> I wish I had some. I heard once, the best or only places to make friends as an adult are where encounters are repeated and casual, so like university and church. But I don’t attend either.

Can I offer some advice?

I suggest you find what people find interesting about you and make yourself available to all who you come across if you feel this isolated, go to events where those traits are part of an equally shared value system, volunteer or tutor at a HS and share your skill set to those who are intrested in pursuing a career in tech and see what comes from it and you might just found some teacher friends as a result. Ex: I still hung out at an arcade as an adult because it was just a part of being a 90s kid, I met so many other people who worked in tech as a result and had lots of interesting conversations about Life and work that I otherwise never would have.

I have also traveled extensively and met people from all kinds of walks of like, such that despite having been in tech in various periods of my Life I still make an effort to speak or hang out with my farmer and chef friends or the friends I met while clubbing or doing activism and introduce myself to new friends with the explicit intent of noting that being solely confined to one aspect of Life is easiest way for me to get bored and lose interest.

As I got older I saw how easy it was to drift away from those things we all had in common as many grow out or have families and the only ones that remained were the ones who I felt were people who I had more in common than the hobbies that brought us together.

Modernity has offered us many comforts in Life, and as a result the things that bonded males strongest together were often trauma related (War, hard dangerous manual labour, immense and high projects); as tech workers are disproportionately on the higher end of the earning scale they should in theory have more opportunity and resources to experience and explore more, but the reality is far harsher: they are often kept far and completely detached from those visceral struggles that have defined male Life for most of Human existence. And thus suffer from this loneliness.

I'm not saying Life is easy, tech has in my experience an immense amount of normalized mental health issues that is only second to my time in Kitchens in frequency and even then only by so much, but it is my observation that working 10+ hours at one's desk and then going to an empty apartment and playing video games or watching netflix and ordering doordash for another 5 hours before going to sleep seems to be the routine so many fall into. I've met so many who have and have relegated this routine for years and solely focus on a higher TC for more stuff and leisure time only to later wonder why they never have friends.

I'm on an odd situation, I'm an introvert by nature but I make friends easily when I'm motivated and which often requires some level of intoxication for me to be agreeable enough to keep a conversation light enough to now scare people off--as a child I was the odd kid in the group who thought too much about everything and pointed out the absurdity of it all, so I came off as pretentiously precocious and could feel isolated but I realized my oratory/story telling skills when used correctly opened many doors so I worked on it diligently and it served me well with my social skills later on in Life.

Personally speaking, I can and have gone weeks/months without talking to anyone because I'm so immersed in a project or what ever subject; but my mental health suffers so much that I always make an effort to make even small talk with a stranger I know I'll never see again or have a call with a friend while I eat or have a drink when I go somewhere or at home even if I'm on the other side of the World from them and on a 9+ hour time difference.