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Comment by hypeit | Hacker News Reader

> We can see this shift everywhere. The characters of the biggest shows of the '90s — "Friends," "Seinfeld," "Cheers" — spent the overwhelming majority of their time hanging out at the café, diner, and bar, and work was either an afterthought or a running joke.

These were television shows, not reality. Even in the 80s and 90s you couldn't spend all of your time in a Manhattan coffee shop or a bar (unless you were a drunk). I think our concept of what a "friend" is was heavily shaped by 20th century sitcoms and not realistic, setting up a couple of generations to be very lonely and very disappointed that life doesn't turn out like TV.

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I agree that fiction — especially sitcoms — should not be taken as a model of reality. I studied film and media science, but one doesn't need academic rigour to come to that conclusion.

However I would still say the best way to avoid making friends is to avoid being in places where strangers hang out. Places where you come into low pressure contact with strangers are places where you get to know people — and where you get to know people, is where you find friends. Going to those places is just a way to increase your chances of talking to someone you like by increasing the number of people tou are talking to.

And the place for you might not be a cafe or a pub, it might be a library, a golf court, a ski hut, an art gallery, a vacation resort, a park, a camping place, .. you get the idea places where people hang out and don't do everyday stress stuff. So no train station platforms or grocery stores.

But places that are especially unsuited are places without strangers, so: your home (unless you invite strangers), deserts or other remote places.

Add in regularity. Friendship doesn't happen overnight.

I've just started taking up sword fencing again at a local club. It takes time for people to build up a rapport of yourself.

If I look decent, and turn up each week that's the image I paint. They have no other image of knowing me outside the club so that's the image they'll judge you on.

Also, subconsciously shoes are always the first thing a person will home-in on when they encounter you for the first time.

sorry, I got totally distracted and remembered a strange scene/gag from The IT Crowd ... "The Shoes!" but also this whole comment is probably way more telling of the fact that folks are expecting friendship to just <poof> happen when it really does require conscious, specific effort a lot of the time. We just didn't realize it was so direct when we were all in elementary/highschool/college/firstjob because it was second nature

I don't look at people's shoes. Why should I care what they wear on their feet? I wear shoes to the point where they're falling apart. If people judge me on that, then I want nothing to do with them.

People will judge you on no matter what. That is normal. They don't know you after all.

You likely do that too — when someone approaches you on the street you very quickly and intuitively judge their whole being to know whether you need to be on the guard or whether you decide you can have a chat with them.

Now unless the rest of the persons appearance gives you other clues totally broken shoes are in my experience a bad sign, most of the time.

Of course that is shallow knowledge of a person, and you can't truly judge someone as a person by the clothes they are wearing — but unless you want to get to know everybody you meet deeply before deciding they are not worth your time, clothes can be a fast (but low quality) proxy.

That also means your appearance is a fast and low quality proxy based on which others decide whether to talk to you and how they should go into a conversation with you.

Thst isn't normative btw., so it doesn't mean you need to wear boring suits all day. You could line two punks up next to each other and have one looking interesting and worth talking to, and the other shady in a bad way.

Good addition to my post. People forget that when they originally made friends (involuntary) regularity was a big part of it. Your parents might have expectwd you to go to $SPORT, so you went and got to know people there, some of which might have become your friends. Same but even greater in magnitude for school.

Now some might have terrible memories of school ans maybe never found a decent friend there, but as someone with multiple silblings I can assure you that luck (or the lack thereof) plays a big role when it comes to theae things.

not just regularity of going there yourself, but you also need to pick places or activities where most of the participants are regulars too.

and that is more likely the case for small active groups or clubs, not bars or museums. but it could be boardgame nights at a bar, anything that draws only a small group.

on events that draw a larger crowd, you have to pay attention to who the regulars are and focus on associating with those if you want to develop any kind of friendship.

You don't need to spend all your time somewhere for it to become a decent third space. You just need to go regularly, at a similar enough time that you start building rapport with the people who also go at the same time. If you go to the gym or bar for an hour or two after work every weekday, for example, you'll quickly notice that the same people are there with you. Interact with them enough, and these people form the outer ring of your social life.

Then you need to have explicitly social gatherings. For example, I've got a biweekly game night that an old friend and I alternate hosting. We invite our friends and the occasional acquaintance from our outer rings, and some start coming regularly. Typically somewhere between 4 and 10 people show up, BYOB, and we play some board games into the odd hours. Often random subsets of the group will grab dinner together before hand.

Then you have your close friend maintenance regimen. People you're not seeing regularly anymore in the context you used to (whether it was school, and old workplace, etc), but that you want to maintain a relationship with. If you spend at least 1 weekend night a week grabbing dinner and some drinks with one of these people, you'll be able to maintain your relationships with up to a half dozen or so people (in addition to the ones that are in your more active group).

Mix in some larger gatherings/parties a couple times a year, and you've set yourself up a healthy social life.

Nailed it.

In threads like this, people often bring up gyms as social spaces.

Hell. No.

I've been using a gym for most of my adult life. Gyms are anti-social spaces. Big box gyms, sports clubs, the gym at the Y, campus gyms, the gyms that most people go to.

Maybe boutique gyms and gyms where you always work with a personal trainer are different. Every gym I've been to: hell, no.

