>As people enter middle age, they tend to have more demands on their time, many of them more pressing than friendship. After all, it’s easier to put off catching up with a friend than it is to skip your kid’s play or an important business trip.
The sad part is that it doesn't have to be this way. The notion that friendship is something you make time for (to the detriment of your other pursuits) seems to be very modern, very Western and an absolutely terrible idea.
Just anecdotally, the friendships where people rely on one another for assistance - helping one another achieve their goals rather than hindering them - seem to get stronger and stronger whereas the "let's catch up" friends seem to wither over time.
Somewhat counter-intuitively, doing simple things like giving a friend a lift when their car breaks down, providing them with meals when they're unable to cook for themselves or helping them move house actually cause you to value the relationship more.
Definitely on this. I enjoy just hanging out and having a beer, but also painting a room, building a porch, doing a little demolition, taking our kids camping together. Time doesn't have to be a zero sum game. (And it’s the same with a lot of stuff— you don’t have to stop parenting to cook or clean or garden, do that stuff with the kids!)
Another aspect I think is how much you plan things in advance, and how willing the people in your circle are to do stuff last minute. One of my groups is some neighborhood dads and every week or so they're like "hey, tonight or tomorrow?" and then it's a hang for whoever can make it, with no expectations or hurt feelings because it wasn’t possible to find a weeks-away date that magically worked for everyone’s calendars only to have half of them cancel at the last minute anyway. You need people receptive to this for it to work, but it has that fluidity of college dorm socializing once it gets going.
"I enjoy just hanging out and having a beer, but also painting a room, building a porch, doing a little demolition"
Perhaps that's the differece: specialization. More contractors and take-out meals mean less working with friends.
Friends are good for unspecialized labor, but when you get into skilled labor it falls apart. The one plumber friend will get swamped with requests, and the quantum physicist may not find an opportunity to reciprocate.
"The friendships where people rely on one another for assistance" and "'let's catch up' friends" would appear to be, according to Aristotle's analysis, friendships of utility and of pleasure, respectively. These are not bad, but there is a higher, more perfect, more durable form of friendship, the friendship of virtue [0], rooted in a common goal. Marriage is such a friendship, for example. It is not surprising, then, that friendships of pleasure or utility should more easily wane, while friendships of virtue are more lasting.
Glad to see someone say something good about marriage. Elite media is so negative about it these days. We are stuck in cliches about how historically it was just a strategic play for money and power and it never made sense as the core friendship around which your life revolves.
Maybe marriage is a nuisance if your life's ambition is to get an essay into The New Yorker, but if you have more pedestrian interests in family, it can be the best.
I just find it interesting how we believe we are so much more advanced than our ancestors and know so much more, but when it comes to living "The Good Life" they were still talking about the same problems we are struggling with in modern society.
Maybe overall we shouldn't be so quick to dismiss the wisdom of the ancients in favor of our modern obsession with data.
Is a friendship of virtue a friendship? That seems to violate the idea that friendships are low-commitment and non-binding relationships.
I would define my wife as my wife and friend, because our status as friends could become shaky but she would still be my wife. Similarly a long time business partner could be someone I identify as a friend or not. Those are both relationships rooted in a common goal, but I think Aristotle's definition of friendship is a stretch here. I think the wisdom of "don't go into business with your friends" is more relevant in my life.
I don't think this is true at all. I'm not from a Western culture originally, and my friends (who i love) across a whole slice of society (from bus drivers to tech executives) have sort of diverged. Some of them always make time no matter what. Others, despite being super helpful when they can, 100% put other priorities over friendship first. Pretty sure that's not just my case and not really limited to the West at all.
"That is always the way with stay-at-homes. If they like something in their own village they take it for a thing universal and eternal, though perhaps it was never heard of five miles away; if they dislike something, they say it is a local, backward, provincial convention, though, in fact, it may be the law of nations."
We went from one income households to two. A lot of dads discovered that mom was actually doing quite a lot of the work and the not-shitty ones started doing their share. Hard to meet up with the lads when you're consoling a sick kid.
In spite of that, women have had larger and stronger social networks than men for decades/centuries (if not all of human history). Now, if anything, the gap is narrowing and women are becoming lonely at a rapid rate.
Perhaps more evidence that catching up with the lads for a pint is less valuable than bringing over a casserole for a friend with a sick kid.
This is so spot on. I feel like I am such a shitty friend especially after having witnessed my friends go above and beyond for when we needed their help without even being asked for it.
My wife's family has a real knack for working out what each other need, basically asking each other how they're going and really keeping a finger on the pulse when listening to the responses.
It's an art form for sure, but working out who needs assistance and in what form makes it really easy to provide it.
>The sad part is that it doesn't have to be this way. The notion that friendship is something you make time for (to the detriment of your other pursuits) seems to be very modern, very Western and an absolutely terrible idea.
Why wouldn't it though? Ultimately speaking time is a finite resource for an individual. If one's pursuits or responsibilities do not align with the pursuits of your friend, then why wouldn't one need pick between expending one's time with said friend vs other callings?
I guess it makes more sense when you consider reciprocity.
Pouring your finite and valuable time into assisting a friend achieve their goals implies that they will, at least to some extent, help you with yours. It doesn't matter if they're aligned as long as you understand one another.
Whereas with the "let's catch up" friends, the implicit agreement is that by making you sacrifice for the relationship, you get the right to make them sacrifice.
