This was a real band. A band with a name, with records people knew. And they were going to play in the basement of a house in Minneapolis. I have no idea how Sean caught wind of it. He knew people in the music world here, and the invite found its way to him, and then it found its way to me.

I said hell yes.

We got there right as the band was rolling speakers down the stairs, so we grabbed some and helped carry them in. The basement was small. They packed people in like sardines. The sound probably wasn’t great, the way basement shows never are, but it didn’t matter at all. You don’t go to a show like that for fidelity. You go because a band you love is somehow standing six feet away in someone’s house.

I’ve thought about why that night stuck with me for so long. For a while I figured it was just the uniqueness of it, the notoriety of the band against the smallness of the room. And that’s certainly part of it.

But then I realized that Sean didn’t have an unlimited number of invites. He could have brought anyone. He brought me, because he knew my taste in music the way you only know it about someone you’ve spent real time with. We used to drive around with no destination, just to listen to songs we both loved. That wasn’t killing time. That was us learning about each other. And when something rare came up, he already knew I’d be the one who’d lose my mind over it.

The good invitations go to the people someone actually knows.

Most of us want to be the person who gets that call. Fewer of us do the slower work of being the person who makes it, the one paying close enough attention to know exactly who’d want in.

Sean and I have mostly lost touch. I got serious with my wife, he was single, life pulled us in different directions, and eventually he moved to California. We’re down to the occasional message now.

Last year I saw Motion City Soundtrack play a small venue here, and the basement scene came flooding back. I sent him a photo and said it reminded me of that show we found our way into twenty years ago.

“Oh snap! Prolly sounded better tho.”

I’d told him I couldn’t even recall the acoustics, just that it was a core memory I’d never forget, and that I hoped he was well.

He remembered how it sounded. I remembered how it felt.

I thought of it as being considerate. Being self-sufficient. The kind of adult who handles his own stuff.

Then I joined a group called MMT, run by my friend Jayson Gaignard. The whole thing is built around generosity. The first time I watched someone ask for something real, the room lit up. People were already opening laptops, texting contacts, jumping in before the person was done talking.

It took me a while to admit what I was seeing. By holding back my own asks all those years, I hadn’t been considerate. I’d been robbing people of something they actually wanted to do. Jayson writes about this in his upcoming book, Community Made. A full third of it is about asking for help, not as a tactic, but as the thing that makes a community real.

I’d had it backwards my whole life.

A pattern worth noticing

A new report from the American Enterprise Institute found that the share of Americans who talk to their neighbors a few times a week has dropped from 59% in 2012 to 40% in 2025. Among young adults, it’s collapsed from 51% to just one in four.

That’s the symptom. The more interesting finding is buried a few sections in.

When asked what it means to be a good neighbor, 65% of Americans said it means “not getting too involved in your neighbors’ personal affairs.” We didn’t just stop talking to our neighbors. We changed the definition of what a good neighbor is. Privacy became the virtue. Distance became politeness. Staying out of the way became a form of respect.

And this isn’t just a story about neighbors. The same logic hollowing out the American block is hollowing out adult friendship. We treat asks like small thefts. We default to “I don’t want to be a bother” and call it consideration when it’s something closer to fear. So we stay out of each other’s business. We text “let me know if you ever need anything” and mean it sincerely, while also somehow making sure no one ever does.

A way forward

I don’t think the answer is to suddenly start banging on doors and asking your neighbors for sugar like it’s 1955. That ship has sailed, and honestly, I’m not sure I’d want it back the way it was.

But I think there’s something worth questioning in the belief itself. The idea that the best version of an adult is one who needs nothing. That maturity means self-sufficiency. That a well-run life is one where you’ve engineered your way out of asking.

What I learned in MMT, and what I’m still learning, is that the people around you often want to help more than you’ve been giving them credit for. When you don’t ask, you don’t just protect yourself from imposition. You take away their chance to show up. You decide on their behalf that the favor would be a burden, when for a lot of people, the favor is the gift they were hoping to give.

You can’t have connection without imposition. Those are the same thing, looked at from different angles. The favor you ask is the thread. The favor you do is the thread. Pull all the threads out in the name of not being a bother, and you’ve got a very tidy, very lonely life.

Something to ask yourself

Who in your life has been waiting to help you, and just hasn’t been given the chance?

Not someone you’re going to use. Someone who would feel closer to you, more useful, more glad to be in your life, if you let them in on something you’re working through.

That person exists. For most of us, more than one.

Try this week

Ask someone for help.

A favor you’ve been handling on your own. A connection you’ve been hesitant to request. An opinion from someone whose perspective you actually value. A small, low-stakes ask that lets the other person feel useful and lets you practice acting like you’re allowed to need people.

Because somewhere along the way, many of us forgot.

It was 2003 and the club was called Stargate. The room was huge and always packed, the kind of crowded where you couldn’t really move so much as exist in proximity to other people moving. The music was late 90s and early 2000s hip hop, loud enough that you stopped trying to talk after a while and just communicated by leaning in close, half-shouting, half-reading lips. And almost every night, when the room had been going for hours and everyone was sweating through their shirts, they would close with K-Ci and JoJo’s “Crazy.” The lights would shift and people would pair up out of the crowd. If you were lucky you’d have one slow dance with whoever you ended up next to before the night was over.

My friend Kevin had invited me to come along that night, and his friend Maryza had brought a friend of hers named Heather. Nobody was trying to set anyone up. They were just bringing their people, the way you do at that age. I spent most of the night thinking she was out of my league and saying as little as possible to confirm it.

We didn’t exchange numbers and I didn’t have a plan, and in any other version of the story that would have been the end of it. What actually happened is that a few weeks later, in a roundabout way through the internet of that era, we ended up talking again, and somewhere in that conversation she reminded me we’d already met. Our first real date was back at Stargate, and I’m not sure I would have crossed paths with her at all if that club didn’t exist.

A pattern worth noticing

The club wasn’t where I made friends. It was the wrapper that gave the friendships I already had somewhere to go. And because it gave us somewhere to go, things happened there that none of us planned.

The complication

I’ve been thinking about this lately because I can’t remember the last time I went somewhere that worked the way Stargate worked. And I don’t think it’s because I’m older. The category itself thinned out. Stargate, Waterworks, Tropics, the Gold Rush over in Cottage Grove. They were everywhere when I was nineteen. Most of them are gone now.

The thing about a place like that, looking back, is that it required almost nothing from you. You didn’t have to plan it, besides what you were going to wear. You didn’t have to be in a good mood. You didn’t even have to be the one to suggest it. Someone in your group would text or call and say they were going, and you went. The place did the rest.

Most adult connection runs the other way now. You text first. You find a date that works for both of you, three weeks out. You pick the place, suggest the time, confirm twice. You bring all the energy yourself. That’s a lot of friction for something that used to be free.

There’s a name for what we lost. Sociologists call them third places. Not home, not work, but the somewhere else where life happens. Barbershops and diners. Bowling alleys. The bar where the same people showed up every Thursday. The category has been thinning out for decades, and most of us didn’t notice because we were busy.

