I got divorced at 51, then mothballed my business and move continents to a city where I had visited often but never lived (London).
I never maintained a friends group from high school or college, and yes, the close friends I had at 51 were mostly those I made around my mid to late 20s after I'd moved to Cayman but before we all had kids and got busier and busier.
I have, though, been successful at building a number of new and close friendships, with close friends I've made in the last 7+ years since moving to London, ranging in age from 20s to 80s.
I don't do small talk or shallow conversation, so my tribe is those who like to be open with ideas, feelings, themselves.
Your post makes me think about tools and methods for making friends, particularly the idea of hanging out in groups as a tool for that. Over the last two years, Ben Brabyn has been running "Walkabouts" in central London. A set day of each month at the same place and time where people simply gather and go for a one hour walk, encouraged to bring a +1 and to bring their curiosity. These have been wildly successful, we now have over 20 of them internationally and more and more each month. I sense it is because people crave meeting new and interesting people. If anyone reading this wants to learn more, message me!
As for myself, when I moved to London, I simply found myself asking people I got to know "I want to meet interesting people doing interesting things". This lead to many, many introductions to meet people 1:1 to talk ideas. Some of those were business-y, some around topics of mutual interest (eg Econ / Geopolitics / Leadership / Coaching geeks). Some became mentees, some became friends, a few became close friends (over time).
"I would love to tell you that building denser, less car-centric urban environments would help people have more friends, but unfortunately the evidence shows that people in big cities are just as likely — or even more likely — to be lonely compared to people who live in the suburbs."
But you can make a lot of friends by working on zoning reform together!
Great post. A couple of thoughts that it triggered for me.
1) I think another factor that makes it more difficult to make friends later on in life is marriage. If you are lucky enough to have married your best friend, or make a best friend of the person you married, there is definitely a “why bother doing the increasingly hard work of trying to meet new people when I already have my best friend at the house all the time?” factor. This particularly true for introverts (full or partial), for whom the initial discomforts of dealing with new people are especially acute.
2) While I agree that phones ate a big chunk of our lives, I do notice that my daughter (17) uses her phone time very differently than I (48). While I mostly spend time reading various things (or listening to podcasts), she spends most of it socializing. A lot of the time she spends “staring at a screen” (as perceived from the outside) is actually chatting with a friend (one on one time) or a group of friends (in a virtual gathering place). And although I am young enough to have spent hours upon hours a day in early AOL chat rooms when I was her age, for me those conversations never materialized into real friendships. But for my daughter, this isn’t the case. She had made real friends online that have led to real-life meetups and relationships that are now years old and do not seem to wane like my AOL acquaintances did. So I think we perhaps do not give the younger generation enough credit for having in fact co-opted the technology we see as social-energy-sapping into a friend-making tool of a new kind.
Agree with you about marriage/coupling up. It is pretty easy to find and make friends when single, because single people are motivated to go out and do things. Then they pair up and stop wanting to go out and do things. I have seen this so many times, and been like this myself. When you are way too busy and tired, getting your butt up and dressed and out is a heck of a lot easier when somewhere in the back of your mind you might meet a sexy stranger who becomes the love of your life. When they're already at home, too easy to just stay there.
Reading this post was more like reading science fiction than any science fiction I've read before. (And I read a lot of science fiction.) Everything here is completely alien to my experience and just barely comprehensible, but in a good way. I've never had a single friend, whether as a child or adult. I've never even considered asking for help or accepting help from another person. I've never willingly started a conversation with another person that wasn't work or task related.
To see the nuts and bolts of practical functioning friendship laid out like this is simply fascinating to me, like the blueprints to an alien starship. I still can't understand how to build the starship, but at least I have more clues. How do you develop the willpower to speak with people for so long? How do you not get betrayed? (My father was betrayed by every close friend he had, which resulted in my family becoming homeless more than once.) I can see the blueprint, but I don't see the power source, or what prevents the ship from exploding, to stretch the metaphor. Again, fascinated!
The book "The Two Hour Cocktail Party" is a super great primer on this subject.
The idea is you have a super time boxed gathering on a weeknight of exactly two hours. Less commitment for people. Way less prep than a dinner party. People are standing instead of seated and trapped in conversation with the same three people all evening. You have a mixture of "new" and "old" friends at each one to keep cycling in new people.
It even includes scripts and precise timings on when to send invitations and reminders based on his experience.
It isn't perfect: he's clearly coming from a place of "child-free person in a city with public transit" and you need a core group of 5ish friends/acquaintances you can count on to turn up to the first few.
