Life gets more differentiated as you get older. You learn what makes you happy and what doesn't, you experience different situations and react to them, and you make decisions about who you're going to be and what you're going to do. And all of that becomes part of your identity. It's part of your accumulated self-knowledge.

And part of that is perceiving differences in how you see the world vs. how other people see the world.

A banker, a janitor, a nurse, an engineer, and a dropout can all still be friends if they have something in common, and confine their friendship to that thing. I still occasionally get together with my high-school friends, when I happen to be back home, and we've become bankers, janitors, nurses, engineers, and dropouts. But 15 years after graduation, the high school we went to is an increasingly small part of our identities. And it feels constraining to hang out all the time, like you're denying all the other parts of yourself that you've discovered since. It's great to get together for a weekend and reminisce about old times, but it's not something I'd want to do every weekend.

The economic aspects are second-order effects. Yes, this tends to stratify people into economic tiers. But the reason for that is that it's hard to do anything for a significant portion of your life without it becoming part of your identity, and it's hard for a skillset to pay off without doing it for a significant portion of your life. And different skillsets are compensated wildly differently, based on supply & demand.

There are so many (work and self-imposed) obligations and "obligations" and BS, that it's even difficult to have quality/fun time with one's spouse.

And this certainly cannot be explained away with "the spouse is a tiny part of your current experience/identity".

So I think this answer doesn't cover the actual issue.

And it's not just workload either. Someone else writes below:

>In order to have impromptu visits that fill up the empty spaces in your life, you first need to have empty spaces in your life. That is largely incompatible with filling every moment of your life with work or career advancement.

But the lack of "impromptu visits" is also apparent in people who don't fill every moment of their life with work or career advancement. The killing of community/communal spaces, the advent of 100 TV channels and 8 billion internet/"social" options etc, also kill a lot of such time.

I don't agree that it's about people 'drifting apart', or 'finding different interests'.

In some sense those are being taken as tautologies, when I don't think they are. Why can't people with different interests hang out?

There's loads to talk about. Our interests are a tiny microscopic portion of the human experience.

In the UK people go out and get stone drunk and then anything becomes a fun topic of discussion. We call it disinhibition. But why are we 'inhibited' to begin with?

This is why I call it 'ego'. I don't think I'm using the term accurately. It's just this idea of pleasing one's self, efficiently, rather than trying to be part of some whole, or just swimming, letting life happen.

No, I'm merely making an informed guess that my experience is common enough.

Never heard about "not spending enough time with the family" as a thing of modern life, a.k.a "work/life balance" issue?

Here are some pointers: "According to a new study by Harvard and McGill University researchers, the United States lags far behind nearly all wealthy countries when it comes to family-oriented workplace policies such as maternity leave, paid sick days and support for breast feeding. Jody Heyman, founder of the Harvard-based Project on Global Working Families and director of McGill’s Institute for Health and Social Policy, states that, "More countries are providing the workplace protections that millions of Americans can only dream of. The U.S. has been a proud leader in adopting laws that provide for equal opportunity in the workplace, but our work/family protections are among the worst."

"As previously mentioned, Americans work approximately 47.1 hours each week; some employees work up to seventy hours. Therefore, it is safe to state that the average number of hours Americans presently work each week is the highest it has been in nearly seventy-five years."

"Fewer than half of working parents stay home when their children are sick, even though research shows that sick children recover more quickly when a parent is there. …54 percent of working women are not entitled to any paid leave for taking care of a sick child or other family members"

I don't even have the problem myself -- I'm only describing a general issue many people face in the context of this discussion.

What we all have in common is the human condition which is much, much bigger than hobbies, career paths, or political beliefs. We get sick, lose people, fall in love, have children, get better, meet people, and eventually die. Our surface area for meaningful, fulfilling interactions is enormous, but our culture is set up in a such a way that it's easy to forget.

Heck, it doesn't even stop people sharing it from killing each other in wars...

The photograph in the linked article explains it quite well to me - regardless of how 'real' it is, there's a picture of a shiny gathering with the dresses and the shiny clothes and the fancy food, and so on.

And there's nothing wrong with that. I love me some good dress-up and the food there looks super yum. But the simple gatherings seem to have disappeared. Outside of family, do people visit just for the sake of visiting anymore?

