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The Friendship Recession: The lost art of connecting

happiness.hks.harvard.edu

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Re: The Friendship Recession: The lost art of connecting

#321

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

sylens wrote: post #44

I wonder how much the polarization of politics contributes to this. I have friends on opposite sides of the political spectrum than me, but were able to basically segment off that area of discussion to enjoy each others company in other areas. It may be because we go back 20+ years with many shared experiences. I would guess many friendships do not have that level of bedrock to ground them, so developments like the r…

I don't think the polarization merely contributes to these divisions, I'd say it's the whole point. It's easy to steer a democracy when 50% won't talk to the other 50%. Much more difficult if they occasionally agree on something.

Re: The Friendship Recession: The lost art of connecting

#322

Post by rendang »

redczar wrote: post #32
dm03514 wrote: post #16

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 ne…

The less dependence on community started with desegregation. There used to be community pools and rec centers. Garbage pickup was a municipal service. Ambulances were free. These things and more all ended with desegregation. Now we live in a society in which people don’t walk and don’t have places in their neighborhood where others congregate. Kids rarely play in the street anymore. The notion of it taking a village…

Which area are you speaking about, exactly?

Re: The Friendship Recession: The lost art of connecting

#323

Post by alganet »

prhn wrote: post #35

I'm not sure what caused this, but I think the expectations of modern friendship have become unrealistic. Maybe it's movies and TV, where a "close friend" is more or less a non judgemental therapist that will throw down in a fight for you. What is a close friend? Before we can start asking people if they have any we should probably agree on a definition. If you use the Hollywood standard, then probably none of us hav…

> Maybe it's movies and TV

That's pathetic thinking. It's inoffensive until someone turns the keys.

Plane accidents often occur by sabotage or failure of multiple systems.

There has been an interplay and "intellectual curiosity" from both movie studios and internet giants on online personas and social groups. They even married recently!

This bait and switch of blaming the other will backfire.

Re: The Friendship Recession: The lost art of connecting

#324

Post by stuxnet79 »

caseyy wrote: post #310
dm03514 wrote: post #16

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 ne…

Maintaining adult relationships post-Covid is hard as a millennial. Or rather, getting friendly relationships started/restarted has gotten very awkward. But I’ve noticed that most people respond very well to my efforts. I started texting my acquaintances and old friends at random just to ask what’s up every once a week or two. I also started calling some people instead. Almost everyone responded really well to that.…

> It’s okay to be the one who initiates. It seems like not everyone can, somehow the level of social anxiety has gone up in the world. In the end, I get my socialization full and so do they. So I’d recommend to whoever feels a bit lonely — reach out to your past friends and current acquaintances.

Agreed. Before Covid I used to have a pretty vibrant social life but I was the initiator and back then I could easily set up physical events. Covid obviously added a lot of friction to that. Now that we are half-way through the 2020s I have enough perspective to say the bad habits that a lot of folks developed during Covid have stuck and it's a shame.

> The only issue with always being the initiator is that no reciprocation is a bit of an… issue to our social brains. Validation, trust, confidence, and friendship itself forms better when there is reciprocation. It’s best not to overthink it, the world is different and what it means to have friends has changed. This is the new normal. It’s better to be the one who leads all the friend groups and activities all the time than to be lonely.

How do you set boundaries?

It would be great if I could go back to how things were, but unfortunately I've changed. I was a lot more naive back then, and usually leaned into giving people the benefit of the doubt. It didn't help that the friendships / acquantainces I'd developed weren't exactly high quality.

In retrospect none of it was sustainable. All this happened when (1) I had lots of free time (2) Could physically meet with friends and (3) Hadn't suffered through betrayals from people I thought I was close to.

As much as it pains me to admit, I just don't have the emotional reserves to deal with one-sided interactions anymore. I would really love to hear from folks who have been in such a situation and have gotten over the hump.

Re: The Friendship Recession: The lost art of connecting

#325

Post by alganet »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #321
sylens wrote: post #44

I wonder how much the polarization of politics contributes to this. I have friends on opposite sides of the political spectrum than me, but were able to basically segment off that area of discussion to enjoy each others company in other areas. It may be because we go back 20+ years with many shared experiences. I would guess many friendships do not have that level of bedrock to ground them, so developments like the r…

I don't think the polarization merely contributes to these divisions, I'd say it's the whole point. It's easy to steer a democracy when 50% won't talk to the other 50%. Much more difficult if they occasionally agree on something.

What does the betta fish mirror has to do with anything regarding friendship?

Re: The Friendship Recession: The lost art of connecting

#326

Post by thayne »

redczar wrote: post #316
thayne wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There used to be community pools and rec centers. Garbage pickup was a municipal service. Ambulances were free. All of that is still true of everywhere I have lived in the US, except for the free ambulances. And I think the cost of ambulances has more to do with the evolution of health insurance in the US than desegregation.

Ambulances were a municipal service and insurance had nothing to do with them. The gutting of municipal services followed desegregation.