I guess the latter is better than nothing, as it beats being alone, but an optimising brain leads one towards putting in minimum effort and letting the relationship decay to the point of just being alive.
We like things to be "fair" and to have mutually beneficial relationships in our work life. On top of that we all struggle with being vulnerable so your idea of a friendship built on top of mutual reliance seems really difficult to pull off.
Far more likely is you needing to accept that you will be doing most of the maintenance work around any of your adult friendships, and they might not have any "benefit" outside of being one of the few balms to existential dread.
Realistically, when would that happen with a middle class lifestyle?
When ny car broke down, I call my roadside assistance to get it towed and took Uber home when my wife was working.
When I need to move, I call movers. Same with home repairs. If I couldn’t cook for myself and assuming I wasn’t married (I am) I order in. I’m not saying having friends isn’t important for emotional reasons. But now, unless I lost my job and have lost my financial means, i usually “need” friends for emotional support.
That being said, when my wife had surgery a few years ago, I really leaned on her (and my friends through association). My wife knew I would be an emotional wreck and they came for emotional support.
> Somewhat counter-intuitively, doing simple things like giving a friend a lift when their car breaks down, providing them with meals when they're unable to cook for themselves or helping them move house actually cause you to value the relationship more.
That must be why we find it hard to maintain friendships these days. We mostly just buy the goods and services we want, and the results are often more convenient and better quality. Mutual aid and dependence seems less necessary, even if it's maybe good for the spirit.
> "let's catch up" friends seem to wither over time
In my experience, at some point there is nothing to talk about anymore, i have some of those long term friends but it's getting to the point where they come by my house, catch up in 10 minutes and then spent the rest of time in the couch on the phone.
I always feel like I'm outside looking in when people talk about making and keeping friends. I was make fun of a lot as a kid, moved around a lot, and then as a young adult I didn't prioritize making friends, thinking I'd have my whole life to make some. I didn't realize that people just stop making new friends after 30 (outside work).
I have a family and that's super nice, but I still never really experienced this. Reading about it just hurts. Sure, I had "friends"in college, but we don't keep in touch.
> I didn't realize that people just stop making new friends after 30 (outside work)
Nah. This is just a self-made bubble. Even without any activity outside work, you can still meet friends' friend and family's friend. There's always new people to talk to.
I've made a lot of friends outside work since adulthood, from various sources. Just last week, I made a new friend at a mutual friend's party, and played a duet together. We've scheduled to play another next month.
Another friend of mine just made 11 new friends outside of work last month, as he joined a baseball amateur league.
Just go do what you enjoy, and talk to people. If you share a common interest, and have no big clash in personality, that's probably a budding friendship.
I’m not sure you can adopt such a dismissive tone here. I mean, your whole premise is that you met a friend at a mutual friend’s dinner party. You seem to have something of an “engine” of friends available that allow a preponderance of socialization. I think many of us in our 30s don’t even have that.
This doesn't help if you're trying to bootstrap from nothing.
> just join a sports league
I spent solid chunks of childhood being forced into sports programs when I at best had below-average physical abilities. I even tried one summer as an adult to play in a league and I discovered that the physical gap had just widened and widened and it just helped isolate me until I quit going.
It's really great that people find things like sports leagues or meetups useful for this, but none of it overlaps with my mostly solo activities.
Unfortunately, that's how it is if you don't share interest with the extroverted crowds: you're just stuck looking for scraps.
50 here, making (and losing) friends every year. We moved to another country, again, and we don’t find it very hard to forge lasting friendships with people so far anywhere.
Most people are just really bad at it; some people here who I try involve in activities always cancel or have ‘better stuff todo’ and then cry, later, that no one invites them anymore or they have no one to play with.
It’s not that hard…
> Imagine there’s another one of you. Wouldn’t you want to be friends with them?
I do have to say that making friends with people you do not see every day for weeks on end feels different. I’ve spent more time with my friends from highschool than I will ever spend with any other individual whom I might eventually consider a friend.
>Imagine there’s another one of you. Wouldn’t you want to be friends with them?
Yeah but finding the other ones like you is incredibly difficult. People in their 30's and 40's with zero friends looking to make new ones are basically non existent where I live.
I find I've managed to find friends incidentally just by doing things. Taking up tennis, I've made friends, rollerskating, friends, and one potential close friend, kids sports, friends.
I've actually been somewhat surprised by how much random people desire connection upon the most tenuous of common interests.
Get involved in something, anything, that you like and slowly reach out to others with the same interests and you'll find friendships. Something I've found though, build them slowly lest they burn out quickly upon a pyre of previously unaware incompatibilities of opinion.
I seem to be an approachable person; being at least a superficially nice person, easy with a smile, seems to make a difference.
My few 'best' friends I see ever so rarely, but when we get together it's like no time has passed. I think that's a true test of deep friendship compatibility.
This. Find some group activity that's not work. Don't be shy to change said activity until you find one that you like. Then you'll have a group of people that are interested in at least one thing you're interested in and don't need to do office politics with you. Some kind of friendship with at least some of them will just follow.
I was going to write my own comment but I saw what you wrote and it reminded me of something that happened a few weeks ago.
Basically I'm the guy who keeps in touch with everyone. I have a chat group with guys I met at age 4. Everyone who went to school with me asks me "where is X now" and I'll tell them I last spoke to them not long ago. I talk to my old teachers, across the spectrum from 1st grade to high school. People from various jobs I did 20 years ago, I still know.
