Of course that’s an over generalization but for the most part it’s true.
Make an effort, make the calls, maintain the relationship by giving it your time, in person. Or the friendship will wither and die.
i recently reconnected to a bunch of people that i haven't spoken to in 20 years. i figured i am not going to find a better opportunity, and if i don't reconnect soon i'll probably never do it.
Yeah. In real life there's no karma value next to your name and no string of reactions next to every statement you utter.
Imagine a VR-based dystopia which displayed such information to everyone you encounter.
For a more modern alternative, discord in a relatively small server should work well. Especially if you connect over a shared interest.
I always assumed reactions were meant to be analogous to people making facial expressions as you spoke.
One thing I’m considering is that maybe it’s ok if friends don’t reciprocate. I think some people just have to be the inviters or relationships fall apart.
As annoying as it is, this is definitely true. I've only recently become an inviter, and it's made all the difference. It helps to recognize that not everybody is an inviter/organizer.
I started swimming with a community team two years ago, and about 4 months in I invited them to also lift weights with me. Now there are about 8 of us that are together 5 mornings per week. Took a chance and invited them on a trip, and now 5 of us are going on a week long trip together.
Find a group of people doing something you like. If it's a tech meetup, community organization, hobby group, whatever. What it is doesn't matter. What matters is that you find people with whom you share _an_ interest. Then take a chance there and say "hey, want to meet up for lunch next week?" Or just say "hey, I'm going to see X next weekend, want to come?"
Now I'm 40, divorced, and have an atrophied social network. Forcing myself to become an inviter is the only path out of loneliness.
[1] Overwhelmingly it’s one guy and if they leave the nights out and trips just stop.
I have seen, over the ,last ten years, a great depression, as in mood. People are getting more depressed, and that leads them inward, and it is driven by anxiety. Most people are "flight" when they are faced with anxiety.
And the capitalism and online world has made isolation much easier and way more "enjoyable". Movies, porn, food, all of it acquired without a single human contact. Now people are clamoring they want to work from home as well, making loneliness even more available.
This is the outcome of hypercapitalism[1]. Extracting labor from the humans while feeding it all its' needs through the tubes of the internet.
I am writing this in a Starbucks right now. Ten years ago I would find couches and comfy chairs in every store. Now? stiff Uncomfortable chairs in a cold industrial setting, the store and counter set up for rushed to go orders.
This is not about something being wrong with people, it is a system that is tearing us apart.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/978047067059...
Also, bad communities fail. They should be allowed to fail.
Until recently, individuals needed to be part of some sort of kinship group to get their needs met and to survive. To communicate with anyone in near real time you had to be close by.
We have managed to engineer a society where individuals can survive "on their own" - basically outside their kinship groups. This is possible thanks to globe-spanning networks of communication and trade.
Kinship groups are great, but many of them have painful costs. Some 60 percent of Americans, for example, suffered an adverse childhood experience in kinship groups. Some of these could not be avoided - like a loved one's untimely death. Most of these negative experiences were intent or neglect by kinship group members.
If your early experiences of kinship groups are negative, you are less likely to seek out other human connection. You have learned that your kinship group is not reliable. If people genetically close to you cannot be relied on, then why should it be different for strangers?
The connections you do find tend to be focused on your interests, and those people don't need to be nearby for you to have a strong connection. But you still have your prior experiences keeping you skeptical of human reliability.
Personally, I sympathize with everyone who is sad about communities becoming fragmented.
I think, though, that if these communities were as supportive, inclusive, or beneficial as they imagine themselves to be this would not be a problem.
Bad communities should be allowed to fail. That is probably what is happening here.
Are there circumstances under which nation states could/should be seen as 'communities', I wonder. And, what would be some sensible ways of detecting and handling failure at such scale.
War and revolution. 'Burn it down and start from scratch' is an extreme path to fix a failing country. Historically, the people that rebuild are rarely the same people that burned it down.
If your local elites are generally better than the alternative people tend to stick around
"I against my brother. I and my brother against my cousin. I, my brother, and my cousin against the world" -Arab Proverb
No. Imagined communities are fake communities with none of the feedback mechanisms that make real communities resilient to elements that have extremely different priorities to the median member. See how the Swedish Social Democrats imported over 1% of the Swedish population in one year from Syria.
Are you not assuming something is not killing these communities from the outside?
Should all people who get an infection be allowed to die?
People are being squeezed to death by hypercapitalism and you blame the communities?
People fight for communities they want to preserve. There’s no guarantees that fight will be successful.
But when they don’t fight? Maybe it’s because they can’t. Or don’t want to. No one should ask them or force them to.
So, "no one should ask" a suicidal person to not kill themselves "or force them" not to.
It is when people cannot fight for themselves that those of us who can fight have to fight even harder. I am saying this as someone who has attempted suicide twice.
You are literally arguing in favor for shrugging your shoulders to things like slavery.
If you believe in autonomy, every human has the right to decide when and how to end their lives. Slavery denies human autonomy by taking all control away.
Even when you think their decision is a bad one, it’s their life and their decision.
> The act of inquiring or requesting; a petition; solicitation.
forcing
> The accomplishing of any purpose violently, precipitately, prematurely, or with unusual expedition.
