The fact is school is the biggest reason why we make so many friends. Different classes, different people, from grade school to college. Food is taken care of by adults or the dining hall. parents pay the bills or it's covered by your student loan.
Then you graduate. Now you must: spend time to cook, work to pay bills, and if you have an SO/kids, the rest of your time goes there. That's literally it.
I agree with this, but with one caveat: it's a slow process, and it takes years to fully take effect.
The process of your friend groups disintegrating does indeed begin with your college graduation, but it takes so long for the effects to be really felt that a lot of people don't realize their friend groups have disintegrated until around the time they hit 30.
Yes for sure, it isn't sudden. I think right after college people "settle down" at different times. Some marry early, some later. Marriage and kids are huge time sinks. By 30 many are married. The more that are married means less time for friends, and slowly those "groups" wither away to the most important.
> Then you graduate. Now you must: spend time to cook, work to pay bills, and if you have an SO/kids, the rest of your time goes there. That's literally it.
Unfortunately, it's even worse than that. Even when _I_ did have the time, say when I've taken a year or two off jobs just to enjoy life, other people usually didn't. So I've spent a lot of that time being alone. That's actually one of the major positives of having a job - it provides you with collegues you can hang around and have fun with (assuming the workplace is not toxic and there are people there whose company you enjoy).
That's also a big negative about a job - like group projects in school, you're FORCED to work with people you may or may not like. As they say, you don't quit your job, you quit your manager.
Yeah I feel this. 24ish and I never really experienced the 'so easy to make friends in high school and college'. I guess not so much that it wasn't easy, I just wasn't in a place where I wanted more than one or two close friends. As a result, I never really got practice.
I think once you figure out what you want (way harder than it sounds like) it becomes just another thing to work on, like going to the gym. I've been making new friends lately, partly by globbing on to some of my roommate's local friends, and it's been easy since I decided to let it be (apologies for the cryptic sentence, I'm still not sure exactly what I'm trying to say). Actually I think it's way easier than the gym, but I've only got a small sample size, and I'm particularly bad at going to the gym.
The line is when you graduate college.
The fact is school is the biggest reason why we make so many friends. Different classes, different people, from grade school to college. Food is taken care of by adults or the dining hall. parents pay the bills or it's covered by your student loan.
Then you graduate. Now you must: spend time to cook, work to pay bills, and if you have an SO/kids, the rest of your time goes there. That's literally it.