Social Life
Why Making Friends as an Adult Is So Hard (And How to Fix It)
Remember being a kid? You’d walk up to someone at the playground, ask if they liked dinosaurs, and suddenly you were best friends. Then you grew up.
Now scheduling a simple coffee feels like negotiating a peace treaty. Everyone is busy, everyone is tired, and meeting new people feels… awkward.
You’re not the only one
The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on loneliness reported that about half of U.S. adults say they’ve experienced loneliness, and that Americans spent about 20 minutes a day with friends in person in 2020, down from about 60 minutes nearly two decades earlier (source). The problem usually isn’t that we don’t want to socialize. It’s the method.
Most of us rely on three ways to meet people:
- Work: do you really want to talk spreadsheets on a Saturday?
- Bars and clubs: loud, expensive and hit-or-miss.
- Dating apps: fine for romance, not much help finding a tennis partner.
The fix: activity-based socializing
The trick to making friends as an adult is to stop trying to “make friends” and start trying to do things.
When you meet someone for a coffee, the pressure is all on the conversation. If there’s a silence, it’s awkward. When you meet to play padel, hike a trail or see a museum, the focus is on the activity, and the conversation happens in the gaps.
Why doing beats talking
- Shared context: you already have one thing in common, the activity.
- Low pressure: if you don’t click, you still got a good workout or saw a good film. It wasn’t a waste of time.
- Follow-through: people are more likely to turn up for something specific they want to do than for a vague “let’s hang out sometime.”
Sodalit: the app for doing
We built Sodalit around this idea. No swiping, no matching: every plan starts with an activity, from a coffee to a padel match, across 53 activity types.
On Sodalit you don’t look for “people.” You look for tennis, cinema or a study session, and the people come with it.
How to break the cycle this week
If you’re stuck in work, home, repeat, here’s your challenge:
- Download Sodalit. It’s free.
- Pick one hobby you’ve neglected, like running.
- Post a plan for Saturday morning.
- Approve requests from people with a solid Reliability Score.
Don’t let your social life depend on your friends’ schedules. Take the lead, find your people, and most importantly, don’t do it alone.
