> People in their 30's and 40's with zero friends looking to make new ones are basically non existent where I live.

Why would they need to have “zero friends”. It is not like people have a max number of friends they can have.

Because in my experience, where I live, once people past 30 have at least one reliable friend in their life the can rely on, they don't open themselves to making new ones, so they invest their time and energy elsewhere.

One person was really blunt with me: "you're a pretty cool guy, but I don't have time/space in my life for new people". Other people are less blunt but the same principle applies.

Obviously I can't say for sure, but to me "you're a pretty cool guy, but I don't have time/space in my life for new people" sounds much more like a polite excuse to avoid saying "you're not somebody I want to be friends with" than an accurate statement about the reason they can't be friends with you despite honestly feeling you and they are compatible friends.

edit: But maybe that's my British instincts wrongly diagnosing a statement that I have no real context to judge better.

Maybe, maybe not. Someone I know who seemingly leads a normal social life turns down all my invitations to hang out with groups because he "doesn't need to meet new people." And he's not the only person I've known who has that attitude.

Sure, that's why I said that I can't know for sure - because it's a sentence that can be used truthfully or it can be used as a polite lie.

I just feel that if it were possible to track every time that sentence is said it would probably be significantly more often used as a polite excuse rather than as a truthful statement. (And even then, that's my gut feeling / assumption, I may even be wrong about which use is more common).

Quite possibly not. If you have job, family, friends you hang out with and one hobby, then there is often zero time for new friendship. Cause that would require additional time.

Replied to similar comment and linking here in case you have comment reply notifications: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33679697

Depends. For instance, I like; nature, rainforest, mountains, forests, programming, building startups (and then selling them), beer, cooking and some other stuff. So when I went to Scotland for instance for the first time (I was 43 I think), I sat in a pub drinking beer and programming an app, got talking with a guy who asked what I was doing. We talked briefly, he is a coder too and into elixer and haskell. Then my wife and me went hiking to the Lochs; it was winter and heavy snow, but I hike in any weather. We ran into this guy, hiking on his own. So we became friends and made a startup; it failed but we will do things in the future; he visits me and I visit him. Had almost exactly the same experience in Thailand a year later with a dutch guy (I am dutch) living there.

Interests connect and these guys hardly ever meet or met someone that intersects as much, so they clear their schedules (as do I) to foster a friendship.

I met most of my friends, business partners and clients this way. Overlapping interests and chance encounters.

I meet plenty people on internet in subreddits with the same interests and sometimes we meet up and then it clicks or it doesn’t.