RSVP etiquette – A Gen Z event host said a “yes” RSVP culture left her planning for a crowd that never came. Her experience reflects broader worries about transactional invitations, eroded social infrastructure, and the mental health toll of loneliness—where technology can mak
On the West Side Highway, Aubrey Strobel spent the morning preparing for a crowd that never arrived.
She had invited 50 people to a June 20 get-together to celebrate her 10-year anniversary of living in New York, using Partiful, a Gen Z-led event hosting and invitation platform. She received 10 nos, three maybes, and 24 yeses—then watched only eight friends show up in the afternoon.
For Strobel, the problem wasn’t just the empty seats. She had spent $1,000 on food, alcohol and decorations, and she moved through the day with a speech in her hands, transporting pizza and setting up a table, all while expecting the people who had said “yes.”
“I feel like RSVP culture is just lost right now,” Strobel said. “A lot because people are really flaky in 2026.”
Strobel, 33, later posted about the etiquette breakdown in June 22 Instagram and TikTok videos that have earned a collective 100,000 views, telling followers she was starting a conversation about what “yes” is supposed to mean.
“If you RSVP, yes, I’m going, that means you’re going. That doesn’t mean you’re supporting someone,” she said in the videos.
Partiful etiquette meets a changing social reality
Strobel says the experience left her questioning her friendships. After she posted online, she said she felt validated to see others had run into similar problems.
In the comments on her post. one person wrote that “it’s definitely a major culture change post covid- people have gotten way too comfortable with canceling.” Another said. “We also have to have a conversation about partiful invites. It’s made a lot of ppl lazy and they don’t send personal invites anymore.”.
The platform’s promise is meant to reduce friction: Partiful and similar apps aim to eliminate the finicky email threads and groupchats that come with planning. Instead. they put event information—guest list. event details and photos—in one place. and allow hosts and vendors to reach attendees with a single text blast.
Strobel said the ease is also part of what worries her. She argues that a casual RSVP culture makes it harder to plan and harder to treat commitments as commitments.
“People don’t take it as seriously,” Strobel said. “How could anyone plan for an event if you’re just RSVPing for support?”
Partiful also allows attendees to see who else is going. The platform says the feature “builds hype and gets people to actually show up.” Strobel believes it can do the opposite—turning attendance into something transactional.
She said it encourages some people to check whether the guest list will benefit them before deciding whether to RSVP. Other “flaky partygoers” may look at a large number of RSVPs and assume enough other people will show up in their place, letting them skip without consequence.
She contrasted that with older invitation norms. “As a millennial, when you got an invitation in the mail, you never knew how many people were going to be there, and you didn’t know who was going to be there,” she said. “Peeking in the windows to a party isn’t helping etiquette in 2026.”
A party plan that collided with silence
Strobel’s life story is stitched into this event. Her first home after moving to New York from Arizona in 2016—an attempt to become an aspiring broadcast journalist—was the YMCA on 47th Street. She lived in hostels, took far commutes, and built her life with “zero friends” and “no money,” she said.
For that reason, the celebration meant more than a gathering; she described it as a way to honor how far she’d come.
As the sun set over the West Side Highway, the details of that effort turned visible. Hundreds of dollars of leftover L’Industrie pizza sat untouched in boxes. Spare Statue of Liberty hats went unworn.
While she was mid-speech—describing what the past 10 years had meant—a passing child interrupted her.
“Where is everybody?” the child asked.
Strobel said she felt secure in general, but still reacted with disbelief.
“Even though I feel pretty secure, I was just like, ‘this is truly horrible. I don’t want to ever do that again,’” she said.
Frank Chaparro, her friend of 10 years, described Strobel as someone who “is always trying to go the extra mile,” and said she often hosts friends in her apartment.
Chaparro said the low attendance came down to shifting social norms. In 2026, he pointed out, you have to follow up repeatedly to get people to RSVP.
He also said casual get-togethers like the wine and pasta nights he held with friends while a student at Fordham University don’t seem to happen as frequently anymore. He described a swing in priorities—away from making other people happy and toward optimizing for personal comfort.
“There’s more of a focus on, ‘What is going to make me feel the best that I can feel today?’ and that sort of tops now any sort of etiquette or social order,” Chaparro said.
The loneliness backdrop behind the “yes” problem
The RSVP breakdown isn’t happening in a vacuum. Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, previously told USA TODAY that many former social infrastructures that helped people connect have eroded for young people.
Loneliness, Zaki said, sits within a broader national conversation. The former U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, has spoken extensively about it. Even before the pandemic, roughly half of adults reported experiencing loneliness. In the spring of 2023, Murthy declared America’s loneliness epidemic a public health crisis.
Murthy has pointed to a steady decline in participation in faith organizations, recreational leagues and service organizations, and to fewer people going to school, getting jobs, and raising families in the same towns they grew up in.
Zaki said the result is that defaults that used to keep social connection running are gone—so people need to make greater individual effort.
“Many of the defaults that made social connection part of the infrastructure of our lives are gone, which is hard because it means that we need to then make greater individual effort to make that happen,” Zaki said.
He described changing habits through everyday examples. Once, sociologists assessed social connections by asking how many people someone could count on to pick them up from the airport at 1 a.m. Today, Zaki said, there’s Uber for that.
He referenced the sitcom “Friends,” where everyone helps Joey pack when he moves out with Chandler, adding that in 2026, he could use TaskRabbit. And where neighbors once helped, delivery services like Postmates and Instacart fill gaps.
Zaki said health research underscores why showing up matters. Studies have shown that connections and friendships benefit people’s health and longevity.
“When we show up for others. our stress decreases. our sense of agency and autonomy increases. our happiness increases. and so when we focus on a hyper-individualistic. almost single-serving version of well-being… we actually are depriving ourselves of one of the great sources of well-being. ” Zaki said.
He said most people want more friends, even if they don’t realize how receptive others can be.
“Statistically speaking, people want to connect with you way more than you realize,” Zaki said. “I think there’s so much life out there with each other.”
For Strobel, the etiquette conversation is personal—built from hours spent setting up, money spent on food and decorations, and a speech interrupted by the simple question, “Where is everybody?”
Her videos are now part warning, part invitation: if RSVP culture loses its meaning, the people hosting may be left holding boxes while the guest list turns into something else entirely.
RSVP culture Partiful Gen Z loneliness epidemic Vivek Murthy Jamil Zaki event hosting social obligations Apple Invites Paperless Post