Regarding complimenting people on the street and potentially turning it into a conversation, it takes some practice. 10 years ago when I did some solo traveling (before uni even) for the first time, I had the choice to stay inside and feel even more agony or to go out and experience social anxiety and pain. I've experienced a lot of social anxiety and pain (initially). It feels better than feeling lonely.
There are courses on how to make friends (and influence people :P, see "How to make friends and influence people", it's a book, I haven't read it though). If you really want to, you can consciously make an effort on bettering social skills and meet anyone everywhere and maintaining it.
A good channel (a bit too broad though) is Charisma on Command [1].
From the HN guidelines [1]:
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Thats why 99% of people have their guard up and are not interested in random chit chat let alone making friends. Reading Dale Carnegie wont change that.
These suggestions are being thrown around as preferred alternatives to meeting people at work.
> People on the street always WANT something from you.
One can learn to spot the difference. This is not always the case. Also, this mentality doesn't help. I see where you're coming from, but when you do what I do, this mentality doesn't help.
> Thats why 99% of people have their guard up and are not interested in random chit chat let alone making friends.
Only true for the first 2 minutes, in my experience. And yea, you can't make friends with everyone. The first 2 minutes people live on autopilot. Approaching them is tricky and needs to be done precisely because you're not talking to the real person (IMO). You're talking to the person who has a whole program in their head that they need to execute and the chance they see you as something that once to sell something is high. It takes a bit of time for most people to understand that you're really just there as another human being. For some people it takes 0 seconds though, for others it takes longer. I personally have noticed it takes less long for guys (being a guy myself), because they're not afraid I'm secretly trying to hit on them.
> Reading Dale Carnegie wont change that.
I mentioned in my comment that I didn't read him either.
> These suggestions are being thrown around as preferred alternatives to meeting people at work.
That's because for me they are. Like I tried to mention: this is my preferred alternative. I'm living this. It's a different perspective that I'm offering.
It's a hard perspective to offer as it's a "show don't tell" type of thing. I've showed many friends, they were all amazed and all bestowed magical abilities upon me of how amazing I was socially. They couldn't explain it away as training. I'm not a naturally social person. I consciously trained it.
They didn't believe it. So I trained a few of my friends to do the same. They see it. They're surprised. It takes a while to train, depending on the person. Though, as far as meeting people and making friends is concerned, 20 hours per week for max 3 months ought to definitely do the trick. So that's 240 hours of training to fix one of the biggest issues in people their lives: making sure they can consciously always build a social life.
The biggest thing I've learned in this regard are a few things:
1. Be positive / optimistic (read Seligman's stuff on learned optimism)
2. Be playful with people (aka not too serious, see creative interpretations in things, roleplay. Doing improv workshops helps a lot)
3. When starting to talk to people, you can:
A. Comment on the situation "This train is going so slow"
B. Give them a compliment "Excuse me, (they look up at you now you have their attention) I just wanted to mention that I like your whole vibe. The guitar, the clothing style reminds me a bit of a hippie actually, haha (they nod in agreement). Yea, just wanted to say it's cool is all."
In most cases the conversations don't go anywhere for me. That's fine. I'm just there to chill and have fun, no need to prolong what can't be prolonged. In one out of 10 cases it goes somewhere interesting.
A related comment I made in a different topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34653505
With that said, I realize now that I over-interpreted the word "bizarro". I gave that quite some tone in my mind. I now realize there are a few wildly different tones you can give to that word.
I have 1 friend I've made during my entire career that stayed with me after the job ended. The others I've lived with, or went to school with, or met following other interests.
If you just mean socialising with colleagues, sure, I do that. But they aren't my good friends.
The office may have been a good place to make friends for some young people, but certainly not all.
I was quite lonely in my early twenties. I had moved away from home and university and all the people I knew. It's quite normal. And nobody worked remotely.
More and more people are staying with their parents because they can't afford to move out.
>people still go to school together
More and more people are doing online/remote learning. During the pandemic, all learning went remote and it ruined childrens' social skills.
>people still have interests out of work
Less and less of these out-of-work interests involve regular, face-to-face social interaction and community building.
>people still go to bars and clubs
People are definitely going to pubs less - this is an issue that has been in the media for a decade and a half. When people do go to pubs, clubs and bars they're less likely to talk to people they don't know. People are certainly less likely to chat up a member of the opposite sex at a bar in 2023 compared to even 2013.
The Covid related ones are not dismantling the places young people meet, that was a public health emergency that will not continue forever.
If people are choosing not to meet in person now, that is also not dismantling the places people meet. That is a choice.
I know that the isolation of Covid has had a terrible effect on young people's mental health and I do not want to diminish that. But it isn't a dismantling of the places they could meet for the main part.
