Adult Friendships

As a child, a person's ability to spend time with or even digitally communicate with their friends might be controlled at the whims of adults.  As an adult, despite what is for some people almost the illusion of more freedom of time and resources to invest into relationships, there might be far more problems that demand attention or pastimes that serve as petty distractions.  Adult friendships that were not already formed in earlier years can become more and more difficult to find, and it is not as if there is an abundance of people who deserve to be pursued as the closest of friends.

In contemporary America, work is part of the reason why adult friendships can be difficult to initiate or maintain, leeching too much time away from things of vastly greater substance.  Commuting time, the uncertainty of on-call waiting periods, and work during hours that could be trimmed out of a schedule thanks to automation are all obstacles to spending more time directly enjoying relationships based on deep matters like rationality and psychological intimacy.  Aside from the time spend working, there is also the lack of energy after professional labor that could motivate a person to spend time alone.

An irony here is that work is also one of the best places to meet people in that it at least puts people in proximity with others (for many jobs), since plenty of people spend so much regular time in their workplace and away from their families, established friends, or other things.  Other contexts where there could be routine interaction with the same group of people, though they will of course likely not be rationalists, are church or academic settings like college or graduate school.  The workplace is a terribly unlikely way to meet people who are anything more than the shallow, emotionalistic, assumption-driven irrationalists one is more likely than not to find anywhere else.

It is a rare thing to find a friend or dating partner (which is a friend which one romantically acts towards) through any of these avenues who is more than this kind of wasted potential.  In the right personal and societal context, adulthood would make it even easier to find people who are willing and eager to prioritize philosophical truths, truths about friendship among them, and relationships oriented around celebrating these truths.  As it is, adulthood might bring more burdens and obstacles to forming new friendships of depth, and other adults are seldom better than young children at fleeing from assumptions and emotionalism.

Better access (in many cases) to digital technology, vehicles, and an income of course has the potential to make friendships all the more easy to seek out or bask in if one's adult life has the right circumstances, and yet both from within and without, finding worthy new friends or even seeing treasured longtime friends can be almost more difficult as one grows older than it is when one's schedule and transportation might be dictated by parents.  It does not have to be this way; if more individuals in their respective society were to forsake irrationalism and pursue relationships rooted in deep, open mutuality in addition to rationalism, friendships could blossom more frequently and deserve more effort to cultivate them.