Friendship Recession Hats

The friendship recession is a real term with real numbers behind it. The share of American adults with zero close friends has quadrupled since 1990, from 3 percent to 12 percent, while the share with ten or more has collapsed from 33 percent to 13. Fifty-seven percent report loneliness, and the hardest-hit group is not teenagers. It is 30 to 44 year olds, the people who moved for a job and never rebuilt the schedule that used to make friendship automatic. The cause is structural and unglamorous. We lost the third places, the standing weekly things, the reasons to see the same people over and over without anyone having to call it a hangout. A hat is a small piece of infrastructure against that. ACCEPTING NEW FRIENDS and TAKING FRIEND APPLICATIONS are posted like hiring signs, because that is roughly the process now. WE SHOULD HANG OUT MORE is the sentence everyone sends and nobody schedules. NO NEW FRIENDS IS A BAD POLICY files a formal objection to a decade of that lyric. Embroidered on structured six-panel hats, one colorway each.