How Our Social Lives Can Be as Great as They Were in College

But it's natural for the types of relationships you form to change as you get older, because you're changing. You're taking on responsibilities and discovering yourself and doing all the other things that passing through life entails. And as you do that, you grow and deepen and find new priorities that suddenly move you the way the old ones don't anymore. That's the human experience; it's not a bug, anymore than it's a bug for a caterpillar to become a butterfly. It's a feature.

Someday you're going to be 30, then 40, then 50, and so on, and the farther you get from your college years the more narrow and limited they are going to seem. Eventually you will look back more in wonder than in comprehension at the you you were then, the same way college-aged you felt looking at a toddler; the way I imagine the butterfly looks at the caterpillar. Besides, the butterfly couldn't fit back into its chrysalis even if it wanted to. It's changed too much to fit into those old clothes anymore.

I feel like so many startups boil down to attempts to arrest that natural development; to freeze life in amber, just the way it was when the people behind them first came of age. But while I know from my own experiences what it's like to make that transition and worry what the future is going to bring, there's not much to be gained from trying to build a barricade to prevent it from arriving. The future is going to arrive whether you want it to or not. The way to handle that is to throw your arms around it, embrace it, and become the you that you were always meant to be, rather than trying to hang on to a you that already slipped out of your grasp before you even noticed.

It's a decent idea but this is not the way to solve it.

Think about how many people you met during your college experience? It was easily hundreds. Out of that you came away with many friends but likely only a few really great friends. I don't think simply introducing 6 random people will even result in 1 successful friendship on average.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this and recently won a chunk of money at a hackathon with an idea in this space. Ping me if you want to talk more.

Honestly, I had some amazing times at my school (upstate hippy dippy liberal arts college where I majored in computer science, creative writing, and recreational cannabis inhalation) but I much prefer socializing and meeting new people in the city the author and I live in. There's just such a huge variance of people, interests, and scenes that it's very easy to make new friends (in my experience, YMMV). Making close friends is a lot harder. But I feel making the whole process through an app and "scheduled" really takes away from the organic means one builds lasting friendships with.

"That would make living in New York more like living in a small college town, where I could walk down to a local bar on a whim and expect to bump into a handful of close friends. "

You can do this if you start chatting up people at the bar? Or frequent an establishment where people you enjoy being around go (gallery, hacker space, whatever)

I think you have the seed of an interesting idea, but my gut reaction to a lot of the friendship / dating apps is that they are solving problems a person can solve on their own if they are willing to do so.