One anecdatum: I simply lost most interest in having friends by 25. I lost the rest when I had a kid. Now my friends are my daughter’s friends parents. I don’t really like them, I just end up chit chatting with them while our daughters play.
Same. I had friends, but I don't have time for them and frankly my quality of life isn't suffering yet. I suppose this is something I might regret when I'm 60, but for now I can't be bothered.
You probably will regret it much earlier than that but from the sound of it you made up your mind for now. Many friends fell into such a deep pit when their kids moved out or something else disturbed their life. Old friends aint coming back and new real friends are hard to make for most after 30. Then again, everyone is different so maybe you will not have that issue.
I have never had a particularly hard time making friends. Then again most of my close friends are in their 60s or 70s now, so they won't be there for me in my 60s no matter how much energy I devote to maintaining the friendship.
Yeah, by 30 you probably have a partner, kids, and a high pressure job that you started after you got the kids (so you've never spent much time socializing with your current peers). You have no energy left for socialising and building/maintaining friendships.
Are you male? I don't want to assume. But as a woman this is something that really concerns me about the guys I and my friends date. I see my father doing the same thing. Once they get into a stable relationship they seem to think that there's no need for a social life beyond their girlfriend, coworkers, and maybe one or two very close old friends... but those old friends tend to drift away.
The reason it bothers me is because these men end up overrelying on their girlfriend or wife for both emotional support and to manage their social life. Without the woman doing it for them, they get angry, misanthropic, and antisocial due to not having an outlet - and they don't see it as a problem at all. But their families get to watch them become more unpleasant and withdrawn as time goes by.
This is something I find really hard to talk about with the men I see doing it, especially when it's my own partner. Obviously it's not all men. But my dad DEFINITELY does it, and the result is that he's gone from being a fairly open-minded, liberal, and environmental kind of person to someone who can't seem to talk about anything other than guns, American politics (we're not even American), and the "idiotic" policies of our local politicians. He recites stuff he's heard on TV as if it's gospel truth. It seems impossible to have normal, non-political conversations with him anymore, he just doesn't have any knowledge or interest that doesn't come from TV.
He's my dad and I love him, but needless to say, when I see my partners going down the same path, it freaks me out. Sorry, I know that's a lot to extrapolate from your very short comment, but maybe it's just something to think about.
Wow, you know that certainly made ME think and also made me flash back to the face my wife pulled when I remarked how my lack of friends doesn't bother me.
Perhaps it should.
I'm an immigrant too, although no language issues, so I have lots of friends in my home country and not many here, a lot of those were expats or work connected and the rest are via my wife and her work - she didn't grow up around here either but is American.
I'd hate to go down that road you talked about and I've seen people do so. We've not been able to have kids either so don't have that path of getting out of our bubble.
This is one of my fastest upvoted comments ever. I think it struck a chord. There's no way of knowing whether it was men or women upvoting, but I have a feeling I'm not the only who has had these thoughts.
I upvoted and while I’m a woman I don’t feel the same at all. I just thought it was an interesting point of view that certainly explains a few behaviors (although not my grumpy dad’s!)
my guess is a fair amount of the upvotes were from men. deep down i think men do realize that we have gaps in our coping skills, but don't fully understand the cause.
The cause is that “society” expects that to “grow up” a man must give up his hobbies and his friends and “settle down” (provide for a family as sole purpose in life).
Someone will say “that’s how the patriarchy harms men too!” But I don’t think I believe that; I don’t think men say “hey bro, we should totally just give up all that cool stuff we do, for no reason”.
Inverted for me, I have more friends than my partner (via tech meetups and chess club), she's a home bod by nature and only really seems to like going out with me.
I've suggested a few times (gently) that she take her work mates up on their offer of going for a meal (I gather one of the women at work is in a similar boat), I'm introverted by nature so I only socialize in settings where there is a distraction (tech and chess as mentioned) but it's enough social life for me.
I don't really need anyone to bare my soul too, I've always handled that stuff myself.
What precisely bothers you? That he changed his politics or that he's lost his friends? I'm not sure these are that related. I moved when I married and though I see fewer friends now and have fewer locally, those I would have here are far closer to the political spectrum you don't seem to like, as it is the case for many city dwellers who move out to the burbs for more space and cheaper housing.
In your father's case it might be because he has no other emotional outlet. But as a male with a decent social life I still don't feel comfortable making my friends an emotional outlet. I'd rather not talk to them about things that are frustrating me or making me feel stressed. So my significant other still gets the brunt of that.
In fact most of my male friends also don't get too deep in discussing their feelings. So it might not just be a lack of friendship, but a deeper problem which is men having a hard time discussing their emotions with others.
There is talking about being angry primary with wife and then there is not talking much except seemingly random outburst of anger or other unpleasantness. I think that parent talked about the latter, when you are annoying and mean without talking about why, but expect other people to be nice to you because you feel bad.
> I think that parent talked about the latter, when you are annoying and mean without talking about why, but expect other people to be nice to you because you feel bad.
Correct. My dad is not angry with my mom or any particular person. He just gets cranky and grumpy if my mom doesn't socialize him.
What emotions, though? He just sounds like an angry person. I am sure dealing with that is a burden on your mom, but an angry person is going to be a burden no matter how many friends they have.
Few people are simply angry. There’s usually some strong emotional attachment to something. All emotions have a root cause. Having a way to process and ultimately let go of such negative attachments is crucial to overcoming things like chronic anger. Therapy/meds are valid options.
My suggested antidote is involvement in civic groups. Neighborhood associations, block watch/civilian patrols, volunteer fire dept., Lion's club, Rotary club, Library board, school board, etc. These are very productive channels for adult male socializing, because they provide a healthy pretense to satisfy the masculine desire to be useful and important to the community, without ostensibly showing the need social bonds which many men might feel shows weakness.
> Are you male? I don't want to assume. But as a woman this is something that really concerns me about the guys I and my friends date. I see my father doing the same thing. Once they get into a stable relationship they seem to think that there's no need for a social life beyond their girlfriend, coworkers, and maybe one or two very close old friends... but those old friends tend to drift away.
Sounds like me!
I don't want more than a couple of good friends. Anything more than that isn't friends, it's acquaintances with delusions of grandeur. That ends up leaving most of the pushing for socialization on my wife's plate, because ... I don't.
That said, I find that women maintaining the social relationships is a bit more stereotype than truth. I know more than a few women that are also pretty shit at it, and they're doubly embarrassed because they don't feel like they're fulfilling their gender role.
I fit into your group of males in a stable relationship with no friends beyond that. But I'm an introspective sort of person and I find it more interesting to interact with random strangers on the Internet than I ever would with a friend who I already knew everything about. I'd probably run out of anything to say to any particular person after a while that isn't repetitive.
That doesn't mean I'm going to get sucked into to some kind of tribe like a political party or a religion. Or maybe it's just as accurate to say I already got sucked into a scientific outlook and scepticism at a young age and now find it impossible to escape.
I'm not being snarky, but the converse is that I tend to see a lot of women over-relying on their girlfriends and groups of acquaintances for emotional support and their social life. The concern is this has a big impact on some couples relationships for the worse.
Society gives adults little time to themselves. Most of your adult, waking hours are at work. But it’s imperative to keep some distance between work and personal life. So a large majority of your adult life is blocked out from genuine social connections.
Our days and hours are very scarce resources...almost all taken from us. I think the Spanish accommodated this by decreasing their daily work hours. If the US did that the US would employ more people, more meaningfully, and benefit from increased social “health”.
You just made me take a long look at my current trajectory. Very thought provoking. Indeed, I can see a distinct split in the people in my life who are in group A (closed off, social life is family dependent) and those in group B.
I barely hang out with friends anymore; I do see it as a problem, but the punchline of the article rings true to me (first night both men are available is in 3 months).
For a while I would make friends with people in their early 20s, as that was the age group that would be randomly free after my kids were in bed. I'm approaching 40 now though and am not sure how socially acceptable this still is...
This is obviously a concern, but I think personality has a lot to do with it.
I haven't made new 'friends' because I just don't want more of a social life. I am a pretty strong introvert; I am loud and friendly and boisterous, but spending time with people tires me out.
During the week, I get up at 6am, spend time with my daughter while I get her ready for daycare. Then, I go to work, where I am talking and laughing and having fun with coworkers all day while I work. Then, I come home, picking up my daughter on the way home. We go for a walk, she tells me all sorts of stuff, and then I make dinner while my wife watches her. We eat, get our daughter to bed, and by then it is around 8pm or so. At this point I am tired, and just want to relax, maybe read or watch TV a bit, chat with my wife, and go to sleep. There is no way I would have the energy or time to socialize on weeknights; I am all socialed out from work. The few times we do have plans during the week, I dread it because I know how tired and unsocial I am going to feel.
On the weekends, I am spending time with my daughter and wife. In the morning, I will make us breakfast and we will either play outside or go for a hike. We then take her home for a nap, and we do chores around the house. I always feel like there is not enough time on the weekend to get everything done.
I have a few close friends who live far away; we all play video games together once a week. I chat with my family, and between my nieces and nephews on both sides, there are a lot of video chats to have.
How is this a bad thing? Why do I NEED more friends than what I have? I am not sure what more 'emotional support' I need; I am a super happy person, always optimistic, and my wife is there for me when I need her (which isn't super often). I also can talk to my parents and sister if I needed more emotional support, or my two close friends if they weren't around.
I don't think your dad's issue is lack of relationships, he just sounds like he is an angry person. Is he retired? Being retired is a WHOLE different dynamic.
In fact, the biggest thing I feel I am lacking is ALONE time to work on hobbies. Before I got married and had a kid, I had all sorts of fun hobbies I did; I built airplanes and helicopters, I built robots, programmed games for fun. I like building and designing stuff, alone in my workshop, but I don't have enough time now to do it very often. This is a fine sacrifice to make, because I love my family and want to spend time with them, but it isn't like I am sitting somewhere lonely.
I am curious, however, if there is something you think I am missing by not having more friends. I certainly can't see it, because the idea of having more friends that I have to visit and see just makes me feel tired even thinking about it.
That sounds like a really nice life honestly, and it sounds like if you need any emotional support you get it from your family or your few close friends. Some people need more than that, whether they realize it or not, though.
I can't say what you need, I don't know you. Maybe you could ask your wife if she thinks you need more friends? If she says something like "eh? Why?" then you're probably fine. But if you get a long pause and then, "Well, it wouldn't hurt..." then maybe you should ask her more questions.
I’d suggest you’re doing fine as you are. But I would also suggest making the time to talk to a therapist once a quarter or year, at least. Just so you’re not tempted to rely on your daughter or wife for emotional support that would be easier handled by a friend or therapist. Outside viewpoints help infinitely more than very close associations for many sorts of issues.
I would like to do activities and meet new people and have social life, but what will you choose - spending time with your kids or social life? I can't go for beer or travel or whatever while holding hand of toddler.
But people without children really have no excuse.
edit: to make things even worse if i go somewhere by myself with child, all i see are groups/cults of mothers discussing parenting stuff, it's very rare to see men, they are too busy working and it's very unlikely to make non romantic female friend
I don't know where you live, but in my town it's very common to bring children to have a beer. The local brewery even has complimentary diapers in the mens bathroom. I count myself lucky to have that as an option, but even if I didn't I would see if friends wanted to go down to the waterfront to have a beer and let my kiddo run around happy as can be.
Travel is certainly more difficult than it used to be, but I've found that the types of trips I used to turn my nose up at (all-inclusive resort-ish) are appealing in a completely new way. We can put the toddler down to bed, set up a baby monitor, and go down and enjoy ourselves like we're actually adults, often meeting new folks.
i think it's completely unheard in many European countries, you have family restaurants but that's not place to hang out with other and man looking after children it's still very rare
I am male but I don’t actually over emotionally depend on my wife, I am just a loner (I lost my interest in friends before I met my wife). My preference for time with my wife is about 30 minutes a day and my daughter about 2 hours a day. I’ll happily spend more than that but my preference would be a book or software project. The problem is that I won’t have a good support network in my old age though.
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things."
I kind of identify with your father. I am in my 40's and about to retire from the military. I do not have any "friends" that are not part of work even though I work with them every day. I don't know if I was ever liberal when I was younger but I have gone more right-wing so to speak. Although I have cut almost all news and TV. I mostly read the headlines and that is about it because just about everything is B.S. and nothing is going to change anyway.
I might even be suffering from some kind of ptsd or social anxiety or something, who knows. Just the thought of going out shopping or driving around makes me not want to even leave the house.
Oh, and I like guns to. But guns are part of my job.
I hope you think about it. You don't have to change your whole life. Just making a small change to be a little more social will probably help. Like, super, super small.
> I mostly read the headlines and that is about it because just about everything is B.S. and nothing is going to change anyway.
Feeling like that is a strong sign that your emotional resources are close to being overwhelmed. If you're a vet, hopefully you have access to counselling services. I hope you try going at least once or twice. Most people can use a few sessions of counselling, even if they're totally healthy.
I’ll be alright. I’m about to make a pretty big change retiring and all. It will either go really good or really bad.
Off topic but I will say that it is almost criminal how many drugs that the military gives you for problems. Went in for sleep issues and came out with about 8 different meds.
Worst case I’ll just move to Alaska and become a mountain man like Jeremiah Johnson. Just kidding...sort of.
I think that women tend to be better at creating and maintaining relationships (I'm not necessarily talking about romantic relationships here).
I also think that women tend to get more emotional support from their relationships. Men don't really get this (at least explicitly) from their friends. They do get it from their intimate partners. For a lot of men, their partner is the only person they ever 'open up to'.
In general, I think there are strong cultural (and possibly even biological) reasons for the different approach to and amount of emphasis men and women put on socialising. In some circumstances, being a bit of a social recluse can be advantageous (e.g. extreme dedication to particular pursuits such as a career), but in total I think that men as a group suffer for this tendency. They are much more likely to end up alone and lonely in later life (discounting the fact that women live longer). I think this probably plays a large part in the high suicide rates amongst older men.
I think that something that could be done to address this issue - and something that would benefit both men and women in a variety of ways - would be to focus on removing cultural and financial barriers that keep men away from their families and in the workplace. For example, we shouldn't talk about maternity or paternity leave, but instead parental leave. The financial security of families should not be seen as a man's responsibility, but a shared responsibility (this goes back to the seemingly intractable issue of the relationship between financial status and attractiveness of men). These are really ingrained cultural attitudes but we can chip away at them.
Focussing on some of these sorts of issues would be good for men's mental health and a much more productive means of levelling the earnings gap between men and women than focussing almost exclusively on sexist discrimination in the workplace - a red herring in many (but certainly not all) cases. As most people are aware, a significant part of the earnings gap is down to the responsibilities women take on outside of the workplace, such as caring for children and elderly relatives or supporting the local school. We should be looking at what it is that is holding men back from participating more fully in their community. I think by not doing this, many men are missing out on one of the fundamental aspects of being human.
Your comment is super important, I don't think everyone who read it realizes how elusive its warning is.
I'm young and already excuse myself by saying that I don't mind having just one or two close friends. But this is how it starts: we tend to think we can handle being mostly friendless, and yet, as we age, it seems that many of us can't.
Not sure what the solution is, but you've definitely underscored a big problem that I've (till now) underestimated. And I'm sure others have too.
> Once they get into a stable relationship they seem to think that there's no need for a social life beyond their girlfriend
Or is it that they seek a stable relationship because their social life was already starting to dwindle? And they fall back to letting their partner manage their social life because they simply wouldn't have one at all without that help.
I see it a lot in people I know. They didn't care one bit about having a stable relationship. That is until their friends started becoming busier in life, maybe some moved away for other commitments, and they started to feel lonelier and wanted someone who was going to be there for them.
All this becomes a vicious cycle as each time someone feels the group of friends is no longer able to satisfy their needs and they seek a partner, the group is fragmented even further, making it even more difficult to provide what the group needs. Eventually you reach the point where there isn't a group anymore.
While I don't know if I speak for many men, in my experience the best male friendships are comprised of multiple people. If you don't have that group, it is difficult to have the best kind of male friendship. That is not to say one-on-one friendships are bad or impossible, but it's just not quite the same.
I agree with everything you wrote except that you seem to be implying this is a male thing, when it is equally common for a woman to drop her friends once she is in a stable relationship and to become dependent on her partner for all social interaction (the suddenly codependent girlfriend is something almost all men experience at some point when dating). Later in life it sometimes manifests as an obsession with ones children at the expense of everything else. Suddenly all conversations are about the kids, etc. The phenomenon definitely applies equally to men and women.
It is not at all equally common, it is a known health risk for men that they are likely to have less social support than women, and it is one of the contributors to the very elevated mortality risk of becoming a widower compared to becoming a widow. Here’s a reference to a few older studies if you like - https://books.google.com/books?id=J3-78PdF83kC&pg=PA201&lpg=...
Social support and codependency are two different things. A codependent person will transfer their dependency to someone else. I was pointing out that codependent women drop their female friends just like some married men do.
Lots of supportive replies to this post, but I'm going to take a different tack - I think you may have pretty badly mis-diagnosed what's going on there.
Firstly, getting more conservative as you get older is normal. And having fewer friends as you get older is normal. There are even jokes about it. You are trying to link the changes in your fathers politics to not having many friends, but you haven't argued why there's a causation vs just being a correlation.