But it is a great strategy to expand your social circle.
Good post. Not to be a downer, but I'm old enough that all but one of closest friends--men I've loved dearly--have died. I find that I little energy & less interest in meeting new people. I don't know whether that's because of age or the pain of loss. What I do instead to combat loneliness is to have a lot of casual acquaintances whom I see frequently.
I feel for you. My father is going through the same thing. His friends are dropping like flies. This is an excellent case for making slightly younger friends in middle age while you still can.
I was always a little shy growing up but I always had plenty of friends. For three years in London and two years in Manhattan, my only friends were friends from work, but there were a lot of them. In other cities, I had dozens of friends: parents of my kids' friends, folks on my football team, neighbours, former workmates.
Even now in my fifties, I have maybe a dozen nearby friends who will ask me out for a beer or some noodles, and I am still close enough to maybe 20 people all around the world who will come and see me when they visit England.
I'd put my friend success down to going to the pub. It's easy to say "Fancy a beer?" and go hang out for a couple of hours with no commitment. Many of these hang-out sessions result in a friendship; some casual, some more lasting.
I think I was just old enough to dodge the draw of the Internet. Younger people have stopped going to pubs because video games are a bigger attraction. My kids, in their twenties, have maybe three friends between them. As a teenager and into my twenties, we went to the pub all the time and I'm still friends with many of those people.
The atmosphere in a pub is very different in England than it is in California. In England, people go out on their own and chat with people they meet at the bar. I'd say I meet someone new about half the time. In California, most people only go to a bar with friends, and I never met anyone while on my own in twenty years.
Get back in the habit of going to the pub. That's my advice. A pub lets you hang out and chat for longer than you might for a coffee or some ramen. There's no need to drink more than an alcohol free beer or a glass of wine. It's a good excuse to chat, and it's easier to cross the line into friendship.
I think it's nice to write about, but it's a bit descriptive with less practical advice. I'm personally pretty bad at making friends and have to try really hard. This advice may seem obvious to you:
1. Say yes to things, even things you feel are not your favorite #1 thing. Even if you're not sure you'll have fun or like it. With less time, people become too stingy with it.
2. Do not flake! It takes effort to invite people, and being invited has an opportunity cost. Decline cleanly if you're busy, but short of an emergency, follow through.
3. Invite people to things. It takes effort to organize hot pot or kbbq or karaoke or board game night, and it's easy to scratch people off the invite list if they say no too much or flake, though give more grace to people who are inviting you to a lot of stuff.
4. The more you're dealing with a cold start problem, the more you should actually lean into niche or specialized hobbies. Because niche hobbies are niche, they're harder to get a group for, so it's more common to add strangers (lots of d&d groups recruit on reddit/Meetup, same probably with idk surfing)
5. Focus on quality over quantity. Don't try to split your time equally among all acquaintances, instead try to hang out a lot with the people you like the most.
I have a bad cold start problem. I am in Chicago. I love the city. Lots to do, but All of mine and my wife's friends have moved away. Connecting with people is proving really difficult. I play a lot of ultimate frisbee and I also tried hash running, but nobody is interested in anything beyond the scope of those activities. It's all only about hash or only about disc. That or they just don't want to even talk. Looking for a book club but I can only find people who want to read self help books, or Christian stuff.
If you're doing activities with people and none of them want to be friends, maybe they all have super busy social lives already. In my 30s I meet tons of people who I would've become friends with in my 20s, but I don't because I don't really need new friends anymore. I'd try to find activities that are more likely to have people a bit younger and/or newer to the city!
Interesting essay. One reason I think that people have fewer friends now is because we don't need them for our basic survival any more. Time was that you needed to form strong bonds within your immediate group and also links to people in other 'friendly' groups to ensure your survival and as a form of insurance against personal misfortune. Now that we live so much further from the survival margin, when we can hire people or machinery to do things that used to require a lot of manpower and we have institutions like insurance companies and the state who provide a safety net if we run into serious difficulty, the imperative to form friendships is lacking. Whether you make a lot of friends or not, is a choice. You just have to make the right one for you. The problem is our tendency to discount the future and then find ourselves in a present we hadn't prepared for, when we're old and are that much closer to the survival margin, with no-one to drive us to the state-provided doctor or make them understand that you really are ill and demand attention on your behalf, and no-one to talk things through with to get a clearer perspective, just a lot of people like that bloke who seemed friendly and in earnest when he convinced you that you needed your roof replaced and that the exorbitant cost was absolutely worth it but now you think it probably didn't and it probably wasn't. Never mind the leap of faith - this is the sort of thing that really kept Søren Kierkegaard up at night.
