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After a long workday, a too long doctor’s appointment, a lingering cold, or a visit to the emergency veterinarian, canceling plans can be an understandable relief. Or as the comedian John Mulaney put it in his 2012 stand-up special: “In terms of like instant relief, canceling plans is like heroin. It is an amazing feeling.”
The hedonistic benefits of canceling plans have in recent years gained a more philosophical underpinning. As the new mantra goes: You don’t owe anyone anything. The thinking is that self-care is key — your needs should come first, even if you’ve committed to plans. So go ahead, ignore that party invitation, ghost a friend’s texts (or block their number completely), or cancel that dinner reservation.
Many Americans, particularly young people, have taken this idea to heart. In a YouGov survey conducted in June 2022, 36% of respondents said they often agreed to plans far in advance but realized closer to the date that they didn’t want to participate. Among respondents 18 to 29, 56% said they very or somewhat often made plans and then realized they didn’t want to go.
But as another adage tells us, everything is good in moderation. As it turns out, that applies to backing out of the plans we make with other people. William Chopik, an associate professor of psychology at Michigan State University, has studied why people feel relief when they cancel plans — and how to best do that.
“We were like, ‘Well, why do they feel that way?’ Because, in a way, you’re kind of rejecting another person,” Chopik said. “You know, you’re telling another person you don’t want to hang out with them.”
While this might seem like an easier way of living, it has more sinister effects on our relationships and economics. If we don’t owe anyone anything, we may start to view service workers as input-output machines to be screamed at rather than as human beings. We can pull the plug on a friend’s Friday-night plans via a text message saying we vaguely don’t feel up to it — we don’t have to view or hear the friend’s disappointment. On a sociopolitical level, we might throw support behind movements to benefit ourselves even if they prove harmful to other people.
“This leads to all sorts of effects for ourselves, from loneliness and isolation to also just a lack of deep meaning,” said Richard Cowden, a research scientist who studies topics including forgiveness. Cowden said there’s an idea called relational meaning, where your meaning in life is fundamentally rooted in relationships — with family, friends, and broader communities.
“Without fulfilling this fundamental need, we struggle in different ways,” Cowden said.
There are many good reasons to cancel plans: an illness, a family emergency, a work meeting gone awry. A society where people feel able to adjust plans for legitimate reasons is a step forward. But for every emergency-driven cancellation, there are dozens more nebulous ones — where, yes, you could go, but a little voice in your head is telling you not to.
All these little decisions to cancel add up to a lot more alone time. In 2010, Americans spent an average of about 5.6 hours a day alone; by 2023, that had risen to nearly seven hours.
Chopik tells me there are two big forces undergirding some of our newfound flakiness. One is the proliferation of what he calls busy culture, a nasty offspring of hustle culture. Modern conveniences make life easier, but constant connectivity pushes us to work more, not less. And when our jobs consume every corner of our lives, we start to view social outings as a special privilege or event rather than something we should weave into our daily routine. Busy culture, Chopik says, is this illusion that we simply don’t have enough time for each other, or that that time is overlaid on the rest of our lives rather than an integral part of them.
The other reason is grimmer: We’re getting in our heads about whether we’re even worth spending time with. After all, one byproduct of the pandemic was a pronounced increase in anxiety disorders and social anxiety.
“People have started to doubt the fact that people want to hang out with them,” Chopik said. Indeed, research suggests we underestimate how positive we feel when someone reaches out to us. We may think that if we strike up a conversation with a stranger on the subway, they won’t want to chat or it’ll make the commute worse. But the opposite is true. We like talking to each other — we just don’t think people want to hear from us.
This insecurity runs counter to what most people want.
“A good test is to think about how you would react to it if a friend reached out or wanted to hang out with you — you would probably be positively disposed to that,” Chopik said. “But then if I asked you, hey, reach out to a friend and just, like, ask how their day was, you’d be like, I don’t know, I don’t want to bother them.”
Niki Meyari, a 20-year-old college student in Arizona, chalks some of that up to residual social fallout from the pandemic.
“You get used to that loneliness and that isolation or maybe only interacting digitally in ways that fully can’t be replicated in real life,” Meyari, who was a teen when the pandemic started, said. “And I think that desensitized a lot of people.”
While it may seem trivial to send that “I can’t come” text, we lose more than just a canceled plan when we back out of a scheduled meetup. For one thing, there’s a counterintuitive hierarchy of cancellations. While you might assume it’s not as big of a deal if a close friend cancels — you’ll probably see them again — Chopik has found that that’s more likely to faze you than a casual acquaintance canceling. That’s partly because we expect the people close to us to honor their commitments — they do, in fact, owe us something.
