Why we lose our friends as we age (2023)
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
COVID also hit pretty bad. Speaking from personal experience, several friends that we saw once or twice a year at informally recurring BBQ/brunch/etc. kind of occasions have faded away as that series was interrupted and never restarted.
And finally... you learn who you are as you age. Friends who seemed cool, who seemed to have the answers... may not be so great from a mature perspective.
The post-Covid real estate/tech/AI /white-collar job/quant boom has led to inflated salaries, wealth inflation and higher prices to match, and then combined with various supply chain shortages and disruptions, e.g. (many tariffs, Israel v Iran v Russia v Ukraine wars and tensions, etc.).
I just don't want to be "that guy who was right... and alone"
In any case, if you need other people, doing the work will pay off. you need it.
Can I get your friends?
Contrast to high school when I had tiers of friends/different groups. It is an exposure thing, more people in education settings.
School is naturally good at forcing this, since we are filtering in and out of different class groups.
If you want to recreate this in post-school life, you have to join high membership interest groups, like casual sports groups (kickball, tennis, golf).
Game nights at the local pub work well too, since there will be a rotating cast of characters to make friends with.
Basically, you have to seek novelty and regular re-occurance to make "natural" new friends.
It's interesting to think of this strictly in terms of aging. I had been thinking of it as strictly a "bowling alone" or "loneliness crisis" problem. Perhaps it's like a modern forest; the same old stressors can be too much when forests are dealing with pollution, parasites, ecosystem collapse, etc. ie, the old stressors are still there but everything is in a much weaker state.
People are still meeting other people. I have a good community with a great library and a park district. They offer many sports and other programs. Right now, I'm busy doing everything with my kid but intend to join some stuff on my own once he is more independent.
Science, book, and sports communities are amazing for meeting people. Then you just pick who you vibe with and see if they are open to hang out outside of the group setting.
This is the problem, though. So many hobby clubs and societies have pre-existing cliques, you don't get to pick - you get selected if they deign, or excluded if not.
I've felt lonelier in many societies than on my own, if that makes sense.
You can also start your own club - my local friends, I've made through starting a D&D group and running a campaign with them.
We might look back on the early millennium, before Covid's devastating effect on groups meeting for special interests, as a golden age when even the weird could find their in-personal socializing niche. (Now someone might claim all is well in their neck of the words, but there are whole cities around the world where people are reporting the hobby events scene as nearly dead.)
At some point I realized I need to improve my life and went back to school for CS. Got a good job and got my life together. My "friends" are still doing the same things, they just got older. If we met today, I would never befriend them.
I did however meet new friends, but they are not as close to me. I like keeping distance. I'm mostly focused on spending time with my child and just teaching him things. I also try to learn about sports and things he is interested in. Therefore, time for friends is limited.
like, match.com doesn't make money if the first match you get is a perfect one and you stop using the app.
Always worth keeping in mind on HN but on a thread like this especially, the comments you see are heavily selected for having been written by people who spend significant amounts of their time commenting on forums for techy nerds... famously a group which is less extroverted irl than most, leans toward being neurodiverse in a way which sometimes makes traditional socialization difficult or less desirable, etc...
In other words, do not despair like I did at antisocial comments.
I don't really see movies in theaters anymore because I'd rather use the childcare to go out to dinner with my wife or take in a baseball game, for example.
If you assume 20 hours, that's 5-10 hangout sessions with someone. During a working life, that might take over a year. University life offers large windows of disposable time to forge those friendships. In work life, we don't have as much disposable time to spend building friendships.
This pretty sums up why there's so much negativity and pessimism every time this topic comes up. People want to have amazing friendships without taking a risk, making an effort and putting themselves out there. Nothing worthwhile in life comes easy.
It's harder to make the time for new relationships when you're older, and you frankly just have less patience for people who should know better and nearly infinite patience for those who couldn't have known better. Ironically, I'm at a point in my life where what I'd like to do the most is teach younger people useful skills that I've learned, but that's a difficult thing to do as most younger people have no interest in interacting with people significantly older than them, and the social context has changed so much now compared to the past that it's socially frowned upon unless you are directly familial related. I've guest lectured at a local college a few times, and I've actually considered doing full-time teaching after I retire from tech, but the types of things I want to teach aren't really a focus in school (think stuff you'd learn in shop, home-ec, or stuff that was never taught).