30/300 Rule - You can typically feel like friends with someone after 30ish hours with them. But often to develop a truly close friendship may closer to 300 hours of shared time together. I like the vulnerability and interdependence paradigm, but also part of this is exposure to develop comfort.
Favors - Favors are interesting cause there is also this psychological quirk where if you ask for favors and the a reciprocated the party that does the favor feels more emotionally invested in the relationship. Self-rationalization of why they did the favor. So do favors but also ask for favors. Interdependence can be healthy like that.
Sports/Athletics - Similar low bar but some rec leagues of pickleball, volleyball or other co-ed sports have been great for me when moving cities and rebuilding community. Low lift, low stakes, learn about people. Quick way to go from zero to a few dozen friends and acquaintances.
Thanks again for the piece! Lots of great takeaways going to apply here in Denver.
I'd like to this that, for all of my many failings, I'm also a pretty good middle aged friend-haver, and I think it's come down to two things mostly:
- err on the side of saying "yes" when someone proposes something, even if I'm kinda in the mood to sit at home and do nothing.
- have more than a breadth than depth of hobbies. I'll try anyone's hobby. My hobby is having hobbies and being fairly bad at all of them. This even works on a kinda meta level because exploring various hobby communities is sociologically interesting.
Also, a kind of club that's good for cold starts is one that does volunteering, because it attracts the pro-social or those that want to learn how to be so.
I really need a short book from Noah that can go on the living room table or hang by the liquor that talks about friendships, life lessons and interesting dates lol.
Covid took two, never to be replaced, years out our lives. We have never recovered.
Both of us are born loners (Isolates). We do attract friends who friend us but we don't seek friends. I sometimes think, for me, it was bright red hair that attracted friends. Sort of like I was a specimen friend. For my wife, maybe it was her blond hair and good looks. She is also a strange isolate. She is active in her book club, cardio exercise and yoga. We don't have friends over to the house for chat, diner or drinks.
Age has a lot to do with it. We just don't have the energy for the task of gaining and maintaining friendships.
Lovely, thoughtful and useful post, Noah.
I got divorced at 51, then mothballed my business and move continents to a city where I had visited often but never lived (London).
I never maintained a friends group from high school or college, and yes, the close friends I had at 51 were mostly those I made around my mid to late 20s after I'd moved to Cayman but before we all had kids and got busier and busier.
I have, though, been successful at building a number of new and close friendships, with close friends I've made in the last 7+ years since moving to London, ranging in age from 20s to 80s.
I don't do small talk or shallow conversation, so my tribe is those who like to be open with ideas, feelings, themselves.
Your post makes me think about tools and methods for making friends, particularly the idea of hanging out in groups as a tool for that. Over the last two years, Ben Brabyn has been running "Walkabouts" in central London. A set day of each month at the same place and time where people simply gather and go for a one hour walk, encouraged to bring a +1 and to bring their curiosity. These have been wildly successful, we now have over 20 of them internationally and more and more each month. I sense it is because people crave meeting new and interesting people. If anyone reading this wants to learn more, message me!
As for myself, when I moved to London, I simply found myself asking people I got to know "I want to meet interesting people doing interesting things". This lead to many, many introductions to meet people 1:1 to talk ideas. Some of those were business-y, some around topics of mutual interest (eg Econ / Geopolitics / Leadership / Coaching geeks). Some became mentees, some became friends, a few became close friends (over time).
Again, thanks for the thought-provoking post!
"I would love to tell you that building denser, less car-centric urban environments would help people have more friends, but unfortunately the evidence shows that people in big cities are just as likely — or even more likely — to be lonely compared to people who live in the suburbs."
But you can make a lot of friends by working on zoning reform together!
Great post. A couple of thoughts that it triggered for me.
1) I think another factor that makes it more difficult to make friends later on in life is marriage. If you are lucky enough to have married your best friend, or make a best friend of the person you married, there is definitely a “why bother doing the increasingly hard work of trying to meet new people when I already have my best friend at the house all the time?” factor. This particularly true for introverts (full or partial), for whom the initial discomforts of dealing with new people are especially acute.
