group tended to hang out in maybe 6-10 different locations - one being a particular bar, one being a particular corner, one being a particular house, etc. Sometimes a location would disappear, sometimes you'd hear about a new location.
On your downtime, you would go to one of those locations and join the group already there, or loiter a little while until someone you knew showed up. If nobody showed up, you'd drift to one of the other locations and do the same thing. One out of 20 times you'd go home without seeing anybody that you were interested in hanging out with.
That's how a commons works, I think. The problem is a lack of a commons, and a suspicion of people in public who aren't currently in the process of shopping. The idea that in this alienated time I'd go to a particular restaurant where people go, drink coffee and just wait for somebody to show up that wanted to hang out almost sounds utopian or suspiciously foreign, but it was my life from probably age 12 to 24.
The commons thing does sound pretty magical the way you described it. For me, there were often anti-social people at those common areas. People who you sometimes didn't want to run into, who were really certain subcultures and they didn't always mix.
I don't know if it's teenagers today, but that's always been the case for me and I'm in my mid 30s. Going outside close knit circle of people you know real well for a while, when you create an event people are perpetually going to leave their answer to the last minute or say maybe.
Perhaps that's the results of a fast-moving culture where, for most people, evening events and activities are prevalent and only a click away with the idea that the grass is always greener being prevalent. You don't want to commit to anything days, let alone weeks, in advance because maybe there will be something better to do. Maybe something you wanted to do with your friends a week ago no longer interests you or your couch is too comfortable to leave for the evening.
People are just less invested in meeting in person nowadays with the ubiquity of social media as well as the increasing demands of society on our time.
People who never flake out now gets a lot of respect from me since they respect my time.
> It's like people forgot how to hang out with friends.
This isn't unique, I grew up on the cusp of cellphone ubiquity, and I think it's that in the first few years after people have real latitude in managing their own time, there's a steep learning curve. In In my experience though, this started to change around 18/19 when people started to realize that being flakey isn't cool. Does it seem like that's happening/happened with your peer group?
