A few years ago I had one unexpected, glorious day with a friend whose new corporate job had swallowed him whole.

I was between jobs – and he had allergies which gummed up his eyes with goo. It was his company’s headshot day and he looked too hideous to photograph, so he called in sick.

It was a beautiful Melbourne day. We rode our bikes around Fitzroy and into the city, lay in a park, popped into the supreme court to watch an hour of a random case, then had a long lunch, a game of pingpong in another park, then on to a pub where we played chess by a fire.

It felt decadent, wasteful even, to spend a day like that rolling around town. No work was done and nothing was achieved. But on a deeper level it felt deeply satisfying to just spend a whole day hanging out, moving aimlessly around the city.

We vowed to have more days like that but we never did.

Last week a piece mourning the death of hanging out with friends hit a chord and went viral.

Everyone entering their 30s goes through it – the dawning realisation that time with your friends changes. You betray each other in all the ways that friends do, getting serious jobs, working multiple jobs to pay a mortgage or save for a deposit, falling in love, getting married and having a family, or – increasingly – just ditching catchups because you’re exhausted and it’s easier to spend time keeping in touch on social media.

Long, unstructured hangouts with friends stop or reduce to a trickle, replaced by the sort of ambient connection where you track each other’s movements and big life events via Instagram stories.

They don’t need to tell you they got engaged, you saw!

But this type of connection is a “snack” compared with the long lunch of the proper hang.

Marisa Franco, a psychologist who has written a book about friendship, told NPR: “I think the trickiness of social media is it gives us these snacks of connection. And it’s like we’ve been subsisting on snacks of connection from social media rather than having the sort of nutrient-dense meal of in-person connection.”

While unstructured time with friends has always contracted when other responsibilities loom, young people aren’t even enjoying the pre-30s long hangouts their parents and grandparents might have experienced.

Instead they’re opting to spend more time at home, on their devices.

For Americans, the average time spent at home rose by one hour and 39 minutes a day between 2003 and 2022. This trend is strongest among younger generations – 15- to 24-year-olds now spend more than two additional hours a day at home compared with their 2006 counterparts, leading the New York Times to describe the US as “a nation of homebodies”.

In 2024, for the first time, adults 50 and older spent more time socialising in person than teens and young adults, according to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics.

Australians are also in cultural and social retreat.

The average Australian spends roughly five and a half hours on their mobile phone every day. When looking at internet usage across all devices, Australians log an incredible 41 hours online each week – more than the average full-time work week.

That’s time we could be hanging out with each other, away from screens.

Re-reading Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip (1977) and rewatching Before Sunrise (1995), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) and Reality Bites (1996), what struck me was that hanging out was the point.

The characters weren’t optimising their time into small chunks, like lawyers billing in seven-minute increments. They weren’t consulting their calendars and booking dinner two months in advance, or setting up WhatsApp chats for the meal, then having to cancel at the last minute. Instead they were flowing through time with their friends, being spontaneous depending on the mood and the weather.

In Monkey Grip, people drop in unannounced, they sit on verandas, they go to the pool (“It was early summer. And everything, as it always does, began to heave and change”) they cook communal meals that nobody planned, they turn up at each other’s houses without warning.

Garner’s novel is an archive of a social world that’s largely gone. Hanging out is not the backdrop in Monkey Grip, it is the entire architecture of the book. Everyone is perpetually available to each other and connecting, in a way contemporary life and screen time have systematically dismantled.

I noticed how slow and unhurried the characters were (“I wandered in a dream around the city”), how they noticed things about each other and the places where they lived because they were fully attuned to what was happening around them. They were not trying to live another life in a virtual world through their phones.

Hanging out is not quite dead – but it’s not thriving. There are many things, including the cost of living, the disappearance of third spaces, the general exhaustion of modern life, the people engaged in more intensive parenting, that are pushing us away from feeling comfortable just hanging out without much of a plan.

There’s a skill to having a good hang, to being a good hanger – to go with the flow, shoot the shit, be spontaneous and open – and we’re losing it.

• Brigid Delaney is the author of five books, including The Seeker and the Sage. She can be found on Substack at the Chaos Era