I think it was the unified purpose, the school catchment area, maybe. That proximity. Everyone is everywhere now. My park is not your park, my pub is not your pub, etc.

That group of my high-school friends who are now largely janitors, retail clerks, and dropouts? They get together pretty much every weekend, usually with spur-of-the-moment plans made on Thursday night or Friday morning. My wife often just invites a friend over for Saturday brunch; occasionally I'll wake up and they're chatting downstairs. I remember one time when I was still at Google, I'd gone over to a friend's to play Starcraft, but his roommate was trying out different cellos and he had played the cello in high school, so we ended up with an impromptu cello trio in the living room. Another friend dropped by unannounced, we got the fireplace going, and when the third roommate arrived home, he was like "This is like a scene out of the 19th century."

The thing is, this is largely incompatible with spending long hours at work or doing things in your off hours (applying for jobs, going back to school, learning new programming languages) for career advancement. I haven't had a moment like that (other than ones my wife initiates) since leaving Google for a startup - I suspect my friends (or some subset of them) still do, but I'm often too busy to be worth inviting.

I think that the number of comments here suggesting a technological solution - an app, societal change, whatever - is pretty amusing. Technology is not going to matter. What does matter is making a decision that friendships and relationships are important to you, and seeking out other people who have also made that decision. And accepting the trade-offs that go with that. There are plenty of people who do live like that, but they are largely not the folks on Hacker News.

One thing I would take issue with is conflating an app with societal change, though. The latter is much much harder. I think that in developed countries we have lost our way a bit.

Work-life balance, to me, would mean that I work hard, and play hard, but that fundamentally work would fit around life. At the moment, life fits around work, for me, and for everyone I know, including those that are really quite well off. And I don't think we are individually choosing this state. Some higher power is, Moloch, I guess.

You always have the choice to ignore incentives; that's why they are incentives and not compulsion. But ignoring an incentive means that you accept not getting the benefits that are offered by that incentive. A lot of people forget that they can do this. You don't have to optimize your life to pick up every little goody that comes your way; you always have the option to say "Yes, that's nice, but I care about other stuff more."

A little while back, I moved with my family from the city to the countryside (the foothills of central Portugal), where there is a growing community of migrants from western cities, living around and alongside the local villagers, who are mostly small-scale subsistence farmers. People call us the Neo Rurals.

Land and living costs are way less than where we came from, which means I can afford to work three days a week, rather than the 5 out of 7 days I was working before. I am fortunate to be able to work remotely (I'm a freelance JavaScript programmer) and to have come from an existing network (the wonderful Brighton, UK). Somehow projects arrive when I just need them (get in touch if you're looking for someone). But people here to do all sorts of work, and often grow food and generate their electricity to lower the base costs.

The door is open. Neighbours' children come by because they want to play. Many people home-educate / unschool. And we do pretty well as a community amusing ourselves, learning from and helping each other.

Uprooting is difficult, but I have never looked back. And it does come with some "hardships", but most of those are really joys.

Very rough numbers here:

Generic person might be able to earn $50K working 40 hour weeks in their most optimal career (one that uses their skills).

Same person might also be able to earn $25K working 20 hour weeks doing a similar thing.

They could also earn minimum wage with a rota that isn't really under their control much.

But the real 'work-life balance' option, the one in which the tables are turned and someone decides to 'schedule' work for 8pm on a Saturday or whatever because it's free in the diary?

As far as I can tell this just sort of doesn't exist. I mean you could do piecemeal bits and bobs for neighbours, maybe. But a sustainable source of money sufficient to eat and heat, pay for a roof?

An example would be a 24 hour supermarket. The employees could bid to fill slots and the rate they'd charge to cover periods. But it's not set up that way because the capital owners hold all the cards and it'd be less optimal for them. What you get instead, is 'come to work 6pm thursday or you are fired, kthx'.

I try to live in that way, and I try to encourage those around me to live in that way (refusing imbalanced employment conditions). I think if enough people did, we could start to help each other, rather than relying on capital and private property so much.

Basic income is one sort of stepping stone towards that. Ultimately I think the ideal is people actually having real choices, not the huge bias we have towards salaried employment at the moment.

If life were an MMO, then salaried employment would be the cookie cutter build, hourly work would be the odd hybrid, and otherwise you've decided to not bother with your talent tree, and you're just gimping yourself. Can we tweak the rules of the game a bit, or are they just emergent?