We are seeing a whole generation miss out on social connections, reporting mass loneliness and depression. You can't just hand wave that away "they made a choice". If an individual does something, its a choice, if an entire generation does something, its the environment that changed.
Maybe the internet and social media is encouraging people to forge remote connections rather than physical ones?
Call it network effects working in reverse, or a change in incentives, but there really are less serendipitous encounters in young peoples' lives.
Sure, you get a few shots at that.
> or went to school with
That's work for young people, who are better at making friends.
Until they, or you:
- quit and move to another company in 2-3 years
- move to another department in the company
- get fired
Then what?
The best friend I've made as an adult was met through work. Then he took another job, and I moved across the country when I went remote. We still keep in touch and occasionally travel to visit each other.
A lot of people in my life have had their feelings hurt when their “work friend” stopped talking to them after leaving the company, because they failed to understand this important truth.
But, we are talking about someone who need coercion to make friends. And they can be nice super ethical person, but there is that skill they don't have.
Most of them are from outside work. Because "but you spend 8 hours with them every day" is not true for most people. I now work with completely different people than I those I worked 3-4-10 years ago. I have friendships significantly longer than that, and I didn't have to work with them side by side all this time.
But... I no longer "spend 8 hours in the office with them". I spend 8 hours in the office with a completely different set of people.
See? Your friends will inevitably be outside the office life.
You can absolutely make friends at a company, you literally spend half of your awake time there. It is more time then what you spent with your school mates back then.
Pick a social hobby. Pick up sports, hiking / running / reading / trivia / sports groups.
Take a class.
Take up a cause - volunteer your time at the local farm, shelter, political office..
Kids don't go to school with the goal of making friends. The friends are a byproduct.
Isn't that the case for 'work friends' too? The people we never see or hear from again the moment they get a good offer at some other company or we ourselves move on to other roles? There will be exceptions of course, people you meet at work who you actually form real meaningful connections with, but there will also be exceptions for the people you meet while volunteering, or while playing a sport. Either way, most of the people in our lives are strangers or acquaintances.
My board game buddies are my closest real life friends, and I met them exactly like this.
However people do need to accept that not everyone makes friends the same way.
I’m just going anecdotal here from college friends that have dispersed across the US.
Warm intros, so to speak, help. If you join a running group attended by a friend of a friend it seems to stick better than joining when you know absolutely no one.
Public transit helps. It’s hard to be consistent when going to the activity requires slogging through traffic.
And lastly, an activity that encourages repeated regular attendance. Hiking is an activity that is super flaky attendance compared to say training for a triathlon with a specific event day.
Most people meeting over other activities I believe have similar stories. Dancing for example, or other group sports.
I've made some very good friends since leaving university. The simplest thing to do is to start with something YOU enjoy. Food, sports, music, pottery, knitting, boardgames even coding (gasp but that's our work).
If you have a passion and you want to be there, and so do the other people - the odds are in your favour that you'll get along.
You have to get out there. The Internet is not a great place to form solid human relationships.
Once you have the financial resources, _then_ you tackle the problem of no interest/hobbies/causes issue - which, i say is relatively easy to tackle as long as you have money; try different things until something sticks!
That's the kind of person I'm talking about
Either they have not tried everything, or they have imbalances or an illness that makes them feel this way. If this is true, there should be no shame in visiting a doctor or therapist of some sort. Otherwise, depression would set in sooner or later and get worse.
> Pick a social hobby. Pick up sports, hiking / running / reading / trivia / sports groups.
It is very hard to pick up a new hobby as an adult.
By 30, most adults (in the US; earlier outside of the US) will have real full-time job responsibilities, a significant other and a few children. Since the children will be young and will need almost all of your time and attention, that leaves little time for anything else.
Families with access to parenting groups will likely be living in bigger cities with high-enough density to support that. This also assumes that you have enough free time/money to participate in these activities (unlikely if you just spent most of your free capital on the house that you just bought because houses are at an all-time high now...).
Many new families are living in HOA-run communities that are wholly designed to be traveled by car, in towns that are also designed to be traveled by car, because you'll likely be commuting to work and back...by car.
Taking your kids on a walk to the grocery store that's 15 minutes away and seeing lots of people on your path isn't possible in these towns. Instead, you're driving four minutes to a huge supermarket where you'll run into families who are also rushing to pick up their groceries because time is scarce, and then driving right back.
Can you interact with neighbors and enjoy community in this environment? Sure! If you like your two or four neighbors in your surrounding area, and if they aren't filthy renters like me who aren't in it for the short-term. (Rentals are also increasing...because houses are at an all-time high and life happens...)
