In 1990, the average American had about three close friends, people they could confide in about important matters. By 2021, that number had dropped to two. The share of Americans who say they have no close friends at all quadrupled over the same period, from 3% to 12%. These numbers come from the Survey Center on American Life, and they confirm what many people feel but struggle to name: friendship is in recession.

This isn't about introversion or social anxiety, though those play a role. It's about structure. Friendship, for most of human history, was not something you had to pursue. It was something that happened to you. You grew up in a neighborhood and played with whoever lived nearby. You went to school and sat next to the same people for years. You worked in an office and ate lunch with your colleagues. You attended a church and saw the same faces every Sunday. The friendships that emerged from these contexts weren't always deep, but they were real, and they were automatic. You didn't have to schedule them. They just happened.

Most of those structures have weakened. Neighborhoods are less stable; people move more often and know their neighbors less. Schools are larger and more anonymous. Offices have given way to remote work, or to open-plan spaces where everyone wears headphones. Church attendance has declined for decades. The places where friendship used to form organically have either disappeared or been redesigned in ways that make organic connection harder.

What replaced them is choice. We now have to choose our friends deliberately, to seek them out, to schedule time with them, to maintain the relationship through effort rather than proximity. This sounds like freedom, and in some ways it is. But freedom has costs. The effort required to maintain a friendship without structural support is significant, and most people don't have the time or energy to do it consistently. So the friendships fade. Not dramatically, not through conflict, but through the slow erosion of good intentions that never quite become action.

The pandemic accelerated this, but it didn't cause it. The trends were visible long before 2020. What the pandemic did was strip away the last remaining structures, the office, the gym, the casual social gathering, and force everyone to see what was already true: without external scaffolding, most friendships don't survive.

This matters for reasons beyond loneliness, though loneliness is reason enough. Friendship is where we learn to be human with other humans. It's where we practice vulnerability, conflict, forgiveness, and joy. It's where we discover that other people are real, that their inner lives are as complex as our own, that we are not the only ones struggling. Romantic relationships can provide some of this, but they can't provide all of it. Family can provide some of it, but family is not chosen, and the unchosen nature of family creates its own dynamics. Friendship is the relationship where we are most free, and therefore most ourselves.

The decline of friendship is also a political problem, though we rarely frame it that way. People with fewer friends are more likely to be anxious, depressed, and distrustful. They are more susceptible to conspiracy theories and extremism, because they lack the social ties that might challenge their views or offer alternative sources of meaning. A society of isolated individuals is a society primed for manipulation. The demagogue offers belonging to people who have none. The algorithm offers community to people who can't find it elsewhere. These are poor substitutes, but they fill a void that real friendship used to fill.

The solution is not obvious. You can't legislate friendship. You can't create an app for it, though many have tried. What you can do is recognize that friendship requires structure, and that the structures have to be rebuilt. This might mean joining something, a club, a team, a congregation, a regular gathering of any kind. It might mean staying in one place long enough for roots to form. It might mean showing up consistently, even when you don't feel like it, because consistency is what turns acquaintances into friends.

None of this is easy. The forces pulling us toward isolation are strong: the convenience of staying home, the comfort of screens, the exhaustion of modern life. But the cost of isolation is also high, higher than we usually admit. The friendship recession is not a personal failing. It's a structural problem with structural causes. But the response, for now, has to be personal. No one is coming to rebuild the structures for you. If you want friends, you have to build the conditions where friendship can happen. And then you have to show up.