55-64 year olds less friends then cohorts 15-20 years ago

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Baby Boomers Are Isolating Themselves as They Age

What did you think of that article?

I would think beyond technology mentioned there much less economic security. The boomers are either out of work with prospects low due to age descrimination or if they are still working they can not slow down as 55 to 64 year olds could 20 years ago because the money is simply not there for retirement and they will be replaced if they do slow down.

It's true that I don't have many friends ... but I thought that was due to autism, not boomerism!

I'm not digital-averse though. I guess you could say I am socially engaged online.

How's your health been, ASPartOfMe?

Things haven't changed much on the "friend" front for a long time now--since my 30s.

Yeah...how is everything going healthwise?

I thought it was interesting that the lack of engagement was an across-the-board phenomenon for people of a certain age: I was very surprised that this behavior was not remotely confined to people on the Spectrum.

I note, however, that the older cohort of people are, in many or most cases, approaching the end of their working lives, likely looking to retirement sometime between the ages of 66 and 70. Some people, once freed of the obligation to report to work each day (and invest the greater part of their energy in their employment, or their career), may feel themselves freed up for various kinds of social engagement.

The boomer generation, of which I am certainly one, has had somewhat of a bad rap. My experience there was a great commitment to social justice. I like to think, as the author of the article suggests, that there is a great opportunity to do good in the elder part of life.

the generation that was (early!!)retired was economically well off, now you must work longer, but there's none, so you end up filling the last years on welfare or handicapped, that makes your retirement lower, and that was cut down already

My situation is far fewer friends but better quality.

One definite factor in my relative isolation is the aspergers, which appears to have intensified with age.

Other factors include increased judgementalism in society - I will not tailor my behaviour and language to suit millenarian social conventions, so any company that objects to working class turns of phrase or smoking I exclude. This simple stance appears to have got rid of society almost completely, and I find myself a Contrarian by accident.

At one point in the 21st century was doing quite well in various demi mondes - poetry, music and peculiar private member's clubs. The smoking ban in Britain wrote off the poetry side, and has got rid of 90% of the rest.

21st century society is an adversary in the world of Alexanderplatz.

I can't help comparing my in-laws to my own parents.

My in-laws grew up in an urban neighborhood where most people were native-born (as opposed to immigrant) Jews and everybody had very similar family experiences, everybody knew each other, they all went to the same high school and university, married people their own age whom they knew from high school, etc. Also my father-in-law went into practice on his own immediately after finishing Dental School and became a success at it (which admittedly would be much harder today) so once established, never had any serious financial concerns from then on. They had a ton of friends from way back, with whom they often socialized, even traveled with. Frequent dinner parties (my wife bemoans the fact that nobody has dinner parties any more). Even today, though approaching 90, my mother-in-law still has quite a few friends that are alive and healthy enough for her to regularly go out with.

My parents were very different. Although my father was financially successful, he was raised by his grandparents in a small town while his mother (in another town about half an hour distant) did whatever it was she did without him around. My mother's parents divorced when she was very young, then she went to a different city to live for a few years, then came back, eventually she moved to the city where she met my father who was several years younger (there is a lot more to this but TL;DR plus privacy concerns). Although financially well off most of their lives, my parents never had a large number of close friends. They would join social clubs and knew a lot of people that way, but were never friends with these people the way my in-laws were with their friends. My mother in particular, although she had had a lot of boyfriends, had a difficult time making friends especially with other women, and especially later in life. She probably had autistic tendencies regarding lack of empathy, etc. which I may have inherited (assuming that's a valid theory).

I don't know what this has to say about age cohorts, except that my in-laws' experience seems distinctly more "back in the day" when you consider the homogeneous neighborhood, socializing within one's own age and ethnic group, marrying young, etc. plus the idea that a young man with a newly minted Dental degree could just hang his own shingle in a random neighborhood and succeed to the extent of long-term financial stability. My parents might seem more typical of the modern day insofar as they had nothing in common when they met, including age, and had moved around as kids after their parents' respective divorces. However they were actually both born before either of my in-laws.

I should point out that I have a brother-in-law who married two different Jewish women and has two kids who both went to the same university, joined or partied at Jewish fraternities, are now either married to or dating other Jews, and are similar to my in-laws in many ways.

So yes there may be some correlation to age cohort but like most things it's a bit more complicated.