For the last few decades loneliness has become a devastating trap. A trap made all the worse by Covid.
U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy says the rapid pace of life has increased the problem of loneliness. He coined the phrase “the loneliness epidemic” to capture this crisis, turning loneliness into a national-level public health concern.
The data supports Murthy’s case. The US Surgeon General’s office published research (our Epidemic of Loneliness) in 2023 showing that about half of US adults reported experiencing measurable levels of loneliness.
Loneliness is our body’s way of saying it needs friends. And it matters. The paper comes with dire warnings of the physical consequences of poor social connection: a 29% increased risk of heart disease; a 32% increased risk of stroke; and a 50% increased risk of developing dementia for older adults.
“Scientists have found that of 106 factors that influence depression, having someone to confide in is the strongest preventer. The impact of loneliness on our mortality is akin to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. One study found the most pronounced difference between happy and unhappy people was not how attractive or religious they were or how many good things happened to them. It was their level of social connection.“
– Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How The Science Of Attachment Can Help You Make—And Keep—Friends
As we age, it has been found that our relationships determine not just our wellbeing, our happiness and our emotional resiliency but are a major determinant of our longevity. Friendships in midlife determine your lifespan. With so much at stake, the question then becomes:
“What the hell are you going to do about it?“
The Midlife Squeeze
There is a mathematics to the loss of friendships as we age, with research suggesting that we lose fifty percent of our closest friends every seven years. This slow deterioration is predicated on the forces of time, which bring often heartbreaking attrition and changes in our lived context.
It is also down to the reality that as we age, we become choosier. We know what we need from our friends. Our loneliness is fueled by self knowledge and a kind of longing that is hard to pin down. As we know ourselves better, we long for better, more meaningful friendships. I see this at MEA every single week I have taught. I feel it deeply in my own life. We’re often lonely for the real intimacy of a deep conversation with someone we trust.
One of the reasons it feels harder to make friends after your mid twenties is because it actually IS harder to make friends. The challenge we face in midlife is that the scaffolding for friendship suddenly gets stripped away. The dynamics of going to school or college no longer put us in front of people. Our own kids may no longer be dragging us to endless soccer matches. The incidence of coincidence that brings people into our lives seems to wither away.
On top of that, in our forties, fifties and sixties, our time gets squeezed as we are sandwiched between work pressures, family demands on our time and caregiving needs to parents and our wider community.
So where within that sandwich do you fit in friendships? The science tells us an overwhelming story. According to the work of Robin Dunbar (anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist) we ‘need’ five intimate friends. We need fifteen close friends. We also need fifty good friends. The list continues and becomes impossibly long when you learn that, according to researcher Jeffrey Hall, a new friendship can take two hundred hours to convert into something meaningful and intimate.
Squeezing in friendship
As a young man, I studied philosophy with my friend and mentor Dick Beardsmore. Dick was a rogue philosophy professor, one of those people who taught with a laugh and shared impossible ideas in a deeply relatable way.
In one of our tutorials he told us a story of how someone might fill a jar with rocks.
“Is there space left for anything else?” he asked the group, eyes alight with mischief.
He then told us that there was space for gravel in the jar, adding that the rocks were the big things we have to do and the gravel more like the smaller tasks that fill a day. Then he asked us again: “Is there any space left for anything else?”
Dick then explained that there was space for sand to fill in every single space in between the rocks and the gravel. The sand represented the infinite little things that fill our days.
“Surely now the jar is full?” he asked. Then, with a magicians flourish, he brought out a can of beer, cracked it open and drank a sip. “There is always room for beer,” he said, laughing as he mimed pouring the beer into the jar. As students, we were shocked. As a teacher, he was delighted.
It was one of those teaching moments I have found myself coming back to. I have since heard the story told differently (though never involving beer), always shared to suggest that we have more time in our days than we might think.
The way Dick told the story focused on the interstitial space for the good things in life. As I look back at that story forty years later, I think that he was suggesting something deep.
The work of the good life – for example, being friendly – isn’t something that happens outside of the rocks and gravel of the day. It is something that soaks into every second and permeates the rocks and gravel of our days.
I have come to see that maybe friendship isn’t an action apart from what we believe to be important. Maybe friendship, done right, is the action.
As is always the way, no sooner had I had this thought than I learned there are practices that are referred to as “integrated practices.”
An integrated practice is, as the name suggests, a practice that becomes integrated into our lives and the way we are. A dedicated practice is one that we make time for and fit into our schedules. So, if you do mindfulness meditations every morning (a dedicated practice), you do it not to be more mindful only in that moment. You meditate so that you become more mindful in all the moments of your life, integrating mindfulness into your way of being.
So too with friendship. The things we do, the dedicated practices in friendship might include keeping a “tickle list” of friends we reach out to every month. The integrated practice might be smiling and saying hello to someone because it makes us feel better.
As I think about the intimidating numbers associated with friendship – the hours we need to make a good friend, the friends we lose, the time budgets a practice requires – I start to feel defeated.
And when I share these numbers with others, many of them immediately deflate and throw their hands up and say, “I have no time for this.”
I talk about culling minutes out of the social media time budget – the 7.5 hours we spend on average on screens. While people get the math, I see their skepticism and frustration. I see how friendship can become another load to add to a busy day.
So I started to look at people who were really good at friendship. How did they make the time for friending? If we can’t find new time for friendship, was there a secret to the way they were already spending their time? Could friendship be an integrated practice?
This seems like a critical question to explore in midlife. Behavior change science shows how the tiniest incremental changes can lead to deep shifts in a life. In fact, as far as I can tell, tiny changes are the only way we can change our behavior. What are the simple shifts in how we do what we already do that can be optimized for friendship? How can we accept that friendship isn’t something apart that happens “outside the jar,” but something that happens in between every part of the big things we have to do every day?
