For many people – probably most – your late teen years are when you forge friendships that last a lifetime. I don’t have many such friends, but the few I do, I am still in close contact with, even though I live in Alaska, while they all live in Iowa and Minnesota. Only a few weeks ago, I was talking with my old buddy Dave, and he noted that we started hanging out together fifty years ago. That’s a long time to be buddies, but we’ve been best friends through good times and bad, through marriages and divorces, through various personal struggles and various personal triumphs, for half a century. We were there to congratulate one another when kids and grandkids were born; I was the first person Dave called outside his family when his Dad died, and Dave was the first person outside my family that I called when my Dad, whom I was very close to, died.
We’ve been through a lot together, and you can’t assign a value to friends like that.
So imagine my confusion when I see a report that some Gen Z kids are eschewing friendships because they are “too expensive.”
A new study says that most Millennials and Gen Z feel that friendships are getting too expensive.
The study, called “The Friendship Tab” and commissioned by Ally Bank, found that 44% of Gen Z and Millennials say they have skipped major social events because of cost.
The study found that almost a quarter of Gen Z and Millennials say they are afraid of missing out on friendships and community due to financial limitations, and 42% said they overspent on activities with friends a few months out of the year, while 18% said they spent over their budget every other month.
Have these youths never heard of parsimony? Living within one’s means? Well, here’s an indicator:
Thirty-two percent of Gen Z and Millennials said they go to a bar or restaurant with friends at least weekly.
Fifty-two percent of these groups of young people reported having one to three friends they get together with often.
Hanging out with friends doesn’t require going to an expensive restaurant or a bar.
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I mentioned Dave. I could tell you about an afternoon at my parent’s place at Bear Creek, in Allamakee County, Iowa. Dave had driven out to the place, and about noon, we made sandwiches, grabbed a bottle of pop, and seated ourselves in camp chairs in front of the house. We shot the breeze and watched the creek flow by, and after about three hours of us doing precisely nothing but run our jaws, Dad happened by and asked if we were going to do anything besides sit there. Of course, we answered in the negative, because sitting there all afternoon was precisely what we had in mind. Dad had other plans, and we ended up helping him bring in a wagonload of firewood. But that was fine, too.
We spend Friday and Saturday evenings, very often, with a bunch of us sitting in the back of a parked pickup, along the Mississippi, or the Yellow or Upper Iowa rivers, or along one of Allamakee County’s many trout streams. We’d get a 12-pack of beer, occasionally something a little stronger, and we’d all talk about girls, about trucks, about fishing and hunting, and about anything that came to mind. Now, half a century later, with these same friends, we get together and talk about women (wives, for the most part), about trucks, about fishing and hunting, and anything that comes to mind.
That’s what lifetime friendships are like. It’s a shame to see these Gen Z kids missing out. It’s a shame to see two of them seated at a table, eyes fixed on a phone screen, ignoring each other. It’s a shame that they may miss out on friendships that will last a lifetime, because they can’t figure out a way to spend time with those friends that doesn’t cost anything – maybe because they don’t have any experience with just sitting around and shooting the breeze.
This is the point where some young folks might go “OK, Boomer.” But when these children are my age, they may be feeling the lack of someone with whom they go way back.
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