Saved by Elena and
The Friendship Problem
Myself and people my age have been trained under the illusion that we can effectively eliminate any and all friction from our lives. We can work from home, Amazon prime everything we need, swipe through a limitless array of mediocre dates, text our therapist, and have a person go to the grocery store for us when we don’t feel like it, all while con
... See moreBrian Wiesner and added
Alex Wittenberg and added
For most people, loneliness doesn't stem from a lack of friends. It comes from not feeling connected to the friends you already have, while "peering in" on their lives via social media. (You can read more about this in the ancient text Big Friendship.) This problem is not fixable if you expect community to just happen naturally . It is fixable if y... See more
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“So much of the loneliness we’re experiencing is the result of multiple social scaffoldings collapsing into each other at the same time; a single start-up alone won’t really fix friendship for us, just as retail therapy won’t really fix our depression. Instead, maybe we fix the scaffolding problem with a scaffolding solution. Many behaviors and man
... See morelinda added
Were friendships always so fragile? I suspect not. But we now live in an era of radical individual freedoms. All of us may begin at the same starting line as young adults, but as soon as the gun goes off, we’re all running in different directions; there’s little synchrony to our lives. We have kids at different rates (or not at all); we pair off at... See more
Jennifer Senior • It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart
Alex Wittenberg added
It may seem counter-intuitive to say that, in the face of the profound challenges our society faces, what we most need is the deliberate cultivation of friendship. But I also find myself thinking that this conclusion is, from one angle, inescapable. At the very least, it seems to me that we need such friendships as an anchor and a refuge from the d... See more
theconvivialsociety.substack.com • The Answer Is Not More Information
Alex Wittenberg added
Like many millennials, Ury is experiencing what’s becoming an aspirational lifestyle: living within walking distance of close friends. As more people work remotely, friends, rather than offices, are becoming the central compass around which people are seeking to orient their lives. Online, friendship is having a big moment: Videos on social media a... See more
Zoë Bernard • It shouldn’t be so hard to live near your friends
Alex Burns added