Tell HN: People underestimate the effect of colleges in making lifelong friends

We formed a group of very close friends who all worked together "against the system" to get the best grades possible while somehow staying sane[1]. Long days and nights working together, or just shooting the shit _at college_ because we were bound to stay there working.

I'm 100% sure that in my personal case, I would not share the bond I do with my friends (even if they were other friends) if I had not met them under these circumstances.

[1] I have been extremely lucky to have belonged to a group of "top of the class students" who worked together, shared notes, assignments and helped each other, instead of competing and throwing each other under the bus -- I know of other people who did not have the same luck.

At least in the parts of the US that I've visited, coffee shops either fill up with people working solo behind laptops, or they're chains that maximize turnover by making furniture scarce and uncomfortable.

The pub is usually a bar with multiple huge televisions and blaring music. In a bar, I'm usually completely unable to follow a conversation at all.

"The club" usually means a fraternal organization like the Elks or the Kiwanis. In most areas, these organizations have long ago aged into being irrelevant. And where they haven't, they're usually very conservative and very insular.

Among the places I've lived, two used to have "community hubs" that died and were never replaced. College Park, MD, used to have a coffee shop called the College Perk in an old rambling house above a highway underpass. It closed down after an electrical fire. Cupertino, CA, used to have another place called Coffee Society. It was the kind of place where regulars met to play chess and have discussions. It closed several years and stands vacant to this day.

What's called the "third place", and that's sorely missing in modern life and in my opinion the root cause of the epidemic of loneliness.

The third place is the third nucleus where you just hang out: one is family/home, two is school/work.

In college usually you hang out with people after school. Then you graduate and it's just home and work. Meeting people outside for drink isn't a third place. A third place is a place where you just are, for how long you want, with no expectation from anybody, and with some movement of people/fresh faces once in a while.

I've seen that in Africa visiting my family (hanging out on the porch after dinner talking to neighbours and passersby), I've seen it in older people in Southern Europe (hanging out in bars playing cards), but in my 30s there is a complete lack of this space. If you're working 9-5 it's even worse.

What's even sadder is seeing the younger generations losing this space, because hanging out online is more convenient, so they're stuck at home, alone.

Binge watching Netflix on the other hand is easy. I can do it whenever I want.

Humans are attuned to have happiness that's deeply connected to interacting and mutual appreciation of other.

Despite the best efforts of Twitch.com, television and other activities do not fill this void for deep appreciation.

Deep relationships are truly essential.

Since we moved to my current neighborhood in the suburbs, however, I socialize several times a week. It's impossible not to. There's a dozen kids within 100 feet on our street. Whether we feel like binge watching Netflix or not, the kids want to play--thus providing their own child care--and it's very easy to just grab a beer with the neighbors. Then there's church where I'm on committees that mandate face-to-face interactions several times a month on top of going weekly. I also live 10 minutes from my parents, so there's dinners over there several times a week. I don't work any less than I did when my social life was less active, and I have two more kids than I did back then. But I watch a lot less Netflix.

I moved to an inner city apartment and suddenly my social life exploded. I have a few friends very close by and some are in the same building as me. A social event is now as simple as sending a message asking if any of them want to grab dinner with me in an hour. We meet up at the lobby and walk to a pub/restaurant. Cars and commuting are this huge barrier to socialization these days.

It's not artificial. This is the tribal culture humans used to live in in prehistoric times. We are evolved to live like that.

Modern society is what is artificial.

Basically making friends is about proximity. If you want to make friends you need to live in an a tribal type community and environment.

But mostly it's a matter of priorities. In school, my priorities were: Academics, Friends, distantly followed by Family, Personal Health, and Home (meaning dorm, flat, apartment, w/e). Now Family, Personal Health, Home, and Career are at the top and Friends are at the bottom. When I was in undergrad I could text my friend "Hey wanna grab food" and we walked to the nearest calzone place. Now I make sure my partner and I have spent time together, that I've done my chores around the house, and then I text a friends to meet. One friend is trying to lose weight and can't eat at a place with too many carbs, the other is trying to cut back alcohol and doesn't want to go to a place with lots of drinks, and I need something gentle on my stomach. Then we agree on the place and meet up. Walking to the nearest calzone place is just not a plan my friends and I would trivially agree on anymore and that's okay. Priorities change with age.

I don't think this has anything to do with the macro trend of decreasing socializing.

I also moved to London from NZ, and have made great friends here and socialise a lot, so it’s certainly not just a major city effect. I’m not really one to preach, but to me I think your perspective is not one that I recognise at all.

