There is a need to build an environment where people can get together first, before they can make friends.
Fraternal organizations, adult recreational sports leagues, social dance groups, etc., all exist. You don't have to be a permanent student to have a slice of your time in a not-too-dissimilar social environment.
> There is a need to build an environment where people can get together first, before they can make friends.
There are plenty of such environments. The people that aren't making friends are choosing not to engage with them. In many cases, because they are expending all their social energy on work and transactional relationships around work rather than non-transactional casual interactions on which to grow friendships.
You really can join a club or meetup or just hang around in the park or a bar and make friends starting now. No need to wait for unplanned, unstarted construction projects to complete first. Good luck, sir.
1) Approximately 0% of my close friends were made in those sort of environments. Not for lack of attempts I might add, but because they are places where it is quite hard to make good friends. Most of the friendships I can think of that other people have weren't made in those sort of environments either. I've made a close friend at a funeral. I've made 0 close friends at social clubs. The friends I had at the social clubs joined because I was a member or vice versa.
2) In a stroke of anecdata, I was talking to a colleague recently who was quitting the club he was member of because he felt the friendships he'd made there were so shallow as to be worthless.
You've already identified that something happens around age 25. That seems a like a bit of a tell to me that there is more to the situation than just awkwardness. It is true that nobody is going to help the lonely because, sort of definitionally, they don't have a strong support network. Therefore they are on their own and will have to figure it out themselves. Joining a bunch of social things certainly should help. Nevertheless it is worth approaching the situation with just a smidgen of empathy and a certain curiosity [0] about what the actual forces at play here are. Slogans like "just be happy", "learn to code" and, I suspect, "just join a club, sir" tend to age poorly.
[0] Not to insinuate that you aren't, but the word count and choice doesn't give me hope that you've really dug in to this topic to make sure there isn't something going on.