-
unless you’re a psychopath, your 20 year old offspring calling you at 4am about to kill themselves is gonna result in you doing basically anything you can to save them.
it’s very easy to sit on the internet and take a perceived moral high ground. it’s much harder to retain that high ground when you get that phone call.
i used to have all sorts of bullshit “rules” like this [0]. but life ain’t binary man. absolutisms don’t really exist out there in the real world. i know it probably makes you feel “safer” knowing that you have a “rule” for this that you feel you can apply carte blanche — it used to for me — but it’s all bullshit man. it’s just the policeman in our own heads.
I see respecting individual autonomy as the best way to respond to the shades of grey in life.
This respect for autonomy goes all the way to the ultimate act of choosing if and when to end your own life.
Even if that decision is a mistake, I believe individuals are free to make fatal mistakes.
This is wishful thinking. The resilience of communities is orthogonal to their moral worth, which is inherently subjective. Many communities which have horrific traits survive and thrive for centuries and even millennia. Many which I'm sure you would consider morally good are perilously close to failure.
When a mountain falls out of the sky, it’s no one’s fault (not even the bad people) that the community failed.
In kinship group days, and especially before vaccines, children simply didn’t survive. They died by the millions.
Today, a child has a viable alternative to the abusive or neglectful kinship group. Very often it is The State, but still. An alternative!
The psychological argument is that it is necessary for survival — that a society that has long taken underlying healthy behaviours for granted is discovering that it's losing what defines society itself.
Trust, cooperation, sustainable development, sound policy-making, education, child-care...
Heck, cooperation is a survival strategy that came out of evolution. It exists outside of humans. It doesn’t need to come from human intent.
It feels weird to me that people think they can intelligently design cooperative societies and groups. You can try, but there’s always going to be trade offs between individuals and the group.
In this moment, individuals are in a place where they can avoid many of those trade offs and costs. I think this is generally positive considering my own experience of costly kinship groups. But I can see why others disagree.
This sounds like what some call the Libertarian Housecat position. "My needs are met, and I am unaware of complex externalities that make meeting my needs possible."
The HN majority "work from home" advocates disagree with this
> It’s often said that if you ask an American what they do, they’ll tell you about their job, whereas a European might talk about their hobbies or passions. Data backs this up;
> But the role of work in shaping identity and social life in the United States has perhaps never been stronger. For example, 77% of Americans work more than 40 hours per week, and few take their full paid leave.
I guess people aren’t making friends at work the way they thought they were?
I hate talking about what I do for work. My life is so much more than my job. I’m also much more interested in learning about other people’s live outside of work, hobbies, where they travel, etc.
The work me is the “looking at things from a 1000 foot view”, “taking things to the parking lot”, “and adding on to what Becky said”.
When I talk to them about what concert I went to, it’s limited to Maroon 5, Stevie Wonder and my friend who is in a punk band. I don’t discuss the concert where my wife and I were at lil Jon screaming “bia bia” or Ice Cube was rapping “F** the Police”.
Code switching is a real thing. I’m in a customer facing role (cloud consulting) and I always have to filter everything I say through the corporate lens. At home and with my friends, I can be the real me.
The article talks about how it’s more of a younger generation phenomenon suggesting older generations still maintain their friendships
I’m grappling with this myself, it requires a lot of energy to form adult friendships. I keep seeing my neighbors out at the playground, I reach out and say hey and hi and ask them how they are doing but stop short of investing the time necessary to form real friendships with them and I know deep down that it’s perpetuating late stage individualism
My experience corroborates this. Reminded me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43473618
Even if we accept that as the primary cause (which I don't) that would mean cowardice and racism are the root cause. An irrational fear of people who don't look and talk like us.
> Things like Elks Lodges went into long term decline when women and blacks had to be admitted.
People don't need institutionalized racism and misogyny to make friends. They already have a right to be racist and privately associate / not associate.
I live in place where this is still true. The rec centers are barely solvent and it's mostly retirees and summer camps (cheap daycare) that keeps them afloat.
Many of us still can't afford housing anywhere near where the jobs are. How could we possibly put down roots and be a real part of a lasting community worth investing time, effort, and possibly savings in?
Most of my friend interactions would come from things like having a moment with nothing to do in the bus, realizing I have no particular plans this weekend and reaching out to a couple friends to see if they’re available.
Now those moments are instantly drowned by opening instagram before a thought bubbles up. And when the weekend eventually comes and there’s no plan, Netflix is just a button press away.
We need moments of boredom and reflection to push us into action, the attention economy is robbing us from that.
I’d even say the increase in anxiety related symptoms is due to this lack of idleness. The mind feels as if it’s super busy moving from active task to active task when in reality there were hours of just defaulting to reels.
https://x.com/matt_vanswol/status/1915121027820159414
Your project house was an individual pursuit when it should be a collective one.
You won’t do social stuff in those micropauses anyway, that’s true, but I think those moments are where you’d normally “mentally review”. Wondering how a friend is, feeling like you miss a connection, etc.
Without that, I think we mentally drift away from social connections.
My stepbrother has declined hang out invitations for decades but the minute I need the most minor house or car repair he’ll drop everything and be there all day.
