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Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)
261–270 of 745 posts
Re: Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)
#262> Thayer Prime, a 32-year-old strategy consultant who lives in London, has even developed a playful 100-point scale (100 being “best friend forever”). In her mind, she starts to dock new friend candidates as they begin to display annoying or disloyal behavior. Nine times out of 10, she said, her new friends end up from 30 to 60, or little more than an acquaintance. > “You meet someone really nice, but if they don’t r…
> OK, here is one case where the lack of friends is not mystifying at all. That'll be a 20 point deduction!
Oh no!
Re: Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
"it's just hard to meet people in the first place" If it's hard, it's usually a psychological difficulty rather than a lack of opportunity. Unless you live somewhere exceptionally remote, you're usually surrounded by people and opportunities for meeting them are quite frequent. You could strike up conversations most anywhere: from streets to bus stops to parks to bars to dance and social clubs to special interest gro…
So I go up to the pharmacist. He's an older gent about my dad's age. We know each other since I pick up my script for sleep issues every month. "How you doing today?" "Oh, you know how it is." He gives me a weak smile. I can tell he feels worn down from the daily grind. I pick up my script, then think of a way to keep chatting. "Hey, this is going to sound weird, but I also have medical condition. Do you have any adv…
It doesn't sound especially weird to me, I'm sure a lot of people ask pharmacists such things to avoid seeing a doctor. I've done it myself. Pharmacist advice is even a thing I've seen advertised. It's possible these things are just different where I am.
In any case, I don't see that asking a pharmacist about a medical-related topic would be interpreted as a friend request.
Re: Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
"it's just hard to meet people in the first place" If it's hard, it's usually a psychological difficulty rather than a lack of opportunity. Unless you live somewhere exceptionally remote, you're usually surrounded by people and opportunities for meeting them are quite frequent. You could strike up conversations most anywhere: from streets to bus stops to parks to bars to dance and social clubs to special interest gro…
So I go up to the pharmacist. He's an older gent about my dad's age. We know each other since I pick up my script for sleep issues every month. "How you doing today?" "Oh, you know how it is." He gives me a weak smile. I can tell he feels worn down from the daily grind. I pick up my script, then think of a way to keep chatting. "Hey, this is going to sound weird, but I also have medical condition. Do you have any adv…
Slightly OT: where is it so weird to ask a pharmacist for advice? In places I've lived in it's either reasonably typical or not typical but within the realm of expected things.
Re: Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm reminded of a song by Cake; Tougher Than It Is. [1] Some people are so high-strung and high-maintenance, I don't know why they do it to themselves. Perhaps their career path rewards this behavior, and they become so obsessed with success as defined by their career, whatever that means, that it becomes their entire identity. Because the way Thayer is approaching life sounds a whole lot like the way people behave i…
I would just think, "this person didn't arrive on time and it pisses me off", then if they did it again, I'd be like, "I don't even want to meet this person that much - I'll just never make another meeting". Sounds like she's just put a number scale on what most people do intuitively. I don't think it's too high-strung or high-maintenance to expect people to be reasonably on-time. Disclaimer: I haven't read the artic…
I'd argue that obsessing about timeliness is of itself evidence of being high-strung or high-maintenance.
On-time is... sometime that day. Or perhaps tomorrow. Later than that is significantly late, but why worry about an hour or two? It really is a very, very particular western culture thing to be time-obsessed: it's not specifically something that all humans do intuitively.
Re: Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)
#266I just get bored by the new people I meet, which makes me sad; I don't feel emotionally invested in the new folks I meet at all
Re: Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)
#267I think you can make good friends at any age, but you need the right environment for that. When you're young you spend a lot of time with the same people, like in school, which is the environment you need to build a close friendship. When you're older you tend to meet a lot of new people, but you don't have many opportunities to spend a lot of time together. Except at work, which is why many people make close friends…
I agree entirely. Friendship requires repetition. When you are older, your time gets spread across more activities, leaving less opportunity for repetitive time spent together.
I'll add that the workplace can be problematic for friendship as there is extra room for undue hostility. If someone makes a mistake, for instance, that mistake may fall directly on your shoulders and friendships predicated on that type of situation usually do not end well. People do not want to feel like they are being taken advantage of in friendship.
Compare that with a scholastic environment and mistakes generally only affect the one who made it (or perhaps faculty, who students usually do not befriend), thereby not affecting friendships. If your own grades were dependent entirely on your friends' performance in school, you just might not be able to maintain those friendships quite so well.
Re: Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)
#268I can’t seem to read this right now since I’m over my limit of free articles but I’ll say that Meetup.com has been really helpful to find interesting people in the same boat. My recommendation to people is to find a meetup (doesn’t have to be from Meetup, could be a sports league, religious group, volunteering...) that meets frequently so that you have a chance to slowly get to know the same group of people over a co…
+1 as well. To piggy-back, I highly recommend EventBrite as well.
Re: Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)
#269If everyone started out identical, however unlikely that is, and hobby interests compounded like interest, increasing the balance of ... warhammer 40K, for the sake of example, by 1% every year, then at age 18 you'd have identical interests and experiences and therefore make shallow friends with all kinds of randos who will diverge dramatically in the future, and by age 50, 1% compound hobby interest per year means y…
When I was younger I thought sports were stupid, but as I've grown older I've come to enjoy watching football a lot and to especially enjoy watching it with other people. Yeah, it's not going to go on my tombstone when I die, but how many things are? It's a common thing to watch, speculate about, emote over, etc., and the game itself has grown more interesting to me as I've come to understand it more. I also think th…
Sports are so boring and repetitive though. Especially when you don't care who wins, and I can't imagine why I'd care.
Re: Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
I live in Seattle, and I’d say that your crazy lifestyle is why you didn’t make friends here - and that it’s probably the same cause for most people who complain about the Seattle Freeze. You worked all day and hung out with family all weekend and an amazing friendship didn’t climb down your chimney? How baffling, must be the city culture to blame. (I moved here for work out of college, and made plenty of friends - b…
I've lived in six different US States (in the South, East, Northeast, Midwest, Southwest, and Northwest) and Washington State definitely stands out as having the largest proportion of socially inept people. The general pattern seems to be that they don't know how to make polite casual conversation with strangers and are either just rude or completely overshare.
Some of us end up oversharing, because we have not run into people who can have a conversation in years, and are feeling deprived. ;-)