I've made more friends more easily in my 40s than any other time in my life, and I'm a relatively quiet and disagreeable person.
Making connections with people you're around frequently is easy. The problem is that adult life doesn't throw you into those situations post-college outside of work.
Now it's on you. Find a group. Sports are the easiest. You will absolutely make strong, long lasting friendships if you play sports. It doesn't matter if you're athletic or talented.
You just gotta show up and see the same people every week over and over. If you're a reasonably well adjusted person (and even that sometimes doesn't matter) you will make friends.
Again, making connections and friends is easy. Being around the same people regularly is difficult. Solve that problem and the friendships will come with little effort.
I have found that people generally understand the value of friendship and are welcoming to newcomers. It's been a very refreshing surprise as I've gotten older.
A lot of people will simply not do this, even if they know they should.
For this reason I think WFH is a massively more risky social experiment than most realize. It works for folks who were either already inclined to "go out and do things" or those who already had established social groups. We will see how this pans out in a generation or two.
Having to have everything scheduled weeks in advance is utterly exhausting and incredibly anxiety inducing to me. If I didn't already have friends I could do spontaneous things with, I'm not sure how I'd be able to have any sort of social life at all. I certainly am not alone in this, even if I'm a minority.
I work as a remote software dev. Joining a volleyball league + run club definitely helped massively for me.
> Again, making connections and friends is easy. Being around the same people regularly is difficult.
Agreed, 90% of the difficulty making new friends is showing at the same place/event regularly. Remaining 10% is actually being someone people want to be friends with.
Depends on the sport. I used to play pickup basketball. Whereas I recognized the players week to week, I never knew any of them. I only accidentally ran into one of them outside the game once. BTW, I loved the game and remember the players well. They just weren't friends.
Then I sailed, crewed raceboats. I got to know many people quite well. There's a lot of social coordination and communication in sailing. Just sitting on the rail on an upwind beat is a conversation, the same conversation every time but like chicken soup for the soul. Also a good crew is lot like a startup. Not easy to break into but worth it.
You are aware, that you are on a board of grinding workaholics, who work hard to have nobody escape the gulag of modern labor - by forcing everyone to grind their lifes to dust to compete with them?
That the processes we are part of have one purpose and one purpose only when it comes to social life, to force everyone to invest there whole social life into a company ? That half the apps written here, are to divide and conquer society and use the created misery and loneliness for additional upsales of the withheld happiness? That companies are actively antagonistic to anybody having friends and friendships?
My problem is that I don't want to play sports or doing a running club or any thing like that. And it isn't that I'm not willing to put in some work, it's that I want to make friends who want to do _other things_. I'm not sure how to find good public groups for people like me with the intent of finding friends for less public interests like video games, board games, books, etc.
I’ve been cognizant of this for several years now, but almost immediately after I began to act on it, the pandemic hit and threw it all into disarray.
Since then I’ve moved which has enabled a massive CoL reduction which is great, but at the same time I’m not sure this is where I want to be for even the next 5-10 years and so I’ve been resistant to putting down roots. Needing to drive to do anything also doesn’t help, as I find driving on anything but practically empty roads unpleasant.
There may be a pedestrian/cyclist-friendly city with great public transportation in my future, and so if I make a point to go out and do things consistently it’ll probably be there.
Agreed. I built a big friend group in a short time in my city just by going to the same club every weekend.
There’s a second part to this though. You have to put in some effort to break people out of “club friend” into “real life friend.” Make plans and invite them.
I agree with this completely. My issue with sport clubs was that as an adult I felt I joined too late. They all were already friends for some time, and although not impossible, it's harder to fit in.
I don’t think it matters that it’s sports specifically, but I agree that the secret ingredient is showing up and putting in the effort consistently and frequently. It’s easier to do that when friendship is a byproduct of something you are interested in or need to do.
Another factor that is important is being open-minded, whether that means being a little more willing to explore things that aren’t your wheelhouse or being tolerant of behaviors or lines of thinking that aren’t natural to you. That doesn’t mean you need to pretend to be someone you loathe or surround yourself with insufferable people, but instead find a way to deal with averse concepts in a constructive way, to be just flexible enough to find an enjoyable common ground. Walk away if there isn’t any, or it isn’t worth the effort you have to put in.
