It’s February, it’s raining in San Francisco and I’m thinking about friend circles. When a person migrates, their social context doesn’t migrate with them. And without your social context you are a different person. I think it’s taken me a while to feel less like a fish out of water and feel comfortable in my own skin. I’m not bothered too much anymore when someone doesn’t understand my accent . I’m not worried if I am fitting in or looking different when I walk down the street. I am overall much less self-conscious and much more self-confident.

I feel like moving to the US made me introverted again. Why again? Because I used to be ultra introverted and shy in college. That changed over the course of my first job; and a few years later I had learned enough social skills to be indistinguishable from normal . That comfort evaporated when I moved to the US. I don’t know if it was the new context, different accents or some sort of immigrant anxiety; I was initially very shy at the office cafeteria and wasn’t comfortable enough to sit with strangers or strike up conversations . Would often eat alone and feel bad about it. Slowly I started to have meals with a few folks, built up courage to chat up strangers, and now I have some sort of a social circle in the office . It took time. No lesson here except that an uprooted tree needs time to grow roots again. But I think my ramp up from introvert to normal person is going faster here, given the skills I built up earlier.

Semi-relatedly, there’s this sad topic of new friend formation dropping off drastically in your 30s. But I think most of us frame the issue incorrectly . We don’t stop forming friends, we stop spending time in shared activities where we can form friends.

In life until our 20s, most of our friends came from school, sports, clubs, the locality, etc. and we formed friends because we just went along and did stuff with random strangers for hours on end.
That I feel is the clue to friend formation. I bet anyone putting themselves in places where they repeatedly interact with a fixed set of folks is likely to find friends and community through it. The change in our 30s is mix of:

1. Genuinely having less time (and energy)
2. Being comfortable being alone
3. Being less open minded about people You can’t counter this with a one-off trip or a networking events; unless you’re really lucky! These encounters tend to be so brief that you’re unlikely to get the superficial parts of a person and see their goodness in action.
   Playing a sport with consistent group of people, joining a scene (music, comedy, theatre), participating in a religious community, volunteering, etc. seem like activities that can counter this. I think the most shameless hack you can do is co-opt capitalism into your service. I was pleasantly surprised when I was running a “side-hustle” and ended up becoming friends with my co-founders and some customers . Some really good conversations I’ve had are from a podcast that me and some friends are trying to start. Their economic impact isn’t much, but I had a lot of fun!

Go forth and conquer lonesomeness with shared activities!