And the people coming up behind us aren’t even grieving rooms like Stargate, because they never had them. The wrapper for their social lives is a phone. Which works for some things, but the kind of collision I had with Heather, the kind where you didn’t know you were going to meet someone until you did, isn’t really what apps are built for. Apps are built to remove the randomness. Stargate ran on it.

When the third places go, the things that used to happen in them go with them. Not just the friendships you might have made. The collisions you couldn’t have engineered if you tried.

A way forward

I’m not nostalgic for Stargate, exactly. (Although the thought of renting out a space to recreate one night of my youth has crossed my mind!) The point isn’t to bring those rooms back.

The point is to be honest about what they did. A lot of what people call “drift” in adult friendship isn’t really drift. It’s the absence of the rooms where staying connected used to be automatic. The wrapper went away, and most of us kept blaming ourselves for the result.

If you want connection at this stage of life, you might have to build the wrapper yourself. A standing Tuesday. A monthly poker night. A bi-weekly thing at the same house with the same people, no matter what. Not because it’s romantic to do, but because the alternative is waiting for a room that isn’t coming back.

A question to sit with

What was your version of Stargate? And if you had to build something now that gave your friendships somewhere to go without you having to invent it every time, what would that even look like?

If the goal is to catch fish, I haven’t had much luck over the years. Mostly it’s felt like long, boring hours that test a patience I don’t have. Ice fishing sounded even worse. Driving out onto a frozen lake, sitting in a small shack in the cold, waiting for something to happen.

Hard pass.

Then a friend of mine, who also has a cabin up on our lake, flipped it on me without trying.

He said fishing isn’t really about catching fish. It’s about sitting next to a buddy with a couple of beers, talking about whatever comes up, and if a fish bites, that’s a bonus.

The fish is the excuse. The point is the friend in the chair next to you.

That reframe made me realize that I’d been gauging the value of fishing, and other activities just like it, based on the wrong metrics for most of my life.

Richard Reeves, President of the American Institute for Boys and Men, shared an insight that I keep coming back to:

We’re not really going fishing. We’re not really doing a road trip. We’re not really playing golf. What we’re really doing is investing in our friendships. But we need the wrapper.

The wrapper. The activity that gives two adults permission to spend several hours next to each other without it being weird.

Most of us, especially men, don’t show up at a friend’s door and say, “Hey, I want to spend six hours with you today because I miss you.” We show up with a fishing rod, or a tee time, or a reason to be in the truck together.

A pattern worth noticing

The activity is the cover story. The real thing is the time. If you don’t see the wrapper for what it is, you might turn down a lot of friendship without realizing it.

I’ve passed on fishing trips for years because I told myself I didn’t enjoy fishing. And that’s technically true. But what I was actually saying no to wasn’t the fishing. It was the eight hours of unstructured time with a friend. The conversations that surface when you’re stuck in a boat together with nothing else to do. The way silence between two friends stops feeling awkward around hour three.

I was optimizing for the wrong outcome. I wanted to catch fish. I wasn’t catching fish. So I concluded fishing wasn’t for me, and I missed the actual offer underneath it.

The same thing happens with golf. With watching a game you don’t care about. With the long drive to nowhere in particular. If you measure these things by their surface activity, a lot of them look like a poor use of time. If you measure them by what they actually deliver, they might be some of the most valuable hours you have.

A way forward

When a friend invites you to do something you wouldn’t normally choose, it might help to ask a different question. Not “do I want to do this activity,” but “do I want eight hours with this person.”

Those are very different questions. And they often have very different answers.

The boredom I used to feel on a boat wasn’t really boredom. It was unfilled time. Time that, in the right company, turns into something else entirely. The hours I wrote off as wasted were actually the most generous version of time a friendship can ask for: slow, unstructured, with nowhere else to be.

I did this once on purpose last fall. A group of guys I respect, sharp entrepreneurs, the kind of people you learn from just by being in the room, invited me on a pheasant hunting trip. I'd never been pheasant hunting. On its own merits, it wouldn't have made my list. But I went, because the wrapper wasn't really the point. The point was a long weekend with that group. And it turned out to be one of the better weekends I had all year.

I’m still working on this. I’ll probably still turn down the next fishing trip out of habit. But I’m trying to catch myself when I do, and ask whether I’m saying no to the activity or to the friend.

A challenge for you

Think of one invitation you’ve turned down, maybe more than once, because the activity didn’t appeal. Fishing. Golf. The long drive. Watching a sport you don’t follow.

Make a pact with yourself to say yes to the next one. You’re not signing up for the activity. You’re signing up for the hours next to them.

I’m an introvert and I know what my mind wants in moments like this…

Solitude. The couch. Maybe a show I’m behind on.

Then I scanned the courtyard where dinner had taken place.

Joey was at another table with Jayson, Simon, and Doug. There was an empty chair next to him. I’d been trying to catch up with Joey all week and hadn’t found the moment. The conversation at my own table had stalled out. And I was wearing a bracelet they give out at MMT that serves to remind us of the group’s core values.

Mine said “Lean In.”

We ended up talking for hours. Human history. AI. What’s coming for the species. The kind of wide-ranging, philosophical conversation I get almost no access to back home. It was the best conversation I had all week, and I almost didn’t have it.

Here’s what I keep noticing about myself, and maybe you notice it too. The version of me at 6:45, deciding whether to go back up to the room, is making a prediction about how the night will feel…

Tired. Draining. Not worth the effort.

But future me has a track record. And the track record says: when I lean in, I’m almost always glad I did. Not 60% of the time. Closer to 95%.

So why does the forecast keep winning?

I think it’s because the resistance feels like data, but it isn’t. It’s a feeling. The feeling shows up reliably, gets a vote, and then disappears the second I’m actually in the conversation. By the time I’m sitting next to Joey, the version of me who didn’t want to go has already left the building. He doesn’t come back to apologize for being wrong. He just shows up again next time, same forecast, same confidence.

I haven’t figured out a solution to this yet, but I’m working on trusting the version of me who’s grateful at 9:30 over the version of me who’s negotiating at 6:45.

I’ve started trying to give a little more weight to the track record and a little less to the forecast.

It was that kind of room. The kind where the conversation goes deep fast, where someone asks where your energy is going these days and before long you're talking about the things that actually matter.

I told Andrew about the book, and he leaned in. And then he said something I've been thinking about since.

He told me he'd lost a close friend recently, and in the months that followed, he'd noticed himself doing something he didn't entirely understand. He was walling off. He was apprehensive about forming new friendships. About investing again.

I scribbled three lines in my notes app at the table, and then I sat with it for the rest of the night.

I haven't lost a close friend. Not yet. I've been spared that, so far, in a way that I know isn't going to last forever.

But the people closest to me have. My wife has buried a friend. My brother has too. And a few months ago, the co-founder of my last business had a heart attack that almost killed him. The kind where you find out after the fact, and you spend the next few hours trying to remember the last conversation you had with him.

I'm in my forties. The runway is shorter than I've been pretending it is, and Andrew's words landed because they weren't a memory for me. They were a forecast.

Most of us, if we're honest, have not really sat with what adult friendship actually costs.