I think too many people think friendship is what happens between people that are the same, and it happens magically and effortlessly. Friendship is work, always. Some people are just less work or pay higher dividends than others. You need patience and the ability to know when a friendship costs more than it’s worth. I think we just tend to have less patience, energy, and flexibility as we get older, but some of that is a choice.
> I have found that people generally understand the value of friendship and are welcoming to newcomers
I feel like there's a curve where in college people are super open to making friends until mid-late 20s where friend groups are well established/people are focused on their careers and then people are more open to making friends again in mid 30s where people lose touch with old friends and are looking to make new ones (either through kids or other shared activities).
> You just gotta show up and see the same people every week over and over.
I second that. I started dancing social Argentinian tango at about 35, first just visiting classes, then practicas, then milongas. I now have more friends from there than from my school and university years.
Also know that things outside of sports work great too, like amateur chess/photography club, local library reading groups, local hackers' club, voluntary organisations, etc.
I am saying this from experience. And will recommend.
Well said. I have had the exact same experience. As I have gotten older I have made more friends. More importantly, more meaningful connections that are by choice and not by circumstances.
This is obviously great advice, but most groups don't organically sprout around interests. Sports, especially, are something that I have a very difficult time imagining enjoying. And with the slow enshittification of meetup, where do you find these groups? Your local library?
Most of the things mentioned in the article result in making friends as an adult being different than making friends as a child, but not necessarily harder. I'm in my late 50s and continue to make new friends.
I think the larger problem is that many approach friendship with the wrong expectations. As Zig Ziglar said.
"If you going out trying to find a friend, friends are scarce. If you go out trying to be a friend, friends are everywhere."
>"If you going out trying to find a friend, friends are scarce. If you go out trying to be a friend, friends are everywhere."
My brain solidified late, in my late 30s, but it did eventually solidify and when it did something like a switch or circuit breaker flipped and I came to this conclusion
I'm going to pretend that I came to it independently.
I have more, closer, friends in my 40s than I did at any time in my life previously.
I don't even know how it happened, I think that I just stopped caring about any potential for embarrassment and I learned that a good conversation is equal parts statements and questions.
Some of the friends I have now, in my 50's, are due to them proactively reaching out to me to get together. Had it not been for them making the effort, our friendship, likely, would've never materialized. When meeting new people with whom I think there might be potential for friendship, I now try to be the one who reaches out and suggest meeting up.
I really committed myself to solving this for myself a few years back. It does take commitment.
A few things I’ve done that work:
1. Start a “Dad’s night” with people in my neighborhood. We picked Wednesday night from 9 - 10pm. Started out just as BYOB in my back yard. Eventually we periodically went to a local pub that was near the neighborhood.
When you have kids of a certain age, it’s inconsiderate to bail on your wife while the kids are still awake. The hard time limit keeps it easy for anybody during the work week. Doing it mid week keeps weekend plans from getting in the way.
Lots of dads were thrilled to have this. The trick is consistent scheduling even if you have some weeks with no shows. That’s why starting it in my back yard was easiest until we regularly had about 8 people showing up. Doesn’t put you out if nobody can make it. Don’t get your feelings hurt because things like this start slow.
Covid killed it, but most of those guys became a Friday lunch group instead.
2. If you can, a cheap poker night. Like $10 buy in so the point is more to hang out than to loot your neighbors coffers and it keeps it accessible for people who have never played. This probably works for most games, but poker is such a broadly played game that it’s not that intimidating. Works in all weather conditions and works well with a sporting event on TV in the background.
Again, the key is consistent scheduling.
For either of these options, make sure people know they can bring a friend if they think they’ll get along with the group.
3. Take up golf. I haven’t done this but I know enough people who have. It works. Join a country club and play regularly. They’ll pair you up with people and groups. It’s not for everybody, but works well for lots of people.
4. Join a church with adult Sunday school. Free and easy way to meet people in your community. Usually comes with family friendly activities around community service too.
