A half a century ago, when I was into eastern philosophy, I remember reading one Chinese sage who said “A friend is someone you would travel for days to sit on a log and toss pebbles in a stream with.” Apparently, Chinese had no rule about ending a sentence with a preposition, especially if you absolutely had to end a sentence with a preposition for it to make sense…
When you’re young, a lot of your friends are parents of children your children are friends with. If you move after your children have moved out, you don’t have shared experiences with other parents. You’re not sitting in the bleachers at little league games or soccer matches, you’re not chaperoning school dances or field trips, you’re not hanging out at the pool together while the kids are swimming or running into folks at the playground. I moved after my children were in college, and other than my nearest neighbors and people at work, I’ve made no friends in my new location, and I’ve been here better than five years.
Now imagine not being close to your neighbors, and no longer working (or working at home).
As part of my work I visit a retired persons home most days - unless you’re with a partner or living with family, by our 70s most people seem to be alone.
You might get a family visit once in a while but otherwise we are all waiting for Godot.
Have you considered joining a gentleman’s club? No, not that sort; the old sort.
I’m watching this play out with my aging parents. Extroverts in every sense of the word, they are now dealing with their rapidly declining social life, and not well. It is apparently very difficult to maintain even a minimal social net in your 80’s following strokes, health problems and the inevitable passing of their age group. I suspect it’s much harder for socially active extroverts to deal with this in later life. My folks consider a normal gathering to be 30 or more at their house (parties rotated weekly amongst the revelers). They seem almost dependent on the company of others and I’m worried about them.
In contrast, my wife and I are extremes in the other direction, and haven’t had 30 people total in our house in the 25 years we’ve lived here. Exactly one neighbor has been inside our home, and that was for a beer after he helped me repair a fence. We are giddy with the prospect of retirement because it relieves us of the obligation to socialize at work and will allow us some of the solitude we desire. We’re busily outfitting and testing a cruiser that will allow us to spend weeks at solitary anchorages, rather than the precious few days we currently get work schedules. I can’t imagine (beyond having physical needs met) that the solitude of old age will bother either of us.
I feel sorry for extroverts like my parents who view a silent room as a social failure. Aging must be very miserable for them. My personal take is that Maslow’s pyramid only has seating for one at the top, and life is easier for those content with their own company.
Oops!
As I mentioned, before, most posts focus on friends/friendships, either under the assumption the people in question aren’t married or that the question is about social isolation from friends, as opposed to social isolation in general. If one gets along with one’s spouse one is not IMO ‘socially isolated’ just because they don’t have many friends otherwise.
We’re half like you guys. I’m pretty anti-social. My wife is perhaps average. She has one network of friends, all married women, but where the husbands are never brought into it: what a relief 
from my POV. In another separate social set the husbands are included time to time. I’d call those guys ‘friends’ to be polite but not close at all, really kind of chore for me to attend those things. It’s not because there’s anything wrong with them, or me IMO, just not that much in common. But the point is she, and our grown kids who live nearby and our extended families also time to time, are mainly what prevent me from being actually social isolated.
I’m no gentleman.
Sounds like a great fantasy. Unless, of course, one of you has a heart attack or stroke, or gets Alzheimer’s … or like me, wake up one morning unable to walk more than 30 feet, permanently. Old age catches up to everyone, some earlier than others. Don’t assume you’ll be one of the lucky ones.
Siam Sam has the right idea. To a certain extent, when people are younger, they tend to have that “college attitude” where their friends are basically the people they party, do drugs and listen to bad music with. Usually in the context of trying to get laid.
Is that how you get rid of your annoying friends? :eek:
A bit of a turn to the thread, but as OP I don’t feel too bad about it… this exchange has hit on another aspect of how later life falls apart… the dangerous myth of retirement. The idea that you live one life until you’re done with it, then make some major change, up to and including a 90-degree turn, into the life you think you want… pernicious, deadly nonsense on every level.
