LogFAQs > #964951407

There's a couple major shifts I've noticed as we get older. It's not a 30s thing necessarily, but that's the tipping point on average. Covid definitely accelerated it.

Friends become way harder to hang out with because they are both more content being alone/routine AND it's harder to plan a hangout or be spontaneous.

There's a fallacy that it's one sided if you are always putting in a ton of effort and initiating the hang out. That a two-sided relationship is super easy to hang out. That's just totally wrong. Both sides need to do a lot to successfully hang out nowadays, and many just can't initiate because they know how much effort it is. Those friends are still really valuable to maintain because they do appreciate when you initiate and will pay it back somehow.

(The problem is when some friends clearly initiate and hang with others, but reject you. Then they just are choosing not to hang out with you. But that's honestly rare.)

HOWEVER sometimes you do find a friend who is great at initiating and it's easy to hang out with them spontaneously. They invite you to stuff all the time, maybe even more than you invite them. These friends are pure gold and need to be treasured as long as possible. They often attract similar people, so you'll have a group you can hang with. No one is guaranteed to have a group like this - it's random. I used to have several groups like this, but now there's only 1.

I remember hanging out with people in their 30s when I was in my 20s, and wondering why they were doing that, and why they were so active in our group. It's because we were their 1 remaining spontaneous group. Eventually they also fell into the contented loner-dom.