I strongly suspect from your wording that this is because you can't accept that your fathers new politics might have any substance to it. You certainly don't sound like you try to understand why he's angry: you described him as changing from "open minded" (good, positive, liberal) to "recites stuff he heard on TV" (bad, closed minded, conservative). Maybe he feels angry because when he tries to explain how he sees the world and what concerns him, his daughter dismisses him and looks down on him? That'd make any parent kind of upset.
Secondly, you seem to be implying that men over-rely on women for emotional support. Perhaps that's been your experience. As a man, in every relationship I've ever been in, the woman has heavily relied on me for emotional support. This is especially true when in a stable relationship. If anything, girlfriends seem to cause more emotional needs than they solve - a non-trivial amount of emotional support needs that come my way seem to boil down to dramas or blowups between girlfriends.
Finally, I'm not sure men see "no need for a social life" once they get in a relationship. That's a very odd belief. One sad reality is that once a man gets in a stable relationship, women tend to make it hard to sustain relationships with anyone else, whether men or women. This is a pattern I've seen over and over again. I don't think it's really planned or deliberate but it happens. The first to go are obviously any female friends. Many women can't handle their man having close female friends especially if they're single or might become so. But it's pretty common for women to disapprove of male friends too, or to get upset if the man spends too much time out drinking with his buddies instead of spending it with her. The inevitable result is that the man has to pick: friends or girlfriend.
Anyway. If you really want to rebuild your relationship with your father, I suggest a two pronged approach:
1) LISTEN to him when he talks about politics and even engage with him. Don't attack him or make it clear that you feel your own politics are morally and intellectually superior. Ask him why he feels guns are so important, try to see the world from his perspective. If he's always talking about things he heard on TV that implies those are the things that vex and concern him the most. You don't have to agree, but if he feels you're at least trying and can make peace with that, it'll help.
2) Stop trying to find explanations for the way he's changing, especially dubious correlation/causation mixups that boil down to sexist generalisations. People do change as they get older. Moreover the world changes, and young people who have a less fixed identity are often more willing to bend to fit whatever way the wind seems to be blowing. If someone's personality or beliefs don't change with time, that can look to a younger person as if the person's personality has changed when from their perspective it's actually the world that's changing and they stayed the same i.e. what you see as "open mindedness" is in reality just a willingness to accept whatever odd new modern idea comes along, even ideas that seem self-evidently nonsensical to your father.
I don't think that's gender related, though I don't have data to confirm this, only an anecdote. In my relationship it's the other way round - I'm usually the one responsible for organizing dinner with friends, nights out, trips etc. and my girlfriend can happily spend weeks at home without going out.
Did your mum take a break from paid work for raising you? I think this is a large (not sole) contributor to the effect (certainly in the past) - that women would often be raising children at home and naturally fall in to socialising amongst each other through their shared situation. Men, then will often focus on work to make up for not being at home, and to ensure a good household income -- which can lead to being too tired to socialise, which quickly leads to losing friends.
Would be interesting to see some stats to see if this narrative hypothesis is born out; do married/monogamously partnered men who become sole breadwinner lose more friends than those in other situations.
I'm male and in a long term stable relationship and my true friends are just as important to me as they ever were. They are like family to me.
On the flip side my girlfriend has decided she suddenly no longer has much interest in hanging out with her friends, which is concerning. I have solitary hobbies I enjoy, and I can't fill the gap that her friends have left.
Is it possible to have a discussion about anything without someone bringing politics to it?
> He's my dad and I love him, but needless to say, when I see my partners going down the same path, it freaks me out.
Your dad is your partner?
> It seems impossible to have normal, non-political conversations with him anymore, he just doesn't have any knowledge or interest that doesn't come from TV.
And here you are doing the same thing. How about not making everything political? Things are toxic as it is. Do you need to bring toxic politics to HN?
That's interesting. I'm a parent of 3yrs old boy, and can't force myself to start chit-chatting with other parents during e.g. parent-teacher meetings at his kindergarten. Maybe that's because I've decided to setup a family earlier than my colleagues and now I'm surrounded by parents who are ~ 5 years (at least) older than me.
I can’t seem to read this right now since I’m over my limit of free articles but I’ll say that Meetup.com has been really helpful to find interesting people in the same boat.
My recommendation to people is to find a meetup (doesn’t have to be from Meetup, could be a sports league, religious group, volunteering...) that meets frequently so that you have a chance to slowly get to know the same group of people over a course of time. I find meeting up once per month is a little too infrequent for growing bonds and prefer weekly/biweekly meetups but sometimes you end up meeting someone who you gel with and it’s easy to meetup many times over beyond the meetup interval.
Incognito holds onto cookies too (in a separate instance of course). Did you find a way to conveniently overcome that without causing the NYTimes not to work?
+1 - for anyone in the tech field (or even if you're not) that likes to meet some new people, join a few Meetup.com groups in your area and talk to random people inbetween the meetup sessions. 9/10 people will be a dud but I've ended up finding som really good friends via Meetup.
In a similar, but opposite direction, I've found (in my mid, now late 40's) that I really enjoy the company of my Dad's friends. They have interesting life stories, are brilliant, and I've got a wide enough range of interests that it is easy to find common ground.
Another +1. You just can't beat that collected wisdom. I've complained about something that seemed so menial, only for my friend to make a really insightful quip about a pattern he's seen in my work life that, although didn't map 100%, reflected more deeply paid attention than almost all of my friends in my 20-something age group.
My conversations with folks of that “era” always seem to be more diverse, interesting and surprising. You never know what direction the conversation will go when you meet someone new. I have a few hobbies where the practitioners tend toward older and through these activities met exceptional people. I love hearing about the the war, Woodstock, actual political change, the drug fueled 70s, etc. Interesting careers that you never knew even existed. I met a ferry pilot who flew private airplanes people just bought internationally to their new owners! I could listen to that guy’s stories for hours.
Contrast that with my interactions with people my own age and younger: Topics inevitably fall to vapid TV shows and sports, celebrity gossip, This Gadget I Bought, where I partied last week, my office co-workers suck, etc. Wake me up when it’s over!
The thing though is that I want a peer. I want someone with a similar outlook on life who I can muddle through life with. The people you describe all sound like fascinating characters, but they're not peers.
I'm 33, and I don't even see people my age as peers. I'm still a big kid at heart, and when I see people my age who are getting married, having kids, climbing the career ladder, it just reinforces that people my age just aren't my peers. I have no interest in ever getting married or having kids, and I have no career ambition. I identify more with people who are a decade younger than me than anyone else. Most people I've seen who are my age come off as more peers to my parents than as peers to me (this was especially jarring the last time I visited my cousins; they're only a few years older than me, but they have three kids each now, they reminded me so much of my mom, while I still see myself as an overgrown kid... by the time their children are old enough to have conversations with I'll probably have more in common with them than with any family members of my generation).
I'm a child-free man. My best friend of 12 years is a mother of 2, and 10 years older than me. We're extremely similar people, with extremely similar interests. We just have completely different daily lives. I'd really struggle to think of her as not a peer. But my identification goes in the opposite direction - I identify more more older people. So it's possible you could find peers among 20-somethings?
For the record, it's not that I see _every_ person who has kids as "not a peer", just most of them. The few I do see as peers are by and large the people who had kids by accident and didn't spend their whole lives dreaming of being a parent.
Oh dear God, no. 20-somethings... have a bit of living to do before they're interesting.
Don't get me wrong, being 20 is awesome. When you're 20. Because you suddenly have so much freedom. But when you're in your 40s, that's not that exciting any more. Well, at least it isn't for me. I've done the crazy things, I know how they end. I like friends with a bit more perspective.
Honestly, what I want is someone like me to muddle through life with.
And simply put, most people over 30 aren't going to be "like me" in the least. Most of them are family-minded, career-minded, or both. I'm just not going to have much in common with someone who's married and either has kids or is trying to have kids, nor am I going to have anything in common with someone who's trying to aggressively climb the career ladder.
The people I have the most in common with and see as peers are by and large slackers in their 20s, not people my age. I'm 33, and the disconnect between me and most people my age is really jarring... I see most people my age as having more in common with my parents than me (this was especially noticeable the last time I saw my cousins in person... they're only a few years older than me, but they act just like my mom did at their age, while I'm still a big kid... I really feel like most people of my generation are effectively of an older generation).
Anecdotal but, I'm 36 and I made the most friends I have ever made in my life in the last two years. From doing the conference/retreat circuit to, surprisingly, the festival circuit (Burning Man, Gratitude Migration, etc.) I've made a lot of close, real, amazing friends
Yeah, I don't think this is exactly rocket science. I'm a pretty introverted and socially anxious person normally (so I don't like hanging out at random parties or talking to complete strangers or whatever) but I've made quite a lot of new friends consistently year over year. All it takes is putting in a bit of effort to do it. Engage in a few activities now and then, keep in touch with people, organize a thing once in a while. It turns out you can make lots of friends via friends of friends, coworkers, people you meet through various activities, etc.
If you put no effort into it of course nobody is just going to randomly insert themselves into your life. And as you get older you don't have those common experiences of intermingling with lots of other people of similar ages or demographic backgrounds due to school, growing up, and so on. So put a little effort into it.
Similar reality (most of my friends since 30, I'm 35 now), very different origins.
I changed a lot as a person after 30 - I moved to the bay area for one thing. I also transitioned... which let me meet other women in more feminine contexts (IE, fans of a clothing brand).
I also met a lot of people who became friends through dating.
Almost all of my friends that I see regularly I met in the last 5 years or so.
I an 43 and met my current best friend circle after 30 and 2 of them after 40. My highschool friends just did not click anymore and I do like long conversations about tech, so I find people that like that as well and make quite deep friendships that last a long time.
Right. I feel like I changed into a whole new person, and all my old friends decided to stay the same. Which is fine, but they aren't people I want to spend lots of time with anymore.
I feel like I'm in the same boat. I got a holiday work visa and lived in Australia when I was 29, and New Zealand until I was 32. For the past decade, I've never lived in the same city for more than three years.
Meetup.com, swing dancing, reddit meetups, board game nights, spoken word poetry, comedy open mics, theater, contra dancing are just a couple of the things I try to get involved in (I get burnt out on a few and rotate hobbies; dropping in and out of scenes).
It usually takes me about a year to a year and a half to make a solid group of friends in a city, but the friends I've made, I've kept in touch with all around the world. Going back to my home town was amazing too, even though so many people I knew had moved on. I wrote some blog posts about being nomadic:
This was something that was discussed recently in one of the Pokemon Go FB Messenger groups I'm in. The group is mostly people in their 30's and 40's, and some of the people don't have any friends outside of the group. The game has basically brought them a network of friends that they didn't have before. And because "raids" (in-game battles of giant Pokemon) require multiple people and for you to physically go somewhere, you end up seeing your Pokemon friends a lot. You may even spend an afternoon driving around town, chasing raid battles. Sometimes it's just saying hello and battling, but other times you strike up a convo, laugh, etc. Lots of people feel the game is dead, or think I'm weird when they find out I still play it, but there's still an active player base, and it's methods of trying to get people (usually anti-social people) out and being social, have definitely hit upon something.
You forge friendship through common struggle. You need to offer one another something or you just introduce yourselves and let one another drift off in opposite directions without any bond forged.
You form your first friendships really early on with an extremely strong commonality - the hugeness of the world and your lack of information about it. Literally everything is in common with your peers circa age 2-4 because nothing is established yet. If it weren't for how our society has a habit of breaking these kids up constantly throughout their childhoods I would think those relationships would form the most iron clad friendships you can get if they survive to adulthood. Too bad about 90% of the kids you meet in daycare you never see again after you start school.
School is the next big one, where for most kids they will struggle alongside each other for 13 years straight. The mixing up of classes year to year again hurts the likelihood of strong friendships forming, but you can also just have kids your age in your neighborhood as a strong peer group. You have massive amounts of commonality at that point - you are taking the same classes, you live in the same area, you know the same people, you are subject to the "same" pop culture of your school.
That is where those high school clicks emerge from. The most bonded peer groups of before specialize as they age.
The same hold true into college, but I definitely don't see the same commonality and uniformity there. Going through puberty is really the cutting off point where divergent personalities specialize your interests enough that finding commonality becomes much harder, and you start having much less to offer your peers over their cumulative experiences and engagements.
It only gets worse from there. The more years into life you are, the more interests and specialties you have as a person that makes finding compatibility all that harder. People force themselves into relationships and marriage out of societal pressure. Nobody forces you into friendship nearly as much, so over that hump the lack of compatible people drops to near zero. Its why I think most marriages fail - they are trying to force the highest degree of friendship, when the older you get the harder it is.
Pokemon Go, and video games in general, are extremely effective ways to get people a commonality to force them together and interacting in ways that can build meaningful bonds. A common challenge is essential to bonding. The more passionate you can be about it the more likely it works.
But even then the 30 year old comes with baggage. They already have their favorite movies and musicians. Likes and dislikes. Hobbies and things they want to avoid. Because they have experienced so much more a fraction than they would have as children they are that much more set in stone. The adage of how you can't change a person applies here - even children demonstrate dramatically declining malleability as they gain experience in life. As you gain magnitudes more life experience your flexibility personality wise declines by similar magnitudes. It is trying to fit together puzzle pieces - if the pieces are made of clay you can mold them to fit. If they are tried out and set in stone they are rigid and it is much harder to find a match, and those matches are much easier to fracture and break.
The commonality and struggle are the prongs of a puzzle piece. The more impactful on your life, the happier it makes you, the more passion you can have for it the more pronounced those prongs can be. Early on you only need the simplest commonality as being the same age or living near one another to forge bonds - as you get old and your piece gets more defined and nuanced, it takes larger struggles and stronger forces to bind pieces together.
I think this is pretty nail on the head. It also implies that the answer is to just be really open minded about what you like and don't like, and why the people you're meeting like x, y, or z, and you'll end up making a lot of friends you wouldn't have expected before.
This is realistic for the 'life narrative' ™, but I find it cynical and lacking in the free will department. If you want to make friends, truly, at any age, work at it and you'll figure it out!
Great answer. I would just add: the bigger the struggle, the stronger the friendship. Military friendships are the extreme example of this. I've seen war comrades crying like children after decades without contact.
Great friends don't need to talk constantly to remain close friends. For various reasons, I lost contact with my best childhood friend for a while. It was 10 years, but it felt like nothing, we instantly clicked again.
There's a beautiful passage in All The King's Men that makes, to me, a similar point:
"The friend of your youth is the only friend you will ever have, for he does not really see you...and perhaps he never saw you. What he saw was simply part of the furniture of the wonderful opening world. Friendship was something he suddenly discovered and had to give away as a recognition of and payment for the breathlessly opening world which momently divulged itself like a moon flower. It didn’t matter a damn to whom he gave it, for the fact of giving was what mattered, and if you happened to be handy you were automatically endowed with all the appropriate attributes of a friend and forever after your reality is irrelevant.”
>There's a beautiful passage in All The King's Men that makes, to me, a similar point:
"The friend of your youth is the only friend you will ever have, for he does not really see you...and perhaps he never saw you. What he saw was simply part of the furniture of the wonderful opening world. Friendship was something he suddenly discovered and had to give away as a recognition of and payment for the breathlessly opening world which momently divulged itself like a moon flower. It didn’t matter a damn to whom he gave it, for the fact of giving was what mattered, and if you happened to be handy you were automatically endowed with all the appropriate attributes of a friend and forever after your reality is irrelevant.”
I think you're definitely right in your observations, it is so much easier to kids to make friends, because they're still so open and malleable, and not set in their ways yet.
>You form your first friendships really early on with an extremely strong commonality - the hugeness of the world and your lack of information about it. Literally everything is in common with your peers circa age 2-4 because nothing is established yet. If it weren't for how our society has a habit of breaking these kids up constantly throughout their childhoods I would think those relationships would form the most iron clad friendships you can get if they survive to adulthood. Too bad about 90% of the kids you meet in daycare you never see again after you start school.
This is exactly my experience as well. My best friend and I originally met before we can even remember, we must have been 3 or 4 years old. There are pictures of us running around in pajamas and bowler hats, play fighting with plastic pirate swords, stuff that I can't really remember now.
We actually didn't really get to see each other more than once or twice a year, because we lived so far apart, so I guess we bonded even more intensely for the couple of weeks we had every summer. We lost touch around the 6th or 7th grade, and didn't really see each other for 10 years or so, apart from sporadic chats on Facebook and such.
But we finally got back together in 2014, and it was almost as if no time had passed. We had burgers and a few beers, and talked for 6 hours straight. Completely separately from each other, we've both become huge metalheads, so now we go to concerts and festivals all the time, and he invited me to join his music quiz team. We're annual champions for three years running now, and the guys have become my closest friends.
They've also gotten me into pen'n'paper roleplaying games, and introduced me to further new friends through that.
It is definitely harder to make friends as you get older, you have to hit just the right shared interests to make it work.
I agree with your overall point, but wanted to point out that most marriages don't end in divorce—that's a myth. The highest rate was 41%, and it's been declining ever since.
I wonder, however, whether that's a positive improvement or reflects a reluctance to marry in the first place.
If two people living together for years split up without being married in the first place, it improves the divorce statistics but doesn't really change the underlying reality.
> Pokemon Go, and video games in general, are extremely effective ways to get people a commonality to force them together and interacting in ways that can build meaningful bonds
Isn't this also true when you join any group of people who sharing the same goal?
