The Gen Z Friendship Crisis: Advice From Someone Living It

I called my cousin Jamie and asked her to explain her entire generation to me.

She's two years out of college, working in product development for a fashion brand in New York. I've written about her before: when she was 22 and brand new to the city, I followed her around Manhattan for a morning. People keep searching this site for “Gen Z friendship crisis” and landing on pages that don't answer them. When I admitted I had nothing for them, she said: “I'm your girl.”

I've been reading friendship research for two years. It took Jamie six words to knock the whole premise over.

“First up, it's not that hard. Truly just being yourself and getting out there and being social. For some people it feels hard, and like a task. But you just have to do it.”

So this won't be another article about how lonely young people are. It's tactics: from Jamie, from readers, and from people I've interviewed. Find your situation below and steal what fits.

You're standing in the second peak

Here's how I think about adult friendship. We make the most friends in two windows. The first is university. The second is starting a new job. Both drop you into a new social environment full of people your age. After those windows close, friendship mostly happens by accident, and people lose more friends than they make as they get older.

If you're in your twenties, the second window is open right now. Almost nobody knows it.

If you have an office job, use it

Jamie moved to New York with childhood friends and deliberately didn't stop there. Her job was full of people her age.

“Instead of keeping them just surface-level coworkers, I got to know them. We did happy hours. You're spending more time with your coworkers than you are with any of your friends.”

Read that last line again. Real friendships come from repeated exposure, seeing the same people until the strangeness wears off. That's the whole thesis of Join or Die and Bowling Alone, and it's why their advice is to join something. A job is forty-plus hours a week with the same people, and you don't schedule a minute of it. Most people in their twenties are handed those hours for free. And they spend them being professional.

Look sideways, not up. Most career advice for young people points up the org chart. Find a mentor. Get face time with leadership. That's fine for your career. It won't make you a single friend. Jamie is explicit that this works with peers, not managers:

“Everyone's there and new. You have to take advantage of the people your age around you going through the same thing. Break that barrier of, oh, let's be friends. Let's go get a coffee before work. Or during your lunch break.”

Own a standing day. If nobody's organizing anything, be the person who does. Someone on Hacker News described announcing one sentence to their office:

“Tuesday is my go out to lunch day, everyone is invited.”

They ate alone at first. It became four or five people every Tuesday. That's hosting at the smallest possible scale. Pick a date, keep the date, let it compound.

“But work friends disappear when the job ends”

Let's take the real objection seriously. Elisa Camahort Page wrote a sharp essay about the coworkers she considered real friends in her twenties. Decades later, she can't find most of them. She calls work friendships “situational, ephemeral.” I've written about the office friendships we already lost, so I take that seriously. And there's a second problem worth one honest sentence: repeated exposure only builds trust if people don't feel disposable, and layoff-era fear makes plenty of offices feel exactly that way.

And yet, two years in, Jamie's results look nothing like Page's.

“My work friends have become my personal life friends and some of my best friends in New York. I hang out with them on the weekends and a lot of them no longer work where I work.”

The difference is a tactic, and I think it's the most important one in this article. Move the friendship outside work before the job ends. Happy hours. Weekends. Meeting their friends, who become your friends too. Jamie has been set up on dates and pointed at job openings through that web. Page's work friendships never left the office. Jamie's did, so they survived the badge deactivating.

If you work remotely

I think remote workers have the hardest version of this problem. Nobody hands you the forty hours, so you build cheap substitutes:

• Keep a routine. Same gym class, same times. Jamie: “You're going to keep seeing the same face. Instead of being weird and seeing the same face for weeks on end, say hi.”
• Pick your coffee shop by its crowd. Try a few, keep the one whose people you like, and go back. Anyone at a cafe midday on a Tuesday is in the same position as you.
• Send the nearby text. From the same Hacker News thread as the Tuesday lunch: “i'm at coffee shop now, want to stop by and catch up.” That text is how acquaintances turn into friends.
• If a coworker lives near you, meet in person. Jamie's tip, and she says you'll actually work better together online afterward.

There's a woman in Austin named Sianne who turned all of this into a system. She worked from home, got the Sunday Scaries, and would procrastinate until Tuesday. When I interviewed Sianne, she said something I liked so much I repeated it back to her:

“I realized that I needed community, but I didn't necessarily have the time for it. So I asked myself, How can I fit community into what I'm already doing?”

Her answer became Momentum Mondays, a Monday-morning meetup where people start the work week together. I've gone twice, and it's one of the best coworking sessions I've been to. The hours were already in her week. She fit the community into them.

If you just moved to a new city

• Ask everyone you know, before you go. Jamie's best tactic, and I've never seen it written down. Message your friends widespread: do you know anyone at all in the city? If so, connect me with them. Somebody is bound to know somebody. Her friend did this before moving to San Francisco and landed with a calendar full of coffee dates.
• Reconnect with dormant contacts. Same move, one step earlier. Reach out to people you've known over the years but lost touch with. The same thread suggests short-term classes, painting or ceramics or wine tasting, because a fixed room of the same people for a few weeks is manufactured repeated exposure.
• Join a run club for the part after the run. Axios reports that 72% of Gen Z runners who join run clubs do it specifically to meet people. Caleb Miller and Shelby Noble each moved to St. Petersburg, joined the same club, and met at the post-run happy hour. The run is the excuse. The happy hour is the point.
• Say it out loud. Tell people you just moved to town and you're trying to meet some new people. People respect that, because you moved to their town. You voted for the place they live.
• Or build the room yourself. A guy named Richard Garand in Calgary moved into an apartment building where he knew nobody, made flyers for a housewarming party, and slid them under his neighbors' doors. Enough people said yes that it became his core group. He didn't wait to get invited to anything. He printed paper.

If talking to strangers scares you

Jamie's scripts are as simple as they sound. “So funny, we're always here at the same time.” Or: “I keep running into you here. Nice to meet you.” Her verdict on everyone who overthinks it: “People make it so complicated.”

Half of this is whether people can approach you at all. My friend Courtney has the best checklist I've seen on being approachable in public: don't wear sunglasses, walk slower, and smile and make eye contact for a few seconds. And take the AirPods out at the cafe. People are less likely to come talk to you with headphones in.

And I want to be fair to the people who make it complicated, because I was one of them. When I first moved to New York City, I wasn't especially outgoing. I remember the first time I went up to a bar and talked to somebody I didn't know. When I came home that night, I couldn't sleep. I was so excited. I couldn't believe those people just talked to me.

It isn't complicated. It can still scare you the first time. Do it anyway.

• 30%of adults 18-34 feel lonely several times a weekAmerican Psychological Association, 2024
• 72%of Gen Z runners join run clubs specifically to meet peopleAxios, 2024
• 59%global rise in run-club membership, driven by Gen Z and millennialsAxios, 2024

The window closes

Jamie's point at the end of our call was that your twenties are for this. Her generation traded the party girl for matcha and Pilates, and she goes out anyway, mocktail in hand, and still makes her morning class. You can do both.

The second peak is open when you start a new job, and it stays open for about a year, while everyone is new and nobody's social life has hardened yet. If you're in it, ask a peer to get coffee before work tomorrow. If you'd rather build your own room, like Richard did, that's what my book The 2-Hour Cocktail Party is about.

And if your first conversation with a stranger costs you a night of sleep, good. Mine did. It was worth it.