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Aside from the dating recession, we have the equally important problem of the friendship recession. In the video Richard Reeves, gives some interesting possible hypothesis as to why friendships have been declining:
Work. I can back this anecdotally. I have made a post on here about how tough it is to find work as a young adult, in my specific industry of IT. Id probably have better chances if I were to move out of Florida, and to Austin TX or Atlanta GA. They have a larger Tech scene (& honestly, as a tech nerd, it be nice to live closer to a micro-center). I would lie if i said i haven't flirted with this idea before, but I actually have decided to remain put, precisely because I love the close friends I've made living where I'm at currently. But I won't exactly blame others for moving around for monetary reasons - we all need cash and it sucks ass to be broke.
He mentions parents & the amount of time now spent on raising children. This is HUGE in my opinion and needs to be talked about more: the fact that we can no longer free range raise our children as was done in the past is a great sorrow. It SUCKS to be constantly helicoptered and hand held as a child. I dont think I can emphasize that enough. It also doesnt need to be done, especially when children in other countries have much more independence, and are happier and healthier as a result.
Break ups splintering friendship groups. If couples break up, it can screw with the friend group as a whole, especially if someone is crazy toxic or commits infidelity. I've seen this happen in friend groups first hand. Its not pretty.
The obvious elephant in the room here is the rise of social media. Where people mindlessly scroll instead of talking to people in real life. While i think this plays a role, sociologists have been recording these kind of declines since the invention of TV. I suspect something deeper going on. What do you think?
Oddly, I think that the latter has caused me to indulge at periods of my life in the Polyamory so widely considered a scourge of the former.
It feels so difficult to have a close friendship, someone who will actually care about or listen to my emotions reliably. Someone who will answer the phone when I need someone to talk to. Someone who will be there for me through thick and thin. Who will listen when I need someone to whine to. Who cares about what's going on in my life. Someone to talk to. Someone enjoys my attention so much they'll go to a pretentious play with me just to hang out.
I can't seem to find a male friend to do these things. I suppose maybe I should have joined the military, or failing that a criminal gang, you need stakes like that to get a lifelong friend. Lacking that, sex seems to be the only tie that binds. I've had on-and-off lovers remain close for a decade, who would answer my call and I'd answer theirs.
And sometimes I think I cling to those lovers because it's a reliable source of emotionally close friendship. I make love to women because I'm too cheap to go to therapy.
I’ve also struggled with the same thing, a condition worsened by the fact that many friends of mine have been chronic social procrastinators and highly unreliable in planning things to do. You talk about not being able to get people on the phone, but often even when I try, I can’t even get people to text me back within three days. You can’t build a social life on that.
Hell, I met a guy in a college class that I got along with rather well, despite his off-colour humor. I asked him if he’d want to do something outside of class and he looked at me like I’d suggested he should dance naked in the college fountain, saying “no, I don’t go out after I get home from class.” He seemed to like me a great deal, but apparently socialization was beyond the pale.
Not being jovial friar, I wouldn’t say that I’ve built emotional rapport with many lovers, but the strongest connections in my life have generally been women I’ve dated. If they like you, they’ll actually text you back.
Zoomers are cooked.
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I honestly think it just takes consistently going out and doing things with someone. Ive had a best friend for 8 years now. I cant imagine my life without him, we met in college. I just asked him if we wanted to see a movie. Im mid 20s, i dont know how old you are, but thats what got me started.
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Something I don't typically see discussed with respect to friendships, only sex, Standards are too high. This meme, essentially.
A lot of people seem to want their friends to be perfectly suited to them. I want to watch a movie with my friend, but I also want to watch the exact movie I want to watch. I want to join a book club, but I also want to read exactly the book I want to read. I want a workout buddy, but I also want to do exactly the workout I want to do. I want to join a close knit church, but I also want to have these exact and obscure religious beliefs.
Having lots of friends seems to naturally involve disdaining most of them at one level or another, and we seem to have lost that skill of remaining friends and valuing friendships while disrespecting each other. Think of our great fictional friendships. Jerry thinks George is a bad person and Kramer is a nut, they'll still go see a movie together; Hank thinks Bill is a loser and Dale's politics are weird and insane, they'll still drink a beer together; Dorothy thinks Blanche is a slut and Rose is an idiot but the song still goes "Thank you for being a friend..." (I felt insane the first time I heard the original of that song on the radio).