So I'm rounding up people for a high school signal group, and even those guys who never say anything to anyone will join it because it's memes and news articles we can comment on. Kinda nice to have all your old buddies there, even with lurkers bring a thing on private groups.
But this one guy, I know him pretty well, been to his house many times growing up, visited his parents, went to each others weddings, etc... Doesn't want to join.
It's just too painful. He feels tormented by some of the other guys in the group. Apparently they tried this some time ago and the chat descended into bullying him like we were in school, except now we're grown up everyone thinks it doesn't hurt anymore.
I really wish there was a solution, but I think it won't happen. Sometimes relationships go off the rails and never come back. I'll still go see my buddy next time I'm near him, but he's cut off everyone else.
You sound both like a wonderful human being and a very annoying one at the same time. But I like it. I salute you for keeping your people connected. Wish I had someone like you in my life.
'It's just too painful. He feels tormented by some of the other guys in the group. Apparently they tried this some time ago and the chat descended into bullying him like we were in school, except now we're grown up everyone thinks it doesn't hurt anymore.'
This sounds like a similar situation with some of my family. Individually they are OK but as a group they revert to to their childhood personas and can be quite unpleasant and hurtful to be around.
Your story reminds me of how different we all are. I left my home town when I left school and essentially cut off everyone from that school and that town. I was friends with everyone in school, very friendly with the teachers, but that town was just not going to be where I excelled in any form. I am not even sure what I would do if an old school friend reached out to me!
A lot of people from tiny country/rural towns I think end up in this situation, because we often end up fighting the "Crabs in a Bucket" phenomenon when trying to be better humans, and leaving can be easier. Whilst I do think about people from my childhood and that town, it feels like an entirely different life to me.
> I didn't realize that people just stop making new friends after 30 (outside work).
I'm not sure where you got that impression. At 51 I'm still making new friends, mostly by seeking people out who share hobbies that I'm interested in. It gives me a base level of conversation to start out with. I recently started up a great relationship with the curator at a clock museum simply by going to his museum and talking clock with him. I go visit him at least once a month now, and he's begun to introduce me to other museum curators in the area. I also made a new set of friends recently by answering a Craigslist ad for a classic car in the area, then going to look at the car and talking to the guy for a couple hours. He invited me to a Sunday drive with a group of local classic car folks, and now I'm part of the group.
In general he's right though, people are getting loneliner and make less (and less deep) friendships as they get old. As far as I know this is all pretty much common knowledge and verified in surveys and research.
That's a pretty big exclusion. It is like excluding friends you make at school when you are a kid.
Obviously, to make friends you have to meet them first and preferably spend some time with them. And during adulthood, work is usually where it happens, during childhood, it is school.
I think the reason it happens less often in adulthood is that many people already have an established group of friends, but if life changes break the group people will make friends again.
Oddly, I was quite awkward as a teenager and really struggled to make friends then.
I had friends in college, but I don’t really keep in touch with any of them these days.
My closest friends are a few I’ve had since childhood, but mostly those I’ve made since adulthood through work and just striking up conversations outside of it.
Try a few new things and put yourself out there. We’re none of us that different and we’re all social creatures.
I don’t know what happened but after Covid no one talks to me anymore.
Prior to Covid I could go out to a bar, strike up a convo with someone (or vice versa) and just chat about stuff, sometimes awkward sometimes not. Now though, no one seems to want to talk, bot sure if something about my demeanor has changed or something. I hate going out now because it usually just involves me slamming down drinks to kill time.
If you're in the bay area, I am always up to have coffee with new, interesting people. I don't have a lot of time, but I actually automate this, and allocate a few hours a week just to casual meetings people. I rotate around who I get together with to make it manageable, so an hour or so doesn't disrupt my schedule at all.
Pre-pandemic, I liked "meetup" or other similar groups. You can make a lot of friends fast at a Haskell meetup, or at a retrocomputing users group. I suppose they're starting to come back....
Can you? I've been going to a monthly language meetup for a year now. It's the only one in real life I've been able to find in SF. Basically no one comes twice, and the ones I reach out to after the monthly meeting are lukewarm about hanging out.
As it comes to friendships, people mistake time for priority.
Yes, I get it, people are busy. But they still have time. The average citizen spends several hours per day passively consuming entertainment. You may even have spare moments at work or in a commute.
You can call your friend. Or send a quick message to do some slow chat. And even in hectic schedules you can meet once a week or even once a month.
When you haven't connected to a friend in months, you're a shitty friend. You don't have a time problem, you have a priority problem. And that's the thing that people are unwilling to admit: it's just less important after a certain age, where we use time as an excuse.
A method which has proven successful with friends is arranging for a future appointment to have a call. Usually we ask what the other is up to next week and book in a 1-2hr slot one evening for a call.
I've found male friends open up much more about how they are when speaking and appreciate the regular monthly check-ins.
> When you haven't connected to a friend in months, you're a shitty friend.
Needlessly harsh overgeneralization, I think.
I hate phone calls for the sake of catching up, and I have plenty of friends who are the same. We'll go months without talking until there's some reason to - maybe I'm going to be visiting their city, or I want to let them know that my wife is pregnant, or I just watched a new TV show that I think they'll love. When those things happen, I text, and we chat and maybe see each other, and our friendship isn't ever diminished just because we haven't spoken in months.
