Happiness comes from within. Relying on the constant dopamine hit of certain kinds of social interaction is a fragile way to live.
In youth, being socially selective can be painful because you miss out on feedback, experimentation, and belonging. Later, it can become a source of stability, focus, and self-trust. Learning how to transition from one phase to the next is difficult, but I think it's necessary for becoming a stable, reliable, and happy adult as you age.
A lot of friendships aren't that deep. I've had work colleagues I really liked and even socialized with outside the workplace, and yet, if they left the company or retired... faded away. If it takes real effort to keep up contact, you get a lot more choosy.
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.
To recover lost connections due to covid we started having house parties again every 3 months or so. Friends can bring their kids of course. Drop by for 5 minutes or 5 hours it’s all good. Bring something to eat or drink if you want or don’t. We just invited nearly everyone we knew. First few were packed. Tapered off a bit now but a couple of years in and it’s going strong and the best bit is new connections made between our friends who didn’t know each other.
Feel the same way about COVID. It damaged the social fabric in ways that have not recovered. I think a lot of people realized that maybe they never really liked socializing as much as they thought they did. I also think it just kind of reset people's expectations around socializing. The other big one to me, that it also unleashed, was inflation. Dining out, sporting events, concerts etc are all way more expensive than they used to be. Places are still busy and games are still packed but the prices are way higher, more evidence of the K shaped economy where only the top stratas are spending. Also, and this is subjective, it feels a bit more performative, as in people are going because it signals they have the means (edit: and the general instagram-ification of our culture.)
The damaged social fabric - for me - didn't consist of spendy stuff. Just backyard BBQ's, pool parties, (hosted) brunch or dinner invitations, that sort of thing. You keep doing it because habit. But then a 2 year interruption because of COVID, habit broken and before you know it you haven't talked to some people for 5 years and now it would be awkward to call them up again...
Restaurants realized they were leaving a lot of money on the table pre-Covid. Post-Covid has seen restaurants raising prices more aggressively, cutting staff, cutting condiments, replacing menus with QR menus, cutting employee and business hours, etc.
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've gotten into my 40s and honestly I've dropped about 25% of my friends - as they are also in their 40s but drink a lot and worse do cocaine. They also are really into making fun of each other. Maybe I'm an old bore, but none of that appeals. I haven't burnt my bridges but I much prefer to spend time with people that are healthy, into reading, are positive. I just can't be bothered...
Still I may change my mind in time - but I am aiming for a long stint of not seeing the boys.
I am married now and with my first kid (10 weeks old) and that has definitely made me time poor. But I only now text the friends that actually matter to me now.
I find it's pretty easy to make new friends with other people doing healthy activities (I'm not in my 40s but many of the people I meet doing sports are).
I'm in my early 40s, and my social life has been collapsing. I've always been weird, but haven't had trouble making at least some friendships most of my life. Like others in this thread, I never recovered after COVID.
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.
The other person says "join a community", but those forms of community which are strong are so often unfriendly to weird people like us. For example, Southeast European cafe culture might still bring neighbours (well, at least the men) together daily over the decades, but someone unable to talk about football or engage in hyper-masculine banter is likely to feel left out and thought cringe.
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.)
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 hasn't worked very well for me, but I think this sort of advice is a lot like "seek therapy" -- it's not strictly bad or good, but different people have different outcomes. In other words, I don't want to downplay the advice, since for certain it will be good advice for some people. It just hasn't been successful for me.
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.
I've lost many friendships because I grew out of things. My friends were a bad crowd involved in street racing and just being a nuisance. No real direction and involvement from parents. I was that too.
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.
It is sad I had a best friend who I just lost out of touch with when we both entered college. I don't remember if I did something wrong or what, I remember he even lived with me at one point when he was having problems with his parents in highschool. Yeah I only have 4-5 really good friends (keep in touch with often) and then a bunch of acquaintances/work people.
Contrast to high school when I had tiers of friends/different groups. It is an exposure thing, more people in education settings.
Ah, I'm one of the outliers, I have more friends now and a richer, healthier social life than I've ever had before. I'm 45, I do have a 7yo kid and wife, two dogs, a full time job, just like everyone else on here for whom these are reasons for not having friends. I have too many friends, actually, but that's a good problem to have. I make a point not to make friends with coworkers and feel bad for some of the people I know who only have work friends. It reminds me of Colin Robinson "I'm gonna go hang out with my real friends, my work friends."
It's just gonna be chatting with sockpuppet AIs from here on out. Someone needs to set up a social network where our AI agents (who for many of us, know us better than our families) sort out who we'd be best set up to socialize with and then set up play dates.