The profusion of infinite media entertainment choices has made this immeasurably worse. When current hit movies in theaters were the dominant form of visual entertainment, you might go to see a movie and hate the movie but you went anyway. You went because it was something to do, because everyone else was going and you wanted to talk about it, and your other option was just not watching a movie at all. Now if your buddy wants to watch a movie on streaming, odds are it wasn't the movie you wanted to watch, so you're not that interested in going over to his place to watch it when you can watch exactly the movie you wanted to watch instead.
Spread this across what concerts you would want to go to. It used to be that the vast majority of young people were listening to the same music at the same time, and if you had tickets to a concert most people would at least consider going. Even the odd guy out who was super into something weird understood he was the weird one. Now, among my friends, few of us share any musical taste, really. Spread this across what books you want to read together. What church you go to. What your political beliefs are. There's an infinite menu and people aren't willing to accept the friction of differences to achieve friendship.
This is why live action spectator sports are such a strong source of social cohesion for a lot of people. Sundays are for The Birds, we all know what we're watching and when. There's no question about picking what to watch, it's an event. We all get together at a set time and a set place. It can be the fights, it can be the game, it can be The Bachelor. But live action spectator events bring people together around a specific constraint, without room for people to make other choices.
In the context of romance, I don't see a problem with calling high standards unrealistic, since reproduction is necessary for the perpetuation of society. However, IMO, calling high standards in the context of friendship unrealistic, and saying that people should be friends with people whom they dislike, is extremely sadistic when friendship is not necessary for the perpetuation of society. A person can call his neighbor a good citizen, and be altruistic toward that neighbor, without calling that neighbor a friend.
I don't think you should be friends with people you don't like. But you should befriend people who you don't like that much. Talk to your coworkers, your neighbors, your in-laws' cousins, make friends with people you're connected to by circumstance and not robust common interests. The modern western idea of adolescence has destroyed this concept of connecting with people who are... fellow citizens, and not fellow anything else, by imprinting social bonding through an idea of absolute similarity. Learning to bond across an inferential gap is a core human experience we're missing, and you should seek it out. Maybe you'll help someone else, maybe they'll help you.
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So is friendship.
One might go so far as to say that friendship is the perpetuation of society.
Indeed. Society only functions properly if people form meaningful friendships.
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The question in either case is whether your standards are getting you what you want. The standards exist for man, not man for the standards.
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Looking back, the periods in my life when I had the most friends are when we needed each other:
But more and more we're all just... self sufficient. We work remotely, we learn from youtube tutorials or AI, and can hire specialists for almost any task that needs doing. There's none of those friction points that force us to be around random people, and when we do, everyone is just staring at their phone. There's also a feedback loop where, the less time you spend around other people, the more your social skills decline, and the harder it becomes to do friendly conversation or invite people to social events.
Not new hires in their first corporate job ever though. Also, kids still attend public schools and college, don't they? That hasn't changed. I imagine economic stagnation may have reached such levels that only few college students can afford to go on summer vacations.
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I think it's 100% digital entertainment. Postman started to see this in 70s and 80s with TV, and the quantity and quality of mass entertainment options has only gotten more enticing and more splintered. While part of me thinks it's great that we have so many movies/shows/novels available now, I think it's pretty terrible for shared culture because people don't have a corpus of shared media in common. AI is only going to make this worse, as people can silo themselves into infinite realms of their favorite fan-fic slop that literally no one else in the world has read/watched.
I’m definitely in the Postman camp, although I think entertainment has gotten more stimulating, not necessarily better. Most mainstream movies barely nod at old-fashioned notions like character development or coherent plot, instead going straight for the dopamine hits of explosions and crazy over the top special effect shots and CGI. You can kind of see this in long running movie series, like James Bond. Early James Bond was a spy, sure he was often in danger, but he was more often than not using his spy craft, thinking and investigating. Now, it’s over tge top, and barely bothers with mystery and gathering clues plus Daniel Craig can survive just about anything. Is that better than Dr. No?
But I do think screens are a hyperstimulous that people choose over other less stimulating options. And if you saturate a society in such screens, eventually they sit home and stare at them all the time. I don’t think anyone would choose this. I’ve said this before. If it were simply a matter of screens being better at entertainment, then people would be saying things like “sure hanging out with my buddies and playing basketball was fun, but it wasn’t as much fun as playing basketball on my PS5 against a random guy online.” I’ve never heard anyone yet regret spending time doing non-screen things because it kept them from a similar screen activity. Nobody regrets going outside.