For example: A soccer or football team or gym? Or maybe a book club even.
I think it comes down to psychology more than anything, albeit I'm not a psychologist. Games are designed for immersion. When you play the best kinds of video games that can get you really invested in them most people can express the feelings of struggle, victory, and defeat they can project through their narratives and interactivity. So psychologically if you "save the world" or "catch / slay a monster" with complete engagement with others your brain can really impress that in your brain with that degree of impact. Personally I will never forget the first time my guild beat Ragnaros in World of Warcraft back in 2006, and I still keep in touch with a lot of the members of that guild despite substantial divergence of interests and lives since then because it was such a well articulated accomplishment at the time.
Sports and books respectively are missing an element of that formula. Sports aren't immersive. The obstacle is always just a game, for fun. Except when it isn't. There is a reason major sports professionals form lifelong bonds amongst each other while a volleyball club doesn't have as profound an impact. Your brain doesn't create a mountain of importance out of the sport.
For books, there is no common enemy to struggle and persevere against. You can get really immersed, but that makes the book memorable, not the people you talk about it with. In the same sense it is better than nothing and can produce friendship, but its not nearly as effective.
The trick is that none of it can be forced. You can't "make" yourself care, and nobody else can. It has to be a legitimate struggle with legitimate engagement and sense of comradery. Kids in school can feel that sense. Immersed gamers can feel it. If you are passionate about game development you can feel that with your codevs. But you need both pieces for the magical result.
Was going to post something similar here. I've got plenty of friends from prior to playing PoGo, but I see my PoGo friends more frequently because PoGo provides a common reason to meet up with them / be in the same physical location.
It's definitely a somewhat unique phenomenon, and I like both the effect (seeing friends more regularly) and being able to experience it from the inside.
It does, however, give me the feeling that I should put more effort into getting together with my other friends. But life provides any number of excuses to delay it.
The unique part, for me, is having to physically be in a specific place to engage in parts of the game, and the places are 'anywhere around the world'.
Reading the sentence I just wrote it still just sounds like sport, where you have to go to an oval or arena or whatever. But with Pokemon Go it's sort of 'anywhere' and yet specific at the same time. It's a particular place at a particular time. The difference may just be that it's a virtual / digital game rather than a physical one.
I met a lot of acquaintances playing Tekken, so I can absolutely believe in the idea that a game would bring people together, even though Pokemon Go is not my thing at all.
I've also similarly made many friends through playing Tekken offline. I believe the local aspect of fighting games (as opposed to most online games nowadays), and the depth of its mechanics is very conducive to making a wide variety of close friends (old and young). I recommend people check out fighting games or games that require person to person contact to make more friends.
I'm not surprised at all... because the same thing happened with Ingress - the previous game from people behind Pokémon Go!
I was only part of the local community of players (green team in my city) briefly, but it was enough to learn that people in it talk to each other all the time (via Hangouts at that time), they see each other every evening, play together and then hang out together. That's one of the strongest friendship-making activities I've ever seen.
Unfortunately, once you stop playing, there's a big chance that all of this goes away.
Side note: I'm surprised how in both Ingress & Pokemon GO, friendships cross team boundaries; you can be adversaries and friends, like in any respectable sport.
When I unexpectedly found myself single after a long-term relationship imploded last year, I did the Tinder/OKCupid thing for a bit. One of the more amusing experiences was when I had planned a date with a girl and was telling a friend about it. At one point after describing the girl's profile, my friend stopped me and asked about some detail before pausing and telling me "she's a smurf! I know her!"
(For those unfamiliar, Ingress players have tongue-in-cheek epithets for the opposing team. Green team are "frogs" and blue team are "smurfs".)
The date didn't lead to anything as I don't think she had any romantic interest in me, but it was definitely a funny point when during a lull in conversation I paused and gravely asked if it was OK for her to be on a date with a "filthy frog" and she busted out laughing.
do you have a resource (blog, youtube video, etc) where one can get a quick overview of Pokemon Go? When I played it there was not much you could do, so I dropped it completely. I may still have the app installed though.
I'll list some sites below. Though the new main focus of the game is "raids". When you open the game you'll encounter gyms at various locations. 2-3 times a day a gym will have a Raid Boss (you'll know a Raid Boss when you see it, because you have to use a raid pass to fight it - you get 1 pass a day, though you can get more by using coins, which you get by taking and staying in gyms, or by paying for them). The boss will be rated from 1 to 5 stars (1 being easy - a single player can take it down; 5 being the hardest, requiring several players, though defeating a level 5 Raid will earn you the possibility of catching a legendary Pokemon).
The hardest part of the game is getting enough players to take down a high level boss, which is why people have taken to joining chats to coordinate raids. Though this may be different for highly populated areas, and it's still possible to just randomly show up at a raid and find people waiting for it to start.
The article makes it pretty clear that relationships and marriage take the place of friends, especially for men. 30 is also that sort of point where women who haven't had kids already think "uh oh, better soon than never". I can see the downvotes coming already for speaking on behalf of women, but I have more female friends than male ones and the number 30 is universally dreaded for the reason I describe. Well, then there's the looks factor which, take it how you will, but society generally views that age as "the wall". So by that point, you'd better have found your partner in life. If that's one's goal, and it is for most people, are you going to expend your energy finding more friends or are you going to expend it towards finding a "life-long" mate?
I'm nearing 30, and I'd say over 90% of my friends have significant others. Long-term relationships significantly changes a person's behavior; the concept of friendship gradually shifts towards "How can I include my SO in this?" If we go to the movies, it's gotta be a film that he/she is going to like, and they don't like scary movies so that's out of the question now. Maybe your existing friends you've still got around will tolerate this, but new friends aren't going to do everything that your SO wants to do. With my guy friends especially, everything now revolves around what their SO wants to do even when their SO actually permits us to go off and do guy things. I think this happens to most people, though, and I would be no exception if I was in a relationship. As the article states, good luck if you are trying to make friends with another couple. Chances are at least one person in that party isn't really interested in the friendship.
Putting aside that constraint, however, I haven't had that much difficulty making friends at my age. I think a lot of people figure out that most people aren't worth their time, thus friends really don't provide all that much. As long as you've got a couple good friends who have your back even if you haven't talked in months, you're golden. If you're in a relationship with someone, the even less you need the company of others.
People also get dull by the time they're in their 30s. They spent so much time working and relationshipping that they lost a lot of imagination and didn't really expand their horizons as much as their Instagrams would suggest. I'm not saying this is a permanent state, but a doldrum that happens after a person has spent so much time ticking off the boxes of things they're supposed to accomplish. That's what tunnelvision can do to a person. It's definitely possible to get out of it, which is probably why my few real friends are either in their early-to-mid 20s or past 40.
30 universally dreaded, and people dull over 30? That's unfortunate. You only get to spend 10 years as a 20-30 year-old, which is only 1/8th or so of a typical human lifespan.
> As long as you've got a couple good friends who have your back even if you haven't talked in months, you're golden
This is very true. I had a longterm, and at the time I thought "rest of life", relationship break down in my early thirties and looking back it has been a change for the very best. I 100% agree about the "wall" at the year 30 mark (she was also around that age and I can't help but think she had a crisis of thought about "is this 'it'?"). I was very much feeling that and it was creating a combined sense of excitement and sheer terror. Throughout all of this was a handful of my own friends, of which I see one regularly and the rest sporadically (from months to years even) - but I never once felt "lacking" in friendship.
I've definitely seen the pattern you describe many times.
The couple that manages this best is one where Sun--Wed is single friends time and Thurs--Sat is couples friends time. Probably not for everyone but this seems to work remarkably well for them.
I'm 33, and my experience has basically been the same as the GP.
Past a certain point, you never see your friends again unless they're accompanied by their SO, and once they have kids, their lives revolve around their kids and nothing else.
And I'll always remember the culture shock when I a new job where my coworkers were mostly in their 30s while my coworkers at my last job were all in their 20s. Office conversations at the new company mostly centered on the logistics of taking out a second mortgage, debates over what kind of grass to put in their yards, and talk of what their children are up to. I was 30 at the time, and I decided then and there that these were people I had nothing whatsoever in common with, and if this is what I have to look forward to as I get older, I don't really want a social life anymore.
That does not sound like they don't have friends, that sounds like they talk about what is current or important for them with their friends in the office.
Oh no, that's not what I meant. I'm sorry if I worded my post poorly.
I meant that the kinds of conversations that typical 30-somethings have are conversations that starkly remind me that people my age and older by and large aren't people I identify with.
I lost a good chunk of my friends when I had kids, they just stopped talking to me or stopped inviting me to things because they figured, I'm a family man now. That's true to an extent, but I'm not a family man when I'm at work, I'm not in Dad mode when I hang out. I since made new friends, some married, some not, some with kids, some not. Various ages and career ranges.
They also got married, and fell into that spouse politics trap (if our wife or significant other don't like each other or click), we can't hang out, ever. I most of my friends I don't even try to make our spouses meet, except through happenstance, and even then, it doesn't matter since 95% of the time we're doing something, its out with friends, and we only have a few friends where we'll do something with their spouse.
Some tried to get in contact when they had kids but quite frankly, I've moved on.
I've "lost" double digit friends in the last 5 years alone (they are still my friends technically, just don't talk or hang out nearly as often anymore). Looking back I notice that my parents also had a dramatic decline in friends after a certain age so it may be a common thing.
A theory of mine is that big families were once a thing because it was a way to have built in friends well after 30. When you have 5 adult kids and many grand kids I imagine you never feel like you don't have a lot of friends as the large family serves as a proxy for that kind of companionship.
That being said I wonder how social media will impact this. The majority of my ex friends still follow me, and I talk to many of them multiple times a week via group text.
I think you can make good friends at any age, but you need the right environment for that. When you're young you spend a lot of time with the same people, like in school, which is the environment you need to build a close friendship. When you're older you tend to meet a lot of new people, but you don't have many opportunities to spend a lot of time together. Except at work, which is why many people make close friends at work, but it's not the best environment since people don't like to mix their private and professional life together.
I’ve had the most success with active groups that are organized around sports, hobbies, or volunteering. It’s much easier than looking for a bestie who has everything in common with you, or a group that just hangs about chatting. Having a topic that everyone in the group is focused on is easier for introverted me.
Regular, serindipitous interactions with people with whom you share an interest is a great facilitator. Basically, "a place of congregation" for your activity
I agree entirely. Friendship requires repetition. When you are older, your time gets spread across more activities, leaving less opportunity for repetitive time spent together.
I'll add that the workplace can be problematic for friendship as there is extra room for undue hostility. If someone makes a mistake, for instance, that mistake may fall directly on your shoulders and friendships predicated on that type of situation usually do not end well. People do not want to feel like they are being taken advantage of in friendship.
Compare that with a scholastic environment and mistakes generally only affect the one who made it (or perhaps faculty, who students usually do not befriend), thereby not affecting friendships. If your own grades were dependent entirely on your friends' performance in school, you just might not be able to maintain those friendships quite so well.
Add to that heterogeneity that not everyone will have the same openness to friendship at the same time as another. Maybe you pulled an all nighter the night before going to your weekly Saturday spin class. You probably won’t feel social, but the people around you might.
I know that most people agree with you but strangely I consider the workplace a good place to make friends and get to know people. You are testing them all the time and you are able to see how they react in stressful situations. If someone is not compatible you'll know it within a short time.
Some of my oldest, closest friends today are people I worked with at a startup in the ‘90’s. But I always keep my current workplace and social life distinct.
The base ingredients for making friends seem to be the same as for committing crime: motive and opportunity. Both motive and opportunity decrease as you get older.
It is a relationship and like any relationships, it takes a ton of time and energy to nurture and grow. It won't be fair to the other person if I don't have one or other.
I have a family, a heavy cycling habit and a demanding job: I don't really have time to make and maintain serious friendships outside these activities. What friendships I have right now are from my single days - they hangout with us during various vacations/dinners etc. But new friendships are pretty much impossible because of a lack of time. If these old friends move away etc., then it is pretty much going to be hermit style after that :)
"Your application is super interesting, but we don't have any openings right now" seems to be one factor. People have only so much "slots" for friends, and most people fill those slots in their teens and 20s.
I wonder how much the current concept of a "friend" is the by product of 20th century media. Much like adolescence was not what we know it as before mid-20th century, I can't help but feel that the role of friend (especially adult friend) was largely shaped by sitcoms. I think the expectation that you would have adult friends ala Friends (the show) is largely manufactured and giving people false expectations.
I'm 42, and I wish someone told me in my 20's it would be harder to make new friends as I got older. I would have done things differently. I would have put more effort into making friends then.
I am able to make new friends, but they end up being more like acquaintances most of the time. Currently I am in grad school, and that's working out well for me. There's something about the shared camaraderie and shared suffering from the workload that builds real friendships.
What other struggles are there that we can take on to facilitate bonding?
It occurs to me that raising children is a struggle and can help someone bond with their spouse. That doesn't help single people (like me) though. Work can be a struggle, but not always a positive one, and switching jobs can end it. I imagine firefighters and EMT workers face a deeper struggle than corporate jobs and form deeper friendships.
I made tons of friends in my 20s and early 30s. Many of them moved away to other cities with time, so I have fewer friends now, but that's also partly due to being in a long term relationship, so I have less time, and I'm still friends with some of the people I became friends with in my 20s, and between work, relationship, life and those other friends there isn't much time left for anything else. That's without kids in the mix!
However none of the friends I made in my 20s were friends borne of a shared struggle. Most of them were people I met through going to social events specifically organised for people to meet each other. The city I moved to had a lot of transient worker types moving through them so there were lots of events organised by and for expats (perhaps I should call us migrants, as that's what we were). People would turn up to a bar and know nothing about anyone except that we all wanted to make friends, and maybe even hook up. Everyone arrived alone and was trying to make new friends all the time, so if you got a few friends that way, they'd also have a few friends, and everyone would start going to similar events so you'd see each other a lot, and that branched out into events organised just in our groups - mostly very simple events like "let's all meet in the park and drink and barbecue today". It was all quite straightforward and struggle-free. As people came and went I found myself going round that loop several times in my 20s, developing new groups of friends as old ones slowly dissipated.
The only slightly tough part of it was learning how to be sociable with total strangers. Most people are a bit shy and it's not really natural to make fun conversation with someone you just met and know nothing about, but it's like anything, it comes with practice.
I wouldn't describe most work as a struggle. There has to be some higher purpose than just getting through the day. Startup life can achieve that in some way, if you're a very early employee or founder as that way the hard decisions and unexpected events are shared in your group. I'm like that right now - not a founder but a senior executive at a startup firm, and I'm lucky enough to be (by coincidence) working with someone who was in the same class as me at university, someone who I had stayed friends with throughout our 20s. And yeah, building a company is tough work, it's definitely a struggle that I feel enhances our friendship, certainly we see a lot more of each other these days!
>none of the friends I made in my 20s were friends borne of a shared struggle. [...] The city I moved to had a lot of transient worker types moving through them so there were lots of events organised by and for expats (perhaps I should call us migrants, as that's what we were). People would turn up to a bar and know nothing about anyone except that we all wanted to make friends, and maybe even hook up.
I think this is, in its own way, a kind of shared struggle: meeting with groups of expats provided you with a group that you could bond with over the shared experiences and modern "hardships" of adapting to life in a new city.
>What other struggles are there that we can take on to facilitate bonding?
I've found that competitive gaming has been pretty good for this, with the stipulation that it mainly applies to 1v1 games which are usually played at live events (such as fighting games like Street Fighter and Super Smash Bros Melee, or card games like Magic: The Gathering), rather than games which tend to have more of an online presence (MOBAs like League of Legends and digital card games like Hearthstone are less good for this). Pretty much any game that has an active local scene will have at least one local business (usually a game store or an arcade) that runs weekly events for a nominal entry fee.
The immediate benefit to playing a competitive game that has an active local scene is that you'll find yourself in the same space and spending time with the same group of people for several hours at a time on a weekly basis, so at the very least you'll become acquainted with most of the locals. Attend enough of these weekly events and it's usually pretty easy to get plugged in with people who run smaller, less-official events on the other days of the week. One of the things I like about Magic: The Gathering is that I can move to any major city, go to a Friday Night Magic event, and quickly get plugged into a local network of people who share my interests.
If you ever take your game beyond the local level, then you'll also probably end up forming more social connections with people in the local scene, as traveling to events becomes much more economical when you do it with a group of people to split the cost of hotel room and gas. When you travel to an event with a group, you end up spending a lot of time with the same group of 3-4 people over a period of a weekend, which can be a great bonding experience. There's also the fact that traveling to events like this has the effect of making you feel like you're competing together as a "team," even if you're all competing individually; it's fun to root for people from your own city, and it's these sorts of experiences that really offer the kind of "struggle" that I think is good for facilitating bonding. Part of the benefit of traveling to an event as a group is having people to commiserate with after you get knocked out of the tournament.
The "commiserate with and/or root for people I recognize from my own city" can also apply to people you didn't travel with, and in fact having serendipitous encounters with people you know but didn't travel with can also be a great bonding experience. When you drive four hours to an event and then see someone you recognize from home, it can make for a great, "Hey, good to see us!" moment, and even if it's not someone you know really well, you always have "so how's your tournament run going?" as an icebreaker. These moments can often end in making dinner plans where you get all of the dozen or so people from your home city to meet up at a bar or diner, and a lot of the most memorable experiences I have from competitive gaming come from those late-night dinners.
