10 American Traditions That Are Disappearing - FLYOVER FOCUS

0:00Nicky Glazer, this stunning tour. The thoughts of death I don't like to dwell on them for longer than like 10 or 15 hours a day, so... November 19th, Yamavath Theater. No wonder women rushed to have kids were being trained for it since we were kids. They're like, here's a baby doll. Here's an easy-bait coffin. I got one of those. I stuck my head in it. I was like, I want out of this narrowness. Tickets on sale now at Yamavathether.com. Don't miss Nicky Glazer. Yamavath Theater. When was the last time your whole family sat around a table and played cards? Not a phone in sight. Somebody keeping score on the back of an envelope. Two people arguing over a rule nobody could actually cite. Or maybe when's the last time you wrote somebody an actual letter? Not a text. A pin, a stamp you had to go find, and then four days of not knowing if it got there. Here are 10 American traditions that are quietly steadily slipping away, and the numbers on exactly how far each one is falling.

1:01Some of these are worse off than you'd guess, and number one is the one I bet most of you may miss the most. And it's also the one on the list you could get back by the end of the month. But before we start, if you're new here, we're the Flyover. You may know us from our daily podcast or the newsletter in your inbox every morning. Fact, first news you can trust no spin. Flyover focus is where we slow down and go deeper on the things that matter. Let's count down. Number 10. Getting your driver's license at 16. For decades, this was the most reliable ride of passage in American life. You turned 16, you took the test, you got the keys. Then it stopped being automatic. In 1983, about 46% of 16-year-olds had a license. By 2008, it was 31%. By 2014, closer to 24.5. And that number's basically held flat ever since. What we're looking at now is the new normal.

2:02It isn't that this generation dislikes driving when the AAA foundation asked young people who'd waited why they waited. The answers came back about as practical as it gets. 44% didn't have a car. 39% said they could get around just fine without driving. So young people are still driving. 9 and 10 have a license by their late 20s. They're just getting it later. The license survived. 16th birthday? Didn't. Number 9. The newspaper on the porch. The thump before sunrise. The rubber band. The plastic sleeve when it rained. Ink on your fingers. The sections divided up around the table. The newspaper came once a day. Scores, obituaries, the comics, the classifies, all of it arrived in one bundle in the morning. And if you didn't get to it that day, you waited for tomorrow. The numbers here are eye-popping. Weekday circulation in this country ran around 63 million in 1984. By 2022, it was under 21 million.

3:03Today, just 8% of Americans say print is how they'd prefer to get local news. That's the entire reason the flyover exists. That's the job we took. Everything you need to know in one place, every morning, no rabbit holes and nobody yelling at you. And it lands in your inbox before you're out of bed. Same ideas that paper. We just got a new delivery route. Number 8. Appointment Television. The rule used to be simple. The TV show came on at 8. If you wanted to see it, you were there at 8. And Saturday morning was the children's version. Serial on your lap, whatever the network decided to show you, you couldn't pause it. You couldn't pick it. That scarcity created synchronization. When mash signed off in 1983, over 105 million Americans watched it. That was 45% of the entire country, watching the same thing at the same minute. Now that's virtually impossible. Broadcasts down to around 19% of everything watched on an

4:05American television set. Cable 20. Streaming sits at around 49%. And last year, it passed broadcast and cable combined for the first time. Although, watching together hasn't disappeared entirely, it still happens for live sports and election night. The only thing that can still put the country on one schedule is something that has to happen live. Nick Eek laser. This stunning tour. The thoughts of death I don't like to dwell on them for longer than like 10 or 15 hours a day. So, November 19th, Yama Vaughe Theater. No wonder women rushed to have kids were being trained for it since we were kids. They're like, here's a baby doll. Here's an easy bake oven. I got one of those. I stuck my head in it. I was like, I want out of this narrative. Tickets on sale now at Yama Vaughe Theater. Don't miss Nick Eek laser. Yama Vaughe Theater. Number seven, lining up for Black Friday. It was both beautiful and a little unhinged,

