1. It’s often more difficult making friend as adults because we have fewer sources of random serendipity through which we might meet a compatible person.
2. We also have more and stronger opinions and preferences as we get older. So while anyone roughly our age would have made for a fine companion when we were 5, when we’re adults, our filters are tighter and our tendency to nope our way out of potential friend situations is higher (there are fewer compatible people, because our sense of ‘compatible’ becomes more stringent as we age).
3. As we get older, there are also more stresses, strains, responsibilities, and other priorities competing for our time, energy, and resources. As kids, we could go hang out with another kid all day long because that’s what our time was for. As adults, we have our own kids or pets or partners or parents to take care of; we have bills to pay and lower backaches to tend to; we’re worried about politics and the state of the world and the security of our romantic relationships and the stability of our jobs and the size of our retirement funds.
4. Those variables have always informed our capacity to initiate and develop friendships, and that’s why community organizations like church groups and social clubs and fraternal organizations like the Freemasons have, for so long, been fundamental to adult social groups. These have been the only reliable means of sparking and cultivating adult relationships outside of work and possibly neighbors for a long time, and thus they’ve been central to how we do things.
5. Today, many of those previously leaned-upon access points for friendship have changed, weakened, disappeared, or moved online. The numbers vary depending on where you live, but far fewer people are enthusiastic members of faith-based groups than even a generation ago. Third places where we might meet up with neighbors have been replaced by more commercial spaces, and most of our daily communications with people outside our partners, immediate family, and coworkers have moved online into digital spaces where it’s more difficult to start and stoke real-life relationships.
6. Most of the data we have on non-familial, non-romantic relationships between adults in the modern world suggest that bonding over shared interests and spending a lot of time with other people at a regular cadence is the most reliable way to develop new friendships. Reading and gaming and knitting and birding and frisbee golf and wine tasting and shuffleboard and foreign language practice meetup groups are all excellent options, especially if they meet (and we attend) regularly, because these groups help us check all those boxes.
7. Those online spaces can also be useful for improving burgeoning relationships: adding a group chat to your shuffleboard club can allow you to stay in touch between meetups, while also giving you the opportunity to connect with other members over other interests, for instance. Even better is inviting some of those people to non-shuffleboard-related activities via this chat, which then gives you another touchpoint over which to bond, and more chances to connect.
8. My mental model for the “friendship recession” plaguing much of the wealthy world right now assumes that the things we used to rely on for sparking and cultivating friendships as we get older are no longer common or reliable, and the new things that have replaced them (like social networks) have been optimized for other purposes, and are now more focused on selling us stuff and gobbling up our attention than connecting us with other human beings. We therefore have to try a lot harder to build ad hoc opportunities for meeting and spending time with other people, because the passive, in-built stuff previous generations could rely upon either no longer exist, or no longer serve the same purpose.

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