2) While I agree that phones ate a big chunk of our lives, I do notice that my daughter (17) uses her phone time very differently than I (48). While I mostly spend time reading various things (or listening to podcasts), she spends most of it socializing. A lot of the time she spends “staring at a screen” (as perceived from the outside) is actually chatting with a friend (one on one time) or a group of friends (in a virtual gathering place). And although I am young enough to have spent hours upon hours a day in early AOL chat rooms when I was her age, for me those conversations never materialized into real friendships. But for my daughter, this isn’t the case. She had made real friends online that have led to real-life meetups and relationships that are now years old and do not seem to wane like my AOL acquaintances did. So I think we perhaps do not give the younger generation enough credit for having in fact co-opted the technology we see as social-energy-sapping into a friend-making tool of a new kind.
Agree with you about marriage/coupling up. It is pretty easy to find and make friends when single, because single people are motivated to go out and do things. Then they pair up and stop wanting to go out and do things. I have seen this so many times, and been like this myself. When you are way too busy and tired, getting your butt up and dressed and out is a heck of a lot easier when somewhere in the back of your mind you might meet a sexy stranger who becomes the love of your life. When they're already at home, too easy to just stay there.
Reading this post was more like reading science fiction than any science fiction I've read before. (And I read a lot of science fiction.) Everything here is completely alien to my experience and just barely comprehensible, but in a good way. I've never had a single friend, whether as a child or adult. I've never even considered asking for help or accepting help from another person. I've never willingly started a conversation with another person that wasn't work or task related.
To see the nuts and bolts of practical functioning friendship laid out like this is simply fascinating to me, like the blueprints to an alien starship. I still can't understand how to build the starship, but at least I have more clues. How do you develop the willpower to speak with people for so long? How do you not get betrayed? (My father was betrayed by every close friend he had, which resulted in my family becoming homeless more than once.) I can see the blueprint, but I don't see the power source, or what prevents the ship from exploding, to stretch the metaphor. Again, fascinated!
The book "The Two Hour Cocktail Party" is a super great primer on this subject.
The idea is you have a super time boxed gathering on a weeknight of exactly two hours. Less commitment for people. Way less prep than a dinner party. People are standing instead of seated and trapped in conversation with the same three people all evening. You have a mixture of "new" and "old" friends at each one to keep cycling in new people.
It even includes scripts and precise timings on when to send invitations and reminders based on his experience.
It isn't perfect: he's clearly coming from a place of "child-free person in a city with public transit" and you need a core group of 5ish friends/acquaintances you can count on to turn up to the first few.
But it is a great strategy to expand your social circle.
Good post. Not to be a downer, but I'm old enough that all but one of closest friends--men I've loved dearly--have died. I find that I little energy & less interest in meeting new people. I don't know whether that's because of age or the pain of loss. What I do instead to combat loneliness is to have a lot of casual acquaintances whom I see frequently.
I feel for you. My father is going through the same thing. His friends are dropping like flies. This is an excellent case for making slightly younger friends in middle age while you still can.
Thank you. I have a number of middle aged friends, but they're not the same. Differences in age are differences frequently unbridgeable.
I was always a little shy growing up but I always had plenty of friends. For three years in London and two years in Manhattan, my only friends were friends from work, but there were a lot of them. In other cities, I had dozens of friends: parents of my kids' friends, folks on my football team, neighbours, former workmates.
Even now in my fifties, I have maybe a dozen nearby friends who will ask me out for a beer or some noodles, and I am still close enough to maybe 20 people all around the world who will come and see me when they visit England.
I'd put my friend success down to going to the pub. It's easy to say "Fancy a beer?" and go hang out for a couple of hours with no commitment. Many of these hang-out sessions result in a friendship; some casual, some more lasting.
I think I was just old enough to dodge the draw of the Internet. Younger people have stopped going to pubs because video games are a bigger attraction. My kids, in their twenties, have maybe three friends between them. As a teenager and into my twenties, we went to the pub all the time and I'm still friends with many of those people.
The atmosphere in a pub is very different in England than it is in California. In England, people go out on their own and chat with people they meet at the bar. I'd say I meet someone new about half the time. In California, most people only go to a bar with friends, and I never met anyone while on my own in twenty years.
Get back in the habit of going to the pub. That's my advice. A pub lets you hang out and chat for longer than you might for a coffee or some ramen. There's no need to drink more than an alcohol free beer or a glass of wine. It's a good excuse to chat, and it's easier to cross the line into friendship.
I think it's nice to write about, but it's a bit descriptive with less practical advice. I'm personally pretty bad at making friends and have to try really hard. This advice may seem obvious to you:
1. Say yes to things, even things you feel are not your favorite #1 thing. Even if you're not sure you'll have fun or like it. With less time, people become too stingy with it.
2. Do not flake! It takes effort to invite people, and being invited has an opportunity cost. Decline cleanly if you're busy, but short of an emergency, follow through.
