nobody prepares you for how lonely adulthood actually is

So I'm going to tell you something very embarrassing about being in your 20s and moving a lot. I had full weeks, I'm not even kidding, like weeks of only talking to the cashier in my coffee shop or in my supermarket. I had so many moments and periods of extended time in which I was not talking to anyone except my mom on the phone or my best friend who was back home from Romania or in which I would do a lot of solo dates because I just didn't have anyone to actually do the hobbies and like interests that I have with. And I'm not saying this is bad.

Like I'm not saying I don't like the solo dates. I love the solo dates. I love doing things by myself. But I'm also saying that when you leave school behind, >> >> when you move to a different place, city or country, and when you're trying to start your life from scratch, it's so hard to find new people and connect with them and grow meaningful friendships from them.

In school, friendships just happen to you. You were put in a room with the same people for years and proximity basically did the work and a lot of the school friends that I have, they're all my friends now because we just didn't connect in like a long-term way, but they were my proximity friends and I will always be doing something with them because it was just literally because we were there all the time together. We wanted to do stuff together. In your adult life, unless you're actively trying to find this proximity and build it into your routine, it's very hard to build friends only through proximity alone because there's very little people that you just spend all that time with that is not in the context of work and I feel like making friends at work, great, but you don't say that that your only friends are your work friends.

When you were a kid or even as a teenager, even in your early 20s, you just have the conditions met for any friendship to form. You don't have to seek for friendships. You don't have to try to find them. You don't have to struggle to make new friends.

Things are just like kind of there and you just all you have to do is just sit there in the same room as them and you will have friends. Your 20s are your oasis, because nobody puts you anywhere, and you don't really have a foundation anymore if you moved from your hometown to already have known a lot of people. Friendships now require initiatives. It requires vulnerability, requires you spending time intentional with that person.

Kind of requires you to go up to someone and ask them if they want to be your friend, basically. Which I don't think any adults ever do. And I think this isn't a you problem, it's probably a like a structural problem. It's a It's not an us problem.

Sociologist Rebecca Adams found actually that you need to have three pillars for a friendship to form. Proximity, repeated unplanned interaction, and a setting that encourages vulnerability. School basically provides all three automatically, including the vulnerability, because you're always complaining about grades and about teachers and about different problems that you have. Your 20s actually provide none of them.

You're no longer seeing the same people every day. Your interactions are scheduled. They're not spontaneous anymore. And the settings that you are in, work, gym, commute, don't really encourage vulnerability.

Actually, vulnerability is bad in those situations. They encourage performance, they encourage you building a good reputation, they encourage your physique looking good, things like that. And I think I've experienced this quite a lot in my school, because we're moving every 4 months. And although I have the school context in which, yeah, I have a lot of friends, I feel like when I actually try to like find friends in the cities that I'm in that are completely not related to my school, it's so hard.

I basically lose all of the connections that I've built in all of those cities every time I move, because it's quite hard to like maintain them, although I did maintain some. But when you go to a different city, it's actually so hard to connect with other people. Even, like for example, I lived in Tokyo, and if you don't speak the language of the city you're going to, and you're just like going to be working in English, it's so hard because no one will want to take the extra step to like I don't know go out of their comfort zone to speak English to you. So in Tokyo I basically didn't have any friends, ish.

Well, I had some like acquaintances that I was doing stuff with, but most of my friends were within my university and then for all of my summer jobs or like summer traveling, I generally found it very hard to find friends unless I was going through like a hostel and I would find people there. But then again, a hostel is the perfect context in which you could make friends because you have proximity, you have the vulnerability of you being there and you're both broke and you don't know how to survive in that super close space and you have a lot of spontaneous moments because none of you have any plan usually. And also you're busier as an adult. I feel like in your like school years, your main priority was making friends.

Like that was like being social, kind of controlling the power dynamics of the school, whatever. Um if you don't know what I'm talking about, it's probably it's better. In school, that was like one of your main priorities. When you get into your 20s, you have so many other main priorities than making friends.

You are growing your career, you're trying to settle down, you're trying to find your lover if you want to have a lover, things like that. So definitely the logistics are hard, but I feel like the hardest part is not actually the logistics. It's probably the embarrassment because there's kind of an unspoken rule in adulthood that friendships should just happen naturally and you don't really have to try to make a friend because that's what you did when you were a kid. You just stay there and the friendship will grow naturally.

Cool people have friends effortlessly. Or at least that's what I thought. Like I just thought that as an adult, you don't really have to be so active in trying to grow friendships and maintain friendships. You should just attract them or you should just wait for people to come to you or you should just like kind of naturally grow friendships.