Yea, this tracks my observations. A lot of adults make connections in their community through their kids and kids' friends. Kids pick their friends and their parents and guardians just go along for the ride, so when the kids play together, it kind of forces the parents to meet and interact.
Without exception, the parents I meet in the 25-40 age range are what I'd charitably call totally anti-social. Not actively mean (although some are), but just not interested at all in even saying a word to you to pass the time when the children are playing together. They just sit there on their phones trying to get through the experience. In general, these parents project outward an attitude of vague grumpiness and annoyance.
A few of the kid-friends are evidently raised by the 50-70 year old grandparents (never even seen the parents), and these folks tend to be much more social and will shoot the shit with you while the kids play. Much more pleasant and willing to interact while we're forced together. My relationships with them have been civil at worst and friendly at best.
Of course, this is just one person's observations, and yea they are a crude generalization. I'm in my mid-40s so don't have that much in common with either of these groups, but the attitude and behavior difference has been stark!
Found it:
2. A few bad apples can spoil a group.
3. Maintaining a group is a thankless job.
4. Third places are money making establishments now rather than community focused. So people save up to go to the ones that they'll remember. So there's competing money for these attractions, and the experience undergoes enshitification.
Solutions?
- lower the cost of community space so more people can enjoy them.
- social etiquette needs be enforced through culture. Conformity has its benefits. We don't need planes to land because Johnny had too much to drink.
this… feels a bit off. I would have to look at that article to see what they are saying.
IMO this is the biggest challenge ahead of us. What’s the point of all this amazing life enhancing technology if we’re lonely, sad, and severed from our tribes.
We lend PHYSICAL copies of albums, video games and books to one another. This increases trust, knowledge and love for one another. We share stories about all sorts of things. We create stories by doing things together.
This is how friendships are formed and maintained. This is humanity. This is who we are and how we behave.
Poverty is the digital world.
See you out there!
In American culture, hyper-individualism has become a virtue somehow but this too is just a symptom of capitalism. Why? Because people who act collectively are a threat to capitalist power structures.
The whole "gig economy" is nothing more than needing a 2nd and 3rd job just to survive as real wages continue to stagnate or decline and costs keeping going up. That's less free time.
The Internet is a negative here too. Physical proximity has historically had huge power in creating freindships. But capitalism rears its ugly head here too in the destruction of so-called "third places".
High housing prices hurt everybody. It destroys community spaces. Hobbies that were once cheap escapes become way too expensive. Housing costs are an input into everything. Take spiraling childcare costs. You need physical space. That's now way more expensive.
Lastly, there is a natural trend for people who marry and have children to replace friends with family. There is an issue of shared life experiences. 50+ years ago pretty much everyone is in the same boat. Now? By choice or necessity, people are opting out of this "traditional" life and this naturally creates a divide.
It was desegregation. Read about the decline of public pools, municipal trash service and free ambulances.
Maybe it's movies and TV, where a "close friend" is more or less a non judgemental therapist that will throw down in a fight for you.
What is a close friend? Before we can start asking people if they have any we should probably agree on a definition. If you use the Hollywood standard, then probably none of us have close friends.
In my experience, most friends come and go. That's OK. People change. Circumstances change. One person is always putting in more effort than the other. Some friends will always be aloof. Some friends will pretend they are independent and don't need friendship "like everyone else does," but they're generally full of it. Some friends will seem clingy.
Just roll with it.
The other challenge is finding people, especially as you get older. I've posted this before, but as you get older you really need to seek out established communities. Sports, trivia nights, things of that nature. Something where you can hop in and immediately meet 5+ people. Then you need to show up, over and over. That's how friendships form.
At that point, it's on you. People are out there and in my experience they are excited to meet new folks.
We can write a huge dissertation on why we think The Friendship Recession has happened, but it's quite simple. Inertia is human nature. It takes effort to learn something new and join a community where people are practicing that thing. It takes vulnerability and effort. It's kinda scary.
It's a lot harder than turning on YouTube or flipping through TikTok. And most people understandably don't want to do hard things, especially after the stresses of work and life.
I’m probably bottom quintile for social skills and I have done some extremely unwise things for one of my friends who was there for me when I needed a hand. The Hollywood idea of “close friend” is a great deal nearer to my own life experience than its representation of many other important relationships.
I've come to this same conclusion, but rarely express it because it's possible I'm just different. And I'd even go one step further, I think what a lot of people say friendship is, isn't actually what human friendship is in practice. I think these unrealistic expectations undermine real-world friendships because they always fall short.
Theoretical friendship:
- Completely perfect and devoid of all realities of life
- No jealousy, no competition, no negative feelings
- Timeless and immortal
- No effort involved
- Completely balanced and healthy for everybody at all times
- Able to talk about every topic
Realistic friendship:
- Temporary at first, may or may not build into something more
- Often starts with a simple exchange of banter on common interests
- Multiple opinions/topics that are mutually avoided
- One person often tries harder, one person often values the relationship more
- The relationship may or may not even be mutually healthy
- Many will hit a point where they become more effort than they're worth and end (e.g. moving)
- Some will never grow out of one or two common things to bitch about
> - Completely perfect and devoid of all realities of life
Friendships are relationships that stand the test of time and hardship. You work through problems, illnesses including mental health struggles, deaths, employment and money problems, family and relationship problems, legal problems, all sorts.
