The Gen Z Friendship Crisis: A Playbook From Someone Living It

Do this first

Do these six things this month to make new friends. Don't wait until you feel ready, because that's just procrastinating.

1. Ask one coworker to coffee before work. Or during lunch.
2. Pick a standing lunch day. Tell your office group chat something like: "Tuesday is my go out to lunch day, everyone is invited." Go even if you eat alone at first.
3. Text someone you know: "I'm at coffee shop now, want to stop by and catch up?"
4. When you keep seeing the same person at your yoga or whatever workout class, say hi the next time. Don't wait three more weeks. Almost everyone loves a friendly hello.
5. The week you arrive in a new city, message every person you know who might know people in said city. Ask if they know anyone at all in town. Then ask them for intros.
6. If a remote coworker lives near you, invite them to cowork sometime.

Jamie makes work friends

OK, back to my cousin Jamie. Jamie didn't wait for a perfect group of friends to appear in New York City. She used the people already in the building that she sees every day.

I'm going to quote her a few times in the rest of this article. This is all based on a phone interview that I did with her in August 2026, so take that for whatever it is worth!

"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."

I like this part that she said next:

"Everyone in my office was sort of 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."

The first year at a job is a weird gift. Everyone is new and a little lonely and a little frazzled right out of college.

Most people spend that year being professional. They eat lunch at their desk and they grind and then they go home. They think that friendship only happens after work, or they want to keep their work and personal lives separate.

Which you can totally do! But it might be easier to also make a few friends at work, like Jamie did.

"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."

Action item: Pick one person at work this week. Ask them to coffee or lunch.

The window you're standing in

Here's how I think about why Jamie's playbook works. We make the most friends in two windows of life. The first is college. The second is your first year at a new job. Both drop you into a room full of people your age whose social lives haven't hardened yet.

If you're in your twenties, that second window is open right now, and it closes. I wrote about what offices lose when it does. And repeated exposure to the same faces is the whole thesis of Join or Die and Bowling Alone. I wrote 42 thoughts on both of them if you want the research version.

I'm not going to pile on with loneliness statistics here. They're all on this page if you want them.

The Tuesday lunch trick

That "Tuesday is my go out to lunch day" line in the checklist isn't mine. Someone on Hacker News described announcing it to their whole office.

They ate alone the first few weeks. Then it became four or five people every single Tuesday.

I love this because it's hosting at the smallest possible scale. Pick a day, keep the day, and let it grow. The "I'm at the coffee shop, come say hi" text from the checklist comes from that same thread, by the way.

Say hi to the same faces

Jamie's other big tactic costs nothing. When you keep seeing the same person at the gym or the coffee shop, say something.

"You're going to keep seeing the same face. Instead of being weird and seeing the same face for weeks on end, say hi."

Her 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."

And I want to be fair to the people who find this hard, because I was one of them. When I first moved to New York City, I wasn't very 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 that those people just talked to me.

It can still scare you the first time. Do it anyway.

Make yourself easy to approach

Half of this game is whether people can talk to you. My friend Courtney has the best checklist I've seen for being approachable in public:

• Don't wear sunglasses.
• Walk slower.
• Smile and hold eye contact for a few seconds.
• And take the AirPods out at the coffee shop.

Nobody comes to talk to you when you have headphones in. You look busy, even when you're not.

If you work from home, cowork on purpose

Remote workers have the hardest version of this problem. Nobody hands you 40 hours a week around people your age, so you have to build a substitute.

There's a woman in Austin named Sianne who did exactly that. She worked from home and got the Sunday Scaries so bad she'd procrastinate until Tuesday. When I interviewed Sianne, she told me:

"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.

Throw the party yourself

A reader of my book named Richard Garand in Calgary moved into an apartment building where he knew nobody. So he made flyers for a housewarming party and slid them under his neighbors' doors. Enough people said yes that the group became his core friends.

He didn't wait for an invitation. He printed paper.

If you want to try this, my book The 2-Hour Cocktail Party is the step-by-step version, and I wrote a shorter guide on how to host a friendship gathering.

If you just moved to a new city

The best tactic here is already in the checklist at the top: message everyone you know before you go, and ask for intros. A friend of Jamie's did this before moving to San Francisco and landed with coffee dates already on her calendar.

I left New York for Austin in 2020 and knew almost nobody. I used that same playbook: host, follow up, and use the weak ties I already had.

Two more things that work:

• Say it out loud. Tell people you just moved to town and you're trying to meet new people. Nobody thinks that's weird. You moved to their town, and people respect that.
• Join a run club for the part after the run. Axios reports that 72% of Gen Z runners who join run clubs do it to meet people. The run is the excuse.

• 30%of adults 18-34 feel lonely every day or several times a weekAmerican Psychiatric 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

It's not that hard

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

You don't have to become a nightlife person. You have to pick a few repeating rooms and keep showing up. The office counts, and so do the Monday class and the Tuesday lunch.

Here's Jamie one last time:

"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."

Somebody has to go first, and it can be you. Pick one person you already see. Ask them to coffee before work this week. Then do it again next week.