Florida is filled with disconnected, isolated people who ran away from their former life for golden years of fun’n’sun’n’play, leaving behind a lifetime of friends, family, community, and roots. It doesn’t work for everyone. I’d argue that it doesn’t work well for many. But it’s the shuck we’re sold first to keep us “productive” well past the time most of us would like to start slowing down and changing course, and then to milk us of our accumulated wealth. (Exhibit number 1: the huge RV or cruiser that was going to be the next ten years’ life, parked or docked and deteriorating because neither partner could quite manage it any more, nor be far from continuing medical care.) And since these expensive life plans often come at the cost of selling or abandoning all else… more isolation, plus self-inflicted financial wounds.
Good luck to you, pullin, really. But hearing about plans like yours make me shiver from too much observed experience… as much as plans by new parents about how well they’re going to raise the new baby make me laugh.
/hijack
And some times it’s a lot more difficult than others. My last job had different hours than every other office-based job in the area; 9-18:30 with a 90’ lunch break would have been considered great in Madrid or Barcelona (in fact, I’m now in Barcelona and we have those same hours, but I don’t take the break and leave early), it was viewed as quite horrible in Valladolid, where most office-based workers leave by 16:00 at the latest and many shift-based jobs are held by people over 30 in the morning, youngsters in the afternoon. As every course, collective sport, gym class, volunteer work… in the area was based on expecting people to be available after 16:30, those particular working hours were death on anybody’s social life. Easiest way to hire someone off that company: offer 8:00 to 16:00, no lunch break (you can use one of your two legally-ordered 15’ breaks to have a sandwich or a tupper).
Exactly. Not wishing to rain on anyone’s parade, but I never expected my slim, active husband, aged 55, to suddenly drop dead 6 weeks after having been given a glowingly clean bill of health from his physician after a complete physical and leaving me alone. Life (or death) may happen no matter what other plans we may be making.
I, too, am very comfortable with my own company and being on my own for long stretches of time. Good thing, as it turns out.
The main point of my original post was to share how easy it can be to sink into isolation as we advance in age. As Broomstick points out, the older you get, the more you have to work at remaining social – especially if your inclination is to prefer solitude. But sooner or later, most of us need help with some task, miss having a stimulating conversation with another adult, may crave physical touch if only a brief hug – especially if the unimaginable happens to your life partner. You can’t just manufacture such friends as the situations arise. Like it or not, you have to make/take the time to cultivate them.
Nava, yes, life circumstances can seriously get in the way of having a social life. I live about an hour each way from the main town in my area, so getting together with the urban friends requires a significant investment of time and resources. I do it, at least once a month, because the benefits far outweigh the costs. But only for quality people with whom I enjoy spending my time.
Were I in panache45’s circumstances, I’m not sure what I’d do. I’m grateful every day for the good health I still enjoy but am painfully aware of how fragile that all can be. I suppose I’d have to come off my little reservation and go live with cats in an assisted living facility. Not exactly anyone’s dream of a satisfying retirement. But probably realistic. My hugs to you, too, panache, if I may be so bold.
Only a young, healthy person could have written that. When you’re neither young nor healthy, you need other people, not just for socializing, but for help getting through your day-to-day life. My husband has to travel a lot for business, and when he’s away, there are any number of things I’m unable to do by myself. And it’s not easy for him either. He has to come home from an exhausting trip, to chores that need to be done (and having to listen to me whine about my problems :rolleyes:).
My apologies if my post sounded callous, following yours about isolation and age-related difficulties. That was not my intent, and I don’t assume the good luck will always continue. This is one reason we attempt to enjoy everything we can now, and hope to retire early to allow some “time off” while still physically able.
I believe your post is excellent advice, especially for the “Leave everything and retire to Florida” crowd. I understand the danger of a major life change that is difficult to undo. I have watched several of the scenarios you describe play out; Most recently relatives that sold the house and retired completely to a large RV. I thought it was a bad idea since it was not only their first RV, it was their first time in an RV. It will be interesting to see how this works out.
