Play volleyball on the free net at the local park instead of signing up for pickleball and buying great.
The people who want to avoid activities and socialization will always pick the more expensive activities so they can dismiss them. Yet go into the real world and people have no problem finding ways to socialize and have fun without spending much money.
Coincidentally, my neighborhood just put up its first volleyball net a week or so back. It was stolen within two days lol
Pickleball courts do not cost money, they are freely provided by the state. I go to free pickleball courts every week in SF, and I bike there for free. You can buy 4 paddles for $20 at sports basement and get literally hundreds if not thousands of hours of entertainment just on that.
I dunno, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for this perspective. Almost everything I do with friends isn’t particularly expensive - if you can’t find cheap things to do you just aren’t even looking.
Then one by one, we got cars and the friend groups shuffled from "Who is in bicycling range" to "Who is in driving range", and driving range is so big that it's not practical to drive 4 miles to my closest friend, knock on her door, hope she isn't having sex with her husband, and ask if she wants to chill
Does she not have a phone? Calling someone up and saying "hey, let's hang out" and then driving over to hang out was literally how most of suburban social interactions happened in the 90s.
It's not naivete; it's dishonesty.