I'm very happy with these friendships, and my friends are very happy with these friendships, and yet you're telling me that we're all shitty friends. Maybe you need to be contacted regularly by someone in order to consider them a friend, but not everyone shares that need. Other people aren't shitty friends just because they don't meet your needs.
There's a difference between sociology (as taught in American universities) and cultural anthropology, and this article is a nice demonstration of that difference. Note that everything in this article only applies to a relatively small socio-economic grouping - i.e. relatively well-off college-educated Americans. This is explicitly stated, more or less, in the article:
> "The saga of adult friendship starts off well enough. “I think young adulthood is the golden age for forming friendships,” Rawlins says. “Especially for people who have the privilege and the blessing of being able to go to college.”"
There are many different cultures and economic groupings, globally speaking, and they don't all devolve into isolated 'nuclear family' groupings over time, as this article implies. The majority of people don't actually have Facebook feeds from people they haven't seen in 35 years. Their friendships are based in the communities they live in - the people they trade with for food, clothing, and other necessities. There's a much greater sense of mutual interdependence, not so much the concept of isolated individual success followed by what, retreat to a gated community?
If you attempt to take an outside perspective, it's rather startling how class-stratified and wealth-stratified American society has become, very similar to the posh/prole divide in imperial Britain.
The issue I have with posts like these is that when you compare and contrast anglo/american culture with "other" cultures, you handwave away specific examples of "others".
"The majority of people" is a pretty broad group here, from Portugal to the Russian far east, Namibia to Papua New Guinea, Chile to Mexico. So when you say:
The majority of people don't actually have Facebook feeds from people they haven't seen in 35 years. Their friendships are based in the communities they live in - the people they trade with for food, clothing, and other necessities. There's a much greater sense of mutual interdependence, not so much the concept of isolated individual success followed by what, retreat to a gated community?
Does that really apply to all non-anglo/american cultures? You would have to be extraordinarily knowledgeable of near thousands of human cultures to know this.
it's rather startling how class-stratified and wealth-stratified American society has become, very similar to the posh/prole divide in imperial Britain.
It'd be a challenge to claim that the "prole/posh divide" in Imperial Britain was anywhere near as strong as some of its contemporaries - say the Qing Dynasty or Ottoman Empire.
> Does that really apply to all non-anglo/american cultures? You would have to be extraordinarily knowledgeable of near thousands of human cultures to know this.
Or you could find out how many users facebook has, and subtract it from the world population. If you're left with "the majority of people," you've easily proved it.
I've been subscribing to The Atlantic for years. It is entirely targeted at upperclass, liberal, college-educated whites. Which is exactly why I read it. Why would I read a magazine targeted at a culture I don't understand or am not a part of? I do expect The Atlantic to explain these culture groups to me in a language I understand, but any periodical simply targets its own audience for profitability reasons.
This sounds like a nice way to keep yourself trapped in an information bubble. I live thousands of miles away from the nearest English-speaking country in a society pretty different to what you'd see in England or the US, yet spend most of my time in the English-speaking section of the internet precisely because of that (reading pretty much anything that comes by, targeted at as diverse groups as possible).
Because it’s valuable to try to understand groups other than your own? Maybe even learn from them? Honestly I’m baffled that you hold this opinion with some pride.
I ascended to that class from a working class family (and no college) and y’all have just as many problems as any other social group.
Where do you get this impression? The article was clearly written for American audiences, and the sociologist Rawlins clearly focuses on American society.
You make it sound like they are just talking out of their rear end, making things up based on their own privileged and unrepresentative personal experience, but my impression is that their opinion is formed by their own research, which might be a couple decades old, but is probably still relevant.
If there's anything to complain about here, is that Americans tend to forget that there is a world outside of the USA.
Americans also tend to forget there is a world inside of the USA that isn't upper middle class, college educated, work all day, annual vacation people posting on social media.
The sense of community and day to day lives are very different and much more enjoyable. The only problem is that due to exploitation by distant corporate actors that community is played with violence, obesity and drug addiction.
The article itself talks of life stages in terms of how things change, with college life being a case study as a small aside in the middle of the article. It's written as though these insights apply to everyone, even mentioning the "International Association of Relationship Researchers" at the beginning.
It's a very common problem in sociology-type sciences, where they study college students because they're easy access, then extrapolate to the entire population.
> Americans tend to forget that there is a world outside of the USA
Reinforced by the apparent reality that mostly what people outside the USA want to talk about is the USA. Even on HN, where we have a large contingent of Europeans participating, we don't hear too much about Europe. It's almost always about the US.
This is true. Also true that because something isn’t of universal applicability that doesn’t mean it isn’t of merit for a specific group. I don’t think the Atlantic pretends it’s readership isn’t overwhelming upper middle
class+ highly educated center-left Americans. There is a balance isn’t there between acknowledging differences exist and only writing things of universal relevance which is mostly to say nothing at all.
Was about to write the exact same thing. Having grown up around multigenerational immigrant families in a working class environment in a Western country that is, the article already sounds foreign to me, and I'm not even that far off the target demographic compared to some other places in the world.
And still now as an adult in my early thirties who moved to Tokyo a few years ago, socially my environment is dominanted by friendships, which is true for many people my age. The article points to friendships being voluntary as one key distinction between say marriage and friends, but statistics will tell everyone that many of those marriages nowadays aren't that permanent.
Article sounds a little bit like it was written by someone who lives in American Beauty still.