It absolutely has to do with insurance. Without insurance or government funding, ambulance service would be prohibitively expensive for most people.

The fact that in America health insurance is often part of worker compensation, meant that cities could transfer the cost of ambulances from taxes to insurance premiums.

Re: The Friendship Recession: The lost art of connecting

#327

Post by closewith »

zug_zug wrote: post #312
closewith wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is the idea that friendship might be transactional too scary a thought to consider head on? Rather than be defensive, it was designed to shock you out of your current thought patterns on friendship, because they are almost delusional. Neither movie idealised friends nor real-life friendships have any of the characteristics you describe, and that is distorting your view of the world. Pretending real friendship is a…

> Come on, time to get offline and go make some friends. Oof, I really struck a nerve huh? I'm sure you're smart enough to know you shouldn't try to hurt people's feelings just because they believe and idea that you don't believe.

> Oof, I really struck a nerve huh?

No, you're misreading the tone here. It's more gentle paternal nudging.

Don't let confirmation bias mislead you into a lonely life, especially not based on a study on somecollege students.

I know it's more comforting to believe real friendships exist only in fiction rather than admit you haven't experienced it, but in the long run, this belief only hurts you.

Re: The Friendship Recession: The lost art of connecting

#328

Post by AtlasBarfed »

ryandrake wrote: post #165
dm03514 wrote: post #16

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 ne…

> The article talks about how it’s more of a younger generation phenomenon suggesting older generations still maintain their friendships Yea, this tracks my observations. A lot of adults make connections in their community through their kids and kids' friends. Kids pick their friends and their parents and guardians just go along for the ride, so when the kids play together, it kind of forces the parents to meet and i…

Social networks invite an inner monologue of extreme critique ... and an inevitable self-critique.

Which leads to social paranoia of judgment and withdrawal.

This is of course by design. Because while people like this are less social, they consume more.

Re: The Friendship Recession: The lost art of connecting

#329

Post by AtlasBarfed »

caseyy wrote: post #310
dm03514 wrote: post #16

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 ne…

Maintaining adult relationships post-Covid is hard as a millennial. Or rather, getting friendly relationships started/restarted has gotten very awkward. But I’ve noticed that most people respond very well to my efforts. I started texting my acquaintances and old friends at random just to ask what’s up every once a week or two. I also started calling some people instead. Almost everyone responded really well to that.…

Honestly, I think that is related to the algorithmic collapse of facebook. Facebook was legitimately good for keeping people connected in the first decade or so.

Then the monetization enshittification happened, both at the overarching corporate level of facebook and internet advertising in general, and with people becoming exhaustingly self-promoting, which devalued trust between friends and degraded new connections.

The weird thing about the world is seeing everyone turn into me when I was in my teens and twenties ... and I was a product of extreme social bullying that really only alleviated in my 40s.

Which scares me because it means there is some either low-key or high similarity to the trauma / rejection / betrayal I felt from society being exerted on a massive scale.

I used to go around errands trying to engage with people as little as possible, but now, maybe it is projection, I see the effects of isolation on so many people in public, that I get great joy in having a quick exchange with someone. Granted I am now far better at making smalltalk, strangely I slingshotted from being absolutely abysmal at it to well above average.

Smalltalk almost seems like rebellion against the oppressive antisocial time-stealing inferiority-inducing powers that have gatewayed using the mobile phone into all parts of people's lives.

Re: The Friendship Recession: The lost art of connecting

#330

Post by Der_Einzige »

PessimalDecimal wrote: post #302
typewithrhythm wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Desegregation coincided with the mass "multicultural" migration initiatives in the rest of the western world. Unfortunately in reality there is a huge difference between a facility used by one group, and one shared between several. Many community facilities become unpleasant when they are anonymous.

This same effect goes a long way to explaining the abandonment of public transit in the US, and strong preference for private travel in a car.

The idea that multiculturalism is incompatible with a harmonious society is empirically denied by the existence of basically utopias like Singapore. All citizens have to learn 4 languages and there is a huge amount of tourists which add to the already multicutral demographics of the country. Lowest crime in the world, best education in the world. Among the best public transit in the world, etc.

What it really is is that some minorities have shittier cultures than others, and some states have handled the integration and assimilation better than others.

Even the USA, for example, is blessed that nearly all of our illegals are Catholics (or more recently evangelical protestants...). Compare this to Europe where it's often muslims who try to bring their Burkas and sharia law with them.

The mass rise of latino voters for trump indicates a very strong effort from America's latino minorities to "act white", to "integrate", and to "assimilate".

I am fine with a multicultural society, as long as it's good culture - and yes, it is quite easy to nearly objectively quantify if a culture or cultural practice is good or not. For example, Americans except for asian americans don't wash their asses with bidets after using the toilet. This leads to swampass/BO, increased toilet paper usage/resource consumption, and far more rectal related health problems. America objectively should change it's cultural practices around bathroom usage.

Unfortunately, cultural critique against bad culture has a tendency for folks to call you "racist", so we aren't allowed to have this conversations with more specificity...

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