We still encounter countless people. What may have changed is not how many people we meet, but how long they remain in our lives before a stranger has the chance to become someone.
In the 1953 film Roman Holiday, Princess Ann does not set out to meet Joe Bradley. Escaping the suffocating formality of royal life, she slips into the streets of Rome, where the effects of a sedative eventually leave her asleep in public. Joe, an American reporter passing by, finds her without realizing that the young woman in front of him is a princess.
Had they simply crossed paths and continued in opposite directions, there would have been no story. But one accident leads to another encounter, and the two begin moving through Rome together—walking, talking, laughing, accumulating the small memories through which a stranger gradually becomes a particular person.
Cinema makes such encounters beautiful, but the beginnings of many real relationships are not so different. We became friends with someone because we happened to be assigned to the same classroom, hired by the same company, raised in the same neighborhood, seated at the same table through mutual friends, or drawn repeatedly to the same church, park, café or corner store. At the time, none of these circumstances seemed especially consequential. One encounter simply followed another until conversation accumulated into familiarity, familiarity into memory, and eventually a person who had once meant nothing in particular acquired a name in our lives: friend.
We usually describe such relationships by saying that the friendship “just happened.”
But did it?
Perhaps what felt natural was not that friendship emerged from nowhere, but that society was quietly arranging so much of the encounter for us that we barely noticed the arrangement. Schools placed the same people in the same rooms day after day. Workplaces brought unrelated lives together for hours at a time. Neighborhoods, churches, parks, markets, cafés and local businesses created environments in which yesterday’s face could become today’s face and then tomorrow’s face again. We still chose whom to trust, whom to like and whom to love, but we did not have to choose from scratch whom we would have the chance to see again.
Perhaps friendship was never quite as effortless as we remember.
Society was doing more of the arranging than we realized.
Meeting Someone Is Not the Same as Forming a Relationship
The Korean thinker Shin Young-bok once used a striking image to describe a certain kind of modern human encounter: the meeting of billiard balls. Two balls certainly meet. They make contact, sometimes forcefully, but at the very moment of contact they are propelled away from each other along separate trajectories. There has been an encounter, but nothing accumulates between them.
The metaphor may be even more revealing today because we are, in one sense, surrounded by more human connection than almost any generation before us. Our phones contain hundreds of contacts. Social media allows us to know where people we have never met went on vacation, what they ate and when they celebrated a birthday. On a subway in a large city, dozens of strangers may stand inches apart while remaining almost entirely absent from one another’s lives.
Recent data suggest that the story is therefore more complicated than the familiar claim that modern people simply “have no friends.” In a 2025 Pew Research Center survey, 81 percent of American adults said they had at least one close friend outside their family, and people with close friends often communicated with them frequently through text, social media, phone or video. Yet only 29 percent said they saw a close friend in person at least a few times a week. We may not simply be becoming disconnected; we may be becoming connected differently.
That raises a more interesting question. Among the thousands of people who pass through our lives, why do some remain strangers while a few become friends?
One answer offered by social science is almost embarrassingly simple: we see them again.
In a 2021 randomized experiment involving 2,966 students across 182 classrooms, researchers found that sitting next to another student increased the predicted probability of a mutual friendship from 15.3 percent to 22.3 percent. Children in classrooms are not adults navigating modern social life, so the finding should not be stretched beyond what it shows. But it offers unusually clean evidence for something researchers have long observed: physical proximity and repeated encounter can alter the probability that a relationship begins.
Our own experience makes the mechanism easy to recognize. Someone we see once is a stranger; seen again, that person becomes “the person I saw yesterday.” Another encounter turns a stranger into a familiar face. Eventually there may be a name, then a greeting, then a conversation, and somewhere along that progression a quiet but consequential transformation takes place.
A stranger becomes someone.
Friendship may only become possible after that.
Before We Care, We Have to See
More than two thousand years ago, the Chinese philosopher Mencius recorded a scene that had nothing to do with friendship and yet captures something subtle about the way human feeling begins.
King Xuan of Qi sees an ox being led away to be sacrificed in a ritual. Watching the frightened animal, the king cannot bear what he sees and orders that the ox be spared and a sheep substituted in its place. The obvious objection follows: if the ox deserves compassion, why not the sheep?
Mencius is interested not simply in the inconsistency but in what caused the king’s compassion to awaken. The king had seen the ox; he had not seen the sheep.
