I was particularly struck this week by a pair of pieces in The Atlantic about why you never see your friends anymore, and a related piece about the scheduling woes of adult friendship. This is something I think about a lot! Many people I know often lament how hard it seems to be to get our friends together in adulthood — I have some friends in New York who it feels like I see once a year, even though we live in the same city! I regularly send my friends Google Calendar invites for dinners and drinks, and often use Doodle to plan gatherings that involve upwards of 5 people, since the alternative is sending dozens of emails to establish a date and time when all members of the group are free. And this is just for friends who are local: it’s even harder to see and keep up with long distance friends — and we have more of them these days than perhaps on parents’ generations did, since many millennials went further away for college and then scattered across the country, moving for job opportunities as they came up. (Two small thing I’m trying to do more on this front: spontaneous phone calls — because scheduling “phone dates” basically never happens — and sending more snail mail).
Why it's so hard to find time to see your friends
Why it's so hard to find time to see your…
Why it's so hard to find time to see your friends
I was particularly struck this week by a pair of pieces in The Atlantic about why you never see your friends anymore, and a related piece about the scheduling woes of adult friendship. This is something I think about a lot! Many people I know often lament how hard it seems to be to get our friends together in adulthood — I have some friends in New York who it feels like I see once a year, even though we live in the same city! I regularly send my friends Google Calendar invites for dinners and drinks, and often use Doodle to plan gatherings that involve upwards of 5 people, since the alternative is sending dozens of emails to establish a date and time when all members of the group are free. And this is just for friends who are local: it’s even harder to see and keep up with long distance friends — and we have more of them these days than perhaps on parents’ generations did, since many millennials went further away for college and then scattered across the country, moving for job opportunities as they came up. (Two small thing I’m trying to do more on this front: spontaneous phone calls — because scheduling “phone dates” basically never happens — and sending more snail mail).