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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?
Something I don't typically see discussed with respect to friendships, only sex, Standards are too high. This meme, essentially.
A lot of people seem to want their friends to be perfectly suited to them. I want to watch a movie with my friend, but I also want to watch the exact movie I want to watch. I want to join a book club, but I also want to read exactly the book I want to read. I want a workout buddy, but I also want to do exactly the workout I want to do. I want to join a close knit church, but I also want to have these exact and obscure religious beliefs.
Having lots of friends seems to naturally involve disdaining most of them at one level or another, and we seem to have lost that skill of remaining friends and valuing friendships while disrespecting each other. Think of our great fictional friendships. Jerry thinks George is a bad person and Kramer is a nut, they'll still go see a movie together; Hank thinks Bill is a loser and Dale's politics are weird and insane, they'll still drink a beer together; Dorothy thinks Blanche is a slut and Rose is an idiot but the song still goes "Thank you for being a friend..." (I felt insane the first time I heard the original of that song on the radio).
The profusion of infinite media entertainment choices has made this immeasurably worse. When current hit movies in theaters were the dominant form of visual entertainment, you might go to see a movie and hate the movie but you went anyway. You went because it was something to do, because everyone else was going and you wanted to talk about it, and your other option was just not watching a movie at all. Now if your buddy wants to watch a movie on streaming, odds are it wasn't the movie you wanted to watch, so you're not that interested in going over to his place to watch it when you can watch exactly the movie you wanted to watch instead.
Spread this across what concerts you would want to go to. It used to be that the vast majority of young people were listening to the same music at the same time, and if you had tickets to a concert most people would at least consider going. Even the odd guy out who was super into something weird understood he was the weird one. Now, among my friends, few of us share any musical taste, really. Spread this across what books you want to read together. What church you go to. What your political beliefs are. There's an infinite menu and people aren't willing to accept the friction of differences to achieve friendship.
This is why live action spectator sports are such a strong source of social cohesion for a lot of people. Sundays are for The Birds, we all know what we're watching and when. There's no question about picking what to watch, it's an event. We all get together at a set time and a set place. It can be the fights, it can be the game, it can be The Bachelor. But live action spectator events bring people together around a specific constraint, without room for people to make other choices.
In the context of romance, I don't see a problem with calling high standards unrealistic, since reproduction is necessary for the perpetuation of society. However, IMO, calling high standards in the context of friendship unrealistic, and saying that people should be friends with people whom they dislike, is extremely sadistic when friendship is not necessary for the perpetuation of society. A person can call his neighbor a good citizen, and be altruistic toward that neighbor, without calling that neighbor a friend.
So is friendship.
One might go so far as to say that friendship is the perpetuation of society.
Indeed. Society only functions properly if people form meaningful friendships.
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