Americans are having less sex than at any point in the modern era. The share of U.S. adults ages 18-64 who report having sex weekly has fallen from 55% in 1990 to 37% in 2024. Among young adults, the shift is sharper: the share of 18-29-year-olds who reported no sex in the past year doubled from 12% to 24%, and one in four Gen Z adults says they have never had partnered sex. This trend applies even to teenagers, surrounded by a culture saturated with sexual imagery; high-schoolers reporting ever having had sex fell from 53% in the early 1990s to 39% in 2022.
It’s easy to read these numbers as a crisis of desire. But the trend isn’t about libido—it’s about physicality. Sex is the most literal form of embodied connection, and its decline reflects something broader: a generation that is losing practice in being physically present with each other.
The real shift isn’t that people want to have less sex—it’s that technological mediation has begun to erode the basic conditions that make intimacy possible: presence, practice, and physical closeness.
That loss shows up long before intimacy. It shows up in the everyday ways people interact—or avoid interacting—observable on our very own campus. Students walk together, eat together, and study in the same common rooms, but the scenes no longer function the way they did even 10 years ago. What looks like closeness is often a substitute for it. At a dining hall table, someone might sit with three friends while texting another friend who lives in the same building. Students who live minutes apart now rely on screens to communicate, even when meeting in-person would take the same amount of time.
This didn’t happen overnight. Over the past decade, conversation has been steadily replaced by online messaging. A knock on someone’s door became a text; a walk across the Yard became a call; a conversation became a FaceTime. These substitutions were convenient; it is this ease that gradually replaced the habits that once pulled people into the same space.
During the pandemic, screens became necessary. But, they didn’t just fill a temporary gap—they have steadily become the default.
A screen can show a face, but it cannot replicate a presence. It flattens what used to be felt—turning a body into pixels, gestures into lag, and eye contact into the illusion of looking. Experiences that were once experienced in three-dimensions have been compressed into two: everything is visible, but nothing is felt. Mediated interaction comes with lag, compression artifacts, and the faint disconnect of looking through a lens instead of someone’s eyes. Over time, that version of closeness becomes normal. Proximity becomes optional: something to add when convenient rather than something expected.
This decline in real-world interaction shows up in national data. Over the last 20 years, American men have spent 30% less time socializing face-to-face, and teenagers have seen an even steeper drop of more than 45%. What appears to be an individual preference is actually marking a generational shift. People are not only choosing screens—they are forgetting the default that existed before their creation.
As in-person interactions thin out, they become harder to tolerate. Silence between two people feels heavier when it is rarely practiced. Eye contact becomes something to avoid. Physical closeness without a buffer starts to feel unstructured, intrusive. The lack of control that once defined ordinary social life now feels like something to minimize.
At the same time, social media has transformed how people present themselves. Every platform rewards curation—flattering angles, retakes, Facetuned photos smoothed until they look natural. Performance becomes the expected form of expression. Over time, people have learned to think in posts: being seen becomes more important than being present, resulting in a generation fluent in performing intimacy yet unsure how to fulfill it.
These shifts set the conditions for the third: intimacy collapsing into simulation. Maybe not quite yet, but we are close. A person’s physical presence comes last, after their digital version has already been built, evaluated, and judged.
The consequences are visible. People exchange hundreds of messages, photos, and videos before ever seeing each other. By the time they meet, the encounter feels pre-written. The unpredictability that once made intimacy exciting—the uncertainty of how someone might speak, how a moment might shift—has already been flattened. Sex becomes something rehearsed before it ever happens.
On dating apps, people swipe through faces the way they scroll through products—one quick flash after another. Infinite choice teaches users to assess rather than feel, to filter rather than engage. The psychology of desire shifts when the primary mode of interaction is comparison.
Porn and influencer culture reinforce those patterns. For many young people, these platforms function as a kind of informal sex education—teaching not through conversations or experience, but through a steady stream of optimized images. Algorithms amplify whatever performs well: bodies lit for maximum clarity, movements edited for smoothness, expressions calibrated to hold attention. Over time, those aesthetic norms shape expectations.
Not all mediated interactions are hollow. For people who are isolated—geographically, medically, socially—technology creates forms of connection that would otherwise be impossible. But those connections operate differently, and these interactions are like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. They offer communication without physicality, attention without presence. They can sustain someone, but they cannot teach the skills that in-person intimacy requires.
What disappears isn’t the drive itself; it’s the conditions that once grounded it. Privacy, patience, uncertainty, and risk all depend on an unedited self, and that is what people now have the least practice offering. As the skills needed for embodied interaction atrophy, the skills needed for intimacy dissolve with them.
The larger loss is not sexual but human. Physical presence is how empathy is learned. Sitting with someone teaches patience. Touch teaches care. Without those experiences, connection becomes theoretical. People can want closeness without knowing how to create it.
Many argue this is simply adaptation, the natural evolution of technology. Maybe so. But the direction is unmistakable: people are more connected and yet somehow lonelier; more expressive and less intimate, more visible and less embodied. The emotional costs follow from that erosion: anxiety around unstructured interaction, confusion about how to read another person without a screen’s cues, and a quiet sense of isolation even in crowded rooms. Distance becomes normal; closeness becomes uncomfortable.
Reversing that trend does not require deleting apps or rejecting technology. It might require something smaller: choosing presence when presence is possible. Sitting across from someone without a screen. Talking until the conversation runs out and staying anyway. Allowing silence to exist without mediation. Relearning what it feels like when another person’s physical presence changes the air in the room.
Because if that disappears, everything else we build—every platform, every perfect image, every simulation of intimacy—will function only as noise trying to fill the silence of a connected world left behind.
Luke Wagner ’26 (lukewagner@college.harvard.edu) is the Managing Director of the Harvard Independent.
