When was the last time you went out?

I’m doing nothing with my friend on a Wednesday when it occurs to me that I can’t remember the last time I did nothing with someone I’m not married to or related to. I’ve had Americanos in coffee shops and saved pasta after work. But as we eat our way through the second layer of the cookie tin, pack her baby in her stroller, and meet my nephew at the school gates, we get to the heart of the conversation; the things we only skimmed the surface in the catch-up calls that went on. We’re… dating. That our upload was enabled by annual holidays is part of the problem.

‘At what point does hanging out become catching up?’ asked Harriet Walker this week. In a piece for The Times, the fashion editor and self-described geriatric millennial examined the impact of aging on socialization. “The time I spend with my friends often feels like a work meeting,” he wrote, of the recovery culture that has become a byproduct of employment. “Work stuff, house stuff, money stuff, busy kids, sick parents, then maybe a little rapid fire while we wait for the bill.” She doesn’t complain, she points out; we do what we can with the time we have. And yet: “… the old version of socializing never had a cut. You’d go to a party, maybe stay over at someone’s house afterwards… then you’d all watch TV in a bunch… Now I’m older, I realize it’s the TV, more than the party, that’s the surest sign of a deep, deeply intimate connection.’

Last week, two things arrived in my inbox that validated this particular social struggle. The first was a survey that sought to quantify the disappearance of Hanging out; We now spend just four hours a month socializing with our friends, with millennials more likely than other age groups to see fewer friends of their friends this year than last. Then the latest edition of Culture Study, a newsletter from journalist Anne Helen Petersen, landed in my Gmail. In the piece, Anne landed on a label for the millennial struggle to hang out. The descent of friendship, he notes, refers to the downward curve in the number of close friendships that begins in the late 20s and persists through the 30s before picking up in the 40s and 50s. The obstacles, as he sees them, are wide-ranging, but chief among them are calendar culture and career advancement.

These are obstacles that Sheila Liming knows. “It’s a phenomenon that started to become apparent to me when I was 30,” she tells me, in a WhatsApp call from Vermont, where she is an associate professor at Champlain College. “I was working a lot, in my first big career position, and I was haunted by this feeling that I wasn’t socially engaged, I couldn’t hang out.” So he did what any unconnected millennial (or xennial, the cusp generation he belongs to) would do: he got online. “I ended up creating my first social media account as a way to deal with that absence, not as a way to replace it. But what interests me is the way coping mechanisms have become simply in replacing the habits and behaviors we originally wanted.” See: Catch up on Instagram’s comment section and diligent meme sharing.

What followed was an investigation into the magic of meandering social time, and what’s stopping us from making more of it. In Hanging Out: The Radical Power to Kill Time, she defends the hang as a form of socialization different from any other; one that creates the conditions for intimacy, connection and meaning in a world that she says is increasingly hostile to all three. These hostilities are many and varied: the inability to put our phones together. But the key to reclaiming gridlock, he argues, is reclaiming our relationship with time, with time thieves including blurring the lines between work and leisure (the Slack app that pings your phone) and research of productivity (the need to fill your free time with writing newsletters). When you find time to hang out, write, you assert your right to be unproductive.

That I felt connected to my friend while cleaning the cookie crumbs off her couch is not at all surprising. There’s now plenty of research to show that in-person interactions offer a connective magic that other forms of communication can’t match. But in addition to being face-to-face, there’s a texture to this kind of social time that makes it especially powerful, Sheila says. “Improvisation is a central element of how humans connect with each other,” she tells me, pointing to the ad hoc and loose way in which children interact as a model for creating connection. “It’s a way of interacting that we lose touch with as we get older, but also something that seems more impossible because our lives are so programmed.”

Lately, my social life has felt more scheduled than ever. With the exception of one week of annual vacation, when time took on a different quality, face time with friends has occurred during allotted social hours, a necessary approach to spending more of my free time writing. But while making plans with friends like a work meeting comes with the territory of stretching for the time, it can threaten the connection in two ways, says Sheila. First, it can make friendship feel like an act of duty. Then the pressure piles on. “There is this feeling that if you want to spend time with someone, it has to be worth it; they it has to be worth it,” he explains. “And that means additional stakes and burdens are placed on living. Because suddenly it feels like: this person did time for me, so I have to make sure it’s worth it for them. This feeling is very damaging to the ways in which we interact with each other.’

This damaging effect needs to be confronted for the message behind it to sink in. It’s only when I listen back to the recording of my interview with Sheila that I realize how much time I spent on our chat influenced the quality of our conversation. My questions feel rushed and bogged down and the conversations their answers create are left almost unexplored. Ironically, if I had applied the meandering magic we talked about to our time together, it would have made for a more meaningful conversation. So I feel very seen when, toward the end of our call, he tells me that your relationship with time isn’t really about time, it’s about control.

“I tend to be a Type A oriented person and giving up control in social interactions is something I’ve had to work on,” she begins. “I used to come to a lot of my social engagements from the perspective of: If I can’t do it well, I don’t want to do it at all. Now, if I have a small window of time in my calendar where I can go and spend some time with anyone, i do. ​​The last time he went out was two days earlier, when he found himself with a two-hour window in the middle of his workday, he texted a friend who lives near his campus .” I went to his house to hang out for a while and then went back to my desk. It wasn’t anything formal, but at that point we started talking about a dinner we could have and other friends we could see. This little interaction set the stage for the next time we see each other, so it’s something I’ve been actively trying to get myself to do. Give it a try… because while you recover your relationship with time it may not be quick work, it’s time well spent.