The friendship recession | Richard Reeves

- There are some studies that suggest, for example, that being without a close friend, being alone, is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It's quite difficult to measure

friendship

s. What is the quality of that

friendship

? What is the amount? When people say they have a certain number of friends, what does that mean? Does it mean how many friends do they have on Facebook? It's hard to get at this quantitatively, and I think people are also a little reluctant to admit that sometimes they don't have friends. Loneliness is, in some ways, quite a stigmatized condition, so getting people to admit their loneliness is something that social scientists really struggle with.

I think a big question now is whether we're facing a "friendship

recession

." That's the term that Daniel Cox, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has used to describe this increase in the number of people who lack a certain number of close friends, who have fewer people to turn to in times of crisis. You need a shoulder to cry on, or at least someone to talk to. Now he's less and less likely to be a friend. And as society changes in all kinds of ways, technologically and economically, I think it's important that we pay attention to what is too often an underrated human relationship: friendship.

Friendships come in all shapes and sizes, and they are also formed in very different ways and in very different places. One way to make friends is simply to be in the same school as someone, to grow up in the same place. Another way is through the situations you find yourself in, through work. They are also friends that are formed through activities that are chosen, whether through a volunteer activity or a sport, athletics. The fourth is online friendships. They are friendships that are formed through a screen or the Internet of one type or another, without necessarily knowing that person physically.

Throughout human history, there has always been a tribal size, I think in friendship groups, which is around adolescence, say 12 to 15, maybe that's a reasonable number to think about. And then there are close friends. Some people, of course, have no close friends, but most have at least one close friend. And most people would say that the ideal number of close friends is around three or four. Friendship was something that ancient philosophers used to take very seriously. If we go back to Aristotle, for example, which in some ways is seen as the ideal relationship, and one of the reasons why friendship is, I think it is so important and so idealized is because it is a relationship of genuine equality and radical, and one in which you are not in the friendship to be able to get something out of it for yourself.

There is no feeling of dependency. There is no sense of exchange. It is not a transactional relationship by any means. And most other times, relationships contain some kind of transaction, some kind of "what's in it for me?" But the definition of friendship is a relationship where there is nothing more to you than the relationship. We've seen a decline in many traditional institutions, including the family, people marrying later if they get married, obviously in areas like religion and, in some cases, the labor market. So what that means is that there is a greater need for people to have social relationships, connections outside of those institutions.

That's where friends are enormously important. But over the same period, we've seen a real decline in the number of people who say they have multiple close friends. There are a number of factors that could hinder the formation of friendships, particularly in 21st century America. Number one is geographic mobility. People who move away from their homes, move to big cities or have professional opportunities that necessarily expand their network of friends. Fathers spend significantly more time parenting and caring for their children, which takes away from the time they previously might have had to make friends. There is also a lot of emphasis on work and careers, what some academics call 'work', which is a feeling that your identity is so wrapped up in your job that you don't have as much energy or time left for friends.

And lastly, I would point to the breakdown of relationships as marriages break up or couples separate, which can really fracture the friendship groups you have formed as a couple. Once they break up, friendship groups often break up too. There are some downsides to being friendless. One is the lack of access to opportunities. It turns out that a lot of people get a lot of jobs and opportunities to go and do things through their friends, so friends act as a channel of communication and information. But there are also some pretty profound effects on health: mental health and even physical health.

It's not exactly clear what the causal relationships are, what's going on, but it is clear that having friends protects health in several ways. So, it's not just that being friendless can isolate you in an economic or social sense, it can also make you sad. And it turns out that being sad is also bad in terms of physical and emotional health. Today, 15% of young people say they do not have a close friend. In the 1990s, that figure was just 3%. And so, we're seeing a five-fold increase in the number of men who don't have close friends. In 1990, almost half of young men, 45%, said that if they had to turn to someone in a time of trouble, it would be a close friend.

But now that figure has dropped to about 22%. And in fact, there are more men, about 36%, who say they would go to their parents. And that's a pretty radical transformation in social media that we've seen, particularly among young men. The pandemic has been a kind of stress test for our friendship networks. Interestingly, we see that it is women who are most affected: more than half of women say they have lost contact with at least some of their friends. I think that's because female friendships are based more on physical face-to-face relationships, while male friendships tend to be more mediated, perhaps through activities or technology.

We don't know for sure, but that gender gap suggests the fact that female friendships are more in need of regular physical contact than male friendships, which is perhaps why female friendships are born with the brunt. of the impact of COVID on those friendship networks. There is obviously a dystopian version of how these trends could continue, which is a world of essentially atomized individuals friendless, isolated, sad, lonely, perhaps in poor health. I think that's why we need to really pay attention to these trends and recognize that friendship is incredibly important to human flourishing and that people want to make friends.

We are programmed to want to be social creatures and be friends, but we may find it more difficult to do so in certain circumstances. Circumstances in which we are under too much pressure, in which we are too segregated, in which there are no opportunities to cultivate friendship. A key lesson we learn is that friendships don't form on their own. Friendship is not a flower that blooms on its own. It's more like a carpentry project that you have to carve and keep working. One of the necessary steps to making a friend is admitting that you want to make a friend and being open to it.

That requires some vulnerability. It requires that, in some way, you reveal a need, a desire. And I think as we get older, sometimes there is a sense of shame about not having enough friends, and saying, "I need a friend," is perhaps one of the most difficult phrases any human being can utter. - Get smarter and faster with videos from the world's top thinkers, and to learn even more from the world's top thinkers, get Big Think+ for your business.