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The article recounts several anecdotes that hint at causes but stops short of authoritatively declaring a set of reasons (and answer its own headline). But the

• SapphireSun 10y ago
  It's easy to make friends. You just need to regularly encounter the same (not unlikable) people in a relaxed setting where you aren't beholden to each other. The problem is that we spend most of our time at work or with family. You have to go to a regular social activity or that won't happen. Of course, you also have to open your heart to the possibility as well.
  • antome 10y ago
    Precisely this. A common piece of advice I hear for people entering a new city for a new job with no one you know around, is to regularly engage in some hobby/activity that brings you in contact with mostly the same people. That could be a baking class, a cycling group, a board-game club, or all sorts of other things. There are a surprising number of possibilities if you actively seek them out.
    • somestag 10y ago
      This is true. However, it becomes more difficult if the hobbies you're interested in tend to attract a type of person that you don't mesh with very well. You can't really become close friends with people whose company you don't enjoy.
      • mountaineer22 10y ago
        This was a strange realization for me as I "aged". How can I have so much in common with a person, yet completely dislike them?
        • ZenoArrow 10y ago
          Interesting. Can you give an example of a hobby you have that tends to attract people who you don't tend to gel with (for whatever reason)?
          • roel_v 10y ago
            Not op, but Computing events (so many stereotypically smelly antisocial people) Fight sports (many wannabe criminals and general low lifes) Ecological gardening (lots of self righteous hippies) Then again, I guess if there are so many people I'm not fond of interacting with, maybe it's not them... (to be fair there are also people in the above groups that are normal, but they're minorities)
            • 1337biz 10y ago
              So true, same for me. Either the topic is interesting, or the people. But rarely both match.
            • klipt 10y ago
              The problem with publicly advertised meetups is the selection effect - they tend to be patronized by people who lack the social skills to make friends. Of course there are also people with social skills who attend those meetups, because e.g. they're just new in town, but if they meet some other people with social skills they will probably become friends with them, start organizing private meetups, and drop out of the public ones.
  • estefan 10y ago
    Actually, you need to meet people who are also open to making friends. But it depends what sort of friend you're looking for. Sure, you can make shallow friendships/acquaintances by just mixing with people regularly, but if you actually want a deeper friendship you need to meet people who have the time and inclination to put in the effort involved. This typically happens when you hit transitional points in life where you feel alone and want a group to belong to (e.g. school to college/university, into your first job away from home with a group of other new starters, mums having their first child, etc). School, university, starting your first job with a group of others at the same time gives you ready made friends (provided you can sit next to them). Friendship is basically a function of time and proximity. This has been shown in several studies and is accurate by my own experience anecdotally. Meeting people who already have a social circle or all their time allocated won't be conducive to making deeper friendships. Once you're in the world of work, going from one job to another, it can suddenly be very difficult to make deeper friendships, especially those that will endure one of you changing jobs (if they're colleagues).
    • nxzero 10y ago
      >> "This has been shown in several studies" Have links to these studies?
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  • deepGem 10y ago
    This is very true. When I was new to Portland, activities helped me make several friends. I joined hiking meetups and would randomly go on hikes to Rainier and Hood. I bought a bike and joined a biking meetup and met several good people. The key is to attend these events regularly. For me, the goal was not to make new friends but to just get reasonably good at the said activity. Making new friends was just a side effect.
• marvin 10y ago
  Is "friend dating" really a thing? That sounds even more ridiculously contrived than "safe spaces".
  • tonyedgecombe 10y ago
    Isn't this what meetup.com is about?
    • 1337biz 10y ago
      MeetUp seems to be mostly about offline user groups now. Mostly about tech - at least in my town.
      • akvadrako 10y ago
        Although a majority of groups are about tech, in most medium cities you can find meetups for hundreds of non-tech topics with enough people attending each week.
  • tantivy 10y ago
    Look up Bumble BFF. I know several people who have made friends on there and for whom it had a positive effect.
    • marvin 10y ago
      Looks like my comment was interpreted differently than intended -- if "friend dating" is a way to meet people you wouldn't otherwise have met, it sounds like an OK way to handle a super-busy schedule. Still treating the symptom rather than the cause, but okay. I interpreted the term as a way to vet potential friends before becoming actual friends, to reduce the risk of having to deal with a somewhat incompatible person in an adult and non-structured manner.
• z3t4 10y ago
  nurturing relationships take time, it takes time away from family and work. When you are young you have no family nor job, so you can spend a lot of time with friends.
  • ianai 10y ago
    I really think it's a time constraint thing. Modern life demands you give up 40 hours a week to a job. There's also the time spent outside of work but "preparing" to work. Driving to work takes time. Cleaning your work clothes and prepping lunch takes even more time. If you have kids or a spouse they'll make other demands on your time. It adds up to not a lot of time to idly interact.