Childhood friendship doesn't ask this of you. You weren't aware of mortality at twelve. You weren't thinking about who would be at whose funeral, or whose call you'd answer one day with your stomach dropping. The friendships you made then felt infinite because, in a way, they were. The future was so far out you couldn't see the edges, and the people you loved felt like fixtures rather than gifts that would eventually be returned.

Adult friendship is different. Every real connection you build now is, at some level, a future loss you're agreeing to. The grief is in the contract, even if nobody tells you that when you sign it.

When Andrew pulled back, he was paying the cost.

Sit with that for a second. The instinct to wall off after losing someone is the heart doing exactly what it was built to do, which is to protect you from doing something that hurt that badly ever again.

It's rational. It's protective. It might even be wise, depending on how you measure these things.

It's also a mechanism, I suspect, by which the back half of adult life gets lonelier and lonelier without anyone ever consciously choosing it. You lose someone, and you flinch. You stop reaching out, dial it back a little, or perhaps you keep things a little more surface than you used to. None of it feels like much in the moment. And one day you look up and the circle is smaller than you remember it ever being, and you're not entirely sure how to get it back.

But the flinch itself is the proof.

The fact that we pull back from forming new friendships after losing one is evidence of how much they were worth in the first place. The grief and the value are the same thing, measured from different sides. We don't flinch from things that don't matter.

That should mean something. Because the thing we're tempted to retreat from, the thing that hurts so much we'd rather just not risk it again, is the same thing almost everything we know about a meaningful life points back to.

It's the people. It was always the people.

So what do we do with that?

I don't have a clean answer. I haven't had to face this yet. I'm writing this from the perspective of someone who watched it land on someone else and started to feel the weight of it for the first time.

But here's the question I've been sitting with since that dinner.

If you lost one of your closest friends tomorrow, what would you do?

Would you keep investing? Would you reach for new people, knowing it might happen again? Or would you find yourself doing what Andrew described, quietly, almost without noticing, walling off?

Most of us have never asked ourselves that question. It’s not the kind of thing we want to think about.

I think that’s a mistake. Not because dwelling on loss makes us better, but because the reflexes we'll have when it happens are the reflexes we're building right now. In how we show up. In how willing we are to be inconvenienced by the people we love. In whether we keep reaching, even on the days when reaching feels like more than we have in us.

I don't know exactly what I'd do, if I'm being honest. I know what I want to do. I know what kind of friend I want to be on the other side of a loss I haven't lived through yet. And I know that the work of becoming that person doesn’t start when the call comes. It starts now, in the small choices nobody’s watching.

The friendships I have today are the ones I'll someday have to lose.

That's not a reason to invest less.

It might be the reason that matters most.

For years I’ve been actively choosing not to get better at something.

As someone who strives for continuous improvement in every other aspect of my life, this felt strange to say the least.

I’m choosing to stay mediocre, and the reason surprised me in the best way.

Beer League

I didn’t start playing hockey until I was about 30. Funny enough I couldn’t even skate when the concept of playing first entered my mind. I had to take adult skating lessons just to learn how to stop!

But once I achieved some level of comfort in that regard I bought the gear and joined a beginner’s league called Hockey Finder. There’s no coach, just a captain whose role doesn’t extend much beyond ensuring that enough people show up to play the game and bringing beers for the parking lot afterwards. In my first game, I’m pretty sure I went offsides at least a half dozen times, and I thought I knew how the rule worked!

But I kept showing up, and twelve glorious years later I’m still at it at least twice a week. It’s become one of the few activities where I lose track of time and forget about all of the stressors of life.

And rather unexpectedly, I made some friends along the way.

The guys you nod at in the locker room, chirp with between whistles, grab a beer with after the final buzzer. And over enough Tuesday nights, that starts to add up. Twelve years of showing up to the same rink with mostly the same people turns into a kind of belonging I didn’t plan for and couldn’t have manufactured if I tried.

The Realization

Sure, I’ve improved over the years. But in the realm of hockey players, I’m mediocre at best. The urge to improve is real, but if my skills jump too far, I’ll be asked to move up to the next level. That means a new team. New faces. And I’d lose the collisions with the guys I’ve been playing with.

So I’ve been purposefully holding back. Skating hard enough to stay sharp and contribute, but not seeking out the coaching or clinics that might skate me out of the group.

The part that really caught me off guard was this. Without really consciously deciding to, I had started prioritizing friendship over my competitive drive. I was already living the thing I’ve been writing about and suggesting to other people. And I hadn’t even noticed.

I’ll be honest, there’s a lot I haven’t figured out. I could probably be doing more to take some of these friendships beyond the hockey container. That’s something I’m working on. But the fact that I was protecting this thing at all, without anyone telling me to, feels like it’s worth paying attention to.

Most of us spend our adult lives optimizing. Getting better, moving up, moving on. It’s just how a lot of us are built.

The question I keep sitting with is simple:

How many other parts of my life am I unconsciously optimizing away from?

Back then something like “hey, beer this week?” would have taken four seconds. Now you find yourself drafting a preamble. Sorry it’s been so long. I’ve been meaning to reach out. How have you been, really? The text has grown a backstory. And the backstory is what’s keeping you from sending it.

Nothing happened. You didn’t fight. They didn’t move away. You just got busy, and they got busy, and a week became a month became whatever this is now. Every few days you think about reaching out. Every few days you don’t.

I want to be careful here, because that heaviness isn’t a sign you’re a bad friend. It’s a sign that something mechanical is happening, something that has more to do with physics than with character. The wheel stopped turning, and starting a stopped wheel is a different kind of work than keeping a turning one going. Most of us were never taught the difference.

I’ve learned this one the hard way, and I keep learning it.

I’m part of a small group of entrepreneurs who meet monthly. We know each other in ways most adults rarely get to know anyone outside of family. You see people at their lowest, you see them at their best, you watch them figure out their lives in real time. After a few years together, the word “friend” starts to feel like an undersell.

Over the years, several guys have rotated out. Some moved on to other groups, some had life circumstances change, some just needed something different. Each time, we said the right things on the way out:

Let’s stay in touch.

This doesn’t change anything.

We’ll grab dinner soon.

And each time, I’d have told you these were friendships that couldn’t fade.

Unfortunately I was wrong, and I keep being wrong.

With some of the guys, communication slowed to almost nothing within a few months. With others, we still meet up occasionally, but the cadence is a fraction of what it was, and the meetings feel a little more effortful each time. None of these guys are bad friends. I’m not a bad friend. We’re all just busy people whose lives stopped intersecting in any structured way, and the friendship, however deep we thought it was, turned out to need that structure more than any of us realized.

I came across a phrase recently from Mary, a friendship educator who posts as @better.social.skills, that finally gave me a word for what’s been happening. She calls it interaction momentum. The idea is straightforward enough: friendships that are in regular motion stay in motion almost on their own, and friendships that stop require a real push to start again. Once I had the phrase, I started seeing it everywhere in my own life.

Here’s the pattern worth noticing:

The cost of the next interaction is set by how recently the last one happened.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. But it changes how you think about almost everything in adult friendship.

The friends I see most aren’t necessarily the ones I’m closest to. They’re the ones whose lives intersect with mine on some kind of recurring basis. Late-night hockey twice a week. The neighborhood guys. The monthly group. None of these started as friendship strategies. They started as activities, or commitments, or things I happened to show up for. But the showing up created momentum, and the momentum did most of the work that I would have credited to the friendship itself.

