Billy the Kid (born Henry McCarty; September 17 or November 23, 1859 – July 14, 1881), also known by the pseudonym William H. Bonney, was an Irish-American outlaw and gunfighter of the American Old West who killed eight men before he was shot and killed at the age of 21. B illy Baker writes about the outdoors for the Globe, through narrative features and first-person misadventures. His first book, “We Need to Hang Out: A Memoir of Making Friends,” was published. About We Need to Hang Out At the age of forty, having settled into his busy career and active family life, Billy Baker discovers that he’s lost something crucial along the way: his friends. Other priorities always seemed to come first, until all his close friendships had lapsed into distant memories. In 2013, the album My Hope: Songs Inspired by the Message and Mission of Billy Graham was recorded by Amy Grant, Kari Jobe, Newsboys, Matthew West, tobyMac and other music artists with new songs to honor Graham during his My Hope America with Billy Graham outreach and the publication of his book The Reason for My Hope: Salvation.

About Billy Baker

Billy Baker Boston Globe

Billy Baker writes about the outdoors for the Boston Globe, through narrative features and first-person misadventures.

His first book, “We Need to Hang Out: A Memoir of Making Friends,” was published by Simon & Schuster in 2021, and grew out of a Globe Magazine article about how men stink at friendship.

Baker is a graduate of Boston Latin School, Tulane University, and the Columbia Journalism School, and is a recipient of the Deborah Howell Award for Writing Excellence from the American Society of News Editors.

We Need to Hang Out: A Memoir of Making Friends

In this comic adventure through the loneliness epidemic, a middle-aged everyman looks around one day and realizes that he seems to have misplaced his friends, inspiring him to set out on a hilarious and ultimately moving quest to revive old tribes and build new ones, in his own ridiculous way.

At the age of forty, having settled into his busy career and active family life, Billy Baker discovers that he’s lost something crucial along the way: his friends. Other priorities always seemed to come first, until all his close friendships had lapsed into distant memories. When he takes an assignment to write an article about the modern loneliness epidemic, he realizes just how common it is to be a middle-aged loner: almost fifty million Americans over the age of forty-five, especially men, suffer from chronic loneliness, which the surgeon general has declared one of the nation’s “greatest pathologies,” worse than smoking, obesity, or heart disease in increasing a person’s risk for premature death. Determined to defy these odds, Baker vows to salvage his lost friendships and blaze a path for men (and women) everywhere to improve their relationships old and new.
In We Need to Hang Out, Baker embarks on an entertaining and relatable quest to reprioritize his ties with his buddies and forge more connections, all while balancing work, marriage, and kids. From leading a buried treasure hunt with his old college crew to organizing an impromptu “ditch day” for dozens of his former high school classmates to essentially starting a frat house for middle-aged guys in his neighborhood, he experiments with ways to keep in touch with his friends no matter how hectic their lives are—with surprising and deeply satisfying results.
Along the way, Baker talks to experts in sociology and psychology to investigate how such naturally social creatures as humans could become so profoundly isolated today. And he turns to real-life experts in lasting friendship, bravely joining a cruise packed entirely with crowds of female BFFs and learning the secrets of male bonding from a group of older dudes who faithfully meet up on the same night every week. Bursting with humor, candor, and charm, We Need to Hang Out is a celebration of companionship and a call to action in this age of alone.

Billy Baker We Need To Hang Out Meme

In one sense, the journalist Billy Baker has undertaken a self-defeating task: to cure his loneliness by writing a book. He could’ve made a documentary — seems more social — but instead he’s chosen one of the loneliest professions, involving endless days of solitary confinement in a room with your keyboard and self-doubt, to try to reconnect with friends.

Still, Baker manages to pull it off, mostly. When not typing at his desk alone, he speaks to psychologists, goes on male-bonding trips and tries to embrace his vulnerable side. The result is “We Need to Hang Out,” an entertaining mix of social science, memoir and humor, as if a Daniel Goleman book were filtered through the lens of Will Ferrell.

Baker, a middle-aged dad and Boston Globe writer, starts with the thesis that we’ve been in the midst of a loneliness crisis — even before Covid. “In the 21st century,” he writes, “loneliness has become an epidemic.” He cites a 2019 survey that found 61 percent of Americans are officially lonely, according to the “gold standard” U.C.L.A. Loneliness Scale.

As the political scientist and sociologist Robert Putnam put it 20 years ago, we are increasingly “bowling alone.” This is not a trivial problem. “Loneliness kills,” Baker writes. It’s a public health threat linked to shorter life spans, heart disease, obesity and Alzheimer’s.

So how, as a society, did we lose so many friends? Social scientists point to several culprits: Fewer of us join civic or community organizations like the Kiwanis or the Elks. We are less likely than previous generations to attend churches, synagogues, or mosques. We are prone to overworking, overscheduling, and overparenting.

Social media was supposed to connect us but has turned out to be a poor substitute for in-person contact. Then came Covid. Now even bowling alone is risky.

In the pre-Covid era, Baker embarks on several adventures to try to revive his withering friendships. He goes on a treasure hunt in Montana with his college buddies. He starts a sort of grown-up frat house, where he and his pals can hang out, drink beer and watch hockey. He tries to resurrect his high school’s Senior Skip Day and persuade his friends to skip work to meet in the park.

Baker is a self-described “guy’s guy,” and his style is appropriately casual, as if he were chatting with us at a tailgate party while holding a Solo cup filled with Miller Lite. For instance, the psychiatrist and scholar Richard Schwartz is described as “a good dude.” Or, of his road trip, he writes: “The car stank like fast food and farts. It was all so stupid. … I miss stupid. I need stupid.”

Baker spends most of the book talking about male friendship, which he says is fundamentally different from its female counterpart: Where women gossip conspiratorially about others not present, men prefer “ball-busting” in person. “Women talk face-to-face. Men talk shoulder to shoulder,” he writes. “Barstools and box seats are designed for it.” Men compete; women like to cooperate. Men, Baker argues, are more competitive and have more boundaries. “Planes, elevators, and urinals are off-limits for chatting with other men,” Baker writes. “Just pretend they’re invisible.

Support this blog

You can support this blog by:

1. Subscribing to our YouTube Channel.
2. Subscribing to our podcast through your favorite podcast app.
3. Subscribing to our newsletter. We send one email every Sunday with a summary of the week.

Previous Posts