5:06folding chairs in a parking lot before dawn, people rushing the door for a television set. Retailers dropped their prices the day after Thanksgiving and waited for the madness. To be clear, Black Friday itself remains enormous. A record 203 million Americans shopped over Thanksgiving weekend in 2025. But that Friday morning line is slowly disappearing. The reasons pretty simple. It all went online. Nearly $12 billion were spent online on Black Friday, 2025 alone. Then another 14 billion on Cyber Monday. A day retailers invented in 2005 for exactly this. Be honest with me. Have you ever actually stood in one of those lines? Because I want to hear the story. What was the item? And was it worth it? You can still get the doorbuster deal. You're just getting it in bed on your phone instead. Number six, the Midnight movie premiere. 12.01am. That was the rule. Not a law. A studio rule to build hype. A theater wasn't allowed to

6:10show a big movie one minute before it. So that's exactly when it opened. And people showed up. Homemade robes, plastic wands, Star Wars costumes. Somebody spent two months building. Friends would sit on the floor of a multiplex hallway for six hours. Then had straight to work the next morning. At its peak, movie premieres were enormous business. The last Harry Potter film pulled $43.5 million out of midnight screenings alone across 3,800 theaters in 2011. Then right around 2012 and 2013, studios moved these premieres earlier. 10pm. Then 9pm. Then 7 o'clock. Easier to attend and cheaper for the theater to staff. The opening night survived. But the midnight hour and the line are what went. And unlike most things on this list, it didn't fade out on its own. The studios themselves phased it out. Alright, I gotta know. What was the last movie you stayed up past midnight for? Or even dressed up

7:14for it for being honest? Let me know in the comments. Number 5. The Block Party. The street was barricaded at both ends. A folding table was packed with covered dishes. Somebody's grill got dragged out into the road and kids rode bikes down the middle of a street they were never allowed to ride down. Philadelphia keeps the best record of this because there you need a permit to close the street. In 2008, the city approved 7,679 block parties by 2019 about 3,500 by 2023, roughly 2,300. Under a third where it was just 15 years prior, the neighborhood block itself changed to in 1974. 44% of Americans did these spent a social evening with a neighbor at least a couple times a month. By 2022, that was 28%. Here's the encouraging part though. Cities noticed. A lot of them now hand out the street closure permit for free, specifically to get these going again. No committee to convince, no budget to raise, it takes one neighbor willing to ask. Number 4. Sunday Church. For most of the

8:21last century, Sunday mornings was a fixed point on the American calendar. The close, the same families and the same pews, Sunday school, coffee afterward, the sign-up sheet in the back, a weekly point of contact for every generation in a town. The long term decline here is speeding up. When Galapast in 1958, whether you'd been to a service in the past week, 49% said yes. As recently as the year 2000, it was still 44. That's five points in 42 years. But by 2023, it was down to 32%. 12 more points in about half the time. Now one thing to keep in mind with that data. Nick Eglaser. This stunning tour. The thoughts of death I don't like to dwell on them for longer than like 10 or 15 hours a day, so... November 19th. Yama Vaugh Theater. No wonder women rushed to have kids were being trained for it since we were kids. They're like, here's a baby doll. Here's an easy big oven. I got one of those. I stuck my head in it. I was like, I want out of this narrative.

9:24Tickets on sale now at YamaVah Theater.com. Don't miss Nick Eglaser. Yama Vaugh Theater. Attendance and participation are quite the same thing. Plenty of people now watch a service from home who would have been counted in a few a generation ago. But the tradition here was never only the worship. It was the building once a week full of neighbors. Number 3. Decorating Graves on Memorial Day. Here's something a lot of people don't know. Memorial Day used to have a different name. It was called Decoration Day. And it was named for the thing you were supposed to do. An 1868 in order went out establishing May 30th as a day for placing flowers on the graves of the Civil War dead. That was the day's entire purpose. Not a long weekend, not the start of summer. Decorating graves was not part of the holiday. It was the holiday. And almost immediately it started growing into something bigger than the graves. By the 1890s, there were bicycle races and dances. Today, when Americans are asked how they plan to spend

