Nobody knows how to hang out anymore and it's making us miserable

• Social isolation was on the rise even before the pandemic, but has spiked in recent years.
• In "Hanging Out," author Sheila Liming explores how people can reclaim the benefits of socializing.
• Liming spoke to Insider about the book and her favorite ways to hang out in an interview this month. 

Nobody hangs out anymore, at least not like we used to. We are eternally tied to our phones, our televisions, our computers, our desks — all of which increasingly exist within the same four falls where we eat, sleep, and unwind each day, oftentimes completely alone.

Even before the pandemic, social isolation was on the rise. The rapid pace of modern life coupled with exponential technological advancement prompted US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy to declare an "epidemic of loneliness" in April 2020. 

Then COVID-19 arrived and exacerbated our societal state of shared solitude. It's that ongoing crisis that author Sheila Liming explores in her new book, "Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time," a work that examines both how and why we lost the art of the hang (hint: it's not all COVID's fault), and one that proposes solutions to help people reclaim those lost connections.

Hanging out, according to Liming, is the unstructured or lightly structured time spent in the company of friends, strangers, or acquaintances. Though a simple concept, hanging out is essential to our existence, Liming argues, providing the space to seek intimacy, connection, and peace with other people.

As our world grows more insular and ornery, Liming suggests hanging out is an action we can — and should — prioritize, even if it means dragging ourselves away from the couch and opening ourselves up to discomfort. 

Whatever happened to hanging out?

It would be easy to blame the crisis of community on COVID-19, an era-defining pandemic that radically altered social interactions and norms around the globe. 

But Liming argues throughout her book that the pandemic was not so much a cause, but a catalyst, to our already-shifting relationship with hanging out. The idea for the book struck her as early as 2019, she told Insider, predating the coronavirus. But the pandemic kicked those musings into overdrive.

"I had been thinking about parties, and I had been thinking about adult social structures, and I had been thinking about the ways that we get together with friends in casual atmospheres," Liming said in an interview this month. "Then all of a sudden we didn't have any of those." 

Covid essentially helped "transfer the majority of our social energies to the internet," Liming writes. Our dependence on technology had already curtailed in-person socializing; the pandemic just sealed the deal.

But the virtual world simply can't offer the same level of intimacy as an in-person hangout, Liming argues. 

Bye-bye to work friends

The pandemic also dealt a death knell to the traditional workplace, though society's relationship with our jobs was shifting long before Covid. Regardless of what ultimately caused the workplace casualty, socialization has suffered as a result. 

The workplace is often where we begin to form attachments in a new place, Liming said. Hanging out requires certain commonalities between participants, Liming told Insider, including space and schedule, which is why the standard nine-to-five, in-person work model was once so conducive to friendships and informal hangouts.

The proliferation of remote working, however, has since nixed the opportunity for shared spaces, while hybrid work has seemingly killed the concept of shared schedules.

"Now even when we go into work, there aren't other people there, and we don't have that same kind of experience of killing time around the water cooler or the coffee pot," Liming said. 

The pandemic has also been blamed for eradicating "third spaces," communal places that are neither the workplace nor the home, where people can gather and socialize, such as churches, clubs, libraries, gyms, bookstores, and parks, according to Liming. Third places allow a person to "exist in public without having to claim the right to exist in public through some sort of productive activity or commerce," she told Insider, making them prime spots for impromptu socializing.

The decline of third spaces, however, has been steadily on the rise since the early 2000s, becoming even more pronounced following the advent of smartphones, according to Liming. 

"A lot of our life started to take place in these virtual public spaces as opposed to physical public spaces," she said.

Hanging out in this day and age takes real work

In her book, Liming offers gentle suggestions to help readers start seeking shared joy.

1. Not all hangouts are created equal

Amid the pandemic tumult, Liming said she started noticing growing anxiety among her compatriots regarding parties.

"We think of parties as being celebratory occasions. Yet, I find that easily half of the people I know view parties with a certain amount of dread," Liming said. "I was interested in that. Why is it that we do these things if we don't like doing them?"

Some types of hangouts revealed themselves to be more conducive to achieving the benefits of socialization than others, she said. 

"I think it's hard to have a really gratifying experience hanging out when you're in a really gigantic group, because inevitably what you do is you end up seeking out the smaller group scenarios," Liming said. 

For maximum benefits: keep your hangout small, Liming advocated, especially as we all become re-acquainted with group socializing. 

2. Find a niche interest

Liming, herself, plays the bagpipes, and dedicates one of the book's chapters to "jamming," recounting her years playing with different groups of friends and likening the improvisational element of making music to the spontaneity present in social settings.

Her mastery of the unique instrument helped her put roots down in several eras of life, including a recent cross-country move, she said.

"What I often do when I move to a place is I find out who plays bagpipes in that place," she told Insider. "If you want to be involved in this, you've got to seek each other out. That's the only way it works." 

Hobbies, passion projects, and reliably-scheduled meetings or meetups are all gateways to hanging out, Liming said.

3. Take risks and take your headphones out

We can plan and prep and fret until we've exhausted ourselves, but sometimes human connection comes when we least expect it, Liming said. She suggests readers mentally and physically avail themselves of opportunities for socializing and chance encounters, the likes of which are likely to evade the headphone-wearing hiker or home-dwelling human. 

"We risk bringing discomfort upon ourselves when we enter into situations that lack foreseeable parameters or outcomes," Liming writes. "But insofar as discomfort is linked to its inverse, to comfort — because we cannot know and define one sensation without having some experience of the other — hanging out can be a way to keep the two in balance, to force a person to constantly confront and reckon with the definitions of each."

4. Be an active participant in maintaining your hangout health

It may seem simple, but it's perhaps Liming's most significant reminder: Cultivating meaningful relationships and experiences requires active participation, effort, decision, stamina, and care. 

"Hanging out requires the repeated exertion and application of one's social capacities. That can feel exhausting, sure..." Liming writes. "But as with all things, the first attempt is the hardest and after that, momentum can be counted on to bear an increasing proportion of the weight of whatever follows."