It needed no reservation, no Google Maps location, no carefully-selected-aesthetic café with “good ambience”, no discussion about whether everyone could afford the menu. It was easy, calm and low-cortisol inducing. You’d simply call your friends and most of the time they’d be right outside.

You could sit on a roadside bench, occupy an unreasonable number of chairs at a tea stall, stand outside someone’s house for two hours, walk around doing absolutely nothing or sit in a friend’s room while watching reels together. It was cheap, spontaneous and gloriously pointless.

I think we are slowly killing this phenomenon. Not friendship, we tend to have plenty of that. I mean hanging out. The ancient art of being physically present with another human being without having a productive reason for it.

The appointment that is friendship

Making plans with your friends now feels like booking an appointment months in advance. Whether it’s work, classes or just personal commitments, everyone needs to be informed well ahead of time before a simple hangout can even happen.

And even after all that planning, there’s always a chance something comes up at the last minute.

“Bro, are you free today?”

“Not today man.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Actually I have class.”

“Friday?”

“Friday I have work.”

“Saturday?”

“Family programme.”

“Sunday?”

“Exam.”

“Next week?”

Seen.

Three business days later: “Sorry bro, I was busy.”

This is how friendships die now. Not dramatically, not with a fist-fight. Just slowly, through an increasingly impressive collection of Google Calendar conflicts. I’d much rather go for a fist-fight, but that’s just my opinion.

The problem is not that young people do not want to see each other. Recent reporting from Dhaka suggests almost the opposite. Cafés are increasingly being used as places to meet friends, study, work, escape the office and simply sit somewhere that is not home. At North End Coffee Roasters, students have reported that the café offered something their rooms could not: an environment for studying, eating and spending time with friends.

The fact that we increasingly need a café to justify sitting together says something. It makes me think that we have turned hanging out into a purchase. We do not simply meet a friend. We buy an overpriced cup of coffee and then meet a friend while sipping on it slowly to prolong the hangout. Long after the coffee is cold and the conversation is dwindling, a voice creeps up in your head that tells you, “You should have just stayed home.”

The economics of doing nothing

Dhaka is not particularly kind to people who want to do nothing.

You need somewhere to sit that is reasonably safe, not unbearably hot and somewhere that does not require you to spend half your evening trapped in traffic getting there. Furthermore, it needs to be a place which you and your friends can afford.

A decent meal for two can easily become an expense that requires a small internal audit. Add transport, drinks and perhaps dessert because someone said, “We’re already here,” and your innocent Thursday hangout turns into a financial analysis meeting.

For students, this matters even more.

Because primarily, most students are home-tutors getting criminally underpaid while the unyielding economy keeps on rising. There used to be a time when 500 taka would get you through an entire day with change left for the next day. Nowadays, the second you break a 500 taka note, somehow it is gone before the barista is done making your coffee.

A 2026 report on Dhaka’s book cafés described them as a cheaper alternative for young people who want somewhere to spend time without committing to a full restaurant bill. One university student quoted in the report said, “The utility of a Tk500 note is much more at the book cafe than at any restaurant.”

It is a funny sentence until you realise how accurately it describes the problem. We have started calculating the utility of friendship and hanging out.

“Can I afford to go? How much will I have left? Should I take a Pathao or the bus? Do I really need that Matcha latte? Maybe I should just stay home.”

And staying home is very easy now.

Welcome to the third place

There is an actual term for the spaces where we used to do all this: third places.

Home is the first place. Work or school is the second. The third place is somewhere informal where people gather, like cafés, parks, libraries, tea stalls, community spaces, even the neighbourhood corner where everyone somehow knows everyone’s business.

Researchers have argued that these places matter because they provide opportunities for social interaction, belonging and support outside home and work. They are supposed to be ordinary, accessible places where you can simply exist around other people.

The important word there is accessible. A third place cannot really be a third place if every visit requires financial planning.

This is one reason Dhaka’s growing café culture is interesting. Cafés are filling a genuine gap in the city. People need somewhere to meet. They need somewhere to work, read, talk, wait, think and sometimes stare into the middle distance while pretending to answer an email.

