Fridays Are Antisocial Now
The week has a heartbeat, and its rhythm is changing.
When Neal Caren, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, recently dug into data from the American Time Use Survey to look at when people were hanging with their friends over the course of a week, he mapped out a pattern that reminded him of an EKG. He saw steady pulses of friend time every weekday evening after work hours, and then bigger spikes on Friday and Saturday nights—like an arrhythmia caused by having fun. At least, that’s what he observed about the early 2000s, the earliest data he looked at. In the years since, the “‘heartbeat’ of social life” has grown fainter.
Americans have been spending less and less time with their friends over the past two decades, a trend that started well before the isolation of the coronavirus pandemic, and has continued long after restrictions were lifted. But looking across the week, Caren found that, starting in the mid-2010s, the biggest loss of friend time happened on Friday nights. (Saturday hangs have also declined a bit, but are still “nearly double the weekday level,” he wrote.) Now Friday—Friday! the day workers thank God for, the day that Rebecca Black sang about, the only day when Robert Smith is in love—looks no different from a common Tuesday. Its social pulse is mild, subdued. “Friday night in America has become just another weeknight,” Caren wrote in the study.
Weeks are a strange temporal unit, Eviatar Zerubavel, a professor emeritus of sociology at Rutgers University who has studied the relationship between time and social life, told me. The day, the month, the year—all of these have a basis in nature. The seven-day week, however, is a completely human invention. The unique flavors of each day of the week are also creations of human culture. Monday isn’t the start of the workweek because any inherent rhythm of life says it should be. Humans arbitrarily decided that. And it didn’t have to come with a negative connotation—but we all know that “a case of the Mondays” isn’t a good thing.
The flavor of Friday has long been a social one. “Friday in general is a strange animal because it’s between what we call the weekdays and the weekend, and it has characteristics of both,” Zerubavel said. Friday night is when we transition from the typical workweek into the days that society has reserved for freedom. For Jewish people, it is the beginning of Sabbath, which is ideally celebrated in community. Those who work nights or weekends surely have a different relationship with Friday nights, but even they share in the broad cultural understanding of what this time is for: parties, happy hours, shrugging out from under the weight of weekday cares, unwinding with your people. When someone says that a Thursday “feels like Friday,” this is probably what they mean—that it feels like the time to wrap up work and kick off the free, social part of the week. (In college, for instance, “Thirsty Thursday” sort of means “Extra Friday.”)
But it seems that the vibe of Friday night is evolving. If it loses its association with socializing, what Friday represents in our cultural imagination might change significantly. “I would expect if we have this conversation 40 years from now, you’ll ask different questions,” Zerubavel said. Caren’s study didn’t look at what Americans were doing instead of spending time with friends on Friday nights. But lately, people of all ages have been reporting a strong preference for staying home on evenings and weekends. In a 2020 Gallup poll, Americans’ favorite way to spend an evening was “staying home with family.” The runner-up was “watching television or a movie at home.” Only 3 percent of people named “entertaining/visiting friends” as their favorite evening activity. In a 2026 Harris poll on Gen Z, 73 percent said that staying home was their default weekend plan.
Friday nights in particular might be suffering because of their association with hitting the bars; drinking has fallen out of favor in the U.S. Remote work could also have something to do with it: Because Friday is a popular day to work from home for those who can, some reporting suggests that the post-work Friday happy hour is becoming endangered. Or people might simply be too exhausted at the end of the workweek. According to the American Psychological Association, work stress is on the rise. On Fridays, “you have to put more effort” into going out after working a full day, Caren said. For whatever reason, “the cost of going out on Friday nights—people aren’t finding this worthwhile anymore.”
Friday night is still a unique part of the week. What’s changing is how people want to transition into their weekend—at home, alone, or with family. Not out with friends. (Or even in with friends!) That’s a remarkable culture shift—but not, in and of itself, a bad one. Not enjoying drinking, being tired from the workweek and wanting to veg out, or prioritizing quality family time are perfectly understandable reasons to take Friday night down a notch. The real problem is that people aren’t shifting their friend time to a new spot on the calendar. The decline of Friday nights spent out on the town with friends has not led to a corresponding spike in Saturday-night dinners, Sunday-afternoon coffees, or even Wednesday-night Survivor watch parties—not according to the data, anyway. It just means people are seeing friends less, period. Friday night is not the thing that’s sacred. Time with our friends is.