Note: You can read the village's "One Square Mile" newsletter here.

By Mary Marvin, Mayor of Bronxville

Jan. 21, 2025: As I am sure, similar to many of you at the start of a new year, I take stock not only of my personal life, but our community life and in my role, the benefits of challenges that we face in our one square mile.

While hiding at home on a recent cold night, I happened to read the February cover story in the Atlantic by Derek Thompson called the “Anti-Social Century”. Sadly, it resonated in not the most positive way and has applications to our special community.

The thesis of the article is that Americans are now spending more time alone than ever before and it is changing our relationships on every level: personal, business, purchasing, work etc.

Mr. Thompson tells the tale of his favorite local restaurant in a small town in North Carolina that used to be packed. The place is now empty, but the former bar is covered with bags that are picked up and as he said in a delicate choreography between kitchen and customer, often exchanged with not a word. Until the pandemic, the bar was bustling and popular with the locals.

Thompson’s anecdote confirms proven data that in the past decade, restaurants have shifted a great deal from tables to take away – a process that was only accelerated through the pandemic and continues today in 2025 so much so that in some areas over half of restaurant traffic comes from “off premises” i.e., customers coming for takeout and/or delivery.

The share of US adults having dinner and drinks out with friends on any given night has decreased by 30% in the past decade and even when we eat at restaurants, we are much more likely to be solo diners. According to the reservation platform, Open Table, solo dining has increased by 29% in the past two years.

As I move down the street to our iconic movie theater, the same trend is happening in the film industry.

So many of us can remember that going to movies was a collective experience to enjoy with friends in the company of strangers with like taste but technology has now turned movies into a home delivery system.

Currently, the typical American adult buys about three movie tickets a year yet watches the equivalent of 19 hours of television or roughly 8 movies on a weekly basis. These two indicators of self-imposed solitude are social fact for the first quarter of the 21st-century in America as the privatization of American leisure is really the big story.

I write this with a total hope, and honestly confidence that our village bucks all of these trends.

Americans are spending less time with other people than any other period for which we have trustworthy data. Going back to comparison data starting in 1965, single men now spend seven hours in front of the television for every hour they spend hanging out with anyone outside their home and the typical single female pet owner spends more time actively engaged with their pet than she spends in face-to-face chats with friends according to reliable surveys.

Americans polled said the amount of time they spend helping or caring for people outside their nuclear family has declined by more than a third. This is in stark contrast to the last half of the 20^th century when our country was extraordinarily social.

Through the 1960s, church memberships and marriage rates reached record highs, and the birth rate produced a famous boom while home communities built theaters, music venues, playgrounds, and virtually every kind of gathering hall. The author placed a great deal of blame on this noticeable shift in the 70’s on the television set.

In the 1970s, 6% of sixth graders had a TV set in their bedroom and by 1999 that proportion had grown to 77%.

Currently smartphones occupy 30% of the waking life of teens and young adults with the share of teen boys and girls who say they meet up with friends almost daily outside school hours has declined by 50% since the 1990s. The amount of time doing unorganized physical activities with friends has decreased dramatically at the same time teen anxiety and depression have hit record highs. The latest government survey of high schoolers conducted in 2023 found that more than half of teenage girls said they felt, “persistently sad or hopeless.”

Anxiety and depression according to all medical studies is inversely related to needed time for reflection and “downtime.” Unfortunately, even when your home alone, thanks to the phone, you can be impacted by the fact that something more interesting is happening somewhere else with friends, colleagues and strangers telling you how much fun they are having, making recharging much harder.

Princeton University psychologist Patrick Sharkey wrote a paper called “Homebound” in which he calculated that compared with 2003, Americans are more likely to take meetings from home, to shop from home, be entertained at home, to eat at home and even worship at home with a sizeable sector of the economy having to re-orient itself to allow us to stay within our four walls.

There is an upside as data shows parents are spending more time with their children than they did a few decades ago and couples and families, thanks to the phone, maintain an unbroken flow of communication.

Unfortunately, despite the phone connection, studies show that though nuclear families are staying in good touch and with the outer ring of folks who might share the same interests such as a sports pool or college alumni group, the intimate relationships with the people around you in your hometown; your neighbors are not nearly as connective as in the past.

My sense is that we experience the opposite trend in the Village and the Trustees, and I continue to focus on making improvements both in physical changes and outreach to foster further close connection in our one square mile.