We used to have multi-generational households in which older adults cared for young children while younger adults went out to work. From the Middle Ages through the immigrant diaspora era of the 1920s, that was the role of the so-called “village,” with the young working and the old helping raise the next generation. In 2026, that idea is largely absent, and one reason is that people are increasingly avoiding conversations with their neighbors.

Today, only 40% of Americans say they talk to their neighbors regularly. In 2012, nearly six in 10 did. That decline in socializing has reduced personal interactions and, in turn, left society more home-bound and reclusive, as many people hesitate to leave their comfort zones. The trend is part of a broader pattern that U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy flagged in a 2023 public health advisory, warning that loneliness and social isolation in the United States carry health risks comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.

“People don’t dance as much anymore at clubs because they’re worried they may do something stupid, they may fall, they may look silly, and they know that everyone has a recording and broadcasting device in their pocket,” said Daniel Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute and lead author of a new report on the decline titled Strangers Next Door.

Among young adults, regular contact with neighbors has fallen from 51% to about one in four in a little over a decade, the sharpest decline of any age group. Among older Americans, 56% still talk to neighbors weekly, down just seven points.

“We’ve lost an appreciation for those kinds of interactions,” Cox told Fortune. “Our sense of belonging, our sense of community, our sense of security and safety are derived in part by those regular, routinized interactions.”

Cox has a book coming out in October, Generation Uncoupled, which examines the widening gap between young men and young women in American life. He said the neighbor data fits a broader pattern he has tracked for years: a steady erosion of the interactions that once held communities together, replaced by a quiet fear of being seen. Sociologists have documented this kind of civic unraveling for decades, most notably in Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, which tracked sharp declines in Americans' participation in community organizations, clubs, and informal socializing starting in the mid-20th century.

Any public misstep can now be filmed and shared without context. “I can remember so many dumb things my friends and I used to say and do, and it never left that kind of circle of folks, and was forgotten usually, like the next day,” he said, describing his adolescence. “I feel like young people cannot rely on that forgetting-ness.”

That pattern also appears in a recent study showing that Americans speak roughly 28% fewer words per day than they did in 2007. It is reflected as well in the disappearance of bars, bowling alleys and movie theaters, once-common gathering places that put people in the same room without requiring advance planning.

Not wanting to ask for help

Cox found that young adults are far less comfortable asking a neighbor for help than people over 30 are. The widest gap concerns something as simple as holding a spare set of keys: 60% of older adults say they would be comfortable with that, compared with 36% of young adults. Fewer than four in 10 parents without a college degree say they would feel comfortable asking a neighbor to watch their child in an emergency.

Cox pointed to several overlapping forces, starting with convenience. Apps have replaced the errands and small transactions that once brought people into contact with one another. “We can order something on Amazon. We can order something on DoorDash, and we don’t ever have to talk to anyone,” Cox said.

Hiring out a task, calling a rideshare instead of asking for a lift, or ordering coffee before reaching the counter all remove the small interactions that used to happen by default. Cox said that has changed what people believe they are allowed to ask of others. “It changes the expectation that you can ask for those things, or that it’s appropriate to ask someone.”

That shift is compounded by surveillance fears. If a stumble or awkward exchange can be recorded and broadcast, asking a neighbor for a favor can feel more exposing than it once did. Cox said that weighs especially heavily on young people, for whom peer approval matters most. “That can really forestall people from engaging in the way that they otherwise normally would,” he said.

A third factor, he said, is how children are raised. The center’s surveys found a generational split in how people describe their upbringing. Americans over 50 are far more likely to say their parents viewed them as average growing up. Younger Americans are more likely to say their parents viewed them as exceptional.

Cox links that change to smaller families, more competitive college admissions and a rise in enrichment activities aimed at the individual child rather than the family or community. “It’s less about you’re contributing to the family, you’re contributing to your community, you’re contributing to your church or denomination,” he said. “It gives you kind of a skewed sense of who you are and how you matter.”

Trust in neighbors also tracks closely with education. Eighty-one percent of college graduates say they trust the people in their neighborhood a fair amount or a great deal, compared with 64% of Americans with a high school education or less. Homeowners report far more trust than renters, and people in detached houses report more than people in apartments.

The same divide appears in whether people feel they can rely on anyone nearby, reflecting the loss of a basic safety net. Fewer than four in 10 parents without a college degree say they would be comfortable asking a neighbor to watch their child for a few hours in an emergency, compared with a majority of college-educated parents.

Cox said part of that gap is trust and part is rootedness. College graduates are more likely to be homeowners, more likely to have lived in a neighborhood long enough to know people, and more likely to be connected through overlapping memberships such as a shared school or youth sports league. “They’re not strangers,” he said. “You’re connected not only by geography but by shared membership in a denser web of organizations.”

The report also describes a shift in what Americans believe a good neighbor owes another person, set against “a backdrop of rising social isolation.” Nearly two-thirds now say being a good neighbor means staying out of other people’s business rather than offering help unasked, a view held even more strongly by young adults than by seniors. That redefinition carries consequences beyond etiquette: researchers have linked weak neighborhood ties to higher rates of depression, anxiety, and mortality, making the erosion of casual contact a measurable public health concern.

The institutions stopped doing the work

Cox argued that the decline is not only about new habits. It is also about the disappearance of structures that once organized social life without requiring individuals to plan it themselves.

“Individuals are taking on roles and responsibilities that once were the domain of institutions,” he said. Regular religious worship, for example, used to ensure that the same group of people showed up in the same place every week, with no organizing required. “It required no effort, no planning, no WhatsApp text chain,” Cox said. Today, seeing the same group of friends takes deliberate coordination, and increasingly, it does not happen.

He drew a parallel to remote work. Employees gained flexibility after the pandemic, but lost the daily, unplanned contact with colleagues that used to come built in. “The workplace is a really important part of our social life,” Cox said. “If we don’t have these umbrella structures that are organizing our lives together, we can often go off and be doing our own thing… but it often leads to kind of a lonely place.”

The report also found a consistent class gap. Nearly six in 10 college graduates spent an evening socializing with a neighbor in the past year, compared with fewer than half of Americans with a high school education or less. The gap holds regardless of whether people live in cities, suburbs or rural areas.

“Places where labor unions or churches or veterans groups were important for the social and civic lives of working-class Americans are far less prominent,” he said. “They’re smaller. They’re serving fewer people.” College graduates have stepped in to do some of that organizing themselves through book clubs, parent groups and informal networks, Cox said, but those forms of social life require time, money and social capital that not everyone has.

Get a dog and take a hike

Two patterns in the data cut across class and age lines: walking and access to physical gathering places.

Americans who walk or run through their neighborhood at least once a week are far more likely to talk with neighbors regularly than people who rarely leave the house. Cox tied that directly to the built environment. “It has to be feasible,” he said. “It has to be something that people can reasonably do regularly.”

That fits with broader research on the decline of America's third places, the sociologist Ray Oldenburg's term for the everyday public spots — coffee shops, libraries, parks — that are neither home nor work but where people historically encountered one another without a plan. When those places disappear or stop functioning as gathering spots, the low-stakes interactions that build belonging disappear with them.

Cox pointed to a small grocery store near his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, across from an elementary school, as an example of what that kind of infrastructure can produce. “You just go there, you’re going to see someone that you know,” he said. “Almost no one’s driving there. Almost all of us are walking.” Encounters that become playdates or plans, he said, often start in places like that because the setting makes them almost unavoidable.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com