From Childhood Friends to Adult Loneliness: What Changed?

In partnership with

Hi there,

As children, we’re expected to learn how to make friends through osmosis. Adults create all kinds of group activities for their kids to participate in, knowing that friendships will form between and among the kids with enough exposure to each other.

How many of you started friendships with another kid just because your parents hung out with each other?

When I think back to my own upbringing in New Mexico, some of my weirdest friends were the ones I collected because my parents were friends with their parents and so we kids hung out a lot with each other (usually begrudgingly, at first). We often didn’t go to the same schools and sometimes weren’t even in the same grades, but because we were stuck with each other for hours on end on a regular basis, we somehow became friends.

Proximity paved the way for friendships as kids. If only it were that easy as an adult, huh?

We all know it’s not.

Making new friends as an adult is a full-contact sport requiring outreach, resilience, consistency, and flexibility.

You’ve got to want it. And you’ve got to act on it.

As an adult, making new friends is fundamentally a provocative act—it’s a tangible disagreement with your present circumstances. It says: “My current state of connection with the world is wrong. I’m creating a different future for myself.”

In creating a different future for ourselves, we include others in our effort so they may also enjoy the benefits of feeling connected, cared for, and loved.

But it requires action, which is what today’s newsletter is about.

Last week I encouraged you to step out of your comfort zone to find new friends. You were supposed to find time on the weekend to do something you liked regardless of whether your friends or family joined you. How’d it go?

If you ran out of time (more on that below), you have a lovely weekend ahead of you to try again!

But first, a word from our sponsor…

Receive Honest News Today

Join over 4 million Americans who start their day with 1440 – your daily digest for unbiased, fact-centric news. From politics to sports, we cover it all by analyzing over 100 sources. Our concise, 5-minute read lands in your inbox each morning at no cost. Experience news without the noise; let 1440 help you make up your own mind. Sign up now and invite your friends and family to be part of the informed.

Sign up today!

Society Needs You to Make Eye Contact and Small Talk

It’s hard to miss the headlines declaring our living in dangerous times. It seems every day brings yet another example of the elected leaders of the United States inching the country (and the world) ever closer to dangerous, tyrannical times unseen in almost a century.

Back in 2017, Timothy Snyder wrote the essay On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century as a vehicle to share invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come. Don’t have time to read it yourself? John Lithgow does an amazing job bringing to life all twenty lessons in this ten minute video.

Of all the lessons that Snyder shares, the mission of this newsletter resonates deeply with lesson number twelve: Make Eye Contact and Small Talk.

Snyder explains, “This is not just polite. It is part of being a citizen and a responsible member of society. It is also a way to stay in touch with your surroundings, break down social barriers, and understand whom you should and should not trust. If we enter a culture of denunciation, you will want to know the psychological landscape of your daily life.”

The only way to understand what’s really happening around us is to keep up the basics of a social life and a sociable society. It boils down to making other people feel as though they’re welcome. And we do that by making eye contact and engaging in small talk (need a refresher on how to start small talk? look back here).

As individuals, we can do our part to make sure no one feels excluded or singled out as “other” (race, immigration status, gender) by connecting through small gestures like eye contact and small talk.

Feeling helpless in the face of it all? You can make small talk with a few people every day. You can make eye contact with a few people every day. It may feel awkward at first, but it’s a muscle we need to rebuild after years of atrophy during the isolation of the COVID pandemic.

Connecting in this way has the bonus of also keeping us out of the digital world and anchored among those people who are physically closest to us.

It’s a way of making sure we can still deal with other human beings. And it’s a way of keeping ourselves human in these stressful times.

It’s a concrete act of connection with others that undermines isolation which is the essential precondition of totalitarianism.

And we’re all capable of engaging in this act every single day.

Make Time to Be in the Company of Strangers

Looking for a better way to make friends as an adult? Get out of your comfort zone.

Two times a week make time to put yourself in the company of strangers in the agency of something bigger than yourself. This could be a church group, a softball league, or a nonprofit. The point of this exercise is you’re finding yourself amongst other people who share a similar interest (the “something bigger” that organizes your company of strangers).

This creates fertile ground for meeting new people around a shared interest, and the small talk that comes from these gatherings puts you well on the path of acquaintance to friend to good friend.

Think you don’t have time? You do.

You don’t have to trust me. Here’s how you see for yourself the amount of time you’re losing in your phone each week:

Look at your screen time report on your phone.

Click “see all app & website activity” and you will see in stark terms what has captured your attention for the week: there’s a graph for the visual learners and a list of the top most used apps for those who are more prose-driven.

I have yet to see anyone’s phone with fewer than ten hours of time that can be recaptured (from time spent scrolling Instagram or TikTok or playing games).

The net-net is that you cannot use “But I don’t have time!” as an excuse. You are wasting more time on your phone than you think, and that time can better be deployed to make connections.

When I first did this exercise, it was an eye-opener to see how much time I was wasting on my phone when I thought I was being mindful of losing myself there.

I was confronted with the fact that my initial excuse for not connecting with others (I have no time!) was actually masking the real reason: I was irrationally anxious about being rejected by the company of strangers.

This leads us to the next prescription for connecting with others: get comfortable swimming in a sea of “NOs.” Ask people to hang out with you (as friends) with the express goal of hearing them say “no.” Surround yourself with opportunities to hear the word “no,” and it will build your resilience like no other exercise could.

Show me a successful person, and I’ll show you a path littered with instances where the answer was “no.”

Successful people are resilient in the face of rejection because they experience it so often. They’re accustomed to asking even when the answer has a good chance of being no. (nothing ventured, nothing gained?) If they’re rejected, they dust themselves off and ask someone else.

I am in awe of people like this. I’m in my mid-50s, and I’m still struggling with the consequences of my fear of rejection.

Why and for what? I’ve got the receipts showing what a high-EQ, caring, and kind person I am (which I hear ranks me above the vast majority of people of people out there).

Yet I still find myself avoiding rejection more than embracing it.

This has to stop, and here’s how I’m going to do it:

At my “company of strangers” events, I’m going to ask people if they’d like to do something as friends (go to a concert, watch a sporting event, do a hike) with the explicit aim of them saying “no.”

I know I can survive the rejection. And I also know that the people who say yes are the real folks I want on the path to friendship with me.

If I’m going to be making more friends, I’ll need to be putting myself out there in a magnet-or-allergy way: sending a clear signal of who I am and what I want so that I attract the kinds of people I want in my life (as a magnet) and repel the kinds of people who won’t get along with the way I see the world (are allergic to me).

All the while making eye contact and small talk with several people a day.

I invite you to join me on this adventure.

Our society depends on it.

When was the last time you spent time in the company of strangers? Do you have something you think could help others? Just hit reply — your email goes straight to my inbox. 🙏