I've found that any hobby that offers "casual regular events on a weekly basis, plus occasional group trips for the people who take it more seriously" is a great recipe for bonding; I played competitive Pokemon for several years despite not enjoying the game particularly simply because of the great social experiences that I had with playing it. I have friends who are into cosplay and anime conventions who have had analogous experiences. Competitive gaming is the main one that I engage in that I consider "strictly recreational," but I've also had some similar experiences with the local game dev scene and with local writing groups, which are adjacent to my professional life. Some of my favorite experiences in game development have come from going to a big event like PAX and just having friends (both from internet and from back home) stop...
> I've found that any hobby that offers "casual regular events on a weekly basis, plus occasional group trips for the people who take it more seriously" is a great recipe for bonding
I used to be active in a ski club that would plan weekly trips to mountains. Made a lot of friends through that. I need to find another organization like that.
Fraternity hazing was originally and still is intended to do this (though it is sometimes taken out of hand), force bonding in an expedited process through shared misery. A lot of the tools were derived from boot-camp and military training, where I believe there is some of that intention, as well.
I met most of my current friends in my 30s. I think it's possible, you just have to prioritize it and put yourself out there in situations where you'll encounter the same people over and over again and can grow something over time because of it. Either sports, or games (board games has been pretty darn effective for me), or exercise (like going on hikes together), or volunteer work, or something.
Like you said, grad school has been useful because you're all going through the same situation and spending repeated time with each other.
For me, it was picking a handful of Meetup.com groups that interested me and going to meetups over and over and over again, until I became one of the regulars that knew pretty much everyone and they knew me. And then we started inviting each other to private events, and friendships grew from there.
I also met most of my friends in my late 20s and early 30s, after moving across the country multiple times when I was younger, severing friendships in the process.
What really helped me was getting into a bunch of hobbies and putting myself out there, starting kickboxing and crossfit, volunteering at a local historic motor race, going to concerts and festivals, music quizzes. Just a bunch of stuff that interestes me, and presumably interest people with a similar mindset as mine.
Have made an effort to add new friendships, the effort is a conclusive prerequisite to strong, valuable ones. Emails in profile, if you drop me a line I'm happy to invest 30 mins/week toward shared camaraderie w an internet stranger ;-)
I'm 22, and I think I have one or two capital-t true friends. I do have so-called friends, but they are at their respective colleges and are doing their own thing, and we do hang out when they are back in town, but then again, I don't consider them capital-t true friends (though I would in earlier years). After graduating high school in 2014 till now, I have spent a great deal of time alone (I argue it is partly because I attended a community college, I still do). While I don't want to be 42 and think I wish "I would have put more into making friends then", I don't think I will (or maybe I will). The aloneness I have had all these years has been so important to my inner self, where all things stem from, that I can't say I would have had it otherwise.
I suppose that's why I tend to gift Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet to friends, i.e. "But your solitude will be a hold and home for you even amid very unfamiliar conditions and from there you will find all your ways." Or maybe that's why I admire Tarkovsky, i.e. "I don’t know… I think I’d like to say only that they should learn to be alone and try to spend as much time as possible by themselves. I think one of the faults of young people today is that they try to come together around events that are noisy, almost aggressive at times. This desire to be together in order to not feel alone is an unfortunate symptom, in my opinion. Every person needs to learn from childhood how to spend time with oneself. That doesn’t mean he should be lonely, but that he shouldn’t grow bored with himself because people who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger, from a self-esteem point of view."
Though sometimes I think about what side is greener, I suppose it's a matter of perspective.
I hate to give advice about this specific matter, but I kinda had the same experience as you and feel like I should share my experience. I'm 28 and I still value my alone time and solitude very very much. But I also have a group of friends and date a lot which keeps me engaged socially as well and I like having both worlds. What I would suggest is to value solitude and alone time but also be open to opportunities to hang out with other people. If I have to make a choice between going to someones birthday party and playing on the PlayStation, I've learned to choose the former, even if I may not know the person all that much.
This. I realized too late that student life (college, university) is not about studying but for making life-long friends, building the base for your network.
As I have grown older I realised that my university friends were mainly a bunch of snobby middle class boring people. They had a careers, while I explored life a fair bit more (and still manage to have a career after taking a few years out).
The guys who I have met through kayaking - an activity where we have quite literally saved each others lives on occasion - are far more interesting and fun and more real friendships.
I moved country when I was 21 for my first job, it was a complete culture shock to me and I didn't know anybody.
It is really hard to make friends even when you are young.
Living in shared apartment, playing sport you love, going for dance classes, etc. These activities definitely helps. It took me 1 year to finally crack the code.
I have somewhat similar experience. I shifted from a small town to a metro city for pursuing my undergraduate programme. I was alienated from the whole class for not being 'cool' or 'hip' enough to hangout with them. External biases made it really hard for me to make friends.
It took me time to get comfortable with who I am and what are my values. But still, I have an inferiority complex which hinders me to get along with anybody as the college experience still loops in my mind saying I am not enough.
He would just yack, and yack. Some times I would put the phone down, and come back in 5 minutes, and he would still be talking. He was eccentric, had a horrid childhood, but genuinely nice.
I thought he was nuts, but nice.
We ended up becoming best friends. They used to call us the odd couple.
I ended up trusted him more than family. We just included each other in everthing without even thinking. My girlfriends were put off by him at first, but he would wear them down talking, and before I knew it, he was calling them daily. And when he missed a day, they would ask me if he is ok. He never crossed the line either.
He died a few years ago, but his friendship technique was something I thought was brilliant. Just wear the person down.
I can pass this along, I once heard a therapist say something like, make friends with people your own age, or younger. Her rationale was they will die before you.
When I was in my tewenties, I just didn't have much in common with my peers. I wasen't more mature, but didn't like my generation that much. My friends were just older. I really loved all of them.
If I had a do-over, I might have really tried to make friends with people my own age. I'm all alone now. It does suck.
Anyways, my eccentric friend knew how to make friends. I haven't tried his technique, but might?
My assumption is that with 30 age really becomes visible. It was at this age, people- the same sort of people i would hang around with and goof with- started to refer to me as "Mr." - as if by having the first grey hair- you somehow become some authoritative figure to be afraid of.
Which is ridiculosis - but you cant change what people think when they see you for the first time.
Because love takes time, and money is time in this society. Takes a lot of money to have friends, and most men are actually to poor to afford friends. That's included in the price society pays for loving wealth first. You cannot serve two masters. You can of course fake it, drinking buddies ect... it's like most things in a money first group, the real thing is continually cheapened until everyone looses interest and then we blame them for having too high of standards.
I've been amazed at how unfriendly neighbours are in the same building with multiple rented apartments. Literally the only interactions I've had with neighbours over the last 3 years is when they finally overcome their disinclination to interact to come, furious, to the door to ask that some music or TV program be turned down. I always smile and say hello to the people living in the same building, and at least 70% of the time that is met with looking in the other direction. (East Bay, San Francisco Bay Area).
Weird, here in Indianapolis it can be rude not to say hello to neighbors & strangers and acknowledgment is about 100%. Still can't wait to leave though.
I think the idea is that people don't always want personal connections with other people they're going to be forced to see on a regular basis (and live next to). Your anecdote about neighbors angrily banging on your door to tell you to turn down the tv is an example of that. If they were your friends they may have been socially obligated to either suffer through the noise or come over and hang out. After a long day of work you may feel like neither of those things. It's sort of similar to why a lot of people don't like dating co-workers. If it goes south, you'll still have to see and work with this person every day. A lot of people would probably prefer to compartmentalize those they live next to and those they hang out with.
It's just odd to me as I grew up on a street (privately owned houses) in which everyone knew everyone else and many pairs of house owners would be on terms which would involve random conversations in the street, helping out when people are away (pets, plants, burglary precautions), maybe even dinner invitations and babysitting. And yet these people also saw each other every day, indeed since they were house owners, they were much more shackled together than people in rented accomodation.
So it doesn't seem like it's the shackled-together aspect that causes the unfriendliness. On the contrary, a model which fits better is that people are inherently antisocial and unfriendly, and find that with rented accommodation they can get away with it.
> On the contrary, a model which fits better is that people are inherently antisocial and unfriendly, and find that with rented accommodation they can get away with it.
I think you’re right. The homeowners are probably aware that they’re locked into their neighbors for a very long time so building relationships makes more sense than the more transient renters.
Different era. I grew up in a similar environment: everyone on my street was as white as me, had simular socioeconomic backgrounds and interests, and like my family lived there forever. Much easier to bond with and know your neighbors.
Contrast with today: Until a recent move to the suburbs, I have had very little in common with my any of my neighbors except for the fact that we are all seemingly perpetually transient. I still don’t have much in common with my current neighbors but living here for a whopping 3 years straight has given me the chance to reach out and get to know them.
I noticed this behavior as well here in vancouver. It's like an unwritten rule that you need to not interact with your apartment neighbors.
I always suspected being house poor has to do something with it. One time I overheard a neighbor who was complaining on the phone about how debt ridden she was. I guess when you are barely scraping you don't have any emotional space to acknowledge people.
I suspect it's worse for senior citizens as well...
I found it is a middle class thing. Most poor areas i lived in, neighbors banded together. Similar with the affluent crowd. The middle are usually more busy and stressed and take their stress out on those around them. Family, coworkers, neighbors.
In the past month three men, (one 45ish, another 55ish, another 74) two of whom I was barely acquainted with, have poured their souls out to me over their relationship and business troubles. I'd argue that it isn't hard to make friends, it's just hard to meet people in the first place. Men in particular get into a habit of focusing on business and family. More than once I've heard older men voice a complaint if their wives weren't the ones to build social relationships, as they expected them to fulfill that role. Below 30, people have more opportunities -- school, sports, activities -- through which they simple meet more people. Above 30, the number of opportunities to meet other people declines unless one makes a concerted effort to seek out their tribe.
They don't sound like very American men. Like the song goes, "I'm afraid of Americans... They don't need anyone, they don't even just pretend." I realized I have no friends at age 19. I've been fine with that for decades. I won't make any such generalizations about women. I know where I'm at. But I will say the younger guys seem weaker these days. They don't have the same general tough, friendless demeanor the Gen Xers had.
This post is, and I am not using the term to be hyperbolic or insulting, pathological. If we need songs to prove the point, Hank Williams, undoubtedly an American man, wrote "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" in 1949.
Alcoholic, died age 29, sings about how he is lonely, like other alcoholics do.
British singer describes how he's afraid of Americans.
You see the difference, right? The current generation, the weak ones, they like to sing about how tough they are. "Heathens" or "Royals" is the typical sort of chest puffing bragging about their own prowess.
That's a lot different from outsiders describing their fear of your kind in song.
Bowie meant that as a criticism. It's not, and is not intended to be, a good thing. And it reflects all the way through the fuck-you-I've-got-mine, pull-up-the-ladder-behind-me baseline society we have inculcated, both within and without tech.
"it's just hard to meet people in the first place"
If it's hard, it's usually a psychological difficulty rather than a lack of opportunity.
Unless you live somewhere exceptionally remote, you're usually surrounded by people and opportunities for meeting them are quite frequent. You could strike up conversations most anywhere: from streets to bus stops to parks to bars to dance and social clubs to special interest groups, work, cafes, parties, conferences, and so on.
Usually, though, most people don't make the effort, for a variety of reasons ranging from fear to awkwardness and lack of social skills.
Once you meet people, though, you have to go further and cultivate acquaintances in to friends, and lots of people fail to do that as well. Even after a friend is made, however, it's still a challenge to get closer and then to maintain the friendship, which again people often fail to do.
As I noted later in my comment "unless one makes a concerted effort to seek out their tribe," which agrees with your point. That stated, this being a technical forum, many of us are Myers-Briggs (if you believe in it) INTJ types -- so yes, we do potentially lack the social skills. Moreover, I reflect upon my own adulthood, where for much of it I have risen before dawn to work, skipped lunches, returned home somewhere in the evenings, by and large have been unable to take vacations, and find my weekends and downtime dedicated to family activities. I don't believe this to be outside the norm, and in fact I'd say in the details, that I have it better than most. So I stand by my assertion that while it is possible to meet plenty of people, most of us adult types are constrained by expectations and obligations, leaving us by and large, lonely and aloof.
I actually do live in a fairly remote place, pmoriarty, but your comment has me reflecting on culture. Seattle, where I regularly visit, is known for the "Seattle Freeze," whereby people are insular and guarded. I spent a lot of years there in the tech world and have no relationships to show from it; just business. Perhaps you are in a locale where the culture is more open and welcoming, where people are more willing to engage in conversations with strangers?
Frankly, I am also by nature an introverted and guarded person, but I have found my life really enriched by consciously working past that to talk to people.
I don't know about that. You just shouldn't strap more meaning onto it than that it's a survey that gives you a qualitative description of the answers you gave to it -- people have some innate attraction to such things and I find it hard to criticize them for it. I just don't think it's appropriate to use for career counseling, etc.
@mathperson - pureGuano covers my view of it too, which is why I added that caveat to my message. It's certainly indicative of personality, but not all encompassing. It's pseudo-science, but interesting and a starting place to understand someone.
I think mathperson is referring to the fact that 'big 5' is the new personality type test that psychology researchers seem to take more seriously.
My understanding is that it's a lot more, I forget the word. reliable or repeatable? I mean, two different big5 tests are more likely to give you the same answer than two different MBTI tests.
Educational Testing Service got interested in it long ago and then dumped it. The National Academy of Sciences did a huge project on improving human performance for the US military back in the 1980's, and they put it in the not useful category. What would you expect for an assessment developed by a team of two with no background in assessment?
I would extend your evaluation to say that it is not appropriate for use on others, but if you think that it helps you assess yourself, knock yourself out.
You know, if you are going to assert something contrary to common belief, you really should include some arguments.
Until you do, I am going to simply assume you're mistaken.
Yup, it's just modern astrology. A bunch of stuff that is mostly kinda true about almost everybody or things that people want to believe about themselves. A lot of it is honestly just ego stroking. "You're usually not a risk taker, except when it's important." It's embarrassing how many people fall for it.
Meh, it's a lens. The older I get, the more I appreciate different lenses and how subjective everything ultimately is. A lot of STEM-types chafe at this, and cling to empiricism as a bedrock in the tumult of human experience, but at the end of the day whether an idea has value to me is entirely orthogonal to its scientific basis or lack thereof.
"for much of it I have risen before dawn to work, skipped lunches, returned home somewhere in the evenings, by and large have been unable to take vacations"
This is certainly nowhere close to the norm in europe. I only know a couple of people who work more than 40 hours a week (37.5 is standard in the UK), and they definitely take vacations.
Completely true, take everything I said and reverse it for Europe. But I'm referring to life in These United States, where we don't have health care, we don't have vacation, we don't have maternity leave, we have very little public transportation... ok, I'll just stop before I get out of control.
Yes in the strictest sense of the word "we" have it. If my neighbor can't pay for it and everyone else refuses to pay for it, my neighbor doesn't have it. If my neighbors have health insurance but can't afford the copay so they have to let smaller problems become life threatening, they effectively don't have it.
It's like you are celebrating a system that didn't take much out of you to give seriously dehydrated people water while conveniently neglecting the result that giving them a bottle of water either made them destitute or prolonged their lives by a small amount. You also conveniently neglect that many first world nations manage to have universal healthcare and spend less per person than us. I will say this though, if you are rich there are very few better places to be for healthcare than America. Hoorah, what a great system; what a great quality of life for everyone!
It's not entirely clear that American healthcare is much better, even if you can afford it, unless you're talking about, like, stratospheric levels of wealth.
It's actually the exact opposite. You have more of a "my neighbors should pay for it" view. That's why you object to paying taxes so much. You want all the benefits of living in an advanced society, but you want someone else to pay for it.
This is simply observed by noting that most people, in both countries, actually work and pay taxes. Therefore, in Europe, most people are paying for both their own services and for those of people who can't afford it. That's an attitude of "I'll pay for my neighbor" not "my neighbor should pay".
I live in Seattle, and I’d say that your crazy lifestyle is why you didn’t make friends here - and that it’s probably the same cause for most people who complain about the Seattle Freeze. You worked all day and hung out with family all weekend and an amazing friendship didn’t climb down your chimney? How baffling, must be the city culture to blame. (I moved here for work out of college, and made plenty of friends - by socializing in the evenings).
I'm an introvert and am an NF type, and I'd generally agree with you. It's not the city, it's how you approach it. If you don't have friends find something to do and they will come. But you have to have the courage to make the first move. If you don't, who will?
I agree with your sarcasm, particularly as it pertains to Seattle. However, my vibe of Vancouver is different. Having lived in Vancouver and visited Seattle many times for concerts and so on, I can say that Vancouver maintains a sort of freeze even with a well above average intent to expand socially. I think because such a large percentage of people (out of necessity or not) meat some of the criteria in the parent comment, it's hard to strengthen. Getting anyone (except in certain niches) out to do something is like trying to pass pro-choice laws. When you do get it to happen, they'll bail (colloquially called the BC bail) at the last second.
I've lived in six different US States (in the South, East, Northeast, Midwest, Southwest, and Northwest) and Washington State definitely stands out as having the largest proportion of socially inept people. The general pattern seems to be that they don't know how to make polite casual conversation with strangers and are either just rude or completely overshare.
^This!
