Why Is It Hard to Make Friends Over 30? (2012)
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Its funny how people had time to do something like standing in line at the post office to pay their bills back then, but they still managed to spend and hour or two to just be with a friend for no special reason. Maybe it was just a necessity back then without the phones and all and nobody actually really liked to spend time with friends and family. Seems like friendship has been automated somehow today to make it more efficient. I bet that in 1000 years long after human kind has disappeared, there will be friends sending each other automated birthday greetings in one of those solar powered data centers somewhere in Finland.
To ensure maximum progress, play date activities must be intellectually stimulating and structured based on how much they contribute to test scores and college admissions down the line—this is known from statistical methods of course. Video streaming smartphone applications enable parents to check in at any time during the activity to ensure maximum growth.
As the children grow up, this does not stop of course. In fact, it becomes less playful and more efficient. Time wasted during youth is punished brutally in the holistic college admissions process.
By the time we've grown into adults, such impulses—such as spending time at a friends' house for no reason at all—can be completely eliminated. This ensures that more time in adulthood is dedicated to what truly matters, which is.... gosh I'm not sure. I can ponder that after I finish this next 'to do' on my list!
Wait, what? Parents are paying other parents for play dates these days?
I also live in a neighborhood where you see everyone outside regularly so a lot of it is spontaneous.
Even with my wife's moms group that has arranged playdates, though, no one pays anyone else.
That is, unless you're arranging play dates at free / public venues... like some kind of common poor.
Maybe I'm old now, but the whole concept of "play dates" rubs me the wrong way...
"but kids will bring home a note with the contact details of their playmate, and their parents will schedule it. The whole calendar scheduling, driving, chaperoning etc are things that definitely happens."
There are a few who walk home from my son's school and it's great to see them take 30 minutes to play or even just sit together throwing cut-grass in the air.
Actually Stranger Things already alludes to that.
Everything is too scheduled. Its hard to break out of the "if it isn't schedule, it isn't happening" model when everyone in the family is so busy. We try and encourage independence even in our youngest, but "free time" is at a premium.
NOTE: my kids aren't "neurotypical" and have lots of appointments, etc adding an extra layer of "busy"
Sadly, kids in our direct neighborhood don't generally mingle or have unschedule play. Definitely different from the way I grew up (grew up in the 90s: little to no supervision, just wandered the neighborhood.)
Didn't this friend also come by your house to play or stay overnight and ofc, after so many hours playing, wouldn't your mom make yourselves a nice snack for you to charge up and stuff? How come your friend's mom do something as autistic as that?
imho, his mom didn't like you (or was just jealous you were hanging out too much? narcissistic parents and stuff) and just wanted to kill the friendship....
srsly dude, the more you live the more you get spooked by people, thank you for refreshing my view of humanity.
Now that the snow is gone one of them switched to hitting pieces of wood with a croquet mallet.
The kids are alright.
I'd bet most of these replies in this nature are written by child-less people giving their view of how things are so much worse now than when they were kids.
They're still doing the same stuff they've always done (wasting time and having fun).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_murders_of_1979%E2%80%...
We're a part of the problem, my daughter is lucky she can walk to one of her schoolfriends houses. Her other besties are a minimum 30 minute walk, but they all attend the same school they're zoned for.
Though that statistic is skewed by me being a nerdchild with few friends...
That's what bikes are for though, right?
I think this helicopter parent micromanagement has just exploded with smartphone gps availability whereas in the 90's parents were pulling out the ol' paper map before road trips and maybe had a malfunctioning Tom Tom gps. Would love to see some data on tech savvy parents tracking their kids, anyone know about this?
My brother wouldn't let her go visit them before he got her a GPS tracking smartwatch with LTE for kids.
(We grew up riding our bikes to/from school, going and playing with neighborhood kids, wandering around, etc...)
That is: the caricature's funny, but it sounds like _way_ too much damn work.
It's basically accurate in the literal sense. Or at least, I'm a parent and I'm seeing this essentially word-for-word with all nearby parents/children in our area. The venmo part stands out as being a SF thing. In the midwest, even young families are mostly old school and just pay with a credit card or paper check (yes literal paper checks written from a checkbook).
But the rest of it...yeah? It's essentially accurate.
Playdates are always scheduled beforehand (in Google Calendar, or far more commonly via Facebook invites between the parents). You do have to drive the child 10-15 blocks to every event (children are so expensive and housing is even more expensive, no one can afford to live near each other, so kids of similar age groups are still all spread out across the metro region and not in any one area/neighborhood). You can check on your kids at via smartphone at any daycare, and any other activity requires at least one parent be present anyway. All activities are required to have some attempt at "education", no matter how silly or tenuous that is.
And it's kind of tricky because it's a defacto part of society. I hate this hyper-scheduled hyper-data-driven stuff myself. But since the large majority of other parents do this, I can't avoid it -- we must contribute to this with our own kid too, otherwise we'd be depriving the child of social interaction with other children of matching ages.
The five-year-old will come in shortly; the ten-year-old will be home later; I expect the thirteen-year-old home sometime around sundown. I planned none of this -- none of it was scheduled. Moreover, none of this is an attempt to educate them in any conventional way, and the only data driving is that freedom and unstructured time help build important qualities like independence and resilience.
As with so many things, there are many microclimates of parenting and child-rearing; if you value unstructured time for your kids and building their independence, you can likely find a community that shares those values.
So did you look for such a community yourself, or did it just happen? Either way, do you have any tips that maxsilver and others can use to find or create a good "microclimate"?
None of this is easy, but finding a community that matches your values (or at least isn't inconsistent with them) is worth the effort: it's one of the most important decisions you'll make in your adult life, and merits special time and attention.
The problem is that this behavior is driven by a tiny monitory, and supported by the rest.
The honest answer is to be the jerk who doesn't go along with it. The only way we can stop being victim to societal trends is to go against the flow.
This. Or to put it another way: "You know who's a more interesting person in adulthood? Someone whose parents didn't bow to peer pressure when they were a kid."
FFS. If you're a parent, you're supposed to be setting an example. Not giving in to the same impulses we ostensibly teach our children to resist.
You absolutely can opt out of socialization for both you and your kid. But, that is what you are doing there.
There's also, you know, letting your kid hang out with other kids organically. They do that naturally, you know?
If other parents expect planned meetups, then "organically" is exactly that. Even if they take no issue random meets in principle, they already planned most time for other things. Their kids are not outside to be randomly met. Often other kids don't even live within walkable distance.