However, in our case we have never had the support network you describe and a large part of our life has been nomadic as we followed economic trade winds. We also have extensive experience in this sort of thing, having owned 6 RVs of various sizes, and 10 boats so far. Since we’re only moving the boat to the coast (not ourselves), I don’t think we’re making too large of a lifestyle jump. We’re just planning longer versions of the short trips we make now.
This is an issue I’ve been dealing with lately, as I’m single, never married, childless, and this past summer, moved to a new city where I know no one, and then turned 40 in the fall.
I never really had the “dormlike, party” attitude when I was younger, even in college. It was always difficult to make friends. I was really shy as a kid, and a total choir boy, so in high school as the friends I’d had started smoking pot and stuff like that, I stopped hanging out with them. When I got to college I was shocked and scandalized by the party attitude–I thought everyone was going to be reading Shakespeare and listening to Mozart and talking like William F. Buckley, Jr. as they debated the finer points of Aristotelian metaphysics, and I remember that heart-sinking, pit-in-the-stomach feeling the first time someone came up to me and said something like “dude, where are you going to get wasted tonight?”
Now, it’s been a long time since I’ve been so naive, but I feel it’s hard to make friends now just because of my station in life. It’s amazing to me to look back on my twenties, and think how most people’s ideal for that time period is to get an apartment with friends within walking distance of a hip urban district, and go to bars and clubs all the time, while what I did was move into a solo apartment in a sleepy suburb and spend my Friday and Saturday nights at home alone playing computer games, hoping against all odds I’d just meet a cute girl to marry who’d enjoy staying in with me.
Honestly, the most active social life I’ve ever had was in my mid-thirties. I had started attending one of these large church “singles” (though it wasn’t only for singles) groups and made a few good friends there. It was amazing; for a period of about 2 years there, I didn’t even have to try to make plans–if I simply did nothing, by the time Friday afternoon rolled around, one of my friends would be texting me to see if I wanted to go to a pub and shoot some pool, or go see a movie, or something else. I even took the opportunity to move into a lakefront house where one of my friends lived with some of his other friends, and there was often something going on there as well. Then, all in the course of about 6 months, everyone moved out of that house, that friend got married, and my other good friend moved hours away. I was basically back in the position I’d been in my entire life until my early thirties.
That church group I went to had an upper age limit of 35, and it was always a running joke that the groups churches have for people older than that were, frankly, somewhat pathetic to people in a younger stage of life; it was well-known that the one at that church was filled with fiftysomething divorcees. Although I’m closer to that age now, that is still not my scene. So making new friends in that type of setting is out for me right now.
Meetup has been mentioned upthread, and I’ve heard that people have had good success with that. I still have this subconscious idea that meeting people online is only for nerds and losers (since I was a computer nerd as a kid and the cool kids didn’t know anything about computers,) but I need to keep reminding myself that everyone’s online now and I’m sure you meet a wide variety of people. But even knowing there are options out there, I definitely identify with what others have said about how the motivation is gone. Unlike when I was younger, when I felt like I could live an entire second life after work, now after a stressful day at work I just want to come home and sit there on the couch and veg out. It almost feels like more effort than it’s worth to browse Meetup, arrange to meet people at a certain time and place, and get in my car and go there. (And the libido isn’t what it once was, so the same goes for Match.com.)
I think what may push me over the edge is the desire not to die alone, because that thought gets more and more depressing all the time. It’s not too late for me, as a man, to father children. The stumbling block there is accepting the idea that I’d be doing what always seemed sad to me, marrying more for companionship than passion, never really having the kind of relationship where you grow together and spend your whole lives together. But the desire not to die alone may get me there soon.
It sounds like you lived a relatively socially isolated life through your 20s and 30s anyway. I’m curious what changed when you turned 40?
Personally, I like to mix things up a bit. During the day I have no problem vegging out watching TV or playing videogames. At night though, I’d rather be out doing stuff. Now that I’m in my 40s, I tend not to get “wasted” anymore. But I still like meeting friends out for a few beers.
How do you expect to do that if you aren’t hanging out with people who get wasted and smoke weed?