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Comment by weatherlite | Hacker News Reader

> I am happily married but have zero friends

Are you sure this is entirely the modern lifestyle's fault? When I look deeply into my past I realize I messed up high school and college a bit socially (for various reasons) and that's the time most people acquire their best friends. I have 1-2 good friends but I'm pretty sure it's on me its not more than that.

Perhaps you went through something similar?

The real annoying thing is making friends after mid 30s is very difficult. I am very choosy about who I want to meet because I'm a parent and my time is valuable and I put up with less bullshit than when I was young. Alas, all "older" folk are like me - so we barely try to create friendships.

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Its probably my fault. Once I had kids I completely lost the ability to manage them and a social life. I felt bad just leaving my wife to go hang out with friends and then as they got older I have replaced IRL friends with doom scrolling. Definitely a mental thing I need to fix. I did delete twitter the other day so that's one small step :)

Deleting Twitter is amazing. I am contentmplating moving to a dumb phone. Extreme I know.

On my old nokia C3, there is a kind of App Store that is not working for a while as the servers are shutdown.

Everytime I "joke" that I live in the future of smartphones.

What is Twitter ?

I am not at the dumb phone point yet, really just for the maps feature on smart phones. Even typing that out make me realize how pervasive technology is. I don't know how to navigate anywhere without my phone because I never had to learn because I could always rely on the voice in the phone to tell me. I am going out to buy a little table this weekend to keep my phone on in the entry way. Phone lives there when my kids and wife are awake. There is nothing happening online that wont be there after they are asleep. The internet is not going anywhere.

I'm a parent of a 2.5yo. What I've learned from other parents around me is to make _sure_ both parents maintain their social lives. I strongly encourage my spouse to call a friend and get out the house at least once every couple weeks, and then I do the same.

It's so easy to forget that relationships require maintenance and having them keeps us both sane - especially when things get hard.

I don’t know… I had really, really good friends in high school and college… but then after I graduated, we all just drifted apart. We moved to different places, got married, had kids… the things that brought us together during college weren’t there anymore.

Modern lifestyle includes moving to different cities.

So this still comes down to our inability to make friends past our 30s... we move more than in the past but its definitely not a new phenomenon.

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