Jul 12th, 2025 Saturday Sunny
How many friends do you have? And what is your age?
If you plot many people’s answers to the above two questions on a graph, you will likely notice a trend: the number of our friends increase (at different rates for different folks) until we finish college/graduate school, whatever that age may be, then start a steady decline. For some, there might be a slight revival after retirement, but it rarely reaches the peak of college era.
It seems that adulthood is cursed with less friendship. Why?
One of the obvious reasons is that adults are busy, with countless responsibilities to divide their waking hours. Work, child care, family obligations, house chores – the list can go on. To stay functional and fit, we also need to allocate time for resting and exercising. After the twenty-four hours have been divided into all these slices, whatever is left for socializing and connecting with friends, can be so minimal. Compared to the things that we have to attend to to be a responsible human, spending time with friends feels like a luxury, a “nice-to-have” that can easily be put aside until later, even though that later may not come for years.
It is no wonder that friends we had in our youth start to disappear from our lives. After all, a friendship, like any other relationship, requires maintenance to be healthy.
If our old friends are drifting away, how about making some new ones? It turns out that is easier said than done.
Think how you made friends as a kid. You met your bestie in kindergarten, and you played together all day. The same pattern repeats as you move through grade school, middle school, high school, and college. Each of you may have distinct personalities, yet you shared the same classrooms, same teachers, same homework, and maybe even same extracurricular activities. All these common experiences link you in a tightly knit circle – in other words, you are bound to be friends by the environment.
As soon as you leave school, you will no longer have such convenient way of interacting with people, letting alone becoming friends. While you may see your coworkers daily, the tasks you work on are usually not identical (why would your boss want two team members work on the same thing?), so most of the time you coexist, rather than work together, in the office space, not to count that your minds may be thousands of miles apart because you are in online meetings with completely non-overlapping groups.
In the case you encounter someone that you would like to become closer with, it may still be challenging to pick out a common interest, something that both would sincerely enjoy (not just play along due to politeness), then figure out a common time out of the packed schedules to do it together with some regularity. Unlike children who are open to try everything, adults tend to have more fixed preferences for hanging out and hobbies, and the niches that people form are so numerous (e.g. two gamers may have quite disparate tastes for games) that it is much harder to identify that similarity in the limited number of people you get to meet.
In a way, we are shaped.
Of course, it is possible to change our shape, but it takes determination, persistence, constant positive feedback, and patience. Have you found that person worthy of all these efforts?