For that matter 3-6 years old don't "organically" start to visit each other alone without parents. How exactly you expect that to happen, really?
Here in Japan if someone throws a house party it's common for everyone to pitch in $10-$30. Before I moved to Japan I had never heard of such a thing. In the USA when I or my family through a party for friends it was always our treat (we paid everything) and anytime I visited a friend's party they never asked for or expected money. The closest to that kind of thing was a "potluck" party where every one brought some food or drink.
Now that I've lived in Japan for a long time I've started to see the benefits of paying. It spreads the burden. It makes it easier to consider throwing a party since you know it won't cost you $50 to $200 in expenses.
Also in Japan it's extremely common to rent an an entire bar, space, restaurant for parties and tell all your friends, come to my party, $30 a person. Before I was lived here that idea would have blown my mind? $30? I'm not going if it even costs $5!. Now that I'm used to it I just see it has "paying for experience" and or "the cost of having fun" and I see that it enables cool venues and also places to be loud without annoying neighbors (since clubs and bars are usually designed for sound). I've gone to the opposite extreme where I'm disappointed when my western friends complain about having to contribute.
So, paying for playdates sounds like it might have positives. More playdates. Maybe easier for the organizer to stock all the various alternative diets the different kids need. etc...
But as I said earlier, 20XX is making yesterdays satirical jokes and turning it into today's headlines.
They exist, but most families don't have the time and money.
Apart from the Smash Bros., it could have been a scene from Andy Griffith or something. If it matters, this is from a pretty wealthy area (Michael Jordan's mansion is about 10 minutes up the road from us).
Paying off the debts owed to society of course
I was born in 1990 and I feel like my childhood sort of straddled the line between these two realities. When my family moved to California in the early 90's, I made friends with the neighbor kids simply because they were the neighbor kids, and we many afternoons finding wandering around looking for ways to entertain ourselves. Kids would frequently play in the middle of the street. Nowadays, the streets of that neighborhood are empty. I'll go to the small nearby park, and maybe see kids if there's a youth sports league game or someone having a birthday party there.
Having spent some time in Australia recently, one of the things that struck me is how often you see kids (often in their school uniforms) walking around town by themselves, going to get fast food with friends or hang out at the library. In the US, I've also noticed it in several ethnic neighborhoods (Jewish and Chinese neighborhoods, specifically).
Part of me wonders how much of this is born out of affluence. On occasion, I'll find myself passing through a lower-income part of town, and the dynamic changes. You see kids walking to the store alone, maybe to buy things, maybe just to hang around and wait for their friends to stop by. Often, groups of kids consist of an older kid (maybe 10 years old) acting as a "caretaker" for a younger group of siblings. You'll be pumping gas, and someone at the opposite pump randomly strike up a conversation with you. If you're not used to it, it actually kind of catches you off guard. I know some people flee to suburbs specifically to avoid these kinds of interactions, but once you get past the initial surprise of, "huh, someone I don't know started talking to me just to talk to me, that doesn't happen every day," I actually find certain parts of it to be quite pleasant. It reminds me of how I used to live, and how I suspect my parents (and their parents) lived.
Too dangerous and the school does not want any liability for a kid being struck and killed.
More encouraging to me, I'm seeing more kids out on bikes here recently (and they and the skateboards never went away entirely).
Even better, on the bike trails I'm seeing more young kids with their parents, riding bikes rather than sitting in trailers.
But what are the distances kids have to travel to school or their friends nowadays vs back then? I mean the school bus was a thing back then too.
As a parent, this has not been my experience. In our (pretty affluent and safe) town I still see kids walking to elementary school alone. I let my kids stay home alone when they were 3-5 (you can go with me to the grocery store or play home, your choice) with main fear while I am gone being that of police or juvenile justice Nazis.
The media and government do seem intent on snuffing this out. In their view we must be afraid and any attempt to let kids play by themselves is placing them in unnecessary risk.
This highly depends on the area, at least with schooling. In Indiana, it was around a half mile when I was a child in the 80's. This was where the school wouldn't bus you. Sometimes in high school, it was around a mile. Some folks have to walk a mile and a half.
My sister just spent some time in Connecticut - there were no busses for anyone. Only one of the busy roads had a crossing guard and things for elementary students.
For playing and whatnot, I think this highly depends on area and parents. While I could walk to a friend's house in the same neighborhood in the town I grew up in, my sister often couldn't because the town of 40,000 we lived in was a normal, sprawled, midwestern town and it was often too far to walk. By the time my brother (11 years younger than me) reached some of those ages, they moved to a rural location and distances got further. I had friends with much more freedom than I had, however: My mother was fairly strict.
But I brought up a (now) 20 year old in Palo Alto without the scheduling, tutoring, driving around and other nonsense, and he did get into a “top” school (whatever “top” really means).
But it did show a clear partition in which kids he could in practice be friends with.
OTOH he was able to pocket quite a bit of cash tutoring some pampered kids!
Wow. Surely this is hyperbole?
...mindless consumption
Overall, I think most trappings of etiquette fade away as you climb down the socioeconomic ladder (I think rich folk have a lot to learn from poor here, fwiw).
Same and I think you're onto something, but my childhood predated mobile phones.
I've watched my nephew, who's from a fairly affluent family, call out to his friend who lives next door to come play. They'll chat to each other over the fence and then negotiate with their parents on where they can go play. Neither have mobile phones and I doubt either have used a landline (or have one) so yelling over the fence or knocking on the door seems like the most straightforward approach.
I think phones were the tipping point which changed behaviours - from most people being fairly OK with unannounced or very loosely planned visits (I'll see you Wednesday! == 7:30pm, Wednesday) to requiring a heads up in the form of a call or instant message.
remember the concept of innocent childhood only really took off in the west in Victorian times - think of how much changes in the last generation, the last century, the last 300 years
But then compare the previous 2000 years. Would someone from Plato's era be that unrecognisable to someone from renaissance Florence? (or vice Versa)
What will the next 200 years bring? What about the next 500?
Well, some of us anyway; I'm sure a lot of places will be abandoned / evacuated due to it being crushed by a few hundred meters of ice, and a lot of people will die from starvation and the inevitable war for resources and hospitable areas.
Beautiful. It gives a special meaning to "best friends forever."
I don't think I've knocked on someone's door without them expecting me to be there in at least 10 years.
There are a few houses that were built about 20 years ago and they have a front porch barely wider than the front door.
