【H198】现代社交困境：为什么越长大朋友越少？

【点击查看】如何正确使用求知行囊阅览室

内容不断更新，建议购买会员永久查看

我们的生活被数据包围，天天对着屏幕，看似交流无碍，实际上却让我们疲惫不堪。

我们连建立那些小而美、平凡又世俗的友谊，或者邻里关系的时间和力气都没了。要知道，这些关系在过去几百年里，一直滋养着我们人类。

在现代社会，我们常常认为技术进步和虚拟社交能够满足我们的所有社交需求。但这种看似方便的社交方式，并没有真正解决我们内心的孤独感。

现代的孤独感，并不是因为我们缺少联系，而是因为我们缺少那种自然、真实的人际互动。就是那种没有事先安排、没有规则约束的交流。

要打破这种孤独，我们需要勇敢地走出自己的舒适区，主动去和现实生活中的人建立联系。比如，在排队的时候，不妨和旁边的人聊上几句；或者，积极参与社区的各种活动。

我们需要重新找回那种小时候在街上“自由玩耍”的感觉，与人自然地交流，不受任何预设条件的限制。

精彩留言：

很多时候封闭自己拒绝社交其实是害怕被别人拒绝！

觉得找朋友帮忙是一种麻烦，就是友谊逐渐疏远的开始。

正文：

最近，我一直在思考一个问题：为什么我的朋友圈越来越窄了？具体来说，就是感觉自己越来越孤独了。我也说不清这是从什么时候开始的，但这几年，我明显感觉到，身边的好朋友越来越少了。

问题其实很简单：都是我自己的选择。30 岁那年，我离开了繁华的伦敦，搬到了一个宁静的小城。在那里，我认识的朋友很少，远不如 20 多岁时在伦敦认识的多。我有一个长期的伴侣，还有一个蹒跚学步的孩子，这意味着我必须遵循严格的睡前例程，以维护我们的家庭和谐。

虽然过去我总装作一个社交达人，但疫情期间我才发现，自己其实是个内向的人。我不再每天去办公室，也不再参加那些让我维持与无数年轻朋友的下班聚会。这些聚会，对我来说，已经成了过去式。

将这个友谊难题归咎于这些原因，然后继续我的生活，这甚至可以说是简单的。比如参加健身课程，用交友软件，加入妈妈群，主动去认识新朋友等等。

我不仅做了所有这些，我还做了更多。但我发现，即使如此，问题依旧存在。我与许多在这生活的人交流过，他们通常不离开自己的社交圈，晚上 6 点后不再待在家里。他们对自己的社交生活并不满意。

我的妹妹住在旧金山，她告诉我，尽管周围有很多和她一样处境的人，但她很难找到人一起散步或喝咖啡，哪怕只是简单的小聚。另一位朋友在伦敦南部，她发现和朋友吃个晚饭，单程就得花上一个小时，结果这顿饭更像是消耗精力，而不是让人心满意足的社交。她希望能有那种不用提前计划，周末下午随时能来坐坐的朋友。我也有同感。

然而，现在提前很久就安排计划似乎成了一种常态：旅行、婚礼、孩子和工作，各种安排满满当当。可到了关键时刻，这些计划往往被取消。有些人不跟进，取消了也不提替代方案。与此同时，那些看似有潜力的成年人新友谊，也很少能发展成我们年轻时那种频繁的日常联系。随着朋友们做出各自的人生选择，彼此的距离也在慢慢拉大。友谊，似乎只剩下了在 WhatsApp 上的简短对话，有时甚至因为某人没回最后一条消息，就一年不再联系，直到再次偶然重逢。

友谊，竟然和行政工作越来越像了。这感觉，是不是似曾相识？

关于 30 岁以后如何努力结交新朋友，这个话题已经被无数文章讨论过，其实并没有什么新意。但我发现，包括我自己在内的很多人，似乎都有一种逃避的心态，甚至可以说是一种病态的懒惰，这背后肯定有更深层次的原因。我敢肯定，我不是唯一一个渴望社交和精神滋养的人，但手机上那七个聊天软件，根本满足不了我的需求。

我想在这里澄清一下，我的观点并不是说“千禧一代毁了友谊”。我也没有在指责我的任何朋友；我和大家一样，对这种情况负有责任。但我正在努力找出导致这种局面的各种原因。理论上，我有很多朋友——如果你看我的手机，确实有很多联系人——但实际上，以我期望的那种亲密、低风险、关系型的方式，还有很多不足之处。

