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> "Despite minor differences between individual surveys, the data consistently show that the average number of close friendships rose from 2.2 in 2000 to 4.1 in

• tanseydavid 1y ago
  >> goes against everything we here about the loneliness epidemic getting worse This seems like a hot-take. IMHO one does not and cannot cure loneliness by having more online friends.
  • dijit 1y ago
    Yeah, if anything I would say that leans in to the loneliness epidemic, if we take things like Dunbars Number to be true. Having more shallow friends is actually much more isolating than having fewer deep friends.
  • dlivingston 1y ago
    Completely agree. Fully online friendships are hollow simulacrums of the real thing, like most fully online things compared to their offline counterparts. That's not to say there isn't real connection or real value there, just that they are a supplement to - and not a replacement for - the 'real thing'. Example: long-distance relationships vs. in-person. My wife and I started off as long distance before moving to the same city together. Obviously we established a very real relationship digitally, but it was a means to an end, and not an end in itself, and the real-world date nights and so on are so much deeper and richer than Facetime calls.
  • avensec 1y ago
    +1. Just adding my own breakdown. What most people describe as Loneliness is a specific form of loneliness that represents the degree of disconnection they feel from others. When you don't feel seen and heard in a friendship, you are more likely to feel alone. More people "proving" they don't want to know you or see you, reinforces the idea.
• user2722 1y ago
  Indeed. Conflicting info. NOTE: I did NOT read the article. If I'd guess I'd say close friendships meaning is now more shallow. Or: younger demographics are against the wider trend. We can also extrapolate this to unrelated topics, like friend groups. Granted, completely unscientific. But if you know two or three different friend groups and have a brain cell or two, you'll notice group-member-patterns. The Joker; the athletic; the geek; etc.. The question I'm trying to get to is: will the search for authenticity in a subgroup of a greater acquaintace group push you toward the fringes?
• MattGaiser 1y ago
  Keep in mind that it is "average" and it is about close friends. Anecdotally, the pandemic was the great cutting of weaker ties. I talk to far fewer people than I did pre-pandemic (and most friends report the same), but I speak to those people more often. I can easily see that ending in a way where some 20% find themselves with nobody. I would say I have 4 close friends. But some 10 weaker ties disappeared from my life. Did those 10 also double down on close friends? Or did perhaps some of them not have enough close friends to do that?
  • jerlam 1y ago
    I would agree - usually close friends are limited to people that share the same values and ideas as you. Having more close friends that all think alike would increase rejection of ideas not shared by other close friends. It is harder (but not impossible) to have close friends that have dramatically different lifestyles, ideals, or socioeconomic class. Weaker ties would include friends that have less in common, and have different ideas. But that fact that they are a friend means that you are aware of their existence and different ideas. In that way, having a broad range of weak friends suggests that you can see things from different perspectives instead of in your own (close) friend bubble. It's like how people are less likely to know their neighbors now, who can hold different ideas. But you don't have to be close friends with them to have some empathy.
    • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > usually close friends are limited to people that share the same values and ideas as you That stirkes me as myopic. My closest friends--the ones I trust with all my secrets, with whom have have practically no secrets, the ones I'd hide if it came to that or risk my life to save--are all over the place values and ideas-wise. It's what makes their company fun. It's also what makes their advice useful, because they'll call me out on my bullshit in a way a mirror image of me could not.
      • watwut 1y ago
        If you are far right, I have to keep secrets from you. For safety. And no, someone actively wanting to limit my freedom and safety because their ideology is that women must be limited cant be trusted. They cant be trusted in calling me on my shit, because what they perceive as shit is my self interest and my core values.
• riazrizvi 1y ago
  Personally, I find modern technology makes it easier to maintain them. 25 years ago my friendships around the world would have been relegated to 'penpalships' because of the cost of long distance calls and the lack of face time. Loneliness is a big topic now due to the pandemic, and the lingering trends from stay/work-at-home mandates.
  • kulahan 1y ago
    They probably aren't the friends people are thinking of when referring to things like this. The benefit of friends isn't just that you have someone fun to talk to, it's that you're building out a social support circle. Your discord friends can't come over and help you clean up after a flood, or watch your dogs while you're away on a sudden emergency, or cook you a meal when you're grieving a loss, or help you get an interview at a job shortly after you're fired (or at least, not one local to you). Loneliness is a big topic now, imo, because people are losing helpful human friends and relying on middling digital friends. Just like how looking at pictures of a forest is nowhere near as healthy as actually going to a forest.
    • snozolli 1y ago
      Your discord friends can't come over and help you clean up after a flood, or watch your dogs while you're away on a sudden emergency, or cook you a meal when you're grieving a loss I'll make the counter argument that -- although I value those things and try to provide them to friends in need -- all of those can be addressed by hiring someone. On the other hand, I've recently received fantastic emotional support from a friend who moved away a few years ago. We've seen each other in person only a handful of times since then, but of all my friends, she happened to be the one with the experience and attitude to help me. Incidentally, I'll add that I'm the type of person to provide those types of support to others, but the vast majority of my friends are not. That doesn't make them bad friends, it just means that I have a service disposition while they don't. I think there's a vast range of qualities that people seek and experience from friends and you're going to have a hard time objectively rating them on any sort of scale.
