Yanwen’s blog

8/2/2026

Yesterday I read several articles about friendship, and they made me think about an interesting irony of getting older.

Here are some of them: "Bumble - Bumble For Friends Data Shows Importance of New Friendships, Including Those Made Online, to Combat Loneliness", AARP article "Friendships Are Still Important Regardless of How People Connect", from American Survey Center "Disconnected: The Growing Class Divide in American Civic Life - The Survey Center on American Life", "The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges, and Loss - The Survey Center on American Life," and "American Men Suffer a Friendship Recession."

The key idea is: the older we become, the more difficult it can be to make new friends—yet friendship remains just as important, if not more important, to our well-being.

AARP's 2026 Friendship Study paints an interesting picture of the importance of friendship in American life. It found that 95% of U.S. adults say friends are essential to a happy and healthy life, up from 90% in 2019—a five-percentage-point increase. The study was based on a nationally representative survey of 1,488 U.S. adults age 18 and older.

Another interesting finding is that 54% of adults reported having friends from another generation—at least 15 years older or younger. This suggests that friendship doesn't necessarily have to be confined to people our own age. Intergenerational friendships can broaden our perspectives and strengthen our emotional support networks.

This connects surprisingly well with the idea behind SHARE Kanazawa that I wrote about yesterday: perhaps we should create more opportunities for people of different generations to live, work, and interact together.

But while people continue to value friendship, making new friends seems to be getting harder.

Bumble conducted a survey of more than 1,000 U.S. adults who had attended or were attending college. Fifty-two percent said they had not made a single new friend during the previous year. At the same time, 60% said they wanted to make new friends.

That contrast is striking: many people want new friendships, but more than half hadn't made even one new friend in the preceding year.

The long-term trend is even more disturbing.

The Survey Center on American Life compared its 2021 American Perspectives Survey with a national survey conducted in 1990. It found that the share of Americans reporting that they had no close friends had quadrupled—from just 3% in 1990 to 12% in 2021.

More recent research from the same organization found that the figure had risen further to 17% in 2024, up from 12% in 2021.

The numbers tell a striking story:

3% (1990) → 12% (2021) → 17% (2024)

The Survey Center on American Life has described this broader trend as a "friendship recession." Daniel A. Cox used the term to describe the decline in Americans' friendship networks over recent decades.

There is a revealing fact of life here.

As people get older, their social networks tend to shrink. At the same time, they continue to place enormous value on friendship. AARP's finding that 95% of adults consider friends essential to a happy and healthy life makes this contrast especially striking.

Why does making new friends become harder?

There are certainly many possible explanations. But one obvious factor is time.

Friendship takes time. We need repeated encounters, conversations, shared experiences, time spent together, and gradually developing trust before an acquaintance becomes a real friend.

When we are young, friendship often happens almost automatically. School, college, dormitories, sports teams, clubs, and other activities put us in the same places with the same people again and again. We don't necessarily have to make a conscious effort to "find friends." Friendship grows out of proximity and shared experiences.

As we get older, that machinery of friendship begins to disappear.

We graduate from school. We build careers, get married, raise children, move to different cities. Our daily lives become increasingly organized around work and family.

We may have less time, fewer opportunities, and fewer natural settings in which to meet new people repeatedly.

Friendship, like almost everything else that matters, doesn't happen without time.

As we grow older, perhaps one of the best things we can do for ourselves is not only to keep our old friends, but to keep making room for new ones.

8/1/2026

I recently read parts of Lonely Society (The Upcoming Fifth Consumer Era) by Atsushi Miura. One part in the book particularly made me think.

Japanese society faces a difficult problem: a huge number of young people have to provide care for family members. This can place a heavy burden on children and young adults, especially in a society facing both an aging population and growing loneliness.

Sociologist Atsushi Miura proposed turning the conventional one-way model of caregiving upside down. He calls it shared caregiving.

Instead of one young person struggling to support several elderly people, why not have several older people collectively support one young person?

Older residents might provide affordable housing, home-cooked meals, life experience, professional connections, and companionship.

Young residents, in return, might help older people with grocery shopping, household chores, transportation, and other physically demanding tasks.

The key is that both generations give and receive.

One example is SHARE Kanazawa, a community in Kanazawa that brings together elderly residents, people with disabilities, university students, and others. Students receive below-market housing in exchange for contributing time to the community and helping elderly residents.

One anecdote from SHARE Kanazawa is particularly unforgettable to me.