That’s what makes the group story so disorienting for me. The same structure that built those friendships in the first place was the structure whose removal started killing them. I had been giving credit to the depth of the relationships, when really, a lot of the credit belonged to the calendar.

The thing that makes this hard to see in the moment is that momentum is mostly invisible until you’ve lost it. Nobody walks around thinking, wow, the structural conditions of my Tuesday hockey game are really protecting my friendships. You just show up, you play, you grab a beer, and you go home. It feels like nothing. It’s actually the whole game.

We’re wired to think about friendship in emotional terms. Do I miss them? Do I value them? Are we close? Those questions matter, but they’re downstream of a more boring one: when did we last actually do something together? The emotional answers tend to follow the logistical ones, not the other way around.

For introverts especially (and I count myself here), this reframe is a small relief. Momentum doesn’t require you to feel like connecting on any given Tuesday. It just requires you to show up to the thing that’s already on the calendar. The structure does the emotional work for you. You don’t have to want it. You just have to keep the wheel turning.

The harder part is what to do about the friendships where the wheel has already stopped, or is stopping. Because here’s the thing about a gap: left alone, it doesn’t stay a gap. The longer you wait, the more the silence starts to feel like the relationship itself, until one day you realize you’re not in a lull anymore, you’re just done, and neither of you ever decided that.

I’m still trying with the guys who’ve rotated out of my group. I still believe something can be salvaged, especially with the ones who’ve been meeting me halfway. But I’d be lying if I said I was confident. What I’m learning, slowly, is that good intentions don’t generate momentum. Only motion does.

Things to ask yourself

Which of your friendships are coasting on momentum right now, and which ones have quietly stopped moving?

If you imagined sending a “hey, want to get together this week?” text to three different people, which ones would feel easy and which ones would require a preamble? What does that tell you?

Something to try this week

Pick one friendship where the wheel has stopped, and send the short version of the text anyway. Not the apologetic preamble, just the invitation. Something like “Hey, free for a beer Thursday?”

The reason this is worth doing isn’t that this one text will fix the friendship. It’s that the alternative is waiting until the message feels easy again, and the message is never going to feel easy again on its own. The only thing that resets the cost of the next interaction is having one.

And if you want to protect the friendships that are still in motion, the move is even simpler: don't skip the thing. Whatever your version of late-night hockey is, the recurring thing you almost talked yourself out of this week, go. Not because you feel like it. Because the wheel is turning, and a turning wheel is the most valuable thing you've got.

One hour at a time.

It reminded me of a stat I’d come across a while back: for every hour you run, you gain roughly seven hours of additional lifespan. It’s one of those numbers that sticks because the return on investment feels almost too good to be true. One hour in, seven hours back. Hard to argue with that.

But sitting there, I started wondering. If one hour of running buys you seven hours of life, what does one hour of friendship buy you?

That question sent me down a rabbit hole.

In 2018, researchers from the Copenhagen City Heart Study published their findings after tracking over 8,500 people for up to 25 years. They compared different leisure-time sports against a national death registry to see who lived longest.

Every form of exercise added years compared to being sedentary. No surprise. But the range was staggering:

• Tennis +9.7 years
• Badminton +6.2 years
• Soccer +4.7 years
• Cycling +3.7 years
• Swimming +3.4 years
• Jogging +3.2 years

And the people who spent their time on gym equipment, who logged more total hours of exercise than any other group?

• Gym-Based Activities +1.5 years

The people who exercised the most gained the least.

The difference wasn’t intensity or duration. It was other people. Tennis needs a partner. Soccer needs a team. On the treadmill it’s just you.

A pattern worth noticing:

I look at my own calendar and it’s obvious. Meetings are scheduled. Workouts are planned. Date nights are blocked off. But time with friends? That just sort of... happens. Or it doesn’t.

And somehow the thing that might matter most is the only thing I haven’t been protecting.

Here’s what makes this tricky for me, though. I’m an introvert. My natural pull after any social situation is to recharge alone. Solitude isn’t just comfortable for me, it feels necessary. So there’s this tension I carry: knowing that connection is one of the most important things I can invest in, while simultaneously being wired to avoid it.

But I’ve noticed something as I’ve been writing this book. Every time I choose connection over comfort, I’m glad I did. Not always in the moment. Sometimes in the moment it’s draining. But afterwards, something feels different. Fuller, maybe.

I’ve started making small swaps. I’ll trade a solo cardio session for pickleball when the chance comes up. My wife joins me for strength training sometimes, and honestly those sessions are just better. More enjoyable, more human. I keep thinking I should invite a friend along too. I haven’t done that yet. But I’m going to.

Something to ask yourself:

How often are you taking the easy route? Not the lazy route, the comfortable one. The solo workout instead of the one that requires coordinating with someone. The quiet evening in rather than getting off the couch. The path of least resistance that also happens to be the path of least connection.

I ask myself this more than I’d like to admit. And I don’t always love the answer.

Something to try this week:

Look at your week and find one thing you normally do alone that you could do with someone. A workout. A walk. A meal you’d otherwise eat at your desk. You don’t have to overhaul your routine. Just swap one solo hour for a social one and notice what happens.

Not because a study told you to. Because the version of your week that includes someone else in it might be the one you actually remember.

I’m writing a book about the friendship stuff nobody taught us. If you want to follow along as I figure this out, subscribe and I’ll share what I’m learning each week.

We’re part of what’s called an Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) forum, a small group of business owners who meet monthly for four hours and do an annual retreat together. I joined because I wanted to grow my business. I wanted to be around other founders who understood the challenges I was facing. Friendship wasn’t really on my radar. I had that covered. Or at least I thought I did.

But somewhere along the way, this group became something I wasn’t expecting. And I didn’t fully realize it until I went through the hardest period of my life a few years ago. Several members showed up for me in ways that few others did. Before EO, my friend network was mostly coworkers and neighborhood friends. Great people. But we’d never built the kind of depth that a crisis demands, and that was on me as much as anyone. I wasn’t sharing my bottom 5% with them either. Those friendships just weren’t structured for it. This group was. And the difference was impossible to ignore.

The structure is simple: everything shared stays in the room. You bring your top 5% and your bottom 5%, the highest highs and the hardest lows, and the group shows up for all of it. They challenge you, celebrate with you, and hold you accountable. No advice unless you ask for it. No judgment. Just presence and honesty.

This organization is built for entrepreneurs. But I don’t think the structure needs to be. The confidentiality, the commitment to showing up, the rhythm of meeting regularly, the expectation of honesty. That framework could work for almost anyone. A group of teachers. Neighbors. Old college friends who’ve scattered. The label doesn’t matter. The infrastructure does. And that’s what I keep coming back to.

A pattern worth noticing

During the retreat, we did a variation of psychologist Arthur Aron’s famous “36 Questions” exercise. In 1997, Aron found that when two people answer a series of increasingly personal questions together, they build closeness fast. The key was gradual, reciprocal self-disclosure. Start light, go deeper, take turns. We paired off one-on-one and worked through our own version, moving from easy questions into more personal territory within the same conversation. By the end, I knew things about people I’d been meeting with for years that I’d never thought to ask about.

