Posted by paulpauper 7 hours ago
COVID also hit pretty bad. Speaking from personal experience, several friends that we saw once or twice a year at informally recurring BBQ/brunch/etc. kind of occasions have faded away as that series was interrupted and never restarted.
And finally... you learn who you are as you age. Friends who seemed cool, who seemed to have the answers... may not be so great from a mature perspective.
The post-Covid real estate/tech/AI /white-collar job/quant boom has led to inflated salaries, wealth inflation and higher prices to match, and then combined with various supply chain shortages and disruptions, e.g. (many tariffs, Israel v Iran v Russia v Ukraine wars and tensions, etc.).
I just don't want to be "that guy who was right... and alone"
In any case, if you need other people, doing the work will pay off. you need it.
Can I get your friends?
It's interesting to think of this strictly in terms of aging. I had been thinking of it as strictly a "bowling alone" or "loneliness crisis" problem. Perhaps it's like a modern forest; the same old stressors can be too much when forests are dealing with pollution, parasites, ecosystem collapse, etc. ie, the old stressors are still there but everything is in a much weaker state.
People are still meeting other people. I have a good community with a great library and a park district. They offer many sports and other programs. Right now, I'm busy doing everything with my kid but intend to join some stuff on my own once he is more independent.
Science, book, and sports communities are amazing for meeting people. Then you just pick who you vibe with and see if they are open to hang out outside of the group setting.
This is the problem, though. So many hobby clubs and societies have pre-existing cliques, you don't get to pick - you get selected if they deign, or excluded if not.
I've felt lonelier in many societies than on my own, if that makes sense.
You can also start your own club - my local friends, I've made through starting a D&D group and running a campaign with them.
We might look back on the early millennium, before Covid's devastating effect on groups meeting for special interests, as a golden age when even the weird could find their in-personal socializing niche. (Now someone might claim all is well in their neck of the words, but there are whole cities around the world where people are reporting the hobby events scene as nearly dead.)
Contrast to high school when I had tiers of friends/different groups. It is an exposure thing, more people in education settings.
School is naturally good at forcing this, since we are filtering in and out of different class groups.
If you want to recreate this in post-school life, you have to join high membership interest groups, like casual sports groups (kickball, tennis, golf).
Game nights at the local pub work well too, since there will be a rotating cast of characters to make friends with.
Basically, you have to seek novelty and regular re-occurance to make "natural" new friends.
At some point I realized I need to improve my life and went back to school for CS. Got a good job and got my life together. My "friends" are still doing the same things, they just got older. If we met today, I would never befriend them.
I did however meet new friends, but they are not as close to me. I like keeping distance. I'm mostly focused on spending time with my child and just teaching him things. I also try to learn about sports and things he is interested in. Therefore, time for friends is limited.
like, match.com doesn't make money if the first match you get is a perfect one and you stop using the app.
Always worth keeping in mind on HN but on a thread like this especially, the comments you see are heavily selected for having been written by people who spend significant amounts of their time commenting on forums for techy nerds... famously a group which is less extroverted irl than most, leans toward being neurodiverse in a way which sometimes makes traditional socialization difficult or less desirable, etc...
In other words, do not despair like I did at antisocial comments.