Ask HN: How do you meet friends?

[throwaway228348]

I'm in my early 20s. I do contract work as a programmer - from home. I've never been good at forming close relationships with people, so the people I met through school sort of drifted away after I left.

This has lead to an unfortunate situation whereby I have absolutely zero social interactions, save for talking to strangers on IRC. I don't trust my family.

How do you fix this? Where do you meet people? It seems like whenever you casually talk to people, the whole thing just falls apart like a house of cards when they ask you what you do in your spare time or such. Why, yes, I work and I discuss work stuff with strangers on the Internet.

[polishdude20]

Your first problem you need to solve is that you have nothing else to talk about except your job / programming. To fix this, you need to pick an activity or hobby. The less "you" the activity is the better. Your current state of activity has been not satisfying your desire for social interaction. You can say your current way of choosing activities has given rise to your current state of activity. Therefore, change the way you choose an activity.

I was in the same boat a few years ago and I chose improv as my activity. Choose something that you do with other people live.

Once you choose your activity. Be the guy that's always down to do stuff. Be the guy that is always willing to host a get together or hang out after the activity.

I highly recommend improv just because it's so social and it's lots of fun. It also takes everyone out of their comfort zones and everyone starts off on the same foot which gives you a sense of family.

[non-entity]

Early 20s here as well. I struggled with this (and tbh still do) as I never went to school and my coworkers are mostly a decade or two older than me and have families in stuff.

I haven't made any friends like I did back when I was growing up, and tbh I dont think that's very possible anymore.

On the other hand, I do socialize a lot better than I used to and do have some acquaintances I hang out with on occasion. After I moved about four or five months ago, I started to go to a meetup. It wasnt about anything particular (tbh I find many tech meetups boring), and was mainly just about meeting up at a bar or restaurant with other people who lived in the area. From there a lot of people had other groups, interests, etc. and I was able to meet people that had at least some things in common with me.

[i_v]

Meetups! They're great and everyone is super welcoming. Depending on your city, there should be a few tech events happening. Use that as a launching pad to branch into areas outside of your craft. In September, I challenged myself to attend a meetup a day and I found myself going to movies, dinners, bars, parks, and so on meeting and talking to people I'd have never met otherwise. Now, I wouldn't recommend everyone do what I did but in my case, I needed something to force me out of my typical routine of spending all of my time in front of a computer.

You're fortunate in that you do spend time talking with strangers on IRC. I actually spend very little time talking to people except in person and I routinely find myself isolated if I'm not constantly pushing myself to reach out to my friends.

From the sound of it, small talk could be a challenge for you. It's definitely a skill and I'd recommend you take note of the points in conversations where you've had trouble and spend time coming up with responses you'll feel confident in using. This is a strategy I've used since my early 20s for everything from casual conversations to interviewing to sales/investor pitches. It takes time and at the end of the day you'll have to accept that we all have our fair share of blunders.

I'd recommend writing out your challenges and trying to break them down as much as possible. It makes it easier to then focus on one area at a time: - Overcoming any shyness or social awkwardness you might feel when approaching someone you don't know. - Becoming a better conversationalist to be able to keep the flow of a conversation going. - Meeting new people who you share some common ground with. - Building friendships with those acquaintances. - And finally, over a longer period of time, deepening those relationships.

Some of these or all of these could be things you want to focus on. From there, switch into problem solving mode and Google your way to success. For me, this has been a lifelong challenge of mine. I love meeting and talking to new people but being a remote worker as well as a homebody can make for a lonely lifestyle if I'm not paying close attention.

I wish you the best of luck out there!

[AnimalMuppet]

Find a regular pickup game of soccer or ultimate frisbee. Not only does it get you social contact, it also gets you exercise.

The ultimate players I know are really pretty nice people. They are accepting of a fair amount of incompetence on the field (looking at myself here). They're not going to reject you because you're old, or female, or unskilled, or clumsy. (Your results may vary with any particular group, of course.)

[PaulHoule]

Where do you live?

Consider volunteer activities: for instance a soup kitchen, or a ham radio club that does comms for bike races.

[throwaway228348 → PaulHoule]

West Europe, which rules out a lot of these options. Software development scene is - to put it mildly - not very big here. So tech meetups are out of the question, unfortunately.