这几个月，我一直在琢磨一个问题。突然有一天，我听到了埃丝特·佩雷尔在播客里的精彩分享，她的话让我深受启发（采访从 50 分开始）。我会引用她的话，因为我相信这些话能像触动我一样，触动你的心。

现代的孤独，看似被超级链接所掩盖。人们轻而易举就能拥有成百上千的虚拟朋友，但真到了需要找人帮忙喂猫的时候，却发现找不到一个真正可以信赖的人。这种孤独，其实是社会资本的枯竭，它的力量是巨大的。

我一直在问一个问题，我完全没想到这个问题会如此切中要害：你小时候，是否在街上自由玩耍?……大多数人都学会了在街上自由玩耍。他们学会了社交谈判。他们学会了不按剧本、不按套路、不受监督地与人互动。他们打架，他们制定规则，他们讲和，他们交朋友，他们绝交，他们重归于好。他们锻炼了社交能力。而这些人中的大多数，他们的孩子却不能在街上自由玩耍。我认为，成年人也需要在街上自由玩耍。

对于我们成年人来说，这就意味着要敢于和排队的人聊天，和地铁上的乘客交流，无论何时创建了任何形式的团体，都要勇于与人沟通。无论是读书会、电影俱乐部还是运动团队，都要积极参与。保持一种实验精神，对事物保持怀疑，同时也要认识到人性的矛盾：我们非常需要别人的陪伴，但往往最需要的人，却可能是那些可能会拒绝我们的人。

我们目前还没有完全掌握预测性技术（predictive technologies）。这些技术本质上是帮助我们更好地生活的工具。它们让我们轻松获取所需，消除障碍，但同时也让我们逐渐失去了与人交往的能力。因为人是复杂的存在，人际关系和友谊都是复杂的系统。它们需要我们在关系中找到平衡，而不是依赖技术来解决所有小问题。这就是现代孤独感的根源。

【译者注：预测性技术。这类技术通常指运用数据分析、机器学习、人工智能等方法来预测未来的趋势、行为或结果。】

友谊，就像一块精心打磨的石头，它由无数的联系和磨合塑造而成。我们深入了解对方的生活，一起规划未来，当朋友生病时，我们会重新安排计划，送上布洛芬、热汤或是备用的充电器。朋友不在家时，我们帮忙照料植物；在我们自己情绪低落时，也会请他们帮忙照看孩子，或是帮我们清理家中的不速之客。哪怕你心情不佳，焦虑不安，也要尽力参与那些早已约定的散步——这些，都是友谊中不可或缺的“交集”。

交集，不仅仅是在日常生活中抽空帮朋友一把，更是一种承认——承认你需要一种金钱买不到、自己解决不了的帮助。这需要你放下那层看似完美、高效、游刃有余的面具，勇敢地说出那句：“我需要你的帮助，你能帮我吗？”

我们这代人一直活在一个假象里，总觉得自己能轻松搞定生活中的各种小麻烦。我们可以在家办公，通过亚马逊一键购齐所需，从一堆平庸的约会对象中挑挑拣拣，给心理医生发个短信，不想去超市时就找人代劳，还能享受海量的娱乐节目，尽管过不了多久，我们连它们的名字都记不住。

用Perel的话说，这所有的一切都是“社交萎缩”造成的。现在，我们的生活被数据包围，天天对着屏幕，看似交流无障碍，实际上却让我们疲惫不堪。结果呢？我们连建立那些小而美、平凡又世俗的友谊，或者邻里关系的时间和力气都没了。要知道，这些关系在过去几百年里，一直滋养着我们人类。

新冠疫情的冲击，让这个变化来得更快了。我们失去了很多社交活动，这些活动原本是培养友谊的好机会，尤其是那些不张扬的友谊。我们的生活中缺少了那种低成本、有规律、反复出现的与人见面的机会，而我们的大脑，原本就是通过这种方式来建立联系的。

与此同时，我注意到我们这个年龄段和收入层次的许多人，似乎都在集体触碰到我们二十多岁时投入重金追求的生活方式的天花板。我敢肯定，我自己也已经达到了这个极限。无论是职业心态、自我提升、冒险精神、旅行体验，还是努力在那些生活成本高得惊人的理想居住地生存，这些因素都让我们感到极度疲惫。

