Men don’t need friends. Men need family. You have some casual friends at work then spend your quality time with family and maybe some childhood friends you kept in touch with. This is the natural way of things.
I always saw men in my father's generation (he was born in the 1940s) have many close friends that would get together regularly. These close and decades old friendships are especially critical now that he's retired. Without them, he'd be completely isolated.
A significant percentage of men not having any close friends feels like a recent development in the last 1-2 generations.
Going by the stories I’ve heard from my dad and uncles, they all had lots of male friends and drinking buddies, guys they knew from the union, the bowling league, the VFW, the Lions Club, etc. All those institutions that have either completely collapsed or become irrelevant for young people in America. I don’t think any of those guys went to church much.
The take that GP is expressing feels like a very post 1980s thing.
I wonder how much of it is men having to move more for work than in the past. Easier to stay in contact with your highschool friends if you can all find good jobs in your hometown. If that friend group overlaps with the bowling league and the union, so much the better. Much harder to join a bowling league and make friends from scratch with no pre existing connections to the social fabric.
>Going by the stories I’ve heard from my dad and uncles, they all had lots of male friends and drinking buddies, guys they knew from the union, the bowling league, the VFW, the Lions Club, etc. All those institutions that have either completely collapsed or become irrelevant for young people in America.
None of those friends and support groups would be "close" friends per TFA's definition because they weren't acting in the quasi-therapist role that the author apparently thinks is required of "close" friends. Yet clearly those relationships filled the need.
You need people like yourself to be a community with, and we're all too fragmented now. Men needed friends as a foil for family responsibilities, and now that the ideal of the nuclear family has been cancelled over the last couple of decades, men don't have any use for friends anymore.
I don’t think that I agree. The two folks that I consider to be my BFF’s recently helped me (and my wife) through a difficult time. Each had a specific set of skills and were able to offer support and help in ways that my family wasn’t.
Cancer and cancer treatment was a bitch. The importance of friends (and family) became evident to me during that time. YMMV I guess.
Ah the good old natural argument, that does ignore that reality (or as some call it: nature) looks different.
What you call natural is societal behaviour that is specific to western society of this day and age. Even in our own society looking three generations back that "nature" looked different and if you cared to look elsewhere than where you live you'd find that what you call "natural" does not exist in certain other cultures as well right now.
Be careful to mistake something feeling natural to you (because you know no different) to something actually being natural in an evolutionary biological sense. Those two are very different bars to clear in terms of proof.
The societies that look different to you are more family oriented and as such agree with the poster you're responding to.
Men want people they would willingly die for, family and only the closest of friends qualify. Western individualism has, in many ways, lost that very basic need.
This is why men who have been through experiences have a tendency to become close friends. Think about former war buddies. Sports is, in many ways, a simulated war scenario.
This is an excellent point, and it's telling that the article espouses feminization as the solution. Men in general are competition to each other, and it is difficult to feminize oneself sufficiently to become a non-threat to other men. Take the natural standoffishness of men and add that to the increasing number of women that think they can do better than any man who's interested in her, and you get a loneliness epidemic. Add the constant degradation of the male role in society, and you get diseases of despair.
I wish I had some. I heard once, the best or only places to make friends as an adult are where encounters are repeated and casual, so like university and church. But I don’t attend either.
I've made tons of good friends in online places over the years. Forums, AOL, MMOs, Discord.
Heck I even met my wife through World of Warcraft. All these things are 'repeated' and 'casual' and online. They're not "social media" though (which seems inhumanly anonymous and transactional to me) more like communities built around specific things.
Art exhibitions and gallery openings, the gym, a sports tournament, every kind of society, concerts, bands, club or voluntary activity, ...
If you don't put yourself into the places where you get to know new people and don't spend some fraction of your time there you might not find friends.
Getting to know people is not luck, it happens when you want to do it. Getting to know people is the first step of finding friends (or relationships for that matter).
There is enough places to go, just pick one you like and put yourself out there.
> put yourself into the places where you get to know new people
The recommendations in the TFA directly imply that in these places where one goes seeking contact, one must also be in a sociable, queryable mode (my periphrase).
That way, any potential for agreeable discussion, laughter, or assistance has the best chance of arising.
Good conversation requires more than most people give. Modern society optimises for work and monetary transactions, and modern communities optimise for becoming very comfortable cells of isolation in which quality of interaction depends almost entirely on the fragility of family ties that also suffer these optimisations.