The original argument is political and moral. Mencius wants the king to extend the compassion he feels toward the animal before him to people beyond his immediate sight. But embedded in the story is an observation about the human heart that remains recognizable more than two millennia later: abstract existence does not move us as readily as particular presence does. Something changes when a being enters our field of attention and ceases to be one among many.
Millions of people may live in our city, and billions may be theoretically reachable through a screen, but most remain abstractions. Then there is the person who appears every Saturday morning at the same café. The neighbor we repeatedly meet in the elevator. The person who runs at roughly the same pace beside us every Tuesday evening.
Eventually the face acquires a name, the name acquires memories, and the memories begin to carry a small amount of concern. One morning the familiar person is absent, and for the first time we notice the absence.
Perhaps relationships begin slightly earlier than we think—not with the exchange of phone numbers, not even with the first real conversation, but when one human being begins to become visible to another.
Seen this way, several seemingly unrelated changes in modern life begin to look like parts of the same story.
Convenience Removed More Than Inconvenience
One of the great projects of modern life has been the removal of friction. We can bank without entering a bank, shop without entering a store and eat restaurant food without entering a restaurant. Entertainment comes to the living room, meetings appear on screens, and for many kinds of work it is now possible to complete an entire productive day without going to an office at all.
Much of this is genuine progress. The time recovered from commuting is real. The flexibility of remote work can be enormously valuable, especially for people balancing work with children, caregiving, disability or geographic constraints. There is little reason to romanticize standing in lines, sitting in traffic or performing errands that technology can accomplish more efficiently.
But we are very good at calculating what convenience saves and much less practiced at calculating what used to occupy the space we saved.
We can measure the minutes no longer spent commuting, shopping or waiting for lunch. It is harder to measure the familiar faces that once inhabited those minutes: the person encountered on the morning train, the colleague who appeared in the same lunch place, the neighbor seen at a local shop, the barista who eventually knew an order without being told.
Most of those encounters led nowhere. Riding the same train did not automatically produce friendship, nor did buying coffee from the same place.
But that is precisely the point.
Relationships emerge from a vast number of encounters in which, most of the time, nothing happens. Only a tiny fraction continue long enough for something to happen.
It would therefore be far too simple to claim that delivery apps, online shopping or remote work have caused loneliness. Even recent research finding higher adjusted odds of loneliness among people working remotely three or more days a week is observational and cannot establish that remote work itself is the cause. The more interesting question lies underneath the argument over whether remote work is good or bad:
When we removed friction from everyday life, did we inadvertently remove some of the coincidence as well?
That question does not require us to restore the inconvenience. It asks whether we can preserve the freedom modern life has given us while recreating, in new forms, some of the human conditions that used to accompany it.
And one important kind of relationship has already begun doing exactly that.
Love Found a New Intermediary
For much of modern history, romantic relationships also depended heavily on existing social networks. Friends introduced friends. Families made introductions. Schools, workplaces, neighborhoods and religious communities repeatedly placed strangers within reach of one another.
As those traditional pathways weakened, however, romantic life did not simply wait for coincidence to return. Technology entered the space.
Research by Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld and colleagues found that, among heterosexual couples in the United States, meeting online overtook meeting through friends around 2013. Their paper described the internet as “disintermediating” friends and family—the traditional intermediaries who once connected potential partners.
But there is another way to describe what happened.
Technology removed an intermediary and then became the intermediary.
When love could no longer rely as heavily on coincidence, we built new infrastructure for meeting. Among partnered Americans under 30 surveyed by Pew, one in five said they had met their current spouse or partner through a dating site or app.
Now place friendship beside romantic love and a curious cultural difference appears.
Saying “I’m looking for a partner” sounds perfectly ordinary. So does looking for a job, a home or almost anything else of lasting importance. Yet saying “I’m looking for a friend” carries a strangely different emotional weight. It can sound lonely, even vaguely embarrassing, as though friendship were one important thing in adult life that we should never appear to be searching for.
Perhaps friendship remains one of the few relationships we still expect to arrive without our appearing to look for it.
There may be a familiar cultural lag at work here. As we explored in “Why Does Adulthood Feel So Expensive?”, the conditions of modern life can change faster than the expectations we use to judge them. Something similar may be happening with relationships: the ways people meet are changing faster than our ideas about what a “natural” meeting is supposed to look like.