Seattle is overflowing with welcoming spirits like newfoundglory. It's your friendless, self-deserving, crazy lifestyle that's the problem. Got your own opinion? You can GTFO! /s
Disclaimer: My two Seattle visits were both welcoming and pleasant, and I've never met newfoundglory. Had I, I likely would have found them to be quite friendly.
I moved to Seattle from the east coast about a year ago. I'm heading back because I don't fit in here. It's me, not the city.
I spent a lot of time working remotely. Bouncing up and down the northeastern corridor. I found a way to get acclimated to a city rather quickly. Find your tribe, friend the service staff, and it generally grows from there. Make yourself that you're a regular, and a good person.
I'm not an outdoorsy person, I'm not a "chill" person. What I enjoy wasn't common fare. That's not meant as a knock. The closest I found here, was the LGBTQ community. But there was a bit of trepidation with me being a software developer, i.e. causing problems for the city.
There is the Seattle freeze. But it's also we're busy and there is not that much in common. It's important to try and not be negative. Blaming the city is not beneficial. Maybe the city just isn't right for you. What do you want from your city, where you live?
I will say I did find it's more insular. My usual fare of trying to join a conversation at a bar didn't work. Saying hi, was not well received. I also think I had a cloud of negativity, from heavy job dissatisfaction that limited a positive response. My few friends here. Were gained from bartenders a bouncer, and someone I met at a mixer.
One other thing I'd note. Is I try and perform outside of work, event hosting, dj'ing, etc. I tried talking to promoters but got stood up a lot. Make an appointment to meet up and no show.
So I go up to the pharmacist. He's an older gent about my dad's age. We know each other since I pick up my script for sleep issues every month.
"How you doing today?"
"Oh, you know how it is." He gives me a weak smile. I can tell he feels worn down from the daily grind.
I pick up my script, then think of a way to keep chatting.
"Hey, this is going to sound weird, but I also have <foo> medical condition. Do you have any advice on getting that treated?"
I have no idea why this made sense to me, but it was something like "Pharmacists fill scripts, and they also see prescriptions daily, so they know which illnesses are treated by which medicines, so therefore this is totally not a weird thing to do."
He gives me this super surprised look and stays mostly quiet. I say "I should see a doctor huh?" and he says yeah. I walk away feeling like a dummy.
I didn't mind at all, and I'm not afraid to try to make new friends. But now instead of this random person thinking of me as a neighbor (he always called me by name) I'm pretty sure he thinks I'm weird. And I am.
The point is, I don't really care about being weird. I don't think I'm alone in this. But I stay quiet because it damages social relationships to express myself in odd ways. It's better to be on a cordial first-name basis than have an arms-length-but-personal experience with them.
The opportunities you mention for meeting people are really not as frequent as you make it seem. And it's unclear what to say to force a conversation. Yes, some people have this skill. Some are also naturally good looking. But seeing as this is Hacker News, I think the audience might be closer to my side of things.
The reason I wrote this was that you mention there are all these opportunities. But going over in my mind, I can't see a single way to talk to that guy that isn't socially weird. He's at work. He just wants to get his job done and move on to the next customer. I don't know anything that could make him laugh. Asking about his day or asking him to tell me what it's like to be a pharmacist would be seen as yet another frustrating thing to deal with at work. And there are other people in line behind me, so this is an imposition on everyone else.
But those people are opportunities too, right? I could just turn around and start chatting them up. Except not really. It's the same for everyone else in life: We're all busy, all dealing with our own things. And the older you are the busier you get.
All of this is to say, you can live in one of the biggest cities in the country and still feel completely isolated and alone. I know. And maybe this comment will put it into context that it's not really their fault. It's just the shape of the situation.
I usually hack on my projects at the mall on a couch, and end up meeting quite a lot of people. But only if they happen to be hacking away on something too, and eventually I ask them about it. But that seems rather an uncommon situation. So I'm wondering "Outside of work and family, where would other hackers have excuses to meet people in daily life?"
Even now, the smart thing is to stay quiet and not post this. You're told to stay quiet in a thousand ways by the society around you.
attempting to start a friendship (or more) with someone who is serving you is one of the more risky avenues. if you're both on the same page, it can be totally fine and work out. unfortunately, most of the time you are just another customer to them and you just put them in a situation where they have to figure out how to gracefully decline while still doing the deferential customer service dance.
You’re basically describing the whole field of small talk. It’s perfect for stuff like this. And then if he’s interested you gradually progress the conversation.
I'm self-employed and I have a rented desk at the local WeWork coworking space. I go there when I feel like getting out of the house to get some work done.
Using the coworking space is a surprisingly good way to meet people. Obviously the guy locked in an office, headphones on, hammering out code should be left alone -- but there will be many people sitting in the common areas, chatting with their buddies. They might be drinking the free beer on tap. They probably have a startup, open source project, etc. that they're passionate about and would be happy to tell you about.
I co-own/run a co-working space and always enjoy opportunities to talk with the others here about our work and life outside of work. I've been in a shared/open office my entire working life and many of my friends have come through these environments.
I think consistently seeing each other daily for whatever period gives you a good chance to find common interests, incorporate social outings, etc.
It doesn't sound especially weird to me, I'm sure a lot of people ask pharmacists such things to avoid seeing a doctor. I've done it myself. Pharmacist advice is even a thing I've seen advertised. It's possible these things are just different where I am.
In any case, I don't see that asking a pharmacist about a medical-related topic would be interpreted as a friend request.
Slightly OT: where is it so weird to ask a pharmacist for advice? In places I've lived in it's either reasonably typical or not typical but within the realm of expected things.
Great post. So many things you wrote are so correct about human interaction in a city.
The point is that you are actually meeting the pharmacist. You're there every week. That's an opportunity.
Say you wanted to talk to him more, I would not be trying to act like more of a customer by talking about medical conditions, I would be talking about things he might be interested in, or mention something else that I'm interested in, or something that anybody might be interested in (weather/current news/sporting event), or something related to the current situation. Or even just throw something out there - "you look like you might know about <certain thing>, my mom has one and was just asking me about it". Even if you're wrong they'll be interested in why you might think that about them which can move onto other subjects. "You remind me of <such-and-such person>". "Hey, you remind me of my dad, what's a good present to get someone like you?". Use your imagination and you can come up with a million of these.
You could even just volunteer something about your life. "Nice day today, I'm in a good mood because I'm going on a trip away soon". If he's interested in talking he'll continue. Most people who are working boring jobs will want to chat with a customer that isn't annoying.
I think it depends on what you want to happen in the end. Do you want to meet this pharmacist out as a friend or more, or do you just want more small talk?
Small talk is, by definition, impersonal. If you want the relationship to be personal, you need to transition from small talk. Either find a common interest or show interest in his interests.
TBH I find small talk pretty irritating and mostly enjoy being impersonal in the city. There's too many people to be friends with everyone, and I don't have time for many friends as it is. "How are you?" - "I'm good thanks"!
Mostly when I do make the effort to chat, people are receptive.
> So I'm wondering "Outside of work and family, where would other hackers have excuses to meet people in daily life?"
Play! Or, well, hobbies in general.
I've met people online through games and technical social forums, some of whom I later grabbed drinks with after we found out we were in the same area, and later still ended up working with several.
Nowadays I'm into boardgames - if you plopped me in a random city with no other contacts and a need to socialize, I'd maybe check online for boardgame bars. Maybe try to strike up a conversation about a boardgame another group's playing that looks interesting, or invite someone who's just grabbing food to join in. Or look up shops that might host the occasional MTG tournament - I don't generally play MTG, but it's a common enough game there's been a circle that plays it at every job I've had, and a tournament settings by it's very nature is going to force at least a minimal amount of interaction between complete strangers.
One of my friends is into drones - building them, racing them, the works. So there's racing events he goes to and meets people at, socializing during the downtime. More interactions of "oh, I recognized XYZ that you did online!" (common forums, videos, etc.) Also hosts a monthly movie night - a relatively easy excuse to get to know people better that he might only kind-of barely know at work.
Paintball seems like another option I should try picking up sometime. I bet paintball fields have some kind of open-to-all events to try and drum up business.
> But I stay quiet because it damages social relationships to express myself in odd ways. It's better to be on a cordial first-name basis than have an arms-length-but-personal experience with them.
Does it, and even if it does, is it really better? Extensive online socializing has made me very comfortable with being frenemies or worse with trolls etc. - worst case scenario, me and whomever I'm conversing with both find out we have better things to do than talk to the other party - and best case scenario, you've found something to bind over for a lifetime. Win/win.
(I realize this can be much easier to say than to internalize, but I wanted to plant this idea.)
> Even now, the smart thing is to stay quiet and not post this.
Then intelligence is overrated.
> You're told to stay quiet in a thousand ways by the society around you.
Then those parts of society are also overrated. Fuck 'em. Keep talking - how else are the other weirdos who also don't know when to shut up going to find you? :P
OT: FWIW, in UK (and France, Spain, Kenya as I recall from visits) pharmacists do prescribe to a limited degree. All the local pharmacies to me [except supermarket pharmacies] have small consulting areas with a closed door where you can chat about your ailments.
NHS I think are keen to encourage use of pharmacists for minor ailments.
This jumps out at me on airplanes. You used to strike up conversations with the people next to you, unless they were sleeping or obviously working on something. Now they're wearing headphones, and it feels intrusive to talk to them.
Being crammed shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers in a capsule is stressful for most people. Some deal with the stress by chit-chattering with others to distract themselves. Others just want to escape into their own heads and block out the uncomfortable surroundings.
I don't think much has changed, except now more people use headphones and cell phones to signal that they're in the latter group. Previously they would have nodded and said "mm-hmm, oh wow" a lot.
I don't think "striking up conversations from anywhere" is the way to go to find long-term friendship. Friendships work best when the lives of both parties (assuming over 30 years old) are in sync: this can be either similar situations, or common life threads to talk about. Outside that, the energy required to maintain friendship goes up dramatically.
For people over 30+ some common threads are same-aged children, similar pets, common hobbies, etc. It's just easier, and let's assume that my life is busy enough that I don't have the energy to work in new relationships that don't have a certain flow to it. It's not about fear or lack of social skills, because at some point we are ALL going to be awkward in a conversation and this is easily forgiven, especially since by the time we hit 30+ we are a bit more patient.
Personally, I've found that creating a small group is the best way to find new friends and the energy to cultivate it is spread out amongst the group. Inviting new people into the common circle is MUCH easier. It's easier to keep interesting conversation with 3 people than 2. But with more people comes the problems of scheduling and opportunities become slimmer.
Similar-minded people looking for friendship is easier than doing it alone.
How do you find out if you're "in sync" with someone? Conversations. How do you start that common circle, how do you pick people to invite to it? Fresh blood requires that someone talk to the strangers. And "anywhere" you've got at least one thread in common: You're in the same place, at the same time, for some reason. Often similar reasons.
Now sure, not every conversation with a stranger will turn into a life long connection between soulmates. Some of them you'll never talk to again. And sure, sharing the work between a circle of like-minded friends can help once you've gotten that like-minded circle of friends established.
But I have to say - some my best friendships have formed when a relative stranger struck up a conversation with me over a game. Or a job. Or a shared technical interest. Or, yes, by just being in the same damn place at the same damn time.
This is my experience as well. People in Seattle even when not on devices are very anti-social. When I was in the midwest, random people invited me to BBQ's and social events all the time.
>If it's hard, it's usually a psychological difficulty rather than a lack of opportunity.
Sure, but that doesn't mean it's easier. In my experience, it's the other way around, really. I am rather good at operating tools, and tools to deal with the physical barriers to socialization are usually pretty easy to operate.
The psychological side of that, though, is... more difficult. There are tools there, too, but in my experience, those tools are much less well understood.
I had the same problem. And for the meeting part if solved this problem by creating drop!in, a nearby event happening now app. An example from the other day, I was walking home from work, refreshed the app and realized there is a free Accenture-led API workshop just a few hundred meters nearby. Walked over had free Pizza and beers and had a nice chat with the local MD of the Accenture Digital Lab. This week we will meetup for lunch. So in my opinion, it's not a problem of meeting people, it's a problem of following up.
So at least for me the "meeting" people got solved.
I grabbed your app because I've been looking for something like this for a while (there's tons of useless ones that claim to do this) however it's crashing on my Note 5 every time I start it after I signed in.
> I'd argue that it isn't hard to make friends, it's just hard to meet people in the first place.
I strongly disagree; I think it's the opposite. Friendship takes time. You need to invest the time into conversation, building trust, building a relationship. You won't have a good friend after a week together.
Exactly this. The tough part about making friends in your 30s and above is that many people don't have the time to spend together to truly grow a friendship. It's tough to hang out with a potential new friend at least once per week unless you live in a dense area or city. At least that's been my experience.
It's also why quite a lot of my close friends are ~10 years younger than me—I move a lot and each new city I hit I have to make new friends. Many times that means people in their 20s that can spend leisure time like that. Probably not the best for my renal system though.
I disagree. There are plenty of places to meet people. Instead its hard for most people to be compatible to hang out regularly. Most lonely people have plenty of acquaintances, but no close friends to regularly hang out.
I think headlines like this are very dangerous. You are either a socially outgoing person or you're not.
For people who aren't, this confirms their lack of social life as 'a problem'. This isn't helpful to them on so many levels.
You make friends and grow your social circle by having a common interest with people. This could be knitting, cars, pacman...it doesn't matter, it's just a common bond and a language you speak. Meeting in real life is essential though. Online acquaintances aren't 'friends'....
When you were younger you probably made friends because you were all in school/college/university together. Some people make friends at work for the same reason (I've never really understood this though. After seeing them for 8 hours or so the last thing I want to do is spend time with them outside of work.) Where else can you go where people are gathered where friendships are likely to be created? Church/mosque/synagoge/temple/etc. was the typical answer for thousands of years. Maybe a service club like Kiwanis, Lions, Rotary? Though I typically think of those belonging to those kinds of clubs as being old men. Maybe there is somewhere else you could volunteer where you might meet like-minded people?
I realized profound joy when I realized that an above-average number of the parents at the [non-mainstream sport] studio to which I take one of my kids were people who shared a _lot_ of my nerdy-interests. It was one of those rare "I've found my people!" moments.
And? What ARE you interested in? Books, board games, video games, anime? There are about a zillion conventions, regularly meeting local groups (basically everywhere), and other ways to interact for enthusiasts of those things.
Meetup.com often covers this as an activity, though your results may vary. Best to find someone likeminded over a niche meetup, befriend them then have drinks after that.
therapists/psychiatrists can't really "cure" depression in most cases; they can only blunt some of the worst symptoms with drugs or teach coping skills. this often plays out over the course of years. in the mean time, depressed people might want to make friendships that they can realistically maintain. this probably does not include friendships that depend on mutual participation in activities for which the person has no genuine interest.
That’s not true, not entirely. There is a variety of approaches here, but one typical approach is for psychiatrist to blunt the symptoms with drugs, just enough so that you can get yourself together and commit to seeing a psychotherapist.
Read the first two chapters from the “Feeling good” book by David Burns to get an idea of what a competent (!) therapist can do.
I know a bunch of people who don't make many new friends and this has many reasons.
People get families. They have time for other people after the kids are done. Depending on the time they got the kids this can take till they are mid 40.
People met a whole bunch of people till they got 30 and decided that they only need the 2-5 best who are left in the end.
People have a career that eats most of their time and they want to invest the rest of this time into their relationship and not general friendships.
In general I have the feeling many people are more focused after 30. Mostly on romantic relationships.
Most new people I added to my "friends" in the last 3 years were love interests. Since I'm polyamorous, this isn't much of an issue for me, but I can imagine this to be an issue for monogamous people. They get a partner and that's it. The people they meet after 30 who are willing to share much of their time are singles searching for a partner, so if you already got one, you're not of interest.
I've just recently moved countries, and I've found that it's really difficult to actually meet people and make new friends, regardless of age. All my friends are also expats/immigrants.
I don't like spending too much time around tech people, since I do that for 8 hours a day, so tech meetups are out of the question. I went to the hiking club, but the average age is like 50. Nightclubs just aren't the place to find friends.
Generally, after school or university, people's circle of friends is fairly set.
The problem is that after university, we have a lot less free time, and there's a lot less opportunity to meet people from different backgrounds and walks of life. Clubs are meetups are great for meeting people with similar interests, but not so great for broadening your horizons. A lot of the things I'm interested in now I never would've done if it wasn't for meeting random people at university.
I guess immigrants have it bit harder because you come from a different culture/language/race so connecting with natives is a bit hard and then you end up connecting with other immigrants.
For me, and especially because I work remotely, it's because there's no central gathering place. Schools and colleges make it easy to find friends. Work a little less so, but I still managed to have a lot of friends there as well.
Sounds like you need a 'third place' - I had one for a while, then it closed down (and I moved). But when you find one, they're great: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place
Genealogy can be interesting. My ancestors "third places" have mostly closed down. I'm the first in my male lineage in an unknown but large number of generations to not be a Freemason. On the other side of the family, Church is not politically cool today.
I've found my local hackerspace to be an awesome "third place", and we're hoping to figure out a way to market it as such to boost our dwindling membership.
My best friends came from a local (now defunct hackerspace) which spun into a lock picking group (of which some people from hacker space were members, which spun into some of my best friendships and a recent career move.
Coming from a mediterranean country, many of the points that other comments raise as problems for meeting people past 30 are not so pronounce.
