Social media and the death of friendship

I posted this last week on my person Facebook page, but I wanted to share it here as well. Enjoy.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about friendship and the role it plays in the modern millennial techno-culture that I find myself inhabiting. There is a real tendency among people in my demographic – especially among those you find online tweeting and creating meme culture – to relish in the difficulty of creating and maintaining friendships, and an attendant valorizing of the “self care” of saying no to those who want to make plans. There seems to be real comedy to be found in the last minute breaking of plans and turning down attempts at connection. I’ve come to think of this as a phenomenon called “ironized introversion”, in which it becomes cool to radically embrace the identity of introverted- to the point of refusing to interact in an embodied way with people when it is not required by work or family obligations (and even those are becoming more and more optional for many.) Social life becomes a purely digital and online endeavor, where the other avatars and accounts on social media become more “real” than anything else about people. 

I know I sound like “old guy yelling at technology” here, but I’m really not meaning to. Because I do sympathize; I am an introvert, very much so, although I like to embrace the hubris of thinking I’m a real introvert, and not one for the social credit it seems to bring nowadays. Human interaction wears me out; an evening with friends requires about three times as much isolation afterwards to recover energy. So I get it, I really do.

At the same time, I do work hard to cultivate real, embodied friendships, in the “meatspace” and not only the digital one. I spent the majority of the last two years off social media by and large, and one of my fears in doing so was that I would lose a whole host of meaningful relationships with people who I am “friends” with here. But, in fact, I found that what it forced of me instead was intentionality and active cultivation in my building and maintaining friendships. Sure, the number of people I regularly interacted with in some way went down in absolute terms. But I also became vitally aware of my actual, important friendships, and they really flourished over the last couple of years in a way that I hadn’t really experienced since high school probably (school life is, after all, probably the peak for many people’s experience of real friendship.) Now, these weren’t all free of technology. The closest friendships I built were still over distance, maintained by and large via Zoom and FaceTime and phone calls and text chains. But notice the intentionality found even in that. We made regular, weekly plans to talk, face to face as we could. We hold each other accountable to these check-ins. And, when we could this summer, we all came together for a few days of real time together, time that I look back on already as one of the highlights of the year for me.

So, it really bugs me, the attitude contained in this tweet, that I see so often around me. Friendship is really hard. It’s risky. It’s messy. It can be exhausting. It involved real flawed human beings, so the likelihood you are gonna get hurt at some point is high. I get that. But there is also nothing like it. Friendship – real, honest to goodness friendship, with other physical human beings – is amazing and life-giving and vital to being a whole human being. Family is great, but there is nothing like real friends who are there and present and choose to love you and spend time with you.

Friendship is an embodied thing. It requires proximity and effort and intimacy and vulnerability. And it is a vital feature of the Good and Virtuous Life, for everyone. Aristotle and Augustine and Aquinas all teach us this, that you cannot be fully human without the presence of others, without the love of friendship. Yeah, making plans is hard, and leaving the comfort and safety of home can be a lot, especially after a full week of work and obligations. But real friendship is necessary. Other human beings are not consumables or commodities, and they aren’t the stuff of memes and social media irony. To relegate friendship to the digital world and spend a lot of time laughing at your own ability to turn down other people’s attempts at relationship building is to make means of those around you, of which there is no greater sin we can commit against one another. 

So, make plans. Go out. Risk yourself. Court exhaustion. Cull your friends list. Be a friend, a real, flesh and blood friend.