That is a necessary but not sufficient condition.

I have plenty of time to make friends, but wouldn't be able to make any. Especially as you get older, it gets nearly impossible to approach people. At this point I'm down to a single nearby friend.

I now work online remotely in Asia and visit different cities to swing dance. Within 2 two weeks trips, I made some good freshman friends in Shanghai and Hong Kong. We still talk online from time to time about the next time we'll meet up.

I am also looking to temper my expectations, as the article suggests. I tried out a couple other styles of dancing and met freshman friends in those scenes. I remember wanting to fit in so much with each new group, and I still feel it with swing dancing friends sometimes. Over time, opportunities to deepen friendships arise. There's a lot that's out of my control.

I've tried going to meetups, but it doesn't seem like anyone is interested in being social. Everyone seems to be looking to network or advance professionally somehow.

I never get the vibe that anyone would want to hang out with me. Maybe I'm just not friendly.

I mean, it is likely that if you are a programmer you'll end up talking about work in a programming or startup meetup.

It will be much harder if it's about boardgames or ultimate frisbee.

I remember going home from some meetups feeling the night was a bust. In retrospect, I would have been less disappointed if I thought of it like dating or job hunting. My goal isn't a 100% match rate. My goal is to find matches that leave me happy.

For an entire year, I probably went to a meetup every other week. In that whole time I didn't make a single new friend.

There's no shame in trying that meet up out for a year. I think that's the crux of "don't expect too much too soon." Sounds like it's time to try out another tech meet up, another hobby meet up, or anything else that has potential.

My high school was super-stratified. The cliques were out of control.

As an adult, I have much more control over my surroundings and have found a place that fits me (it took some time - I've lived in two countries and 7 different cities). At 46, I'm much more comfortable with who I am and liking what I like than when I was 16. Teenagers often try so desperately to fit in that it ends up taking a long time to discover who they really are. BTW, I love how the movie American Beauty addresses this.

These days I have the resources to do what I want to do. That includes eating out with friends, going to baseball games, or just to the park to play with my kids and dog. I think the only time I get the sense of stifling that you describe is when I go to a formal event but that too is an experience I want.

Christians also have traditional Church attendance and so do Muslims and many other faiths I'm sure. The point is, traditional life revolved around a community. Today, everyone is very individualistic in the USA. They move out and have their own place, not just the men but the women too. The grandparents live alone and then are shipped off to nursing homes while the kids are shipped off to daycares. But it wasn't always like this. In our modern society we are disconnected like never before.

So one of us will look around in disgust, invite someone over for dinner or drinks or something, and then politely pop in on the other, like "hey honey... I just invited [so-an-so], and they'll be here in an hour".

Suddenly, within 20-30 minutes, the place is spotless.

40 years later, I still miss that.

Having an office, and a culture where people would 'drop by' sometimes, either for real work reasons, tenuous work reasons, or purely social, has been a godsend.

Now I'm thinking about how to consciously engineer this given our environmental constraints...

I really hope something like Campus Housing works out. They had a great idea but didnt execute. With the right group of people I'd be super down to live in something like a dorm again.

I think we'd have a great time. No vi vs emacs, mind.

Edit: Since this got a few upvotes but not many replies, feel free to come at 37°46'08.4"N 122°29'08.8"W (https://goo.gl/maps/Vvyctgz4CAQ2). Will have a Linkedin tshirt/backpack.

Success breeds spatial flexibility.

Proximity breeds close relationships.

They get pretty fun beyond a critical mass but that usually takes logistics, sponsors, and so on, and you're basically organizing a conference. I think Imgur had sponsors for the last big one and fed everybody the whole time. There's a spectrum. Small and intimate can be good, big and organized and logistical can be good. Sets the tone.

Get one or two of the heavyweight names here to talk, toss out some Goat Hill, and you'd draw a crowd.

(Even though I probably would spend the time figuring out how the fuck you teleported us across the world.)

Park runs are fun (for various values of fun) and probably a good way to meet people.

My experience is not like that at all. On the contrary, people I know became less and less concerned with keeping an extended social circle and retreated to family.