But those kinds of exercises were maybe four hours of our week. The rest was go-karts through the streets of Tokyo, ninja training, food tours through unfamiliar neighborhoods. Shoulder-to-shoulder stuff. And the conversations that happened in between, walking from one place to the next, throwing out questions in the back of an Uber, sitting around a table after an experience, those were often the moments that mattered most.

I know how fortunate I am to be able to do something like this. A week in Tokyo is a luxury of both time and money, and I don’t take that for granted. We’ve done retreats domestically that were just as meaningful. The location isn’t what makes it work. What matters is the container: the people, the commitment, and the sustained time together. You could do this at a cabin two hours from home.

Because there’s something that happens when you spend several consecutive days with people that a monthly meeting can’t replicate. You see how someone gets ready in the morning. How they navigate a crowded train station. How they interact with a waiter who doesn’t speak their language. Ordinary human behavior you’d never witness in a structured setting. And it changes how well you know someone.

I became genuinely close with one of our newer members over the course of the week in a way that months of meetings hadn’t accomplished. We’d been cordial in our regular sessions, but this trip is where the friendship actually took shape. Not because of any single conversation but because the sustained proximity gave the relationship room to breathe. That’s hard to manufacture in a four-hour meeting once a month.

And I’ve seen what happens when someone in this group goes through a real crisis and the others show up for them. When the structure you’ve built together becomes the thing that carries you through the hardest chapter of your life.

Those two realities sit side by side in my mind. The friendships still taking shape and the ones that have already been tested. Both of them reinforcing the same thing: this stuff matters, and it rarely happens on its own.

Something to ask yourself

Do you have a space in your life where vulnerability is expected and showing up is non-negotiable?

I’m not talking about a group chat that goes quiet for weeks or a friendship held together by good intentions and “let’s get together soon.” I mean a place where the structure itself creates the conditions for depth. Where confidentiality is assumed, honesty is the norm, and you walk away better for having been there.

Most of us don’t. We have friendships that are real but unstructured. Full of warmth but no rhythm. And without that rhythm, even the best friendships tend to drift.

Engineer a collision this week

I’m not going to pretend you can build something like this overnight. It took years for our forum to become what it is now, and we still check in on how it’s going and set goals for the group together every year. This stuff takes maintenance.

But I do think most people are one conversation away from starting.

Think about two or three people in your life and ask yourself: would they show up if I proposed something regular? Not a one-time hangout. Something with a rhythm. Even just quarterly.

You might be surprised by the answer.

This is something I plan to write a lot more about, both here and in the book I’m working on. How to build these kinds of groups. What makes them work. What makes them fall apart. The exercises, the structure, the ground rules. Because I think this might be one of the most important things we can do for our friendships, and almost nobody is talking about how to actually do it.

More on that soon. For now, maybe just sit with the question:

Who would you want in the room?

One friend replied, "I would be up for that one of these days."

That was March 12th. We still haven't gotten together.

And here's the part that gets me: I'm the one who extended the invitation. I put it out there, got the response I was hoping for, and then just... let it sit. Like suggesting it was enough.

"Let's get together soon" might be the most well-intentioned lie we tell each other. Four words that feel like reaching out but cost us nothing. We never attach a date or a time to it. Just the warmth of good intentions with none of the follow-through.

Interestingly enough, I was already thinking about this a few weeks earlier. I was on Andrew McMahon's Holiday from Real cruise in the Caribbean, and one of the supporting acts was a band called Petey USA. They played a song called "Breathing the Same Air" that brought up some powerful emotions I wasn't expecting or prepared for. The whole song is about not knowing what to say to a friend who's going through something hard. So you just show up. And breathing the same air is often enough.

Something about hearing that on a ship in the middle of the ocean made me think about my friendships back home differently.

Maybe the reason "let's get together soon" never turns into anything is because we've convinced ourselves that getting together requires a reason. The golf simulator. A dinner plan. Something worth coordinating around. But the song suggests something simpler. That sometimes just being in the same room is the whole point.

I wonder how many of us are one unscheduled hangout away from feeling whole again.

No agenda, no calendar coordination. Just showing up and breathing the same air.

I'm going to send a different kind of text this week. Not "let's get together soon." Something with a day and a time attached to it.

Or you know what? Maybe I'll skip the text entirely and just walk over.

The headline reads “non-college-educated men most likely to have no close friends.” And the conversation around this data has largely followed that framing. Male loneliness crisis. Men struggling to connect. Men falling behind.

But spend a minute with the actual lines, and a different story starts to emerge.

A pattern worth noticing

Look at the two lines without a bachelor’s degree.

Men without a bachelor’s degree: 21% report having no close friends. Women without a bachelor’s degree: 19%.

Two percentage points.

We’ve spent years treating this as a men’s problem. And the data does show that men without degrees sit at the top of the chart. But women without degrees are right behind them, and their trajectory has been steepening. In 1990, just 2% of women without a bachelor’s degree said they had no close friends. Today it’s nearly one in five.

If we keep framing this as only a male crisis, we’ll miss half the people who are struggling.

Now look at the chart again, but this time compare the top two lines to the bottom two.

Men without a degree: 21%. Men with a degree: 11%. Women without: 19%. Women with: 8%.

The gap between college-educated and non-college-educated adults is roughly double the gap between men and women in either group. And thirty years ago, the education gap barely existed. In 1990, nearly half of Americans with a high school degree or less reported having six or more close friends. Today that number is 17%.

Something structural changed. And it changed along class lines more than gender lines.

So what happened?

College doesn’t make you better at friendship. It just puts you in rooms where friendship happens.

This isn’t about intelligence or social skills. It’s about infrastructure. College gives you four years of repeated proximity with people your age who share your interests. And college graduates tend to carry that pattern of joining things into adulthood: sports leagues, professional groups, volunteer organizations.

But the institutions that used to serve that same function for everyone else have been slowly disappearing. Churches, unions, civic clubs, local organizations. These were the places where friendships formed without anyone having to be intentional about it. As those spaces eroded, the people who depended on them most lost their primary pathway to connection.

And here’s the part that should give all of us pause, regardless of what’s on our wall: those structures thin out for everyone eventually. You graduate. You move. You change jobs. You have kids. The things you used to show up to no longer make it on the calendar. And unless you find new ones, you might start wondering which line on the chart you belong to.

I’ve been sitting with this data for a couple weeks now, and the thing I keep coming back to is how this happens without much fanfare. Nobody announces that they’ve lost their friends. There’s no moment where you look around and think “this is the day my social life collapsed.” It’s just a slow fade. One less person you talk to. One more Friday where the couch wins.

I’ve been thinking about what I can do about it in my own life. One idea I keep coming back to: starting a bi-weekly get-together with a few friends. Something simple, maybe everyone shares music they’ve been listening to lately, we listen together, we talk. Low barrier, easy to repeat. The kind of thing that gives a conversation something to orbit around besides “how’s work?”

The research is pretty clear. Friendship isn’t built on grand gestures. It’s built on showing up to the same place, with the same people, over and over again.