When you're young (<20), you don't have many responsibilities or long term goals. But as soon as you get out of college, you have several multi-decade goals to work towards:
1) asset accumulation
2) lifestyle development
3) family raising
From a pure risk management point of view, assets, lifstyle, and family are much more stable in terms of extracting value from.
Friends, from a value added point of view, are a risky investment for a couple of reasons. They require time and commitment to make and get value out of, but have a high chance of no return. If you invest too much in friends, you're pretty much guaranteed that something out of your control breaks the friendship by 5-10 years, either moving away, diverging interests, or the most likely, the friend decides to invest time in the assets, lifestyle, and family instead of your friendship.
There's a vicious circle (opposite of virtuous cycle) in this. As a society, if more people focus on family, assets, and lifestyle because they are less risky, there's less people willing to commit to being a friend available for those that want to focus on friendships, and eventually friendship by the age of 30 become extinct except in rare cases where special environments sustain them.
To summarize, it's a systemic issue where even if you wanted to make friends, it's not worth it as an adult to do so.
Anyway, what's the point of having a lot of assets if you don't enjoy your life at the end?
Where neighbors used to possibly serve as an extension to your resources (a large ladder, sugar, someone to sign a package for you maybe), these days solutions (often technological) have sprung up to reduce the necessity of working together (rent-a-tool shops/sites, ease of transportation, configurable delivery).
Of course, the negative effects of restricted social networks are being felt now in communities (poor cohesion) and individually (mental health issues)... Tech helps sometimes (connecting people who might feel isolated in their immediate surroundings) and can hurt a lot of the time as well.
I wish I had people I felt I could trust like a friend again though, and also understood+got excited by the nerdy stuff. Everyone has their hustles. Takes time I suppose, a couple people I know could turn to friends. Hacker Dojo 1.0 was awesome, seems like hacker spaces have more general appeal now, can’t imagine parties like that again... but I do still know a handful from that era, 1-2 could be friends. I am connecting with relatives, feeling silly for neglecting them for 20 years.
Anecdotes, hopefully helpful and not too self-focused.
> you have several multi-decade goals to work towards
Why do you think the goals you listed are worthwhile? Who made these goals and why?
To clarify - the study of systems is not to prove a point of superiority or inferiority or to affirm or deny your value system; it's to observe the features of the system that indicate why things might happen the way they do.
When I say adults shouldn't invest much in friendships, it's not because it's bad for adults to value friendship, but because the investment into friendship yields less results than if they invested it somewhere else.
When talking about systems, it's better to talk about them objectively rather than subjectively, and to consider them from a detached viewpoint. Observation is not the same as association; just because I observe a phenomenon and attempt to write it down doesn't mean I associate with it.
For the goals I stated, I do not have an evaluation about these goals from a worth perspective. I merely point out that those things are the primary long term goals of most adults. There's a lot of others, but those seem to be the most common. I'd be happy to argue why they are, but again, my arguments will come from an objective point of view (the features that going after those goals have that make them so popular) rather than a subjective point of view (what I believe is a worthwhile goal).
It's no wonder that whenever I go back to America or see Americans in my travels I am struck by how utterly shallow and unhappy they seem to be. And the stereotype of the American Smile is already disappearing from people's memories.
That being said, I have found the feeling happiness and contentment impossible to obtain without mutual human companionship. That being said, the amount of human companionship needed is probably heavily variable between humans; I'm sure some people are happier with less. I find it difficult to imagine a well adjusted (non serial killer) person who is perfectly happy with none. If your personal needs for companionship have always been met, I understand why you'd be confused as to why people seek it out so much.
Typically, if one of your primary needs is to feel loved, valued, and cared for, family and friends solves that the best way. Assets do not.
However, not everyone's primary need is to feel loved, although there is a certain level of that needed by everyone. Your primary need may be for things to stable, organized, orderly, or for you to accomplish goals you set out for, or to be consistent with your value system whatever you set up.
So golf by yourself, and a walk around the block in your new suit?
I'd like to posit that "back in the day", people's lives had reached a max in their 20's after they finished school, got a job (unionized and/or indefinite contract), got married, bought a house, started having kids, etc.
Nowadays, school will take longer because you need it to make a decent living - there's too many low paid jobs. Second, to get married and buy a house and such, you need a decent income. To get that, you either need a high education and live in an area where you can use that, or work multiple jobs and have no time for a social life, or be lucky and get a middle class paying jobs in an affordable area.
So it's not just a personal choice from ambition, like you're suggesting, but it's also that the previous generation had it easier. They had the option to work where they live, to buy a house off of that money, and do it all before their 30's.
They later get two internship offers: one from a no name local place where the internship is data science (which they want), but the other is at Googazon Faceple chasing birds off the property. The student inevitably has a meltdown, because they want the prestige of a big four.
This isn't to say that there is inherently anything wrong with trying to min/max life. You'll have a better time (to a point) when you make more money. But let's not forget that if you're spending 5 years in misery for little gain, that's 5 years you aren't getting back.
You only get one life. Enjoy it.
What I mean is that you don't always have to hit max to be satisfied. Don't get so bogged down in the details that you come up for air after you've hit 50.
My cousin lives in Texas, where I had a glimpse of what it was like back in the day. Her 2000 sqft house cost 200k, and she paid it off on a 50k salary. She lives very well, and has no financial worries; life is a bit boring for her.
If I were to buy the equivalent house in my current city, it would cost 20x as much. And it's not just housing that's skyrocketed, it's every aspect of modern day living.
It's truly a multi-decade goal, and min maxing is important to being able to achieve it.
I'm not a min/maxing person, but I do find value out of min/maxing, especially with local optima.
Min/maxing is a great tool in combination with strong personalized value systems, feelings, and a determined will to make your life your own.
I see no problem with trying to min/max life, unless you're philosophically opposed to the systemic issues that a min/maxing society generates.
I think such a utilitarian view is a post-hoc rationalization rather than a useful way to look at it. But even if we follow this line of thought, it is not clear that family, for example is of such high value that it has to be detrimental to everything else. It seems more to me that family benefited from the time freed up by not having friendly relationships, but whether people derive more value from family than they did in the past is very debateable. Spending more time with it is not proof that it has higher value - people will always do something in lack of alternatives.
Not bitter about it but just stating the fact that lasting friendships aren't the best investment because of how volatile modern society can be.
Happiness is maximized by social inclusion coupled with a sense of meaning (as in your impact in your social sphere being needed and positive). Being surrounded by people who matter and who want you in their midst. That can be a large, cohese, multi-generation family, or an extensive friend network. Multi-generation families living in tight neighborhoods don't happen anymore, so your next best target is an extensive friend network. I'm sorry, but I sincerely believe your stated goals are plain wrong.