I think honestly if you gave people the option of having the entertainment technology available in 1946, but also having the lifestyle of the same year — lots of real friends, going to dances, playing sports outdoors with your buddies, gathering for card and board games or just dinner, etc. I have a strong suspicion that most people would leap at the chance. There’s a lot to be said for such a lifestyle and the culture and community it creates. So radio plays aren’t as cool as Netflix and you can’t listen to anything at any time. You still have close friends and a community and get more exercise and share an organic culture.
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I think we're slowly (re?)discovering the value of shared culture. A couple generations back technology didn't really allow highly-individualized culture, although it did allow regional variation. Broadcast media has nibbled away at the regional variation for a century at this point, but the niche individuality is much newer, driven by point-to-point technology. It's never needed to be an explicit choice before because we were content-limited, but I think we're starting to see people choose explicitly to watch what their friends are watching.
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I think many reasons mentioned by others contribute, and we can quibble which is a more important contributor (screens or work), but I believe there's few mechanisms not already mentioned.
If it doesn't come to you naturally, creating and maintaining friendships is a skill or an art, in a lack of better word. Like all skills applicable in a social graph, you need enough of it in two points to keep an edge between them.
I am not very god at having friends: it is difficult for me to gauge who is interested in the discussion we are having or who is simply maintaining discussion out of politeness way past enjoyment. I have few good conversation openings, not that many ideas how/where to hang out and what to do. All of this becomes much worse because I'd like to hang out with guys who similar interests, which correlates with a similar personality type, but they/we all are similarly deficient in the relevant skills these days, and not always even cognizant of it. It's much easier and more fun to engage with a top percentile conversationalist than a median or sub-median one.
Secondarily, atomization and larger scope of interests available. If I lived in a small-to-medium sized town 40 years ago, there would not be that many options where and how and who to hang out with, I'd join the social club closest to my interests and would not know I could have different interests. Now, when I make an effort to meet people in nerdy social functions, they are interested in computer games / niche media / streaming series / CCGs / other stuff I am not interested in, and when not busy with jobs/studies/obligations (if they have any), they mostly hang out with their remote friends in Discord and doomscroll their favorite social media; I hang out with my books or scroll here. I am already too stuck in my interests and they are in theirs. I can fake an interest in listening to them but as far as I can tell, they have no interest in mine, fake or otherwise, which makes for quite one-sided "friendship".
Politics is an additional complication. Perhaps I have rosy memories, but in the '00s and until mid '10s, I think people were able to be slightly less serious and more willing to argue about their politics and then politely agree to disagree after it got bit heated. Now when someone, anyone, starts talking politics or any CW-adjacent topic, the vibe is always super tense and it is like hearing a sermon in a tent, you are supposed to nod and figuratively say "amen" when they are finished and continue with your own compatible tirade.
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It's worth mentioning that Americans used move a lot more than they do now. In the late C19th, a third of Americans changed address every year. Even at the height of American civic engagement in the 1960s, people moved more than they do now. So I don't think we can really blame people moving for work for a recent decline in friendship.
The common thread is that any technology that makes it easier to be alone (TV, the internet, smartphones, quick home delivery, work from home) decreases the incentive/necessity to go outside and interact with real people. Even in the 90s, I remember boredom as a kid, with only 4 TV channels and books, there was much more reason to go and hang out with my friends. Now, boredom has been basically eliminated. Of course, we still need to socialise in person, but the low friction option prevails too often and leaves us all lonely and depressed.
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Screen time. Same argument as with dating. I don't think we need to overthink this. As people have more options to spend their free time on, they will most likely pick activities with least friction. Without looking at data, I'm sure invention of TV started contributing to this as well. But nothing compares to having instant access of a dopamine hit that every single one of us has in our pocket. No wonder some can't even resist it while driving. Not to mention how superior of an experience it is to discuss certain things online versus in person. You're typing this out on an obscure forum instead of discussing it with the boys.