Is not that it isn't harder to meet people and make strong bonds, but its common for men in their 40s and 50s to play Football, hang out with their colleagues for a drink after work, meeting friends of friends, etc.
Generally speaking I feel like social ties are much stronger there, so it may be worth to take a look at how people behave in other places when addressing these topics.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 357 ms ] threadPartners and Kids are nowhere near... I don't even have a drivers license ffs (mainly because public transport is quite good here).
Should I start with that?
The reason it bothers me is because these men end up overrelying on their girlfriend or wife for both emotional support and to manage their social life. Without the woman doing it for them, they get angry, misanthropic, and antisocial due to not having an outlet - and they don't see it as a problem at all. But their families get to watch them become more unpleasant and withdrawn as time goes by.
This is something I find really hard to talk about with the men I see doing it, especially when it's my own partner. Obviously it's not all men. But my dad DEFINITELY does it, and the result is that he's gone from being a fairly open-minded, liberal, and environmental kind of person to someone who can't seem to talk about anything other than guns, American politics (we're not even American), and the "idiotic" policies of our local politicians. He recites stuff he's heard on TV as if it's gospel truth. It seems impossible to have normal, non-political conversations with him anymore, he just doesn't have any knowledge or interest that doesn't come from TV.
He's my dad and I love him, but needless to say, when I see my partners going down the same path, it freaks me out. Sorry, I know that's a lot to extrapolate from your very short comment, but maybe it's just something to think about.
Perhaps it should.
I'm an immigrant too, although no language issues, so I have lots of friends in my home country and not many here, a lot of those were expats or work connected and the rest are via my wife and her work - she didn't grow up around here either but is American.
I'd hate to go down that road you talked about and I've seen people do so. We've not been able to have kids either so don't have that path of getting out of our bubble.
Food for thought indeed.
This is one of my fastest upvoted comments ever. I think it struck a chord. There's no way of knowing whether it was men or women upvoting, but I have a feeling I'm not the only who has had these thoughts.
The cause is that “society” expects that to “grow up” a man must give up his hobbies and his friends and “settle down” (provide for a family as sole purpose in life).
Someone will say “that’s how the patriarchy harms men too!” But I don’t think I believe that; I don’t think men say “hey bro, we should totally just give up all that cool stuff we do, for no reason”.
I've suggested a few times (gently) that she take her work mates up on their offer of going for a meal (I gather one of the women at work is in a similar boat), I'm introverted by nature so I only socialize in settings where there is a distraction (tech and chess as mentioned) but it's enough social life for me.
I don't really need anyone to bare my soul too, I've always handled that stuff myself.
In fact most of my male friends also don't get too deep in discussing their feelings. So it might not just be a lack of friendship, but a deeper problem which is men having a hard time discussing their emotions with others.
Correct. My dad is not angry with my mom or any particular person. He just gets cranky and grumpy if my mom doesn't socialize him.
Sounds like me!
I don't want more than a couple of good friends. Anything more than that isn't friends, it's acquaintances with delusions of grandeur. That ends up leaving most of the pushing for socialization on my wife's plate, because ... I don't.
That said, I find that women maintaining the social relationships is a bit more stereotype than truth. I know more than a few women that are also pretty shit at it, and they're doubly embarrassed because they don't feel like they're fulfilling their gender role.
That doesn't mean I'm going to get sucked into to some kind of tribe like a political party or a religion. Or maybe it's just as accurate to say I already got sucked into a scientific outlook and scepticism at a young age and now find it impossible to escape.
I don't doubt the gender asymmetry that you imply; do you care to speculate about why it exists among middle-aged people?
Our days and hours are very scarce resources...almost all taken from us. I think the Spanish accommodated this by decreasing their daily work hours. If the US did that the US would employ more people, more meaningfully, and benefit from increased social “health”.
For a while I would make friends with people in their early 20s, as that was the age group that would be randomly free after my kids were in bed. I'm approaching 40 now though and am not sure how socially acceptable this still is...
I haven't made new 'friends' because I just don't want more of a social life. I am a pretty strong introvert; I am loud and friendly and boisterous, but spending time with people tires me out.
During the week, I get up at 6am, spend time with my daughter while I get her ready for daycare. Then, I go to work, where I am talking and laughing and having fun with coworkers all day while I work. Then, I come home, picking up my daughter on the way home. We go for a walk, she tells me all sorts of stuff, and then I make dinner while my wife watches her. We eat, get our daughter to bed, and by then it is around 8pm or so. At this point I am tired, and just want to relax, maybe read or watch TV a bit, chat with my wife, and go to sleep. There is no way I would have the energy or time to socialize on weeknights; I am all socialed out from work. The few times we do have plans during the week, I dread it because I know how tired and unsocial I am going to feel.
On the weekends, I am spending time with my daughter and wife. In the morning, I will make us breakfast and we will either play outside or go for a hike. We then take her home for a nap, and we do chores around the house. I always feel like there is not enough time on the weekend to get everything done.
I have a few close friends who live far away; we all play video games together once a week. I chat with my family, and between my nieces and nephews on both sides, there are a lot of video chats to have.
How is this a bad thing? Why do I NEED more friends than what I have? I am not sure what more 'emotional support' I need; I am a super happy person, always optimistic, and my wife is there for me when I need her (which isn't super often). I also can talk to my parents and sister if I needed more emotional support, or my two close friends if they weren't around.
I don't think your dad's issue is lack of relationships, he just sounds like he is an angry person. Is he retired? Being retired is a WHOLE different dynamic.
In fact, the biggest thing I feel I am lacking is ALONE time to work on hobbies. Before I got married and had a kid, I had all sorts of fun hobbies I did; I built airplanes and helicopters, I built robots, programmed games for fun. I like building and designing stuff, alone in my workshop, but I don't have enough time now to do it very often. This is a fine sacrifice to make, because I love my family and want to spend time with them, but it isn't like I am sitting somewhere lonely.
I am curious, however, if there is something you think I am missing by not having more friends. I certainly can't see it, because the idea of having more friends that I have to visit and see just makes me feel tired even thinking about it.
I can't say what you need, I don't know you. Maybe you could ask your wife if she thinks you need more friends? If she says something like "eh? Why?" then you're probably fine. But if you get a long pause and then, "Well, it wouldn't hurt..." then maybe you should ask her more questions.
But people without children really have no excuse.
edit: to make things even worse if i go somewhere by myself with child, all i see are groups/cults of mothers discussing parenting stuff, it's very rare to see men, they are too busy working and it's very unlikely to make non romantic female friend
Travel is certainly more difficult than it used to be, but I've found that the types of trips I used to turn my nose up at (all-inclusive resort-ish) are appealing in a completely new way. We can put the toddler down to bed, set up a baby monitor, and go down and enjoy ourselves like we're actually adults, often meeting new folks.
- HENRY DAVID THOREAU, 1854
> I mostly read the headlines and that is about it because just about everything is B.S. and nothing is going to change anyway.
Feeling like that is a strong sign that your emotional resources are close to being overwhelmed. If you're a vet, hopefully you have access to counselling services. I hope you try going at least once or twice. Most people can use a few sessions of counselling, even if they're totally healthy.
Off topic but I will say that it is almost criminal how many drugs that the military gives you for problems. Went in for sleep issues and came out with about 8 different meds.
Worst case I’ll just move to Alaska and become a mountain man like Jeremiah Johnson. Just kidding...sort of.
I also think that women tend to get more emotional support from their relationships. Men don't really get this (at least explicitly) from their friends. They do get it from their intimate partners. For a lot of men, their partner is the only person they ever 'open up to'.
In general, I think there are strong cultural (and possibly even biological) reasons for the different approach to and amount of emphasis men and women put on socialising. In some circumstances, being a bit of a social recluse can be advantageous (e.g. extreme dedication to particular pursuits such as a career), but in total I think that men as a group suffer for this tendency. They are much more likely to end up alone and lonely in later life (discounting the fact that women live longer). I think this probably plays a large part in the high suicide rates amongst older men.
I think that something that could be done to address this issue - and something that would benefit both men and women in a variety of ways - would be to focus on removing cultural and financial barriers that keep men away from their families and in the workplace. For example, we shouldn't talk about maternity or paternity leave, but instead parental leave. The financial security of families should not be seen as a man's responsibility, but a shared responsibility (this goes back to the seemingly intractable issue of the relationship between financial status and attractiveness of men). These are really ingrained cultural attitudes but we can chip away at them.
Focussing on some of these sorts of issues would be good for men's mental health and a much more productive means of levelling the earnings gap between men and women than focussing almost exclusively on sexist discrimination in the workplace - a red herring in many (but certainly not all) cases. As most people are aware, a significant part of the earnings gap is down to the responsibilities women take on outside of the workplace, such as caring for children and elderly relatives or supporting the local school. We should be looking at what it is that is holding men back from participating more fully in their community. I think by not doing this, many men are missing out on one of the fundamental aspects of being human.
I'm young and already excuse myself by saying that I don't mind having just one or two close friends. But this is how it starts: we tend to think we can handle being mostly friendless, and yet, as we age, it seems that many of us can't.
Not sure what the solution is, but you've definitely underscored a big problem that I've (till now) underestimated. And I'm sure others have too.
Or is it that they seek a stable relationship because their social life was already starting to dwindle? And they fall back to letting their partner manage their social life because they simply wouldn't have one at all without that help.
I see it a lot in people I know. They didn't care one bit about having a stable relationship. That is until their friends started becoming busier in life, maybe some moved away for other commitments, and they started to feel lonelier and wanted someone who was going to be there for them.
All this becomes a vicious cycle as each time someone feels the group of friends is no longer able to satisfy their needs and they seek a partner, the group is fragmented even further, making it even more difficult to provide what the group needs. Eventually you reach the point where there isn't a group anymore.
While I don't know if I speak for many men, in my experience the best male friendships are comprised of multiple people. If you don't have that group, it is difficult to have the best kind of male friendship. That is not to say one-on-one friendships are bad or impossible, but it's just not quite the same.
People age, and that includes their personalities.
The idea that people naturally veer to the right of the political spectrum as they age is a myth.
Firstly, getting more conservative as you get older is normal. And having fewer friends as you get older is normal. There are even jokes about it. You are trying to link the changes in your fathers politics to not having many friends, but you haven't argued why there's a causation vs just being a correlation.
I strongly suspect from your wording that this is because you can't accept that your fathers new politics might have any substance to it. You certainly don't sound like you try to understand why he's angry: you described him as changing from "open minded" (good, positive, liberal) to "recites stuff he heard on TV" (bad, closed minded, conservative). Maybe he feels angry because when he tries to explain how he sees the world and what concerns him, his daughter dismisses him and looks down on him? That'd make any parent kind of upset.
Secondly, you seem to be implying that men over-rely on women for emotional support. Perhaps that's been your experience. As a man, in every relationship I've ever been in, the woman has heavily relied on me for emotional support. This is especially true when in a stable relationship. If anything, girlfriends seem to cause more emotional needs than they solve - a non-trivial amount of emotional support needs that come my way seem to boil down to dramas or blowups between girlfriends.
Finally, I'm not sure men see "no need for a social life" once they get in a relationship. That's a very odd belief. One sad reality is that once a man gets in a stable relationship, women tend to make it hard to sustain relationships with anyone else, whether men or women. This is a pattern I've seen over and over again. I don't think it's really planned or deliberate but it happens. The first to go are obviously any female friends. Many women can't handle their man having close female friends especially if they're single or might become so. But it's pretty common for women to disapprove of male friends too, or to get upset if the man spends too much time out drinking with his buddies instead of spending it with her. The inevitable result is that the man has to pick: friends or girlfriend.
Anyway. If you really want to rebuild your relationship with your father, I suggest a two pronged approach:
1) LISTEN to him when he talks about politics and even engage with him. Don't attack him or make it clear that you feel your own politics are morally and intellectually superior. Ask him why he feels guns are so important, try to see the world from his perspective. If he's always talking about things he heard on TV that implies those are the things that vex and concern him the most. You don't have to agree, but if he feels you're at least trying and can make peace with that, it'll help.
2) Stop trying to find explanations for the way he's changing, especially dubious correlation/causation mixups that boil down to sexist generalisations. People do change as they get older. Moreover the world changes, and young people who have a less fixed identity are often more willing to bend to fit whatever way the wind seems to be blowing. If someone's personality or beliefs don't change with time, that can look to a younger person as if the person's personality has changed when from their perspective it's actually the world that's changing and they stayed the same i.e. what you see as "open mindedness" is in reality just a willingness to accept whatever odd new modern idea comes along, even ideas that seem self-evidently nonsensical to your father.
Would be interesting to see some stats to see if this narrative hypothesis is born out; do married/monogamously partnered men who become sole breadwinner lose more friends than those in other situations.
I'm male and in a long term stable relationship and my true friends are just as important to me as they ever were. They are like family to me.
On the flip side my girlfriend has decided she suddenly no longer has much interest in hanging out with her friends, which is concerning. I have solitary hobbies I enjoy, and I can't fill the gap that her friends have left.
> He's my dad and I love him, but needless to say, when I see my partners going down the same path, it freaks me out.
Your dad is your partner?
> It seems impossible to have normal, non-political conversations with him anymore, he just doesn't have any knowledge or interest that doesn't come from TV.
And here you are doing the same thing. How about not making everything political? Things are toxic as it is. Do you need to bring toxic politics to HN?
My recommendation to people is to find a meetup (doesn’t have to be from Meetup, could be a sports league, religious group, volunteering...) that meets frequently so that you have a chance to slowly get to know the same group of people over a course of time. I find meeting up once per month is a little too infrequent for growing bonds and prefer weekly/biweekly meetups but sometimes you end up meeting someone who you gel with and it’s easy to meetup many times over beyond the meetup interval.
www.nytimes.com.
In all seriousness, at 42 I really do prefer to hang out with 20-somethings because they’re fun.
Contrast that with my interactions with people my own age and younger: Topics inevitably fall to vapid TV shows and sports, celebrity gossip, This Gadget I Bought, where I partied last week, my office co-workers suck, etc. Wake me up when it’s over!
I'm 33, and I don't even see people my age as peers. I'm still a big kid at heart, and when I see people my age who are getting married, having kids, climbing the career ladder, it just reinforces that people my age just aren't my peers. I have no interest in ever getting married or having kids, and I have no career ambition. I identify more with people who are a decade younger than me than anyone else. Most people I've seen who are my age come off as more peers to my parents than as peers to me (this was especially jarring the last time I visited my cousins; they're only a few years older than me, but they have three kids each now, they reminded me so much of my mom, while I still see myself as an overgrown kid... by the time their children are old enough to have conversations with I'll probably have more in common with them than with any family members of my generation).
Don't get me wrong, being 20 is awesome. When you're 20. Because you suddenly have so much freedom. But when you're in your 40s, that's not that exciting any more. Well, at least it isn't for me. I've done the crazy things, I know how they end. I like friends with a bit more perspective.
And simply put, most people over 30 aren't going to be "like me" in the least. Most of them are family-minded, career-minded, or both. I'm just not going to have much in common with someone who's married and either has kids or is trying to have kids, nor am I going to have anything in common with someone who's trying to aggressively climb the career ladder.
The people I have the most in common with and see as peers are by and large slackers in their 20s, not people my age. I'm 33, and the disconnect between me and most people my age is really jarring... I see most people my age as having more in common with my parents than me (this was especially noticeable the last time I saw my cousins in person... they're only a few years older than me, but they act just like my mom did at their age, while I'm still a big kid... I really feel like most people of my generation are effectively of an older generation).
If you put no effort into it of course nobody is just going to randomly insert themselves into your life. And as you get older you don't have those common experiences of intermingling with lots of other people of similar ages or demographic backgrounds due to school, growing up, and so on. So put a little effort into it.
I changed a lot as a person after 30 - I moved to the bay area for one thing. I also transitioned... which let me meet other women in more feminine contexts (IE, fans of a clothing brand).
I also met a lot of people who became friends through dating.
Almost all of my friends that I see regularly I met in the last 5 years or so.
!/s
/g
Meetup.com, swing dancing, reddit meetups, board game nights, spoken word poetry, comedy open mics, theater, contra dancing are just a couple of the things I try to get involved in (I get burnt out on a few and rotate hobbies; dropping in and out of scenes).
It usually takes me about a year to a year and a half to make a solid group of friends in a city, but the friends I've made, I've kept in touch with all around the world. Going back to my home town was amazing too, even though so many people I knew had moved on. I wrote some blog posts about being nomadic:
https://khanism.org/perspective/a-tale-of-two-journeys/
https://khanism.org/perspective/minimalism/
You form your first friendships really early on with an extremely strong commonality - the hugeness of the world and your lack of information about it. Literally everything is in common with your peers circa age 2-4 because nothing is established yet. If it weren't for how our society has a habit of breaking these kids up constantly throughout their childhoods I would think those relationships would form the most iron clad friendships you can get if they survive to adulthood. Too bad about 90% of the kids you meet in daycare you never see again after you start school.
School is the next big one, where for most kids they will struggle alongside each other for 13 years straight. The mixing up of classes year to year again hurts the likelihood of strong friendships forming, but you can also just have kids your age in your neighborhood as a strong peer group. You have massive amounts of commonality at that point - you are taking the same classes, you live in the same area, you know the same people, you are subject to the "same" pop culture of your school.
That is where those high school clicks emerge from. The most bonded peer groups of before specialize as they age.
