At some point it becomes suddenly, disconcertingly clear that we have very few pals left
By George Chesterton 24 July 2023 • 8:00am ‘I’m both envious of those who appear to have lots of friends and suspicious of how they’ve acquired them’
Five times a year. That’s how often I see the friends I have left. It feels like slim pickings for a man with my winning personality. What happens to male friendship in middle age? The question comes with a pang. Am I missing out, or deficient in some way? I mean, I have plenty of friends. Well, I have a decent number of friends. OK, I have a few friends.
I’ve talked myself into a kind of loneliness that’s hard to justify given that I’m surrounded by so much familial love. (“Poor widdle me,” as Kim Jong-il once sang in Team America.) I’m both envious of those who appear to have lots of friends and suspicious of how they’ve acquired them.
“Friends” is a dominant theme of the cliché-industrial complex, appearing in an endless feed of Facebook platitudes and Instagram posts. Taylor Swift said, “All you need to do to be my friend is like me”, which is either very profound or very stupid. Let’s assume it’s the former and that a definition of friendship is unconditional affection, rather than needy sycophancy. If I’m Billy No Mates, and Taylor is correct, then it means I don’t like many people and they don’t like me. So I appear to have brought this on myself.
This phobia of being clubbable is perhaps best expressed in a passage from Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22, when Colonel Korn finally consents to send Yossarian home from the war on one condition.
“What must I do?”
Colonel Korn laughed curtly.“Like us.”
Yossarian blinked. “Like you?”
“That’s right,” said Colonel Korn. “Like us. Join us. Be our pal … Become one of the boys. Now, that isn’t asking too much, is it?”
“That isn’t going to be too easy.”
To truly like a person, you need trust, and that requires emotional investment – an increasingly rare commodity as you age – so as old friends fade away, they cannot simply be replaced. The space to build trust with newcomers is just not there.
Most often your partner becomes your best friend by default, which is no bad thing, while an imperceptible drift from sociability takes place over the years – sometimes it’s because of children, sometimes physical distance, sometimes lifestyle choices, like religion or polyamory.
Lasting significance
It doesn’t help that three of my oldest friends are currently unavailable. Of the men I spent most of my youth and young manhood with, one is in Los Angeles, another lives an alternative lifestyle in Devon and the third joined me in a spectacular falling out that killed our 30-year relationship overnight (mostly my fault, naturally).
It’s easier to be blasé and picky when you are young. There are so many friends to choose from and so many relationships you can roll into and out of again without the sense of any lasting significance. Having so few friends can’t be foreseen at 21, but maturity nudges out the immediate need, with the hours dominated by family and work. Once-intense friendships blow up or become diffuse, yet I still see other men managing it better than me.
Moments of envy that other men my age have armies of besties are countered by the cynical assumption that to have so many must mean a decent proportion are false or flimsy in some way. If friendship means something, then how can it be so effortless for these mysteriously popular men, who dangle their mates like an ageing hipster’s neck chains?
The more I witness friendship groups treating Glastonbury like a middle-aged Christmas (“only six sleeps to Glastonbury”), the less I want to know. It’s the fun that really puts me off. I carry the remembrance of festivals past, which is enough to dissuade me now. It’s great if 250,000 people want to enjoy music and drugs in a pop-up town with less diversity than Antiques Roadshow, but don’t sell it to me as a return to Eden. This is the kind of sentiment that evinces comments such as “I feel sorry for you”. They’re not necessary. I already feel sorry for myself.
Design and necessity
Apparently there is a dire need for a safe space for men, which is a bit like saying grey squirrels need a safe space from red ones. But I would concede there is a particular state of ease that’s only possible for men among other men.
There is also consolation that with those few friends you have left, months or even years between meetings are written off with the wave of a hand. Just as well really. This is when you notice the unfettered affection and loyalty male friends feel for each other. It’s kept simple by design and necessity.
Having lost interest in football I’ve destroyed 50 per cent of my conversation options – and I wasn’t exactly Bantersaurus Rex to begin with. Male bonding is sometimes little more than a home-cooked version of a radio phone-in on an infinite loop.
True male friendship is paradoxical, in that it is intimate without intimacy. Men neither touch each other physically nor discuss anything directly – what is said out loud is trivial and everything important is unspoken. If a subtext is identified, it’s quickly ignored before moving on, since no man wants to turn a subtext into an actual text over a few beers.
Like a lot of things about getting older, acceptance is the only meaningful response. My friends are real. My loneliness isn’t. It’s a product of a faulty memory and an ego that hasn’t yet burnt itself out. At least we have yacht rock to talk about. During those occasional and precious tribal gatherings, you all become carriers of each other’s memories, like the shaman or village poets who guard the oral history of your collective lives.