Modern (speaking about American specifically) infrastructure is so badly designed for connecting with people. Most people live in the suburbs. That means it's likely a 30+ minute car ride to meet with a friend. 60 minutes all in just for commute to meet with someone. That completely eliminates spontaneous meetups, that's why every get together is a 1 month in advance thing these days. This connects back to screen time, most people are just choosing the path of least resistance - being glued to a screen at home.
There's no third spaces. People don't drink anymore, so bars and clubs are out. What else is there? New thing is running clubs I guess.
Beg your pardon? I think alcohol sales are down roughly 2-3% from a few years ago, but people certainly still fill up all the good bars in any major city on the weekends, at minimum.
Do you specifically mean alcohol sales at bars and clubs? I'd also like to know what exactly 'a few years ago' means here.
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I think friend groups in a lot of places I've lived in also struggle with suburban sprawl making it hard to buy houses in similar suburbs. When I was living in Melbourne, Australia it was essentially people just hoping for anything at a reasonable price within an hour's commute of the CBD but radiating out in all directions from the CBD. Keeping a friend group together in your thirties when one of you buys a townhouse 30 minutes west of the CBD and another one buys a townhouse 40 minutes East of the CBD
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This implies that you don't have any friends in the suburb you're living in. Is that considered usual in the US?
I doubt there's data on this, but I'd say it's pretty common. It's unlikely your existing friends end up living in the exact same suburb as you and you really gotta go out of your way to make friends with your neighbors, who will most likely be older than you (median age of a homebuyer in the US is 59). A 30 minute drive is literally nothing in the US though. It takes approximately 12-15 minutes to just get out of my suburb without traffic.
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While I have a compartively large friendgroup that streches back to high school(And beleive you me, you have NO idea how surprised I am by this), the one issue we run into nowadays is the one you mentioned - Work. All the work my friends can get require either heavy odd hours or boatloads of travel with intermittent time at home, meaning getting together can be sporadic.
Amoung said particular group, mine was the only job that didn't require travel, and given my luck, that may very well change in the coming year.
I'll not ask you to doxx yourself but I just wonder where all your friends live then. Is it some suburb in the Rust Belt? Some stagnant town in Central Valley, CA? What is going on here?
Even better, this development is honestly kinda recent. I can think back to, oh, pre-covid and things were alot more managable in terms of getting together and whatnot.
While this is a personal supposition of mine, I honestly think the economy is doing alot worse than people realize. So the only option left for alot of men are jobs that are basically the 'leftovers' - requiring lots of travel, technically unappealing to those that want to settle or have families they want to spend time with, and so on.
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These three explanations seem wrong:
I would hypothesize:
I'm actually going to mention the loss in socialized drinking.
Significantly more young people don't see the purpose of clubs and bars. Alcohol can be had for cheaper, healthmaxxing turns people away from it, and many don't drink at all. The purpose of alcohol as social lubricant doesn't hold if there's nothing to lubricate.
You can get around overpriced bar alcohol by going to someone's house with a bottle of supermarket booze, but that needs a level of trust that basically doesn't exist anymore outside of macro house parties. The era of going to party at some stranger's house doesn't seem to have survived Facebook or the #MeToo movement.
I actually kind of want to make a post on the moment I finally understood bars, but that understanding took years to evolve. And by the metric I now consider bars worthy, most of them fail completely.
But it seems like the decline in drinking is an effect, not a cause, of the friendship recession.
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I look forward to an effortpost in the Friday Fun Thread.
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Meh I don't feel like this is necessarily contradictory. Even if fertility is falling for many people, the people that are parents still have their time pre occupied with children more often, even as the number of parents declines as a share of the population. They are so pre-occupied with their children that they don't make time for their friends, hence the friendships fracture.
I'm actually surprised by the lack of mobility, though. Perhaps more people think like me than i thought.
As a side note, hours worked has also declined. We've had car infrastructure for a bit as well, and we also see the decline in countries that don't have that infrastructure.
Looks like technology might be a key killer here.
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TV, video games, social media, etc... share the quality of being low friction, inferior (for certain values of 'inferior') substitutes for in-person, group oriented entertainment. These things can be done with other people, but it is hard to meet other people doing them. Obviously, people still go out and do stuff, but it gnaws away at the margins.
Another factor, I suspect, is labor mobility. I'd have to double check (I won't), but I believe an ever greater share of people are moving significant distances for work. This puts them in the position of breaking existing relationships and puts them in the awkward spot of being an adult with no real social connections in their new community. And they may do this several times over their career.