尽管那种生活方式代表着极大的特权，但它往往意味着要远离我们成长的地方，或者在一些我们实际上需要重新开始的新地方生活。我们这些有孩子的父母正在逐渐认识到，两个有收入的成年人在没有家人或附近社区的无偿、便利帮助下抚养孩子是多么的困难。那些不受现代西方资本主义影响的人通常不会这么做，因为坦白说，如果不失去理智，这样的生活几乎是不可能的。

还有件事别忘了，在我们都跌跌撞撞地向前走，累得筋疲力尽，感觉孤立无援，被各种生活或工作中的要求压得喘不过气来的时候，我们还被迫不断地在背后关注那些可怕的世界大事。就像布雷特·斯科特在这篇精彩的文章里说的，我们太依赖科技来满足生活的方方面面了，这让我们面临新的焦虑。我们的神经系统现在被接入了一个神经质且极度敏感的全球信息系统，它不断地把一些无关紧要的东西塞进我们的大脑。

在没有背景信息，又面对种族屠杀的残酷画面时，我们一边用手机点外卖，一边下班后还在回复 Slack 上的工作消息。在这种状态下，如果有人突然问我们四个星期后的计划，我们感到困惑或不想回答，这真的很奇怪吗？

【译者注：Slack是一款专为工作团队设计的协作工具，它提供了实时消息传递、文件共享和搜索功能。】

我经常提到这个观点，但今天还得再强调一遍：我们的大脑，真的不是为了这样高强度运作而设计的。你肯定听说过“邓巴数”，它告诉我们，大脑在主动维护社交关系上，最多只能处理大约 150 人。想想看，早上起来刷刷 Instagram，回复一堆邮件和 WhatsApp 消息，这 150 人的社交极限很快就被突破了。

我认为，这就是友谊问题的关键所在：在这个全球化、互联互通的世界里，我们为了生计奔波劳累，以至于根本没有精力去进行那些可能真正给我们带来活力和生命力的轻松面对面交流。

在这份时事通讯里，我努力把眼前看似零散的问题，和我们这个时代的大危机联系起来。这件事的影响很大，不只关乎友情或孤独。就像比尔·麦克吉本最近说的，要对付气候变化，最好的方法就是住在一个大家互相信任的地方。

在过去的 75 年里，邻居似乎变得可有可无：只要你有一张信用卡，几乎所有你需要的东西都能送到家门口。但未来 75 年，情况将大不相同；我们还是需要对身边的人有依赖感。我们将需要重新认识到，作为一个社会性物种，这对美国人来说可能是个挑战。

成为父母，让我深刻体会到，这个世界真正缺少的，也是我们最需要的，就是彼此的陪伴。这听起来有点理想化，甚至有点嬉皮士的味道，但正如麦克吉本所言，这种需求正变得越来越迫切和现实。我们天生就是社交动物，需要与他人建立联系，无论是家人、朋友，还是社区和我们选择的家庭，都需要彼此的身体接触、实际支持和友谊。

过去十年，我走遍世界，结识了一群才华横溢、人脉广的朋友。一部手机，就能把他们召集到一起。我曾以为，除了他们，我只需靠自己。但成为父母，让我意识到这是一次身份的转变。我感激这份转变，因为它来自成为父母的经历。我们正在考虑，如何根据这个新想法，调整我们的生活。虽然改变让人既害怕又兴奋，但我在这个过程中找到了力量。这个力量，源自一个想法——照顾他人，其实是一种解放。这个想法，是我在采访小说家扎迪·史密斯时听到的。

这是一种从“我们可以自我优化到不需要他人”的观念中解放出来的想法。我们不必依赖自我提升来达到完全独立。在竞争激烈的市场中，我们努力工作，24 小时随时可以购买、订购或召唤我们所需的一切，这似乎是一种进步。我们不再向那些我们认识的人和朋友寻求帮助和支持——他们已经筋疲力尽，我们不愿去打扰，或者他们居住遥远——反而应该在自我关怀上投入巨大，以此来免疫自己，不再向他人索求任何东西。

这些观念深受资本主义的追捧——让更多人生活在孤立的个人空间里，意味着可以卖出更多的商品、服务和快餐包，以适应快节奏的生活——但这从根本上违背了人类追求繁荣发展的本质。

