Yeah my wife and I spend a fair bit of effort trying to make friends. It is remarkable how resistant many people are, immediate shutdown. And very noticable when someone is willing to open up a bit and allow repeated encounters etc. One of my guesses is that most people are poorly equipped for any divergences in people around them. They like very homogeneous social groups. So the great divergence happening where everyone is getting more and more different from each other has really weirded them out.

The death of hanging out

Derek Thompson has a new post in his newsletter about how no one is having dinner parties any longer. 

There’s lots of stats about how badly social life has collapsed in America. You can click on the link to see them. It’s bad.

From my own experience: I live in a very small town. One of my oldest friends lives across the street. I could throw a baseball to his house. We do get together roughly every week or two, usually with another friend. So that’s good. But we never stop by each other’s place. Even though we are both just right there. It just doesn’t feel right. 

And I think that speaks to the larger unease we all have with, I suppose, imposing on each other. We all err on the side of staying out of each other’s hair.

One small part of his post jumped out at me: the fact that we are exercising more but we also tend to do that alone.  Maybe I just recognize myself in this, as a longterm gym denizen? But I think it points to something deep about this reluctance to get to know each other.

He writes:

As I wrote in an essay last year on the “great American exercise boom,” the evidence suggests that, despite the increase in running clubs, the surge in exercise time seems to be mostly solo. A lot of people are going to the gym with a podcast to keep them company (e.g., me) or rolling out a yoga mat in the basement by herself (e.g., my wife).

If you go to the gym, you have probably noticed that hardly anyone ever talks to anyone there. It is very weird to talk to strangers at the gym.

In the gym I’ve gone to here in small town America, there is a clique in there that chats a lot, but most people don’t. This is strange to me, because those of us who go are so unusual here. We’re all in decent shape! That is very counter-cultural in the Midwest! You’d think we’d bond over being such local freaks! But we don’t. 

We keep to ourselves.

Even in group exercise is alienated. You might do the same class every weeks for months, but will you ever learn the names of the people you do the class with? In my experience, probably not. I’ve logged an unbelievable number of hours in group exercise, but I have seldom made any friends there.

You might just say: Well, you’re a weird guy Brady. True. But I also didn’t see it happening between others. People didn’t talk to each other much. They just came in, did the thing, and left. 

Folks just aren’t bridging the stranger gap to get to know each other. 

Even when we do gather in a room together, do a thing we share as a common interest, on a regular basis, week after week, we don’t get to know each other along the way. 

That’s a little unsettling.

What bothers me the most is that I have no idea what anyone could do about it. It seems to me that all of this speaks to a very deeply-rooted rot in our culture. 

—Brady Dale
September 30, 2026

from Brady Dale's blyg ↗ · snapshot of v2