I’ll be honest with you.
At 64, looking back at my generation, I see a pattern that haunts me.
We boomers made choices in our 40s that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time.
Career-focused, success-driven, keeping our problems to ourselves.
Now, I watch my peers in their 70s and too many are profoundly alone.
The cruel part? We never saw it coming.
We thought we were being responsible, mature, practical, we thought friendship was something that just happened naturally, we thought vulnerability was weakness, and we thought our marriages could run on autopilot while we chased promotions.
We were wrong about all of it.
I’ve spent considerable time reflecting on this, particularly after watching several former colleagues struggle with isolation after retirement.
The patterns are clear once you know what to look for.
Here are the eight things my generation did in our 40s that virtually guaranteed loneliness later, and why we missed every warning sign:
1) We prioritized work over building deep friendships
In our 40s, work was everything.
Sixty-hour weeks were badges of honor.
Weekend emails showed dedication.
Missing social gatherings for conference calls demonstrated commitment.
We told ourselves we were building security for our families.
Good relationships keep us happier and healthier.
But, in our 40s, we chose differently.
We chose the promotion over the poker night, the business trip over the birthday party, and the networking event over the neighborhood barbecue.
We maintained surface-level work relationships while our real friendships withered from neglect.
Now, post-retirement, those work relationships evaporated the moment we cleaned out our desks.
The people we spent decades alongside? Most disappeared within months.
We built our entire social world around temporary arrangements and wondered why we felt so unmoored when work ended.
2) We avoided showing vulnerability in our relationships
My generation perfected the art of keeping things surface-level.
We talked about sports, stocks, and politics, but never our fears, failures, or feelings.
Showing uncertainty was career suicide, and admitting struggle was social weakness.
As vulnerability expert Brené Brown explains, “Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.”
We missed this entirely.
In our 40s, we built walls instead of bridges.
We perfected our professional personas, we answered “How are you?” with “Fine” even when we were drowning, and we thought we were being strong.
In a way, we were actually becoming strangers to everyone around us.
3) We treated loneliness as a personal weakness rather than a health risk
When loneliness crept in during our 40s, we dismissed it.
Real adults didn’t need constant companionship.
Needing friends was juvenile; we had responsibilities, not time for feelings.
Loneliness is far more than just a bad feeling, though.
It harms both individual and societal health, yet we ignored every signal.
The Sunday afternoons that felt endless, the hollow feeling after another solitary business trip, and the growing distance from our spouses.
We called it maturity or independence, yet we never called it what it was: a health crisis in slow motion.
4) We neglected to invest time in our marriages
Here’s what we told ourselves: Good marriages don’t need constant attention.
If you picked the right person, things would work themselves out.
We had bills to pay, kids to raise, and careers to build.
Romance was for newlyweds, not people with mortgages.
Research shows that people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80.
Marital satisfaction in midlife was actually a better predictor of later health than cholesterol levels.
I got married at 35, later than many peers, because work took up my prime years.
Even then, I thought I was being smart, establishing myself first.
But in my 40s, I continued that pattern.
Date nights became quarterly events, conversations became logistics meetings, and we managed a household together but stopped knowing each other.
Too many of my peers woke up at 70 next to strangers, or worse, alone after gray divorces that surprised no one but themselves.
The bigger house, the better car, the impressive title.
These were our metrics in our 40s.
We measured success in square footage and stock options.
However, those who are in satisfying romantic relationships are far more likely to be happy overall and make more money.
Social connections actually enhance rather than compete with success.
We had it backward as we sacrificed relationships for success, thinking we’d have time for friends after we made it.
But “after” never came.
There was always another goal, another milestone, another acquisition.
By the time we realized money couldn’t buy companionship, the companions had moved on.
Our 40s were when we should have been mastering the art of connection.
Instead, we let those muscles atrophy.
We communicated through memos and emails, we managed people rather than befriended them, and we strategized conversations instead of having them.
People with poor social skills have high levels of stress and loneliness in their lives.
We thought professional skills were enough.
Back then, we could run meetings, close deals, and manage teams but we couldn’t maintain a friendship, deepen a relationship, or build genuine community.
We became socially incompetent right when social competence mattered most.
7) We underestimated how much time friendships actually required
We thought friendships were like houseplants: Water occasionally and they’d survive, we’d catch up twice a year and call it maintaining the relationship, and we believed history was enough to sustain connection.
Researchers at the University of Kansas found it takes around 50 hours to move from mere acquaintance to casual friend, 90 hours to become friends, and more than 200 hours before you become close friends.
Two hundred hours.
In our 40s, we wouldn’t invest 200 hours in anything that didn’t show ROI.
Friendship seemed inefficient.
Now we understand that those hours were investments in the only currency that matters in your 70s: Connection.
By our 40s, we’d decided who we were and who our people were.
New friends seemed unnecessary, even exhausting.
We had our routine, our established relationships, our comfortable patterns.
Why complicate things?
Life has a way of shrinking those circles.
People move, get sick, pass away.
The tight circle we maintained becomes a noose when it’s all we have.
We didn’t account for attrition, build redundancy into our social lives, nor understand that social networks need constant renewa.
Closing thoughts
The hardest part about writing this is knowing how preventable it all was.
Every lonely 70-year-old I know was a busy 40-year-old who thought they had time.
They thought retirement would be when they’d finally focus on relationships, they thought their spouse would always be there, and they thought their health would hold.
If you’re in your 40s or 50s reading this, you still have time.
Start with one genuine conversation, make one phone call, schedule one regular meeting with a friend., or invest one hour in your marriage this week.
These are investments in your future self.
For those of us already past that point, it’s harder but not hopeless.
Building connections at 64 requires more intention, more vulnerability, and more effort.
However, the alternative is a loneliness that compounds with each passing year.
Start where you are: One connection, one conversation, and one risk at a time.