我的童年被“在街上玩耍”所定义，正如佩雷尔所言，这或许正是我为何如此怀念那份属于成年人的自由。我认为，我们必须要勇于进入那些未知结果的情境，愿意与那些不完全认同我们在网上精心校准观点的人交流和互动。除了努力与朋友相处——无论是新朋友、老朋友还是那些有潜力的熟人——我们还要寻求我们所需的帮助和支持，同时也要乐于提供帮助。这些，都是我们需重新锻炼的内在力量。

要让这些变化不显得繁琐，重要的是要记住，我们不是机器。我们需要改变自己，找回与人互动和建立关系的能力。我明白，若想更多地投身于那些我可以互相支持的持续性、基于地点的关系之中，我就必须减少对其他事物的投入。尤其是那些手机里闪闪发光的东西，它们总是大声宣称，在别处，有人正在做或说一些我应该知道的事情。

中英：

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about what’s going on with my friendships, or to be more specific, my lack thereof. I’m not quite sure when it happened, but I’ve felt the presence of friendship dwindle in my life in the past couple years.

最近，我一直在思考一个问题：为什么我的朋友圈越来越窄了？具体来说，就是感觉自己越来越孤单了。我也说不清这是从什么时候开始的，但这几年，我明显感觉到，身边的好朋友越来越少了。

One reasonable diagnosis of the problem is that it’s entirely down to my own life choices: At 30, I moved to a smaller place away from London, where I made most of my friends in my 20s. I am in a long term partnership and I have a toddler, which means I am strictly beholden to a bedtime routine for the maintenance of our collective sanity. Despite charading as a bubbly extrovert for years, I realized during the pandemic that I’m actually an introvert. I stopped going to an office and the after-work drinks that perpetuate many urban millennial friendships. That sort of thing.

问题其实很简单：都是我自己的选择。30 岁那年，我离开了繁华的伦敦，搬到了一个宁静的小城。在那里，我认识的朋友很少，远不如 20 多岁时在伦敦认识的多。我有一个长期的伴侣，还有一个蹒跚学步的孩子，这意味着我必须遵循严格的睡前例程，以维护我们的家庭和谐。虽然过去我总装作一个社交达人，但疫情期间我才发现，自己其实是个内向的人。我不再每天去办公室，也不再参加那些让我维持与无数年轻朋友的下班聚会。这些聚会，对我来说，已经成了过去式。

It would be easy, correct even, to solve this friendship riddle by blaming all of the above and move on with my life. Join some workout classes and friend-finding apps. Go to mom groups. Make an effort with new people etc.

But beyond the fact that I have done all that and then some, I think something else is going on here. A lot of people I speak to — people who live in cities, and haven’t moved away from their networks, people who don’t stay indoors after 6pm – are not happy with the state of their social lives.

My sister, who lives in San Francisco, says that despite knowing many people who live nearby and share her particular life stage, she can barely get someone to commit to something as casual as a walk with a coffee later in the week. Another friend said having dinner with friends in south London midweek — a 60 minute commute — ends up being more of an energy drain than a nourishing social interaction. She craves more of the kind of friends that can pop over for an hour on a Sunday afternoon without planning weeks in advance. So do I.

And yet it seems normal now that plans are made far in advance — scheduled around myriad travel and wedding weekends and kids and work commitments — and then canceled right before. Someone doesn’t follow up, or cancels and then never proposes an alternative plan. Similarly, promising new adult friendships never seem to blossom into the kind of quotidian check-ins and week-to-week ephemera that the friendship of our younger years is based on. Life-long friends make new life choices, drift apart. The friendship fizzles into WhatsApp volleys back and forth, and then someone doesn’t answer the last message, and then it’s a year before you ever talk again.

Friendship starts to feel strikingly similar to admin. Sound familiar?

友谊，竟然和行政工作越来越像了。这感觉，是不是似曾相识？

Much has been written about the struggle to make friends once you enter your 30s and beyond, so in some sense this is all nothing new. But for a long time, I’ve detected a level of avoidance, a pathological burnout among many people I know, and in myself — something that suggests a deeper cause is at the core of this. I know I can’t be the only one craving a kind of social connection and nourishment that the seven messaging apps on my phone don’t provide.

