We Lost the Permission to Be Alone in Public

In July 2024, the Whitney Museum and New York’s Meatpacking District staged life-size replicas of Edward Hopper paintings,^[1] “Nighthawks” among them, and invited visitors to pose inside them for pictures. People still want a stool at Hopper’s all-night diner^[2] 83 years after he painted it, and not because anyone misses 1942. The painting lasts because it shows something we have lost: permission to sit alone in public, among strangers, with nothing to do but think.

Hopper resisted the lonely reading. Asked about the painting’s alienation, he replied, “I didn’t see it as particularly lonely.”^[3] A man and a woman sit together, a server works behind the counter, and another man sits with his back to us: a community, even in silence. There are no phones and no laptops, just people and their thoughts. The Art Institute of Chicago,^[2] which bought the canvas in 1942, notes that the diner has no entrance, so we stand outside, looking in. Nor is the diner a real place. Hopper started from a restaurant he had seen on Greenwich Avenue, but the museum calls the painting “not a realistic transcription of an actual place,” which leaves every viewer to supply a diner of their own. For a city dweller, it might be a cabin in Montana.

Federal time-use data can’t measure permission, but they can measure behavior. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey^[4] asks one person in each sampled household to account for the previous day and, for most activities, to say who was “in the room with you” or who “accompanied you.”^[5] By my calculations from the survey’s microdata, the average American 15 or older spent 281 minutes a day alone outside of work, sleep and grooming in 2003, and 327 in 2024. All of that 16% rise came at home, where time alone grew 52 minutes, while time alone away from home rose until 2019, then fell. Reweighting seven age groups to their 2003 shares shrinks the rise from 46 minutes to 31, but on that basis time alone at home still grew 37 minutes and time alone away from home fell six. From 2019 to 2024, time alone in restaurants and bars, grocery stores, other stores and malls, libraries, and subways and trains fell by a third, from 12 minutes a day to eight. Hopper’s own scene grew rarer: the share of people who ate or drank alone at a restaurant or bar on a given day was 2.9% in 2003 and 2.7% in 2019, but 1.3% in 2024.

Time Americans spend alone at home and away from home, 2003 to 2024

The strongest objection is that loving this painting romanticizes an urban alienation that was painful and dehumanizing, and that its nostalgia is false. Isolation does real harm: the surgeon general’s 2023 advisory, “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation,”^[6] draws on this same survey^[7] to count 24 more hours a month spent alone in 2020 than in 2003, using the survey’s partial-year 2020 sample,^[8] and warns that the mortality impact of being socially disconnected is “similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.”^{[6, p. 4]} The painting’s year was no idyll. Hopper was at work on the canvas in the days after Pearl Harbor,^[3] 1942 brought sugar and coffee rationing,^[9] and Jim Crow laws^[10] still segregated public places, so a seat among strangers was not everyone’s to take. All true, and Hopper still caught something beyond alienation. What he called “the loneliness of a large city”^[2] is different from personal loneliness: it is being alone among strangers, simply there. Loving the painting means recognizing that state as an opportunity for inward reflection, without celebrating isolation. The advisory makes a similar distinction, one no tally of minutes alone can capture: it defines solitude as “a state of aloneness by choice that does not involve feeling lonely,”^{[6, p. 7]} says that “temporary experiences of solitude may help us manage social demands” and calls chronic loneliness and isolation “a significant health concern.”^{[6, p. 12]} The simplicity worth wanting belongs to the moment, not to 1942.

Taking the permission back has a cost. An hour at a counter produces nothing, answers no one and builds no empire, and in an efficiency-driven, always-connected life, that looks like waste. What it buys is time to listen to yourself, which even the most popular person in the world needs. The nearest thing left to Hopper’s counter is the car: about 30 minutes a day, or 45% of the time Americans spend alone away from home,^[4] goes to driving a car, truck or motorcycle. We’re not trying to rebuild the diner. We’re trying to reclaim the permission to sit quietly with our thoughts at 3 a.m. Otherwise the counter survives only as a set, a diner you pose in for a picture.