[1] Someone other than your life partner; sharing assets and lifestyle with your life partner is limited and an exhaustible resource -- to use your terms.
I'd understand the argument if 50 year olds should be making more friends. They have assets, they have a stable lifestyle, and maybe it's precisely because they didn't invest in making friends earlier that they don't have anyone to share their assets with.
But I'll double down and say that for 30 year olds there are so many other things they can be doing and the environment for making friends is so harsh, that it's simply not worth it. For most young adults, their social circle is extremely mobile. Everyone gets more responsibilities and other priorities that take their time. Most aren't in a position to take care of others (from a combination of money, time, and responsibility) - the simplest of friend making activities, like inviting someone over for a meal, can be very much out of your reach as a 30 year old.
For myself, I'm collecting assets because I want to build a responsible safety net of protection for your family & future. I'm developing my lifestyle to build a nice environment for my kids to grow up in. Not everyone has those things handed to them, and building up those things are not trivial in the modern world. These goals really are multi-decade goals.
I'll acquiesce that they are not lifetime goals. After they are accomplished, there's still a lot of life to live, and values and priorities can change after the underlying needs that the previous goals are built on are fulfilled.
Friends can and do provide very strong returns on investment. They can help with asset accumulation (networking for better jobs; in my case I helped a couple of friends with portfolio management of their retirement plans!).
Friends are part of a lifestyle. My lifestyle includes doing group activities with friends 2 nights a week. The social interaction that happens between rounds of trivia is more important to me than the trivia result themselves.
Friends are part of a family, too. Good friends accept and even enjoy it when your partner/kids come along. Eventually you can enter into babysitting swap systems where one family watches the kids while the other couple goes and does other stuff. Also it's important to model mature friendship patterns for your kids.
So overall, friendship isn't only super important in it's own right, it also overlaps with the three important categories you list in your post.
How is making friends not a part of lifestyle development?
Btw kurtzgesagt has a very interesting video[1] on the subject where they show that rats get really anxious if they can't socialize. They then take a leap and say that human are pretty much the same.
I don't think anything changed dramatically in the last 60 or so years on this point, even with the development of social media; by the time you're 30, you're basically done making friends.
The article glossed over it, but in your childhood and teens, you're surrounded by a new group of people every 5 or so years, and just through sheer quantity, you're likely to make at least a few friends. Throw on team sports, extracurriculars, clubs, and the ease of introductions in a school environment, and it's almost impossible not to make a few friends all the way into your late 20s.
Somewhere around when you turn 25 or so, though, without substantial effort, things stabilize. If you were going to leave your home, you probably did, and you're settled in. You and your old friends start to marry and have kids, and both of these occupy your free time (and theirs). You may have bought a house or found a job you want to settle into for a while, with plans to stick around for several years.
For at least 8 hours of your day, you are at work, interacting with people in an environment toxic for creating trusting friendships (You're competing for the same roles, titles, bonuses, etc.), and worse, these people you're competing with are almost always the exact same people, so if you're not really friends with any of them immediately, that's basically never going to change.
With the remaining time in your evenings, you'll also settle into a routine. You won't be playing sports anymore, and if you have hobbies, you'll generally be doing them with the same small consistent set of people in your area, assuming you do them with others at all.
So, in short, if your 8-hour workday isn't a time to make friends, and you're not interacting with people in a way that leads to making friends in your 8-hour evenings, when the hell do you expect to be making your friends over 30, during your 8-hours asleep?
I don't know, maybe you need to be more particular about where you work.
You neglect the other 8 hours in a day, and you aren't alone in that. I have a ton of coworkers who do their 8, go home and watch tv and have a beer, then go to bed.
Meanwhile I'm going on short hikes, taking classes or hitting the gym, or going to shows and meeting new people.
With kids, the equation is obviously different (at least the eight hours of sleep portion) but you can take the little one to the park, to play dates with other kids, and occasionally non-kid focused events (the last beer fest I went to seemed to have several kids running about).
At the end of the day you have to prioritize how to spend your time and use it fully. It is harder then just watching tv and having a beer, but much more rewarding. Take classes, volunteer, be social. Your time is limited, always use it well.
Honestly I find all types of commuting exhausting in different ways, except possibly a medium-to-long trip on a nicer train, where I can use my laptop (mostly) how I would in a hotel room.
It will probably never happen, but in my view the next major worker's rights advancement should be some kind of amelioration of the commute factor, either by employers or the government. It's probably more than half the reason I left my last job.
I've always believed that making things 'feel more fair' tends to motivate at least some workers to put in extra effort more enthusiastically.
Just like you wouldn't go to a gym and deadlift 300lbs cold, you're not going to get off work and run a social club in your free time - but if you put in the consistent work, you can absolutely get there.
I'm guessing you're right - you _can_ do it (the same way people in medical residency can force themselves to work 80 hour workweeks), but will it ever feel pleasant and not like a chore? I can go out with friends in the evening after work, but I'll be a bit slow and groggy.
And this is why the weekends are typically much busier than weekday evenings at restaurants and other social locations.
Also, no one is ever stuck. On your time for self care you have to make an effort. This is a lesson you simply have to learn. I know I have.
I'll sit and have hours-long conversation with other parents of my kids' friends'. Pretty meaningful conversations. I'm not even entirely sure of their names.
My lifestyle is already shifting me out of the no-kid lifestyle (and therefore friends who don't have kids) by default.
OK, that's a little harsh to my coworkers: I get along with them well enough, and after I or they leave the company I'll probably add some of them on Facebook, but that doesn't change the fact that I have no energy for people I know outside of work.
On the occasion I do have the energy to go out to a bar or something, then I have to choose between socialization and spending time on my hobbies. I can spend a few hours after work at the bar... or I could spend them at home reading more of a novel or hacking at one of my personal projects. Back when I was in college, I had plenty of time to do both. I could hang out with friends and then go and do stuff on my own at home. Now that I'm out of college, I have to choose, and having to choose sucks.
Definitely this.
We let work take way too much time from our lives.
If you count commuting, the minimum 8 hours at work (more like minimum 10) then work can eat up to 12 hrs/day.
On top of that us 'knowledge workers' carry our work around in our heads all the time.
It's not as though after 8hrs we just put the wrench down and go home, no the ongoing problems of work follow us around and even toss and turn us in our dreams sometimes.
To me this is unacceptable.
The way that we employ our working hours is a waste of time[1] on a colossal scale, and for little benefit to humanity most of the time.