If the structures that used to make that easy are disappearing, maybe the move is to start building our own.

As I was reviewing the data I started thinking about my own life, and a question crept in that I wasn’t expecting…

Do I have any close friends?

Not because the answer is no, but because “close” is doing some heavy lifting in that question.

I have people who know just about everything about me. People who share my values, who I’d trust with anything. But many of them live far enough away that we connect way less than I’d like.

And then there are people in closer proximity who I genuinely enjoy spending time with, but the relationship hasn’t reached that deeper level yet.

So how would I answer that survey question? Yes or no?

I don’t think it’s that simple. I think most of us live somewhere on a spectrum of closeness. Some friends know your soul but you rarely see them. Others you see all the time but the conversation stays on the surface. The research asks a binary question, but real life is messier than that.

And once I started thinking about it this way, I realized something. The gap I feel isn’t about whether I have close friends. It’s about the distance between where my friendships are and where I want them to be. The friends who are farther away, they're not across the country. They're a 30-minute drive I keep avoiding. And the ones who are nearby? They're a deeper conversation I keep not starting. Both just take a little more intention than I've been giving them.

So I’ve identified a place to get started.

I play hockey twice a week. The games are typically pretty late, and my default mode afterward is to change and get home as quickly as possible.

But lately I’ve been thinking about what I’m leaving on the table. There are a couple guys in that locker room I’d like to know better. People who seem like they could become real friends. And every time I rush out, I’m choosing comfort over connection.

This week, I’m going to stay five minutes longer. That’s it. Not a grand gesture. Just five minutes. Enough to ask a question I normally wouldn’t. Enough to let a conversation go somewhere beyond the game.

You might have a version of this in your own life. A room you’re already in where the potential is sitting right there. Maybe it’s worth staying a little longer. Going a little deeper.

See what happens.

When asked what they'd change if they could do it over, the response was consistent and emphatic. Less time on careers. More time on the people who mattered.

The study, led by director Robert Waldinger, found that the quality of our relationships is the single strongest predictor of happiness, health, and how long we live.

Not wealth or career achievement…

Relationships.

I created two charts based on the study's findings to illustrate what this actually looks like across a lifetime.

Take a look:

The top chart shows how most people actually allocated their energy across their 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s. Money and career dominate every single decade. People who mattered get whatever is left over. And health sits somewhere in between, quietly neglected until it demands attention.

The bottom chart shows how the same people, looking back, wished they had lived.

The inversion is striking. In hindsight, people who mattered rises to the top in almost every decade. Money and career shrinks to the smallest portion. Health and wellbeing gets significantly more attention than it received the first time around.

Look at the 50s column in particular. By that decade, the people in the study overwhelmingly wished they had been pouring energy into relationships and health, not chasing more career milestones. But in the top chart? Career is still eating up the biggest share well into their 50s.

That gap between the two charts is where regret lives.

I know this gap well because I lived in it.

I started a business in my early 20s. Worked 10 to 12 hour days for years. My coworkers became my only real social circle, not necessarily because I chose them as friends but because they were the only people I saw. My wife and kids got whatever energy was left at the end of the day, which honestly wasn't much.

I told myself it was temporary. That I was building something. That the sacrifice would be worth it when things settled down.

As it turned out, things never settled down. There was always another milestone, another product launch. And somewhere along the way, the temporary sacrifice became the lasting reality.

What did it cost me? Relationships I can't fully recover. Time with my family I can't get back. And I spent years ignoring my own health because I was "too busy."

I didn't see the gap between those two charts while I was living it. I only saw it looking back.

Why we keep falling into this trap

Waldinger himself addressed this in a talk at Harvard. He said that people tend to focus on money and achievements because they're measurable. We can track a salary increase, count our steps on the managerial ladder, or watch a portfolio grow.

But relationships? They change all the time. They can't be measured the same way. And because of that, we deprioritize them. We pour energy into the things that give us a visible return and neglect the things that give us an invisible one.

The study found that people who were most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80. The most connected people outlasted the wealthiest and the most accomplished.

Waldinger put it plainly:

Loneliness kills. It's as powerful as smoking or alcoholism.

And yet, we keep optimizing for the wrong things.

The part that gives me hope

The researchers found something else that matters…

It's never too late.

People in the study who had struggled with relationships for decades sometimes turned things around in their 50s, 60s, even 70s. They reconnected with old friends. They built new communities from nothing.

Waldinger said, "Old dogs can learn new tricks. We have all these instances where people find the unexpected as they get older. People who are sure they're never going to have decent relationships. Close friends find them. People find love for the first time in their seventies and eighties. We have the data."

That's the thing about those two charts. The gap between them is real. But it doesn't have to be permanent. Every decade is a new bar on the graph. You get to decide how the next one looks.

Something to sit with this week

Look at those charts again. Which decade are you in right now? And does the top chart look uncomfortably familiar?

If it does, you're not alone. Most of us are living the top chart while knowing, somewhere in the back of our minds, that we’d be better off living the bottom one.

The study participants didn't get a second chance. But you're reading this now. Which means you still have time to close the gap.

Maybe that starts with something small this week. A text to someone you've been meaning to reach out to. Or just an evening with your phone put away and a conversation that goes a little deeper than "I'm fine, just busy."

The data is clear. The people who mattered were always the answer. Most of us just figure it out too late.

If this resonated, share it with someone who needs to see these charts. And if you're new here, I write about adult friendship every week because I think it's the most important thing many of us are quietly neglecting. Stick around.

It happens so slowly you don’t even realize you’ve lost something. And if you don’t know you’ve lost something, how could you know to process the grief?

Instead it just lingers. Like a dark cloud that never quite passes. Not sadness exactly, because sadness implies you knew what you lost. This is something different.

This is grief without a funeral.

When friendships end in conflict, at least we know to grieve. We process it. We talk about it with other friends, maybe cry in the car, eventually move on. There’s a clear inflection point. A before and after you can actually point to.

But most friendships don’t end that way. They fade. So slowly you can’t identify when it happened. And because there’s no moment to point to, there’s no grief. There’s just a vague heaviness you’ve been carrying around without knowing why.

I’m starting to wonder how much of the anxiety and loneliness people carry is actually unprocessed friendship grief they never knew they had.

And the reason it never gets processed is subtle. When there’s no clear loss, there’s nobody to blame. So we turn it inward. We tell ourselves we’ve just been busy. That they’ve been busy. That we’ll catch up soon. “Soon” becomes months, months become years, and at some point the relationship quietly closes without either person saying goodbye.

If tens of millions of people have been slowly losing close friends for decades, and none of them recognized it as loss, none of them ever grieved it, we might be looking at something far darker than a loneliness epidemic.

A civilization quietly drowning in despair it doesn’t even have a name for.

But moving past it has to start somewhere.

So here are a few things worth sitting with.

Is there a friendship in your past that ended slowly, without resolution? Not a fight, not a falling out, just a quiet fade you never quite got over?

Have you ever let yourself actually grieve it? Not just think about it. Grieve it. The way you would any other real loss.

And maybe most importantly: does the weight of it still show up somewhere, even if you’ve never connected it to that person?

Engineer a collision this week.

