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Who Americans Spend Their Time With (theatlas.com)
Data scientist Henrik Lindberg has a series of fascinating charts based on data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics that show who people in the United States spend their time with over the course of their lifetime. Check out the charts here. From a report on Quartz: Some of the relationships Lindberg found are intuitive. Time with friends drops off abruptly in the mid-30s, just as time spent with children peaks. Around the age of 60 -- nearing and then entering retirement, for many -- people stop hanging out with co-workers as much, and start spending more time with partners. Others are more surprising. Hours spent in the company of children, friends, and extended family members all plateau by our mid-50s. And from the age of 40 until death, we spend an ever-increasing amount of time alone. Those findings are consistent with research showing that the number of friends we have peaks around age 25, and plateaus between the ages of 45 and 55. Simply having fewer social connections doesn't necessarily equal loneliness. The Stanford University psychologist Linda Carstensen has found that emotional regulation improves with age, so that people derive more satisfaction from the relationships they have, whatever the number. Older people also report less stress and more happiness than younger people.
I am reminded of the saying: He who has many friends has none.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
until I got beheaded. Servers me right I guess.
Intereresting data, but not in any way surprising.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Coworkers get the majority of my time. *sigh*
How depressing.
By age 25 most people have usually figured out that other people are assholes.
missing "time with cat" chart.
Emotional regulation could be a side effect of less hormonal urges.
Until your 20s or so, 'friends' are usually the least objectionable acquaintances from school. Now, that's potentially a large pool of people so you can get lucky and find real friends in that group.
For a brief period in your 20s, you may form some friendships with coworkers or somebody you meet socially. Usually a limited pool of people, and that's the pool you're choosing a spouse from.
In your 30s (if you have kids), your friends are the parents of your kids' friends.
It often isn't until retirement that you're actually free to form relationships with someone based on common interests instead of common circumstances. And guess what? They're all old and moderately set in their ways so the odds of a friendship forming are lower. And they're going to die at a higher rate than in your youth, so there's that, too.
Hello "friends"!
I wonder how reading/posting on Slashdot is categorized.
All the people that are wrong on the internet. DUTY CALLS!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
So is slashdot the official reddit recap? This was posted there a week ago.
FTFY :)
For most people, certain types of social interaction are a fundamental need like eating or sleepy. But if you're tired or hungry, it's pretty clear what you need to do to not be tired or hungry (that is, sleep or eat). But it's a lot less clear what a person needs to do to not feel lonely, horny, etc. Many people try to find solutions on the internet (Facebook "friends", internet porn, etc.) but somehow that's often not enough - they still feel lonely, etc. On the other hand, there are plenty of people who feel lonely despite being married and spending significant time in the close vicinity to their spouse. If there's one reason I would like to have been born in some future time, it's because I would like to have robots available to could fulfill my social interaction needs.
My best friend died last night, so I had to reload a saved game from earlier in the day.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Usually by late 20s people have weeded out the bad friends and stuck with the few good ones. Many people in early 20s are surrounded by "friends", yet still lonely. This also has a lot to do with self realization as well. Once you fully know who you are it becomes easier to determine who you want to hang out with instead of who "should" hang out with.
Keep coming back even after you stop doing drugs and booze. The losers go away. Even my future wifes hot BFF stuck around after we made out once, best friend I ever had!
Mine did as well, so now I have to use my left hand.
That social fellah that thrives on human contact is statistically likely to sink into depression being alone in old age...
BUT if you're anti-ocial then THIS IS IT! - that time you have been waiting for all your life, to be left the fuck alone.
I look forward to the next study when such people speak of feeling liberated from the inane drudgery of mundane every day interactions with people.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
Is there a miscellaneous or something? What am I missing? 15-year-olds have 10.52 total hours and 39-year-olds have 16.19 total hours.
-Dave
I'm in my 30s and can't imagine having fewer friends than I already do.
We spend our school days trying to figure out where we are in the social structure of our world.
That effort, once we hit puberty, turns into the search for a suitable mate.
By 25 - according to the /general/ development of humans, not the last 70 years of extended fertility and 'modern' prioritization of career over family - you should typically be done seeking a mate, and into child raising.
Once you're done raising children, you're more or less reproductively superfluous and should die off all else being equal.
