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Aside from the dating recession, we have the equally important problem of the friendship recession. In the video Richard Reeves, gives some interesting possible hypothesis as to why friendships have been declining:
Work. I can back this anecdotally. I have made a post on here about how tough it is to find work as a young adult, in my specific industry of IT. Id probably have better chances if I were to move out of Florida, and to Austin TX or Atlanta GA. They have a larger Tech scene (& honestly, as a tech nerd, it be nice to live closer to a micro-center). I would lie if i said i haven't flirted with this idea before, but I actually have decided to remain put, precisely because I love the close friends I've made living where I'm at currently. But I won't exactly blame others for moving around for monetary reasons - we all need cash and it sucks ass to be broke.
He mentions parents & the amount of time now spent on raising children. This is HUGE in my opinion and needs to be talked about more: the fact that we can no longer free range raise our children as was done in the past is a great sorrow. It SUCKS to be constantly helicoptered and hand held as a child. I dont think I can emphasize that enough. It also doesnt need to be done, especially when children in other countries have much more independence, and are happier and healthier as a result.
Break ups splintering friendship groups. If couples break up, it can screw with the friend group as a whole, especially if someone is crazy toxic or commits infidelity. I've seen this happen in friend groups first hand. Its not pretty.
The obvious elephant in the room here is the rise of social media. Where people mindlessly scroll instead of talking to people in real life. While i think this plays a role, sociologists have been recording these kind of declines since the invention of TV. I suspect something deeper going on. What do you think?
I think it's 100% digital entertainment. Postman started to see this in 70s and 80s with TV, and the quantity and quality of mass entertainment options has only gotten more enticing and more splintered. While part of me thinks it's great that we have so many movies/shows/novels available now, I think it's pretty terrible for shared culture because people don't have a corpus of shared media in common. AI is only going to make this worse, as people can silo themselves into infinite realms of their favorite fan-fic slop that literally no one else in the world has read/watched.
I’m definitely in the Postman camp, although I think entertainment has gotten more stimulating, not necessarily better. Most mainstream movies barely nod at old-fashioned notions like character development or coherent plot, instead going straight for the dopamine hits of explosions and crazy over the top special effect shots and CGI. You can kind of see this in long running movie series, like James Bond. Early James Bond was a spy, sure he was often in danger, but he was more often than not using his spy craft, thinking and investigating. Now, it’s over tge top, and barely bothers with mystery and gathering clues plus Daniel Craig can survive just about anything. Is that better than Dr. No?
But I do think screens are a hyperstimulous that people choose over other less stimulating options. And if you saturate a society in such screens, eventually they sit home and stare at them all the time. I don’t think anyone would choose this. I’ve said this before. If it were simply a matter of screens being better at entertainment, then people would be saying things like “sure hanging out with my buddies and playing basketball was fun, but it wasn’t as much fun as playing basketball on my PS5 against a random guy online.” I’ve never heard anyone yet regret spending time doing non-screen things because it kept them from a similar screen activity. Nobody regrets going outside.
I think honestly if you gave people the option of having the entertainment technology available in 1946, but also having the lifestyle of the same year — lots of real friends, going to dances, playing sports outdoors with your buddies, gathering for card and board games or just dinner, etc. I have a strong suspicion that most people would leap at the chance. There’s a lot to be said for such a lifestyle and the culture and community it creates. So radio plays aren’t as cool as Netflix and you can’t listen to anything at any time. You still have close friends and a community and get more exercise and share an organic culture.
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I think we're slowly (re?)discovering the value of shared culture. A couple generations back technology didn't really allow highly-individualized culture, although it did allow regional variation. Broadcast media has nibbled away at the regional variation for a century at this point, but the niche individuality is much newer, driven by point-to-point technology. It's never needed to be an explicit choice before because we were content-limited, but I think we're starting to see people choose explicitly to watch what their friends are watching.
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