🧙♂️ The Wizard of Loneliness Went to the Gym. Here’s What He Learned.
🧪 The Experiment
💡 Sol Bites: 4 Lessons From the Gym Experiment
🦉 Words of Wisdom
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The Wizard of Loneliness Went to the Gym. Here’s What He Learned.
There’s a blog post making the rounds (it hit the front page of Hacker News) that I keep thinking about. A guy graduates college, lands a job in Syracuse, and then realizes two years later that he has zero friends. He calls himself the “Wizard of Loneliness.”
His nightly ritual was googling “how to make friends after college.” You already know the answer the Internet gives, because it’s always the same: Do your favorite hobby with other people. Except his hobby is programming, the local dev meetup happens once a month, and every “just show up” activity quietly assumes you already have a friend to bring. So he did the only thing left. He went to the gym and ran an experiment on himself.
The Experiment
Every day for one month, he picked one person at the gym and walked up to talk to them. He had an opening line (“Hey, I see you here all the time. You’re pretty strong. What’s your split?”), then tried to keep things going for five to 10 minutes. He logged it all in a spreadsheet, because of course he did: seven conversations in week one, 10 in week two, 14 in week three.
One guy became his gym buddy, then had him over and cooked him a smash burger. Another, a fellow new-to-Syracuse student, texted him later to say their conversation meant a lot, because he had been struggling too. The lonely guy doing the approaching was also, without planning to, the cure for somebody else’s loneliness.
Sol Bites: 4 Lessons From the Gym Experiment
The standard advice is missing a step. “Do your hobby around people” gets you close to people, but it does not always get you a friend. You still have to start the conversation, and many of us don’t get to that point.
Awkwardness is survivable, and that’s really all you need to know.. The Wizard admits to chickening out of approaching people and making a detour to the water fountain his first few days. The fix was speed: Approach people before fear talks you out of it. A bad interaction stings for a few minutes, then you move on.
People are friendlier than they look. Headphones usually meant “I'm listening to music,” not “Leave me alone.” Most people popped an earbud out to chat.
Friendship is a time math problem. A 2018 University of Kansas study by Jeffrey Hall put rough numbers on it: It takes around 50 hours to get a casual friendship, roughly 90 to get a “friend,” and 200-plus for a close friendship. Those are approximations, but the point holds. A location you already visit daily is a good place to log the hours.
The Wizard of Loneliness still hasn’t cracked the final goal—consistent weekend hangouts—since his new gym friends are busy on the weekends. But as he puts it, that’s a better problem than eternal loneliness. The friends you want are probably around you. Somebody just has to say the first hello.
For anyone who’s ever felt alone in a crowded room
Words of Wisdom
One of the most important things you can do on this earth is to let people know they are not alone.
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