Sarah has her eye on two women from her Italian class, which she’s taking to brush up on her Italian, but also to get out there—New Year’s; New Sara.
The women, from what she can tell, are like him: In their 20s, one grew up in a town near San Jose, where Sarah is from, they all work in technology, and well, “they Just look at, I don’t know, the kind of people I can be friends with,” she says.
He has a plan to befriend them: sit next to them, be friendly, relax, make some small talk, maybe have a drink at a nearby bar later.
“I’m so awkward…but you definitely plan it.”
Sarah is in the market for new friends, which can be a difficult and stressful endeavor. She has “going out” friends and a few work friends with whom she is close, but they are all situational. There are barriers in those relationships that prevent her from being very close or intimate in the way that she is looking for.
This was not the case for Sarah before the pandemic. She was close friends with her roommates, but they have since moved on. Sarah now lives alone and struggles to find people who are just willing to hang out. It seems like anything has to be scheduled weeks in advance.
“Pre-Covid I think the depth of the friendship more matched my expectations,” she says. “People used to be a lot more open to having drinks after work, or just wanting to do something really casual, but now I think things have to be planned so much.
“It could be a factor of getting older and people having more responsibilities and working more, but I never really felt that before the pandemic.”
Sarah has started talking openly about these struggles on TikTok—she used to be so embarrassed—with thousands of comments and literally nodding in agreement.
She’s not alone – our relationships with our friends, acquaintances and the people we work with feel different now. For somewhere between two years and a lifetime, we wore masks and were encouraged to stay at least six feet apart. Crowds meant danger, and they often came with spears on their noses. And while we were all keen to connect via Zoom, it had long ago lost its novelty.
It’s not exactly surprising that a notification from nascent French social media app BeReal reveals most people at home either on their couches or in front of screens. FOMO? Never heard of him. No one goes anywhere anymore, and we tend to spend less time with people. How did we think our friendship would survive?
According to the survey Center on American Life, roughly half of Americans lost contact with a friend during the pandemic. And young women who form deeper connections with friends and rely more heavily on those relationships faced greater intensity: nearly 60% reported losing contact with at least some friends, and 16% said that they are no longer in regular contact with most of their friends.
As people take stock of how their lives have changed after a year-long pandemic that kept people apart and fundamentally changed how we socialize, the friendships we left behind are now Can’t seem to cut it.
Work used to be our playground
There really is no blueprint for making friends. When you’re a kid, if you throw a basketball in the face of some kid you don’t really know and smack his nose, you can still be best friends (true story). Your earliest friendships are usually the result of proximity and convenience: the kid who lives across the street, the kid in your class, the kid whose parents are friends with your parents.
But making friends as an adult has always been more difficult—the Internet is littered with advice columns and articles about why it’s so hard.
It only intensified during the pandemic.
Historically, many people have made their closest friends early in their careers (this was true of my parents, who met and married in office). Work, for many, is just an evolution of the social network: from playgrounds to high school cafeterias to college quads and office cubicles. We make friends where we spend most of our time.
The average person spends more than 81,000 hours at work in their lifetime — nearly a decade, according to Gallup CEO John Clifton — and we’re more likely to make friends at work than any other way.
Of course, for better or worse, work hasn’t been the same since March 2020. You may have heard, but people really aren’t the same in the office as before. According to Kastle Systems, office occupancy has recently exceeded 50%. And even when you are there in person, many of our conversations are still virtual. In his research, behavioral scientist and University of Michigan professor Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks is asking why people leave Zoom meetings and conversations blank.
“Technology gives us the illusion that we were face-to-face, but we’re really not,” he says. Luck, “I’m a huge advocate of treating people in the workplace like full complex human beings, not little worker bees, but we may have forgotten that there are actually real human interactions at work.
“These people don’t need to be your friends, but we need to have that conversation,” he says.
friendship epidemic
The evolution of how we operate is only one factor negatively affecting our friendships. Pandemic is another. But, as is the case with so many things, the tensions of the last few years only exposed pre-existing cracks in institutional and social systems.
“There was an expectation that you’d come out of the pandemic, and we’d just be able to reconnect, then it was kind of a disappointment,” says Sanchez-Burkes. “There are people who are ever changed by the pandemic and may not be in line with the connections they had before.”
The decline in the quality of people’s friendships and relationships, however, has been happening for decades, according to the survey Center on American Life. Men’s social circle, in particular, has been on the decline for about 30 years.
We have fewer close friends than ever, talk to fewer friends than ever, and we rely on our friends less than ever for support. As a result, we are on the brink of another real public health crisis: loneliness.
Many of us have an innate sense of what we are missing when we only have superficial friends. Scroll through TikTok and you’ll bump into a litter of young women who wonder why their friendships aren’t playing up to the ideals of Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, Charlotte.
In August 2022, Hailey (pronounced Halle, as in Berry) posted a TikTok while sitting in her car in Cambridge, Ottawa, talking directly to the camera. In the video, which has been viewed 1.7 million times, she talks about not having a solid group of friends, despite having three different best friends, and the loneliness she’s felt since they left. Or have started moving on with their lives.
“I think no one really talks much about how difficult it can be to be in your 20s as a woman and not have a group of female friends,” Hailey wrote in a nearly three-minute TikTok post. I said which ends with him in tears. “I just feel incredibly lonely and some of the time it’s been really hard not to reach out to friends quickly … It feels very isolating.”
She acknowledges that she can call her friends at any time and they will listen and support her, but “it’s not the same,” Haley says. “I’d love to find some new girlfriends.”
Hailey tells that she has known about their relationship and friendship since then Luck, As someone who was never used to being alone, and had just gotten out of a serious relationship, she says she forced herself to be comfortable with herself.
friend request
Many of us yearn for the friendships of a bygone era. Why, if we have people in our lives whom we consider friends, do we feel like we are lacking meaningful relationships? Why the overwhelming feeling of loneliness?
“I think [Mark] Zuckerberg ruined the word ‘friend,'” Sanchez-Burke says. “It’s just a button you click on a screen. What does this even mean anymore? Really it’s about what kind of conversations do we have and are they human enough? People’s assessment of their lives is that they lack these high-quality interactions.
Our friendships, how we interact, and the quality of our connections have all but changed since social media and our increasingly virtual worlds permeated it. The way these apps make people feel more connected while putting up pixelated barriers to real connection is a point well documented and debated.
It may be no coincidence that the general decline of connectivity mirrors the rise of the internet and social media. In a 1990 Gallup poll, 75% of respondents reported having a best friend. Fast forward to 2021, and 59% of people surveyed by the Center on American Life said they have a best friend.
Sarah from San Francisco says, “I used to feel a little embarrassed… I didn’t like talking about these things.” “But as I post more videos on TikTok and get fed up with videos about this, it’s definitely more universal than I thought, which weirdly makes you feel better because it doesn’t feel like you’re experiencing it. have been
“I read this quote that was about how intimacy is built when you have unfiltered or untimed time with a person,” she continues. “It’s not just like going to dinner or happy hour at 7 p.m. It’s really like when you spend an indefinite amount of time with someone and then those moments happen … I’m looking for those deeper connections.” Am.
On the way, he struck up a conversation with one of the girls in his class. The drinks didn’t happen, but they already know some of the same people, she says, “so I think we’re closing the gap.” It’s a process she’ll try again next week, and she’s also recently signed up for a pottery class.