Having kids really changes the game in a lot of ways. For me to consider doing something now, its not just that I'm interested or if I have the money, I also have to make sure childcare is lined up - either my partner or a family member. It makes you very judicial in what you choose to do as you have a finite amount of childcare to spend (unless you are really lucky and have a family that is always available to watch your kids).
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.
Some of this has to also do w/ the environment. If you have a solid weekend pickup game of any kind and a park/rink/court closes it is pretty much the end of that group, as much as you might try to find another spot it is never the same.
One thing I try to do is cultivate new friendships through new hobbies. Some of them develop to become lifelong friendships. It takes time and effort, and to me it is worth it.
I've found it to be very obviously the case that the main reason this happens to me is that everyone is moving around all the time. People scatter to all corners of the country (or even the world) and time zones and travel times just make it impossible to meet and maintain friendships. None of my friends growing up live in the same state as me.
I don't have the link, but this claim almost always gets made in these kinds of comment threads, and then someone points out that American mobility is in fact lower today than it was in the late twentieth century. And different countries are different but still report growing loneliness, etc.
On the flip-side, there's an expression "fair-weather friends" for people who are only friends when you don't need anything. Which is perfectly reasonable, but you're not really friends just because you can enjoy doing an enjoyable thing together where nothing is asked and nothing is given.
put everyone's birthday in your calendar, and wish them a happy birthday (at least a text) every year
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
As I've gotten older I struggle to make new friendships, but I still keep up most of my older friendships. The friendships that I've dropped or let fade away are mostly because they were toxic relationships in some regard or alternatively that I'm simply in a much different place in my life than the other person. I still have multiple friends that I've known for more than 20 years, but nobody left from high school or earlier that I keep in touch with. My path just diverged so much from others once I left my hometown, and while one of my long-term friendships is with someone from the same home town, we both live in the same city now over a thousand miles away.
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.
We grow up. At a younger age you are willing to put up with asymmetrical relationships, mostly because you don’t realize they are asymmetrical. You just start seeing them for what they are as you age.
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 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. It helps me find balance.
Happiness comes from within. Relying on the constant dopamine hit of certain kinds of social interaction is a fragile way to live.
In youth, being socially selective can be painful because you miss out on feedback, experimentation, and belonging. Later, it can become a source of stability, focus, and self-trust. Learning how to transition from one phase to the next is difficult, but I think it's necessary for becoming a stable, reliable, and happy adult as you age.
A lot of friendships aren't that deep. I've had work colleagues I really liked and even socialized with outside the workplace, and yet, if they left the company or retired... faded away. If it takes real effort to keep up contact, you get a lot more choosy.
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.
To recover lost connections due to covid we started having house parties again every 3 months or so. Friends can bring their kids of course. Drop by for 5 minutes or 5 hours it’s all good. Bring something to eat or drink if you want or don’t. We just invited nearly everyone we knew. First few were packed. Tapered off a bit now but a couple of years in and it’s going strong and the best bit is new connections made between our friends who didn’t know each other.
We call it “Party for no reason.”
Feel the same way about COVID. It damaged the social fabric in ways that have not recovered. I think a lot of people realized that maybe they never really liked socializing as much as they thought they did. I also think it just kind of reset people's expectations around socializing. The other big one to me, that it also unleashed, was inflation. Dining out, sporting events, concerts etc are all way more expensive than they used to be. Places are still busy and games are still packed but the prices are way higher, more evidence of the K shaped economy where only the top stratas are spending. Also, and this is subjective, it feels a bit more performative, as in people are going because it signals they have the means (edit: and the general instagram-ification of our culture.)
The damaged social fabric - for me - didn't consist of spendy stuff. Just backyard BBQ's, pool parties, (hosted) brunch or dinner invitations, that sort of thing. You keep doing it because habit. But then a 2 year interruption because of COVID, habit broken and before you know it you haven't talked to some people for 5 years and now it would be awkward to call them up again...
Restaurants realized they were leaving a lot of money on the table pre-Covid. Post-Covid has seen restaurants raising prices more aggressively, cutting staff, cutting condiments, replacing menus with QR menus, cutting employee and business hours, etc.
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.).
If you got phone number or online communication , it should not be that hard to keep up
I've gotten into my 40s and honestly I've dropped about 25% of my friends - as they are also in their 40s but drink a lot and worse do cocaine. They also are really into making fun of each other. Maybe I'm an old bore, but none of that appeals. I haven't burnt my bridges but I much prefer to spend time with people that are healthy, into reading, are positive. I just can't be bothered... Still I may change my mind in time - but I am aiming for a long stint of not seeing the boys. I am married now and with my first kid (10 weeks old) and that has definitely made me time poor. But I only now text the friends that actually matter to me now.
>as they are also in their 40s but drink a lot and worse do cocaine. They also are really into making fun of each other.
Can I get your friends?
