'Let's Definitely Do That Sometime': The Empty Promise That's Making Us All a Little Lonelier

I'm going to say something that might make you cringe a little, because it made me cringe when I realized it about myself.

I have told at least a dozen people in the last year that we should "grab coffee soon." I said it warmly. I meant it, in the loose, vague way that you mean things when you're not actually committing to them. And then I did absolutely nothing to make it happen.

Neither did they.

And we both knew, on some level, that we both knew.

This is the "We Should Grab Coffee" trap, and if you live in America in 2024, you have almost certainly been both the person setting it and the person caught in it.

The Nicest Way to Say Nothing

Somewhere along the way, Americans developed a whole dialect of social non-commitment. "We should hang out." "I've been meaning to reach out." "Let's plan something soon." "We're way overdue for a catch-up."

These phrases feel like connection. They're delivered with genuine warmth, often accompanied by a hug or a hand on the arm. They're not lies, exactly — in the moment, the person usually does want to see you. But they're also not invitations. They're the shape of an invitation without any of the actual content.

Real invitations have dates. They have places. They have a specific ask that requires a yes or a no. "We should grab coffee" has none of those things. It has a sentiment and an exit.

And we've all agreed, collectively and quietly, to accept it as currency.

Why We Do It

Here's my honest take, and feel free to push back on this: we say "let's hang soon" because it lets us feel like a good friend without doing the work of actually being one.

It's a way of signaling warmth — to the other person and to ourselves — without taking on any real risk. Because real plans come with real possibility of rejection. You suggest a specific Tuesday, and the other person says they're busy, and now you have to figure out another time, and suddenly there's effort involved, and effort implies that this relationship matters enough to you to inconvenience yourself for it.

Vague plans sidestep all of that. Nobody says no to "sometime." Nobody has to show up for "soon."

It's not malicious. It's not even usually conscious. But it is avoidance, dressed up in friendliness.

The Loneliness Nobody's Connecting to This

Here's what I keep thinking about: we are living through a documented loneliness crisis in this country. Survey after survey shows that Americans have fewer close friends than they did 30 years ago. People report having no one to call in a real emergency. Younger adults especially are describing a kind of social hunger that they can't quite name or fill.

And yet — we are also, by all appearances, extremely socially active. We go to events. We network. We post about the people we love. We say "we should catch up" to approximately everyone we've ever met.

Those two things coexist because social activity and genuine connection are not the same thing. You can have a packed social calendar full of surface-level contact and still feel profoundly unseen. You can say "let's hang" to 15 people and still go home feeling like nobody really knows you.

The coffee that never happens isn't just a scheduling failure. It's a missed opportunity for the kind of real, specific, committed time together that actually feeds a friendship. And when enough of those opportunities get replaced with warm non-invitations, you end up with a social life that looks full from the outside and feels hollow from the inside.

The Fear Underneath the Vagueness

I think the reason this pattern is so hard to break is that it's protecting us from something real.

Asking someone to specifically, concretely hang out with you — and meaning it — is vulnerable. It implies that you want them in your life in a real way. It opens you up to the possibility that they'll say no, or say yes and then cancel, or say yes and show up distracted and halfway present. It requires you to care enough to be disappointed.

Vague plans protect you from all of that. If nothing was ever really scheduled, nothing can really fall through.

But that protection comes at a cost. Because the friendships that sustain us — the ones that actually hold us up when life gets hard — are built on exactly the kind of specific, vulnerable, inconvenient showing-up that "we should grab coffee" is designed to avoid.

The Quiet Message We're Sending

There's something else worth naming here. When we repeatedly offer vague plans to someone and never follow through, we're sending them a message — even if we don't intend to.

The message is: you're not quite worth the friction of a real plan.

Most people won't say that out loud. They'll just quietly stop suggesting things. They'll interpret the pattern correctly, even if they're too polite to name it. And eventually, the relationship drifts into the category of "people I used to be close to," and nobody can quite pinpoint when or why.

That's a lot of relational loss to chalk up to "we've both just been so busy."

What It Actually Takes to Break the Pattern

I'm not here to shame anyone — including myself — for doing this. It's baked into how we socialize in America. But I do think it's worth trying to do something different, even just occasionally.

Make the ask specific. Instead of "we should do something soon," try "are you free the weekend of the 15th? I'd love to actually see you." It feels more vulnerable. That's the point.

Follow up on your own vague plans. If you said "let's grab coffee" and meant it even a little, you can be the one to make it real. Send the text. Pick the coffee shop. Be the person who turns the sentiment into a plan.

Say no when you mean no. Part of why we lean on vague yeses is because a clear no feels harsh. But a clear "I can't commit to plans right now, but I really do value you" is kinder than three months of soft-pending maybes.

Notice who you're actually making time for. Your calendar doesn't lie. The people you consistently show up for — with specific plans and actual presence — are the people your actions say matter most. Make sure that list matches what you feel in your chest.

The Invitation You Actually Mean

At the end of the day, the "we should grab coffee" trap is really just a small symptom of a bigger thing: a cultural discomfort with the directness that real connection requires.

Saying "I want to see you" — and meaning it enough to make it happen — is an act of courage in a social climate that's made vagueness the polite default.

But here's what I know from years of conversations on this platform: the talks that actually change things, the friendships that actually hold, the relationships that actually last — they're all built on someone being willing to be specific. To show up. To say, out loud, that this person is worth the effort of a real plan.

So yeah. Let's grab coffee.

Are you free Thursday?