Research suggests that all this homebody chatter is not just for show: Young people really are more prone to staying in these days. One 2018 paper, published in the journal Joule, found that Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 spend a whopping 70% more time at home than the general US population. In another 2018 survey, conducted by the marketing research firm Mintel, 28% of millennials between 24 and 31 said that they preferred to drink at home because going out was too much effort, compared to just 15% of baby boomers who agreed with that statement.
But it’s also true that all those Etsy t-shirts and introvert comics are part of a somewhat paradoxical phenomenon: The internet has given rise to a collective, public performance of solitude.
Source: Why millennials never want to leave their apartment anymore by Sarah Todd for Quartzy (archive) / Noted: 2019 November 20 / Discuss: On Dreamwidth