The Friendship Recession: The lost art of connecting

It's not lost, just no longer necessary for survival.

Also, bad communities fail. They should be allowed to fail.

Until recently, individuals needed to be part of some sort of kinship group to get their needs met and to survive. To communicate with anyone in near real time you had to be close by.

We have managed to engineer a society where individuals can survive "on their own" - basically outside their kinship groups. This is possible thanks to globe-spanning networks of communication and trade.

Kinship groups are great, but many of them have painful costs. Some 60 percent of Americans, for example, suffered an adverse childhood experience in kinship groups. Some of these could not be avoided - like a loved one's untimely death. Most of these negative experiences were intent or neglect by kinship group members.

If your early experiences of kinship groups are negative, you are less likely to seek out other human connection. You have learned that your kinship group is not reliable. If people genetically close to you cannot be relied on, then why should it be different for strangers?

The connections you do find tend to be focused on your interests, and those people don't need to be nearby for you to have a strong connection. But you still have your prior experiences keeping you skeptical of human reliability.

Personally, I sympathize with everyone who is sad about communities becoming fragmented.

I think, though, that if these communities were as supportive, inclusive, or beneficial as they imagine themselves to be this would not be a problem.

Bad communities should be allowed to fail. That is probably what is happening here.

Again, it depends. I have friendships that I made over the internet, that lasted 8 years before I even learned their real name. Now we work together and live in the same city. Maybe the times were different though.

For the us, I feel like it’s late stage individualism. This is what happens I think when people prioritize themselves over their communities, I think we have less dependence on our communities than ever thanks to the internet and being able to physically avoid community. We have less interaction than before. We can order grocery pickup and not even have to be physically around people for basic life tasks. We order next day delivery on Amazon and don’t even have to go out in the world and be in the physical presence of others :(

The article talks about how it’s more of a younger generation phenomenon suggesting older generations still maintain their friendships

I’m grappling with this myself, it requires a lot of energy to form adult friendships. I keep seeing my neighbors out at the playground, I reach out and say hey and hi and ask them how they are doing but stop short of investing the time necessary to form real friendships with them and I know deep down that it’s perpetuating late stage individualism

You can have face-to-face interaction with people other than your colleagues.

I'm way out on the edge of the bell curve in terms of desire for 1 on 1 quality time with friends. Almost everyone enjoys time when it is given to them, but almost no one is proactive. I hear "Thanks so much for reaching out I am so bad at it" from practically everyone. I've concluded that most people simply don't have the executive function to manage and overcome such a disconnected social environment.