Community Doesn’t Make Friends. People Do.
Finding new friends after you leave the workplace needs a plan!
In my last two posts, I wrote about the challenge of making friends later in life. The responses I received—thoughtful, honest, sometimes a little wistful—reminded me of something I learned several years ago, long before I ever imagined writing a book about retirement.
I spent time living inside senior living communities as part of an ethnographic research project. I wasn’t there to survey people or hand them a clipboard. I was there to watch. To sit at the edges of rooms and notice what people did when they thought no one was measuring them.
What I witnessed has stayed with me ever since—not because it was unique to retirement communities, but because it revealed something true about all of us.
The Intellectual
There was a gentleman who moved into one of these communities hoping to find men who shared his interests—his love of ideas, of books, of real conversation. He assumed that because everyone around him was retired, he would naturally find “his people.”
He didn’t.
What he discovered instead was that shared age is not the same as shared identity. Being seventy-eight doesn’t make you interesting to another seventy-eight-year-old. It just makes you the same age.
That observation is profound, and I don’t think we say it enough: people aren’t looking for people their age. They’re looking for their tribe.
The Lunch Table
Another man, new to the community, wanted to build something different. He deliberately invited me to lunch—not just for the company, but because he wanted me to see what he saw every day.
So I watched.
Conversation. Silence. Small, tentative attempts at connection. The particular awkwardness of trying to enter a social group that has already formed its own rhythms, its own shorthand, its own unspoken seating chart.
It was ethnography at its finest, handed to me on a lunch tray. And it told me something I’ve carried ever since: belonging is not a switch you flip when you walk through a door. It’s a negotiation, and it takes courage to sit down at a table where you don’t yet have a seat.
Breakfast Rituals
This may be the strongest story of all.
A group of men in one community had, without anyone deciding it should happen, created a ritual. Nobody assigned it. Nobody organized it. It never appeared on the activities calendar. And yet every single morning, they simply appeared. Coffee. Stories. The same chairs. The same routine.
Community.
Meanwhile, down the hall, many of the women stayed behind closed doors—until someone literally knocked.
That contrast tells us something fascinating: community isn’t only about personality, or even about desire. It is built through rituals that repeatedly, reliably bring people together. Not once. Not when it’s convenient. Repeatedly.
That may be the biggest lesson of all.
What This Taught Me About Friendship
Watching these communities changed the way I think about friendship. I realized that loneliness isn’t solved by moving somewhere new. It isn’t solved by living closer to other people. And it certainly isn’t solved by waiting for someone else to invite us in.
Community has to be created.
Sometimes that means joining a bridge game you’re not sure you’ll enjoy. Sometimes it means sitting in the same coffee shop every Tuesday morning until the barista knows your order and, eventually, your name. Sometimes it means inviting yourself to lunch. Sometimes it means knocking on someone’s door.
Why This Feels So Unfamiliar
Throughout our working lives, friendship often arrives by accident. We see the same colleagues every day. We serve on committees we didn’t ask to join. We attend meetings. We bump into people in hallways a hundred times before we ever really talk to them.
Work supplies the rituals. We don’t have to design them—we just have to show up to the job, and the friendships happen alongside it.
Retirement removes those rituals. All of them, at once. And so, for the first time in decades, friendship requires intentional design. Not because we’ve lost the capacity for connection, but because we’ve lost the structure that used to carry it for us.
That, to me, is the real story.
The Bigger Idea
My research taught me that friendship isn’t something we find once and keep forever, tucked safely away like a photo in a drawer. It is something we continually create, again and again, as our lives change shape around us.
Perhaps our next chapter isn’t simply about finding new friends.
Perhaps it is about creating the habits, rituals, and small acts of courage that allow friendship to grow—on purpose, this time, rather than by accident.
Because communities don’t make friends.
People do.
The Question For the Day
So maybe the question worth sitting with isn’t “how do I make new friends?” It’s “what ritual could I start—today, this week—that I’d be willing to repeat?” That’s where it begins. That’s where it always begins.
This is one of the ideas at the heart of Rethink Retirement: that the next chapter of our lives isn’t handed to us fully formed. We build it, the same way those men built their breakfast ritual—one small, repeated choice at a time. If this resonates, the book goes deeper into how we design that chapter on purpose. Check it out at www.andisimon.com or get your copy today at Amazon