Stratification of American society is largely due to people fleeing violent and property crime, especially once they have children. There is considerable hysteresis so it’s not as simple as lining up cost of living and crime stats, but a “nice neighborhood with good schools” will be considerably more expensive all else being equal.
As a gay adult not planning to have children, friends are the center of my life and probably will be for a long time. I think gay culture in NYC is an excellent example of the opposite of what this article describes - we all work hard, and many of us have partners, but we all maintain an evolving network of friends. It’s not hard to stay in touch or run into someone or make plans on a whim. It feels kind of like we’re all permanently adolescents. People come and go (jobs, travel, new opportunities), but with enough connections there’s always someone you’ve known for a while who is currently around. Sometimes these friendships aren’t very deep, sometimes they are. Some are brief, some are decades long.
> there are three expectations of a close friend that I hear people describing and valuing across the entire life course, Somebody to talk to, someone to depend on, and someone to enjoy.
I have two close friends. All three of us are in similar life circumstances. Married, kids in elementary/middle/high school, programmers, in our 40s or early 50s, etc.
But, our entire friendship revolves around boardgames. We get together every Thursday night to play games for 3-4 hours.
Someone to talk to? Well, we don’t talk outside of boardgame night and we don’t really talk at boardgame night, other than about the game.
Someone to depend on? Well, pretty much all we depend on is that we will all show up.
Someone to enjoy? Well, frankly, we probably all enjoy boardgames more.
> So you never, ever mention any personal event at game night? I don’t think so.
We really really don’t. We are there to play games, we don’t have time or brain space for small talk. We play heavy games that take a lot of deep thinking.
I found I formed a deeper connection with my D&D group once we started doing non-D&D things together. It was a switch from consistent friends to close friends.
"Acquaintance" is a word many more americans should be using much more of the time. The over-use of "friend" to describe "anyone I know" has been a problem for me ever since I moved here (3 decades ago). It also has implications for reporting too, where "anyone a person of interest knew" is a "friend".
The reason why we have fewer friends now is because we have optimized life for economic growth, not happiness. Technology is the primary thing to blame here. If we didn't have technology, we would have to rely on each other more and we would not have social outlets like the internet to provide a superficial social bandage to our underlying social needs.
It's also the width of the economic growth mindset. We fuel the 'have more devices and be free-er and independent' so naturally people can live on their own (misery).
I may be imagining things but when you live in a small place where you have no choice but to share the load and pleasure of life (granted the group is emotionally stable), you don't suffer from that. You're a jolly bunch making your place nicer, finding and cooking food, and being goofy at night around the fire.
It's an interesting question but it won't stop. I think the question is (for the individual), how can you organize your life and your priorities so that friendship plays a more central role in your life?
I liked this article. I think more about friendships than any other philosophical topic. I moved to a new city at 22 where I knew almost no one. It turns out that it's orders of magnitude harder making friends without a few seed connections. The nuances of meeting people and building relationships are so arbitrary and idiosyncratic; some things, like sports, happen to be really conducive to making friends, whereas conferences and tech meetups for me proved less fertile. Even acquaintances often simply aren't looking to change their group of close friends.
It was frustrating and discouraging for a long time and then suddenly I found myself with people to call on and spend time with. Half a decade later I moved and had the opportunity to try the experiment again. This time secondary connections made finding my network almost trivial. Maybe age helped too, being further removed from the university cliques.
I was relieved to find out, albeit way after the fact, that many have this experience. One friend recently quit his job to start a company focused on this phenomenon [0]. I hope he can displace the zombie of Meetup.
What kind of secondary connections were those the second time if I may ask? I might be in this situation soon and wondering if I can direct it in some way.
One example is that when I was moving, existing friends from the old city gave me a lot of tips of things to get involved in, i.e. there was a run club in a certain neighborhood or whatever.
Otherwise, previous friends knew people and put me in touch. And finally there were 1-2 people who had also moved to the same city at some point, making it easy to plug into their networks
Love the username- please tell me it's a Master + Margarita reference
Anecdotally here's what's worked for me:
1. Intramural sports- even if you're not sporty, some leagues have zero barrier to entry (Bowling or sand volleyball 6's). There are usually pickup sports apps as well that you could probably find based on your city (i.e. JustPlay)
2. Volunteering- especially neighborhood / trail cleanup groups that you can find on Instagram or Meetup. These are low commitment and people tend to be friendly. Habitat for Humanity was another one that had lots of young people new to the city.
3. Free Fitness (or any other hobby) Groups- you can find anywhere. November Project, for example is in most cities
Readit News
The sad part is that it doesn't have to be this way. The notion that friendship is something you make time for (to the detriment of your other pursuits) seems to be very modern, very Western and an absolutely terrible idea.
Just anecdotally, the friendships where people rely on one another for assistance - helping one another achieve their goals rather than hindering them - seem to get stronger and stronger whereas the "let's catch up" friends seem to wither over time.
Somewhat counter-intuitively, doing simple things like giving a friend a lift when their car breaks down, providing them with meals when they're unable to cook for themselves or helping them move house actually cause you to value the relationship more.
Another aspect I think is how much you plan things in advance, and how willing the people in your circle are to do stuff last minute. One of my groups is some neighborhood dads and every week or so they're like "hey, tonight or tomorrow?" and then it's a hang for whoever can make it, with no expectations or hurt feelings because it wasn’t possible to find a weeks-away date that magically worked for everyone’s calendars only to have half of them cancel at the last minute anyway. You need people receptive to this for it to work, but it has that fluidity of college dorm socializing once it gets going.