But if the social conditions that once produced accidental friendship are changing, why should intentionally creating opportunities for friendship be considered artificial?
Perhaps We Have to Create the Conditions for Chance
There are signs that some people are already experimenting with an answer. Running clubs, book groups, hiking communities, craft circles and other recurring in-person gatherings have become prominent enough among younger adults that the phrase “community-maxxing” has recently been used to describe the search for more intentional offline social life. It is too early to declare this a broad social transformation, but it is an intriguing cultural signal: people may not be rejecting digital life so much as looking again for places where the same human beings can repeatedly appear in front of one another.
At first, deliberately going somewhere in the hope of an accidental friendship sounds almost contradictory.
But was the past really so different?
A school friendship feels natural, yet someone designed the school, divided the grades, assigned the classroom and created the timetable that repeatedly put those two children together. A friendship at work may feel equally spontaneous, although an organization hired both people and brought them into the same place five days a week.
The real difference, then, may not be whether encounters are arranged.
It may be who does the arranging.
In the past, institutions quietly arranged much of our repeated proximity for us. Increasingly, we may have to arrange some of it ourselves.
That does not require surrendering the freedom modern life has created. Someone who can work remotely does not need to return to the office five days a week simply to prove that human contact matters. But perhaps there is value in choosing one or two days to go in—not merely to occupy a desk, but to be there on days when the same colleagues are there, to have lunch with them, to become part of one another’s ordinary weeks.
A person working from home might choose to spend one afternoon each week in the same neighborhood café or coworking space. Someone who exercises alone because it is more efficient might reserve one evening for a recurring running group. A household that can have virtually everything delivered might still walk to the neighborhood market occasionally, not because shopping in person is technologically superior, but because a neighborhood only becomes socially meaningful when people repeatedly appear in it.
None of these acts guarantees friendship, and that is important. Their purpose is not to manufacture relationships but to restore some of the conditions from which relationships can emerge.
Remote work illustrates the distinction particularly well. If eliminating a commute returns an hour or two to someone’s day, there is no reason that time must be handed back to the employer. But perhaps some of it can be handed back to people—to an old friend, a regular gathering, a neighborhood café, a recurring class, or simply a place where familiar faces have the opportunity to become more familiar.
Convenience gave us time back. The question now is where we choose to reinvest some of it.
The same principle applies beyond individual choices. For employers concerned about social cohesion, the more useful question may not be simply how many days workers come to the office, but whether the same people are there at the same time often enough for relationships to accumulate. A company where everyone comes in twice a week on unrelated days may satisfy an attendance policy while recreating very little repeated proximity.
Cities and communities might ask a similar question. A successful public space need not merely attract large numbers of people once; perhaps it should give the same people reasons to return. A successful community might measure not only how many attended an event but how many encountered one another again. And technology designed for social connection might eventually be judged not only by how many introductions it produces, but by whether those introductions have any realistic opportunity to become relationships.
The challenge, then, is not to choose between freedom and connection.
It is to ask a better question:
How do we restore repetition without surrendering freedom?
The answer does not have to begin with a major social program. It can begin with something much smaller: allowing ourselves to admit that we would like more friendship, choosing occasionally to do with others what could more efficiently be done alone, or returning to the same place at the same time rather than continually optimizing for novelty and convenience.
What matters is not maximizing the number of people we meet.
It is preserving in our lives the possibility of meeting the same people again.
And this may also require us to reconsider what we mean when we call a relationship “natural.” A friendship formed in a running club is not artificial because someone joined the club hoping to meet people, any more than a marriage is less real because the couple first met through an app.
Perhaps a natural relationship is not one whose beginning was accidental.
It is one whose feelings were not forced after the beginning.
We can design a place to meet. We can recommend people to one another. We can even increase the likelihood that the same people will meet repeatedly. What no institution or algorithm can determine is why we eventually notice when one particular person fails to appear, why we begin wanting to tell that person something that happened during our day, or why, among thousands of human beings, that person’s happiness or sorrow gradually begins to matter to us.
That final distance still has to be crossed by human beings themselves.
Why Can’t We Just Become Friends by Chance Anymore?
