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A Vox reader writes: Why is it so hard to make friends as you continue to get older?  You don’t need me to tell you what you probably already know: Forming new friendships in adulthood feels close to impossible (unless you’re a preternaturally charming social butterfly, in which case, good for you!).  For the rest of us, introducing yourself to people is awkward, and inviting someone new to hang out can be more nerve-wracking than asking your crush out on a date. Even if you do schedule a time to meet, who has the time for regular get-togethers when you hardly see your current friends as it is?  Sign up for the Explain It to Me newsletter The newsletter is part of Vox’s Explain It to Me. Each week, we tackle a question from our audience and deliver a digestible explainer from one of our journalists. Have a question you want us to answer? Ask us here. Although over 60 percent of Americans consider having close friends crucial for a fulfilling life, 8 percent of people 18 and older report having no close friends. And as our reader suspected, as we get older, our social circle starts to diminish. One study found that people generally have the most friends at age 25. After that, we’re in a gradual friend decline for the rest of our lives. In the midst of an ongoing loneliness epidemic, friends remain a lifeline: They are our champions and cheerleaders, the people we entrust with our closest secrets and insecurities, our companions for life’s moments, big and small.  If these connections are so crucial, why do we have such a tough time forming new ones? After reporting on friendship for seven years, here’s what I’ve found. Why is it so hard to make new friends? It’s not just you; most people feel this way. But when we say making friends as adults is hard, it’s because we’re comparing the experience to childhood, when it was indeed easier.  As kids, we’re thrust into social situations, like school and sports, with no real say over who’ll be there or whether we can opt out. All this forced time together facilitates relationship-building: Research shows it takes over 200 hours spent with someone to consider them a close friend. Racking up that time is much easier when you’re in the same classroom, playground, practice field, neighborhood, dorm room, or study group. As adults, who has the time to put in that kind of legwork? Our precious hours are spread between all of our responsibilities and relationships, from work and hobbies to partners and children.  One study found that once we settle down, we tend to shed an average of two friends; all the energy that went into maintaining those friendships is now devoted to a romantic partner.  The older we get, the more fixed, obligatory relationships we acquire: partners, in-laws, longtime friends, children. Modern child-rearing, in particular, can occupy so much space in your brain and calendar that your only social interactions might be with people adjacent to your child’s life and activities — people you wouldn’t necessarily choose to hang out with.  What prevents us from forming connections? Remote work has put a damper on another once-vibrant source of friendships: It’s much harder to make meaningful connections with coworkers in the age of Zoom.  Fundamentally, many of us are burned out by modern life. When you have nothing left to give at the end of the day, spending time with friends — not to mention putting yourself in exhausting scenarios to make new friends — can feel like a chore. It’s why so many of us have felt relieved when a friend cancels plans at the last minute. Finally, there’s the problem of our own self-consciousness. Let’s say you meet another parent on the sidelines of your kid’s soccer game. You compliment their shoes, they offer up a witty joke — the two of you might really get along. But you never take the connection off the field.  Why? We have a self-sabotaging tendency to believe other people don’t enjoy chatting with us as much as we enjoy talking to them, a phenomenon called the liking gap. It’s mostly an invention in our heads, but it’s powerful. So, how can I make more friends? We should act like kids again.  If you have the free time, put yourself in a situation where you’ll encounter the same group of people for an extended period of time, like a club or volunteer group. Then, try to turn off the nagging voice in your head that says you’re not interesting or might say something stupid and strike up a conversation with someone. Remember: they like you more than you think (that’s according to psychologist Marisa G. Franco in her book Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make — and Keep — Friends).  If you’re nervous in your new group setting, you can take a few weeks to warm up and build a relationship with others. You know exactly when and where you’ll see these people again so there’s less urgency. This makes it easier to start building toward 200 hours spent together.  For those who are strapped for time, take note of the people you already see and interact with most frequently, maybe a coworker or a neighbor. What’s stopping you from befriending them? Start with some small talk the next time you see them and graduate into longer conversations as you feel comfortable. The more meaningful these conversations become, the more likely you are to build a genuine friend-level relationship.  As awkward as it may be, ask for their phone number or email and schedule your next get-together before the current one ends. And even if you feel so burned out you couldn’t possibly imagine dragging your lifeless body off the couch for happy hour with a new person, remind yourself that connection is the antidote to that feeling, not isolation.  This will probably feel exhausting because hanging out with new people is more energy-intensive than spending time with those we already know. But it should also be fun. There’s no pressure to find your next best friend, just someone who you’ll enjoy talking to for the next 10 minutes.   This story was featured in the Explain It to Me newsletter. Sign up here. For more from Explain It to Me, check out the podcast. New episodes drop every Wednesday.

