The person said that he was feeling very tired
He mentioned that he was feeling very exhausted. ’m talking about the kind of intimacy you can only get by spending time with someone and getting to know them on a deeper level and finally there’s trust which is the belief that our friend will keep our secrets and be there for us when we need them
Nearly three out of five Americans report feeling lonely, according to a 2021 study. This feeling is especially prevalent in certain groups, such as lower income adults, single parents, and people of color. A 2019 study found that 22% of Millennials have zero friends, and 27% have zero close friends on FaceBook.
This depressing statistic makes us wonder what happens to a society when the bonds of friendship fracture. To figure out if friendship is a relic of 1950s soda fountains, it helps to look at what friendship is.
The ancient Greeks conceived of three different kinds of love: Agape (love of God for man and man for god), Eros (sensual passionate love), and Philia (love we feel for friends and family). Aristotle built on this, breaking friendship down into three categories: friendships of pleasure, friendships of utility, and friendships of virtue. Philosophers have identified three necessary features of these bonds: mutual caring, intimacy, and trust. Mutual caring implies that we value our friend on an intrinsic level, while intimacy is the kind of closeness that can only be achieved by spending time with someone. Trust is the belief that our friend will keep our secrets and be there for us when we need them.
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Another blow to community building has been the simultaneous decline of the shopping mall, which are commercial but technically free to prowl around with your pals. They were essential to any Millennial teenager’s social life; my main mall was the Oviedo Marketplace Mall. Let me know what your teenage mall was, fellow Millennials, and also if you’ve ever been to the Oviedo Marketplace - definitely let me know because that’d be crazy!
This all means that unless you can afford an eight dollar beer, your opportunities for socializing outside of work and home are limited. To the commenter who is going to say this in advance: you’re totally right - eight dollars for a beer is crazy. But where we are and where refilmer videos is a crazy place to be. God bless you for living someplace where happy hour has three dollar highlights - that’s awesome.
But you might be thinking that this is just Boomer logic that fails to recognize that, while we might not have the same types of physical spaces as we once did, digital space has created avenues for friendship and socialization that far transcend what you used to get at the Elks Lodge. To be clear, there are many positives about digital spaces and friendships. A place where I go for digital friendship is Wisecrack Live - that’s our stream. It happens on Thursdays at 11 A.M. Pacific, but I legit think of a lot of you there as my friends - you know who you are, fellow Lords of the chat. I’ll see you soon!
But hey, you should check it out if you’re looking for digital friendship. But at the same time, it may actively foster loneliness. As philosopher Umberto Echo argues, the internet is one thing and its opposite - it could remedy the loneliness of many, but it turns out it has multiplied and it generates its own remedies to eliminate this isolation (Twitter, Facebook) which end up increasing it.
This is borne out by some data: one study in 2017 found that those who visited social media sites 50 or more times per week had tripled the odds of feeling socially isolated as their counterparts who use these sites less than nine times a week. 50 a week - I realistically probably open the Twitter app 50 times a day. I should stop that.
In a 2020 study, 7 out of 10 heavy social media users said they felt lonely - a whopping 20 percent more than light social media users. Yet another study found that spending too much time on your phone can make face-to-face interactions feel like work, causing them to be less fun. In fact, the mere presence of phones during a meal made participants more distracted and they got less enjoyment from their interactions. And another study of 3,000 people found that deleting Facebook was up to 40% as effective in curbing well-being as going to therapy.
This makes sense when we think about the kinds of interactions encouraged by social media. Hertz argues that social media’s tendency to encourage perfectly curated visions of our lives perpetuates an authenticity which is clearly counter to the philosophical ideal of intimacy in friendships. It’s notable that we often refer to our social media community as an audience rather than a well-community, and this obviously implies a performative aspect. We may engage in mutual disclosure when we tweet about our bowel movements, but it’s calculated and calibrated to make us seem our wittiest rather than our most authentic.
There’s the additional layer of competitiveness in which we’re all players in a game where some win lots of likes and others get crickets, which doesn’t exactly make for a chill hang. Now of course, social media for many provides an important lifeline, keeping us in contact with people we might not otherwise communicate with. Some studies even suggest that these interactions can ameliorate some amount of our loneliness. And if scrolling through Instagram gives a dose of life-enhancing humanity, then seriously that’s a wonderful thing.
But from the context of the Lonely Crowd’s analysis, where mid-century folks’ attempts to cultivate wider networks led to feelings of loneliness, you have to wonder if we’re not just recreating the same cycle.