[1] Literally the finite precious time we each have on earth.
I also found it unacceptable. I'm definitely going to start planning for life, not for work.
As many people who done both labour and knowledge work could tell, there isn't that much of a difference.
The average commute will be somewhere in the middle, sure. But just tossing out that work takes half of most people's day is disingenuous - it only does that if you let it, and if you choose not to live close to your office. I understand that's not always an option, especially in SF/NYC, but if you're willing to base your housing choices in part on where you're working, it's generally not difficult to have a sub-30 minute one-way commute.
And letting work keep you up at night is 100% a choice.
I disagree with you, especially with our field: you take work home. Even if you don't want, you can't disconnect and stop thinking about work as soon as your working hours are done. The only time where I can really disconnect is when I'm on holidays, and this usually happens after a week of holidays.
This is one of the sad realization one must have at some point. Reminds me of Bukowski's Factotum[1] where Bukowski mentions that we're selling our most precious item: our time.
> “You haven’t been busting your ass, Chinaski.”
> I stared down at my shoes for some time. I didn’t know what to say. Then I looked at him. “I’ve given you my time. It’s all I’ve got to give—it’s all any man has. And for a pitiful buck and a quarter an hour.”
> “Remember you begged for this job. You said your job was your second home.”
> “…my time so that you can live in your big house on the hill and have all the things that go with it. If anybody has lost anything on this deal, on this arrangement…I’ve been the loser. Do you understand?”
I think this quote is valid whatever your paycheck. If you're working full time you're probably getting screwed in the deal.
[1]: some quotes: https://p1x3l.com/story/214/bukowski-factotum
Women tend to have more than men over 30, and it is true that the number of new one's fomed tends to decrease from the youthful stage, where other patterns are more prominent (practicing mature social roles through play, etc).
Much of it is likely evolved, though there is definitely a large culural and environmental component.
I... man, I hate working at places like that. And I don't very often; I suppose it's the privilege of having in-demand skills and living in a place with a wide choice of employers, but yeah, I've had jobs like that and I got out quick. The vast majority of places I've worked came with sort of built in friend groups. I mean, "work friends" are different from real friends, but it is a built in social group that pretty much has to be friendly to you unless you do thing that are outlandishly unacceptable. And sometimes 'work friends' turns in to real friends.
Friendship and competition can go together, and they usually do. I mean, look at normal people and sports, or academic high achievers and academics. If you can't compete without being friends, you either need to work on yourself or you need to compete with different people.
As technical individual contributors, I personally don't feel a strong sense of competition, for that matter. In my experience, you get more points by telling the boss something true and good about a co-worker than you do for telling the boss something true and bad about a co worker. I mean, we all know, if you want to really get ahead, you switch jobs, right? and yes, in the abstract, you are competing with your co-workers for those other jobs, but you rarely know who else is interviewing for a particular position.
But my own experience is that work is way better for meeting friends than high school.
(I mean, unless by friends, you mean dates... which is a different sort of thing, and yeah, I personally don't have the social skills to date people I work with, so I avoid that whole can of worms)
I tend to go out a lot on my own, and over the past three years or so I've made maybe two friends. Not close friends mind you, but people I feel comfortable shooting a message out of the blue just to see if they want to meet up and shoot the breeze.
During the same three years however, I've made a conscious effort to meet new friends but it's a hard shell to penetrate. People already have their circles, or maybe they think you have ulterior motives (e.g. "I already have a partner" or "we're not looking to hire".) It seems to me that as people grow into their 30s, they grow cynical to the point of almost closing themselves off.
I have a much easier time making friends who are in the 40s or 50s, or younger people in their 20s – neither group which I can really feel entirely comfortable just hanging out with.
I've taken up video games over the past year. It's hard to find quality conversation while shooting imaginary characters on screen, but at least I've been able to find enough people that there's at least one or two people online that I can have a casual conversation with while mashing buttons. This helps somewhat, but it's a far cry from in-person social interaction.
There's also another reason for that: they don't have to take care of kids. Young singles and old empty-nesters are the best people to hang out with. Most people my age either have kids or are newlyweds, neither of which is conducive to hanging out with people.
Though I'd probably go with "50s or 60s" over "40s or 50s", just because older people are more likely to be empty-nesters. Or if their kids are still living with them, they're adults who don't need any kind of supervision.
The ratio of people actively befriending me, is lower than people I befriend. Maybe 3:1 Making me think most people don't put much effort into making friends.
My advice would be:
1. Networking is not making friends. If you want to leverage someone, it's a business relationship not a friendship.
2. People who befriend you might not be the kind of person you would choose to be your friend, but they obviously like you enough to make an effort so give them a chance and reciprocate. People probably try to befriend you but you don't even notice.
3. Let bad or superficial friendships go and concentrate on making good ones. I have loads of really close friends, but keep my Facebook friend count (relatively) low.
4. If a friend is having a problem, help them. This is how you move past the superficial friendship. Prove you are worthy of being a friend.
5. Never screw a friend over. See rule #1. If you intend to play a zero sum game with a friend, be willing to lose that friend. (I do business with good friends, but only if I know I will never be in a position to have to choose between my wealth/happiness and theirs). Also always be honest. Friendship requires trust.
6. Make an effort. Ask people out for a drink or a coffee. Invite them over for dinner. It's hugely time consuming. This week I am running out of time with friends wanting to hang out and friends who need help. But it's worth it.
7. Join clubs, organizations and/or religious institutions. Not just one. Friends of mine had good success with dance classes.
8. One close friend is worth hundreds of superficial friendships.
There is much benefit in being monogamous. Polygamy or frequent changes to whom the partner is comes at quite a cost in time and effort.
Similarly with friendships, there is a cost to having 'hundreds of close friends' (as if such a thing could happen). There is also a cost in trying to push one's 'friends quota' beyond what we have (5-6 close friends) to a wider circle of not-so-close friends.
Yet some people - those with 500 Facebook friends - think that having more than the small circle of close friends is a desirable thing, which it may be but only in the way that having a harem of partners is a desirable thing.
There is also the matter of being part of a community. We all need to belong. Yet too many people hop in their car, drive out their driveway and never say hi to the neighbours.
Superficial neighbourhood friendships are fine. The guy who you say hello to whilst you are walking the dog is okay to say hello to even if he votes differently to you. That superficial chat about the weather is okay.
Recently had a funeral to attend, of a neighbour. Although this was a well attended service I was quite surprised at how some people chose not to go to the wake. Those dog-walking saying-hellos do actually matter, this was what made the funeral mandatory for me but meh for those that did not care to go.