There are churches that will accept you for who you are, and let you search for what you need. If you showed up at my church and introduced yourself as "not a Christian, but I think regular involvement with this group would be healthy for me" I would welcome you and find ways to involve you.
Organized religion is not for everyone, but it might be that what you want can be served by organized religion, a la carte.
> I wish I had some. I heard once, the best or only places to make friends as an adult are where encounters are repeated and casual, so like university and church. But I don’t attend either.
Can I offer some advice?
I suggest you find what people find interesting about you and make yourself available to all who you come across if you feel this isolated, go to events where those traits are part of an equally shared value system, volunteer or tutor at a HS and share your skill set to those who are intrested in pursuing a career in tech and see what comes from it and you might just found some teacher friends as a result. Ex: I still hung out at an arcade as an adult because it was just a part of being a 90s kid, I met so many other people who worked in tech as a result and had lots of interesting conversations about Life and work that I otherwise never would have.
I have also traveled extensively and met people from all kinds of walks of like, such that despite having been in tech in various periods of my Life I still make an effort to speak or hang out with my farmer and chef friends or the friends I met while clubbing or doing activism and introduce myself to new friends with the explicit intent of noting that being solely confined to one aspect of Life is easiest way for me to get bored and lose interest.
As I got older I saw how easy it was to drift away from those things we all had in common as many grow out or have families and the only ones that remained were the ones who I felt were people who I had more in common than the hobbies that brought us together.
Modernity has offered us many comforts in Life, and as a result the things that bonded males strongest together were often trauma related (War, hard dangerous manual labour, immense and high projects); as tech workers are disproportionately on the higher end of the earning scale they should in theory have more opportunity and resources to experience and explore more, but the reality is far harsher: they are often kept far and completely detached from those visceral struggles that have defined male Life for most of Human existence. And thus suffer from this loneliness.
I'm not saying Life is easy, tech has in my experience an immense amount of normalized mental health issues that is only second to my time in Kitchens in frequency and even then only by so much, but it is my observation that working 10+ hours at one's desk and then going to an empty apartment and playing video games or watching netflix and ordering doordash for another 5 hours before going to sleep seems to be the routine so many fall into. I've met so many who have and have relegated this routine for years and solely focus on a higher TC for more stuff and leisure time only to later wonder why they never have friends.
I'm on an odd situation, I'm an introvert by nature but I make friends easily when I'm motivated and which often requires some level of intoxication for me to be agreeable enough to keep a conversation light enough to now scare people off--as a child I was the odd kid in the group who thought too much about everything and pointed out the absurdity of it all, so I came off as pretentiously precocious and could feel isolated but I realized my oratory/story telling skills when used correctly opened many doors so I worked on it diligently and it served me well with my social skills later on in Life.
Personally speaking, I can and have gone weeks/months without talking to anyone because I'm so immersed in a project or what ever subject; but my mental health suffers so much that I always make an effort to make even small talk with a stranger I know I'll never see again or have a call with a friend while I eat or have a drink when I go somewhere or at home even if I'm on the other side of the World from them and on a 9+ hour time difference.
It is really not hard. Find decent people with which you have something in common. Give them some loyalty and support and if you get some back - you have friends. With years they turn into close friends.
Men's friendships are forged they don't just happen.
The town - 2010:
- I need your help. I can't tell you what it is, you can never ask me about it later, and we're gonna hurt some people.
Some people do work like this. They wish to do violence and would prefer some company (for example, perhaps after witnessing a delightful soccer match in Belgium). Of course there are also many fulfilling & intimate friendships where people don't ask for help in hurting people.
To steelman ReptileMan's point -- I think we should extract the _spirit_ of the back-and-forth of the quoted exchange and realize that it's about the willingness to jump in... to anything a potential friend might suggest and to see where that takes you (within reason and preference, of course).
I have a friend I've known since I was 16 and I'd do absolutely anything for that man.
But you damned well better believe I would ask questions and make decisions based upon the answers. I'd probably also talk him down from doing something stupid.
I like your point about male friendships being forged (it's very true), but your example is a non-sequitur.
Many of us are victims of feminism to some degree.
I managed to make lasting friends in high school with some gay boys. But after high school, I preferred to hang around straight people, and a straight guy won't get too close--because it might be gay?