This retreat in many cases has a lot to do with the refusal to put up with other's annoying behaviour. Family is no peace oasis either, but it's more difficult to defect from it :)

I return to my hometown for holidays and see this effect every year. There are still big groups of acquitances, but they're more homogeneus than what they used to be. I believe there's a big pressure when you're young to have a lot of friends and to fit in. When older we become grumpier and less tolerant of neighbour's faults.

It was gorgeous in Seattle this week. Monday night I went to a BBQ with 7 of my closest friends. We spent hours on the rooftop deck of their apt building relaxing and shooting the shit. The rest of the deck was shockingly empty for such a nice day.

Tuesday night I went to a different BBQ hosted by other super close friends in their backyard. We spent hours relaxing and eating and having fun with their 4 year old.

Wed I messaged a friend I didn't know that well and we got drinks after work. 3/3 beautiful evenings spent outside with friends! I was happy about this.

I don't mean to judge or brag, just share my experience. I'm finding meaningful connection into my 30s, which I'm thankful for because it's really important to me.

It's not necessary to qualify comments like this. :)

Sounds like we all need to move to Seattle. Maybe not too many of us though. :P

I find myself thinking that there's an economic side to all of this. It might just be that my small hometown was less competitive. London feels like it has some sort of illness by comparison. A place to work, not a place to live.

> It's not necessary to qualify comments like this. :)

Thanks for being gracious. :) It bent somebody out of shape though -- the comment got downvoted. Doesn't bother me, but I can see how it could rub someone the wrong way.

Weird, I've had similar luck. My best friends in high school were all music buddies, and I felt closer to them than any of my friends (both technical or otherwise) I've made since then. Makes me want to move somewhere with a better music scene!

How? I'm genuinely interested. I have basically no idea how people make friends outside of forced closeness, something which is regretfully lacking in the adult world.

We can’t go back to the park again because we take life (and ourselves) too fucking seriously.

99% of the people here aren't heads down in their study for months trying to complete a masterpiece. People are simply asocial and lazy.

Compared to teenagers?

It's a bit like that cartoon... humans sacrifice their health to make $$ and spend $$ to get it all back... humans wish they'd be older and then wish they'd be younger... etc.

At the same time I've also missed sports. My solution was to get back into skateboarding. I haven't skated in ten years but you'd be surprised by your muscle memory. I got all the gear and headed to the nearest skatepark and was quickly approached by the local skaters. I met a lot of great people and skated with them all evening. Haven't had so much fun in a while. Can't wait to go back.

This is actually a phenomenon which, according to Karl Polayni's Aristotle Discovers the Economy, roughly began in Greece shortly after the inventions of the alphabet and coinage which helped lay the framework for a more global economic system.

Traditionally tribal or "uncivilized" economies produced goods and services primarily for the local consumption of the clan, community, or family.

But soon after, production for consumption shifted to production for exchange as such societies became less "tribal" and more "civilized" via increasing literacy and "the market system".

With this phenomenon began the shift from the tribal values of family and community over the individual to civilized societies' value of the individual over the community.

Aristotle warned that this dynamic would destroy the autonomy and connectedness of the family and community and create a dangerous dependence on foreign goods.

However, the banker and the lawyer realize that they have more life choices available if they are nearer to top of the hierarchy, and this directly leads to more obligations -- to maintain their positions, they must fulfill more responsibilities.

More choice leads to more reproductive success.

Q.E.D.

Well perhaps people would hang around at a bus stop or street corner and just chat bollocks but it's occupied by 16-year olds.. ;)

At 16, there aren't many places to go with other people your age to just hang out and socialize. You're too young for a bar. Restaurants are expensive. Malls are lame. Maybe a diner, but that's only 4-5 of you at a time, and you'll probably need to order something. And this can be a burden for a diner owner for taking up tables for the cost of 4 cups of coffee an hour.

Your parents can go to bars and restaurants and each others houses and socialize. But as a teenager, going to someone's house generally requires the permission of other adults, and so on, which isn’t something you can plan around independently. And in our teenage years, we're generally trying to figure out what this life thing is without the parental supervision. It's difficult to explore independence with our parents within earshot.

I saw a lot of this first-hand, even beyond my immediate peers, as a DJ throughout my teenage years. When my peers were looking to hang out, they came to me for options. If I couldn't provide directly, I would generally know who could. It was usually someone's house / apartment whose parents worked 16-20 hours per day (like my mother). My own friends and I would try to rent places out to throw gatherings, and we never had trouble finding people to fill the room.

