shocking friendship stats

Read time: 3 minutes

greetings on this juicy june morning,

my goal with this newsletter is to make you merry every monday morning.

each week i am working to build merry makery not only for you, but with you.

your feedback is actively shaping each send.

by experimenting with sections, topics, formats, images, & memes, i’m learning what resonates with you & what falls flat.

imagine my delight (& surprise) to learn how much you savored my data-focused email. in response to your enthusiasm, i'm thrilled to introduce a new section — metrics.

metrics to inspire you to be a better merrymaker with others & yourself.

so thank you for every response to my emails and surveys — you make me so merry, friend.

speaking of friends, thats the subject of today’s newsletter.

metrics

~2,000 adults were surveyed in may 2021 for the american perspectives survey. a study to better understand friendship in day to day life, especially after the global pandemic.

many fascinating findings from this research with two trend comparisons to 1990 that really stood out to me.

back in 1990, 75% americans had a bestie. by 2021, that dropped to 59%, a 16 percentage point decrease over the course of 31 years.

this means that only 6 in 10 americans have a best friend.

the above signals a decline in quality of friendships
and sadly the below shows a decline in quantity of friendships.

the study asked participants for the number of close friends, not including relatives.

the most concerning swings are on the tail ends of the dataset. people with 0 close friends and people with 10 plus friends.

in 1990, only 3% of americans had 0 friends.
in 2021, 12% of americans had 0 friends, up 9 percentage points.
meaning more people have no friends.

in 1990, 33% of americans had 10 or more friends
in 2021, 13% of americans had 10 or more friends, down 20 percentage points,
yes a TWENTY point swing.
meaning less people have double digit friends.

with quality and quantity down, it’s not surprising, that about half (49%) of americans are only somewhat or not at all satisfied with their number of friends.

tl;dr most americans want more friends.

the findings don’t point to one culprit nor suggest an easy fix.

but they certainly do show how more people want friends and we can do our part by being a close friend to more people.

mindset

i previously explained to y’all my theory on how friendship is the spice of life and how we must make time to build & maintain our spice cabinets.

in other words, friendship must be a priority. not an afterthought.

being a friend is an active, better yet proactive state, not just reactive.

remind yourself with this affirmation:

message

peter drucker, a business management guru, famously said:

“tell me what you value & i might believe you.
but show me your calendar & bank statement,
& i’ll show you what you really value”

while a bank statement is semi helpful to seeing how much you value friendship.

a better place to look is your call logs and message history. those recent lists show who you really value.

sadly friends do sometimes slip through the cracks without us even noticing & i want to help you avoid that.

so right now copy paste this message & send it to a friend.

makings

better yet, grab these cards & send handwritten notes to your friends.

because notes > notifications. period.

moments

your bestie,

MacK