If you want lots of friends, you will probably have lots of friends. Therefore, if I don’t have many, I must not need many to begin with. Either that or I’m unbearable. Answers on a postcard, please. But don’t expect a friendly reply.
This part stuck out to me. When I was younger I often got myself into bad situations that presented opportunities form connections through shared experiences. As I get older I’m fucking up less and when I do it’s just me trusting myself and going through it alone.
To truly like a person, you need trust, and that requires emotional investment – an increasingly rare commodity as you age – so as old friends fade away, they cannot simply be replaced. The space to build trust with newcomers is just not there.
I think the unsaid part is just time spent together- when you’re a kid it’s easy to have dozens of hours a week to hang out and bond. As you age, there’s other time commitments - kids, spouse, family, maintaining a house, etc. In order to have that emotional investment you need to get past the awkward first stages of friendship.
I think a lot of people lose/drop their hobbies, or the things that let them bond and meet other people. It’s hard to say “I dropped football and now I lost 50% of male conversation” without more info. If all your friends are only bonding over football, yeah. So find other things to do! There’s a million of them, and people are always passionate about their own interests. Find people with similar interests.
The author also mentions “it feels like they’re always just someone’s partner” and that’s very telling. Are the only men you’re engaging with those who are partners of your own spouse? Well no shit you’re not feeling like you have friends. I like my wife’s friends partners, but they’re firmly in the acquaintance category.
I had a good friend move to the same small town I’m in. Between work and family, we don’t get together for months on end, even though he’s a 5 min drive down the road. We want to get together, but we’re both too exhausted and burnt out.
It’s also the societal loss of “3rd places”. There’s home, work, and then… where else do you actually meet people? And if you do, where do you connect with them? Especially low-cost and not health-damaging like a bar…
He has long list of terrible shit he’s done, but this is literally nothing lol
People acting like he stole someone’s property. He changed the username of some random squatter on his own personal website.
Which also there’s a huge underground communities who hack, trade, and sell these “rare” usernames. So no doubt it was owned by some squatter or someone who obtained it through malicious means.
So you’re saying rare usernames have a monetary value, but also that it’s perfectly fine for a website to steal these rare usernames because the man-child owner of the site has a weird obsession with a certain letter of the alphabet? And how do you know they obtained it via “malicious means” and not that they weren’t just an early adopter of twitter?
The fact that he’s treating twitter like his “personal website” is part of the problem.
It’s not stealing. He owns the website. It literally is his personal website. Tf are you guys smoking. Usernames are not property. The entitlement here is ridiculous and just objectively wrong.
Where is the part where that matters in the slightest. Still a username on a live service that is subject to change at any time, and there has never been an expectation of ownership.
Where is the part where that matters in the slightest.
You are proposing that, in justification of the dick move, this user is “no doubt” squatting or obtained the username maliciously when that isn’t the case based on the third paragraph of the article and other interviews with the original registrant of the handle. I don’t really think that’s a good faith discussion.
Regarding your second sentence, I don’t disagree but at I’m also not trying to make a point beyond my first reply of “sometimes you shouldn’t do things that you are able to do”.
I’m guessing he’s trying to spell something dirty again with his companies like he did with the Tesla models (S, 3, X, Y). Dude basically is a 13 year old boy if they were given billions of dollars.
Ford really should have released the electric Mustang as the Model E. Not only because Mustang was a bad brand to use for that but because Elon losing his shit about it would have been hysterical and free PR.
I don't understand how he expects to brand a letter. It'll do poorly in any kind of searching. Especially since it's a common letter to see on its own.
The part I’m really blown away by is that I just saw this final project in the intro to design class I teach from a group of international students earlier this spring. The project was to create a logo design and brand guidelines as a small team. The students can pick the business and whether it’s new or a rebrand, and this group went with social media all-in-one apps and made the justification that they are hugely popular in China, but nothing like that exists in the US. My favorite part is that the letter X was a HUGE part of the logo/branding, but they did not name it just “X” specifically for the reasons you listed - it’s not discoverable or unique in searches, the App Store, etc.
From the article: "... is seeking to make X into a “super app” that features not only Twitter’s existing social networking and messaging features, but also payments and banking as well as video."
Stealing users data and accounts then using them for their own purposes seems like a great way to get people to trust you with their banking information.
Yeah, it's like if you took "google.com" from Alphabet and replaced it with "google12345678998765.com"; they had a web URL and they still have a web URL so it's basically the same thing.
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