Perhaps, then, we have not forgotten how to make friends. What may be disappearing is some of the time and space through which a potential friend moves from stranger to familiar face, from familiar face to a person with a name, and eventually from a name to someone who matters.
Princess Ann and Joe Bradley meet by accident in Roman Holiday, but the reason their encounter has remained memorable for generations is not simply that two strangers happened to cross paths on a street in Rome. The accident continued. They spent time together, and during that time each ceased to be merely another person in the world and became a particular person to the other.
Real friendship may not be so different.
Every day we collide with other lives, sometimes like Shin Young-bok’s billiard balls, touching briefly before continuing along separate trajectories. But occasionally one encounter becomes a second, a face acquires a name, the name gathers memories, and eventually there comes a day when that person does not appear and we notice the absence.
Somewhere in that long and almost invisible progression, an encounter becomes a relationship.
What modern life may be short of, therefore, is not people. We already see and communicate with extraordinary numbers of them. What may be growing scarce is something quieter: enough repetition, enough time and enough shared presence for one human being to become someone to another.
In the past, much of that human coincidence was supplied by the structure of everyday life. If less of it arrives automatically now, perhaps we should not simply wait for it to return.
We can make room for it.
TENVER VIEW
For a long time, we have assumed that friendship should happen naturally. Yet many of the friendships we remember as spontaneous were nurtured by an invisible architecture of schools, workplaces, neighborhoods and communities that repeatedly brought the same strangers into one another’s lives.
If that architecture is changing, deliberately seeking friendship may not be what is unnatural. What may be outdated is our expectation that friendship should still appear effortlessly under conditions that no longer produce as many repeated encounters.
We do not need to reverse modern life to respond. There is no reason to surrender the freedom of remote work, abandon online convenience or manufacture unnecessary inconvenience. We can instead use a small part of the freedom we have gained to recreate some of the repetition we have lost—going into the office occasionally when the same colleagues will be there, returning to the same café, joining the same group at the same time each week, or simply leaving room in an optimized life for familiar faces to appear again.
The point is not to meet more people.
It is to give some of the people we meet a chance to stop being strangers.
We cannot manufacture friendship, but we can create more of the conditions in which friendship becomes possible. Perhaps that is one of the small human tasks of a more convenient age: to restore repetition without surrendering freedom, and to give one another enough time to become someone.
That may be where the next friendship begins.
Sources
Pew Research Center. “Where Men and Women Turn for Emotional Support and Social Connection.” January 16, 2025.
Pew Research Center — Social Connection and Close Friends
Rohrer, Julia M., Tamás Keller, and Felix Elwert. “Proximity Can Induce Diverse Friendships: A Large Randomized Classroom Experiment.” PLOS ONE, Vol. 16, No. 8, 2021.
PLOS ONE — Proximity Can Induce Diverse Friendships
Rosenfeld, Michael J., Reuben J. Thomas, and Sonia Hausen. “Disintermediating Your Friends: How Online Dating in the United States Displaces Other Ways of Meeting.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Vol. 116, No. 36, 2019.
PNAS / PubMed Central — Disintermediating Your Friends
McClain, Colleen, and Risa Gelles-Watnick. “From Looking for Love to Swiping the Field: Online Dating in the U.S.” Pew Research Center, February 2, 2023.
Pew Research Center — Online Dating in the U.S.
“Remote Work and Loneliness: Evidence from a Nationally Representative Sample of Employed U.S. Adults.” Journal of Affective Disorders, 2026. Based on data from 87,317 respondents in the 2024 U.S. Household Pulse Survey.
PubMed — Remote Work and Loneliness
Mencius. King Hui of Liang, Part I — the account of King Xuan of Qi, the ox and the sheep (“You saw the ox, and had not seen the sheep”). Chinese Text Project.
Chinese Text Project — Mencius, King Hui of Liang
The Guardian. “‘Community-maxxing’: Gen Z Are Done with Doomscrolling — and Ready to Socialise.” August 25, 2026.
The Guardian — Community-maxxing
Shin Young-bok. “Classic Lectures: Mencius.” Pressian, February 15, 2002. Shin discusses modern human relationships through his metaphor of “the meeting of billiard balls”—brief points of contact that end before they can develop into lasting relationships. The idea was later developed in his book Gangui: Naui Dongyang Gojeon Dokbeop, Dolbegae, 2004.
Pressian — Shin Young-bok’s Classic Lectures
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