[waldohatesyou]

I wish I had something interesting to say here but honestly, kind of depressed. Not the clinical kind of course but more the aimless 24 year old kind.

I've been working at this startup (or perhaps scaleup would be a better term considering they're already worth 7 billion dollars). It's great career-wise. I'm learning a lot and I feel like I'm being compensated fairly. But I thought my life would feel "complete" once I was satisfied with my professional position but it still isn't. Not to mention, I'm not super sure where to go from here.

It doesn't help that I've been feeling awfully lonely. The close friends that I thought I made in university don't seem to care much for me these days. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure they're happy and whatnot. I'm not mad at them for choosing other folks over me, it just makes me wonder what the point of those friendships was in the first place.

But ah well, that's just life I suppose. I hope anyone reading this is having a better go of it than me :)

[cyberlurker]

I’m not much older than you but I eventually learned to enjoy friendships as just a moment in time. It’s nothing personal but people get busy and make new friends or get new responsibilities. I used to message tons of people to keep friendships alive because I felt similarly to you. Once you let go and just treat the people around you with your full attention, you will be happier. I fully understand covid has made that more difficult though. You could try Triva nights, board games, volleyball, events like that to get out there. I found that if you just walk up to people and start a conversation at those they are very likely to be like you and want to make friends.

I hope you feel better soon. Just know many people go through this and just don’t give up, get out there the best you can.

[zmmmmm]

> the close friends that I thought I made in university don't seem to care much for me these days

Just one dot point: a second wave of friendships comes when (if) you have children. It's a much under rated part of being a parent that suddenly you get thrown in with a whole new crowd of people also looking for like minded friends (since family based activities pretty much exclude all your old friends from most of what you now want to do).

Of course, this is not much help if you don't have a life partner yet, but just to say, don't conclude all your opportunities for friendship are gone.

[caditinpiscinam]

I'm an aimless 24 year old as well. I often feel sad that the friends I have aren't very interested in the programming / tech things I like to think about. I'm hoping to find some meetups or other communities where I can build those relationships in person

[idontevengohere]

I'm an aimless 24 year old as well. I love programming! How about we start a Discord - club for aimless 24 year olds....

[Sytten]

Might actually work, also 24 and a bit clueless.

[sweuder]

I made it, come on down:

https://discord.gg/RqGGD5vP

[gyz]

+1, count me in

[sweuder]

I made it, come on down:

https://discord.gg/RqGGD5vP

[d3nj4l]

I'll be 24 in a few months, I'm up.

[sweuder]

I made it, come on down:

https://discord.gg/RqGGD5vP

[baylessj]

Another aimless 24 year-old here, count me in!

[sweuder]

I made it, come on down:

https://discord.gg/RqGGD5vP

[jb_s]

This is super common at that age and I totally feel you with the university friends thing. I lost touch with many of my uni friends and only have a more shallow friendship with other friends I made after that (maybe I'm a shitty friend?) - I've thankfully made a few more friends at my last couple of jobs and through some hobbies but not super close ones, however I then had a kid and have lost touch with a whole bunch of them over the past couple of years :')

Anyway, there's a stereotypical lifestyle that we've associated with being a professional coder, especially in your early-mid 20s. We've all heard it: "eat, sleep, code, repeat". At some point IMO this should be considered harmful. First, it enforces a narrow, diminished lifestyle without additional hobbies or interests. Second, it reifies coding as an end rather than a means - yes sometimes we want to build something pretty for its own sake, but a lot of the demotivation I've personally experienced has been from building stuff I don't give a flying fuck about. Insurance systems, legal bookkeeping systems, even a fucking recruiting portal for my country's military... I actually feel guilty about getting pulled into that one.

[chrisco255]

That's sometimes how it goes. I'm in my late 30s and been through many phases in life. Different careers, different cities, etc. It's very difficult to keep friendships together when the circumstances that kept you in the same place change. After university, people go in dozens of different directions and disperse around the country. If you work in some job for many years, you'll find the same thing to be true when you leave.

There's only probably a handful of good, close friends that will last for more than a few years as good, close friends. That's okay. You'll make new ones in the new endeavors you take up. Do what you can to hang on to the ones that stick around.

[csallen]

It helps to understand that life is about much more than your career or material success. Really internalize that idea. It's counterintuitive, because it feels so certain that hitting ProfessionalGoalX will make you permanently happy. But it won't. It never does. Even if that goal is wildly ambitious and makes you famous or makes you millions of dollars, it'll feel great for a while, but those feelings will dissipate, and in ~18 months you won't be any happier for it. This is one of those lessons that's better to learn vicariously than it is to learn by wasting years of your life and sacrificing your happiness ;)

As for friends, I'd recommend four things:

1) Build a habit of making friends. It's not good enough to make friends once or twice in your life and then hope they'll stick around forever. It should be a continual process that you do for its own sake, from now until you die. Otherwise the number of friends in your life will always be declining (or at risk of doing so). Also, since this should be an ongoing process, you need to find a way to enjoy it so it's fun and sustainable.

2) Be proactive. Be open to things. Get out of the house. Go out and do real-world events with people. Reflexively say yes to things people invite you to. When you meet new people, be interested, agreeable, and pleasant, yet forward. If you hit it off with someone, ask for their number and casually invite them to future hangs.

3) Prioritize people who are also open and proactive. Not everyone has time to make friends. Not everyone wants to maintain friendships. Spend more of your time on the people who do.

4) Rather than make individual isolated friendships, build a tribe. What that means is you should make an effort to introduce the friends you meet to other friends. Do group hangs. You want it to be the case where the people you know also know each other. This solidifies relationships and helps them last longer, because like any other network, the value of your tribe will increase to the people in it as the size of the tribe grows. It also leads to a higher frequency of hangout opportunities, as everyone in your network now gains the power to catalyze hangouts with everyone else in your network. It also makes serendipity easier -- the more people you know, the easier it becomes to meet new people who are friends of friends.

These things have helped me tremendously. I'm 34 years old, I moved to Seattle last year after living in SF for 10 years. I spent most of my time quarantining after I moved, but after getting vaxxed in April I've been much more social, and I've already made encouraging progress toward building a new tribe.

[stocknoob]

Wanted to thank you for this post, it was excellent, especially the first paragraph.

[Zababa]

24 years old too and I also thought that work would "fill the void" in a way. I recently talked again with a high school friend and it was great, but it doesn't really solve the problem daily. I'm thinking of trying antidepressants for a while and see how it goes.

> It doesn't help that I've been feeling awfully lonely. The close friends that I thought I made in university don't seem to care much for me these days. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure they're happy and whatnot. I'm not mad at them for choosing other folks over me, it just makes me wonder what the point of those friendships was in the first place.

I don't know what to say here except that I lived through that too, and it's still hard to accept.

[ttonelli]

I would recommend reading about stoicism and mindfulness. For me they felt like those things that are obvious but are super helpful to see explicitly stated. And have helped me learn to enjoy life more and set priorities for where/with whom I spend my most precious resource, my time.

[tayo42]

i wish i was in my early 20s and aimless. the whole world of possibilities still... feels like everyday just more and more doors close now