3. Invite people to things. It takes effort to organize hot pot or kbbq or karaoke or board game night, and it's easy to scratch people off the invite list if they say no too much or flake, though give more grace to people who are inviting you to a lot of stuff.
4. The more you're dealing with a cold start problem, the more you should actually lean into niche or specialized hobbies. Because niche hobbies are niche, they're harder to get a group for, so it's more common to add strangers (lots of d&d groups recruit on reddit/Meetup, same probably with idk surfing)
5. Focus on quality over quantity. Don't try to split your time equally among all acquaintances, instead try to hang out a lot with the people you like the most.
I have a bad cold start problem. I am in Chicago. I love the city. Lots to do, but All of mine and my wife's friends have moved away. Connecting with people is proving really difficult. I play a lot of ultimate frisbee and I also tried hash running, but nobody is interested in anything beyond the scope of those activities. It's all only about hash or only about disc. That or they just don't want to even talk. Looking for a book club but I can only find people who want to read self help books, or Christian stuff.
If you're doing activities with people and none of them want to be friends, maybe they all have super busy social lives already. In my 30s I meet tons of people who I would've become friends with in my 20s, but I don't because I don't really need new friends anymore. I'd try to find activities that are more likely to have people a bit younger and/or newer to the city!
Interesting essay. One reason I think that people have fewer friends now is because we don't need them for our basic survival any more. Time was that you needed to form strong bonds within your immediate group and also links to people in other 'friendly' groups to ensure your survival and as a form of insurance against personal misfortune. Now that we live so much further from the survival margin, when we can hire people or machinery to do things that used to require a lot of manpower and we have institutions like insurance companies and the state who provide a safety net if we run into serious difficulty, the imperative to form friendships is lacking. Whether you make a lot of friends or not, is a choice. You just have to make the right one for you. The problem is our tendency to discount the future and then find ourselves in a present we hadn't prepared for, when we're old and are that much closer to the survival margin, with no-one to drive us to the state-provided doctor or make them understand that you really are ill and demand attention on your behalf, and no-one to talk things through with to get a clearer perspective, just a lot of people like that bloke who seemed friendly and in earnest when he convinced you that you needed your roof replaced and that the exorbitant cost was absolutely worth it but now you think it probably didn't and it probably wasn't. Never mind the leap of faith - this is the sort of thing that really kept Søren Kierkegaard up at night.
Great piece! Thanks Noah - much appreciated.
A few quick follow up thoughts:
30/300 Rule - You can typically feel like friends with someone after 30ish hours with them. But often to develop a truly close friendship may closer to 300 hours of shared time together. I like the vulnerability and interdependence paradigm, but also part of this is exposure to develop comfort.
Favors - Favors are interesting cause there is also this psychological quirk where if you ask for favors and the a reciprocated the party that does the favor feels more emotionally invested in the relationship. Self-rationalization of why they did the favor. So do favors but also ask for favors. Interdependence can be healthy like that.
Sports/Athletics - Similar low bar but some rec leagues of pickleball, volleyball or other co-ed sports have been great for me when moving cities and rebuilding community. Low lift, low stakes, learn about people. Quick way to go from zero to a few dozen friends and acquaintances.
Thanks again for the piece! Lots of great takeaways going to apply here in Denver.
I'd like to this that, for all of my many failings, I'm also a pretty good middle aged friend-haver, and I think it's come down to two things mostly:
- err on the side of saying "yes" when someone proposes something, even if I'm kinda in the mood to sit at home and do nothing.
- have more than a breadth than depth of hobbies. I'll try anyone's hobby. My hobby is having hobbies and being fairly bad at all of them. This even works on a kinda meta level because exploring various hobby communities is sociologically interesting.
You've done a good service here.
Also, a kind of club that's good for cold starts is one that does volunteering, because it attracts the pro-social or those that want to learn how to be so.
Sing in a barbershop quartet. That’s 3 right there, in harmony!
I really need a short book from Noah that can go on the living room table or hang by the liquor that talks about friendships, life lessons and interesting dates lol.
Covid took two, never to be replaced, years out our lives. We have never recovered.
Both of us are born loners (Isolates). We do attract friends who friend us but we don't seek friends. I sometimes think, for me, it was bright red hair that attracted friends. Sort of like I was a specimen friend. For my wife, maybe it was her blond hair and good looks. She is also a strange isolate. She is active in her book club, cardio exercise and yoga. We don't have friends over to the house for chat, diner or drinks.
Age has a lot to do with it. We just don't have the energy for the task of gaining and maintaining friendships.