Friends Without a Birth Date 

One of my closest friends turned 80 this year. Her name is Ros, and we first met online, proof that connection doesn’t require a shared postcode or even a shared decade to thrive. We were both speaking on a panel about healthy ageing, and from the first few minutes I felt her warmth and energy leap through the screen. Since then, we’ve spoken often, sometimes several times a week, about everything from philosophy and politics to music, dating, swimming, the ideal lipstick colour, you name it, we have spoken about it. I’ve stayed at her home; she’s met my daughter. The friendship is alive, surprising, and joyful, the kind that makes age irrelevant. 

Then there’s Adele, who is 26. We first bonded over a shared interest in intergenerational connections, and before long we had created one of our own. We laugh, we swap ideas, we nudge each other toward courage. Again, this friendship feels less about age and more about curiosity, shared values, and a willingness to learn together. 

These friendships, one with someone almost 30 years older, one with someone more than 30 years younger, have taught me something simple but profound: friendship is not age-specific. It is a human resource, a wellspring of connection, energy, and perspective. 

What Really Binds Us 

We often assume our closest friends will be people our own age. Yet research tells another story. A survey by AARP, a U.S. organisation with more than 38 million members, found that nearly four in ten adults already have a close friend at least 15 years older or younger. 

And when those friendships form, something shifts. Ageist stereotypes fall away, replaced by a sense of capacity and creativity across the life course. Even the World Health Organization now highlights social connection at every age as essential for wellbeing. Because in the end, what holds friendships together are not birth dates, but the things we choose to share: curiosity, values, and the joy of being understood. 

The Risk of Age Silos 

Despite this, most of us still live in “age silos.” Schools, workplaces, housing, even friendship apps and clubs often group us by year of birth. It looks tidy, but it shrinks the map. Younger people get written off as naïve, older people as irrelevant, and we miss the chance to learn from one another. 

It hasn’t always been this way. For most of history, intergenerational life was the norm. Apprenticeships, festivals, families, and villages mixed ages as a matter of course. Only in the past century, with youth culture on the rise and ageism taking root, did wide-gap friendships start to feel unusual. In reality, what’s “taboo” today is simply the loss of something deeply human. 

What Gets in the Way? 

So what are the barriers? Some are structural; schools, workplaces, housing, and even leisure activities are designed by age, funnelling us into peer groups from the start. Friendship apps and clubs reinforce the pattern, asking us to tick “under 30” or “over 50” before we’ve even said what we love. 

Others are cultural and mindset-driven. Ageism makes us suspicious of crossing those boundaries, while stereotypes whisper that older people are irrelevant or that younger people are naïve. Habit plays a part too, we stick with the familiar and miss the chance to meet across decades. 

Against that backdrop, the idea of age-diverse friendship can feel unusual. But what if we flipped it? 

Designing for Connection 

What if we stopped organising friendship by age and designed for energy, interests, and joy instead? 

On the dance floor, Tina, 60, and Yukari, 27, found each other not as “different generations” but as two people lit up by the same beat. A chance meeting at a rave turned into a friendship  and eventually a DJ partnership, built on rhythm, trust, and shared courage. “I learned so much about longevity. Age really doesn’t make any difference when it comes to living and having fun,” says Yukari. 

In the sea at Seaford, Ruth Rose, now 91, leads a community of more than 650 swimmers. She isn’t the oldest in the water, and that’s the point: her group spans every decade. They come for the cold shock of the waves but stay for the warmth of connection. “Feeling you are part of the group, that we are there for each other, is happiness. You can’t buy this,” Ruth says. 

These stories remind us that the strongest connections aren’t made by sorting people into age bands, but by creating spaces where generations can move, learn, and belong together. Too many apps, clubs, and programmes still do the opposite, neat on paper, but limiting in practice. 

The UN Decade of Healthy Ageing now recognises intergenerational connection as a pillar of public health. The lesson is clear that connection thrives when we design for curiosity, not chronology. Whether on a dance floor, in the sea, or around a shared cause, age slips into the background. What shines through is energy, joy, and the life we share within them.  

Friendship for the Future 

If friendship is a public good, then innovation has a role to play. The challenge is not to digitise or automate connection, but to make it easier for friendships like these to form. 

Imagine a world where clubs and apps matched people by what excites them, music, swimming, activism, design rather than by age brackets. Where events were designed with less rigid edges, so a rave had an early set that welcomed everyone, or a community swim had a crew ready to greet newcomers of any age. Where libraries, parks, and co-housing weren’t just amenities but part of our friendship infrastructure, places intentionally built to bring people together. 

Innovation at its best doesn’t just fix problems; it opens possibilities. If loneliness is a risk, then friendship is resilience. And if ageing is too often framed as decline, intergenerational friendship reminds us of a richer truth: life across generations can be continuity, creativity, and joy. 

So perhaps the real question isn’t whether we can be friends across generations, but whether we can afford not to be. In a world still sorted by age, intergenerational friendship points us to something bigger: the best connections are not defined by age at all, but by the life we share within them.