Think of one friendship that faded. Write about it, talk about it with someone you trust, or just sit with it quietly and let yourself feel the weight of it.

Unprocessed grief doesn’t disappear. It just finds other places to live. Naming it is a start.

Teen hangouts dropped off a cliff after 2012. Those teens are now adults in their late 20s and 30s wondering why they have no close friends. We keep treating the loneliness epidemic like it came out of nowhere. It didn't. We just weren't paying attention when it started. Chart

View the post by Chris Carey on X

The chart comes from Jean Twenge’s data, tracked through the Monitoring the Future survey, which has been following American teens since the mid-1970s. It shows the percentage of 12th graders who say they hang out with friends two or more times a week.

For about three decades, that number barely moved. Boys hovered around 80-85%. Girls were close behind. Then, around 2012, it fell off a cliff. By the most recent data, both lines had dropped dramatically, with girls falling the furthest.

2012.
The year smartphone ownership crossed the 50% mark in the U.S. The year Facebook bought Instagram. The year social media went from something teens did sometimes to something they did constantly.

I’m not here to rehash the screen time debate. What I want to talk about is what happened next.

Those teens are now in their late 20s and 30s. They’re the ones sitting in apartments on Friday nights wondering why adult friendship feels so impossibly hard. They’re the ones who have 800 followers and no one to call when life inevitably throws them a curve ball.

And here’s what I keep coming back to: we talk about the loneliness epidemic like it showed up out of nowhere. Like one day everyone just woke up isolated. But that chart tells a different story. It tells us this started over a decade ago, with a generation of teenagers who stopped practicing one of the most important skills for building connection: spending unstructured time together, in person, with no agenda.

Think about what hanging out with friends actually teaches you. How to read a room. How to sit with awkward silence until it becomes comfortable. How to navigate a disagreement without unfollowing someone. How to be boring together, which is where most real intimacy actually lives.

These aren’t things you learn from a screen. They’re things you learn from showing up, repeatedly, in the same physical space as another person. Research from the University of Kansas found that it takes roughly 50 hours of time together to move from acquaintance to casual friend. 90 hours to become a real friend. And more than 200 hours to develop a close friendship. That’s not screen time. That’s face time. Hanging out, joking around, catching up about life.

Previous generations accumulated those hours almost by accident. You rode bikes to your friend’s house. You sat on porches. You drove around with nowhere to go. The infrastructure of friendship was baked into daily life.

When that infrastructure collapsed for an entire generation of teenagers, they didn’t just miss out on hanging out. They missed out on the repetitions. The muscle memory. The thousands of micro-interactions that teach you how to build and maintain a relationship with another human being.

So now we’ve got a whole cohort of adults who are smart, accomplished, and genuinely good people... who feel like they’re failing at something everyone else seems to find easy. And most of them think the problem is them. That they’re too awkward, too busy, or too far gone.

They’re not. They just never got the practice.

This is actually the part that gives me hope. Because if the problem is a skill gap rather than a character flaw, skills can be learned. At any age. It just requires something that feels deeply uncomfortable for people who grew up in the age of optimization: it requires inefficiency. It requires unstructured time. It requires showing up without a clear ROI.

It requires doing the thing that a generation of teenagers stopped doing in 2012.

A pattern worth noticing:

The people who struggle most with adult friendship aren’t lacking social skills. They’re lacking social reps. There’s a difference. Skills can be studied. Reps can only be earned by showing up.

Something to ask yourself:

When was the last time you spent unstructured time with a friend? If you can’t remember, perhaps it’s worth moving up your priority list?

Engineer a collision this week:

Text someone and say something like: “I don’t have a plan, but I’m free Thursday evening if you want to just hang out.” See what happens when you offer your time without packaging it into an event.

If you found this newsletter through a post I shared on X yesterday, welcome. I write about adult friendship every Tuesday because I think it's the most important thing most of us are neglecting. If this resonated, stick around. There's more where this came from.

Then we went to different colleges.

I ended up at the University of Minnesota’s Morris campus while he stayed in the Twin Cities at the main campus. I’d come back on weekends, but I spent most of that time with my girlfriend. Andrew joined a fraternity and built a new group of friends who lived with him in the frat house.

The drift was happening on both sides. I was focused on my relationship. He was building a new life with people who were actually there.

After a year I transferred back to the Twin Cities. I couldn’t stand the small-town vibe of Morris. But by then, a single year apart was enough for the damage to set in.

We did reconnect a few times. My 21st birthday at his frat house was wild. But it was clear we’d gone different directions. I wasn’t into the party scene. He had new friendships that were exciting and right in front of him. Same city again, but we weren’t running in the same circles anymore.

There was no falling out. We didn’t fight about anything. We just drifted.

I got pulled into running my business. He got pulled into his life. One day I was on LinkedIn and saw he’d moved to Illinois with Verizon Wireless - the same company where we’d both worked in high school.

That’s how I found out.

Most friendships end this way. Not with some blowup, just with logistics. Your lives stop overlapping. Different cities, different schedules, different priorities. The everyday proximity that held things together just isn’t there anymore.

I hear about people whose friendships survived college and job changes and moving across the country. I wonder sometimes why ours didn’t. Most of my friendships now have pretty short timelines, which probably says something about this phase of life I’m in.

Sometimes drift is natural. Lives genuinely go in different directions, and that’s okay. But sometimes we let friendships slip that we actually wanted to keep, and “our lives just don’t overlap anymore” becomes a convenient excuse to avoid doing the harder work.

I’m not sure which category Andrew falls into. Maybe both.

What I do know is that overlapping lives isn’t something that just happens to you. It’s something you can choose to engineer, or choose to let fade. The question is whether the friendship is worth the effort when nothing about your daily life naturally keeps you connected.

In regards to Andrew and me, we let our lives stop overlapping, and that was all it took.

Bill Burr has this bit about worry and anxiety that’s been stuck in my head:

You’re gonna be fine. And even if you’re not gonna be fine, isn’t it better to just exist thinking you’re gonna be fine, until it’s not fine?
And then when it’s not fine, then you can just fuckin handle it then.
There’s no sense to ruin it right now, right?

Every winter up here, we all retreat. The bags games stop. The outdoor hangs disappear. And every spring, we pick back up like nothing happened. History would indicate this is perfectly normal.

And yet I’m still running disaster scenarios.

Instead of maintaining the friendship, I’m manufacturing anxiety about whether it still exists. I’m borrowing trouble from a future that probably isn’t coming.

But there’s a third option between “assume you’re fine” and “handle it when it’s not fine.”

You could just ask.

I could text right now. “Hey, we good?” Either I get confirmation and stop wondering, or something actually needs addressing. Either way, I’m not carrying this anymore.

Most friendship anxiety isn’t about real problems. It’s about hypothetical ones we’re too afraid to confirm or dismiss.

So maybe the question isn’t whether you’re gonna be fine?

Maybe it’s whether you’d rather keep worrying or just find out.

Morgan said the guy is “nine-and-a-half out of 10 as a human being.” Kind, dependable, fun to be around. The kind of person who makes you glad they’re in your life.

