Still cannot meet friends my own age

Post Reply New Topic

I have been running into an issue of meeting intellectual friends my own age, even though I am active in a number of activities in the community. This is one of the things that I am constantly told to do to meet people, but it hasn't worked out for me. I have a number of friends that are older than me though.

I am active in both the local political scene and at my church. I also occasionally attend musical concerts, plays, lectures, etc. It bothers me that I never seem to find intellectual people my own age in these venues. It would also be a plus if I could find someone with an HFA/Asperger's or a schizophrenia diagnosis, since I have seemed to relate these folks the best in my friendships.

I had a close friend that I lost to suicide a little over a year ago. One of the things that I really miss is his curiosity and the intellectual conversations, along with his spirituality and political activism.

I am not sure where to begin to find people like him, that are intellectual. What I have been doing seems to not be working.

I seem to have a similar problem, passionatebach, and have had ever since I was in my early twenties (I'm 29 now). I am a member of a book club that gets together every month, and everyone else is older than 50. I also join these nature lovers walks, usually on weekends, and those are also mainly visited by people over 50 (most commonly over 65).

I have great fun in the company of the people attending, but I am kind of frustrated at the generation gap, and the lack of age peers attending these venues. At the same time, the people are always nice, very knowledgeable, and inclusive, but at 29 I no longer want to be the 'junior' of any company I'm with.

I should say that I have met age peers at certain other venues of interest, like a literary festival, a couple of Indonesian cultural fairs, and in Chinese class. But there, a different obstacle rears up, and that's that I'm almost always the least educated person among age peers. I'm always the only cleaner/warehouse worker, while my age peers at these cultural events all have 'proper' education and 'presentable' jobs. Half of them lose interest in speaking to me once they learn of that. The other half is still cool around me, but I've never managed to strike up a friendship if I wanted to.

Also, even if it's a year past, I'm very sorry for your loss.