‘Echoes of Wisdom’ is an innovative, charming and surprisingly huge blend of old and new Zelda.

On the day of her big coming-of-age bash, Audrey Calzada wore a tiara. Mariachi played. Friends performed a synchronized dance to Rema’s “Calm Down,” and she had a mid-party outfit change from a sequined midnight-blue gown to a gold one—just like so many other girls might do at their quinceañeras, the ritual for 15-year-olds that’s celebrated across Latin American cultures and their diaspora. But Calzada, who works in the oil industry in Texas, had passed the quinceañera milestone decades ago. She was about to hit her 50th birthday, and she was determined to celebrate with pizzazz. “The joke in my community,” she told me, “is that I’m extra.”Calzada is one of several women I spoke with who, upon turning 50, chose to celebrate a cincuentañera—a remixed version of the quinceañera that’s become more popular in recent years. On TikTok, some videos of these parties have racked up more than 1 million views. Certain hallmarks of the quinceañera, such as ball gowns and father-daughter waltzes, show up, while others, such as the gift of a “last doll,” get ditched for whatever the women prefer. “50 never looked so good,” one celebrant wrote on TikTok, captioning a video of herself catwalking in a pink dress, a tiara, and aviator shades.Some women’s families have planned their parties for them. Other women have orchestrated the festivities themselves. Yet most women I spoke with had at least one thing in common: They wanted nothing to do with the bleak depictions of older age that they were being fed. Many women at 50 “have been led to believe that life is over,” Norma Elia Cantú, a professor at Trinity University, told me. She referred to “Over the hill” birthday cards and party favors making the rounds at many midlife fetes, items suggesting that life’s latter half is an ugly descent into irrelevance, ended only by the unforgiving slap of death. Cantú, in planning her own cincuentañera in 1997, had no interest in this sort of gloom. “I wanted to counteract that,” she said, “and make it a celebration.”[Read: ]The gap between how old you are and how old you think you areThe hunger for meaningful midlife festivities of course extends beyond the Latino community. In the film Between Two Temples, released last month, a retired music teacher in upstate New York undergoes bat mitzvah preparations in late adulthood, mirroring real-life rituals in the Jewish tradition offered to older congregants at certain synagogues. Secular celebrations such as “croning ceremonies” and menopause parties are also growing in popularity across the U.S.For Latina women in the United States, celebrating a cincuentañera goes beyond just defying stereotypes about aging—it’s a culturally resonant way to honor the life that they’ve built, often with the kind of splash that many couldn’t afford as girls. Argenis Gonzalez, a quinceañera planner in Orlando, Florida, told me he estimates that 70 percent of his clients’ mothers never got to celebrate a quince of their own because of a lack of money. Julia Alvarez, in her nonfiction cultural study Once Upon a Quinceañera, writes that many first-generation Latinas skipped theirs because they “didn’t want anything that would make us stand out as anything other than all-American.”The cincuentañera, then, is a chance for women to celebrate a second coming-of-age, this time as the grown adults that they could only dream of being when they were 15.In the course of a long life, the party lineup is awfully front-loaded: By the time a person hits 40, they may have celebrated a bat mitzvah or a quinceañera or a sweet 16, a prom, a graduation, and a wedding (or two)—cultural festivities where it’s socially acceptable to drop some cash and go all out. Later in life, the number of elaborate festivities dwindles. This distribution might have made sense for humans a century ago; in 1900, the average global life expectancy was only 32 years. Yet the average life span has more than doubled since then, leaving the second half of life starved of confetti.Midlife also looks different than