Then Morgan did the math. If this friend became a wildly successful entrepreneur? Maybe he’d move from a 9.5 to a 9.7 - barely a shift.

The friend is bothered by it though. By his lack of “success” in terms of income and wealth. He’s objectively crushing it as a human being but feels inadequate because the thing he can measure doesn’t reflect that.

Income and wealth are easy to measure. The traits that make someone a great friend aren’t.

What gets measured gets managed. What doesn’t, drifts.

Career has a scoreboard. Salary, title, promotions, net worth. You know when you’re winning.

Friendship doesn’t. No performance reviews. No raises. No dashboard telling you your connection score dropped.

So it drifts. A postponed hangout here, a missed text there. Then you realize you haven’t had a real conversation with your closest friends in months.

You optimized your career because you could see the results. Friendship never had a chance.

Friendship is one of the strongest predictors of health and happiness. Stronger than income after a certain point. But we treat it like something we’ll get to later.

We’re chasing incremental wealth gains while 9.5 friendships drift to a 6 because there’s no alarm bell.

What if you brought the same intentionality to friendship that you bring to your career?

You set a timer to check in regularly. If you don’t respond, it alerts your emergency contact. It exists because people living alone were dying and no one noticed for days, sometimes weeks.

The app has become the most downloaded paid app in China’s App Store history. Over 10 million people have downloaded it in a matter of weeks. Ten million people paid money for an algorithm to ask if they’re still alive.

One user wrote: “For the first time, someone is concerned about whether I’m dead or alive.”

Another: “The scariest thing isn’t loneliness — it’s disappearing.”

A pattern worth noticing

We’ve outsourced caring to technology.

China is facing 200 million projected single-person households by 2030. That’s a 30% solo living rate. But this isn’t just a Chinese problem. It’s a human problem that’s showing up there first because of scale.

The things that used to happen naturally don’t happen anymore. A call. A knock on the door. Just showing up. We didn’t decide to stop. We just got busy. We assumed someone else would check in. We waited for the other person to reach out first.

Meanwhile, people are living entire lives where no one would notice if they disappeared.

A 38-year-old designer in Shanghai who’s lived alone for a decade said this: “I just don’t want to die with no dignity, like the body gets rotten and smelly before it is found.”

The app isn’t protecting against loneliness. It’s protecting against invisibility.

The app works because it’s reliable. It checks in. It follows through. It doesn’t get busy or forget or assume someone else will handle it. It’s more dependable than the people who claim to love us.

The “Are You Dead?” app is a mirror. It’s showing us what we’ve become. A society so disconnected that we need an algorithm to do what friends used to do automatically. What family used to do without thinking about it.

And the algorithm does it better than we do.

Things to ask yourself

Who in your life might be quietly hoping someone will reach out? Not the people who are obviously struggling. The ones who seem fine. The ones who never complain. The ones who would never ask for help even if they needed it.

Engineer a collision this week

Think of one person right now. Someone you haven’t talked to in a while. Someone who crossed your mind recently for no particular reason.

Don’t text them. Call. Or if you’re local, show up.

You don’t need a good reason. You don’t need to explain yourself. Just say: “I was thinking about you. Wanted to see how you’re doing.”

No catching up on six months of life. No agenda. Just letting them know they mattered enough for you to act on the thought.

Do it today. Not tomorrow. Not when it feels less awkward. Today.

Because the alternative is a world where an app has to ask if you’re still alive.

And ten million people are grateful it does.

You’re always the one who reaches out first.

You’re the planner. The one who suggests getting together. The one who sends the “hey, how are you?” text that breaks weeks of silence.

And honestly? It gets old.

You start wondering if these people even think about you when you’re not actively in front of them. You start keeping score. You start pulling back, just to see if they’ll notice. Just to see if they’ll be the one to reach out for once.

Most of the time, they don’t.

And that stings.

A pattern worth noticing

When you resent always being the initiator, you eventually stop initiating. Then the friendship dies. And you tell yourself it died because they didn’t care enough to reach out.

But maybe it died because you were testing someone who was never going to pass that test.

The complication

Some people just aren’t wired to initiate. They’re not thinking about you less. They’re not less invested. They’re just operating with different instincts. For them, friendship is responsive, not proactive. They show up when invited. They engage when reached out to. But they’re rarely the ones making the first move.

If you’re an initiator, this feels unfair. Like you’re doing all the work. Like the friendship only exists because you’re willing it into existence.

And sometimes, that’s true. Sometimes you are carrying a friendship that doesn’t deserve to be carried.

But sometimes, you’re just expecting everyone to have your skill set. Your awareness. Your particular way of maintaining connection.

A way forward

I propose we adapt the Golden Rule more specifically for friendship: be the friend you wish you had. You wish people reached out more? Reach out first. You wish friends checked in? Check in on them.

But here’s what that doesn’t mean: be a doormat. Carry every friendship on your back. Ignore whether anything real is happening.

The question isn’t whether you’re always the one reaching out. The question is: when you do reach out, does something real happen? Do they show up? Do they engage? Do they reciprocate in ways that matter, even if initiation isn’t one of them?

Because resentment doesn’t just make you tired. It makes you stop trying. You pull back to prove a point. To see if they’ll notice. To test whether the friendship can survive without your effort.

And often, it can’t. Not because the friendship wasn’t real. But because you stopped doing the thing that kept it alive, waiting for them to do something they were never going to do.

Questions

Have you pulled back from friendships because you were tired of always reaching out first? What happened to those friendships?

When you think about the friends who don’t initiate, do they show up in other ways? Do they respond when you reach out? Do they invest when you’re together?

Which friendships are worth your initiator energy, and which ones are just draining you?

Engineer a collision this week

Reach out to one friend you’ve been waiting to hear from. Don’t make it a test. Just reach out.

Then pay attention to what happens after you do.

We’d been through things together. We showed up for each other. We had history. Surely they understood what they meant to me, even if I never actually said it.

Then I started wondering how they felt about me.

Not in a needy way. Just the normal uncertainty that creeps in when life gets busy and the gaps between conversations stretch longer. Were we still close? Did I still matter to them? Had I slipped down their priority list without realizing it?

If I was questioning whether they valued me, they were probably questioning the same thing about me. We were both sitting in uncertainty, both making assumptions, both filling the silence with doubt.

A pattern worth noticing

We mistake consistency for communication. We think showing up is the same as saying it matters.

It’s not.

You can be a loyal friend, a present friend, a friend who never misses a birthday or flakes on plans, and still leave people wondering where they stand with you. Because without the actual words, people write their own story. And in the absence of explicit appreciation, the story usually isn’t “they must really value me.”

It’s “maybe I’ve been deprioritized.”

You’re both grateful. You both care. But neither of you says it, so you both end up questioning whether the other one feels the same way you do.

Questions

Which friend are you most grateful for right now?

When’s the last time you told them that?

If you’re questioning whether someone values you, have you considered they might be wondering the same thing about you?

Engineer a collision this week

Pick one friend. Tell them something specific you appreciate about them. Not “thanks for being a great friend.” Something real. Something they did, something they are, something about them that makes your life better.

I started doing this and it changed things. Not just for them. For me too. And I’ve watched it give other people permission to do the same.

Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it. - William Arthur Ward