5. Get involved with local tech communities and meetup groups.
I made my first new friend in years simply by… asking. Struck up a conversation with a guy in line for coffee, on my way out of the cafe went up, gave him my number, said I was looking to make new friends.
The world is more like the playground than you might think. Just ask if someone wants to be friends. They probably do.
I'm 37. Any time I strike up a conversation with someone new who seems like an interesting person, I end the conversation by asking to exchange contacts. In the context I live in, that usually means scanning a WhatsApp QR code, or asking for an Instagram or Telegram ID. Then I invite them to the next suitable thing I want to do. I make 3-5 new friends a week this way. Of course, not all of them become close, reliable friends, but I'm never alone, and the ones I click most with become closer friends over time.
One thing that can help people do this is to realize that not everyone will actually become a friend. I've done similar things - only to later realize that, nah, we don't really click. And then we drift apart, and never see each other again.
And that's fine! But the friends I have made and kept have been worth it.
TBH, I thought this was a pretty empty article. It seemed to rehash things that I believe most people are aware of regarding the difficulty of making friends once you hit adulthood. Thus, I'll add one piece of advice that I didn't see mentioned in the article or the comments.
Beyond just having unstructured time together, I think I made some of my best friends when I was in a group that had a common goal, and we had to work together to achieve that goal. While the common goal actually isn't the most important factor in making friends, I think it provides the framework that makes the "unstructured" time so much more natural, easy, and regular. E.g. joining a sports team provides the framework of regular practice, but then you can make great friends getting something to eat after. Or in a community theater group, the rehearsals provides the structure, but it's all the downtime where you really get to build friendships.
I mention this because I so often here the advice of "join a group of other people with shared interests", and while that's true, I've found that is it's too "laissez faire", then the normal pressures of adult life can often get in the way, and it's harder to connect. E.g. a book club is nice, but when you get really busy it's easy to just bail and not feel as connected to the folks in the club.
I confess I largely stopped paying attention after the "as a kid, it was easy" comment.
As a kid, having playmates was easyish but having friends was tricky. As an ND intellectual multilingual round peg in a town of unilingual anti-everything square holes, I had acquaintances but no good friends until high school, one or two then, none in uni, though there were sufficient like-minded people that it mattered less, and, from then until 10 years ago, at most one or two.
In late 2014 I bought a Jeep and joined a hardcore offroad group (rocks, not mud). They are the most diverse group I've ever hung with, and I have half a dozen people I would consider close friends and rather more who would drop everything and drive 50km in a snow storm if I needed help.
I lucked out. But to say it was ever easy is misaligned with my experience.
I made lots of friends (and eventually my wife and best man at my wedding) in my early 30s by first joining a meetup group and eventually becoming the organizer for it. It was disbanded a few years ago (before Covid), but I still hang out with the 13 or so people I met in the group. The group lasted almost 8 years.
I had work friends in my 20s, but it was always difficult for me to make new friends after college. Joining a common-interest meetup group made it so much easier. I find the key is to meet weekly and in-person. If you don't do this, you just won't be able to put the time in to actually have a real friend.
It would be nice if it was as easy for adults as it is for kids. My daughter will go up to another kid and say "Do you want to be my friend?" and they will play all day together.
Children have it easy because they are made to go to school. It's simple forced proximity. Adults often had it easier in the past because people needed each other more, and that placed them together.
But advancing technology takes that away. People need each other less and less with each passing day because we are too self-sufficient with technology. AI is the final step that will make friendships very hard to form indeed.
You just need a shared interest or objective in as close to 'real life' as you can get it, and you need to dedicate time to it that you would otherwise give to TV and doom-scrolling.
Gamers make real friends. Open source enthusiasts can make real friends. Music fans can make real friends (though your local scene is considerably better for this).
It does take management and maintenance, and if you're a single person then covid lockdowns will have broken many ties; I am definitely a more insular person than I was before.
But stop wasting your time watching TV, make a plan to make your social media more focussed on local activities and less focussed on personal drama, and try to be part of something a bit bigger than yourself. Get a dog, maybe.