Perhaps that's the differece: specialization. More contractors and take-out meals mean less working with friends.
Friends are good for unspecialized labor, but when you get into skilled labor it falls apart. The one plumber friend will get swamped with requests, and the quantum physicist may not find an opportunity to reciprocate.
[0] https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2016/06/16819/
Maybe marriage is a nuisance if your life's ambition is to get an essay into The New Yorker, but if you have more pedestrian interests in family, it can be the best.
Maybe overall we shouldn't be so quick to dismiss the wisdom of the ancients in favor of our modern obsession with data.
I would define my wife as my wife and friend, because our status as friends could become shaky but she would still be my wife. Similarly a long time business partner could be someone I identify as a friend or not. Those are both relationships rooted in a common goal, but I think Aristotle's definition of friendship is a stretch here. I think the wisdom of "don't go into business with your friends" is more relevant in my life.
I don't think this is true at all. I'm not from a Western culture originally, and my friends (who i love) across a whole slice of society (from bus drivers to tech executives) have sort of diverged. Some of them always make time no matter what. Others, despite being super helpful when they can, 100% put other priorities over friendship first. Pretty sure that's not just my case and not really limited to the West at all.
Perhaps more evidence that catching up with the lads for a pint is less valuable than bringing over a casserole for a friend with a sick kid.
One of the reasons I won't read these articles - I don't want the content to become an excuse/prescription for me losing touch with friends.
Also who made the writer an expert? (May not apply to the author of this particular article, but I am generally skeptical).
It's an art form for sure, but working out who needs assistance and in what form makes it really easy to provide it.
Why wouldn't it though? Ultimately speaking time is a finite resource for an individual. If one's pursuits or responsibilities do not align with the pursuits of your friend, then why wouldn't one need pick between expending one's time with said friend vs other callings?
Pouring your finite and valuable time into assisting a friend achieve their goals implies that they will, at least to some extent, help you with yours. It doesn't matter if they're aligned as long as you understand one another.
Whereas with the "let's catch up" friends, the implicit agreement is that by making you sacrifice for the relationship, you get the right to make them sacrifice.
I guess the latter is better than nothing, as it beats being alone, but an optimising brain leads one towards putting in minimum effort and letting the relationship decay to the point of just being alive.
Far more likely is you needing to accept that you will be doing most of the maintenance work around any of your adult friendships, and they might not have any "benefit" outside of being one of the few balms to existential dread.
When ny car broke down, I call my roadside assistance to get it towed and took Uber home when my wife was working.
When I need to move, I call movers. Same with home repairs. If I couldn’t cook for myself and assuming I wasn’t married (I am) I order in. I’m not saying having friends isn’t important for emotional reasons. But now, unless I lost my job and have lost my financial means, i usually “need” friends for emotional support.
That being said, when my wife had surgery a few years ago, I really leaned on her (and my friends through association). My wife knew I would be an emotional wreck and they came for emotional support.
Why do you find this counterintuitive?
In my experience, at some point there is nothing to talk about anymore, i have some of those long term friends but it's getting to the point where they come by my house, catch up in 10 minutes and then spent the rest of time in the couch on the phone.
I have a family and that's super nice, but I still never really experienced this. Reading about it just hurts. Sure, I had "friends"in college, but we don't keep in touch.
Nah. This is just a self-made bubble. Even without any activity outside work, you can still meet friends' friend and family's friend. There's always new people to talk to.
I've made a lot of friends outside work since adulthood, from various sources. Just last week, I made a new friend at a mutual friend's party, and played a duet together. We've scheduled to play another next month.
Another friend of mine just made 11 new friends outside of work last month, as he joined a baseball amateur league.
Just go do what you enjoy, and talk to people. If you share a common interest, and have no big clash in personality, that's probably a budding friendship.
This doesn't help if you're trying to bootstrap from nothing.
> just join a sports league
I spent solid chunks of childhood being forced into sports programs when I at best had below-average physical abilities. I even tried one summer as an adult to play in a league and I discovered that the physical gap had just widened and widened and it just helped isolate me until I quit going.
It's really great that people find things like sports leagues or meetups useful for this, but none of it overlaps with my mostly solo activities.
Unfortunately, that's how it is if you don't share interest with the extroverted crowds: you're just stuck looking for scraps.
Dead Comment
I think this might be a self fulfilling prophecy.
I’m 40 and I’m still making friends. I don’t see why there must be some sort of magical age limit.
Imagine there’s another one of you. Wouldn’t you want to be friends with them?
Holy shit, that's a really thought-provoking question.
I wonder how many others would answer "probably not".
Most people are just really bad at it; some people here who I try involve in activities always cancel or have ‘better stuff todo’ and then cry, later, that no one invites them anymore or they have no one to play with.
It’s not that hard…
> Imagine there’s another one of you. Wouldn’t you want to be friends with them?
Nice one and yes, I would :)
Yeah but finding the other ones like you is incredibly difficult. People in their 30's and 40's with zero friends looking to make new ones are basically non existent where I live.
I've actually been somewhat surprised by how much random people desire connection upon the most tenuous of common interests.
Get involved in something, anything, that you like and slowly reach out to others with the same interests and you'll find friendships. Something I've found though, build them slowly lest they burn out quickly upon a pyre of previously unaware incompatibilities of opinion.
