Why am I less lonely now?

I became less lonely after I gave up on trying to find new friends

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Last week I wrote about how loneliness is an evolutionary warning sign, which is an idea articulated by Robin Dunbar¹. And in the course of writing that post I mentioned that this current moment right now is, for me personally, probably the least lonely period of my adult life since college.

I don’t think I had actually realized that was the case until I wrote it down. For years I’ve been so preoccupied with thinking about the broader social contours of loneliness that I hadn’t entirely noticed its flow and ebb in my own life. So, over the last week, I’ve been contemplating why exactly I’m less isolated right now. And I think there are a few very specific things that have made a difference.

Before I get to them, though, two points: First, I’ve experienced various periods of significant loneliness. And I’ve tried to address that. For example, when I returned to Southern California in 2014, I initially had few friends or family within driving distance². So I constantly went to events, shows³, gallery openings, public markets, and anything else I could think of. I went to some weird stuff — I once attended a “film festival” with 15 people who made movies using vintage Fischer Price toy cameras — and I loved it. But I didn’t really walk away with any lasting friendships from all of those efforts — which was baffling.

The second point is that there are a lot of people in this boat.

A survey from May⁴, and published last month⁵, found that nearly half of Americans reported having three or fewer close friends. Another 12 percent said they had no close friends at all. The survey also found that “the number of close friendships Americans have appears to have declined considerably over the past several decades.” The number of Americans with a “best friend” has also declined, and Americans ultimately aren’t “overly satisfied about the size of their friendship group.”

Credit: Survey Center on American Life

All of which is to say that many of us appear to have experienced an inadequate (in-real-life) social network.

I haven’t entirely solved this issue. But I would say that I have a less lonely life now than in the past. Here are a few things that I think contributed to that:

• I moved to the location where I had the largest network of friends and family. I’ve already written before about moving from Los Angeles to Utah. I moved for lots of reasons, but chose Utah because I had family and friends living there. I won’t rehash everything I’ve written before. But I will say that while I miss many of the cultural elements of LA, the day to day quality of my social life is better in Utah simply because I’m closer to more people here.

• I spend far more time with my family. Related to the point above, I often see members of my family three times a week or more. We go to my siblings’ softball games and have frequent family dinners. We’re going on a trip with most of my extended family later this month. I’ve also had a number of family members staying at my house, including for up to a month at a time. It has been great (and further convinced me that an intergenerational house is the way to go).

• I had kids. I fully expected kids to increase my level of isolation. In fact, the opposite has proven to be the case. Part of that is probably just because kids take up a lot of time, which leaves less time for other things. And part of it is also probably because society doesn’t expect parents to have a Friends-like existence. If I’m at home on a Saturday night as a dad, well, that’s normal life. But on a deeper level, I also discovered that devoting energy to someone else (ie kids) is enriching. I know, billions of people have discovered this before me. But I think messaging about adulthood right now focuses so much on individual wants and needs that it ends up cutting against the idea that having kids can be enriching⁶.

• I gave up. Basically, after trying for years to build what I imagined was the ideal friend network, I concluded that what I wanted was perhaps impossible. So I abandoned the idea of making lots of new friends after the age of 30⁷. I’ve still gradually made new friends, and I hope to make many more. But I’m not holding my breath. I talk a lot in this newsletter about the proverbial village (“it takes a village…”) and what I realized is that it’s much harder to build a new village from scratch than to just invest in the one you may already have. The result has been less pressure, less FOMO, and a sense of clarity about how to use my limited social bandwidth.

None of this means I have everything figured out. But as I think of my efforts to fight loneliness, and the fact that I saw some modicum of success by ultimately giving up, I’m reminded of a quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne about the related idea of happiness:

Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it⁸.

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Headlines to check out this week:

The politics of loneliness is totalitarian

“The fact that friendlessness is on the rise seems to be a function, in part, of the wasting away of these intermediary institutions in civil society. Families are smaller than they used to be, and fewer people marry in the first place. Communities are fraying under economic pressures and as a result of social shifts. Fewer people go to church. Work more often involves analysis of symbols (ideas and numbers) and takes place mostly within our own heads, mediated by technology, with remote work also becoming more common in recent years. Unions are a shadow of what they once were. We've been bowling alone for decades.

All of this can make it harder to forge friendships. At least in the real world.”

Family estrangement a problem ‘hiding in plain sight’

“Conducting the first large-scale national survey on the subject, Pillemer found that 27% of Americans 18 and older had cut off contact with a family member, most of whom reported that they were upset by such a rift. That translates to at least 67 million people nationally – likely an underestimate, Pillemer said, since some are reluctant to acknowledge the problem.”

1. I’m currently reading his new book Friends: Understanding the Power of Our Most Important Relationships. Do check it out.

2. I grew up in the LA suburbs, so I did have some high school friends in the broader region. And several members of my extended family lived in Southern California. But the thing to understand about LA is that the traffic is so bad that it can take hours to go ten miles. So, there were people I literally never saw in four and a half years of living in the Hollywood area because driving across LA was like going on a major road trip.

3. One cool thing about LA is that some well-respected clubs (at least pre-COVID) would have free shows on Monday nights featuring a house band doing a residency. I loved going to these shows and it was that kind of thing that made me fall in love with LA.

4. H/t to Brad Wilcox of the National Marriage Project. I discovered this survey after he tweeted it.

5. The survey was conducted by the American Enterprise Institute, a non-profit and nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, DC. The survey involved doing interviews with a random sample of 2,019 American adults.

6. I’m not here to tell anyone to have kids. Do, don’t, it won’t have any impact on me. I’m sharing this because kids were an integral, and surprising, piece of the puzzle when it came to addressing loneliness in my own life. But that’s not the case for everyone, and I know a number of people who aren’t particularly satisfied with parenthood. I think generally that for parenthood to be enriching a whole bunch of other things need to align (finances, community support, housing, job opportunity, etc.) and for a lot of people those things are very much not aligned. There’s a lot to be said about how to make parenthood more rewarding and less burdensome for more people, but that’s a whole other topic that I’ll have to get into in future posts.

7. This is another good opportunity to shout out the great New York Times piece “Why Is It Hard to Make Friends Over 30?”

8. The American Notebooks. Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851.