For me it went something like: I'm lonely > try to make friends > it's hard, but wait I already have friends > try to reconnect with old friends > for various reasons old friends don't want to/can't be friends > try to make new friends > wait I want my old friends > not going to happen > volunteering
I used to be like this! then I figured out the reason what makes making new friends hard, I became more relaxed hanging out and reaching out to new friends, now I can enjoy both new and old friends' accompany, tho I'm still working on making myself more comfortable making friends.
It feels like there's nothing of substance in this article.
My own addition to this beyond the "we need third spaces", etc. that gets repeated is that I believe where you live has a huge influence that maybe scales in a way that is not tangible to a person who hasn't experienced it. My life in NYC is wildly different than what it was back on the west coast. I struggled to make friends in Portland, Seattle, and SF. I found that those cities were not just lacking friendliness but somewhat actively hostile towards building friendships. Seattle having the "Seattle Freeze", SF being full of introverted fobs who had a disdain for anything that wasn't their own culture, and Portland being against anything that wasn't anticomformist.
By no means is NYC perfect, it is far from it, but it has allowed me to meet a lot of people who are completely open to meeting new people and making new friends. Will these be friends I have for the rest of my life? Probably not but they sure do make the time pass more easily. I do find it has a "quality" issue when it comes to friendships but I think that is somewhat also due to the sheer volume of people I am thrown. What is alarming to me about NYC is how many people who are native to this region are willing to make new friends. It almost felt that with any place that I lived on the west coast, it was almost a given that you'd never make friends with locals because once they found their little insular group then they'd never branch out of it and never make new friends. It created an overall unwelcoming environment because everyone didn't want to ever try anything new.
Anyway, just my two cents. Different cities even within the same country can yield wildly different results. I will miss the accessibility of friendship when I do inevitably move back to the bay area to start a family - but I am hoping I will be so focused on my immediate family that I will not be too bothered by the loneliness of not having as many easily accessible friendships.
Just suggesting because I don't see it here: foreign language group classes. I would say groups are pretty good for beginner level. But you are trading a bit of learning efficiency for the social aspect, arguably
This one is hard to get right. At the end of a class, I'd often be too tired to talk to them more. And it has to be a smallish, very interactive class.
But the diversity of people you find is awesome. I loved getting out of the tech bubble by meeting people who were learning the local language. Owners of kebab stores, nurses, waiters, and more.
I came to California, in part, because my family in the Midwest is a bunch of Jesus freaks - not the "love thy neighbor" kind, more like the "God hates fags" kind. So when a girlfriend (in California) invited me to her church for some volunteer work, I went prepared to hate on everyone. However, I was blown away, as they were the nicest people I'd ever met in my life. They all went out of their way to help one another, just to be helpful, not to destroy the "gay agenda" or "save the unborn" or whatever. No one preached to me, no warnings about burning in hell.
My point is that, love it or hate it, church can be a great way to meet good people. I'm still anti-religion, anti-church, although a bit less. But I can't deny the social support church can provide.
Friends and people to have fun with are not the same thing.
The older you get, the less you trust people because you know what you and those you grew up with have become.
You got deep insights into decades of politics, dark patterns in engineering, and fraud and lies everywhere. All that is done by people, who are either like you or not. In any case, it's hard to trust any of them, especially if you have kids and you understand how all these people turned into what they are now. That's up to 13% of the population, I estimate, who, if you are more honest than corrupting (in the worse sense), can simply be dropped after one or two conversations and evenings. Move on as quickly as possible, don't let them occupy any space whatsoever in your mind.
Radical honesty, trusting your gut and acting on it when it comes to people and most other things goes a long way and saves you decades of time, brain power, nerves and rewards you with so much peace of mind. If it's not an honest match, fuck it. There's a million other people.
But that must not necessarily matter when it's about just having fun. Just a getting a few good licks out of an evening and being human works with anyone. It's in everyone's interest to let shitty people pay for their sexual gratification, though. Their 'bad boy' or 'bad girl'-vibes are just a facade, a charade, a bad act and any intimate time with them is worth much less than the average sex toy.
