Old Friends

April 5, 2026

Have you ever noticed how many friends you have now, compared to when you were younger?  Before we start getting all depressed about this, let us first understand that it’s extremely common and natural to have considerably less friends as we age.  Sure, there are young adults whose social circles may still be under expansion; or, those who may have grown up on a farm or in a rural town, moved to a big city and then had tons of friends; but as they get older, their cohort inevitably shrinks.

To be clear, I’m not in any way talking about the “friends” or followers we count on social media, which can and typically do, continue to just increase.  Out of our 1,000+ Facebook friends, which ones are we actually hanging out with 10 years after we’ve deleted our account (or after the platform crashes)?  In tech terms, to understand this is to know that these are the people I’m talking about when I say “friends”.

Initially, we may consider ourselves quite fortunate to have these relationships and they often ground us in ways we may not even consciously recognize.  The bonds we form with our friends are born out of experiences we’ve shared with them, which is why it can feel often feel so dreary to move on and away from them, as our life circumstances change.

As we get accepted to different schools, begin cultivating careers, moving to new cities or starting families, most people’s instincts guide them toward maintaining relationships that continue to offer substance, love, meaning and stability, while naturally exchanging quantity for quality; and as we grow through these phases of life, most of our friends are also selected and maintained based on what they may have in common with us.  

Who Dis?

Throughout our youth, friendships can often be dictated by how impressionable we happen to be at the time; and I’m not sure it’s much different for a lot of us as adults.  All of the same mechanisms of desire for approval and companionship are functioning, it just looks a little different (and more expensive); when instead of needing specific shoes or baggy jeans to look cool, we need cars and houses and titles to feel like we can finally be accepted– constantly.  

This not only sheds light on our struggle to latch onto an identity, it shows us how easily manipulated we are by consumerist culture, to the point where we end up establishing entire social circles based on things like clothing and status.  The more our lives involve material consumption, the less value these relationships will bring; and this is sure to place unintended restrictions on who we’re capable of becoming.

I’m not necessarily suggesting that the correlation between friendship decline and aging is directly caused by having inauthentic or materialistic relationships; but when we start to realize and really feel the time of our personal existence ticking away, we definitely (and perhaps inadvertently) become more selective with how and with whom we spend it. 

Do we know if this process of weeding out those we are no longer compatible with is actually good for us?  As friends slowly drop off from our social radar, optimism tells me that our ego is dissolving and we are making space for more positive and meaningful relationships, a byproduct of having grown collectively wiser.  

This may be partially true, but we also know that people tend to become more stubborn as they age; which may allude to this idea that the more rigid our opinions and beliefs become, the less we find in common with other people.  The rosy theory that we’re spending more quality time with fewer people can be offset by the supposition that we simply stop wanting to be around people who don’t think or act like us.

This is where that damned consumerist culture and its hijacking of our personal identities seems to play a sneaky role.  If we spend 40, 50, even 80 years of our life in this pattern of spending money and accumulating stuff to achieve happiness, in the end, the stuff is all we’ll have to show for it.  

After we hit retirement, our health deteriorates, we lose our spouse and suddenly find ourselves living alone for the first time since college, 57 years ago, the real tragedy is not just the loneliness that creeps in; but the risk of our tunnel further narrowing, as we continue to amass material items amidst trepidation, well past the point of finding value and joy in human-to-human connection.

Counting Costs

Even though I’m around other dads a lot because my kids are making friends with their kids, I don’t expect to become instant besties with any of them.  If the only thing we know we have in common is that our children have fun together, that’s fantastic for them; we might even chat it up and find something we’re both interested in, but that doesn’t supply enough inertia for us to want to make each other bracelets or text each other after 9:30 pm on a weeknight. 

The assumption that I would befriend a bunch of other dads is based on the fact that we’re “in the same place”, so to speak; and if I’m only looking to make friends with people who fit that criteria, then I’m ultimately missing out on (by cutting off) a wealth of possibility.  We miss so many opportunities that may have offered us a richer perspective on the world and our place in it, simply because we’ve allowed the tunnel of our sapience to narrow, giving way to a mere illusion of who we are and what we need to have around us in that dream, in order to support it.

We may stand to benefit a great deal by deviating from our familiar circles and being more open to the idea of developing friendships with other adults who are in different phases of their life, apart from our own; distinctive upbringings, fields of study/work, and cultural backgrounds, older, younger ; it doesn’t matter, as long as we admire these individuals because they are good and because of how they interact with the world.      

When our minds and our hearts are closed off, when we look at friendship as an obligation, or when we fail to see the big picture, maintaining such close relationships can be a struggle.  Hell, we may even find drudgery in living with ourselves, at which point it is nearly impossible to care for someone else altruistically, while paving the way for invariable contempt.  

But when we’re self-aware, when we value people more than we value things, when we live openly, and we show this through our actions, things tend to fall into place; and we can navigate every phase of our life with a wisdom that allows us to truly appreciate and breathe in the beautiful, cosmic connections that we form with our friends, regardless of how many of them we have or how old we are.  

To recognize that someone is a good person is nothing more than an observation; to befriend a person of that caliber is a gift to be cherished.  This is immeasurable and it’s called love; and it’s really the only thing we need, in friendship, and in life. So we can probably stop counting.