His “friends” sound awful. Why would you want them?
He might also be awful, no shame in that (a little shame in that tho).
I find it's pretty easy to make new friends with other people doing healthy activities (I'm not in my 40s but many of the people I meet doing sports are).
I'm in my early 40s, and my social life has been collapsing. I've always been weird, but haven't had trouble making at least some friendships most of my life. Like others in this thread, I never recovered after COVID.
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.
The other person says "join a community", but those forms of community which are strong are so often unfriendly to weird people like us. For example, Southeast European cafe culture might still bring neighbours (well, at least the men) together daily over the decades, but someone unable to talk about football or engage in hyper-masculine banter is likely to feel left out and thought cringe.
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.)
Find a community!
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 hasn't worked very well for me, but I think this sort of advice is a lot like "seek therapy" -- it's not strictly bad or good, but different people have different outcomes. In other words, I don't want to downplay the advice, since for certain it will be good advice for some people. It just hasn't been successful for me.
> Then you just pick who you vibe with
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.
True, but if they always have an influx of new people, you can form your friendships with them.
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.
I've lost many friendships because I grew out of things. My friends were a bad crowd involved in street racing and just being a nuisance. No real direction and involvement from parents. I was that too.
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.
Having a family also reduces the driver to connect with random people.
It is sad I had a best friend who I just lost out of touch with when we both entered college. I don't remember if I did something wrong or what, I remember he even lived with me at one point when he was having problems with his parents in highschool. Yeah I only have 4-5 really good friends (keep in touch with often) and then a bunch of acquaintances/work people.
Contrast to high school when I had tiers of friends/different groups. It is an exposure thing, more people in education settings.
Ah, I'm one of the outliers, I have more friends now and a richer, healthier social life than I've ever had before. I'm 45, I do have a 7yo kid and wife, two dogs, a full time job, just like everyone else on here for whom these are reasons for not having friends. I have too many friends, actually, but that's a good problem to have. I make a point not to make friends with coworkers and feel bad for some of the people I know who only have work friends. It reminds me of Colin Robinson "I'm gonna go hang out with my real friends, my work friends."
It's just gonna be chatting with sockpuppet AIs from here on out. Someone needs to set up a social network where our AI agents (who for many of us, know us better than our families) sort out who we'd be best set up to socialize with and then set up play dates.
Having kids really changes the game in a lot of ways. For me to consider doing something now, its not just that I'm interested or if I have the money, I also have to make sure childcare is lined up - either my partner or a family member. It makes you very judicial in what you choose to do as you have a finite amount of childcare to spend (unless you are really lucky and have a family that is always available to watch your kids).
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.
Some of this has to also do w/ the environment. If you have a solid weekend pickup game of any kind and a park/rink/court closes it is pretty much the end of that group, as much as you might try to find another spot it is never the same.
https://archive.ph/uF6WC#selection-773.5-780.0
One thing I try to do is cultivate new friendships through new hobbies. Some of them develop to become lifelong friendships. It takes time and effort, and to me it is worth it.
I've found it to be very obviously the case that the main reason this happens to me is that everyone is moving around all the time. People scatter to all corners of the country (or even the world) and time zones and travel times just make it impossible to meet and maintain friendships. None of my friends growing up live in the same state as me.
I don't have the link, but this claim almost always gets made in these kinds of comment threads, and then someone points out that American mobility is in fact lower today than it was in the late twentieth century. And different countries are different but still report growing loneliness, etc.
a lot of people see friendships as a source of free labor.
On the flip-side, there's an expression "fair-weather friends" for people who are only friends when you don't need anything. Which is perfectly reasonable, but you're not really friends just because you can enjoy doing an enjoyable thing together where nothing is asked and nothing is given.
put everyone's birthday in your calendar, and wish them a happy birthday (at least a text) every year
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
Because the real you discovers that they were never real friends.
As I've gotten older I struggle to make new friendships, but I still keep up most of my older friendships. The friendships that I've dropped or let fade away are mostly because they were toxic relationships in some regard or alternatively that I'm simply in a much different place in my life than the other person. I still have multiple friends that I've known for more than 20 years, but nobody left from high school or earlier that I keep in touch with. My path just diverged so much from others once I left my hometown, and while one of my long-term friendships is with someone from the same home town, we both live in the same city now over a thousand miles away.
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.
We become less social as we age...
We grow up. At a younger age you are willing to put up with asymmetrical relationships, mostly because you don’t realize they are asymmetrical. You just start seeing them for what they are as you age.
Time is a precious resource and you learn to filter who you spend it with.
That's not necessarily true at all.
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'm not sure where "fears" comes from. My assertation was that we (collectively) become less social as we age. We value social interactions less.
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.
> we
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. It helps me find balance.