I was subjected to decades of gender-based emotional abuse and so my relationships with women are also poor. This is a direct result of feminists and feminism. I developed an attitude that women can fend for themselves and don't really need me to assist or be a gentleman anymore, because feminists drilled that all into my head.
Example: I invited a woman to church one evening and the event had a reception with delicious food afterward. It finished up around 9pm and we were right in the middle of downtown in a major metropolis. I flitted off to the train station chatting to a different woman. I hadn't given a second thought that my companion was stuck downtown wearing dark clothing and she would also need to find a bus stop, alone and female. Honestly none of that occurred to me because I didn't even consider it a "date" or a "companion" for the night.
I have a close male friend but I am extremely troubled on an ethical level that we should not have such a friendship. It's difficult to explain and I'm sure I hurt his feelings but he has a huge family and, if you ask me, I mean little to him compared to others.
COVID-19 and the Internet killed off all my remaining social opportunities. I sit at home and I work and I sleep and I eat, and that's existence. My closest friends are YouTubers and so they get all my likes and subscribes.
> I invited a woman to church one evening and the event had a reception with delicious food afterward. It finished up around 9pm and we were right in the middle of downtown in a major metropolis. I flitted off to the train station chatting to a different woman. I hadn't given a second thought that my companion was stuck downtown wearing dark clothing and she would also need to find a bus stop, alone and female. Honestly none of that occurred to me because I didn't even consider it a "date" or a "companion" for the night.
You inviting someone somewhere would make you a decent human being if attend to them even if you had no sexual or emotional incentive to, it’s because you are the one who invited them.
> Many of us are victims of feminism to some degree.
A male doesn't have male friends and this is femenism's fault?
> But after high school, I preferred to hang around straight people, and a straight guy won't get too close--because it might be gay?
Sounds like you have some serious insecurities... One of my best friends is gay, I don't think anyone ever thought I'm gay because I hang out with him, but if they did I just don't care. My mate is more important to me than some random prick's opinion.
Also plenty of activities considered manly and not gay are done in groups. Team sports are often perceived as manly not gay activities, things like hunting or fishing are also done in groups commonly and society percieves them as totally not gay, even after Broke Back Mountain. Men hanging out with other men are usually not perceived as gay.
I'm not saying that you are, but this sounds like a repressed gay man would be insecure of. And there's nothing wrong with being openly gay, but being repressed fucks people's mental health.
> I was subjected to decades of gender-based emotional abuse and so my relationships with women are also poor. This is a direct result of feminists and feminism.
Honestly pretty much everyone is influenced by the society, feminists and feminism are everywhere. If it was something provoked by a social movement as large as feminism it would hapen affect everyone. It would affect me, your coworkers, your cousin, the butcher, etc. Now I agree that social interactions in general have changed, but most people still manage to have functional relationships.
Sounds to me that you have some internal issues to deal with... Perhaps professional wouldn't hurt.
> I don't think anyone ever thought I'm gay because I hang out with him, but if they did I just don't care. My mate is more important to me than some random prick's opinion.
I worked with a man I'm pretty sure was gay, does that make me a prick?
Just the other day I had someone assume I was the husband of a woman I was helping out, I certainly didn't think that was enough to make judgements, nor did I feel the need to correct them.
If someone making an innocuous assumption is enough to for you to determine they're a prick, maybe you're the prick?
> I don't think anyone ever thought I'm gay because I hang out with him, but if they did I just don't care. My mate is more important to me than some random prick's opinion.
I read it that the implication someone makes about him potentially being gay would only be an issue if that person implies that in a negative way and not just as an neutral observation which then would make it totally valid to say they are pricks.
I posted an Ask HN post yesterday, because I want to create a Discord server to idle on and talk about nothing with strangers, with no rules of engagement. Like the good old days of hanging out on IRC.
If you're feeling the loneliness of our times as much as I do, you are more than welcome. Remember to share your Discord name and I'll ping you.
Because any media that shows two males as friends, has legions of people claiming them as gay, i.e. Sam and Frodo, Sherlock and Watson. So in the popular conscience two close guys must be gay. You cannot have a relationship in popular culture between two males, without a vocal minority claiming them as gay. Men subconsciously react to that. To signal they are straight avoid looking like they have close relationships with other men.
Exactly my thoughts. As a straight male, I've never had this issue. Even if someone were to think we were gay, who cares? Maybe we could be, I don't see the issue.