An art university student moved into the community determined to do everything she could to help the elderly residents. But soon, something else happened. The elderly women began bringing her homemade pickles, freshly baked pastries, vegetables from their gardens, and other treats.

Eventually, she realized that she wasn't simply there to help them. They were also taking care of her. She said it was the first time she had truly felt that someone cared about her well-being in the big lonely city.

This story impressed me for two reasons.

First, care can be mutual.

We often think of intergenerational care as a one-way relationship: the young take care of the old.

But the anecdote shows a different story. The young can provide the physical help that older people need, while older people can provide something the young may desperately need as well: warmth, attention, companionship, food, encouragement, and the feeling of being cared about.

Second, older people need more than care. They need a sense of dignity and usefulness.

The elderly residents are not simply useless people waiting to be cared for. They still have skills, experience, generosity, and love to offer.

They demonstrate that: They still have something to give and can still make someone happy.

Perhaps this is something we sometimes overlook when we talk about aging. We focus so much on what older people need from society that we forget to ask what they can still give to society.

Ultimately, people don't only need to be cared for. They also need someone to care for. They need to feel useful, needed, and valued in society.

A healthy community may be one in which people of different ages and abilities have reasons to depend on one another.

The young may need the strength and energy of youth. The old may offer wisdom, experience, generosity, and warmth.

The real answer to loneliness may not be simply to provide more services, but to create more opportunities for people to care for one another.

After all, sometimes the person we think we are helping may be helping us just as much.

一读者问：“ 对爷奶替背书包上学的一代来说，能指望他们的多少给与呢？” 好问题！爷奶替背书包的现象，大概只有中国有

7/31/2026

Yesterday I was rather disturbed when I read some new medical research about biological aging and early-onset cancer. I especially wanted to share the findings with the younger generation.

A study published last month in Nature Medicine, titled "Biological aging and generational shifts in early-onset cancer risk," analyzed 154,169 participants from the UK Biobank, with partial validation in more than 10,000 participants in the U.S.

The researchers compared people from different birth cohorts using several measures of biological aging, including PhenoAge, the Klemera-Doubal method, and metabolomic measures.

The results:

In the UK data, people born between 1965 and 1974 had a 23% higher standardized PhenoAge age gap than those born between 1950 and 1954. In other words, at the same chronological age, people in the more recent birth cohorts appeared to have more advanced biological aging. The pattern was also seen in the U.S. data: people born between 1990 and 1999 had a substantially higher PhenoAge age gap than those born between 1965 and 1969.

More importantly, greater biological aging was associated with a higher risk of early-onset solid cancers. Each standard-deviation increase in the PhenoAge age gap was associated with an 8% higher risk of early-onset solid cancer in the UK cohort. The researchers also found associations between immune-tissue aging and early-onset lung cancer, and between adipose-tissue aging and early-onset colorectal cancer.

Another recent review, "Early-onset colorectal cancer as an emerging disease of metabolic dysregulation," points to a related concern: early-onset colorectal cancer has been increasing, particularly in high-income countries, at the same time that obesity and metabolic disorders have become more common among younger people.

Researchers are investigating whether obesity, insulin resistance, chronic inflammation, altered gut microbiota, sedentary lifestyles and poor diet may contribute to an environment that makes colorectal cancer more likely.

We should be careful, however. These studies do not prove that overeating or obesity directly causes the generational increase in biological aging or early-onset cancer. Cancer has many causes, and the researchers emphasize that the full explanation remains unknown. Other possible contributors include alcohol, sleep disruption, environmental exposures, socioeconomic conditions and factors that scientists have not yet identified.

Still, there is an important lesson here.

I think about what my 95-year-old mother has told me about her childhood, youth and most of her adult years. Her generation experienced famine and malnutrition. Today's younger generation lives in almost the opposite environment: food is abundant, inexpensive and available all the time. Nutrition is way too much.

That transformation is one of humanity's great achievements. But abundance brings its own challenge. Together with it is new food processing technologies making it harder to resist over eating.

For greater part of human history, the problem was food shortages. Today, we live in an age of abundant food, but our bodies have not evolved quickly enough to adapt to this abundance.

Perhaps we need to learn a new kind of discipline: just because we have more does not mean we should eat more.

We cannot control every environmental factor that may influence biological aging or cancer. But we can control some of the basics: how much we eat, what we eat, how active we are, how much we sleep, and whether we allow excess weight and metabolic problems to develop.