Plus, around your mid 20s-early 30s you start realizing that so very many of your so-called friends are really assholes you put up with, and choose to no longer do so.
By your mid-40s you're starting to suspect that MOST people are really assholes, and ultimately there are just a few people (optimally, your spouse) that you really enjoy spending time with, if anyone.
-Styopa
Look it up if you're < 40, then wake the fsck up.
Didn't Siddhartha already explain this one? Prepare yourselves. You're going to be old, alone, sick, and scared. Everyone is.
Does yelling "get off my grass" counts as interaction and the kids count as acquaintances?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Wondering how the curves look if you included on-line time. Then of course one has to wonder if FTF friend is same as Facebook friend? And if alone on computer is the same is just alone?
I overhear my son gaming with his friends and he is yelling in headset at the screen. Sometime it reminds me of my grandfather yelling at the TV when I was a kid.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
The qz web page title says:
You have less friends as you get older, and you spend more time alone, according to the data — Quartz"
"less friends"? sigh.
Hah! The captcha was "contempt"
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LOL. I don't want to spend time with anyone after having been around people for 8 hours at work.
While this study may appear to show friendships grow back after retirement, they don't always.
There are well know problems with people with extensive work and research and travel related relationships having trouble adjusting in retirement, as they have to replace the extensive non-family or work-related relationships with other ones. Especially prominent among men.
Shows up during job change too.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Actually, most people end up fairly happy as they age. Unless they disconnect from family and friends they started with, by moving far away.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
He got "a" right. So we'll award him a passing mark and let him move up to the next grade.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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Albums on the turntable.
I particularly remember unwrapping and playing Rolling Stones Some Girls.
Dark Side Of The Moon. Don't give me that do goodie good bull shit HOLLY SHIT.
All I can do is sit at home and reminisce.
I still turn an album once an awhile instead of Itunes.
Have not even seen weed in about 10 years.
I might buy a time share where it is legal or fucking move..
As we grow older, kids replace friends (and, if you can be theirs by 18. you win!). We all grow apart / go different ways and pickup new buds along the way. I've got buds I can reach-out to, but talk with 1yr. They're good guys but they, nor I, have the time. in our 40s. #FamilyRules
-T
Look it up: Libertarianism
Women's biological clock ticks faster than people think, and it takes youthful vigor for a man to build his family up. You're wasting time.
While I believe people are growing and changing, evolving (some are not) throughout their lives, I think the 20s are most critical, and people in their 20s should not raise a child.
What does a 25yr old have to offer to a child in terms of guidance and wisdom when the same 25yr old is just beginning his adult life and most are totally clueless about life. Even the older ones often are, but that's a different matter.
Similarly, most people are not assholes, but they think other people are, so they become assholes themselves and/or isolate themselves and stop trusting everybody hence contributing to the whole problem.
Take a fucking chance, you might get surprised.
I guess it's nice to have that formalized, but it ain't a big shock.
I'm 37, and the biggest thing, in terms of time, that I've found myself amassing is hobbies. My sportscar paid-off and therefore pretty close to free to enjoy at pennies per minute. The kayak costs virtually nothing. The theremin, kalimba, and hammock chairs are completely zero cost. Video games, reading, and even tvision are basically pennies per hour. Even home DIY amounts to very little cost per-day. Cooking and gardening and the theatre are cheap too. I already lack the time to master any one of them. I don't look forward to retiring to be with friends. I look forward to retiring to focus on all of the hobbies I've learned to love.
I just realized that I've been reading /. stories and comments offline for the past 20 minutes on my phone. It's an app called S2.
There's not much guidance and wisdom that can be imparted to a baby. And hopefully as the children grow up, the parents grow in wisdom and maturity as well. If you wait until you're in your 40s to have kids, A) it could be much harder to conceive and B) you'll be in your 60s or 70s when they're teenagers. Maybe that would be fine but it sounds tiring to me. I think mid 20s to mid 30s is the perfect time to start having kids.
The simple fact for most of the history of humanity is that having a baby in your early 20s meant the highest chance that the mother actually gets to LIVE through the experience.
In most people's calculus, that's slightly more important than being able to 'give them better guidance' because you waited longer to have them.
-Styopa
I noticed a lot of old friends got busy with their own families, work/job, etc. It sucks, and I miss them. I hate being old! :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).