      • 1y ago
• ToucanLoucan 1y ago
  I have a sinking feeling it's a situation where people who are adept at creating and maintaining relationships are getting more of them, whilst people who struggle socially are being excluded more than ever as a result. The overall count grows, but a substantial slice of the population still has barely any. I have no data for this, just a gut feeling. I still see so many people on the day-to-day who are completely socially inept. I don't even mean just like, rude or abrasive, I mean people who don't have the emotional intelligence to like, navigate basic conflicts.
• scarmig 1y ago
  It could also be something structural about how the "friendship graph" looks. The mean number of friendships isn't the median or typically experienced number of friendships, and if friendship relationship distributions follow some kind of power law, a change in the power-law exponent could make those diverge.
  • FloorEgg 1y ago
    I am wondering the same thing. It's interesting that they didn't report at all on the median and only the average. Also find the timing interesting, as I can't help but suspect that both the justification and incentive for self-reporting a higher number of friends materially changed for some people in the early days of social media. They didn't seem to acknowledge this at all. The model they built that draws a causal relationship between graph density and polarization is interesting, but these gaps leave me skeptical. There are just so many other reasons I can see for polarization. 1. Late-stage of civilizational monetary cycle (bretton woods - petrodollar) -> historically leads to polarization 2. Dramatic increase in access to information / wide range of things to know and care about 3. Attention economy (novel upsetting news is best at getting attention, not nuance, not truth) 4. Habits of instant gratification diminishes patience for nuance 5. Maybe foreign state interference/bias towards polarization to destabilize rivals? 6. Several more maybe?? So I buy the graph density correlation, and I'm curious about contributing to causation, but I'm extremely skeptical that it's the primary or sole cause.
    • svnt 1y ago
      It seems insane to try to connect a twenty year shift in one global variable to one causal factor. This approach is why the social sciences continue to struggle to create understanding. It is all they can afford to do, though. That said, 3) I think possibly best explains both: the increase in average number of friends due to influencer dynamics skewing the distribution, and the increase in polarization due to the tactics in social media. However there seems to be no chance it is a durable or reproducible link, as it depends on the novelty of polarization techniques which wear over time and become known and integrated in education, reducing their effectiveness
    • 1y ago
• cowpig 1y ago
  I can't find any evidence supporting the claim in the article, and the study it links to for me is a dead link. Are you able to find the source?
• yieldcrv 1y ago
  Or women have 8 and guys have 1
  • watwut 1y ago
    When you look at studies, women and men are lonely at about the same rate. There are differences at the margins - period right after divorce, being stay at home and such. But overall rates are the same.
    • Jensson 1y ago
      You mean "feel lonely at the same rate" or that they are actually alone at the same rate? Men do have fewer friends and its much more common for men to have no close friends at all.
      • mothballed 1y ago
        The free market rate of a young/fit woman's sexual services are several hundred or even thousand+ $/hr. I suspect any man who is seen as potentially offering 100s of $/hr in services if you pretend to be a friend long enough, would see similar interest of fake friends. I could see it making you even more lonely, to have to filter through that though, as a man is probably less likely to reject someone as a 'false positive' who might be a true friend through such filtering process. If you are down and out man and someone is being nice to you and not trying to sell you something, I've found it pretty rare that the person isn't being genuinely friendly. I've heard the exact opposite from females.
        • pseudalopex 1y ago
          Most of most women's friends are women. Close friends even more.
• deleted 1y ago
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• bossyTeacher 1y ago
  > have people redefined what they consider to be "close friends"? Yes. People nowadays spent 8 hours per day chatting to someone online and they call it close friend even if they never met in real life. Also, people nowadays are notorious for being unable to have friendship that is not a [insert activity here] buddy.
• deleted 1y ago
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• solid_fuel 1y ago
  I don't really see the causal link here between "more close friends" and "growing polarization", and I'm having trouble finding the actual study - the link in the article seems broken. I can't find more information on the actual distribution, but I think looking at the _average_ number of close friendships is a red flag. It's perfectly possible for some social groups to be growing, while others are shrinking.
  • jahsome 1y ago
    It likely doesn't account for the evolving definition of what a "close" friend actually is. Just because Jack and Jill know a bunch of details about each others' lives owing to facebook updates or group chats, that doesn't necessarily mean they share a strong connection, at least not in the traditional sense. But I suspect they might still feel a certain connection and belonging to each other. It used to require frequent, active, quality communication to know someone well. Now it just requires a few clicks.
    • armenarmen 1y ago
      > It likely doesn't account for the evolving definition of what a "close" friend actually is This has to be it. I’ve got guys I would die for, and I don’t know their birthdays.
• wonderwonder 1y ago
  I had the same thought. Some of you have 5+ close friends? and before you had 2 - 3? Where are you finding these people :) I don't think I have had an IRL friend let alone a close one for 20+ years. So since my mid 20's Happy for you all though!