But cafés are still businesses. You can stay for three hours, provided you sip your flavoured latte at the speed of a tortoise. Even then you will be greeted with cold looks and side-eyes from restaurant staff. Almost as if they want you to get out with your coffee and go somewhere else.

Furthermore, Dhaka has very few truly free alternatives. Parks exist, but access, safety, weather and location matter. Public spaces are limited and traffic makes moving between neighbourhoods exhausting. So we meet in commercial spaces because the city has gradually made it difficult to meet anywhere else.

And then there is the phone. A particularly cruel development in human history is that we can now spend an entire evening with our friends while our eyes are glued to our screen looking at everything and everyone except the people sitting directly in front of us.

A recent TBS feature on loneliness in digital Bangladesh described the scene rather perfectly: five friends sitting together at a Dhaka tea stall, physically close but absorbed in their screens. One young man told the publication that he checks his phone because of FOMO, the fear that he might miss a joke, a news update or something important.

That is the strange bargain of modern friendship. We have never had more ways to communicate. And yet most of the time, nobody is actually talking.

This does not mean social media has destroyed friendship. That would be far too easy. Technology also keeps people connected across cities and countries and lets friendships survive distances that would once have ended them.

But tech has definitely changed what being together feels like. You can be physically present and mentally elsewhere; you can be sitting across from your best friend while watching an Indian man cook a feast for his whole town. You can be listening to someone’s breakup story while reacting to someone’s Instagram story. You can laugh at the same reel without ever looking up, because chances are that your friend has already sent it to you.

We have somehow achieved simultaneous companionship and absence.

And then life happened

There is another culprit that gets less attention because it is much less fun to blame: adulthood.

At university, you see your friends regularly. Then everyone graduates.

One person gets a job in Gulshan, another moves to Uttara, someone starts a master’s, someone leaves the country, someone gets married, someone starts working 10-hour days, someone is broke and someone is just too lazy.

Suddenly the friendship that once required nothing now requires logistics.

This is not unique to Bangladesh. Research and surveys elsewhere have found declining in-person socialising among young adults. One analysis of US time-use data found that young adults aged 18–29 spent an average of 12.8 hours a week with friends in 2010, falling to 6.5 hours by 2019 and around five hours in the period examined after the pandemic.

The importance of doing nothing

This is the part that makes the death of hanging out more than a complaint about young people becoming boring.

A 2025 study of 400 university students in Rajshahi found that more than 22% experienced loneliness, with younger students and students from poorer families among the groups facing higher odds in the study.

A separate 2025 youth wellness survey involving hundreds of Bangladeshi university students found that 19% reported feeling lonely often, while 35% said they felt stressed daily.

None of this proves that the disappearance of casual hangouts causes loneliness. But it does raise an uncomfortable question.

What happens when a generation collectively stops hanging out?

Because friendship is not built entirely through important conversations, it is built through nonsense.

The two-hour conversation that begins with someone’s exam and somehow ends with whether Batman could survive in Bangladesh. The tea stall argument about football. The yappster friend who says, “I have something to tell you,” and then takes 45 minutes to get to the point. The spontaneous walk that goes nowhere.

The silence isn’t awkward because you have known each other long enough for silence to become part of the conversation. These moments do not look important while they are happening and that is precisely why they are important.

Maybe we just need to waste some time

Maybe hanging out was never supposed to be productive.

It was just sitting somewhere with your friends until someone finally said, “I should probably go home.”

We have made everything so complicated now. From finding a place, to finding a time, to finding money, to finding a reason. Somewhere along the way, simply wanting to see someone stopped being reason enough.

But people still want it. You can see it everywhere, in crowded cafés, noisy tea stalls, university corridors and the group of friends sitting on a pavement because they have nowhere else to go.

Maybe hanging out is not dying after all; we just have to make room for it again.

Room to sit, room to talk nonsense, room to waste an evening with people we love. Because time wasted having fun is not wasted at all.