I seem to be an approachable person; being at least a superficially nice person, easy with a smile, seems to make a difference.
My few 'best' friends I see ever so rarely, but when we get together it's like no time has passed. I think that's a true test of deep friendship compatibility.
Basically I'm the guy who keeps in touch with everyone. I have a chat group with guys I met at age 4. Everyone who went to school with me asks me "where is X now" and I'll tell them I last spoke to them not long ago. I talk to my old teachers, across the spectrum from 1st grade to high school. People from various jobs I did 20 years ago, I still know.
So I'm rounding up people for a high school signal group, and even those guys who never say anything to anyone will join it because it's memes and news articles we can comment on. Kinda nice to have all your old buddies there, even with lurkers bring a thing on private groups.
But this one guy, I know him pretty well, been to his house many times growing up, visited his parents, went to each others weddings, etc... Doesn't want to join.
It's just too painful. He feels tormented by some of the other guys in the group. Apparently they tried this some time ago and the chat descended into bullying him like we were in school, except now we're grown up everyone thinks it doesn't hurt anymore.
I really wish there was a solution, but I think it won't happen. Sometimes relationships go off the rails and never come back. I'll still go see my buddy next time I'm near him, but he's cut off everyone else.
This sounds like a similar situation with some of my family. Individually they are OK but as a group they revert to to their childhood personas and can be quite unpleasant and hurtful to be around.
A lot of people from tiny country/rural towns I think end up in this situation, because we often end up fighting the "Crabs in a Bucket" phenomenon when trying to be better humans, and leaving can be easier. Whilst I do think about people from my childhood and that town, it feels like an entirely different life to me.
It sounds like you’re prioritizing quantity of friends.
I'm not sure where you got that impression. At 51 I'm still making new friends, mostly by seeking people out who share hobbies that I'm interested in. It gives me a base level of conversation to start out with. I recently started up a great relationship with the curator at a clock museum simply by going to his museum and talking clock with him. I go visit him at least once a month now, and he's begun to introduce me to other museum curators in the area. I also made a new set of friends recently by answering a Craigslist ad for a classic car in the area, then going to look at the car and talking to the guy for a couple hours. He invited me to a Sunday drive with a group of local classic car folks, and now I'm part of the group.
At least you got the family part
That's a pretty big exclusion. It is like excluding friends you make at school when you are a kid.
Obviously, to make friends you have to meet them first and preferably spend some time with them. And during adulthood, work is usually where it happens, during childhood, it is school.
I think the reason it happens less often in adulthood is that many people already have an established group of friends, but if life changes break the group people will make friends again.
I had friends in college, but I don’t really keep in touch with any of them these days.
My closest friends are a few I’ve had since childhood, but mostly those I’ve made since adulthood through work and just striking up conversations outside of it.
Try a few new things and put yourself out there. We’re none of us that different and we’re all social creatures.
Prior to Covid I could go out to a bar, strike up a convo with someone (or vice versa) and just chat about stuff, sometimes awkward sometimes not. Now though, no one seems to want to talk, bot sure if something about my demeanor has changed or something. I hate going out now because it usually just involves me slamming down drinks to kill time.
says a lot about our nature, i empathize (even though unlike you I can blame myself a bit for failing this aspect of existence), good luck
Yes, I get it, people are busy. But they still have time. The average citizen spends several hours per day passively consuming entertainment. You may even have spare moments at work or in a commute.
You can call your friend. Or send a quick message to do some slow chat. And even in hectic schedules you can meet once a week or even once a month.
When you haven't connected to a friend in months, you're a shitty friend. You don't have a time problem, you have a priority problem. And that's the thing that people are unwilling to admit: it's just less important after a certain age, where we use time as an excuse.
I've found male friends open up much more about how they are when speaking and appreciate the regular monthly check-ins.
Needlessly harsh overgeneralization, I think.
I hate phone calls for the sake of catching up, and I have plenty of friends who are the same. We'll go months without talking until there's some reason to - maybe I'm going to be visiting their city, or I want to let them know that my wife is pregnant, or I just watched a new TV show that I think they'll love. When those things happen, I text, and we chat and maybe see each other, and our friendship isn't ever diminished just because we haven't spoken in months.
I'm very happy with these friendships, and my friends are very happy with these friendships, and yet you're telling me that we're all shitty friends. Maybe you need to be contacted regularly by someone in order to consider them a friend, but not everyone shares that need. Other people aren't shitty friends just because they don't meet your needs.
> "The saga of adult friendship starts off well enough. “I think young adulthood is the golden age for forming friendships,” Rawlins says. “Especially for people who have the privilege and the blessing of being able to go to college.”"
There are many different cultures and economic groupings, globally speaking, and they don't all devolve into isolated 'nuclear family' groupings over time, as this article implies. The majority of people don't actually have Facebook feeds from people they haven't seen in 35 years. Their friendships are based in the communities they live in - the people they trade with for food, clothing, and other necessities. There's a much greater sense of mutual interdependence, not so much the concept of isolated individual success followed by what, retreat to a gated community?
If you attempt to take an outside perspective, it's rather startling how class-stratified and wealth-stratified American society has become, very similar to the posh/prole divide in imperial Britain.
