The Three Things That Did The Work For You
Proximity, repetition and unstructured time built your old friendships, and adult life removes all three at once.
Think about how you met the people you were closest to before the age of twenty five. Almost none of it involved decision making. You sat near someone. You had the same timetable. You worked the same shift. The friendship grew because you kept being in the same place, week after week, with hours in it that were not allocated to anything. Proximity put you together, repetition made you familiar, and unstructured time let something develop that neither of you planned. Nobody scheduled a catch up. There was no catch up, because you had never been apart long enough to need one.
Adult life dismantles that arrangement with remarkable efficiency. Work separates you geographically and then keeps changing the geography. Housing moves people to wherever they can afford, which is rarely where their friends are. Partners, children, care of ageing parents and simple exhaustion each take a bite out of the unallocated hours until there are none. Even the workplace, which is the last environment that supplies proximity and repetition for free, has become less reliable at it, because people come and go and many of them are on a screen.
The important consequence is this: whatever happened by itself before must now be manufactured deliberately. That is the whole of it. Adults who have full social lives are not more likeable than adults who do not. They are, almost without exception, people who have accepted the manufacturing job and got on with it: they hold a standing time, they invite first, they tolerate the low return rate. It is less romantic than the story we tell about friendship, and it is considerably more useful.