I have a few board game groups I belong to. We occasionally also do things outside of board games. So, for me it was finding a common interest.
Another factor, for me, is being married. My wife has a lot of friends. They go on walks together, have regular Ladies Lunches were they try different restaurants in the area. I've become friends with some of the other husbands when we do things together as couples. Everything from movies, to holiday parties, to escape rooms, to board game nights (party games), to murder mystery dinners, etc.
I barely have any friends. Being a single father is incredibly isolating.
Doing group activities is the key, but finding a group that can include me and my son is very rare. Also, our neighbors are incredibly impolite. We're hoping to move homes soon, and I am hoping the change in perspective will have a good impact. So I would add neighborhood community also has an impact on socializing.
I co-parent so can relate somewhat. I do get every other week to myself - but it's really hard to be a regular when you can only go every other week (similar issues with dating). I don't really have an answer - it's something I'm still trying to figure out.
For me a huge challenge is that I grew older (college years) in an environment where people were strongly convinced that opinions and tastes can only be right or wrong. If someone liked something else than the group, they just didn't see the truth. It was exhausting and also meant that "finding friends" basically meant trying to find someone who likes and values exactly the same things as you.
I learned pretty late that you can get along very well with people who have vastly different taste and as long as your ideals are not directly contradicting, it still works.
So I guess my suggestion is: don't artificially limit your pool of potential friends by looking for the perfect match. No need to find your soul-copy. Someone with whom concersation flows is just fine.
If you make a little effort it gets easier once you hit 50s or 60s. People in their 30s and 40s are very busy with family and work. This changes once kids are gone and people near or have reached retirement.
[+] [-] prhn|1 year ago|reply
Making connections with people you're around frequently is easy. The problem is that adult life doesn't throw you into those situations post-college outside of work.
Now it's on you. Find a group. Sports are the easiest. You will absolutely make strong, long lasting friendships if you play sports. It doesn't matter if you're athletic or talented.
You just gotta show up and see the same people every week over and over. If you're a reasonably well adjusted person (and even that sometimes doesn't matter) you will make friends.
Again, making connections and friends is easy. Being around the same people regularly is difficult. Solve that problem and the friendships will come with little effort.
I have found that people generally understand the value of friendship and are welcoming to newcomers. It's been a very refreshing surprise as I've gotten older.
Get out there!
[+] [-] phil21|1 year ago|reply
For this reason I think WFH is a massively more risky social experiment than most realize. It works for folks who were either already inclined to "go out and do things" or those who already had established social groups. We will see how this pans out in a generation or two.
Having to have everything scheduled weeks in advance is utterly exhausting and incredibly anxiety inducing to me. If I didn't already have friends I could do spontaneous things with, I'm not sure how I'd be able to have any sort of social life at all. I certainly am not alone in this, even if I'm a minority.
[+] [-] jokellum|1 year ago|reply
> Again, making connections and friends is easy. Being around the same people regularly is difficult.
Agreed, 90% of the difficulty making new friends is showing at the same place/event regularly. Remaining 10% is actually being someone people want to be friends with.
[+] [-] CalChris|1 year ago|reply
Then I sailed, crewed raceboats. I got to know many people quite well. There's a lot of social coordination and communication in sailing. Just sitting on the rail on an upwind beat is a conversation, the same conversation every time but like chicken soup for the soul. Also a good crew is lot like a startup. Not easy to break into but worth it.
[+] [-] PicassoCTs|1 year ago|reply
That the processes we are part of have one purpose and one purpose only when it comes to social life, to force everyone to invest there whole social life into a company ? That half the apps written here, are to divide and conquer society and use the created misery and loneliness for additional upsales of the withheld happiness? That companies are actively antagonistic to anybody having friends and friendships?
[+] [-] eximius|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cosmic_cheese|1 year ago|reply
Since then I’ve moved which has enabled a massive CoL reduction which is great, but at the same time I’m not sure this is where I want to be for even the next 5-10 years and so I’ve been resistant to putting down roots. Needing to drive to do anything also doesn’t help, as I find driving on anything but practically empty roads unpleasant.