By actively going to a church group or dance class I didn't really have my heart into I think the resultant relationships would be as fake as my belief in god/dancing in silly shoes. Your friend might think he/she has success but there may be others in the group who think that he/she is a sad letch rather than someone passionate about what they are doing. Joining a dance class to shed a few pounds (rather than to get laid) is legit though.
In Polish, there are different two words for friends (i.e. people who care for you, who would give you ex. a big loan or a kidney) and for people who you just like to hang out with, because it's fun and convenient for both of you at the time. I feel it's more blurred in English, with both of them being called friends.
I recall that my parents used to have dinner parties all the time, out in the suburbs during the 1970s/1980s and their friends also had dinner parties. There was a culture of dinner parties among adults back then. For some reason it died out. But I think the idea, and the habit, is a useful one.
Interestingly, people who belong to a subculture report success - gay people have it better, but also swingers, another lifestyle (I would add to that the nudists as a very friend-seeking community). Online gaming seems to be a good venue for having that initial "match" of a common interest, as well as meetup groups. While i suspect most people find friends at work, it appears to be an unsatisfactory way for many to make lasting relationships.
So, it appears that there is a genuine need here that can be filled by "something that looks a bit like dating". Maybe facebook should consider rolling out a 'friend finder' along with their dating feature. Nevertheless, it seems to have become less of a taboo to admit that people can't find friends, and it seems there is space here for social apps to cover.
Craigslist used to have a "strictly platonic" section in their personals, but it's gone now along with the rest of their personals.
The site would probably have recurring topics like:
1. Making Friends / Socializing in our day and age / Loneliness
2. Macbook pro replacements
3. Tesla / SpaceX
I started hosting board games once a month and it made it a lot easier to maintain and grow friendships for everyone. So I would say any group for any activity that meets regularly, whether for video games, books, athletics, etc are also good places to foster friendship.
What do those churches do / talk about anyway? If it's people going on about why / how they don't believe, it's not for me. Or is it more like a humanistic church?
The basic tenants or '6 principles' that the church holds are all things I subscribe to in my personal beliefs anyway (basically respect other people) and most of the sermons are fairy interesting and cover lots of different religions, philosophies, and ideas (bonus: the whole thing wraps up in under an hour!). There are tons of smaller groups that meet outside of regular services to discuss everything from Christianity to Hinduism as well as more general philosophy and social work. As well as things such as neighborhood groups, parenting groups, gardening groups.
For me sports clubs fill that niche. From my local lawn bowls club I meet people of all ages, the oldest member is 84, the youngest are kids of parents and there is everything in between and from all walks of life. You can do this without even playing sport but if you participate you can meet an even wider range of people.
Much of this activity is centered around various sports and the bar of course. If that's not your deal then there are all sorts of other local communities, you just have to look.
there is no exact alternative, because the church-ness is an essential element
In my late 20s my life looked like downhill. I had had friends but I had no friends at that point. I was single and alone. I was depressed and anxious. The only good thing I had going for me was that I had a job.
Just before I turned 30 I was fortunate to come across a video on youtube which pointed out that there were various quite impressive personages who were at 30 failures and only became the impressive persons after that date. I don't have to become a genius, but it's nice to know that our society's rich privilege that favors young people says nothing about human nature. Life can get better from any starting point, and there's nothing wrong with ageing.
And then I joined a community where I was able to find friends. (In my case, it's the Esperanto community.) Now I'm engaged to someone I met through the community (though she's not an Esperantist) and my own personal community of friends has expanded even further. Now I've got the opposite problem I used to have - I have so many friends I struggle to balance them all (and my own need to have some empty time - perhaps higher than average because I became so accustomed to being alone). It happened in only a few short years (today I'm almost 34, but it feels like I've got another life). My fiancee regards me as an optimist - anyone who knew me five years ago would be shocked.
And all this is to say nothing about the changes I've witnessed in my parents' lives in the same period.
It might be harder for humans to get friends after 30 but you don't need to think "I'm a friendless blahblah year old, what hope is there for me?".
What do you think is required to bond at these things? I've done a couple of after-work activities in an attempt to socialise, but I haven't struck gold yet. (At cooking class, people seem more interested in catching their train, than socialising afterwards.)
It's occurred to me that any out of hours activity just has far less social exposure than what I'm used to. For example, at school you'd sit next to someone for 8 hours a day. To get the same kind of exposure from a weekly 1 or 2-hour class would take 1 or two months!
I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about which aspects helped bridge this in your case. A deep, shared interest in Esperanto? Luck? Nothing in particular?
When I read that two weeks ago, I reached out to an acquaintence who I wished to 'move up' the friend tier structure, because he (and his wife) fit into the Healthy & Enjoyable quandrant. Last weekend they came over to see an air show. Today they invited my wife and I out on their boat. We all had an amazing time.
We're all in our 30s. It's tough. But I like to idea of focusing on the ones which can make an impact, and are healthy and make you happy having them as friends. I'm an advocate for fewer, closer friendships.
Seriously though, marriage doesn’t mean you can’t have friends, keep friends or make new ones. It’s a twisted sort of relationship that requires you to give up your friends or only spend time with your wife.
My wife is my best friend but my 2 out my 3 kayak buddies are women, I spend that day with friends helping them build motors, I go on road trips with friends, I go off for mountain biking weekend and ski trips with my friends, etc.
I will say, my friends who have kids do tend to drop off the radar but you can’t blame that on marriage.
Also when spouses go and spend time with the other spouse's friends, its challenging to simultaneously catch-up with their old friends while also trying to include their new spouse in the conversation.
Some married couples work through this but others just privately and repeatedly criticize each other's friends so eventually they are left with only one friend -- their spouse.
You can't just be friends with one of them. You can't just go and hang out with one person without their spouse coming along. If you tell them their spouse isn't invited, they'll get offended. If you don't tell them, you can expect the spouse to tag along... and if their spouse gets tired and wants to leave early, they're both just going to cut out right then and there (I had one friend who would just up and leave the bar with his wife whenever she got tired without even giving me a chance to finish my drink and tab out so we could leave together... every time, it felt like a slap in the face).
Sometimes, even if I like their spouse, I just want to hang out with a friend one-on-one. And then there are people who I like but whose spouses I can't stand.
It just happens that a lot of people, around 30, prioritize some life styles that makes you less social. Also, they are trying to make something out of what they have right now, instead of getting something new.