If you're childfree and live in a large city, then, sure, tons of opportunities to make new friends. Unless you're a lawyer working 100+ hrs/week or a SWE grinding at a startup that just hit PMF and is hyperscaling. Or you suck at breaking through cliques. (Lots of people suck at this; myself included. Don't feel bad! Most people make most of their lifelong friends in grade school or church, as a youth, so most times, you're trying to shoehorn yourself into a group that has developed decades of direct and indirect ways of communicating and interacting with each other.).
> Take a class. > Take up a cause - volunteer your time at the local farm, shelter, political office..
This is actually good advice, but, again, time is scarce for many people.
This is more or less like saying "wanna lose weight? just eat less!" Not invalid, but also not helpful and very dismissive of people needing different things.
> Kids don't go to school with the goal of making friends. The friends are a byproduct.
...of being in an enclosed environment with other humans for eight hours a day, doing things they might or might not want to do. Kind of like work actually...
Let's be clear. I'm not saying that it's impossible to make friends as an adult. I've done it, and I've met tons of people that have done it!
I'm just saying that it's significantly easier to make friends at work.
More importantly, it is a lot easier to foster a culture and a work community in the office.
Perhaps my definition of "friend" is stricter than others. I differentiate between friends and acquaintances and a lot of people don't seem to.
But I think the more obvious answer is just that some people, like me, have a lot of difficulty connecting to other people. No amount of going to a gym will help that.
Walking into a job, literally the only thing you have in common with these people is an employer. While time spent together is an important component of building relationships, it lacks the other substantially important pieces of relationships: Common interests, similar backgrounds, similar worldviews, etc. (Though it doesn't mean they're inherently absent)
But I generally have nothing in common with the people I work with.
I'm friends with people who share my world outlook, my moral and philosophical and aesthetic views, and there's no correlation between that and working with people.
> Friend just means someone you have established a platonic relationship with right here right now.
NO, that's not friend, FFS! That's an acquaintance or a coworker.
Don't get me wrong - I'm a very sociable guy, I love hanging out with people, but I only have a few actual _friends_.
> Some of the commenters describe a friend as someone who will maintain a connection with you no matter the circumstance (loss of job, moving to a new city etc)
> I believe that is an unrealistic expectation.
I'm sorry, but if you leave a job and lose all your connection with someone, _you were never friends._
I moved to a new continent in 2016 and I'm still in touch with my small group of actual friends, and I even made two more here.
I played WoW for a good 8 years everyday through high school and college, became great friends with some of the people I played the game with.
When I finished school, I hung up my WoW character and said good bye to my friends in the game.
Although I no longer keep in touch with any of them, those were some of the best 8 years of my life and I am truly fond of the memories I made playing the game and working together.
Is that not the same as a work place?
No. In the workplace, you have to accomplish stuff every day of suffer serious consequences. You spend 8 hours a day with your coworkers, sure, but that time is not spent socializing. You're under the gun to produce.
In a game (or other recreational activity), none of that is true. They are inherently social activities. You can get to know each other, you are at play. It's a very, very different thing.
With normal friends, I can at least avoid them. Co-workers? Not so much.
I'm nice, I'll socialize, but I won't share or divulge any detail of my private life.
I disagree as the workplace isn’t a good locus of interest for personal relationships. I’m not interested in my coworkers hobbies. I have developed friendships with co-workers but they are rare.
Some of my happiest times at work are when I worked with friends. But they were friends before work and I worked with them because they are friends, I didn’t become friends because of work.
I also think it’s valuable to have checks and balances in life and having my personal life wrapped up with work, although great for my employer, puts too much risk in losing my job.
Add to this, that my workplace was distributed and I switched from driving into work to get in video calls with people in different locations to doing that from my home office.
If someone doesn’t see humans for days when working from home, that is an individual problem to solve and there are many options to solve that. Work is not efficient for solving that problem.
Join a gym, get a dog and walk it, join a grocery/csa co-op, use meetup, join a church, volunteer, visit seniors in your area, tutor kids, join a book club, do yoga/tai chi. The list going on and on and all those are more likely to result in human connection and friendships than going into work.
Ahhh, that makes more sense now. You're using "friend" to mean what I would call an "acquaintance".
I think the workplace is one of the hardest places to find true friends, because the relationship is dependent on the job. And, can you really be truly open and vulnerable to workplace friends? Can you safely talk smack about your boss, or your cube neighbor, or the company? Can you show up on their doorstep in crisis at 3am and have it not affect things at work?
Once working, you spend 8h a day with a group of people.
It's by far the easiest way to make friends since the needed repetition of making contact (a minimum requirement for friendship) is already solved by going to work togetherp