I cant help ... college is when the peer group is the most uniform. They are all the same age and in the same life stage. They all study the same or similar thing, have similar interests. And are all being college educated. You meet trades people there. If you study CS, you will meet very few artists.

I liked college experience, but both high school, employment and sports clubs were more diverse in terms of who I met there.

How many little boys in my neighborhood swear they want to grow up to be a pro football player, but this is the main activity they see gaining adult approval in the cafe. I wanted to be either an orchestra conductor or a luthier based upon two experiential impressions that aesthetically influenced me.

The "metaverse" is already beginning to set in, and it's like a drug--no issue in moderation, but destructive if you get addicted, which is extremely easy to do. Do people love drugs more than relationships with other people? Well, drug addicts do, but we understand that as a neurological twitch (an illness, even) more than a high-minded desire.

> The reason that college works in forming friendships and romantic relationships is the artificial environment it creates where people are obligated to show up and mingle with people who are from different backgrounds, and for at least 2 years.

I'm not sure I agree. College doesn't "obligate" this, and it doesn't always happen. People of low social classes feel isolated and excluded (often without the excluders knowing what they are doing that alienates them) and people of high social classes have already set up their barriers. The middle classes are latest to form social class identity--around 19-21 in the US, as opposed to 15-18 for the lower and upper [1] social classes.

However, college is the closest thing we have in the US to an attempt at communism [2] (even if it is artificial and expensive, therefore indicative of what David Graeber calls the communism of the rich). The influences of pre-existing social class and personal wealth (which most college students don't have yet) are not completely blocked, but at a minimum--those things matter less than they did before college in terms of a person's living standard, and less than they will after college.

> Some people truly desire strong bonds, but it seems that most people decide that the strong bond with their spouse is good enough.

Sadly, I don't think most people in America have even that. They might think they do, but what's going to happen if they're unemployed for 12 months? Ultimately, even the family, as an institution, succumbs to corrosion in a bourgeois society. Unlike Marx, I don't seek to abolish the family--as somewhat of a tradleft, I'd rather protect it--but I agree with the Marxists that this form of capitalism creates a society in which all bonds are negotiable when living under a socioeconomic system that has no moral restraint when it comes to applying financial pressure.

You can still find a ride-or-die spouse in parts of the country, but in Silicon Valley? If you met her at a tech company, then as soon as you lose your Jira job, she's going to find a crypto bro.

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[1] I'm not the first to observe that the lower and upper class have more in common with each other than either does with the middle. At the extremes, people tend to be class realists who understand how much money matters in daily life. It's those in the middle who can afford to indulge in naivete.

[2] No, not USSR or CCP "communism", which neither of those systems even managed to approximate; rather, by communism I mean a post-scarcity social arrangement in which people form bonds and pursue interests for non-financial reasons... that is, a society free of economic totalitarianism. Since the USSR and CCP are merely another form of economic totalitarianism, run by the state rather than private employers but otherwise just as oppressive as our society, they don't qualify.

For some of us, we can read all the Dale Carnegie or Leil Lowndes available, and still go absolutely nowhere with actual, applicable social skills.

The only option is enormous quantities of alcohol, GHB, or phenibut, but the risks are often too great there.

I have no contact with anybody else from university. I had a few friends at university that I spent a lot of time with studying and partying, but after I graduated I didn't stay in touch with any of them.

That sounds weird. I don't know what the American college experience is like (I just work here), but my experience in Finland was the opposite. I've had difficulties in making friends in adult life, because I'm also bad at unstructured socializing. When I was a student, there were opportunities for structured socializing everywhere. There were something like 250 student organizations in the university, and many of them also had national umbrella organizations, national meetings, and shared activities with similar organizations in other universities.

This may have been true of your college, at the time you attended, but I don't think the experience generalizes at all. Lots of colleges and universities feature heavily structured socializing time. They may have extensive orientation activities during the first week on campus, before classes begin. This functions as both an ice breaker and team building event within faculties or departments. As part of this process, first years / freshmen / frosh are typically introduced to a host of formal clubs, student organizations, and fraternities/sororities they can join. They will also often participate in orientation activities and be introduced to groups and events within their residence building (or college within a larger university) which adds another layer of structured socialization.

Frankly, I would say that university has the potential to offer the most structured socialization time a person can experience throughout their entire life. Of course, as with any opportunity, the door may be open but it's up to the individual to walk through. Plenty of people go to school and put 100% focus on their studies. They never socialize with anyone and they largely remember school as a time of stress and isolation. Barring specific programs with insane workloads, that was their choice, however.