Pete Wright

One in about six of us is walking around without a single person we'd call close.

And it's not evenly distributed.

Nearly a quarter of adults without a college degree reported having zero close friends.

That is the friendship recession.

It really does.

Yeah.

So beyond the fact that the friendship recession is like a PowerPoint title slag.

Sure.

Yeah, it does capture something real.

And I think our social circles are shrinking, too.

And that decline has been steepest among men whose close friendships have been cut roughly in half since 1990.

And here is, I think, something that's interesting.

The American Friendship Project was a multi-year research effort out of several universities, Nevada, Michigan, there were a bunch of them.

They found something that complicates the doom a little bit.

When they surveyed people in 2022 and 2023, most Americans actually reported having friends.

Over 75% said they were satisfied with the number of friends they had.

But this is the complication again.

More than 40% said they weren't close to any of those friends or they weren't as close as they'd like to be.

So separate research says, and I guess I would use the word acquaintances, that they have a lot of acquaintances, but no close friends.

And that leans into that shrinkage of our social circles.