I don’t know why the article conflates parties and drinking so much. You can have great tea-parties, baking parties, soda-chips-and-movie-parties etc. The one thing I notice in my friend circle is that everyone is staying in touch with everyone else via social media and people don’t build a group where they live anymore. I’ve found 3 good friends in the city I live in, but if I ask when we can meet and maybe have a get-together, the answer will be in 5-12 month. People are booked out on the weekend - visiting parents, aunts, a childhood friend from kindergarden, another friend from highschool who lives at the opposite side of the country, then a friend from university, that friend who was a coworker five years ago… People are still in some form of contact with just about every person from their lives. I have friends who have every weekend in the year planned out by february, meeting up and visiting all kinds of friends and family from years ago. There’s just no way to have proper parties (even cheap, alcohol free ones where we cook ourselves) because there just isn’t a way to have more than 2 friends in our city on any given weekend.