My main principle of making friends is: say yes to everything and everyone.
You don’t generally just meet your favorite person out of the blue. You meet them at a party thrown by someone who is not your favorite person but you went anyway.
The reason this works is friend (and date) finding is a numbers game. You just need minor contact with thousands of people to find the handful that fit great.
It also works because of practice. You get practice building curiosity, reliability, body language, jokes, etc with the friends you don’t quite click with, so that when the right person appears you have the skills to engage them fully.
And none of this means doing the same things over and over with people you don’t really like. Do your best to find life with them, but keep saying yes to new people. Let the people you really don’t click with sort of decay out.
Another is to seek out people with similar interests to yours. Not similar to all interests, but some. Meetups for people who like hiking/programming/knitting/3D printing/weird sarcastic books/whatever. You can even go and lurk.
To begin, simply forget the dating, or even friend making; just see if you have some interesting conversations. At some point you'll implicitly make a friend, at least a casual one.
So, I get that and its a general advice you can find in win friends and influence people type books.
The problem is, what if you have no one to say "yes" to? What if you live in an area where everyone is getting married, having families, and generally either doesn't socialize outside that or has closed nit groups?
Sure, say yes to everything. But, what happens if you have nothing to say yes too?
You might have to move. Not every place has enough people to make finding your people a tractable problem.
You might also need to lower your standards. Maybe there are “losers” around who actually are worth more of your time than you think. Sometimes this just means talking to someone who is older than you, or weird looking, or awkward. Your first “friend group” might be people a generation older than you. It happens. They can connect you back to people your own age eventually.
And lastly, just doing any old thing with any old people is fine. Volunteer. Go to a city council meeting. Do an exercise class. Those “pre-social” environments can become social quickly.
And remember to “hang back”. Don’t get out of there right away. Lonely people often hang around at the end of events. (But balance that with not being a creep about hanging around too long with people who are trying to close a space or go home)
But 2020 was a bad year for all of this. I don’t know how to do this stuff in a global pandemic. That’s another thread.
You don’t generally just meet your favorite person out of the blue. You meet them at a party thrown by someone who is not your favorite person but you went anyway.
The reason this works is friend (and date) finding is a numbers game. You just need minor contact with thousands of people to find the handful that fit great.
It also works because of practice. You get practice building curiosity, reliability, body language, jokes, etc with the friends you don’t quite click with, so that when the right person appears you have the skills to engage them fully.
And none of this means doing the same things over and over with people you don’t really like. Do your best to find life with them, but keep saying yes to new people. Let the people you really don’t click with sort of decay out.