Is the world really a lonely place, or should some of us just try harder?
Every week is a new solution to a thoroughly modern problem. Run club, platonic match-making, dating apps pivoting to setting up dates with friends, not love interests.
If you believe the internet, the world has become a truly friendless place. And rather than feeling like the lone square peg in a world of besties, people who self-identify as lonely or lacking meaningful friendships are making an awful lot of noise. Thousands of them write comments every day – on stories about dinner parties and birthdays and thoughtful gestures – along the lines of “must be nice”.
Credit: Robin Cowcher
A financial advice columnist I follow on TikTok recently hosted a rotating list of 25 friends at a summer house in Paris, and posted about the logistics and expense of achieving such a feat. The comments? “Who even has 25 friends to begin with?”
A freelance recipe creator gleefully shares videos about how she prepares and hand-delivers home-cooked bento boxes to her friends at their office jobs, as an excuse to see them more often during the week. She’s constantly met with reactions like, “If I had friends like this I bet they wouldn’t even appreciate all that effort.”
When I was a teenager, my weekends were more often spent talking on chatrooms and updating my MySpace Top 8 list than being at the parties and events everyone else seemed to be invited to. It made me feel like these commenters: excluded, alone, not thought about. But there was a pride in pretending otherwise. I had social media as an outlet for my innermost confessions, but I also think I knew, somewhere deep down, that no one wants to hang out with someone who’s no fun. So I’d need to act the part to be invited.
Something’s shifted, culturally and digitally in recent years, and I’m not the only one who’s noticed.
In June, the culture writer Ira Madison III wrote a “rant about having friends” in his newsletter. It was a response to a critic of his podcast – on which guests were often people in the entertainment industry he had an established relationship with – who wrote: “We get it Ira has a friend in every show.” The eyeroll emoji was thrown in as an especially pointed touch.
“Frankly, we’re under siege from people who do not have friends, do not have social lives, and resent anyone else for possessing one,” Ira declared in the post, titled “An apology for having friends”.
I nodded along fervently as I read. When I dipped my toe into the terrifying world of making TikTok videos, I posted a video about the dinner party a friend had for his 32nd birthday. It was the age Bridget Jones turned in our favourite movie, so he planned a thematic dinner in honour of the beloved chain-smoking spinster. There was caper gravy, (deliberately) blue soup and a marmalade-flavoured cake. After watching the footage of us cheersing and laughing and pushing the tables aside to dance, some people who watched it felt the compulsion to comment, “At least you have friends.”
After years of headlines about loneliness epidemics and the effect of phones and social media on our interpersonal relationships, I’ve recently come to believe that there are digital barriers affecting the way we socialise, yes, but there’s also some responsibility few people seem willing to take.
We all want community, goes the recently viral tweet, but nobody wants to pay the price. Which is leaving your comfort zone, interacting with people who aren’t always your people, being put out, meeting someone’s expectations, making annoying small talk. Taking a risk to make a change, as Kelly Clarkson (kind of) sang. If we can’t bring ourselves to do that, then maybe we don’t want the connections as much as we say we do.
It’s never simple. Moving to a new city as an adult makes forming new organic connections hard, as does reorienting your life after major events like break-ups or babies. But even as apps and trends and life changes, the classics are as true as ever: find and follow your genuine interests. Listen as much as you talk. RSVP and show up – even if it’s raining and the Uber surge pricing is horrifying. Do the nice thing without expecting anything in return, and maybe it might come your way.
Do it not just for yourself and the future social life you dream of building, but in the spirit of keeping your own side of the street clean – rather than guilting or strong-arming others into tidying up your emotional life for you.