• coldtea 10y ago
  >if every new family, every fresh-on-their-own adult, every new arrival in town within the same age and peer group experiencing the same social decline, why is this phenomenon so widely unsolved, and not self-correcting? Because most problems are not self-correcting -- they require real and conscious effort, and even that can be futile if it goes against larger forces (e.g. economic downturn / necessity). Poverty, sexism, discrimination, bullying, corrupted politicians, bureaucracy, the examples of not self-correcting issues are countless.
  • niftich 10y ago
    Yes, but if everyone's (supposedly) lonely, why don't everyone's incentives align in their quest to be less lonely? That was the rhetorical question I expressed. Sexism, discrimination, bullying -- there are no aligned incentives on opposite sides of these, by definition, so no expectation whatsoever that they'd be self-correcting.
    • somestag 10y ago
      Because the process of becoming "less lonely" is time-consuming and sometimes downright uncomfortable, and success isn't even guaranteed. Friendship is what happens when you enjoy each other's company. If 20 lonely people are sitting in a room, no one's going to stand up and say, "Hey, I bet a lot of us are lonely. Why don't we hang out together?" Even though they're right that everyone is lonely, what are the chances they'll all get along? Or maybe one person goes around to the 19 others and individually asks each one to be friends. The success rate on that is going to be rather low, and it'd take a lot of time. Your rhetorical question is misguided because it presumes that loneliness implies an already existing effort ("quest") to be less lonely. I think it's safe to say that most lonely people have no idea how to go about being less lonely (and if they do have an idea, it's daunting to them).
    • onion2k 10y ago
      Admitting being lonely is a social taboo in most situations - it's perceived as failure. While many people feel it, few are willing to seek help.
• somestag 10y ago
  There is a wide continuum of behaviors and interactions between courteous banter and harassment. This isn't the usual lament about how people don't talk to each other; this is the lament that people don't talk to each other because we don't want to be bothersome to others, even if sometimes we wouldn't mind being talked to. Although I'm hesitant to generalize this to everybody, I've definitely observed this in my own life. I know that sometimes I could use some pleasant social interaction, but most of the time I just want to be left to myself. I assume other people are the same way, so I leave them alone. The thing is, if everyone went off of the probability argument (they probably don't want to be bothered because most of the time they want to be left alone), no one would ever talk with anyone. We need the overly outgoing people--who aren't quite so sensitive to other people's alone time--to keep the communication flowing. I had a number of very close friends in high school, but only because a few of them would constantly get everyone else in our group together. Those people (who can get annoying, sometimes) are absolutely necessary for everyone else to form social bonds. Those types of people become busier as adults, and so they stop forming the groups that everyone else depended on. No working adult has time to hang out dozens of hours every week. The old friends might last, but the new friends are almost always kept at arm's length. I think that friend dating is actually pretty great. It's not the kind of thing I'd take part in, but I absolutely see the value in a service that helps people meet on friendly terms.
• gaius 10y ago
  There is a wide continuum of behaviors and interactions between courteous banter and harassment The modern problem is that you don't even know where initiating a conversation falls. Even saying "hello" is a hate crime in some people's minds. Who wants to take the risk? Even if you're with your friends, you never know who's listening at the next table, with their finger on the tweet button... It has a chilling effect.
  • atomical 10y ago
    A random person's tweet has a chilling effect?
    • morgante 10y ago
      Yes. Since seeing some of the latest feminist theories online, I avoid saying anything to women I don't know. I'd much rather avoid the risk of a negative outcome than gamble on the small potential for a positive, friendly interaction. Edit: I'm not sure whether this is a good or bad change. Perhaps it is in fact better to avoid the small chance of great harm by sacrificing the larger chance of small benefit. Downvoters: This is not meant to be a political point, just an observation of my own behavior.
• bane 10y ago
  I observed when I was growing up, and have heard similar anecdotes from many other people, that many people attend Church or a similar regular religious setting because of the social activities and opportunities to make friends and acquaintances. I know more than a handful of family members who's entire social circle revolves around church activities -- and many of them aren't really terribly religious. It makes quite a bit of sense, in most big metros you can find plenty of churches with congregations of well over a thousand members, giving you a large pool of possible social connections. It seems as people in general become less religious, there's less of a default gathering place. But I've noticed that various types of fandoms seem to be filling in some of that gap. For example, if you have an interest in old computers and games there's a couple dozen big shows all over the U.S. every year and it's my understanding that many people have formed regular friendships because of these shows. I almost wish there was a "Church of the Rational Mind" that met for service every Sunday morning at a local University auditorium, and you could hear lectures on various topics for an hour, then socialize afterwards. The Bible provides fodder for a tremendous number of sermons, on many topics, but there isn't the same kind of focused equivalent book for secularists.
  • mathattack 10y ago
    In Judaism, "community" is an explicit part of observance. It's also a reason Jews are nudged to be members of a temple. (Many others too) In Silicon Valley I've seen non-theistic churches sprouting up. I believe the Society for Ethical Culture on New York is similar.
