It seems like the culture is getting lonelier and when you form friendships, people are so quick to freeze each other out at some point, withdrawing from nourishing the connection. My dad’s generation would call each other and check in and do things together. These days it’s very common to hear the excuse that they’re too busy. This could be capitalism increasing working hours and colonising personal time with professional and it could be cultural.
Like if you’re too busy for a friend, are you also binging Netflix constantly, playing sport, going for walks etc? That just means you’re just putting maintaining friendships as a lower priority than those things.
I wonder whether there’s a general social anxiety in the culture now where people would rather retreat to digital worlds rather continue the challenge of maintaining real world friendships where you need to at least be somewhat accountable. It seems like catching up with old friends, we have a great time and lament not having found the time.
Technology is built such that it will always give us the dopamine hit regardless of whether we’re good people. So it being less challenging makes us weaker as we increasingly choose digital more than real world. I’ve just seen friend after friend (of mine and others) withdraw the basic requirements to nourish a friendship until it’s atrophied. And people use excuses like ‘I’m busy’ or ‘people move on’, in which case, perhaps the notion of friendships and communities of people supporting each other now has a culturally accepted slide yo extinction. Do people want to fight against this shift? What do we do?