The same hold true into college, but I definitely don't see the same commonality and uniformity there. Going through puberty is really the cutting off point where divergent personalities specialize your interests enough that finding commonality becomes much harder, and you start having much less to offer your peers over their cumulative experiences and engagements.
It only gets worse from there. The more years into life you are, the more interests and specialties you have as a person that makes finding compatibility all that harder. People force themselves into relationships and marriage out of societal pressure. Nobody forces you into friendship nearly as much, so over that hump the lack of compatible people drops to near zero. Its why I think most marriages fail - they are trying to force the highest degree of friendship, when the older you get the harder it is.
Pokemon Go, and video games in general, are extremely effective ways to get people a commonality to force them together and interacting in ways that can build meaningful bonds. A common challenge is essential to bonding. The more passionate you can be about it the more likely it works.
But even then the 30 year old comes with baggage. They already have their favorite movies and musicians. Likes and dislikes. Hobbies and things they want to avoid. Because they have experienced so much more a fraction than they would have as children they are that much more set in stone. The adage of how you can't change a person applies here - even children demonstrate dramatically declining malleability as they gain experience in life. As you gain magnitudes more life experience your flexibility personality wise declines by similar magnitudes. It is trying to fit together puzzle pieces - if the pieces are made of clay you can mold them to fit. If they are tried out and set in stone they are rigid and it is much harder to find a match, and those matches are much easier to fracture and break.
The commonality and struggle are the prongs of a puzzle piece. The more impactful on your life, the happier it makes you, the more passion you can have for it the more pronounced those prongs can be. Early on you only need the simplest commonality as being the same age or living near one another to forge bonds - as you get old and your piece gets more defined and nuanced, it takes larger struggles and stronger forces to bind pieces together.
Great answer. I would just add: the bigger the struggle, the stronger the friendship. Military friendships are the extreme example of this. I've seen war comrades crying like children after decades without contact.
Great friends don't need to talk constantly to remain close friends. For various reasons, I lost contact with my best childhood friend for a while. It was 10 years, but it felt like nothing, we instantly clicked again.
"The friend of your youth is the only friend you will ever have, for he does not really see you...and perhaps he never saw you. What he saw was simply part of the furniture of the wonderful opening world. Friendship was something he suddenly discovered and had to give away as a recognition of and payment for the breathlessly opening world which momently divulged itself like a moon flower. It didn’t matter a damn to whom he gave it, for the fact of giving was what mattered, and if you happened to be handy you were automatically endowed with all the appropriate attributes of a friend and forever after your reality is irrelevant.”
Wow, this quote is phenomenal
>You form your first friendships really early on with an extremely strong commonality - the hugeness of the world and your lack of information about it. Literally everything is in common with your peers circa age 2-4 because nothing is established yet. If it weren't for how our society has a habit of breaking these kids up constantly throughout their childhoods I would think those relationships would form the most iron clad friendships you can get if they survive to adulthood. Too bad about 90% of the kids you meet in daycare you never see again after you start school.
This is exactly my experience as well. My best friend and I originally met before we can even remember, we must have been 3 or 4 years old. There are pictures of us running around in pajamas and bowler hats, play fighting with plastic pirate swords, stuff that I can't really remember now.
We actually didn't really get to see each other more than once or twice a year, because we lived so far apart, so I guess we bonded even more intensely for the couple of weeks we had every summer. We lost touch around the 6th or 7th grade, and didn't really see each other for 10 years or so, apart from sporadic chats on Facebook and such.
But we finally got back together in 2014, and it was almost as if no time had passed. We had burgers and a few beers, and talked for 6 hours straight. Completely separately from each other, we've both become huge metalheads, so now we go to concerts and festivals all the time, and he invited me to join his music quiz team. We're annual champions for three years running now, and the guys have become my closest friends.
They've also gotten me into pen'n'paper roleplaying games, and introduced me to further new friends through that.
It is definitely harder to make friends as you get older, you have to hit just the right shared interests to make it work.
If two people living together for years split up without being married in the first place, it improves the divorce statistics but doesn't really change the underlying reality.
Isn't this also true when you join any group of people who sharing the same goal?
For example: A soccer or football team or gym? Or maybe a book club even.
Sports and books respectively are missing an element of that formula. Sports aren't immersive. The obstacle is always just a game, for fun. Except when it isn't. There is a reason major sports professionals form lifelong bonds amongst each other while a volleyball club doesn't have as profound an impact. Your brain doesn't create a mountain of importance out of the sport.
For books, there is no common enemy to struggle and persevere against. You can get really immersed, but that makes the book memorable, not the people you talk about it with. In the same sense it is better than nothing and can produce friendship, but its not nearly as effective.
The trick is that none of it can be forced. You can't "make" yourself care, and nobody else can. It has to be a legitimate struggle with legitimate engagement and sense of comradery. Kids in school can feel that sense. Immersed gamers can feel it. If you are passionate about game development you can feel that with your codevs. But you need both pieces for the magical result.
It's definitely a somewhat unique phenomenon, and I like both the effect (seeing friends more regularly) and being able to experience it from the inside.
It does, however, give me the feeling that I should put more effort into getting together with my other friends. But life provides any number of excuses to delay it.
Sounds like sports or any hobby that involves other people. But I haven't played it so maybe I'm missing what's unique about it.
Reading the sentence I just wrote it still just sounds like sport, where you have to go to an oval or arena or whatever. But with Pokemon Go it's sort of 'anywhere' and yet specific at the same time. It's a particular place at a particular time. The difference may just be that it's a virtual / digital game rather than a physical one.
I was only part of the local community of players (green team in my city) briefly, but it was enough to learn that people in it talk to each other all the time (via Hangouts at that time), they see each other every evening, play together and then hang out together. That's one of the strongest friendship-making activities I've ever seen.
Side note: I'm surprised how in both Ingress & Pokemon GO, friendships cross team boundaries; you can be adversaries and friends, like in any respectable sport.
(For those unfamiliar, Ingress players have tongue-in-cheek epithets for the opposing team. Green team are "frogs" and blue team are "smurfs".)
The date didn't lead to anything as I don't think she had any romantic interest in me, but it was definitely a funny point when during a lull in conversation I paused and gravely asked if it was OK for her to be on a date with a "filthy frog" and she busted out laughing.
The hardest part of the game is getting enough players to take down a high level boss, which is why people have taken to joining chats to coordinate raids. Though this may be different for highly populated areas, and it's still possible to just randomly show up at a raid and find people waiting for it to start.
* https://pokemongo.gamepress.gg/
* https://rankedboost.com/pokemon-go/
* https://thesilphroad.com/
* https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrtyNMe3xtv3CLg5QR78HzQ/vid... - Best youtube channel I've encountered, though it's done in vlog style, so it's probably quicker to get information from the sites above.
I'm nearing 30, and I'd say over 90% of my friends have significant others. Long-term relationships significantly changes a person's behavior; the concept of friendship gradually shifts towards "How can I include my SO in this?" If we go to the movies, it's gotta be a film that he/she is going to like, and they don't like scary movies so that's out of the question now. Maybe your existing friends you've still got around will tolerate this, but new friends aren't going to do everything that your SO wants to do. With my guy friends especially, everything now revolves around what their SO wants to do even when their SO actually permits us to go off and do guy things. I think this happens to most people, though, and I would be no exception if I was in a relationship. As the article states, good luck if you are trying to make friends with another couple. Chances are at least one person in that party isn't really interested in the friendship.
Putting aside that constraint, however, I haven't had that much difficulty making friends at my age. I think a lot of people figure out that most people aren't worth their time, thus friends really don't provide all that much. As long as you've got a couple good friends who have your back even if you haven't talked in months, you're golden. If you're in a relationship with someone, the even less you need the company of others.
People also get dull by the time they're in their 30s. They spent so much time working and relationshipping that they lost a lot of imagination and didn't really expand their horizons as much as their Instagrams would suggest. I'm not saying this is a permanent state, but a doldrum that happens after a person has spent so much time ticking off the boxes of things they're supposed to accomplish. That's what tunnelvision can do to a person. It's definitely possible to get out of it, which is probably why my few real friends are either in their early-to-mid 20s or past 40.
This is very true. I had a longterm, and at the time I thought "rest of life", relationship break down in my early thirties and looking back it has been a change for the very best. I 100% agree about the "wall" at the year 30 mark (she was also around that age and I can't help but think she had a crisis of thought about "is this 'it'?"). I was very much feeling that and it was creating a combined sense of excitement and sheer terror. Throughout all of this was a handful of my own friends, of which I see one regularly and the rest sporadically (from months to years even) - but I never once felt "lacking" in friendship.
The couple that manages this best is one where Sun--Wed is single friends time and Thurs--Sat is couples friends time. Probably not for everyone but this seems to work remarkably well for them.
Kids would probably change things though.
Past a certain point, you never see your friends again unless they're accompanied by their SO, and once they have kids, their lives revolve around their kids and nothing else.
And I'll always remember the culture shock when I a new job where my coworkers were mostly in their 30s while my coworkers at my last job were all in their 20s. Office conversations at the new company mostly centered on the logistics of taking out a second mortgage, debates over what kind of grass to put in their yards, and talk of what their children are up to. I was 30 at the time, and I decided then and there that these were people I had nothing whatsoever in common with, and if this is what I have to look forward to as I get older, I don't really want a social life anymore.
I meant that the kinds of conversations that typical 30-somethings have are conversations that starkly remind me that people my age and older by and large aren't people I identify with.
They also got married, and fell into that spouse politics trap (if our wife or significant other don't like each other or click), we can't hang out, ever. I most of my friends I don't even try to make our spouses meet, except through happenstance, and even then, it doesn't matter since 95% of the time we're doing something, its out with friends, and we only have a few friends where we'll do something with their spouse.
Some tried to get in contact when they had kids but quite frankly, I've moved on.
A theory of mine is that big families were once a thing because it was a way to have built in friends well after 30. When you have 5 adult kids and many grand kids I imagine you never feel like you don't have a lot of friends as the large family serves as a proxy for that kind of companionship.
That being said I wonder how social media will impact this. The majority of my ex friends still follow me, and I talk to many of them multiple times a week via group text.
I'll add that the workplace can be problematic for friendship as there is extra room for undue hostility. If someone makes a mistake, for instance, that mistake may fall directly on your shoulders and friendships predicated on that type of situation usually do not end well. People do not want to feel like they are being taken advantage of in friendship.
Compare that with a scholastic environment and mistakes generally only affect the one who made it (or perhaps faculty, who students usually do not befriend), thereby not affecting friendships. If your own grades were dependent entirely on your friends' performance in school, you just might not be able to maintain those friendships quite so well.
I have a family, a heavy cycling habit and a demanding job: I don't really have time to make and maintain serious friendships outside these activities. What friendships I have right now are from my single days - they hangout with us during various vacations/dinners etc. But new friendships are pretty much impossible because of a lack of time. If these old friends move away etc., then it is pretty much going to be hermit style after that :)
I am able to make new friends, but they end up being more like acquaintances most of the time. Currently I am in grad school, and that's working out well for me. There's something about the shared camaraderie and shared suffering from the workload that builds real friendships.
What other struggles are there that we can take on to facilitate bonding?
It occurs to me that raising children is a struggle and can help someone bond with their spouse. That doesn't help single people (like me) though. Work can be a struggle, but not always a positive one, and switching jobs can end it. I imagine firefighters and EMT workers face a deeper struggle than corporate jobs and form deeper friendships.
I made tons of friends in my 20s and early 30s. Many of them moved away to other cities with time, so I have fewer friends now, but that's also partly due to being in a long term relationship, so I have less time, and I'm still friends with some of the people I became friends with in my 20s, and between work, relationship, life and those other friends there isn't much time left for anything else. That's without kids in the mix!
However none of the friends I made in my 20s were friends borne of a shared struggle. Most of them were people I met through going to social events specifically organised for people to meet each other. The city I moved to had a lot of transient worker types moving through them so there were lots of events organised by and for expats (perhaps I should call us migrants, as that's what we were). People would turn up to a bar and know nothing about anyone except that we all wanted to make friends, and maybe even hook up. Everyone arrived alone and was trying to make new friends all the time, so if you got a few friends that way, they'd also have a few friends, and everyone would start going to similar events so you'd see each other a lot, and that branched out into events organised just in our groups - mostly very simple events like "let's all meet in the park and drink and barbecue today". It was all quite straightforward and struggle-free. As people came and went I found myself going round that loop several times in my 20s, developing new groups of friends as old ones slowly dissipated.
The only slightly tough part of it was learning how to be sociable with total strangers. Most people are a bit shy and it's not really natural to make fun conversation with someone you just met and know nothing about, but it's like anything, it comes with practice.
I wouldn't describe most work as a struggle. There has to be some higher purpose than just getting through the day. Startup life can achieve that in some way, if you're a very early employee or founder as that way the hard decisions and unexpected events are shared in your group. I'm like that right now - not a founder but a senior executive at a startup firm, and I'm lucky enough to be (by coincidence) working with someone who was in the same class as me at university, someone who I had stayed friends with throughout our 20s. And yeah, building a company is tough work, it's definitely a struggle that I feel enhances our friendship, certainly we see a lot more of each other these days!
I think this is, in its own way, a kind of shared struggle: meeting with groups of expats provided you with a group that you could bond with over the shared experiences and modern "hardships" of adapting to life in a new city.
I've found that competitive gaming has been pretty good for this, with the stipulation that it mainly applies to 1v1 games which are usually played at live events (such as fighting games like Street Fighter and Super Smash Bros Melee, or card games like Magic: The Gathering), rather than games which tend to have more of an online presence (MOBAs like League of Legends and digital card games like Hearthstone are less good for this). Pretty much any game that has an active local scene will have at least one local business (usually a game store or an arcade) that runs weekly events for a nominal entry fee.
The immediate benefit to playing a competitive game that has an active local scene is that you'll find yourself in the same space and spending time with the same group of people for several hours at a time on a weekly basis, so at the very least you'll become acquainted with most of the locals. Attend enough of these weekly events and it's usually pretty easy to get plugged in with people who run smaller, less-official events on the other days of the week. One of the things I like about Magic: The Gathering is that I can move to any major city, go to a Friday Night Magic event, and quickly get plugged into a local network of people who share my interests.
If you ever take your game beyond the local level, then you'll also probably end up forming more social connections with people in the local scene, as traveling to events becomes much more economical when you do it with a group of people to split the cost of hotel room and gas. When you travel to an event with a group, you end up spending a lot of time with the same group of 3-4 people over a period of a weekend, which can be a great bonding experience. There's also the fact that traveling to events like this has the effect of making you feel like you're competing together as a "team," even if you're all competing individually; it's fun to root for people from your own city, and it's these sorts of experiences that really offer the kind of "struggle" that I think is good for facilitating bonding. Part of the benefit of traveling to an event as a group is having people to commiserate with after you get knocked out of the tournament.
The "commiserate with and/or root for people I recognize from my own city" can also apply to people you didn't travel with, and in fact having serendipitous encounters with people you know but didn't travel with can also be a great bonding experience. When you drive four hours to an event and then see someone you recognize from home, it can make for a great, "Hey, good to see us!" moment, and even if it's not someone you know really well, you always have "so how's your tournament run going?" as an icebreaker. These moments can often end in making dinner plans where you get all of the dozen or so people from your home city to meet up at a bar or diner, and a lot of the most memorable experiences I have from competitive gaming come from those late-night dinners.
I've found that any hobby that offers "casual regular events on a weekly basis, plus occasional group trips for the people who take it more seriously" is a great recipe for bonding; I played competitive Pokemon for several years despite not enjoying the game particularly simply because of the great social experiences that I had with playing it. I have friends who are into cosplay and anime conventions who have had analogous experiences. Competitive gaming is the main one that I engage in that I consider "strictly recreational," but I've also had some similar experiences with the local game dev scene and with local writing groups, which are adjacent to my professional life. Some of my favorite experiences in game development have come from going to a big event like PAX and just having friends (both from internet and from back home) stop...
I used to be active in a ski club that would plan weekly trips to mountains. Made a lot of friends through that. I need to find another organization like that.
Like you said, grad school has been useful because you're all going through the same situation and spending repeated time with each other.
For me, it was picking a handful of Meetup.com groups that interested me and going to meetups over and over and over again, until I became one of the regulars that knew pretty much everyone and they knew me. And then we started inviting each other to private events, and friendships grew from there.
so it may be less about being 30+ and more about not having regular activities which bring you in contact with the same people over and over again.
What really helped me was getting into a bunch of hobbies and putting myself out there, starting kickboxing and crossfit, volunteering at a local historic motor race, going to concerts and festivals, music quizzes. Just a bunch of stuff that interestes me, and presumably interest people with a similar mindset as mine.
I suppose that's why I tend to gift Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet to friends, i.e. "But your solitude will be a hold and home for you even amid very unfamiliar conditions and from there you will find all your ways." Or maybe that's why I admire Tarkovsky, i.e. "I don’t know… I think I’d like to say only that they should learn to be alone and try to spend as much time as possible by themselves. I think one of the faults of young people today is that they try to come together around events that are noisy, almost aggressive at times. This desire to be together in order to not feel alone is an unfortunate symptom, in my opinion. Every person needs to learn from childhood how to spend time with oneself. That doesn’t mean he should be lonely, but that he shouldn’t grow bored with himself because people who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger, from a self-esteem point of view."