Maybe some men have this insecurity, but if they're letting the unknown opinions of strangers prevent them from having meaningful friendships, I think they may need to work that out.
I have never seen this happen. In fact, I only see the opposite, it can be difficult to have a friend of the opposite sex without people thinking you are intimate.
This was the original, nuanced meaning of "homophobia", before it was simplified in the popular mind (where nuance cannot live) to merely mean "hatred of gay people". I think there was an implicit "see, there's something for straight people in this too!" aspect to the argument -- something like, "by eliminating the taboo on homosexuality, we will also eliminate the negative consequences to straight men of heterosexual signaling ". I'm not sure that's panned out though, since if anything it has probably increased the need for that signaling in many circles.
Yeah I think it's actually the opposite, in extremely homophobic middle eastern countries it's not uncommon to see close straight male friends holding hands etc, because it would be unthinkable to insinuate they are gay given the social taboo. Meanwhile in the West it is only gay male couples that hold hands, and straight men avoid it to avoid being seen as "gay" which would make women reject them etc.
I moved to a city. One reason was that the car-dominated suburbs makes it reaaaally hard to make friends. Time from getting out of bed to meeting someone is like 30-45minutes, and I have to spend money. In the city,it is more like 15 minutes, meaning you can do it twice as often, hang out longer.
I would say this is a big factor.
The country side works so long as your friends are close by for beer, movies, and games? maybe?
I agree with this 100%. When I lived in the city with my family, I'd a) run into random friends frequently and b) getting together was trivial since a large number of people lived within walking distance.
I find the opposite problem that living in a larger city makes connecting with people outside of work harder. Everyone lives far away and getting together can take an hour of driving.
A small or mid sized city on the other hand has a large enough group of people but they are more accessible to each other on evenings and weekends.
> Time from getting out of bed to meeting someone is like 30-45minutes, and I have to spend money. In the city,it is more like 15 minutes, meaning you can do it twice as often, hang out longer.
How tightly packed is your calendar that this makes such an enormous difference?
I'm asking because I always met my friends in the city centre, to which the commute alone from my place was 45min.
It is less about a packed calendar and more about being able to say yes to spontaneous invites.
Friend, “Hey man, I’m at the coffee shop. Want to join me?” Me, “ya, sure. Be there in 15min.” No prep, and no money spent (well, maybe a train fare if you can’t walk or ride a bike).
An anecdote I heard at a time ago was it is difficult for some men to make close friendships with other men because of homophobia - or the perception of.
To get a friend you have to first, be a friend. You have to invest your time into the relationship. Friendships are forged over time with others who reciprocate.
We are, generally, losing this skill as a society.
"One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly
possible." Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, Ch XX, Failure (1871).
Yet curiously there is constant mention of friends in the preceding chapters and beyond: I looked up the quotation in the Gutenberg Project version, and the sentence following has the 105th of 149 occurrences of the string "friends". Was Adams just being sententious, or do we have inconsistent notions of what friends are, or both?
75 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] threadA significant percentage of men not having any close friends feels like a recent development in the last 1-2 generations.
The take that GP is expressing feels like a very post 1980s thing.
None of those friends and support groups would be "close" friends per TFA's definition because they weren't acting in the quasi-therapist role that the author apparently thinks is required of "close" friends. Yet clearly those relationships filled the need.
Cancer and cancer treatment was a bitch. The importance of friends (and family) became evident to me during that time. YMMV I guess.
If that was said by married man then I'd joke that he needs a little longer leash
What you call natural is societal behaviour that is specific to western society of this day and age. Even in our own society looking three generations back that "nature" looked different and if you cared to look elsewhere than where you live you'd find that what you call "natural" does not exist in certain other cultures as well right now.
Be careful to mistake something feeling natural to you (because you know no different) to something actually being natural in an evolutionary biological sense. Those two are very different bars to clear in terms of proof.
Men want people they would willingly die for, family and only the closest of friends qualify. Western individualism has, in many ways, lost that very basic need.
This is why men who have been through experiences have a tendency to become close friends. Think about former war buddies. Sports is, in many ways, a simulated war scenario.
It's not natural what we do in our modern society at all btw.
Tribes were very normal and tribes never just focused on family.
Animal kingdom also shows plenty of group and tribe behavior
I'm only kind of joking.
Heck I even met my wife through World of Warcraft. All these things are 'repeated' and 'casual' and online. They're not "social media" though (which seems inhumanly anonymous and transactional to me) more like communities built around specific things.
