The Strange Death Of Friendship
The Strange Death Of Friendship
By New York Times Bestselling Author Michael Levin
Back in the 1980’s, the Wall Street Journal ran an article about a company that found “friends” for friendless CEOs so that they could go off hunting and fishing together.
Everybody laughed at the piece, because it seemed ludicrous that grown men were incapable of making friends of their own and actually had to hire a company to provide that service.
Fast-forward to the age of technology in the era of a pandemic, and if that company is still around, I will wager that they are doing a booming business.
Whatever happened to friendship?
We have become so isolated and atomized, first, ironically by communications technology that ought to bring us closer together, and then by the pandemic, which has scuppered most forms of social interaction, at work or at play.
Most of us today live lives of not just quiet desperation, but loneliness as well, because everything mitigates against close contact with fellow human beings.
A client of mine once pointed out an intriguing fact — the founders of the major communications technologies to which most of us repair constantly, Facebook, Twitter, and so on — were founded by young men in their early 20’s with Asperger’s or some other socially limiting state.
As my client put it, their technology amounts to “You sit and type over there, and I’ll sit and type over here, and we won’t have to look each other in the eye.”
And that’s how things are today.
No one’s looking anyone else in the eye.
We’re all on social media, or texting, but primarily staring at our phones, not looking into the eyes of other human beings.
We’ve all become Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey.
Empathy developed when human beings looked into each other’s eyes, saw common cause, and banded together, into pairs, then families, then tribes, and ultimately, nation-states.
In the age of the iPhone, it is if we had erased 10,000 years of human social development…in a decade.
Where do we go from here?
What does the world look like when people don’t, in the words of the old telephone ad, reach out and touch someone?
Ultimately, things can collapse into a Hobbesian world, a war of all against all.
I’ve heard stories for four or five years now about how people won’t even date people with different political beliefs.
You say CNN, I say Fake News, so let’s call the whole thing off.
One of my closest college friends passed away this summer, of a brain tumor, it developed because of the proximity of his home at the tip of Manhattan island to the smoldering wreckage of the World Trade Center after 9/11.
After he passed, his sister sent me several letters I had written him back in the early 1980’s, shortly after we had graduated college.
If you are under 30, a “letter” is something where you actually write words on paper, or type them with a typewriter (you can find examples of typewriters on Wikipedia) fold them into an envelope, address the envelope, put a stamp on it, and put it in the mailbox.
It is the ultimate in asynchronous communication.
I was touched that my friend had saved the letters all this time, and when I read them, I found they were fairly innocuous.
The sort of thing you would put in a text or an email today.
Nothing deep.
But that’s the way the world was — friends took time to write to each other, to phone, even (are you sitting down?) drop in unexpectedly just to say hello.
The big unknown about the pandemic is the extent to which prior behavior patterns will reemerge when the social distancing rules are finally removed.
Here’s to hoping that all this isolation creates not just a desire but a hunger for old-school friendship, where people reached out, touched one another, and intermingled lives.
Isn’t there a friend of yours you could call today, just to see how he or she is doing?
It won’t take long.
I’ll wait.
