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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.
Intereresting data, but not in any way surprising.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
By age 25 most people have usually figured out that other people are assholes.
missing "time with cat" chart.
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.
This is why I don't really want to hang-out with coworkers after the workday is over. I spend eight hours a day with you, and despite this industry attracting a lot of geeks we don't really have a whole lot in-common. Why would I want to spend even more time with you when I could spend it with people that share common interests?
I do the occasional happy-hour, but there's a surprising number of rabid sports fans in the office despite most of them never having played a sport since young childhood, and I don't like hanging-out with people that refer to their favorite out-of-state sports team as, "we," when discussing their trumphs and tribulations.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
All the people that are wrong on the internet. DUTY CALLS!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I've never really ever made friends with co-workers that went outside the office in my professional life.
The only times I was close with co-workers, was during my HS-> Grad school years, when I worked in retail and restaurant business....ESPECIALLY the restaurant business.
Perhaps a lot of that came from the way you are scheduled as a waiter or bartender...same weird hours, and the fact we were young enough to be interested in crawling all over each other, no didn't always know who you might be sleeping with on a given night...
But for my professional life....co-worker friends can be problematic, in that you can't be sure if they are real friends or not, and since everyone in the work place is in some sort of competition with each other, they can more easily use things against you that they see in your behavior or attitudes outside the office (which shouldn't be anyones business for the most part).
That's not to mention any *romantic" activity in the workplace...that can get messy emotionally (having to work with a chick you just dropped to sleep with her friend), or at worst....in todays litigious society, find yourself in a sexual harassment (warranted or not) case.
So, for me, I"ve found workplace friendship outside the office doors, is just really not worth the potential hassles, when it is so much easier to meet and get to know people outside the office where you can truly be yourself and be more sure that both parties like each other for who they are, rather than the personas you have to put forth in the work place to succeed.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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
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
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
The competition-aspect is very true, and the problems when relationship turn sour, romantic or even simply platonic, is true also.
My only workplace romance was with a woman that did not work out of the same facility as I do; I was doing a lot of field work at the time so I got to visit everywhere. That made it a lot less problematic when the relationship ended because I never visited any single site frequently to begin with, and even if I did go to her site, odds were even that I wouldn't run into her anyway, the facility was big enough.
There are a fairly large number of former-friends in this place too, where they were friends when everyone was low-ranking, but the slim possibility for promotion plus the nature of the way patronage works meant that often those who were left-behind became bitter towards those that saw fairly rapid advancement, and those that advanced became shitheads to those who were now perceived as being lesser. Makes for an oh-so-fun work environment when one has to keep a flowchart of who does and doesn't like whom, to avoid topics to make it less unpleasant.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Does yelling "get off my grass" counts as interaction and the kids count as acquaintances?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Yeah I'm pretty much the same.
I'm not particularly extroverted but generally easy to get along with so I have some coworker "friends", as in people I could bullshit around at lunch of briefly after work. We'd do an occasional happy-hour or see a movie, but then they quit and I never speak with them, so yeah.
This is starting to become a bit of a problem now at the start of my 30s though as many of my real friends moved or got into relationships and suddenly have no time to hang out. Like not even daily or weekly, sometimes I'm happy if I see them once per month. So at least I'm way ahead of the curve on this!
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"
You might want to try to go over to those real-friends' homes to hang out. When you're married and especially if you have children you might not have a lot of time to spend out-and-about. You may be limited to having a beer or two with friends over an hour or two while you shoot the shit out in the garage before you have to go back in and be responsible again.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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LOL. I don't want to spend time with anyone after having been around people for 8 hours at work.
Just wait until you're 40!
My close friends all got married and had kids in their mid-30's. One was in my Judo club and his wife actually told me she understands that guy's need their time together and she won't keep him from getting together with his friends, etc. He hasn't been back to Judo in almost two years and guess how many times we've hung out since the wedding that weren't family events?
I suppose being an extreme introvert has something to do with it, but I'm able to fill my "free" time with many activities and pursuits: Judo, guitar, quadcopters, cars, computers, etc. The older I get the less I care about what other people are doing.
I've found several things work against being friends with your co-workers outside of work compared to school.
In college, you have a bunch of (semi-)free time in between and after classes, most everyone is about the same age, hardly anyone is married or has kids, and most everyone lives within a mile or two of campus (and thus pretty close to each other).
In the real world, you work 8 (or 10 or 12) hours with a one-hour commute before and after work, the ages range from 22 to 65, nearly everyone is married and most have kids, and everyone lives somewhere within 30-40 miles of work (generally not in the same direction as each other).
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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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.
Last time I read a Libertarian platform it combined some ideas I like with some that would be horribly unworkable in practice (regulating pollution with private lawsuits, for example). I'm not going to support a political party that has no clue about what it would do if in power.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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).