There may be a pedestrian/cyclist-friendly city with great public transportation in my future, and so if I make a point to go out and do things consistently it’ll probably be there.
[+] [-] aqme28|1 year ago|reply
There’s a second part to this though. You have to put in some effort to break people out of “club friend” into “real life friend.” Make plans and invite them.
[+] [-] nullderef|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jvm___|1 year ago|reply
"Meet Saturday morning 6:30am" is the group you want. Show up, run, be friendly. 6 months from now you'll have 10-50 friends.
[+] [-] moribvndvs|1 year ago|reply
Another factor that is important is being open-minded, whether that means being a little more willing to explore things that aren’t your wheelhouse or being tolerant of behaviors or lines of thinking that aren’t natural to you. That doesn’t mean you need to pretend to be someone you loathe or surround yourself with insufferable people, but instead find a way to deal with averse concepts in a constructive way, to be just flexible enough to find an enjoyable common ground. Walk away if there isn’t any, or it isn’t worth the effort you have to put in.
I think too many people think friendship is what happens between people that are the same, and it happens magically and effortlessly. Friendship is work, always. Some people are just less work or pay higher dividends than others. You need patience and the ability to know when a friendship costs more than it’s worth. I think we just tend to have less patience, energy, and flexibility as we get older, but some of that is a choice.
[+] [-] xmprt|1 year ago|reply
I feel like there's a curve where in college people are super open to making friends until mid-late 20s where friend groups are well established/people are focused on their careers and then people are more open to making friends again in mid 30s where people lose touch with old friends and are looking to make new ones (either through kids or other shared activities).
[+] [-] SergeAx|1 year ago|reply
I second that. I started dancing social Argentinian tango at about 35, first just visiting classes, then practicas, then milongas. I now have more friends from there than from my school and university years.
[+] [-] __rito__|1 year ago|reply
Also know that things outside of sports work great too, like amateur chess/photography club, local library reading groups, local hackers' club, voluntary organisations, etc.
I am saying this from experience. And will recommend.
[+] [-] tiffanyh|1 year ago|reply
I ask because your friend group will radically be shaped by who you’d kids friends are.
[+] [-] kwar13|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] PittleyDunkin|1 year ago|reply
This is obviously great advice, but most groups don't organically sprout around interests. Sports, especially, are something that I have a very difficult time imagining enjoying. And with the slow enshittification of meetup, where do you find these groups? Your local library?
[+] [-] downut|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] timoth3y|1 year ago|reply
I think the larger problem is that many approach friendship with the wrong expectations. As Zig Ziglar said.
"If you going out trying to find a friend, friends are scarce. If you go out trying to be a friend, friends are everywhere."
[+] [-] snakeyjake|1 year ago|reply
My brain solidified late, in my late 30s, but it did eventually solidify and when it did something like a switch or circuit breaker flipped and I came to this conclusion
I'm going to pretend that I came to it independently.
I have more, closer, friends in my 40s than I did at any time in my life previously.
I don't even know how it happened, I think that I just stopped caring about any potential for embarrassment and I learned that a good conversation is equal parts statements and questions.
[+] [-] maroonblazer|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] brightball|1 year ago|reply
A few things I’ve done that work:
1. Start a “Dad’s night” with people in my neighborhood. We picked Wednesday night from 9 - 10pm. Started out just as BYOB in my back yard. Eventually we periodically went to a local pub that was near the neighborhood.
When you have kids of a certain age, it’s inconsiderate to bail on your wife while the kids are still awake. The hard time limit keeps it easy for anybody during the work week. Doing it mid week keeps weekend plans from getting in the way.
Lots of dads were thrilled to have this. The trick is consistent scheduling even if you have some weeks with no shows. That’s why starting it in my back yard was easiest until we regularly had about 8 people showing up. Doesn’t put you out if nobody can make it. Don’t get your feelings hurt because things like this start slow.
Covid killed it, but most of those guys became a Friday lunch group instead.