Always be friending
What I have seen is that the way to make friendships in the busy time of midlife is to make friendship integral to everything we do. That means making friendship the connective tissue between our daily actions, presencing friendship into the moments between the things we already do. When we text for work or school, when we walk between the car and the house, when we decompress for the day on the couch.
A midlife friendship practice isn’t about finding extra time for friendship. It’s about becoming a little friendlier in the things we do all the time.
How does this actually work? In my friendship practice, I call people when I am alone in the car. It may sound dumb. But I make a point of connecting on a long drive with someone I haven’t talked to in a while. Long car journeys are now hallowed friendship time for me. I’m careful who I call. I pick someone I haven’t spoken to in a while and just call. Sometimes they can answer. Sometimes not. I may try two or three friends on a drive and see who turns out to be available.
As I read the news, I’ll ping a friend an article I’ve enjoyed. As I’m discovering new things for myself, I share them with my friends. I share a new song I love with people I know love music, one by one. A good book, same thing. My portfolio of friends all like something different. Each share is a tiny spark of reconnection, a recognition of our friendship. Even if we don’t speak often, it will sometimes prompt a conversation or a shared moment between us.
When something makes me laugh, I share it with anyone I think may laugh with me. When something makes me cry or shocks me into deeper thought, I share it as well.
Here is the trick: I don’t share on social media. I don’t do group texts. I send a specific person a specific text. Even if I share something with several friends, I share it with them one by one, directly. The communication is personal, attuned, curated and targeted. Communicating with friends is a tiny investment, a moment of shared psychic treasure. An energy put into your relationship.
This is one of my key maintenance strategies, and one of the key maintenance strategies I’ve seen people who successfully friend use as well – especially for friends who are far away. That ping is like an echo location. Are you there? Are you OK?
It’s one of the few times our communications media seems to actually work for us. It is also incredibly important not to get tangled up if you haven’t connected with someone in a while. Do they want to hear from you? Likely yes. Go ahead and reach out. Make a connection.
“Always be friending” isn’t just about cultivating our intimate friendships. In their study, Mistakenly Seeking Solitude, Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder gave people stepping onto a train a $5 Starbucks gift card to either sit in deliberate solitude the entire ride or to start a conversation with a stranger. While the majority of participants predicted they’d enjoy solitude more, the study found that people who talked to strangers had an overwhelmingly more enjoyable experience.
We seem to believe that meeting people will somehow be hard. Intrusive. Problematic. That we will enjoy our own company more. A big part of “always be friending” seems to rely on rewiring and reimagining our belief systems. People enjoy people. There are times, when you are out in the world, when it is safe to do so, that it may make sense to reach out and connect.
Five ways to redesign an adult life around friendship.
So what are the key strategies for friendship in midlife? I’ve boiled them down into the following practices that roll one into another to create a kind of midlife friendship system.
Friend the ordinary: Turn ordinary life into opportunities for connection.
Friendship doesn’t need to become another task or burden for you to feel bad about neglecting. The trick is to friend the life you already have. Talk to the person beside you on a plane, on a train. Make the school pickup a social moment. Ask a colleague a real question rather than just exchanging information. Share the song, article, joke, photograph. Turn your routines into something relational. Don’t find more time for friendship. Make the time you already have more friendly.
Make It Specific: Friendship grows through specific attention, not broadcasting.
“I saw this and thought of you.” Make your communications specific, personal and reciprocal to someone in your life. This practice is bigger than just how you communicate. It is about knowing people well enough to know what goes to them. You know who loves music. You know who needs a laugh. You know who is struggling. You know who would love the book. You know who needs to hear, “I was thinking about you.” Pay attention to the particular people in your life by building a practice around tiny and consistent acts of recognition.
Lower the Bar. Stop making friendship dependent on the perfect interaction.
Midlife friendship gets strangled by our own judgment. Our actions get crowded out by thoughts like, “It’s been too long. I should have called sooner. They probably don’t want to hear from me. We’re not that close anymore. They’re busy.”
As a rule, assume people want to hear from you unless they have told you that they do not. Go ahead. Connect. Remember the easiest friend to make is one you already have. But even with strangers we systematically underestimate the relational value of small encounters. Lowering the Bar Means not waiting for the perfect moment to connect with someone in your life.
Build Your Own Scaffolding. Replace the accidental friendship architecture of your childhood with the intentional architecture of adulthood.
When you’re young, friendship is structurally easy. As we age, nobody is putting potential friends into the room with us anymore. So as adults, our friendship practice demands we build the structures that childhood gave us for free. Create a tickle list. See up recurring dinners. Create a weekly walking group. Set up annual trips or standing calls with friends. Whatever you do that builds a predictable cadence wins!
Don’t wait for coincidence. Create the cadence for connection.
Let yourself be known. Cultivate depth by noticing others and revealing yourself
We can become very good at maintaining friendships without ever allowing ourselves to be truly known. We share the article, make the plan, have the drink, catch up on the news. But intimacy requires something more. It requires revealing a little of ourselves. The fear, the uncertainty, the longing, the ridiculousness, the thing we’re proud of. Friendship grows in the space between being seen and seeing someone else. In mid life. What we long for is deeper, more meaningful friendships.
That meaning starts with what we are willing to share.
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Ready to invest more energy into your own friending practice? Join Jeff at one of his upcoming Power of Friendship workshops. The next one is happening November 1–5, 2026 in Baja and we would love to see you there. See workshop details here.