I just cited a study in my other comment showing that precisely the opposite is the case - and yet it's curious that so many people's anecdotal experience is that everyone is moving around all the time. (That's true for me as well.) There must be some kind of stratification going on.
Maybe people used to move more but not as far? So people nowadays are more likely to move across the country or even abroad, whereas folks used to move frequently around their hometown?
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I think it's both people are moving less, and it's more disruptive to move. You'd think that it would be less disruptive because of zoom, etc. but plainly zoom is not a substitute for in-person stuff. No, it's that once someone moves the lower social opportunities in daily life mean that it's much harder to hit that "critical mass" of friendship (or, especially, some bare minimum threshold), which means that people who do move, end up more lonely than previously.
So perception-wise, "difficult moves" are more salient while previously "successful moves" didn't occasion much comment. Thus, you notice more moves precisely because they are so disruptive. At least that's my theory.
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Unfortunately, I said that I wouldn't check and I am man of my word.
Almost certainly. One of the many hazards of relying on personal experience to draw conclusions about societal trends. I wouldn't be surprised if highly mobile people are overrepresented on Internet fora, but then I have no research to back that up.
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I was kind trying to say this in the main post, & Richard is saying this specific thing in the video.
Thing is, i have no idea how one would go about rectifying this. The labor market is just insanely competitive and difficult, and many industries that are high paying or may be of interest to a specific person aren't evenly distributed across the country (there are more software engineers in California than Alabama, because Cali & 'Bama have fundamentally different economies). The alternative seems to be just biting the bullet and accept working $6 per hour at a gas station and buying the substandard trailer, whose best amenities consists of roaches & mold, for those who live in fundamentally poorer areas of the US. Not a very attractive proposition.
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Personally I've experienced the opposite. It's easy to make friends, stay in touch with them, and find activities to do with them.
I'm a parent of 3 and I only work part time remotely, so at least two of the factors listed apply to me.
I'm friends with a bunch of the neighborhood dads. We will have get togethers during the nice weather where the kids all just run around someone's house and backyard.
I've made some friends on TheMotte who are fun to talk with and play video games with.
I've made some friends on some of the games I play online.
I still have many friends from my time in college, I will have a few hour long phone chats with one of them. Another I get lunch with every other month. A few others I see regularly at underwater hockey. I'll have all the underwater hockey players over to my place for a get together on occasion.
My wife and I have about 15 cousins each, some of them live close enough to hangout but they are also in the process of getting married so we have averaged about two weddings a year while married.
I'm going to see Hail Mary with a friend and former roommate when it comes out. When I texted him I realized we hadn't texted or hung out in over a year. I haven't been avoiding him or anything I'm just literally too busy to hangout with all the friends I have.
I like having friends though. I enjoy hanging out with people and having deep or interesting or just funny conversations. My mother is a major contrast with me. She has a few friends that she might speak with a few times in a decade. One couple that might be considered friends with her and my dad, but that couple puts in all or most of the effort to get together. And otherwise she just has her adult children (3, including me) that she hangs out with. She doesn't like having lots of friends. She easily gets a form of social anxiety that makes her dread going out.
With everyone I know this is the same general pattern. They either have a 100-200 friends they can't possibly hangout with, but they try anyways. Or they have like 1-5 friends that they are barely trying to maintain. Both groups of people seem to be getting exactly what they want.
I think the main limiting factor on modern friendship is how many friends someone wants to have. And thus I don't think it's much of a problem at all.
I suspect most introverts like to have 1-5 good friends, but they suffer from several decades (perhaps a century) of generational decline in skills/knowledge how to maintain them. When I read Victorian/Edwardian literature and biographies (mostly Tolkien's biography), it seems like nerdy literary academics knew friendships were important, to the point of elevating friendship as a virtue. Another possibility is that I see a selection effect, where people who did not shit about friendships do not write to us. I don't think so: close, well-maintained friendships seem less central theme in modern media products. Love as in agape and philia are often missing, love as in eros is often overwhelmingly present.
That is interesting, I'd never heard the Victorian and Edwardian take on this. I arrived at basically the same conclusion as them. I am very much an introvert. I am comfortable and happy just sitting in my basement playing video games or reading books all alone. I realized many years ago that friendship is important for mental health, and I've tried to never neglect it.
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