People Are Weird

Americans with no close friends rises to 17%

Friendship is becoming easier to let fade, with more Americans reporting no close friends at all.

▲ Rising80% confidencehorizon Dec 2026data as of 2024

Confidence-weighted forecast · history → projection

Tracking share of U.S. adults reporting no close friends (percent of adults)

ObservedProjectionshaded band = confidence cone

80%

Confidence

2026

Horizon

Jun 2026

First called

Tracking

Status

The call

A friendship can now die quietly. No fight. No dramatic ending. Just fewer plans, fewer calls, fewer reasons to leave the house.

The number to notice

The share of Americans reporting no close friends rose from 3% in 1990 to 17% in 2024.

What’s driving this

more time at home
digital contact replacing in-person maintenance
adult schedules crowding out friendship
fewer shared institutions that force repeated contact

Sources · check usOpen

The Decline in American Friendship ↗American Enterprise Institute · 2024-08-22survey The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges, and Loss ↗Survey Center on American Life · 2021-06survey

For you

Your friendships will not survive on vibes. If you do not schedule, initiate, and repeat contact, low-friction life will quietly replace people with screens.

What would change our mind

This call weakens if a comparable national friendship survey shows no-close-friend rates falling below 10% or if in-person friend time returns to pre-2010 levels.

Behind the numbersOpen

The 1990 comparison comes from a Gallup News Service poll referenced by the Survey Center on American Life. The 2021 point comes from the American Perspectives Survey, and the 2024 point comes from AEI’s American Social Capital Survey reporting by Daniel Cox and Samuel Pressler. “No close friends” excludes close relatives in the 2024 reporting. Different survey instruments can affect exact comparability, so treat the direction as stronger than the exact level.