> - No jealousy, no competition, no negative feelings
There are obviously always mixed emotions, but generally you won't harbour serious ill will towards your friends. This is something you can work on, though, as jealousy and envy are personality traits that can be controlled. Healthy competition is a positive, though.
> - Timeless and immortal
Friendships change and sometimes have to be ended, even when you like the other person. I think this is quite common and almost a trope of Hollywood movies.
> - No effort involved
Short of family and maybe employment, friendships require the most work in life. This one is particularly baffling from a Hollywood perspective, as going a friend in need is like the all-time Hollywood trope.
> - Completely balanced and healthy for everybody at all times
Obviously this isn't true, but this isn't portrayed either. Flawed characters are the only compelling characters in Hollywood.
> - Able to talk about every topic
Again, changing the uncomfortable topic trope is an ultra-trope.
Your "realistic friendship" section fits acquaintances rather than friends.
>I think these unrealistic expectations undermine real-world friendships because they always fall short.
I think some self-reflection is in order here, as this is projection.
I doubt even popular school / university kids manage to sustain that many actually *close* friends for long !
The article follows similar lines, but I feel "forcing friendships" just leads to shallow "friendships" with little meaning. In fact so many modern friendships are sustained by small talk, which Carl Jung derides as meaningless..
I have a friend who on one hand believes all of the anti-vax, evil illegal immigrate stuff and might even believe that Trump’s tariffs are okay. But on the other hand, I have never heard him say anything negative about other people, cultures, sexualities etc.
I consider him a good friend. On the other hand, there was this other guy I was friends with for awhile. He became full MAGA. It got to the point where I just couldn’t deal with him anymore.
I guess the people I won’t deal with or Trump conservatives (ie populists). I’m good with traditional conservatives we can usually even have polite intellectual conversations about politics.
I'm not sure how anyone could believe immigrants are intrinsically bad without racism tbh.
It’s relatively easy for someone to understand just by taking a slight step back out of their world view why a man may be attracted to another man or a woman may be a attracted to another woman or someone may be attracted to both sexes.
But trans goes against everything they know about science. And even for those who are very much “let you do you” thinks it’s a bridge too far to have biological men in women’s sports.
This is a bridge too far for even me (yes I know it’s an unpopular opinion) and I’m a “f*! the police”,BLM, universal healthcare, free college education, religious skeptical, increase the safety net and lean liberal
I'm (apparently, or so I'm told) a flaming lefty lib, who recently moved out of the Bay Area to a very "red" part of California. If I limited my friends to only people like me politically, I'd have to be a hermit. I basically take it as given that any new person I strike up a conversation with will not agree with my politics, so I just don't bring it up. Most of my friends got the hint clearly when they brought some of their Trump shit up and I immediately steered the conversation away. We have a good understanding--let's talk about positive things we have in common: hobbies, beer, cars, whatever. Don't bring up politics or religion, and you can make friends with anyone!
Some of them just can't bear to live even a few minutes without talking about their politics at every possible moment, and they're just not friends anymore.
The nation concept now drains out the need and viability of communities, families and friendships. It's like a whale swallowing animals. Animals can no longer keep their own structure and identity once they are inside the whale. They will be disintegrated into individual molecules and become citizens of the whale. Nations do the same. The existence and strength of a nation requires disintegration of internal structures and autonomous bodies. Communities, families and friendships all go against the individualistic nation concept. The best citizens are individual workers with no connections and no opinions and maybe no gender.
On a workday, there isn't much time. I roll out of bed at 6:30, get the kids up and fed breakfast and out the door. I finally get actually working at 8:30-9:30, depending on if I exercise or not. Stop work in the 5:30-6 range, switch into making dinner, getting kids to eat dinner, policing screen time and homework. Then bedtimes and such, following up on the zillion school emails, PTA newsletters, scheduling. If I have 45 min of downtime, typically in the 10-11pm range, if I'm lucky.
On weekends, there's all the deferred housework, like cleaning and laundry. Kids have swim and sports. Visits to grandparents, from grandparents. Every now and then we have someone over for a games afternoon, or someone is visiting from out of town, but I really doubt that adds up to 4 hr / wk.
A tip I got from a friend in his 60s was that even when you lose friends, life is great because you constantly have the opportunity to find new ones. I am in a new close friends renaissance in my 40s, just be vulnerable and don’t take rejection personally.
But it's hard for me to draw the line between being vulnerable and say, oversharing or dumping
My best friend comes over once a weekend and we watch the TV that my wife doesn’t want to.
I participate in a sport (powerlifting) where I’ve made friends and there’s room to socialise while exercising.
I chose to move back to my home town and also go to college there.
I go to metal gigs with friends when the kids are asleep.
I’m happily married, my wife is training for a marathon and sees friends too.
We pay for a cleaner.
Don’t know that this is 6.5 hours in person with friends every week but I’d say it’s at least a couple of hours each.
It’s doable, it just might require not doing some stuff you already do and enjoy. There’s a bunch of stuff I did pre-kids that I don’t any more and would like to find time for again one day.
