The Friendship Recession - Rob Horowitz

The Friendship Recession - Rob Horowitz

“I believe we gotta forgive and make amends cause nobody gets a second chance to make new old friends,” sang Luke Bryan in his 2017 country hit, “People are Good.”   Well, it seems that we are not only making and keeping fewer old friends; we are making far fewer new ones.   This all adds up to what Daniel Cox, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), has aptly dubbed America’s friendship recession.

 

Over the past 30 years or so, the number of friends Americans have dropped precipitously. In 2021, nearly half of Americans said they had three or fewer friends, while in 1990, only 27% indicated having that small a number, according to a recent Surgeon General’s report on the loneliness epidemic. The decline is particularly pronounced among men.

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This rollback of friendship has large individual and society-wide consequences. Fewer friends make our private lives less rich and satisfying, contributing to the growing sense of loneliness and isolation too many of us experience. At the same time, it also reduces social capital, reducing participation in the community and the public square.

 

As Daniel Cox points out in a recent article, “Friendship predicts community involvement and civic participation.”   Americans with more close friends attend far more local meetings and events, volunteer more than those with fewer or no close friends and even are more likely to strike up conversations with strangers.  For example, “Sixty percent of Americans with at least six close friends say they have attended a local event or community meeting at least a few times in the past 12 months compared to only 33 percent of those with no close friends,” according to Cox.

 

The marked decline in friendship has a major structural component.   As more of us live alone, less of us are married, and more work is done remotely, our sources of new friends have greatly shrunk.  While young people, who meet people at school, at camp, and at youth activities, are still making a good number of friends, adults and particularly older adults are too often not.  Only about 4 in 10 seniors, for instance, “say they have made a new friend in the past year.” 

 

There is still widespread recognition of the importance of friendship. Nearly 6-in-10 Americans “say having good friends is essential to a fulfilling life,” nearly 3 times as many as say “being married is essential,” according to the AEI’s Survey Center on American Life.

 

In today’s America, however, making friends as an adult requires a proactive purposeful approach. It is up to each of us to redouble our individual efforts.  These are efforts that will pay dividends.  We will not only enrich our own lives. Together, more friendships will contribute to stitching back together our communities and our nation.