2. If you can, a cheap poker night. Like $10 buy in so the point is more to hang out than to loot your neighbors coffers and it keeps it accessible for people who have never played. This probably works for most games, but poker is such a broadly played game that it’s not that intimidating. Works in all weather conditions and works well with a sporting event on TV in the background.
Again, the key is consistent scheduling.
For either of these options, make sure people know they can bring a friend if they think they’ll get along with the group.
3. Take up golf. I haven’t done this but I know enough people who have. It works. Join a country club and play regularly. They’ll pair you up with people and groups. It’s not for everybody, but works well for lots of people.
4. Join a church with adult Sunday school. Free and easy way to meet people in your community. Usually comes with family friendly activities around community service too.
5. Get involved with local tech communities and meetup groups.
[+] [-] comprev|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] wkirby|1 year ago|reply
The world is more like the playground than you might think. Just ask if someone wants to be friends. They probably do.
[+] [-] yosito|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mettamage|1 year ago|reply
This comment will help me. I used to talk to people in line, despite being a bit shy and sometimes socially anxious.
My shyness and anxiety can take a hike. I feel upset enough to block them out.
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|1 year ago|reply
And that's fine! But the friends I have made and kept have been worth it.
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|1 year ago|reply
Beyond just having unstructured time together, I think I made some of my best friends when I was in a group that had a common goal, and we had to work together to achieve that goal. While the common goal actually isn't the most important factor in making friends, I think it provides the framework that makes the "unstructured" time so much more natural, easy, and regular. E.g. joining a sports team provides the framework of regular practice, but then you can make great friends getting something to eat after. Or in a community theater group, the rehearsals provides the structure, but it's all the downtime where you really get to build friendships.
I mention this because I so often here the advice of "join a group of other people with shared interests", and while that's true, I've found that is it's too "laissez faire", then the normal pressures of adult life can often get in the way, and it's harder to connect. E.g. a book club is nice, but when you get really busy it's easy to just bail and not feel as connected to the folks in the club.
[+] [-] PeterWhittaker|1 year ago|reply
As a kid, having playmates was easyish but having friends was tricky. As an ND intellectual multilingual round peg in a town of unilingual anti-everything square holes, I had acquaintances but no good friends until high school, one or two then, none in uni, though there were sufficient like-minded people that it mattered less, and, from then until 10 years ago, at most one or two.
In late 2014 I bought a Jeep and joined a hardcore offroad group (rocks, not mud). They are the most diverse group I've ever hung with, and I have half a dozen people I would consider close friends and rather more who would drop everything and drive 50km in a snow storm if I needed help.
I lucked out. But to say it was ever easy is misaligned with my experience.
[+] [-] billy99k|1 year ago|reply
I had work friends in my 20s, but it was always difficult for me to make new friends after college. Joining a common-interest meetup group made it so much easier. I find the key is to meet weekly and in-person. If you don't do this, you just won't be able to put the time in to actually have a real friend.
It would be nice if it was as easy for adults as it is for kids. My daughter will go up to another kid and say "Do you want to be my friend?" and they will play all day together.
[+] [-] vouaobrasil|1 year ago|reply
But advancing technology takes that away. People need each other less and less with each passing day because we are too self-sufficient with technology. AI is the final step that will make friendships very hard to form indeed.
[+] [-] throw646577|1 year ago|reply
You just need a shared interest or objective in as close to 'real life' as you can get it, and you need to dedicate time to it that you would otherwise give to TV and doom-scrolling.
Gamers make real friends. Open source enthusiasts can make real friends. Music fans can make real friends (though your local scene is considerably better for this).
It does take management and maintenance, and if you're a single person then covid lockdowns will have broken many ties; I am definitely a more insular person than I was before.
But stop wasting your time watching TV, make a plan to make your social media more focussed on local activities and less focussed on personal drama, and try to be part of something a bit bigger than yourself. Get a dog, maybe.