“I think that a lot of people have taken this concept, and they’re applying it to everyone in every situation, and I just don’t think that’s productive,” Ashley Corbo, a 27-year-old content creator, said.
Chopik has found that when it comes to canceling plans, there are better and worse ways to go about it. For those getting canceled on, excuses such as dealing with health or family issues are more reasonable than not feeling like it or poor planning.
We have placed comfort and convenience on a pedestal that it does not need to be on.
Pulling the rug out from under those closest to us and leaning on dubious health reasons is starting to affect our friend groups. Americans are increasingly less likely to have a best friend — perhaps we’re filling our social circles with acquaintances we might not be upset with when they cancel.
And the idea that canceling plans is a form of self-care may be backfiring. Chopik said the people we’re closest to are actually included in our sense of self. The time we spend with friends is precious, and it feels costly to lose out on that.
“We have placed comfort and convenience on a pedestal that it does not need to be on,” Meyari said. “In turn, actually, in the long run, it makes us more uncomfortable, because we don’t really have others to be with.”
Economically, places for socializing, like restaurants, have instituted new measures to protect their bottom lines from our flaky tendencies. Look no further than the dominance of restaurant reservation fees or no-show charges. In a survey conducted by OpenTable in 2021, 28% of respondents in the US said they hadn’t shown up for a reservation over the past year. In 2022, OpenTable launched its reservation-deposits feature designed to help restaurants avoid no-shows, citing their thin profit margins. The company told BI that, from January 2024 to December 2024, they found the global volume of no-shows for restaurants using the deposit feature was about 50% lower than for those that don’t require a deposit. A spokesperson for Resy, another popular restaurant booking app, said that in September 2024, nearly one-fifth of New York City restaurants on the platform charged at least one cancellation fee. Nationally, it said, 12% of restaurants charged a fee that month.
“Most restaurants are small businesses — every table that sits empty can have a significant impact, especially when the average profit margin of restaurants is razor thin,” the Resy spokesperson said.
Our newer isolationist tendencies — or the rarity of social gatherings — might also be giving people a shorter fuse. In a 2022 survey of workers in the restaurant industry by the advocacy organization One Fair Wage, 46% of women said they’d experienced increased harassment from customers or supervisors during the pandemic. Anecdotally, service workers have said that customers generally treat them worse than they used to.
“I noticed that customers were starting to act almost like they were taking stuff out on us,” Cristian Cardona, who left her job in fast food in 2021, previously told BI. “They would get upset, angry. Sometimes they would get violent, yell stuff at us, and it made it a hostile environment for us a lot of times.”
On an intellectual and transcendental level, as Cowden said, there’s a line of thinking that we become more human the more we depend on others and spend time together. And when you’re stuck thinking you don’t owe others anything, you might not have someone to help reel you back into reality.
While flakiness can be frustrating, the rising tide of cancellations is not inevitable. The event companies Evite and Eventbrite said that people on the platforms were increasingly showing an interest in attending health and fitness events, fandom festivities such as cosplay events, and alternative-music festivals.
“We’ve seen a ton of traditional things, people reverting back to book club, game nights,” Olivia Pollock, a hosting and etiquette expert at Evite, told BI. They may find, in those cases, that they owe it to each other to read that book or show up to play that game.
As individuals, we might also need to lean into something that modern luxuries aim to alleviate: discomfort. Feeling a bit uncomfortable — whether that means showing up to a party we’re not enthusiastic about or trekking to a friend’s house — can pay off in the long run. On the other side may be a friend or a party full of new friends. While it might feel more comfortable to stay home or go into facilitated digital interactions where you can disappear in a moment’s notice, it’s worth having to suffer through some small talk or meeting a stranger.
Meyari recalled a piece of advice she received on balancing discomfort: Are you uncomfortable with actually going to something, or with the transition of having to get up and go?
“For a lot of people, those lines just get blurred; they think just because they don’t want to transition from place A to place B, it means they don’t want to go to place B at all,” Meyari said. “And they don’t want to figure that out — because discomfort is just naturally such a bad thing to them — that they don’t want to look deeper and say, like, oh, this thing is actually good for me. I’m going to be uncomfortable for a little bit, but that’s OK.”
Juliana Kaplan is a senior labor and inequality reporter on Business Insider’s economy team.