    • neuromantik8086 10y ago
      I've been to Ethical Culture services a couple times and found them to be enjoyable and filled with open/amicable individuals, although I do have a couple misgivings: For one thing, full membership requires you to tithe a fixed percentage (2%) of your income to the organization. Maybe I'm just being cheap, but I don't make a ton of money in research and that coupled with living in the most expensive area of the US makes me less inclined to seek out membership in their congregation. I also feel weird about how they discuss their founder, Felix Adler. The number of times they invoke him seems almost like it's a cult of personality for him / he serves as a Jesus stand-in, and while I can't say I feverishly dislike the man, that was a huge turn off. If the group's observances were less centered around him and more concentrated on a broader variety of humanist figures, I would be able to get behind them a bit more. The last issue I have with Ethical Culture is that it felt very monocultural / like an echo chamber. I'm fairly liberal by most standards, but I like to have exposure to individuals with different viewpoints from my own, be they conservative or libertarian. In Ethical Culture, any group other than die-hard liberals would meet with stiff opposition rather quickly and this was something I wasn't very comfortable with when I did attend services there. When I was religious, my church congregation was a much better mix of political perspectives (and even theological disagreements occurred occasionally). In NYC, I've had much better experiences with the Secular Humanist Society of NY. It's much less formal, much more cost-effective for an expensive city (their meetings are in the back rooms of bars for the most part and yearly membership is only around $20 last time I checked) and it feels a lot more egalitarian / less hierarchical.
• floatalong 10y ago
  Psychologists have long theorized that when the need to belong is unmet, people start to pay more attention to the world around them. Imagine times when you were driving down the highway, feeling hungry, and you noticed every single food sign you drove by. Same with friendships and loneliness. When you feel left out, or feel unconnected, then you notice social cues. You become hyper-aware of yourself and of other people. Yet this doesn't drive toward social interaction. That's why you see lonely people standing in the back of the party, watching everyone else. Gardner's research suggests that people struggle to "self correct" (as you phrase it) because of feelings of loneliness. [0] This doesn't sound intuitive, but here is the idea. When nonlonely people are surveyed, they cite commonsense solutions to making friends: clubs, sports, coworkers, coffee dates with acquaintances. But when lonely people are surveyed, you'll likely hear something researchers call fantasy findings. Instead of planned coffee dates or the monthly photography club, lonely people believe that friends are made in chance meetings, blind luck, unlikely encounters, chatting someone up on the domestic flight. Lonely people may be unable to think practically about social outcomes and devise effective social strategies. The author says "The ratio of times I hear, 'We should hang out!' to actual hangouts is about 10 to 1." These kind of fantasy offers express feelings of connection that bypass the difficulties of forming real relationships. Lonely people are very good at relying on these when thinking about forming connections. It's not that lonely people don't know how to meet other people, it's that they associate friendships with daydreams, conjuring up images of togetherness. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16207773 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16207773
  • nathanvanfleet 10y ago
    What pervades your comment is that lonely people are somehow broken or stuck in a fantasy world. Is that really how you feel? There is a certain class of person who is incapable of making friend and will forever be lonely and a class of person who is somehow effective and organized about making friends that they make them.
    • elptacek 10y ago
      This is particularly fascinating to me, because I am a deeply and painfully lonely person. My current working hypothesis is that my life experience has caused some level of attachment disorder, resulting in a feeling of loneliness even when I am not alone. The main reason I started going to various roller derby practices and events was to grow my circle of friends (the common sense advice -- clubs, events). This has happened, but I still feel a sense of apartness, which I suspect will take a long time to go away. I've learned a lot about the mechanism of establishing friendships, though. As niftich points out above, I had the tendency to consider friendly encounters as one-offs; more specifically, "Oh, that happened. How pleasant." And then go through the mental acrobatics of wondering if the person would like to continue being friendly or [s]he was simply being polite. So the idea of "broken fantasy world" works in reverse here: I have a broken core belief where I don't understand the value someone gets out of hanging out with me. Just a week ago, friends came over to celebrate my birthday and watch the WFTDA champs. Another friend who is not part of that circle remarked on something that hadn't really clicked for me -- I must be a good friend (and loved) because my house was full of people. So the feeling of loneliness, somehow baked into a bunch of erroneous core beliefs, also masks reality and hinders the formation of relationships.
• pjc50 10y ago
  > interactions with strangers to be largely perceived as unwelcome I think this is very much a density thing. In an urban environment, it would simply occupy too much time and effort to acknowledge people because there are too many of them. That leaves this environment where if someone does start speaking to you, you assume (often correctly) that they want something or are weird. Whereas if you're out in the middle of nowhere it would be extremely odd not to acknowledge the few people you did meet. > mentally filed as one-off events not requiring a follow-up -- talking with the person next to you on a plane The protagonist's "single serving friends" from Fight Club.