Take a woodworking class.
If you don't put yourself into the places where you get to know new people and don't spend some fraction of your time there you might not find friends.
Getting to know people is not luck, it happens when you want to do it. Getting to know people is the first step of finding friends (or relationships for that matter).
There is enough places to go, just pick one you like and put yourself out there.
The recommendations in the TFA directly imply that in these places where one goes seeking contact, one must also be in a sociable, queryable mode (my periphrase).
That way, any potential for agreeable discussion, laughter, or assistance has the best chance of arising.
Good conversation requires more than most people give. Modern society optimises for work and monetary transactions, and modern communities optimise for becoming very comfortable cells of isolation in which quality of interaction depends almost entirely on the fragility of family ties that also suffer these optimisations.
Organized religion is not for everyone, but it might be that what you want can be served by organized religion, a la carte.
Drop me a message if you want to know more.
Can I offer some advice?
I suggest you find what people find interesting about you and make yourself available to all who you come across if you feel this isolated, go to events where those traits are part of an equally shared value system, volunteer or tutor at a HS and share your skill set to those who are intrested in pursuing a career in tech and see what comes from it and you might just found some teacher friends as a result. Ex: I still hung out at an arcade as an adult because it was just a part of being a 90s kid, I met so many other people who worked in tech as a result and had lots of interesting conversations about Life and work that I otherwise never would have.
I have also traveled extensively and met people from all kinds of walks of like, such that despite having been in tech in various periods of my Life I still make an effort to speak or hang out with my farmer and chef friends or the friends I met while clubbing or doing activism and introduce myself to new friends with the explicit intent of noting that being solely confined to one aspect of Life is easiest way for me to get bored and lose interest.
As I got older I saw how easy it was to drift away from those things we all had in common as many grow out or have families and the only ones that remained were the ones who I felt were people who I had more in common than the hobbies that brought us together.
Modernity has offered us many comforts in Life, and as a result the things that bonded males strongest together were often trauma related (War, hard dangerous manual labour, immense and high projects); as tech workers are disproportionately on the higher end of the earning scale they should in theory have more opportunity and resources to experience and explore more, but the reality is far harsher: they are often kept far and completely detached from those visceral struggles that have defined male Life for most of Human existence. And thus suffer from this loneliness.
I'm not saying Life is easy, tech has in my experience an immense amount of normalized mental health issues that is only second to my time in Kitchens in frequency and even then only by so much, but it is my observation that working 10+ hours at one's desk and then going to an empty apartment and playing video games or watching netflix and ordering doordash for another 5 hours before going to sleep seems to be the routine so many fall into. I've met so many who have and have relegated this routine for years and solely focus on a higher TC for more stuff and leisure time only to later wonder why they never have friends.
I'm on an odd situation, I'm an introvert by nature but I make friends easily when I'm motivated and which often requires some level of intoxication for me to be agreeable enough to keep a conversation light enough to now scare people off--as a child I was the odd kid in the group who thought too much about everything and pointed out the absurdity of it all, so I came off as pretentiously precocious and could feel isolated but I realized my oratory/story telling skills when used correctly opened many doors so I worked on it diligently and it served me well with my social skills later on in Life.
Personally speaking, I can and have gone weeks/months without talking to anyone because I'm so immersed in a project or what ever subject; but my mental health suffers so much that I always make an effort to make even small talk with a stranger I know I'll never see again or have a call with a friend while I eat or have a drink when I go somewhere or at home even if I'm on the other side of the World from them and on a 9+ hour time difference.
Men's friendships are forged they don't just happen.
The town - 2010:
- I need your help. I can't tell you what it is, you can never ask me about it later, and we're gonna hurt some people.
- Whose car are we gonna take?
Loyalty means supporting and accepting someone for who they are. Not just doing whatever they ask regardless of consequence.
But you damned well better believe I would ask questions and make decisions based upon the answers. I'd probably also talk him down from doing something stupid.
I like your point about male friendships being forged (it's very true), but your example is a non-sequitur.
The article talk about how men makes close friends almost automatically before (highly related to job) and why it's not the case now.
So yes, the article only focus on men because the reason why men makes close friends almost automatically before doesn't work in how men behave now.
I managed to make lasting friends in high school with some gay boys. But after high school, I preferred to hang around straight people, and a straight guy won't get too close--because it might be gay?
