# The quiet grief of adult friendship - Host: [timesofindia.indiatimes.com](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/hosts/timesofindia.indiatimes.com/) - Saved: May 21, 2026 (2026-05-21T16:34:47Z) - Record: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/dcd1a4bf9f30/ - JSON: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/dcd1a4bf9f30.json ## What Jamie wrote I enjoyed this article. Adult friendships are challenging to prioritize. Or at least that is how it seems to be. > And perhaps this is why adult friendship feels increasingly radical. It resists the transactional logic modern life rewards everywhere else. Because a real friend offers something profoundly rare: unoptimised presence. Family is structured by blood. Marriage by institution. Work relationships by utility. Friendship survives purely through mutual choosing. Nobody has to stay. And yet some people do. I read this with the constant reminder in my mind that so many men report having no close friends. None. And the parasocial friendships of social media and podcasts don't fill this hole. I find myself routinely thinking "wow, you are failing as a friend" because I haven't replied to an email or sent a message. It at least feels in part that there is so much you have to do, and then you want to do, that by the time you get to the stuff you could do the energy is gone. Then you start to look at the other end of parenthood. That is where that grief of lost friendships lands. The good news is that it is never too late, and this specifically is something that helps prod me to get better, make time, and reach out. ## Facts - Kind: [Page](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/kinds/page/) ## Appears in - [WT349: WT349 — Owning the Rails](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/349/), Notable ## Same host - [April 11, 1954 was most boring day in history](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/4056b8ba1495/) (timesofindia.indiatimes.com, November 30, 2010) ## Saved the same week - [Review: ‘Steve Jobs in Exile’ recounts Apple founder’s tough mid-career lessons – Six Colors](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/b1b5a5c1d049/) (sixcolors.com, May 21, 2026) - [tokenspeed — feel LLM tokens-per-second](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/acc29463ef3b/) (mikeveerman.github.io, May 21, 2026) - [forge: A Python framework for self-hosted LLM tool-calling and multi-step agentic workflows](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/8ed713f2da7b/) (github.com, May 21, 2026) - [I was wasting Claude until I learned the RCCF method](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/08727a7c8c5c/) (makeuseof.com, May 21, 2026) - [The Productivity Apps That Don’t Speak Agent Will Lose](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/00457834d145/) (macsparky.com, May 21, 2026) ## Elsewhere - Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/civil-irony/the-quiet-grief-of-adult-friendship/