Recently, I was discussing with someone why it's difficult to make new friends in middle age. One reason I can see is that, over each decade, one's life becomes more isolated to some degree or another. In adolescence and early adulthood, life is all about one's friends and what they tell you that you are. At about age 30, people are going their own ways, entrenched in careers, mating and breeding, and other means of individuation. After 40, one becomes aware of an unprecedented sense of one's own personal history. Then, after age 50, it seems that one's life is too much backstory to recount to anyone, or for anyone to be expected to relate to. If one be without family and friends who had been around, or had contiguous experience with one, during the preceding decades, one can feel alone with one's own story that no one knows how – nor cares – to listen to.
This is unfortunately true when, at age 50 and beyond, one tries to re-acquaint with those whom one had known two or three decades before: there's too much catching-up by speed-reading to do; people want to rely upon their memories of one, but the changes in one's personality, like the inevitable changes to one's appearance, can be so jarring that they're unsettling and disillusioning. The Younger Self who had formed the memory, and still resides in the Older Self, is suddenly flashed the image of the Future Self. One as a 25-year-old has awakened 30 years in the future and can't go back to sleep to retreat into the dream-state of youth that was rich in possibility and devoid of consequence.
Scrolling through Reddit, however, I see a lot of complaints from young adults as to how difficult it is for them to make friends. It's not that they're particularly maladjusted; from what they describe, it's due to things such as mediated social interaction that never translates into real-life interactive relationships, the pickiness of women on dating apps or how all the men on dating apps are "losers" or "creeps," the loss of public spaces where social energy naturally collects and forms, and the subsequent loss of common social skills and mores.* It's as though people can't agree on how to be friendly, anymore. I've noticed that once one becomes online "friends" with people one knows in real life, one hardly ever sees those people to sustain real-life relationships with them. Relationships get virtualized, reduced to conceptual data, out of convenience and laziness.
The lonely young adults on Reddit are hitting the first Wall, as they and their friends approach the age of 30. Their friends are getting married, some have kids, and mostly all are newly engrossed in their careers, and thereby have lost the time, ability or the desire to maintain friendships with people they've effectively left behind. There are also those who are struggling financially and have been ghosted** by their friends who've become successful. That itself is an unspoken aspect of our society: class-consciousness and the threat of lost status due to associating with those beneath one's supposed station.*** As socializing in public has been corrupted by the ethos of opportunistic networking, and potential friends are assessed for what they can "bring to the table" as though being calculatedly recruited, it's rarer and rarer that someone likes you for what you are. If we all could shovel the accumulated bullshit away and get back to that, it would resolve the "loneliness epidemic."****
(*) Anyone remember when people would chat with the random strangers seated next to them on airplanes, rather than trying their best to refuse to acknowledge them?
(**) This phenomenon of "ghosting" people is relatively new, though not unprecedented, as it reflects how ephemerally and superficially human relationships are in the context of social media, carried over into the "real" world.
(***) The irony to such class-consciousness is that, in our society, most people – apart from those at the top and those at the bottom – are constantly unsure of where they stand on the social ladder. Putting others beneath oneself or ostracizing them serves to reify and to place oneself within the conception of such a hierarchy.
(****) During the so-called Pandemic, it became evident to people how expendable others viewed them as being. If people weren't turning on others out of contention over the various issues (often politicized and polarized) related to this vast social experiment, they saw people just disappear from their lives, never to return. People were able and willing to readily deem others as "non-essential" or as a potential threat to their health – and probably also felt ashamed for that – but feeing guilty for what one can't admit to oneself finalized these ruptures.