I feel the real reason really is just lack of time. It takes a serious amount of time to make and maintain a friendship.
This comes to a point with a family because you have so little extra time that you're very careful to use it wisely. To spend the hours hanging out and getting to know 10 strangers well enough that 1 may become a close friend is just a hard trade-off to make.
As another comment said, it makes one feel selfish. Especially, when that was time you could have spent with your wife and kids. It's hard.
The other thing I think we humans really end up dealing with is being alone. As you age, you simply have fewer and fewer friends. They die. You have less to offer to younger folks and are less mobile to get out. If anything, I think perfecting the ability to make friends would be handy. But I think in doing so, those friends would likely not be "deep" relationships...which gets back again to time.
An idea I've had in my head for the past week or two, mainly because I have several projects that I just keep "not getting around to".:
I think there is a difference between free time and idle time.
Free time is when you could be doing something that has been back-burnered, such as a project around the house, or getting together with friends.
Idle time is when there is nothing going on, but you are sort "on call" as it were (particularly in my case in the context of having young kids around). These are the times when you do lazy things like watch TV or surf the internet.
Most of productivity "hacking" is probably just making an effort to convert more "idle time" into "free time", which is easy in some ways, but non-trivial in others. I think the distinction between the two is very helpful in considering why people say they don't have any time, but still manage to find time to do all sort of unproductive things. If you are simply idle, it's partly because you fully expect that you could be called away to do something else at any moment. To have free time, you need to consciously block off that time from other obligations.
friendship should be a part of life. you shouldn't need to set aside time for your friends, they could come over while u re cooking or stay casually over lunch. It used to be a lot more like that in the past. I think the past decades have switched to an almost ceremonial way of life where helicopter parenting consumes the entirety of family life and everything else has been abandoned
This comes to a point with a family because you have so little extra time that you're very careful to use it wisely. To spend the hours hanging out and getting to know 10 strangers well enough that 1 may become a close friend is just a hard trade-off to make.
As another comment said, it makes one feel selfish. Especially, when that was time you could have spent with your wife and kids. It's hard.
The other thing I think we humans really end up dealing with is being alone. As you age, you simply have fewer and fewer friends. They die. You have less to offer to younger folks and are less mobile to get out. If anything, I think perfecting the ability to make friends would be handy. But I think in doing so, those friends would likely not be "deep" relationships...which gets back again to time.