it used to for many women. In addition to living longer, American women are marrying later and delaying motherhood, if they choose to have children at all. After age 50, Cantú hiked Spain’s famed Camino de Santiago route five times; Calzada solo-traveled through Southeast Asia. Their lives don’t exactly square with patriarchal stereotypes of what older women might be up to, such as helping raise grandchildren or knitting sweaters in a Florida retirement home.Physical shifts such as perimenopause fuel significant change in midlife. As my colleague Sophie Gilbert wrote earlier this year, “The state of midlife, for women, is a kind of second (or third) adolescence, a coming-of-age identity crisis that roils with hormones and exploration and discontent.” Unlike the transition into adulthood, though, which boasts ceremonies galore, many women undergo this transformation with little social support or acknowledgment. Lacking rituals or jamborees, they might turn to a close friend, a journal, or a therapist to attend to the stew of feelings that accompanies any big life change.That’s where the cincuentañera plays a role. Unlike most big celebrations in a woman’s adult life, the cincuentañera focuses on her individual accomplishments. “The milestones that mark the passage of time or social success for women tend to be those of child-rearing, tend to be those of marriage,” Rachel González-Martin, a Latino-studies professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Quinceañera Style, told me, referring to events like baby showers and weddings. Yet the cincuentañera is squarely about the person celebrating. It’s about a woman having “arrived at that which was potential at fifteen,” as Cantú writes in Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change, a book she co-edited. At Cantú’s cincuentañera, for example, her three-tiered cake featured figurines of a graduate and a book, honoring her work as a professor and a writer.[Read: Three rules for middle-age happiness]The process of throwing oneself an extravagant shindig can itself be empowering. During a quinceañera, a 15-year-old might choose the flowers and the party theme, but older family members are most likely running the show and footing the bill. The cincuentañera, though, can be anything. Alma Villanueva, an Amazon Flex driver in Arizona, told me that at her cincuentañera, she danced not just with her father but with her mother as well. For Villanueva, the twist on the tradition was an opportunity to give both of her parents a public shout-out. When she took them out for a spin, she told me, “I didn’t want them to dance with me. I wanted to dance with them.” Calzada said that at her party, she also wanted to salute her relationships, and gave her loved ones tiaras of their own. “Watch til the end to see a sea of queens,” she captioned a TikTok video of her bejeweled attendees grooving to Bad Bunny.The cincuentañera may be relatively new in the history of parties, but Calzada hopes it becomes a tradition—a ritual that future generations of women can cherish as they step into a new phase of life. She hopes her daughter celebrates both a quinceañera and a cincuentañera. She wouldn’t want her to miss out on one of the cincuentañera’s greatest gifts: the chance for a woman to dream up her remaining years with a freedom she didn’t have at 20 or 40—or especially at 15. “This wasn’t coming of age, because I’m entering adulthood,” Calzada said. “This was coming into a phase of my life where I’m finally living for myself.”

Gilbert Flores/Variety via Getty ImagesStephen Colbert said earlier this week that Donald Trump had been “kind of boring” when he appeared on his show and the former president—obviously—could not just let that lie. “He is VERY BORING,” Trump hollered on Truth Social overnight, responding to Colbert, who was interviewed with his wife Evie on PBS News Hour about their new cookbook on Monday.The Late Show host said that the former president would not make a return to the show as a guest, with Trump's last appearance nine years ago failing to make an impression on Colbert. Read more at The Daily Beast.