"The majority of people" is a pretty broad group here, from Portugal to the Russian far east, Namibia to Papua New Guinea, Chile to Mexico. So when you say:
The majority of people don't actually have Facebook feeds from people they haven't seen in 35 years. Their friendships are based in the communities they live in - the people they trade with for food, clothing, and other necessities. There's a much greater sense of mutual interdependence, not so much the concept of isolated individual success followed by what, retreat to a gated community?
Does that really apply to all non-anglo/american cultures? You would have to be extraordinarily knowledgeable of near thousands of human cultures to know this.
it's rather startling how class-stratified and wealth-stratified American society has become, very similar to the posh/prole divide in imperial Britain.
It'd be a challenge to claim that the "prole/posh divide" in Imperial Britain was anywhere near as strong as some of its contemporaries - say the Qing Dynasty or Ottoman Empire.
Or you could find out how many users facebook has, and subtract it from the world population. If you're left with "the majority of people," you've easily proved it.
I ascended to that class from a working class family (and no college) and y’all have just as many problems as any other social group.
You make it sound like they are just talking out of their rear end, making things up based on their own privileged and unrepresentative personal experience, but my impression is that their opinion is formed by their own research, which might be a couple decades old, but is probably still relevant.
If there's anything to complain about here, is that Americans tend to forget that there is a world outside of the USA.
The sense of community and day to day lives are very different and much more enjoyable. The only problem is that due to exploitation by distant corporate actors that community is played with violence, obesity and drug addiction.
The article itself talks of life stages in terms of how things change, with college life being a case study as a small aside in the middle of the article. It's written as though these insights apply to everyone, even mentioning the "International Association of Relationship Researchers" at the beginning.
It's a very common problem in sociology-type sciences, where they study college students because they're easy access, then extrapolate to the entire population.
Reinforced by the apparent reality that mostly what people outside the USA want to talk about is the USA. Even on HN, where we have a large contingent of Europeans participating, we don't hear too much about Europe. It's almost always about the US.
And still now as an adult in my early thirties who moved to Tokyo a few years ago, socially my environment is dominanted by friendships, which is true for many people my age. The article points to friendships being voluntary as one key distinction between say marriage and friends, but statistics will tell everyone that many of those marriages nowadays aren't that permanent.
Article sounds a little bit like it was written by someone who lives in American Beauty still.
If I have to guess, what I think you're actually talking about is
1) after middle-class suburban kids leave home to go to college, then
2) graduate and move into gentrifying areas to take internships/jobs in big cities, then
3) get married during that period in their 20s while their income is rising into six figures, and
4) they purchase their starter house in the latest gentrifying neighborhood, then
5) get pregnant and get a dog at the same time, so
6) muggings and property crimes in their new neighborhood turn them extremely reactionary, then
7) they move to a massive palace in the suburbs either shortly before or shortly after the kid pops out.
i.e. the universal American experience.
Claim made without evidence, and there is plenty of evidence that there are other larger factors at play.
I have two close friends. All three of us are in similar life circumstances. Married, kids in elementary/middle/high school, programmers, in our 40s or early 50s, etc.
But, our entire friendship revolves around boardgames. We get together every Thursday night to play games for 3-4 hours.
Someone to talk to? Well, we don’t talk outside of boardgame night and we don’t really talk at boardgame night, other than about the game.
Someone to depend on? Well, pretty much all we depend on is that we will all show up.
Someone to enjoy? Well, frankly, we probably all enjoy boardgames more.
> Someone to talk to? Well, we don’t talk outside of boardgame night and we don’t really talk at boardgame night, other than about the game.
So you never, ever mention any personal event at game night? I don’t think so.
> Someone to depend on? Well, pretty much all we depend on is that we will all show up.
If one of them moved to a new house and needed help, would you go? Yeah, you would.
> Someone to enjoy? Well, frankly, we probably all enjoy boardgames more.
Nonsense, the secret ingredient of a good game is good company. So yeah, you big fluffy, you enjoy your friend’s company!
We really really don’t. We are there to play games, we don’t have time or brain space for small talk. We play heavy games that take a lot of deep thinking.
I may be imagining things but when you live in a small place where you have no choice but to share the load and pleasure of life (granted the group is emotionally stable), you don't suffer from that. You're a jolly bunch making your place nicer, finding and cooking food, and being goofy at night around the fire.
No group is emotionaly stable. We just deal with all the problems that come up more, or less effectively.
It was frustrating and discouraging for a long time and then suddenly I found myself with people to call on and spend time with. Half a decade later I moved and had the opportunity to try the experiment again. This time secondary connections made finding my network almost trivial. Maybe age helped too, being further removed from the university cliques.
I was relieved to find out, albeit way after the fact, that many have this experience. One friend recently quit his job to start a company focused on this phenomenon [0]. I hope he can displace the zombie of Meetup.
[0] https://getopenmat.com/
Otherwise, previous friends knew people and put me in touch. And finally there were 1-2 people who had also moved to the same city at some point, making it easy to plug into their networks
Anecdotally here's what's worked for me:
1. Intramural sports- even if you're not sporty, some leagues have zero barrier to entry (Bowling or sand volleyball 6's). There are usually pickup sports apps as well that you could probably find based on your city (i.e. JustPlay)
2. Volunteering- especially neighborhood / trail cleanup groups that you can find on Instagram or Meetup. These are low commitment and people tend to be friendly. Habitat for Humanity was another one that had lots of young people new to the city.
3. Free Fitness (or any other hobby) Groups- you can find anywhere. November Project, for example is in most cities