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.