I think this whole idea is kind of garbage and I feel like it's quite sad and it's making a lot of people feel lonely. And honestly, I see it not only in like my 20s, but also in my parents' age generation. Because they are actively not trying to find new friends because finding new friends is not a thing that you do in your adult year. I really think it's sad.

It's a very sad story that people tell us. Because if you're in your 20, or if you're an adult, you can still ask people to hang out and it doesn't have to be a coffee chat. It doesn't have to be professional. It can just be a friendship hangout.

Just to meet each other. And honestly, I feel like if you don't force yourself to do it and that's my main takeaway from moving so much and trying to find friendships everywhere. If you don't force yourself to ask people out to hang out, like non-romantically at all, then you're probably not going to find people to be close with because you need that proximity and that first friendship date to be able to grow a friendship. Just find someone through like a friend of a friend or something like that who's living in the city that you're moving to and just ask them, "Let's grab coffee.

Do you know anyone who's into dance or art or pottery or whatever you're into?" And yeah, you will feel awkward. You will feel kind of wrong. That person will also be probably surprised because you'll ask.

But the thing is most people are lonely in our generation. So like they likely won't say no and they likely will enjoy the fact that you took the connection first. But it also might fail. Like maybe it works 70% of the time, but it will fail like 30% of the time.

So you kind of have to accept that you probably will get embarrassed at some point. Because people don't really want to meet you. But that's okay. We're not in middle school anymore.

No one's going to gossip about us. Okay, so some things that I learned from moving so much. One, if you know one person in that city or like in the place that you're moving, everything else will just get unlocked. Like you just have to know one person and that person will introduce you to other people.

So the moment that you get to know one person and the best is through like the friend of a friend or like something like that. Um that's probably the best way to start like having a social circle in a new place. The second thing is that a activity actually builds a shared interest. I've made way more friends by just like doing an activity or like dance class or karate or whatever activity that I was trying and then talking to people there or finding someone that does the same activity with me and inviting them to come with me to do that activity than just like talking about interests and even like having the same value.

Because again, it's proximity and it's vulnerability and if you're doing the same activity together, you're probably going to fail and you're probably going to stay close to each other for like a certain period of time of that activity. So yeah, it's just going to make you friends faster. So it's just going to connect you guys faster. And the third thing that I want to talk about is the fact that soft socializing is actually a thing and if you don't like partying, if you don't like clubbing and stuff like that, which I feel like a lot of our generation doesn't like actually.

I personally don't really like it as much. You can find other types of clubs and you should join them and you should actually go to them like book clubs or running clubs or whatever. And I bet there's like a ton of clubs in the city that you're moving to and then try to socialize there. And it's also healthier than going to clubs all the time and hoping for friendships from there.

And also you will have to accept that a lot of people will be temporary. Like there's very little people that you will have in your friend group forever unless you really really are trying hard to like make a longer term friend group. Usually you're going to stay in touch with the people that are at most connect with you and you most are able to spend every single second of your life together without getting drained or without them feeling like I don't know strangers. Basically you connecting with each other at the soul level.

I feel like unless they are those kind of people, they're not really going to stay in your life for a long time or very frequently and that's not necessarily and that's not necessarily a problem. You kind of have to accept it and I feel like as an adult you have to accept it even more because adults have less time than children to spend on relationships. So we tend to have less and less. But, it's okay because the people that will stay in your life, those people matter.

And you should still care for them. You should focus a lot of your time on caring for them because those are the people that you most connect with. So, yeah, I wanted to make this video because I was really feeling kind of weird for how hard it actually is to make friends in this period of your life. And I feel like a lot of us are blaming ourselves for not being able to connect with people maybe outside of our university or if you're in work, outside of the work.

But, it's just hard. It's just generally hard. >> And if you actually want to build these connections, you actually have to take a step forward and be vulnerable and be open to communication. And yeah, don't be afraid of being embarrassed.

I hope you enjoy this video. I hope you learn something from it. I really hope it opened up some perspective or I don't know. If you feel like this is relatable to you or you ever felt like this is kind of hard to do in your 20s or you're struggling with this right now, I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Honestly, I feel like opening up about this and like communicating with each other and sharing tips is probably one of the best ways to create a community and get help from that community. So, yeah, please do that if you want. And if you like this video, I'm sure you're going to like this playlist, too. Love you guys.

Have a blessed day of your life. Kisses. Bye-bye.