Some seem to reiterate the importance of time investment into the search for new friends. I agree with this. The more you put yourself out there, the odds would hopefully be more in your favour. However, the guarantee of the outcome isn't there. One could spend hours, days, months joining various hobby and interest groups with such an agenda and still end up with nothing.
It's almost like after a certain age, new friendships become more incentivised. The friendship itself only exists because it can be rationalised with mutual benefits.
In our 20s we still have our school friends, and they introduce us to their friends. We study and make friends. They introduce us to their friends. There's always a few parties. I'm those parties mostly everyone is looking for a boyfriend or girlfriend. We're in the same boat. We have common aims.
In our 30s, those school friends have largely disappeared. We stop studying and stop meeting fellow students. The parties dry up: more and more of those people now have found someone and find no need to "party".
You have your workplace. But if you're a manager your friends are often brown-nosing. And if you're not, office or company politics may interfere. And those left may need to rush back to look after their kids anyway.
The best thing I've found is volunteering. You meet new people, you form new friendships, you learn new skills, you help your community, your week now probably involves at least a little more exercise.
----
Answer: You don't put effort into doing that.
When's the last time you invited people out for drinks or to your place?
When's the last time you threw a party?
That's literally how hard it is. Do stuff with people.
For a lot of people in a lot of places not called the bay area, people move to a town and find themselves a church. The church organizes provides all kinds of opportunities to socialize and make friends in a non competitive in-group sort of way. I'm not religious, and think that organizing life around church can promote certain myopic attitudes, but I can see how this kind of access to an egalitarian community of worship can really have benefits
You've mentioned one of the biggest values of churches. They still exist in the bay area even if they aren't "cool"
Lol, you can tell you're not a churchgoer ... /jk (but not entirely)
The worst part of this is that you have to make sure your house is clean. Food, get people to chip in, alcohol get people to bring their own drinks. If you're having to bend over backwards to impress people, they're not your friends and they won't be.
I too find myself mirroring - if they are a verbose writer, I'll be verbose; if they're short I'll be short.
My own friends are truck drivers, engineers and software developers, vegetarians and hunters. They all are fundamentally nice, decent people.
"Editor’s note: This article first ran on July 13, 2012, but we’re running it again because the topic is timeless."
I see this kind of thing happening more and more. Looking at the tags on the page, it bears a modified date of 2018-02-09T19:25:10-05:00. This is important, because they are telling Google that the content has been updated, when it hasn't. But they'll get more traffic and revenue now from an old article by lying to Google.
You see this happening on TV now too. In a technique I call "DVR Fraud," shows like 60 Minutes, which are made up of a few 15-30 minute segments per episode, are mixing and matching segments from old shows and creating "new" episodes with nothing new in them except for brief commentary explaining "as we first showed you in 20XX...". They are marked as "new" in the program guide, and if you have set your DVR to record only new episodes of that show, it will record this rehashed content.
TV networks and websites are abusing automated services and tools like Google and your DVR to generate new revenue from old, rehashed content. I despise regulation, but I think somebody needs to take a look at least at the DVR Fraud issue. It is becoming a large-scale fraud, as it is being used to artificially inflate Nielsen ratings, and likely siphon millions of ad dollars based upon viewership that would never have watched the content had it been properly labeled as a rerun.
> a significant problem
This is way over-dramatic for re-runs of TV shows. I can't believe you think this is a problem so grave that it needs state intervention!
Or is this actually bait?
I don't think the company or people hosting HN needs to worry about money.
I'm not the type to reach out to people or offer to hang out, and given I don't get similar invitations, I guess others aren't like that OR there's an air about me that indicates I wouldn't appreciate it. Which is probably not wrong, I mean my infrequent meetups with my childhood friend are awkward at best, we watch a movie and have a chat or something but that's it.
I think once you figure out what you want (way harder than it sounds like) it becomes just another thing to work on, like going to the gym. I've been making new friends lately, partly by globbing on to some of my roommate's local friends, and it's been easy since I decided to let it be (apologies for the cryptic sentence, I'm still not sure exactly what I'm trying to say). Actually I think it's way easier than the gym, but I've only got a small sample size, and I'm particularly bad at going to the gym.
The line is when you graduate college.
The fact is school is the biggest reason why we make so many friends. Different classes, different people, from grade school to college. Food is taken care of by adults or the dining hall. parents pay the bills or it's covered by your student loan.
Then you graduate. Now you must: spend time to cook, work to pay bills, and if you have an SO/kids, the rest of your time goes there. That's literally it.
> The line is when you graduate college.
I agree with this, but with one caveat: it's a slow process, and it takes years to fully take effect.
The process of your friend groups disintegrating does indeed begin with your college graduation, but it takes so long for the effects to be really felt that a lot of people don't realize their friend groups have disintegrated until around the time they hit 30.
Unfortunately, it's even worse than that. Even when _I_ did have the time, say when I've taken a year or two off jobs just to enjoy life, other people usually didn't. So I've spent a lot of that time being alone. That's actually one of the major positives of having a job - it provides you with collegues you can hang around and have fun with (assuming the workplace is not toxic and there are people there whose company you enjoy).
It also becomes harder to line up schedules to keep in touch with old friends. Back in college, at least everyone was on the same academic calendar.
The threat of boredom is always a huge motivator for people to hang out and try not to be bored together. As people get older, that ceases to be a social motivator for many/most people. They may still have a bunch of other reasons for wanting to socialize, but boredom’s not one of them.
From experience, finding new couple friends appears to be impossible. The difficulty is even quantifiable. For example, to make a friend person A must like person B, and vice versa, or expressed as a permutation: P(2,2)=2 units of difficulty.
But to make a couple friend the difficulty increases to P(4,2)=12...a 6x increase :(
Has anyone had success finding couple friends?
I disagree with this notion that adults at the age of 30 shift their focus to children when the average age of first time mothers has steadily risen to 26.3 years old since 1970.
I feel like the general points made in this article apply more to 35-40 year olds as I know there are plenty of people in their early 30's still focused on growing their social circles without settling down with a family yet.
With parenthood in the mix, you have to get really aggressive about scheduling, but it's still not impossible.
I mean all of those 'jokes' make it sound like a really unhealthy and abusive relationship. No wonder people don't get married as much anymore.
Telling someone they can't have friends outside the marriage is straight-up emotional abuse, no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
Ever since I graduated college, I've watched my circle of friends dwindle over the years, as all of us have busy lives and don't have much room for socialization, especially not when factoring in each other's schedules.
