A lot of acquaintances: Few friends

Recent polls have pointed to a lot of loneliness. In January 2020, NPR reported that three out of five Americans said they were lonely. There have been other reports which have focused on specific age groups. To find other signs that Americans are lonely, try looking up keywords in Youtube like “no friends.” One video that pops up has the title “21 Years Old: I Have No Friends.” This video is not quite a year old and has 3 million views.

But why are these people so lonely? Is it our use of social media? In fact, the NPR article suggests some accuracy to this claim. Is it the fracturing family? There’s evidence for this as well.

Just a couple months away from my birthday, I could start making my own video called “33 Years-old: No (Close) Friends.”  Looking at my life, I think I see some clues as to why I’m lonely and maybe why other people are.

Early moves as a homeschooler

Like the 21-year-old girl in the video I mentioned, I was homeschooled. When I was turning 13, my parents moved our family to another part of the country. I often wonder if I would have friends if they hadn't done that.

While I imagine this move affected how my high school years went, I’m less sure, unlike the girl in the video, that I can blame homeschooling for feeling friendless. Am I less extroverted than my peers? I think that’s true especially given our hyper-extroversion these days, but a lot of the reasons I am going to list don’t have much to do with being a homeschooler, though maybe they have more than I am aware of, but I'm pretty sure there's no secret thing about homeschoolers. In fact, a lot of us our better adjusted. No, this issue is just across the board. 

My choice of school

As a young adult, I went to a very small Catholic college. There were roughly 100 people at the school when I started. Making friends was very hard. Dating was even more difficult than making friends.  To date there would have been like dating under the microscope.

My school was a typical example of a small, Catholic institution with fiery ideas about what an education should be, ideas made even fiercer because they were mixed with Catholicism. The ideological battles pulled apart friendships that could have existed. Many classmates transferred or dropped out. Ironically, by the time I left, the college had just begun to turn the page and regrow.

Graduating during a hard time and being forced to work in whatever job I could find  

I graduated a year after the great recession, probably not the most auspicious time to try to find work with a degree in literature. My small college didn’t really have any support network or alumni network, and the Catholic, private liberal arts high school near my college didn’t even respond to my resume. So, I fell into a job at Whole Foods Market as a cashier and got another job at a university as a writing tutor. 

I had two colleagues at the writing tutor job—a young man a few years older than me and a woman quite a few years older. WFM was filled with young and old passing through usually after a few months. Nobody at work (both jobs) had my values. My writing tutor colleague was living with his girlfriend. The cashiers at work were trying to score with girls. The girls were drifting through life.

Catholic meetups don’t work out and I decide to move

At this point, all my Catholic college friends had moved back home and my homeschooling acquaintances had drifted away—most were protestant for one. I tried to make connections at Catholic young adult meetups. To go, I often drove an hour or more and lost sleep. I fell somewhere in between the Catholics at the groups—not quite a charismatic and not quite a pure intellectual.  

I got the travel bug probably from seeing friends do it. I also thought I could improve my career somehow by getting a MA in Liberal Arts. I combined travel with study in the end. In retrospect, I was giving up pretty quickly on the opportunities around me. 

Graduate school should have been a time to make new friends, but there really is no one that I currently talk to from either campus I attended (on separate sides of the country). Once more, the culture let me down. My classmates and I shared a passion for the liberal arts, but a lot held very liberal views in comparison to mine.

An unsatisfactory return

Back home, I avoided work at WFM by landing a job at an ESL Adult Academy. Getting the job had everything to do with their need and very little to do with my experience or degrees. Before long, I was juggling different part-time teaching jobs.

Socially, I was also back in the same boat; I was making a lot of acquaintances but not a lot of friendships. I tried to make friends at Catholic meetups and to date but it was all uphill and brutal to do after work sometimes.

Hitting the road again and returning with better work

I’m not sure why I decided to travel again and this time in another country. I have a hunch I was discouraged by my prospects, and in some ways, seeking the introversion of being on the road rather than working at these small Catholic groups which so often let me down. Finally, I ran out of money and had to cancel my travels abroad. Back home, my teaching experience abroad got me a job in a public school—albeit a struggling one. It wasn’t an entirely happy story. Traveling gave me something but a lot of the connections had to end when the trip ended.

Conclusion

Upon finishing, I realize I have a lot in common with the 21-year-old girl in the above video. I was homeschooled; I went to a small school (a college in my case, a high school in hers), and I struggled with feeling shy and socially awkward and different my whole life. I also agree with her points about it being tricky to really start something with someone. I have had many long conversations with people that seem not to result in much more. However, I also see how it was partly my own choice to do things that made making friends harder. Whether these choices were made partly as a result of not having friends or whether they caused the situation is hard to say. 

Beyond this, I also see how my focus on myself got in the way of making friends as well.  I am fascinated by a recent poll that shows that two main reasons why young Americans feel they don't have friends are that they are shy (53%) and because they feel they don’t need friends (27%). To some extent, these were my main reasons, and I think the reason a lot of us don’t have friends. Thus, perhaps, Americans are in a contradictory position, both feeling introverted and not wanting friends but feeling the resulting loneliness strongly.