Congrats OP, sounds super excited for his new social life.

I live overseas and I’m very lonely. I’ve been told to join a group or club related to my interests so I can meet new people and make friends, but I can’t. It doesn’t feel natural to me to go for friend-hunting. And I’m very tired of meaningless, superficial connections and conversations I’ve had with most of the people from my surroundings. I feel my only friends are the ones I did at school. After that period of my life, people -or even me- start to disappear.

But with my friends from school, we can be without seeing each other for years and it’s always so easy and rewarding to catch up. I wish I’ve spent more time with them before moving :,(

The natural, and easiest, way to make good friends is to spend a lot of time with people. Some of those people will become good friends with no effort at all.

Given nuclear families etc. in the West, this is kinda hard as an adult. Happens automatically as a child and college student, though. My advice to you is:

1) Get a housemate or several. Better yet, join an already shared house. Forget about your preconceptions about whether you "can" live with other people or not. You aren't special, people lived together for ever.

2) Explicitly decide to work through this "doesn't feel natural to me" thing. OK, fine, it's gonna feel kind of awkward at first. By the 5th friend-hunt it won't.

Don't go friend hunting, then. Go activity hunting, and if you make friends out of it, all the better.

I feel the same with my friends from school but the reason we feel like that is that school forced us to be together and a deep friendship was forged as a result.

In adulthood, that forcing function doesn't exist so you have to make the effort. So regardless of whether or not it "feels natural" to go "friend-hunting" (it doesn't to me either), if you don't do it, you will be without friends.

It's also worth framing it to yourself differently. Friend hunting sounds awful and fake but organising fun/activities for similarly minded people seems more positive

Well, I was expecting another type of content.

I’m looking for a job (software engineer) since two months ago and I haven’t landed a single interview. 0. Null. Nothing. I don’t know if the problem is my age, or the fact that people are not reading cv’s anymore because an AI recruitment software is analyzing the applications, or if there aren’t enough jobs out there.

Back in the days, finding a new job was always super easy for me. Not just as a programmer. Before that I was working on another industry and even without formal qualifications, I was always hired because I had all of the skills needed. The difference is that during that time (2012-2018) interviews were face to face, on site, so it was easy to check if a candidate was a fit. And I was younger. I guess that was a thing that helped.

When I switched to engineering, same thing. I always had a job at good companies, with recognized clients, or building widely used software products.

This is the first time I’m struggling with being unemployed. It’s a huge change. I even miss the small talk with a recruiter before the interview questions. I was not fired, I quit. I thought it was going to be easy to find something (as always!) but I was wrong.

Oops I mixed a lot of things. But I am sooo frustrated rn.

By all accounts the job market is wildly different than it was a few years ago. I’m curious how much AI is being used to screen. I see some guys on LinkedIn with prompt injections in their profiles, I wonder if that would work.