[+] [-] neom|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] changexd|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bradlys|1 year ago|reply
My own addition to this beyond the "we need third spaces", etc. that gets repeated is that I believe where you live has a huge influence that maybe scales in a way that is not tangible to a person who hasn't experienced it. My life in NYC is wildly different than what it was back on the west coast. I struggled to make friends in Portland, Seattle, and SF. I found that those cities were not just lacking friendliness but somewhat actively hostile towards building friendships. Seattle having the "Seattle Freeze", SF being full of introverted fobs who had a disdain for anything that wasn't their own culture, and Portland being against anything that wasn't anticomformist.
By no means is NYC perfect, it is far from it, but it has allowed me to meet a lot of people who are completely open to meeting new people and making new friends. Will these be friends I have for the rest of my life? Probably not but they sure do make the time pass more easily. I do find it has a "quality" issue when it comes to friendships but I think that is somewhat also due to the sheer volume of people I am thrown. What is alarming to me about NYC is how many people who are native to this region are willing to make new friends. It almost felt that with any place that I lived on the west coast, it was almost a given that you'd never make friends with locals because once they found their little insular group then they'd never branch out of it and never make new friends. It created an overall unwelcoming environment because everyone didn't want to ever try anything new.
Anyway, just my two cents. Different cities even within the same country can yield wildly different results. I will miss the accessibility of friendship when I do inevitably move back to the bay area to start a family - but I am hoping I will be so focused on my immediate family that I will not be too bothered by the loneliness of not having as many easily accessible friendships.
[+] [-] ydnaclementine|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nullderef|1 year ago|reply
But the diversity of people you find is awesome. I loved getting out of the tech bubble by meeting people who were learning the local language. Owners of kebab stores, nurses, waiters, and more.
[+] [-] jsnsnd|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jimt1234|1 year ago|reply
My point is that, love it or hate it, church can be a great way to meet good people. I'm still anti-religion, anti-church, although a bit less. But I can't deny the social support church can provide.
[+] [-] bware0fsocdmg|1 year ago|reply
The older you get, the less you trust people because you know what you and those you grew up with have become.
You got deep insights into decades of politics, dark patterns in engineering, and fraud and lies everywhere. All that is done by people, who are either like you or not. In any case, it's hard to trust any of them, especially if you have kids and you understand how all these people turned into what they are now. That's up to 13% of the population, I estimate, who, if you are more honest than corrupting (in the worse sense), can simply be dropped after one or two conversations and evenings. Move on as quickly as possible, don't let them occupy any space whatsoever in your mind.
Radical honesty, trusting your gut and acting on it when it comes to people and most other things goes a long way and saves you decades of time, brain power, nerves and rewards you with so much peace of mind. If it's not an honest match, fuck it. There's a million other people.
But that must not necessarily matter when it's about just having fun. Just a getting a few good licks out of an evening and being human works with anyone. It's in everyone's interest to let shitty people pay for their sexual gratification, though. Their 'bad boy' or 'bad girl'-vibes are just a facade, a charade, a bad act and any intimate time with them is worth much less than the average sex toy.
[+] [-] irrational|1 year ago|reply
Another factor, for me, is being married. My wife has a lot of friends. They go on walks together, have regular Ladies Lunches were they try different restaurants in the area. I've become friends with some of the other husbands when we do things together as couples. Everything from movies, to holiday parties, to escape rooms, to board game nights (party games), to murder mystery dinners, etc.
[+] [-] adamredwoods|1 year ago|reply
Doing group activities is the key, but finding a group that can include me and my son is very rare. Also, our neighbors are incredibly impolite. We're hoping to move homes soon, and I am hoping the change in perspective will have a good impact. So I would add neighborhood community also has an impact on socializing.
[+] [-] nvarsj|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] applied_heat|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bleakenthusiasm|1 year ago|reply
I learned pretty late that you can get along very well with people who have vastly different taste and as long as your ideals are not directly contradicting, it still works.
So I guess my suggestion is: don't artificially limit your pool of potential friends by looking for the perfect match. No need to find your soul-copy. Someone with whom concersation flows is just fine.
[+] [-] rqtwteye|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] robocat|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jessekv|1 year ago|reply
As an adult, you have to do that bit yourself. (Thanks mom!)
[+] [-] someothherguyy|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ta12653421|1 year ago|reply