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Comment by elric | Hacker News Reader

That's a hard pass for me. Spontaneity is a big part of what makes friendships work for me. I don't need more scheduling stress in my life. I'm ok with leting old friendships water down and sometimes even wither away. Sometimes they can be picked up later, sometimes they are replaced by new connections. And that's fine by me.

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Scheduling stuff with friends does not preclude also having spontaneity. It's just that for busy people spontaneity doesn't happen often enough to maintain a friendship.

Spontaneity doesn't happen unless you have lots of extra time lying around and most busy people don't have that.

In fact ironically I actually have to schedule blocks of unscheduled time for myself and schedule blocks of unscheduled time for time with my partner. Those blocks of time just mean that I don't have a specific plan and will do whatever I/we feel like doing when we get to that time. That allows for spontaneity in the context of me alone as well as in my relationship.

However, for friends that doesn't really work so well. It's not like if I have a block of unscheduled time that a friend is just going to magically knock on my door (I don't live in a college dorm, but if you do, that might work.) For friends we kind of need to agree on e.g. where to meet or what to do, so for friends it's usually scheduling scheduled time.

> It's just that for busy people spontaneity doesn't happen often enough to maintain a friendship.

Precisely, especially if you want to have multiple engaging friendships.

Spontaneity isn’t realistic outside your early 20s, when people start to get married and have children. You can't expect your friend to be be spontaneous if they're got to pick up their children from school.

I'm going to disagree with that. Spontaneity just changes a bit, it's not a boolean choice. You can spontaneously ask a friend to do something, and if they can't (because of kids or whatever) then you can schedule it. Is this less spontaneous than going over unannounced as a kid? A bit, yeah. But at least it still feels like fun. Scheduling friendships "like meetings" with "recurring events" is the polar opposite of spontaneous. That just feels like work.

The advice here is only to "try it if you’re sad about losing touch with people." If that's not you, no problem!

What age bracket do you find yourself in? DO you have children? There comes a time when spontaneity is unrealistic, and without planning all you will do is annoy your friend and their family by knocking on their door at 10 PM being spontaneous.

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