I have a young niece I teach things and there's neighborhood kids that come around when I'm doing project car stuff in the driveway, but generally it's fairly disappointing to me how most adults stop wanting to learn by the time they're just 20-25, and people are fully stuck in to their ways by 30. I'm still learning new things every day, and I have never lost my desire to learn or to self-improve. I am a different person than I was 5 years ago or 10 years ago, and I think better than I was. There's no reason I should ever stop getting better and learn new things, but just knowing things doesn't make anything better, it helps to also teach others or use your knowledge to help people. So many folks are just completely resistant to the idea of learning something or accepting help.
like their stuff on social media
friendships ebb and flow, as people get married, have kids, get divorced, kids become independent, move away, move back. don't give up on a friend even if they disappear for a few years when they first have kids
try to arrange at least an annual in-person meet up, if in the same city
try to involve them in your interests, and try to take up their interests, or at least be curious
fantasy football is helpful. golf as you get older. baseball games. meet for lunch if you're in their part of town. host parties for events like super bowl, the oscars, stuff like that
You just have to accept that socializing won't feel the same or have the same function in your life. You choose how and how much to value what you make of it.
Most of these fears are absurd. Why can't you just go outside and talk to anyone you want? If your answers are along the lines of "it's rude" or more honestly "I am awkward", then congratulations you just figured out what's holding you back.
Everything we're doing here online can be (and is!) done offline. It requires some acceptance of discomfort and recognition that you won't be so precious about IRL conversations anymore. It will become as mindless/mindful as you can handle, but opportunities are always everywhere to make friends.
I can attest that is true for me. It's not about fear. It's that I don't care to socialize as much as I did when I was younger.
I think we're talking past each other here. You and the article say "we", but it sounds more like "you" and everyone else that has not found new reasons to socialize.
I do tangentially agree there may be an answer why the old reasons aren't good enough anymore, but that doesn't mean there isn't as much value.
If anything there's more value (to me) now that I have a better grip on why I socialize as an adult. It became more nuanced with my lifestyle changes. I stopped needing friends and started wanting them. I keep the ones I have for their perspectives on life. I have far less in common with my adult friends than I ever did when I was younger. I deliberately select for that. It helps me find balance.
I thought maybe I was projecting insecurity about myself onto them and feeling what I thought other people felt and tried to push myself away from them to avoid similar judgement, but I can talk with my limited close friends in public about these things just fine without having the same feeling. I've wrestled a bit with why I cringe so heavily at hearing others talk and seemingly show enthusiasm in the things I do and why I wouldn't want to be friends with them, and the answer I eventually landed on was the performative nature. From my own experience, I understood what they were saying was banal and small, but portrayed jovially and overexerted in discussion undeservedly because of desiring the aesthetic of comradery and friendship over any meaningful attachment.
With every ounce of my being, I reject someone attempting to contort a discussion into convincing someone that you know enough shibboleths to be "cool", and for most of my life in school and early work thats all I saw the value of these "friends" for: the appearance of cooperation or shared interest over having any actual nuanced understanding of eachother or the topics we talk about.
Friendships draw on connections and bonds, and the type of person who needs to sell to me that they could understand my interests and thus could be friends at a surface level always rung as the lowest level of self serving needy pathetic loser. Mentioned in this thread, a huge driver for building friendship is "repeated casual contact", so seeing the experiment repeat multiple times at others dropping contact the second you go out of their vision just continued to echo how hollow and vain a lot of people "seeking friends" really are. At any mutual interest group, I still feel pretty similar. Sports clubs, bars, conventions all draw these crowds of people and it feels embarrasing to even be in the same area as them.
I lost my friends because I never really made many, and I dont think a lot of other people do either. Sure, age and location obviously strains communication with people, but thats just an excuse for why you dont want to put in work to continue a friendship, you can communicate to anywhere on the planet nearly instantaneously. You were never really friends to begin with and finished your transactional relationship, thats really all it ever really was. There's plenty of those to waste your time on if you want, though.