• somenameforme 1y ago
  The DOI links aren't working so I can't read the study but I think there's a simple explanation, that also belies the headline. It may be that the typical number of close friends is now 0. But as people no longer even have any concept of close friendships, they're considering 'lesser' relationships as close friendships, because it's all they know. This is made even more likely if they didn't define the term and allowed 'online friends' to be counted as 'close friends.' And I strongly suspect this may be the case since the graph shows a major inflection point in the increase of friends being 2007, the exact year when Facebook started becoming massive.
  • bombcar 1y ago
    My whole life is on the internet We've become a family We have never met This is life inside the machine Give me another hit of dopamine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhQW0ufJRBQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhQW0ufJRBQ
  • dtech 1y ago
    So this would boil down to "social media increases polarisation". Quelle suprise
  • andrelaszlo 1y ago
    What do you mean? I have hundreds of friends on Facebook. /s
  • renewiltord 1y ago
    An entertaining insight into the thought process of adding epicycles.
  • VagabundoP 1y ago
    Yeah I'd like to see a follow up with the depth of friendships compared with pre-social media ones.
    • JadeNB 1y ago
      How could one compare depth of friendship of even two current friendships, let alone of current friendships with historical ones that are only accessible through people's mutable memories?
• joe_the_user 1y ago
  Found with AI but this article claims the opposite of the GP. https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-state-of-american-friendship-change-challenges-and-loss/ https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-state-of-a... And the various articles found seem to agree. The GP claims to have combined 30 surveys. I wonder if they wound-up with one of those statistical paradoxes where a combining of data sets points to something different from each individual data set. But something probably isn't true 'cause the individuals sets are well curated and the combination isn't.
• bawolff 1y ago
  > average number of close friendships rose from 2.2 in 2000 to 4.1 in 2024," says Hofer. Seems like median would be the much more relavent measure for this.
  • eru 1y ago
    Or just graph a rough picture of the distributions, no need to boil it down to a single numbers.
• andyjohnson0 1y ago
  Without knowing the distribution it is unwise to place too much trust in a numerical average. There is always a tendency to assume a normal distribution, but even a small population of hypersocial individuals can drag the mean higher. And reported loneliness does not always imply an absence of close friends, although I'd agree that that is a major factor.
• elric 1y ago
  > Or have people redefined what they consider to be "close friends"? I suspect that you've hit the nail on the head. It would also be interesting to see numbers on churn. How long do these many close friendships last? Do they last longer than before? Or, more likely, less long?
  • Ratelman 1y ago
    Boils down to the basics of proper science - how does one measure/quantify close friends?
    • Ratelman 1y ago
      Reflecting on my own experience - frequency of contact (if I see them once a year, can't really count them as close friends) How involved they are in my life - are they people I turn to when I'm facing a problem, do they turn to me when facing their own problems? Do we have frequent deep conversations - not just surface level discuss the weather, sports etc. but stuff that matter. Quantifying this - length of friendship (# of years), frequency of contact (annually, monthly, weekly etc.), level of trust (low, medium, high - can I trust my kids with them kind of trust), level of involvement (low, medium, high - what things do I feel comfortable sharing with them - suppose this is also level of trust?)
      • basisword 1y ago
        >> Reflecting on my own experience - frequency of contact (if I see them once a year, can't really count them as close friends) I think this one is interesting. If you saw them daily for 20 years and then transitioned to once a year are they automatically not close friends? Even if they satisfied the other criteria (like you could turn to them when you are facing a serious problem, you have deep conversations on that annual meeting because you are comfortable with them, etc)?
        • pixl97 1y ago
          I'd say we need a more analog definition than a binary one. The term 'close' friend at least to me means close. Either in physicality or depth and regularity of contact. Only talking to them once a year, even in depth is more like a semi-close friend. They are not there to help you with the day to day issues that you may not even realize you're having.
• movpasd 1y ago
  It may be a combination of both: the fact it is easier to stay in touch makes it more difficult to let go of friendships. But this may make those friendships feel less meaningful and therefore increase loneliness.
• gomez4151 1y ago
  [dead]
• eleveriven 1y ago
  Yeah, it might not be that people are less lonely, just that we've expanded what counts as friendship in a hyper-connected world
• Der_Einzige 1y ago
  Most of the “lonlieness” epidemic is really an epidemic of young men not getting laid and not getting married. Simple as.
  • JulianChastain 1y ago
    It seems salient to ask the follow up question of "Why aren't men getting laid and/or married?" Actually finding the root cause may be much less simple. Your response seems as hand wavy to me as saying "Most of the loneliness epidemic is really an epidemic of people feeling lonely"
    • OkayPhysicist 1y ago
      Because if the problem was "everyone is feeling a bit lonely", then that's something that points at actual problems, that aren't self-inflicted, and need fixing. If the problem is "The absolute worst men you know no longer can get laid by being the only available option", then whatever, who cares, it's self-inflicted.
      • JulianChastain 1y ago
        As far as I can tell all the data on loneliness points to equivalent rates between genders