My hope is that the younger generation can enjoy the abundance without becoming victims of that abundance.

7/30/2026

Yesterday I was talking with another grandparent about our newborn grandson and the future of higher education.

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, it's difficult to imagine what education will look like twenty years from now. AI is becoming increasingly capable while it costs only a fraction of human labor. Some people even wonder whether AI will eventually replace many human teachers.

As I looked at my tiny grandson, however, another thought touched me.

No matter how advanced AI becomes, what a baby needs most during the first years of his life is still human attachment—the warmth and feeling of being held, spoken to, comforted, encouraged, protected and loved.

That thought reminded me of a new expression that has become popular on Chinese social media: 活人感 (huórén gǎn).

Literally, 活人 means "a living person," and 感 means a feeling or sense.

It describes someone who feels genuinely human—authentic, emotional, unpretentious, and refreshingly real. Such a person doesn't sound scripted or mechanically polite. They have quirks, imperfections, spontaneous reactions, and genuine emotions.

Interestingly, calling someone "very有活人感" has become one of the highest compliments on the Chinese internet.

The expression says something about our times.

Many people feel that AI-generated writing is impeccably organized, endlessly polite, grammatically correct, and highly predictable. Social media has also encouraged carefully curated online personas. Against this backdrop, someone who simply feels like authentic human stands out.

What intrigues me most is the irony.

For centuries, people admired perfection. Today, one of the highest compliments is to say that someone simply feels human who is not perfect.

Is it because the perfection of AI makes us appreciate the imperfections of human beings even more?

Or is it because, in the age of AI, authenticity has become increasingly rare? People naturally value what is rare, just as they treasure pandas.

Or perhaps the answer is even simpler. Unlike AI, we are emotional beings. However much we strive for perfection, we still want to remain authentically ourselves.

Our occasional hesitation, spontaneous laughter, genuine curiosity, emotional warmth, human attachments and even our flaws remind others that there is a real person behind the words.

And perhaps that is the enduring lesson for my grandson.

No matter how intelligent and error-free AI becomes, the qualities that shape a meaningful life—and meaningful relationships—will still be profoundly human.

7/29/2026

On July 23, I was surprised to hear the news of the passing of Keigo Higashino (東野圭吾), the renowned Japanese mystery novelist.

Born in Osaka in 1958, Keigo Higashino majored in electrical engineering and worked as an engineer before turning to writing. He wrote in his spare time, won a literary prize in 1985, and eventually resigned from his engineering job to become a full-time author.

His road to success was anything but easy. It took years before he established himself as one of Japan's leading novelists. Over a four-decade writing career, he published more than one hundred books and received numerous literary honors, including Japan's Medal with Purple Ribbon.

One aspect of Higashino's writing that I have found especially fascinating is his mastery of leaving narrative blank space.

Instead of explaining everything, he intentionally leaves certain details unsaid, allowing readers to infer, imagine, and reach their own conclusions.

These carefully arranged gaps are one reason his novels stay with readers long after the final page. Even after closing the book, you find yourself replaying the story, filling in the missing pieces, and discovering new meanings.

I have tried to learn from this technique in my own writing, particularly in my essays about Liu Kaixin and about the phenomenon of "read but unreplied" (已读不回).

Rather than stating every lesson explicitly, I have learned that it is often more powerful to stop just before the final conclusion. Readers tend to remember the insights they discover for themselves more vividly than those simply handed to them.

Lately, it has occurred to me that this principle extends far beyond writing.

Sometimes, less is more. The same idea applies to parenting.

There is a popular Chinese saying:

懒妈妈养勤快孩子，勤快妈妈养懒孩子。
Lǎn māma yǎng qínkuài háizi, qínkuài māma yǎng lǎn háizi.

Literally, it means, "A 'lazy' mother raises a hardworking child, while a hardworking mother raises a lazy child."

Of course, it does not mean to encourage parents to be lazy. Rather, it reminds us that parents should not do everything for them when the child can do it himself. 

A child who is given opportunities to solve problems, make decisions, and shoulder responsibilities gradually develops ability, independence and confidence. 

A child whose path is constantly cleared by parents may instead become dependent on them.

Perhaps writing and parenting are not so different after all.

A skilled writer leaves space for readers to think. A wise parent leaves space for children to grow.

Both understand that growth often comes not from being given every answer, but from discovering some answers for ourselves.