> And the friendship drought could get worse with more people working remotely or hybrid-ly.
It may be just a consequence of my circumstances, but work for me has never been the place to “make friends” and actually remote work enables my social life more, even by just a minuscule amount.
In regards to making friends in general. I always find myself the odd one out in every environment. At work particularly, I’m typically substantially younger than my colleagues some of which are old enough to be my parents or grandparents. Not that you cannot develop friendships with an age gap like that, but I don’t think it’s advisable. Majority of these people have there own life, are in the process of settling down or have their own families already. We are simply at different stages of life and it’s unlikely to result in any true friendships.
I don’t really have a social life either, which feels pretty faking at my age, but I do try to go out at least once or twice in the weekends. Over the years, I’ve had a number of acquaintances I’ve met, but no friends really. In most of the groups I hang out in, I find the same issue as work, though on a smaller scale. Still generally to young to develop any sort of bond with the people I’m with, but the gap tends to be smaller so that there’s still some things we can relate on. If I’m not the youngest in the room, it seems in the oldest, which is honestly an even more uneasy feeling as I have a hard time relating to most of my own generation, despite certainly exhibiting some characteristics of it.
Some people in this thread have additionally mentioned the resource of time as an inhibitor to developing friendships. I can understand this. I generally enjoy the occasions I get to go out or sometimes stay home and enjoy myself, but there’s always an uneasy feeling about how afterwards it’ll be another week of mindless wageslaving before I get a chance to to relax again.
Ultimately, I haven’t really made any friends since I was maybe 15 or so. This makes sense though, as since adulthood, I’ve basically been divorced from any sort of environment where young people find themselves. Having never gone to school I was mostly isolated from my peers from 18-24, and while there are many people at that age who do not tend to go to school and do well socially, I believe that at least a small majority of those people tend to choose paths that put them in communities with similar people, whereas I’ve always been out of place, demographically speaking, whether that be in impoverished dumps or next to moderately wealthy professionals/retirees. Though I am now coming around to the age where many of my peers will leave school and enter the “real world” I don’t think much will come of it as I have a bad history of always being in the wrong place at the wrong time (doubly so career wise, ha)