Friends Are Frontloaded
Come with me on a little thought experiment.
Let’s take your teenage and adult life, from ages 14 to 80. And let’s line up all of the friends that you are going to meet, or have already met, during that life. Specifically, we’re going to line them up in order from “earliest met” to “latest met”. So that girl you sat next to in history class for a month is on the left, the guy you play bingo with at the retirement home is on the right.
At what point in your life do you think you’d have met half of the people in the line? When would you recognize the person in the middle? The middle of 14 and 80 is 47, so maybe sometime in your early forties, or maybe your late thirties.
Would you guess 22? I didn’t. But apparently that’s the number. As someone who is currently 22, this was fairly shocking to me. I kind of feel like most things in my life are just beginning, and when something is ending it tends to be something like “school” or “living at home” or something else that’s associated with being a kid. But people make friends throughout their life! Could I really be over half done making friends?
But before we get to the existential crisis portion of the post, let’s back up a bit. Why is the midway point so young?
A few weeks ago, I was looking at this fairly depressing chart, which says that time spent with friends peaks at about age 18, with 137 minutes spent per day. After that, it never goes up again. Even by age 25, you're at just 77 minutes per day. By age 30, 53 minutes.
This tracks pretty well with a typical understanding of how life works. You grow up, spend a lot of time with friends in high school and college, but then once you graduate, you get a job, eventually have kids, and those things take up a lot of your time. Your friends understandably just aren't as important as your kids, and you have obligations at work, so your time with friends slips away a bit. This makes sense! I understand why it happens. It will probably happen to me, too.
Now, I'm writing this as a 22-year-old senior in college. I have about four months until I graduate. I’m already on the downslope of the "time spent with friends" chart, and have been for four years. Maybe this isn’t true for me in particular; I’m still in college, and probably part of the downslope in the graph is because of people who don’t go to college. But the chart made me wonder - how many of the friends I’ll have throughout my life have I already met?
By age 22, I've theoretically spent about 30% of the time with friends that I'm going to spend, between the ages of 14 and 80. This is already a pretty high percentage, but it was compounded when I realized that I’m probably making more friends now than I will be at age 70. I couldn’t find any statistics on this, but let’s say that my rate of making friends, per interaction, is about double what it will be when I’m 35, and four times what it will be when I’m 60. (31% of people over 60 haven’t made a new friend in over 5 years.) This means that as of right now, I have made 52% of the friends I will ever make.
Isn’t that kind of insane? I’m only 4 years into my adult life, or less than 10%. And yet I’ve made over half of the friends I’m ever going to make?
In my life, I've typically taken a sort of undirected approach to finding friends. My friends have tended to be people that I spent a lot of time with through organizations, activities, and generally through close proximity. I think this is true of a lot of people. What worries me, though, is what if this isn't the right way to do it? What if I've spent over half my friend-finding time wrong?
I don't think I'm bad at making friends. But I do think that my criteria for why I might become friends with someone has changed a lot in the last few years. To give one example, when I was 16, one of the biggest factors that controlled who I became friends with was "how many classes I shared with them." It wasn't the only factor - I had 4 classes with some people who I never really got along with well, and I had 0 classes with some people who I was pretty good friends with. But if I had 4 classes with someone, then I had a shared experience with them and things to talk about or complain about together, which allowed me to become better friends with them. Now, in college, though, I don't think I've met a single person solely through classes. The way in which I've made friends has changed significantly. If I'd been thrown out into the world at age 17, I don't think I would have been able to make that many friends, because I'd been relying on things like classes that would no longer exist.
The first 22 years of my life have been spent surrounded by people who are close in age to me, often with similar backgrounds and interests. I'm writing this from my apartment, which is across the hall from some other students, in a complex almost entirely populated by other students, with 30,000 other students within a 2-mile radius. This is probably about as close to an ideal friend-finding situation as you can get. But it's almost over - in May, when I walk across the stage at graduation, my access to this will get cut off forever. So if my approach to finding friends is wrong, I'm going to get much less feedback about it starting very soon.
In many areas of life, you get a lot of attempts to do something before it really counts, before you suddenly are running out of chances to do it at all. For romantic relationships, it's pretty established that the "prime time" to find someone to marry is somewhere around 18 to 40 or so, and plenty of people go about it the wrong way initially, but eventually fix their mistakes and find the right person for them. Even if people are older than 40, it's not even close to impossible to find a partner. That's 22 years of adult life - over a third of your entire adult life, on average.
Similarly, you have a long time to figure out what sort of activities you enjoy doing. Sure, you’ll be past your physical prime once you’re over 30 (most of the time). And you’re not going to be playing at Carnegie Hall if you started playing piano after about age five. But you can pick up most activities at most ages, and gain some sort of internal fulfillment. You can start running in your 50s, you can start playing piano in your 60s. Lots of people start a new hobby even once they retire!
But if you go about “finding friends” wrong from 14-22, you kind of don’t get another shot. That half of your life is over. You’ve got 48% left to figure it out. By 26, you’re 2/3 of the way through. And unlike hobbies or relationships, if you want to make friends, at least friends that are around your age, you kind of need lots of other people to also be interested in making friends with you. So if you’re thinking “ah, but these statistics are for other people, I will simply just go make a bunch of friends later in life,” it’s probably going to be harder to do. (It’s also kind of true for relationships, but at least for those you only need to find one person).
Friends are really important to me. Writing this article has made me realize that they are not an infinite resource. Of course I knew that logically, but I don’t think I really felt it. I can go and try a bunch of different hobbies for a few months, quit them, and just try again later. But I can’t do that with friends.
So what does this mean? A few things:
The friends you already have are more valuable and harder to replace than it might seem.
If you are fairly young, you should put a lot of effort into making yourself a better friend, figuring out who you want to be friends with, and trying to become friends with those people.
If you have toxic friends, people who you don’t really want to be friends with, and they are taking time away from finding better friends, you should leave them quickly.
Take advantage of the chances you have to make and develop friendships, because they are not infinite and you get a lot less of them as you get older.
It’s true that these are not exactly profound insights. I’m not suggesting that you need to be making drastic changes to your life. But if you’re debating whether to go to a social event, or if you should reach out to someone you haven’t seen in a while - maybe this can be another point in favor of doing it.
I genuinely came back to read this multiple times and not once did it fail to move or impress me. Amazingly written in the most perfect way. Dom please write a book!!
This is a topic dear to my heart, so this comment may be excessively long. This article on the topic has a good overview: https://archive.is/CuZH4
There are several factors here, some of which you can control. People tend to focus less on "exploration" than "exploitation" (making friends vs. spending time with existing friends) as they age, but you can deliberately choose not to do this. People who have kids tend to spend less time with friends for obvious reasons - probably hard (and bad) to try to avoid this if you do have kids, but you could choose not to have any.
As the article notes, one of the key factors for friendship is repeated, unplanned interactions, and this is probably the main reason adults have fewer friends - school is a constant series of repeated, unplanned interactions with people with similar ages (and in college, probably somewhat similar interests). This is something you can create through deliberate effort - join a community theatre or a softball league or a meetup group or any other activity that puts you around the same people a bunch without having to specifically say "Hey do you want to spend a bunch of time around each other?" to one specific person.
And then there's the aggressive solution where you actually DO try that. I've been experimenting with this, sort of a "platonic dating" model, and it definitely requires a specific type of person to work, but in the last couple of years (I'm in my mid-30's) I've picked up two new close friends who I spend time with weekly as a result.