Part of the reason I don’t live in America is I see a lot of people on salaries 2-4x mine who seem to be unable to have time to see their friends.
This is just a choice though. A choice Americans absolutely love making, but a choice none-the-less. On Reddit some dude was trying to argue that an individual needs $70,000 a year in fixed expenses just to live. Bare minimum. OTOH, I have what I consider an absurdly luxurious life and I spend less than $60,000/year TOTAL.
Buried lede.
It’s the first “luxury” I pay for when able to right after air conditioning, and I did it even when I was single with a roommate.
Costs where I live are $200 or so twice a month to have my entire place cleaned top to bottom and I live in an above average sized house.
It’s not nothing, but it’s affordable enough to prioritize. The best thing you can buy with money is time, and I’ve found this is one of the largest RoI possible in terms of dollars per hours given back.
Others will prioritize different spending but overall I find it a better return than even taking a vacation.
However, there’s significant diminishing returns on weekly or biweekly cleaning service vs monthly or by monthly. Especially if you can use a robotic vacuum and have decent air filtration.
I think people overestimate how much time a cleaner saves. It’s helpful if you can afford it but IMO it’s not the life-changing improvement that you hear about on Reddit and other places. Someone who comes once per week to spend an hour or two cleaning could give an hour or two back (usually not 1:1 because they clean deeper than you would yourself most times to show that a good job was done). It’s not going to make the difference between having tons of time to spend with your friends if your scheduled is already packed though. That is, unless you plan to pay for a daily cleaner which is a different level of expense.
https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu...
Because otherwise, as the father of a 1 and 5 year old, I completely agree with OP and find your story unbelievable. Like OP I work/exercise/do chores from 6 am to 10 pm. I'm on HN right now only because it's Saturday and I'm relaxing.
Unlike the first OP, I don't get involved with the PTA and we don't really email with the school at all. I don't understand the emailing constantly with school thing, but to each their own and I'm sure there's a valid reason for those that do.
We, like the person you're replying to, also pay for a cleaner, but that's for deep cleaning and only happens once every two weeks. I've somehow settled into a routine that has me doing basic cleaning right after dinner.
My wife and I share chores and swap out tasks evenly. This allows one of us to clean and have some "me" time while the other bathes the kids/does bedtime, before we meet together and hang out for a bit in the evening before bed. Sometimes during the week we'll have a friend over during this time. Our weekend hours are limited in the evenings, because I have to get up early for work, but we make it work.
On the weekends, we are good about balancing our fun time. Grandparents come over and watch the kids as we go out together, or, just for one example, my wife will handle dinner/bedtime (or breakfast, if I go to something dance-musicy that runs late) while I go out to a show. I'll do likewise for her if she wants to go out with friends.
Also on the weekends, we often meet up during the day with friends of ours who also have kids. We get to hang out with our friends while our kids play together.
Additionally, my work has a gym and my work schedule is earlier than most - 6 to 3PM. I work out before and after work, and then go pick my kiddos up, make dinner and play with them after cleaning. I also chose a job that insisted they prioritize family and work/life balance and I leaned into that, and they leaned back! No notifications hit my phone after 4PM and in the four years I've worked here, I have never had to work a weekend nor been pressured to do any work outside of when I'm at the office.
My wife is also super nice about letting me go on 3-4 day backpacking trips multiple times through the summer.
We prioritized finding some time for us for our own sanity, and kinda naturally settled into this schedule. It might not work for everyone, and I feel very fortunate to have space for us.
Edit: Don't get it twisted, though... I'm tired. I can't get a full 8 hours of sleep on a regular basis, closer to 7, sometimes a bit less. The daytimes are also constant in order to ensure we get time at the end. It's hard.
Edit 2: We also prioritized ensuring our kids were great sleepers from day one. They go down for bed anywhere between 7 and 8, and don't wake up until ~7AM. We're also very lucky in that they've never really come into our bedrooms in the middle of the night and stay in their beds until we get them in the mornings. I don't know how we got fortunate there, but /shrug.
Having some give and take between parents makes such a big difference.
I think every time I’ve talked to friends who are new parents who complain about not having any free time ever, they eventually reveal some excessive rigidity in how they share the parenting load. Some parents try to have both parents involved in everything all the time. Some parents refuse to let the other parent handle a task like bedtime. Some parents let their kids get demanding about which parent does a task and they never push back on it. And of course some couples have one lazy parent who just doesn’t do the thing, leaving it to fall to the other parent.
There’s often a lightbulb moment when parents realize that there can be flexibility and trading back and forth between parents.
I once coached a young guy who was struggling at his job because his ~9 month old still wasn’t sleeping well. After some questions he revealed that both he and his wife were getting up with the baby every time and staying up together.
It took some convincing to break him of the notion that every interaction with the baby required two parents. Once they started staggering their sleep schedules and taking shifts during the night everything improved.
> Like OP I work/exercise/do chores from 6 am to 10 pm.
I hear this a lot, but let’s be honest: You don’t need to exercise and do chores every single day for the entire time outside of work, do you? Would it be the end of the world if you met up with a friend one night instead of going to the gym? Could you invite a friend to the gym?