I don't mean while working out. I mean before, in locker rooms, and after in the sauna or lounge. Those are both spaces where there's an expectation of some level of small talk.

Not in any gym I've ever worked out in. Who strikes up a conversation with strangers in a gym locker room? That's not a place where I go for smalltalk; it would be like talking to the other men at the urinals while we're pissing.

The best way to meet new people and make new friends, in my experience, isn't to simply be somewhere at a regular time - it's to do something which naturally involves interacting with the other participants. In other words, get a hobby.

To give an example: in the last few years I've met and befriended a lot of new people in my area through training in BJJ.

"it would be like talking to the other men at the urinals while we're pissing"

Doesn't everyone do that?

Hold your peace while you hold your piece.

I have the same opinion. As I said in a comment I made in this thread before, gyms are non-places today. Maybe a CrossFit gym can be a social space because there are workouts that require a partner. It's not enough to go somewhere regularly, you need to be forced to interact with people.

There's a pretty wide range of gyms. My old gym seems to be more like what you two are talking about, with just a weight room, an aerobics room with treadmills and stairmasters and such, and a locker room with a couple showers.

I'm talking about a full-on gym, with all that, various sport courts (racquetball, squash, etc), a locker room with a sauna, steam room, hot tub, etc., and social spaces with a cafe and seating.

The former expects you to show up, work out, and get out. The latter is a lot more conducive to loitering.

Exactly - everyone has their headphones on, no one wants to talk!

The only way I made friends at gyms was playing a sport - racquetball in my case, took years.

But again - I barely hung out with anyone outside the gym.

wow... for me gyms (or sports in general) was the #1 place to meet new people, here where I live and in my bubble (germany) it's quite common to spend a few hours in the local boulder gym, or climbing gym, drinking coffee, grep a pizza boulder/climb a bit and small talk, meet friends and new people, same on the local skate park or pump track, hang around, skate, talk, and meet new people, also the sauna/pool areas of some larger gyms are quite social, same goes for the local park, watch the kids at the playground, a coffee is always nearby and plenty of people to talk... and everything in walking or biking distance (I live in a small town)

A climbing or sports gym is different than a typical weightlifting gym. I mostly see people doing their sets alone, or running on treadmills and such

I think Friends showed us what we most deeply desire - a life without concern for work where we spend most of our time with our loved ones at a Third Place away from home and work. I agree it is not literally realistic, but it could be viewed as aspirational.

Youtuber Andrewism made an excellent video about the Third Place last week that explains what various thinkers have written about these places, and considers how we might bring them back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD_CMrCpBMc

I much prefer having people over at home or going to their home over a Third Place. I think the only Third Place I really like is a park with a view.

Suburbia poor - rich in materials, poor in people and experiences aka life

In a world where our third places have degraded this is not surprising. I am walking distance to an Oakland hacker space and I love their social nights. Of course I love having friends over to my place too, but a good third place is lovely.

I don't know about Manhattan, but I can tell you in my small hometown, you can walk down to the pub any night and you'll meet up with some friends randomly, no planning required. It's actually amazing.

Of course this is much more difficult in large cities, but it's something to work towards, and is clearly possible.

imo, options to spend one's time being limited (in a good way) leads to these coincidences more often than in towns/cities with unlimited (sort of) options.

But speaking from experience, if you have a falling out you can’t really go back there anymore and choices are generally limited in small towns.

There were way more places to hangout in the 1990s. Gentrification wasn't full tilt so rents were subdued. Record stores, book stores, video stores, arcades, coffeeshops where socializing not work was the norm. Movie theater going was different -- no phones. Teenagers weren't chased out of the malls.

They actually seem pretty accurate depictions of friend groups to me.

Friends: the friend group was defined by college room-mate, family and room-mates i.e. people thrust together as a unit and then socialising together. They went to Central Perk as this unit, and did not become friends through it.

Seinfeld: the friend group was defined by college room-mate, a neighbour and an ex-girlfriend. They didn't meet in third-places, they went to the diner as that unit. That Kramer was an outgoing weirdo using his proximity to basically force himself into a pre-existing relationship is familiar. The presence of Elaine is unusual but she was basically grafted-on to fix a sitcom rather than drawn from real life.

Cheers: this is more of the "people you know at a third place" but the running joke was that despite drinking every day with each other, they weren't really friends and didn't even like each other. This type of "regular acquaintance" is perhaps a familiar experience for a lonely adult struggling to find new friends. You can shoot the breeze with someone you see regularly but it's a constrained relationship.

It's unfortunate that the strangers who want to talk at third-places are only the Kramers and Cliffs of the world. A combination of bores and nutters that you have to actively avoid. Anyone vaguely normal has ear-buds in and head down. It would be nice to try and reverse that. At a minimum, normalise saying "hello" to strangers as a polite necessity instead of a red flag. For some reason it's common when hiking but not in a city. I'm more likely to chat to a stranger in the wilderness than a dense neighbourhood.

These were television shows, not reality.

This article is wild. It's conflating television with real life.

How did we get to this point?

> How did we get to this point?

Don't reflect on society based on what some article leads you to believe.

We haven't conflated a damn thing. This article is an ad meant to influence on several topics ranging from politics (civil engineering, gentrification, etc.) to the literal brands mentioned. So much content on the internet is like this these days: a mess of paid junk trying to emulate real opinions hoping something catches.

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