Ask HN: Why is it so hard to make good friendships in the Bay Area?

Most of this problem is self propelled prophecy.I highly suggest you to read the book "Never eat alone" following principles in it will help you maintain a bond with someone and re engage it. Mostly by reinviting those people you met for food. Everyone eats food right. This was the basis for which i started http://LetsLunch.com

When you're in school, you tend to become friends with people you're placed together with - people you were placed with in dorms, people who had the same classes as you and with whom you did projects/psets, and people in the same clubs as you. In that sense, many of your friendships are predicated on chance encounters. Most are, as someone pointed out, serendipitous.

If you want to make friends out of people who aren't your colleagues, you need to take actions to ensure your friendships aren't dependent on chance encounters anymore. If you meet someone you think is really interesting, you need to go out of your way and invite them to lunch/dinner/parties/events. This does blur the line between networking and friendships though. Then again, the strongest network is a network of friends.

I also wonder if there's a difference between SF and the Mountain View/Palo Alto/San Jose area. It seems to me like it would be easier to stay connected with people in SF, since you'll often bump into the same people at different parties/events - I know that this has certainly been true in my case whenever I go up to SF. Down south people are spread out and there's a lot less going on in terms of events.

Assuming you're applying the appropriate effort over a large enough sample, which it sounds like you are, then the logical possibilities are that people either don't want to make friends, generally, or that people don't want to make friends with you, specifically.

The first one seems more easily tested -- for example, it can be disproved if other people are making friends under reasonably similar circumstances. It may turn out to be the case, however, that you're aging into life phase in which people are generally less inclined to buddy up. If this or some other issue is the case, you may need to change the conditions -- e.g. move somewhere else, seek young friends, etc.

If you begin to suspect it's the latter (people don't want to make friends with you specifically), then what you want to get is some honest feedback so you can evolve into an easier-to-befriend person. The good news is, a little self-awareness goes a long way.