I stopped talking to one of the few close friends I had left after he married an extremist tradcon and started posting a constant stream of hate. It's really disheartening to watch a guy who used to be one of the most compassionate people I know post memes with slurs in them (including slurs against a group I'm part of), videos by Neo-Nazis, rants about how Jimmy Kimmel's done deserves to die, etc. He went from being like a brother to me to being someone I never want to talk to again. And even before he completely jumped down the alt-right rabbit hole, as soon as he started dating her, I would never see him without her ever again. It was draining inviting him to hang out places and him always bringing his then-girlfriend who I hated with him every single time. Even when I went to buy him expensive scotch at a bar to congratulate him on his engagement (because even though I hate her guts, I was still happy for him that he found someone), she decided to tag along (seriously, that was supposed to be a private moment between me and him)... I really regret wasting that money on scotch for both of them given what he's turned into.
In the last month, I have set foot of my house to socialize exactly once, and that was for a friend's birthday party... so that's not going to happen again for another year.
Facebook has been a godsend, because it's basically the only way I talk to most people anymore. Through Facebook, I can stay in touch with a bunch of people who I wouldn't have the opportunity to see in real life. I have a ton of friends I get along with really well but for various reasons none of us are able to get together in real life, so Facebook it is.
It doesn't help that I have no interest in getting married or having children. In fact, the idea of either sickens me. So as everybody else is pairing off to get married or spending 99% of their free time taking care of kids, I'm stuck by myself. I just wish I had more single (and preferably asexual) friends to hang with.
I actively hate being in my 30s. I wish I was in college again, because I really miss the vibrant social life I had back then.
i've found it much easier to maintain a "vibrant social life" in a city. do you live in the suburbs, or somewhere even less densely populated?
If not having a vibrant social life is the price I pay for living in a place that doesn't make me want to kill myself, then I'll go ahead and pay that price. I miss having a vibrant social life, but I'd take not having one over not living in the burbs.
okay, the disconnect here may be that i live in europe, and you live in ...i'd guess north america?
> It doesn't help that I have no interest in getting married or having children. In fact, the idea of either sickens me. So as everybody else is pairing off to get married or spending 99% of their free time taking care of kids, I'm stuck by myself. I just wish I had more single (and preferably asexual) friends to hang with.
suburbs are indeed optimised for numerous things you're not up for; this is a difficult problem to solve.
> If not having a vibrant social life is the price I pay for living in a place that doesn't make me want to kill myself, then I'll go ahead and pay that price.
things can eat away at you quietly. not having a vibrant social life may not confrontationally make you want to kill yourself, the way the other serious issues you've mentioned do, but it can erode moral and have cascading negative effects on your mental health.
we aren't all built the same though, so ymmv.
I'm only 23 but I am very much the same as you. All my friends have gone a traditional route so finding new friends outside university is harder.
I've made a few friends from work but politics are starting to threaten 2 of these. I too live in a small town/suburb but never have tried living in a city so I will need to try that!
I think I am demisexual personally so I'd totally be your friend!
I found some friends by taking up brazilian jiu jitsu and that has proven really useful. Find a topic you truly love and I think friendships will sprout up.
Keep killing it!
I simply would not stay in a work enviornment like that.
I find it disappointing when articles like this don't even consider biological, evolutionary factors that could play a role.
"I'm super progressive"
Until
"I have a downvote button now motherfuckers"
These perceptions are in the eye of the beholder. Multiply that 10x when it's about "who downvoted me", since there's literally no information then, just a blank screen to project on.
We're open minded enough, just bring up some actual arguments and facts to support them.
It's like ignoring the possibility economic factors in trying to explain some feature of society.
It should not be necessary to propose specific possible factors to make such a criticism.
Since so many people seem to want a possible account, there might be an evolutionary advantage to gaining friends leading up to and during prime reproductive years, advantages that are lesser as you transition past those ages.
Just like our brains are more receptive to learning languages when we're younger our younger brains may be more receptive to developing friendships. Note that I've said right from the start that such details could be factors in an explanation, not that they would be the whole explanation.
Also, I've repeatedly said that biological and evolutionary details may be factors not the whole explanation, so other factors can have changed during that timeframe.
Considering the evolutionary argument, what happens is the opposite of what one would expect - when people are getting old they are more in need of friends for practical reasons - failing physical condition. So if there is an evolutionary reason, it's probably a paradox.
It may be true however that people seek more alone time as they get older - our brains become less excitable, less craving of novel environments and people and information etc. That's a behavior that's related to aging however, not evolution.
Re: evolutionary argument. That's not what one would expect. That's simply your assumption based on a simplistic notion of what an evolutionary explanation would involve.
Re: your final paragraph, that shows you haven't been paying attention to what I've been saying. If you read my comments you'll notice I've said "biological or evolutionary", and aging is most definitely biological. Anyway, you're wrong to assume that has nothing to do with evolution!
Perhaps it would help your argument if you provided counterarguments to others instead of just dismissing them. Pretending to speak from authority weakens your position.
Re: counterarguments - or how about you don't make confident assertions about topics you're clearly lacking a solid grounding in (for example, your comment shows you don't understand that evolution operates on the level of genes rather than individuals) -- where you must know you're lacking that grounding -- and go and learn a bit more about it yourself rather than demanding that others provide you that education? I'm sure you wouldn't behave in this sort of way if it was some other topic, like something to do with computing.
It is possible that evolution might have made it so that older people do not have friends, so they die sooner and thus consume less resources from prime-age people. The older people are past their child-making age, so they can't affect future evolution in their favour. It's odd however that people did not complain about this until the latter half of the 20th century , or that men did not escape this fate (since men can have children even at old age).
i do not back this up with any evidence though, since you 'd dismiss it as irrelevant anyway.
Other parts of your really basic lack of understand of it is also demonstrated by your latest comment:
- thinking that evolution works as if it had intention and foresight.
- thinking that being past child-making age can't affect "future evolution in their favour" (this is a variation on the misunderstanding that evolution operates on individuals rather than genes).
There's nothing wrong with being ignorant about a topic, but there is with being so and acting like you know what you're taking about.
I dont care if you keep insulting me to make your point, but for the sake of conversation, dont assume your assumptions are correct
And BTW, this new comment of yours represents another elementary misunderstanding of evolution, that of assuming group selection (despite some contested arguments for specific cases of purported group selection, no one agrees with such naive group selection).
The reason you're being down-voted is because liberalism believes in a clean slate for human beings. Heritable genetic traits that provide advantages or disadvantages goes against this model.