10:26Memorial Day about 9 percent, say they'll visit a grave. 5 percent of parade were a ceremony. Even still, the tradition didn't die. Every year at Arlington National Cemetery, soldiers place a flag at every single headstone. Veterans groups and small town cemeteries do the same across the country. It's less common for a family to make that drive now. More often, it's someone who never knew the name on the stone. Number 2. Asking Her Father for Permission. The scene is stitched into hundreds of movies and probably a few of your own family stories. The sweaty, palmed boyfriend shows up alone and asks to speak privately with his girlfriend's father. His question? I'd like your permission to marry your daughter. Now, asking the family isn't necessarily dead. In fact, in a study of nearly 17,000 American couples close to 70 percent said they went to a parent before proposing. What's changing is how it looks. It's less often one man asking one man. Now it's far more common for the groom

11:30to be to ask both parents together. He's frequently going to other family members too. About one in five went to someone other than the parents, like a grandmother, a brother, or a stepfather. And the question itself has shifted to, do I have your permission? Has become, can I have your blessing? And by the time he's at the kitchen table, nothing is actually being decided. In the same study, 57 percent of couples had already been talking about marriage for more than a year. He isn't asking for an answer anymore. He's really just asking to be let in. Now I have to ask the father's watching. Did somebody ask you and be honest? Did you make him sweat a little first? And number one, Sunday dinner. Grandma's good dishes got laid out. The ones that never saw a dishwasher. A card table was dragged in for the kids. Something that had been cooking all day in the oven. And then you, your family, and whoever else got invited just sat there talking. It was how the week ended. Now here's what's interesting. Despite how it might feel, Americans did not stop eating

12:34dinner together. When Gallup measured it, families with kids at home were sitting down about five nights a week, almost exactly what it was back in the 1990s. It's the Sunday spread specifically that's fading. Less often, less food, and a thinner circle around the table. It looked different depending on whose house it was. Maybe it was Sunday gravy or fried chicken and macaroni and cheese, or a pot roast on a long table after church. But people describe it the same way again and again. The full course meal. The special one. Handed down on purpose. I think they wanted their kids to carry, which is exactly why it's number one. Most of what we've counted down today was something you could do by yourself. You read the paper, you stood in the line, you took the test, but Sunday dinner required everybody to buy in. It didn't work unless people showed up. And that's also why it's the easiest one to get back. Nothing about Sunday dinner was ever taken away. No company retired it,

13:38no studio moved it to seven o'clock. It only ever needed people and people are still here. Just a table and somebody willing to name a time. So 10 traditions and every one of them ended the same quiet way. Somebody did it for the last time and had no idea it was the last time. But here's the thing I want to leave with you because it's easy to hear a list like that and think we're saying it's all over. We're not. Every one of these still happens somewhere today. Somebody got their license at 16 this week. Somebody's street is closing down for a party this summer. Somebody's putting flowers on a grave in May. None of that is gone. What ended is that it used to be automatic. Now it takes somebody deciding, which means most of these are one person away from coming back. So tell me two things in the comments. First, which one on this list was yours? The paper on the porch, the party on the block, or that table on Sunday. And second, what did we leave

14:41off? Because there's a tradition in your family that isn't on this list and I'd like to know what it is. Whatever came to mind while you were watching, it isn't gone. Just haven't done it in a while. Before we go, if you've enjoyed this episode, we'd love to have you become part of the flyover community. The flyover is much more than a podcast. Today, it includes our national newsletter, 12 state editions, the flyover podcast, the feel good flyover podcast, and now flyover focus. And we're just getting started. Coming soon, we'll also be launching flyover destinations. To learn more about all of these projects, visit jointheflyover.com and be sure to subscribe or wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss an episode. I'm Amy Hess. Thanks for flying with us.

15:53Tickets on sale now at Yamabah Theatre dot com. Don't miss Nicky Glazer. Yamabah Theatre.