Though sometimes I think about what side is greener, I suppose it's a matter of perspective.
Community College typically don't have dorms and high participate in student orgs.
As I have grown older I realised that my university friends were mainly a bunch of snobby middle class boring people. They had a careers, while I explored life a fair bit more (and still manage to have a career after taking a few years out).
The guys who I have met through kayaking - an activity where we have quite literally saved each others lives on occasion - are far more interesting and fun and more real friendships.
I was involved with the university club for a while, until my level was beyond wanting to help teach beginners and push my own limits somewhat harder.
Travelled and worked as a rafting guide after university, and I quite literally have kayaking friends all over the world now.
It is really hard to make friends even when you are young. Living in shared apartment, playing sport you love, going for dance classes, etc. These activities definitely helps. It took me 1 year to finally crack the code.
It took me time to get comfortable with who I am and what are my values. But still, I have an inferiority complex which hinders me to get along with anybody as the college experience still loops in my mind saying I am not enough.
He would just yack, and yack. Some times I would put the phone down, and come back in 5 minutes, and he would still be talking. He was eccentric, had a horrid childhood, but genuinely nice.
I thought he was nuts, but nice.
We ended up becoming best friends. They used to call us the odd couple.
I ended up trusted him more than family. We just included each other in everthing without even thinking. My girlfriends were put off by him at first, but he would wear them down talking, and before I knew it, he was calling them daily. And when he missed a day, they would ask me if he is ok. He never crossed the line either.
He died a few years ago, but his friendship technique was something I thought was brilliant. Just wear the person down.
I can pass this along, I once heard a therapist say something like, make friends with people your own age, or younger. Her rationale was they will die before you.
When I was in my tewenties, I just didn't have much in common with my peers. I wasen't more mature, but didn't like my generation that much. My friends were just older. I really loved all of them.
If I had a do-over, I might have really tried to make friends with people my own age. I'm all alone now. It does suck.
Anyways, my eccentric friend knew how to make friends. I haven't tried his technique, but might?
Never followed the advice. In all honestly, I remember her telling me she was going to take some time off.
I was so relieved on so many levels.
Which is ridiculosis - but you cant change what people think when they see you for the first time.
I find how I dress and hold myself signals "age" more than my actual aging. If you act tired and old, no matter your age, it is a signal.
We also have hair dye, dentures, plastic surgery for those that care. And many do.
Youth is a verb.
So it doesn't seem like it's the shackled-together aspect that causes the unfriendliness. On the contrary, a model which fits better is that people are inherently antisocial and unfriendly, and find that with rented accommodation they can get away with it.
I think you’re right. The homeowners are probably aware that they’re locked into their neighbors for a very long time so building relationships makes more sense than the more transient renters.
Contrast with today: Until a recent move to the suburbs, I have had very little in common with my any of my neighbors except for the fact that we are all seemingly perpetually transient. I still don’t have much in common with my current neighbors but living here for a whopping 3 years straight has given me the chance to reach out and get to know them.
Yes, that's my concern too.
I always suspected being house poor has to do something with it. One time I overheard a neighbor who was complaining on the phone about how debt ridden she was. I guess when you are barely scraping you don't have any emotional space to acknowledge people.
I suspect it's worse for senior citizens as well...
Its just my experince, but there it is.
Flattery will get you nowhere.
>Hank Williams
Alcoholic, died age 29, sings about how he is lonely, like other alcoholics do.
British singer describes how he's afraid of Americans.
You see the difference, right? The current generation, the weak ones, they like to sing about how tough they are. "Heathens" or "Royals" is the typical sort of chest puffing bragging about their own prowess.
That's a lot different from outsiders describing their fear of your kind in song.
If it's hard, it's usually a psychological difficulty rather than a lack of opportunity.
Unless you live somewhere exceptionally remote, you're usually surrounded by people and opportunities for meeting them are quite frequent. You could strike up conversations most anywhere: from streets to bus stops to parks to bars to dance and social clubs to special interest groups, work, cafes, parties, conferences, and so on.
Usually, though, most people don't make the effort, for a variety of reasons ranging from fear to awkwardness and lack of social skills.
Once you meet people, though, you have to go further and cultivate acquaintances in to friends, and lots of people fail to do that as well. Even after a friend is made, however, it's still a challenge to get closer and then to maintain the friendship, which again people often fail to do.
I actually do live in a fairly remote place, pmoriarty, but your comment has me reflecting on culture. Seattle, where I regularly visit, is known for the "Seattle Freeze," whereby people are insular and guarded. I spent a lot of years there in the tech world and have no relationships to show from it; just business. Perhaps you are in a locale where the culture is more open and welcoming, where people are more willing to engage in conversations with strangers?
My understanding is that it's a lot more, I forget the word. reliable or repeatable? I mean, two different big5 tests are more likely to give you the same answer than two different MBTI tests.
I would extend your evaluation to say that it is not appropriate for use on others, but if you think that it helps you assess yourself, knock yourself out.
This is certainly nowhere close to the norm in europe. I only know a couple of people who work more than 40 hours a week (37.5 is standard in the UK), and they definitely take vacations.
It's like you are celebrating a system that didn't take much out of you to give seriously dehydrated people water while conveniently neglecting the result that giving them a bottle of water either made them destitute or prolonged their lives by a small amount. You also conveniently neglect that many first world nations manage to have universal healthcare and spend less per person than us. I will say this though, if you are rich there are very few better places to be for healthcare than America. Hoorah, what a great system; what a great quality of life for everyone!
This is simply observed by noting that most people, in both countries, actually work and pay taxes. Therefore, in Europe, most people are paying for both their own services and for those of people who can't afford it. That's an attitude of "I'll pay for my neighbor" not "my neighbor should pay".
Disclaimer: My two Seattle visits were both welcoming and pleasant, and I've never met newfoundglory. Had I, I likely would have found them to be quite friendly.
Wanna be friends?
I spent a lot of time working remotely. Bouncing up and down the northeastern corridor. I found a way to get acclimated to a city rather quickly. Find your tribe, friend the service staff, and it generally grows from there. Make yourself that you're a regular, and a good person.
I'm not an outdoorsy person, I'm not a "chill" person. What I enjoy wasn't common fare. That's not meant as a knock. The closest I found here, was the LGBTQ community. But there was a bit of trepidation with me being a software developer, i.e. causing problems for the city.
There is the Seattle freeze. But it's also we're busy and there is not that much in common. It's important to try and not be negative. Blaming the city is not beneficial. Maybe the city just isn't right for you. What do you want from your city, where you live?
I will say I did find it's more insular. My usual fare of trying to join a conversation at a bar didn't work. Saying hi, was not well received. I also think I had a cloud of negativity, from heavy job dissatisfaction that limited a positive response. My few friends here. Were gained from bartenders a bouncer, and someone I met at a mixer.
One other thing I'd note. Is I try and perform outside of work, event hosting, dj'ing, etc. I tried talking to promoters but got stood up a lot. Make an appointment to meet up and no show.
"How you doing today?"
"Oh, you know how it is." He gives me a weak smile. I can tell he feels worn down from the daily grind.
I pick up my script, then think of a way to keep chatting.
"Hey, this is going to sound weird, but I also have <foo> medical condition. Do you have any advice on getting that treated?"
I have no idea why this made sense to me, but it was something like "Pharmacists fill scripts, and they also see prescriptions daily, so they know which illnesses are treated by which medicines, so therefore this is totally not a weird thing to do."
He gives me this super surprised look and stays mostly quiet. I say "I should see a doctor huh?" and he says yeah. I walk away feeling like a dummy.
I didn't mind at all, and I'm not afraid to try to make new friends. But now instead of this random person thinking of me as a neighbor (he always called me by name) I'm pretty sure he thinks I'm weird. And I am.
The point is, I don't really care about being weird. I don't think I'm alone in this. But I stay quiet because it damages social relationships to express myself in odd ways. It's better to be on a cordial first-name basis than have an arms-length-but-personal experience with them.
The opportunities you mention for meeting people are really not as frequent as you make it seem. And it's unclear what to say to force a conversation. Yes, some people have this skill. Some are also naturally good looking. But seeing as this is Hacker News, I think the audience might be closer to my side of things.
The reason I wrote this was that you mention there are all these opportunities. But going over in my mind, I can't see a single way to talk to that guy that isn't socially weird. He's at work. He just wants to get his job done and move on to the next customer. I don't know anything that could make him laugh. Asking about his day or asking him to tell me what it's like to be a pharmacist would be seen as yet another frustrating thing to deal with at work. And there are other people in line behind me, so this is an imposition on everyone else.
But those people are opportunities too, right? I could just turn around and start chatting them up. Except not really. It's the same for everyone else in life: We're all busy, all dealing with our own things. And the older you are the busier you get.
All of this is to say, you can live in one of the biggest cities in the country and still feel completely isolated and alone. I know. And maybe this comment will put it into context that it's not really their fault. It's just the shape of the situation.
I usually hack on my projects at the mall on a couch, and end up meeting quite a lot of people. But only if they happen to be hacking away on something too, and eventually I ask them about it. But that seems rather an uncommon situation. So I'm wondering "Outside of work and family, where would other hackers have excuses to meet people in daily life?"
Even now, the smart thing is to stay quiet and not post this. You're told to stay quiet in a thousand ways by the society around you.
Using the coworking space is a surprisingly good way to meet people. Obviously the guy locked in an office, headphones on, hammering out code should be left alone -- but there will be many people sitting in the common areas, chatting with their buddies. They might be drinking the free beer on tap. They probably have a startup, open source project, etc. that they're passionate about and would be happy to tell you about.
I think consistently seeing each other daily for whatever period gives you a good chance to find common interests, incorporate social outings, etc.
In any case, I don't see that asking a pharmacist about a medical-related topic would be interpreted as a friend request.
The point is that you are actually meeting the pharmacist. You're there every week. That's an opportunity.
Say you wanted to talk to him more, I would not be trying to act like more of a customer by talking about medical conditions, I would be talking about things he might be interested in, or mention something else that I'm interested in, or something that anybody might be interested in (weather/current news/sporting event), or something related to the current situation. Or even just throw something out there - "you look like you might know about <certain thing>, my mom has one and was just asking me about it". Even if you're wrong they'll be interested in why you might think that about them which can move onto other subjects. "You remind me of <such-and-such person>". "Hey, you remind me of my dad, what's a good present to get someone like you?". Use your imagination and you can come up with a million of these.
You could even just volunteer something about your life. "Nice day today, I'm in a good mood because I'm going on a trip away soon". If he's interested in talking he'll continue. Most people who are working boring jobs will want to chat with a customer that isn't annoying.
I think it depends on what you want to happen in the end. Do you want to meet this pharmacist out as a friend or more, or do you just want more small talk?
Small talk is, by definition, impersonal. If you want the relationship to be personal, you need to transition from small talk. Either find a common interest or show interest in his interests.
TBH I find small talk pretty irritating and mostly enjoy being impersonal in the city. There's too many people to be friends with everyone, and I don't have time for many friends as it is. "How are you?" - "I'm good thanks"!
Mostly when I do make the effort to chat, people are receptive.
Play! Or, well, hobbies in general.
I've met people online through games and technical social forums, some of whom I later grabbed drinks with after we found out we were in the same area, and later still ended up working with several.
Nowadays I'm into boardgames - if you plopped me in a random city with no other contacts and a need to socialize, I'd maybe check online for boardgame bars. Maybe try to strike up a conversation about a boardgame another group's playing that looks interesting, or invite someone who's just grabbing food to join in. Or look up shops that might host the occasional MTG tournament - I don't generally play MTG, but it's a common enough game there's been a circle that plays it at every job I've had, and a tournament settings by it's very nature is going to force at least a minimal amount of interaction between complete strangers.
One of my friends is into drones - building them, racing them, the works. So there's racing events he goes to and meets people at, socializing during the downtime. More interactions of "oh, I recognized XYZ that you did online!" (common forums, videos, etc.) Also hosts a monthly movie night - a relatively easy excuse to get to know people better that he might only kind-of barely know at work.
Paintball seems like another option I should try picking up sometime. I bet paintball fields have some kind of open-to-all events to try and drum up business.
> But I stay quiet because it damages social relationships to express myself in odd ways. It's better to be on a cordial first-name basis than have an arms-length-but-personal experience with them.
Does it, and even if it does, is it really better? Extensive online socializing has made me very comfortable with being frenemies or worse with trolls etc. - worst case scenario, me and whomever I'm conversing with both find out we have better things to do than talk to the other party - and best case scenario, you've found something to bind over for a lifetime. Win/win.
(I realize this can be much easier to say than to internalize, but I wanted to plant this idea.)
> Even now, the smart thing is to stay quiet and not post this.
Then intelligence is overrated.
> You're told to stay quiet in a thousand ways by the society around you.
Then those parts of society are also overrated. Fuck 'em. Keep talking - how else are the other weirdos who also don't know when to shut up going to find you? :P
NHS I think are keen to encourage use of pharmacists for minor ailments.
I don't think much has changed, except now more people use headphones and cell phones to signal that they're in the latter group. Previously they would have nodded and said "mm-hmm, oh wow" a lot.
For people over 30+ some common threads are same-aged children, similar pets, common hobbies, etc. It's just easier, and let's assume that my life is busy enough that I don't have the energy to work in new relationships that don't have a certain flow to it. It's not about fear or lack of social skills, because at some point we are ALL going to be awkward in a conversation and this is easily forgiven, especially since by the time we hit 30+ we are a bit more patient.
Personally, I've found that creating a small group is the best way to find new friends and the energy to cultivate it is spread out amongst the group. Inviting new people into the common circle is MUCH easier. It's easier to keep interesting conversation with 3 people than 2. But with more people comes the problems of scheduling and opportunities become slimmer.
Similar-minded people looking for friendship is easier than doing it alone.
Now sure, not every conversation with a stranger will turn into a life long connection between soulmates. Some of them you'll never talk to again. And sure, sharing the work between a circle of like-minded friends can help once you've gotten that like-minded circle of friends established.
But I have to say - some my best friendships have formed when a relative stranger struck up a conversation with me over a game. Or a job. Or a shared technical interest. Or, yes, by just being in the same damn place at the same damn time.
I'm probably just picky, because I can't imagine making a single friend over a year using that scattershot approach.
Sure, but that doesn't mean it's easier. In my experience, it's the other way around, really. I am rather good at operating tools, and tools to deal with the physical barriers to socialization are usually pretty easy to operate.
The psychological side of that, though, is... more difficult. There are tools there, too, but in my experience, those tools are much less well understood.
So at least for me the "meeting" people got solved.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dropin.main
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/drop-in/id1038351294?mt=8
Looking at the data I have received from the sign-up and data selection processes there should have been no problems.
I strongly disagree; I think it's the opposite. Friendship takes time. You need to invest the time into conversation, building trust, building a relationship. You won't have a good friend after a week together.
It's also why quite a lot of my close friends are ~10 years younger than me—I move a lot and each new city I hit I have to make new friends. Many times that means people in their 20s that can spend leisure time like that. Probably not the best for my renal system though.
I disagree. There are plenty of places to meet people. Instead its hard for most people to be compatible to hang out regularly. Most lonely people have plenty of acquaintances, but no close friends to regularly hang out.
For people who aren't, this confirms their lack of social life as 'a problem'. This isn't helpful to them on so many levels.
You make friends and grow your social circle by having a common interest with people. This could be knitting, cars, pacman...it doesn't matter, it's just a common bond and a language you speak. Meeting in real life is essential though. Online acquaintances aren't 'friends'....
yeah, this is me. how do you meet the people who just want to sit around, drink a few beers, chat a little, and maybe watch a movie?
Read the first two chapters from the “Feeling good” book by David Burns to get an idea of what a competent (!) therapist can do.
People get families. They have time for other people after the kids are done. Depending on the time they got the kids this can take till they are mid 40.
People met a whole bunch of people till they got 30 and decided that they only need the 2-5 best who are left in the end.
People have a career that eats most of their time and they want to invest the rest of this time into their relationship and not general friendships.
In general I have the feeling many people are more focused after 30. Mostly on romantic relationships.
Most new people I added to my "friends" in the last 3 years were love interests. Since I'm polyamorous, this isn't much of an issue for me, but I can imagine this to be an issue for monogamous people. They get a partner and that's it. The people they meet after 30 who are willing to share much of their time are singles searching for a partner, so if you already got one, you're not of interest.
I don't like spending too much time around tech people, since I do that for 8 hours a day, so tech meetups are out of the question. I went to the hiking club, but the average age is like 50. Nightclubs just aren't the place to find friends.
Generally, after school or university, people's circle of friends is fairly set.
The problem is that after university, we have a lot less free time, and there's a lot less opportunity to meet people from different backgrounds and walks of life. Clubs are meetups are great for meeting people with similar interests, but not so great for broadening your horizons. A lot of the things I'm interested in now I never would've done if it wasn't for meeting random people at university.
I guess immigrants have it bit harder because you come from a different culture/language/race so connecting with natives is a bit hard and then you end up connecting with other immigrants.
Coming from a mediterranean country, many of the points that other comments raise as problems for meeting people past 30 are not so pronounce.
Is not that it isn't harder to meet people and make strong bonds, but its common for men in their 40s and 50s to play Football, hang out with their colleagues for a drink after work, meeting friends of friends, etc.
Generally speaking I feel like social ties are much stronger there, so it may be worth to take a look at how people behave in other places when addressing these topics.