I was subjected to decades of gender-based emotional abuse and so my relationships with women are also poor. This is a direct result of feminists and feminism. I developed an attitude that women can fend for themselves and don't really need me to assist or be a gentleman anymore, because feminists drilled that all into my head.
Example: I invited a woman to church one evening and the event had a reception with delicious food afterward. It finished up around 9pm and we were right in the middle of downtown in a major metropolis. I flitted off to the train station chatting to a different woman. I hadn't given a second thought that my companion was stuck downtown wearing dark clothing and she would also need to find a bus stop, alone and female. Honestly none of that occurred to me because I didn't even consider it a "date" or a "companion" for the night.
I have a close male friend but I am extremely troubled on an ethical level that we should not have such a friendship. It's difficult to explain and I'm sure I hurt his feelings but he has a huge family and, if you ask me, I mean little to him compared to others.
COVID-19 and the Internet killed off all my remaining social opportunities. I sit at home and I work and I sleep and I eat, and that's existence. My closest friends are YouTubers and so they get all my likes and subscribes.
You inviting someone somewhere would make you a decent human being if attend to them even if you had no sexual or emotional incentive to, it’s because you are the one who invited them.
A male doesn't have male friends and this is femenism's fault?
> But after high school, I preferred to hang around straight people, and a straight guy won't get too close--because it might be gay?
Sounds like you have some serious insecurities... One of my best friends is gay, I don't think anyone ever thought I'm gay because I hang out with him, but if they did I just don't care. My mate is more important to me than some random prick's opinion.
Also plenty of activities considered manly and not gay are done in groups. Team sports are often perceived as manly not gay activities, things like hunting or fishing are also done in groups commonly and society percieves them as totally not gay, even after Broke Back Mountain. Men hanging out with other men are usually not perceived as gay.
I'm not saying that you are, but this sounds like a repressed gay man would be insecure of. And there's nothing wrong with being openly gay, but being repressed fucks people's mental health.
> I was subjected to decades of gender-based emotional abuse and so my relationships with women are also poor. This is a direct result of feminists and feminism.
Honestly pretty much everyone is influenced by the society, feminists and feminism are everywhere. If it was something provoked by a social movement as large as feminism it would hapen affect everyone. It would affect me, your coworkers, your cousin, the butcher, etc. Now I agree that social interactions in general have changed, but most people still manage to have functional relationships.
Sounds to me that you have some internal issues to deal with... Perhaps professional wouldn't hurt.
I worked with a man I'm pretty sure was gay, does that make me a prick?
Maybe ease up on the judgement there.
Just the other day I had someone assume I was the husband of a woman I was helping out, I certainly didn't think that was enough to make judgements, nor did I feel the need to correct them.
If someone making an innocuous assumption is enough to for you to determine they're a prick, maybe you're the prick?
They very clearly did not say that.
So because you preferes to hit on someone else you didn't co sider asking your other friend to ask if you should go with them to a train station?
That's not an issue of feminism this is just you being weird.
You had gay friends and again you mention feminism?
Wtf do you have a ethical problem with friendship?
Are you perhaps actually gay and that's you issue?!?
If you're feeling the loneliness of our times as much as I do, you are more than welcome. Remember to share your Discord name and I'll ping you.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33775355
Maybe some men have this insecurity, but if they're letting the unknown opinions of strangers prevent them from having meaningful friendships, I think they may need to work that out.
Is this really a counterexample? It would seem to me to be another example of the same phenomenon.
I would say this is a big factor.
The country side works so long as your friends are close by for beer, movies, and games? maybe?
A small or mid sized city on the other hand has a large enough group of people but they are more accessible to each other on evenings and weekends.
How tightly packed is your calendar that this makes such an enormous difference?
I'm asking because I always met my friends in the city centre, to which the commute alone from my place was 45min.
Friend, “Hey man, I’m at the coffee shop. Want to join me?” Me, “ya, sure. Be there in 15min.” No prep, and no money spent (well, maybe a train fare if you can’t walk or ride a bike).
We are, generally, losing this skill as a society.
Yet curiously there is constant mention of friends in the preceding chapters and beyond: I looked up the quotation in the Gutenberg Project version, and the sentence following has the 105th of 149 occurrences of the string "friends". Was Adams just being sententious, or do we have inconsistent notions of what friends are, or both?
But do we actually need it?