The house doesn’t need to be spotlessly cleaned every night. If you’re cooking dinner, switch to recipes that are easy to prepare and then double them so you can have leftovers.
It’s easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of doing things constantly until they expand and fill all of your time. Becoming more efficient and flexible about the things I did outside of work opened up a lot of free time.
Is this great for everyone? Nope. Is it better than having no friends? Probably.
Zero judgment here, genuinely, but: I keep hearing people say my life is impossible and it doesn’t seem like it.
As a childless person with far more "free time" than either of you, I've fallen into the same trap. I build it up in my head that I'm "just too busy" and during my downtime I'm "too tired," but the reality is often that I've just lost the habit and fail to perceive the opportunities.
None of this is meant to undersell the problem. I don't think human beings evolved for this pervasive, isolated busyness, and I think a lot of societal dysfunction cascades from it. I think it has real, negative effects on our biology and psychology, and no one should be shamed for succumbing to those effects. But at the same time I don't think the situation is hopeless and I admire and aspire to your initiative and creativity, and I think the rest of us can get there too.
It’s one of the problems with birth rate collapse. The fewer people have kids, the harder it is in very hard to measure ways.
Quick Google tells me 40 years ago, in 1985, there was 62.6 million children in the US. In 2025 there are 74.7 million. That is more children in 2025 than 1985.
Parents not allowing their children to play independently isn't due to lack of other children, it's a choice.
Still, it’s healthy. Working out is also effortful but healthy.
Instead of doom scrolling on social media we called a friend.
Instead of binge watching another meh show, we had friends over to play cards or a board game.
Instead of over scheduling kids with constant activities, parents had a regular night out with friends while kids spent quality time at home with the other parent.
The time is there. It was in the past. We just have a finite amount of time and use it differently.
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2024/09/school-dr...
Plants are the new pets, pets are the new kids, and human kids are exotic pets for the wealthy or crazy (or a combination of those traits).
I'm having a hard time parsing that statement.
Are you suggesting that only the wealthy can realistically afford to have children today, or that parents increasingly treat their children like status symbols or pets?
Both interpretations strike me as pretty dystopian.
More objectively, research seems to indicate happiness tends to be less vs childless during the first hard years, but it slowly evens out and pale with kids are generally much happier later in life.
I have a few opinions here. Unhappiness spreads faster than happiness. You don’t hear about all the happy families down the road, but you will hear about the dysfunctional one. Your friends don’t talk much about the good feelings snuggling up with their toddler, but will tell you about the massive meltdown that their toddler had a few weeks ago.
If you aren’t dysfunctional, set a consistent example, and are consistent with your kids boundaries, you don’t have to be unhappy with your kids. Along those lines, put your screens down and go do something with your kids (don’t just passively watch between doomscrolling) and you’ll find there’s a lot of enjoyment to be found for you too.
This is likely an unpopular opinion, but most of the parents I know do not have these extreme schedules and lack of flexibility that leave zero time for friends.
I do know some parents who fell into the parenting version of “the cult of busy”. I think it’s easy to stack your calendar with a million things and commitments and then wonder where your time went. When someone starts complaining about never having any free time but then in the same paragraph mentions optional commitments like PTA involvement taking up their free time, you have to read between the lines to see what’s really happening. If I didn’t have enough time to see friends for even 4 hours per week, dropping PTA involvement would be an easy target.
Honestly, the time crunch trap happens to people in all situations, kids or not. I did some volunteer mentoring for a while and it was shocking to hear so many 20-somethings without kids or relationships tell me how they never had time to see their friends any more between their 9-5 job and chores. When pressed for details they reveal that they’re doing things like grocery shopping every day, spending 2 hours making and cleaning up dinner every night, an hour at the gym, 2 hours catching up on their Netflix, and on and on.
Life is all about priorities. Honestly as a parent I don’t know how anyone could get less than 4 hours/week with other parent friends. We always meet up with parent friends at the park or do other activities together. If you’re strictly entertaining kids alone and you’re not in a remote location, it would be my top priority to make some other parent friends quickly.
Plus, I'd still have two kids up, asking me to extend the wifi because they're not done with English yet or to help scan a page for math. I'm not going to just leave that to my partner.
Even the more traditional pint-after-work would leave me coming home tipsy at 7pm, having slacked off on all of dinner prep and child-wrangling. If I made a habit of that, it would get me my ass handed to me, and rightfully so.
I do wonder if the whole "pub-culture" thing was entirely predicated on the unpaid and unacknowledged work of women. And how much of that extended to other traditional extracurriculars like bowling leagues and clubs and such.
It still may be possible now but that will require reducing your standard of living to what was common then. Think no stone counter-tops. Not driving a 0-3 year old car with $10,000 just in electronics. Having linoleum floors instead of high-end tile. Eating Hamburger Helper, spaghetti, not ordering door dash 5x a week. Resisting the constant stream of social media, influencers, advertisements that are telling you everyone else lives better than you and making you feel bad about it, which causes you to spend money on things you don't need but raise the aesthetic of your life and make you feel like you're living better.