This was all about socializing and having a place to go. We needed these places to go without the pressures of our home lives and adults therein. And when we couldn't find a place, we resorted to waterfronts, parks, street corners, etc. Wherever we could find to just be ourselves with our peers.

In college, for the first time for many, we have our own places: our dorms. Add to that more responsibility (for most), and a lack of income (for most), and what better place to hang out with your peers than hopping from dorm-to-dorm? Why go to a park or hang around at a bus stop when you can go one floor down to another dorm? You’re no longer required to go out into the cold to socialize with your peers.

In adulthood, there are plenty of places to go, though most of them cost money. So in early adulthood, we enjoy our freedom to go anywhere and just "be". So it's bars, and restaurants, and wherever. We spend what little we make enjoying the newfound freedom to go anywhere. Sure, we _can_ go to the park, be we don't _have_ to go to the park. We can afford to go somewhere else and enjoy each-other's company, much unlike the previous decade.

A restaurant is a place where speaking more loudly than a certain amount will earn you ire from others. You're surrounded by other groups that aren't your group. There's a prescribed format. It's a ritual, you know? There's a sandbox out there, and the format is 'let's go and do X, for X hours, and that's it'.

I hate restaurants, and cinemas, and cafes, and stuff. Just give me a roof and we'll make the fun. But the roof doesn't exist, because as a society, we decided that capitalism and the building of private castles is how it's going to work. Railing against that as an individual is terribly hard.

The problem with it, is that if we decide as a society that these paid, gated experiences are how we're going to socialise, then everyone who doesn't work hard enough is excluded. That's how we get things like socio-economic groups. If you socialise in restaurants, then your friend circle reduces to the people who can afford to socialise in restaurants.

If it's non-deliberate, then it's sad. If it is deliberate, then it's the 'ego thing' that I tried to speak of in the first post - it's about us not realising that we are humanity, we don't need to battle each other and assert dominance, we can just be, you know? Individual, yes, but one, too.

We need public spaces and gatherings because otherwise the ultimate endgame is that people retreat into ever-smaller niche groups until we just sit on our own.

I spent the majority of my twenties and some of my thirties in NYC, and it does match up very well with what you're saying. It definitely matches the habits I was alluding to as well.

I've spent many a night on different roof-tops around the city. Most people have tiny apartments, so we tended not to visit one another, except for the occasional golden jewel of apartment - rooftop access. During the summer, there's almost always someone throwing a rooftop party, and we visited often (or had our own).

Likewise, the parks are everywhere. They're immense, amazing, well-maintained, and well-visited by people from all walks. I've spent day-after-day in Union Square, Prospect Park, Central Park, whatever that park is along the entire West-Side-Highway, and Battery Park (amazing sunsets). Sometimes just to people-watch and sometimes to meet up with friends as we figure out our next adventure, but always an inviting place to be.

There was also a trend in NYC - as I was leaving a few years ago - to start replacing major streets with pedestrian parks [1] (including Broadway in times square!), which I was 100% all for. Most locals I've known have been huge fans of getting cars out of Manhattan and making the streets more pedestrian-friendly, whether it be through tolls or just plain closing off major thoroughfares.

And honestly, after living in 4 major cities around the US, there is nothing like going for a long walk around NYC. I'm in Chicago now, and walking more than 1.5 miles can get a bit tedious. I still do it in the warmer months, but it's still very much a driving city. In NYC, 1.5 miles is always interesting. You'll pass through three or more distinct and lively neighborhoods along the way. There are so many people out, so many buskers and people enjoying cafes and parks, that you _want_ to walk everywhere. There are plenty a night, while I was single and dieting, that I'd walk all the way home after a night out - through Lower Manhattan, over the Williamsburg bridge, and about another mile to Bushwick. Loved it every time.

At any rate, my post wasn't in disagreement. It was merely an anecdotal description of _why_ we end up in commercial establishments in our younger adult lives. Overall I agree with you, and what I'm explaining above is that I've seen some form of what you seem to see as an ideal in action, and I'm an enormous fan of it.

1: http://www.pps.org/reference/broadway-boulevard-transforming...