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There is a word that is the bane of existence for English teachers, parents, and podcast listeners everywhere: “like.” This week on Explain It to Me, we answer a pressing question for our listener, Allison: “Why do I use the word ‘like’ so much?” Allison is a college junior, and with graduation on the horizon, she wants to sound more mature before she enters the workforce. “When I’ve been in internship interviews or job interviews, I do my best to speak more eloquently,” she said. “Why do I say “like’ so often?” To tackle this question, I had a conversation with Valerie Fridland, sociolinguist and author of the book Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English. Though often dismissed as a “filler word,” Friedland argues that we use “like” in our conversations for a reason. “The reality with ‘like’ is it has come into our language because it serves some really important purposes for us,” she said. “No one starts using a word because it’s pointless.” Fridland talked to me about how “like” is indispensable in so many ways, how it entered the lexicon, and if people use it as often as we think.  Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. For more, you can listen to Explain It to Me on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545. I remember being as young as seventh grade and my parents being at a parent teacher conference. My mom and dad said to my teacher, “She uses the word ‘like’ so much. How do we get her to stop?” And my teacher was like, “Oh, my kids do it too.”  I want to say that when you were introducing that, you’re saying what the teacher was saying. You said “she was like.” I can’t turn it off! But it was serving a function for you because that is one form of “like.” It’s what we call in linguistic speak a “quotative like,” and that “like” substitutes for the verb “to say.” What you are doing is saying, “I’m not telling you verbatim what the teacher said. I’m giving you sort of my subjective recall of what she said.” It’s a really useful tool because it allows you more flexibility when telling a story. That makes sense. You can use it sometimes to draw attention or highlight. It can also be used to hedge what you say. And a lot of times you use “like” to indicate that this is a subjective estimation of something. So you could say, “He’s like a doctor or something,” which is indicating I don’t exactly know what he does, but it’s something like a doctor. Then, you can also use it at the beginning of a sentence. And that’s a little different. That’s usually a sentential adverbial, which makes it sound fancy and important, but really what it means is it’s a linking “like.” So when you say something such as “I don’t know what he did. Like, I think he was a doctor.”  The similarity among all these likes is that they’re all expressing some sort of subjectivity. And that’s the true power of “like.” Subjectivity is something that’s often frowned on and not taken as seriously as something that’s considered a cold, hard fact. Absolutely. There are a number of reasons why people don’t like “like.” I think one is because its whole purpose is impreciseness.  Often we take impreciseness to be uncertainty, but those are not the same thing. Just because someone is imprecise in what they’re saying doesn’t mean they’re uncertain about what they’re saying. Those are actually two very important distinctions. Unfortunately, the people that tend to be associated with “like” use, are also the people that are typically thought of as vacuous, empty-headed and sort of clueless. And that’s young people and women. Those are also the people that tend to use “like” the most. So you throw in this feature that marks impreciseness on a group that is often associated with being uncertain, being less sure of themselves, being less confident — which is not a fair assessment of them — but still the assessment. That makes for a feature people don’t like. What is it about the word like that makes it so flexible for all these different uses? Like is a very, very, very old word. Words shift and change meaning through time. And the older the word, the more often it can do this.  In about the 13th century, we first get “like” in our language and it is a verb. Then around the 15th and 16th centuries, we start to use it in similes. And then around the 16th century, you start using it as a conjunction, where instead of just being between two objects, you’re expressing similarity between an object and a whole sentence: “He rode the bike like the sky was on fire.” Then, in the 1700s, you start to see it as a discourse marker, often from lower status criminal witnesses or criminal defendants giving testimony in the Old Bailey proceedings in London.  That’s where we actually start to see “like” used this way for the first time. Who uses “like” the most now? When we look at studies done in the early 2000s, users under 40 were the most predominant “like” users, and users over 40 used it to a much less degree. It seems to have really come into fashion in the 80s and 90s.  It has increased in use in every generation since. So is it true that it is very much a Gen Z feature? Yes. And they might use it more than the generation above them, because it has continued to progress in their speech. But were they the innovators? Absolutely not. And was it something that was really a strong feature of the previous generations, millennials and Gen X? Absolutely. 

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Eric Charbonneau/Getty ImagesMeghan Markle was a “demon” who had “psycho moments” as a boss, people who worked for her have told The Daily Beast.The former employees spoke out after a carefully curated crop of former and current staffers said she was the best boss ever, who gives her staff bundles of freshly cut flowers and home-produced eggs, and makes her staff feel like seeds being watered.The delightful portrait of Meghan’s management style was painted in Us Weekly on Tuesday, as Team Meghan launched a fightback against a report in The Hollywood Reporter that claimed Meghan was a “dictator in high heels” who reduced “grown men to tears.” Sources close to the couple denied that story as a “fabrication” to The Daily Beast last week.Read more at The Daily Beast.

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