I'd bet that if someone was happy to live in the standard of living that was 20-30 years ago, it could still be done on a single middle class income which would allow for the leisure time required to spend 6.5hrs+ with friends [citation needed]
These conversations are difficult online because people who fall into routines without friend or personal time often refuse to believe that anything else is possible. Even in this comment thread there are accusations that other people are lying about spending time with friends because they just can’t believe it’s possible.
The common thread I see in discussions is the claim that every day is filled from start to finish with every activity. Now realistically we know you’re not exercising every single day, not doing laundry all weekend start to finish, and not reading a zillion PTA newsletters every night because those are just examples. Yet those lists are always given as reasons why people can never have free time even though they aren’t always happening.
It’s much harder for single parents, obviously, but for a household with two parents it shouldn’t be hard for one parent to go out with friends after the kids are down one night each week and/or for a couple hours on the weekend. This alone would get to 4hrs/week or beyond. I’m not exaggerating when I say every set of parent friends I know does some variation of this. Friend groups will sync up their nights away to get together.
Second, playing with kids is an easy opportunity to meet up with parent friends. We take the kids to a local park with local parents a couple days a week in the afternoon briefly before dinner. Really easy way to catch up while the friends are playing.
Third, once the kids are old enough to not require extreme supervision at dinner time we like to have friends over for dinner. Obviously this isn’t a fancy 3-course meal with wine afterward, but we don’t care. Friends like to stop by for a quick dinner.
Fourth, if you’re cramming your schedule so full of kids activities and cleaning tasks to keep the house constantly clean that you have zero wiggle room for finding a couple hours with friends each week, that’s a choice. Saying this makes a lot of people angry, but the truth is you have to prioritize and compromise. Some times we decide we don’t have time for another activity commitment. Other times we decide the house can stay messy for an extra day to catch an opportunity to meet up with someone. Most of the time we trade off parent to parent.
Like I said, it’s different if you’re a single parent. However every parent friend I know does some variation of this and we spend time with each other. If finding a measly 4 hours per week feels completely impossible, I would suggest stepping back and looking at priorities and how your splitting time between parents.
I should also mention that paying attention to things like screen time and distractions is important. I’ve had a few friends who were exasperated at how impossible it felt to do anything, until they checked their screen time tracker and realized that 3-4+ hours of every day was disappearing into their phone. For others this could be TV or computer Internet browsing. Some of this is always okay, but you have to realize it’s a choice you’re making about where the time goes.
Money and locality.
Money: You pay people to do things that take up time.
We have a house cleaner. That's a few hours right there. When the kids were little, we had a nanny. But the nanny didn't just watch the kids. She also washed and folded the laundry, tidied the house daily, and sometimes cooked dinner. In fact, now that they are in school, I'm thinking of hiring a home helper to do those things because those chores get neglected right now (although the kids can almost do it now instead).
Locality: Visit people who live nearby.
Most of my friends that I see regularly are either my wife's brothers and their families, since they all live locally, or the parents of our kids friends, who all live nearby since we go to the local school, or the neighbors who we like. We have family dinner a few times a week, either at someone's house or out to eat (see point one about money), and especially on weekends and summer break, we hang out a lot with the neighbors.
I don't however see my college friends or work buddies much anymore. That is what I had to give up when I had kids. We have some group chats and will occasionally get together, but that requires arranging babysitting, or one of us going on a trip with those friends (see the point about money again). But both my wife and I try to do that at least once a year (go on a friends trip).
We see the rise of online dating apps being the number one way (by a large margin) for urban educated singles to meet their future partners. If you’re in a place like SF or NYC, you can completely forget about meeting your future spouse at some hobby, the gym, or even in a friend group. I think a lot of this has to do with entitlement - a strong belief that a person deserves a match that is unwaveringly perfect/better-than-themselves. This Disney-ification of romance is very strong among certain crowds.
In my view, this has a strong effect on social circles. People won’t introduce anyone anymore. You might have a party and people might end up together but the idea of specifically inviting people or introducing friends to each other for romantic purposes is, practically speaking for yuppie circles, gone. The main reason I’ve seen is that certain people have gotten increasingly hostile to anyone even suggesting a person to them that is less than perfect/godly. To the point where many people are afraid of suggesting anything and therefore will not risk their own reputation and friendship because they really feel they’ll lose their friend if they even suggest a potential romantic connection.
So, anyway, my belief is romance within social circles is quickly dying due to entitlement and this has a strong pusher for people to not put as much effort into them. Once that is established, it carries over into the rest of your life because you didn’t ever prioritize it. Therefore, even if you’re partnered, you have learned to live without.
It’s shocking how few relationships I’ve seen are from social circles. If anyone ever studies how people 25-35, educated, and living in major cities dates… being single will be more common than any non-app method.
I recently moved back from Asia to Northern Europe, famous for being a place hard to make friends. I made a new friend, when I one day went to the local swimming pool and just started to talk with an old, pensioner guy.
He reached out to me later, we set up a coffe chat and now it's a biweekly routine.
It was a fun story so I told it to friend & partner/families. All of my women friends first reaction was caution. "what does he want? Be careful with your drink!". My guy friends were more perplexed on why I'd even bother befriending someone almost 50+ year older than me. What's there to be gained.
I realized a few years back that meeting people with absolute zero expectations is the most fun way. It even worked good on online dating. As long as I enjoy taking to the person (a low bar) it's not time wasted.
Time is not to be wasted. Everything needs a goal/reason. Most people cultivate this mindset and the added expectations on new connections, to me seems like a cultural shift that happened as a result of what the article describes. One can remove that sentiment even with the work/nuclear family stuff. (not sure about the physical constraints)
It's pretty sad and telling that people's first reaction to something as wholesome and positive as making a new friend is suspicion and selfish apathy. Illustrative of the widespread anti-social mental illness that we somehow have managed to normalize.
What are you gaining then? It must be something right?
But in my experience, friendship quality is much more important than quantity.
I’m only truly friends with people I admire and am interested in, and grow to care about. Some of these friendships happen fast and others are slow burners - they aren’t all alike. But they are definitely hard to come across, particularly in middle age.
I believe those friendships give me the kind of benefits that experts suggests we lose in isolation. These are the kinds of friendships you carry with you wherever you are - often wondering what those friends would or do think about the things you are experiencing.
On the other hand, I have many acquaintances, some quite longstanding, where the friendship switch never got flipped. Perhaps I am viewed as a bit stand-offish. I am never not gracious but I just don’t have the small talk gene.
What on earth does this word salad mean? Fallen by 300%? 200%? 75%? 2/3? All are reasonable interpretations of this incoherent math.
> to tolerate the messy work of forming friendships
If it's true that people are becoming worse at maintaining friendships and losing some skill or tendency they require, then people are ipso facto also worse at being friends. (And even if there's no ipso facto corollary, the following seems just as valid an explanation for the decline in friendship as the author's expnarion: not that anybody is worse at maintaining friendships but rather that there are fewer friendships worth maintaining, fewer people worth the effort.)
I have no idea whether this is actually happening. I'm just stunned by the article's poor, predictable reasoning and odious, sanctimonious, middle-brow, TED-talk moralism: the author takes it as a given that we "manifest" our social lives, that somehow (magically?) our intention and dedication create the desired reality. The author doesn't consider an alternative hypothesis.
But if I tell you that someone is a bad, tedious, or insufferable friend, you won't expect, let alone (I hope) encourage, me to "tolerate the messy work," demonstrate the "courage" this author has decided is missing, or "show up" and be "vulnerable." You'll encourage me, rather, to save my energy for those who deserve it.
If social skills have withered in some portion of a person's pool of available, possible friends, then that person not only cannot be blamed for ending friendships; doing so is actually the best outcome, short of "manifesting" more tolerable people.
Edit:
> embedded myself in existing social structures and prioritized in-person social activities —ecstatic dance gatherings at the Harvard Divinity School, morning prayers at Memorial Church
Uh huh. If you're the kind of person who decides, I don't know, to seek friendship through daemonic possession, speaking in tongues, or, I don't know, shaman-guided spirit journeys, you're not someone whose advice I particularly want.
Other than that, every minute I don't have to spend with my family is precious. And every such a minute with enough energy to do something productive is even more precious. So yeah, for me solitude is absolutely a preference.
Oh, and you can absolutely have friends AND children. I have both.
where are wages stagnating and for whom?
I genuinely think it's not possible to maintain close friendship with this many people, especially if they're not in the same group. Or perhaps my definition of a "close friend" differs from an average american, both now and back then.
MattGaiser•6h ago
My anecdotal impression is that people don't really use those that are available very much and the drop in investment is because of that.
I have organized a few events in community halls over the past few years and I have been struck by just how available the event spaces we looked at were. No conflicts, no competing priorities, nobody using any of the other rooms at the same time, etc. Some communities are no longer bothering to have community halls at all, as nobody really uses them.
Where I live, the local community centres are not heavily used. Community social events have dwindled due to being poorly attended. The coffee shops, bars, and pubs have cut seating and replaced it with dedicated pickup areas for those who send in orders or are buying it through a delivery app. Schools have cut all manner of parent activities as the parents don't participate.
Same thing for anything that isn't a flagship park or flagship sports facility. Sure, the top city parks are crowded, but most are pretty empty even on sunny days.
So I have to ask, is there actually much demand for more social interaction? As it seems that the drop is mostly in demand, not supply.
redczar•6h ago
barry-cotter•5h ago
redczar•4h ago
One thing whites did when they flooded the suburbs was make sure those suburbs did not have communal things like municipal pools.
haswell•6h ago
I’ve personally become aware of the fact that I need more social contact. I want to attend events, but never really built the habit of organizing. My ex was always the social instigator, and I didn’t realize how much I relied on that (we were together for most of my adult life).
The more people I talk to about this, the more I hear them lamenting the lack of in-person gatherings.
I think social media has kind of filled the need poorly, and this has changed habits. It’s not what people want, but it has them hooked, and IRL gatherings have suffered as a result.
It reminds me of some of the comments from the younger crowd about TikTok. “I hate it, but I can’t stop using it, because everyone else is on it”.
I really think people want real social interaction but have gotten caught in this social media habit that just barely meets the need. Junk food vs. a nutritious meal.
I suppose at the end of the day you could still say this means demand is down, but I think there are more layers than that.
intended•6h ago