I want to be clear here that the point I am making is not Millennials Killed Friendship. Nor am I calling out any particular friends of mine; I am as guilty of this as anyone. But I am trying to figure out the matrix of factors that leads to a situation where in theory, I have friends — actually loads of them if you look at my phone — but in practice — in the kind of relational, low-stakes, intimate way I crave — there’s a lot to be desired.

I’ve been thinking about this for months, and then one day I heard the eminently quotable Esther Perel address it on a podcast (interview starts at about the 50:00 mark). I’m going to quote her heavily, because I hope the words will stay with you as they did me.

“Modern loneliness masks itself as hyper connectivity. And so people have easily 1000 virtual friends, but no one they can ask to feed their cat. That loneliness, which is really a depletion of the social capital, is extremely powerful.

现代的孤独，看似被超级链接所掩盖。人们轻而易举就能拥有成百上千的虚拟朋友，但真到了需要找人帮忙喂猫的时候，却发现找不到一个真正可以信赖的人。这种孤独，其实是社会资本的枯竭，它的力量是巨大的。

One question I keep asking that I had no idea was going to be so pertinent: When you grew up, did you play freely on the street? … And the majority of the people learned to play freely on the street. They learned social negotiation. They learned unscripted, un-choreographed, unmonitored interaction with people. They fought, they made rules, they made peace, they made friends, they broke up, they made friends again. They developed social muscles. And the majority of these very same people’s children do not play freely on the street. And I think that an adult needs to play freely on the street as well.

我一直在问一个问题,我完全没想到这个问题会如此切中要害:你小时候,是否在街上自由玩耍?……大多数人都学会了在街上自由玩耍。他们学会了社交谈判。他们学会了不按剧本、不按套路、不受监督地与人互动。他们打架,他们制定规则,他们讲和,他们交朋友,他们绝交,他们重归于好。他们锻炼了社交能力。而这些人中的大多数,他们的孩子却不能在街上自由玩耍。我认为,成年人也需要在街上自由玩耍。

For us as adults, that means talking to people in the queue with you, talking to people on the subway, talking to people when you create any kind of group. Book club, movie club, sports club. You stay in the practice of experimentation, doubt, of the paradox of people: You need people very much but the very people that you need are the ones that can reject you.

We do not have the practice at the moment. Everything about predictive technologies is basically giving us a form of assisted living. You get it all served in uncomplicated, lack of friction, no obstacles and you no longer know how to deal with people. Because people are complex systems. Relationships, friendships are complex systems. They often demand that they hold two sides of an equation. And not that you solve little problems with technical solutions. And that is intrinsic to modern loneliness.” 我们目前还没有完全掌握预测性技术（predictive technologies）。

这些技术本质上是帮助我们更好地生活的工具。它们让我们轻松获取所需，消除障碍，但同时也让我们逐渐失去了与人交往的能力。因为人是复杂的存在，人际关系和友谊都是复杂的系统。它们需要我们在关系中找到平衡，而不是依赖技术来解决所有小问题。这就是现代孤独感的根源。

【译者注：预测性技术。这类技术通常指运用数据分析、机器学习、人工智能等方法来预测未来的趋势、行为或结果。】

Friendships are, by their very nature, made of friction. To know what is going on in someone’s day-to-day life, to make plans with them, and then reschedule those plans when someone inevitably gets sick, and then bring over Calpol or soup or an extra laptop charger. To water their plants while they’re away, to ask them to take your kids when you’re feeling sad, or for help getting rid of mice in your house. To show up for the walk you planned even when you’re a vulnerable anxious mess — this is all friction.

And friction is not just interrupting your day or life to help out a friend, but also admitting you need the kind of help you cannot pay for or order yourself. To pierce through your veil of seamless productivity and having-it-together to say: I need something from you, can you help me?

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 consuming an endless stream of entertainment options that we’ll scarcely remember the name of two weeks in the future.

All of this creates a kind of “social atrophy” as Perel calls it. We are so burned out by our data-heavy, screen-based, supposedly friction-free lives that we no longer have the time or energy to engage in the kind of small, unfabulous, mundane, place-based friendships or acquaintance-ships that have nourished and sustained humans for literal centuries.

Add in the pandemic, which I think has accelerated this, and we’ve lost entire categories of social interaction that used to foster friendships, especially low key ones. Our lives are bereft of ways to see people in the low-effort, regular, and repeating ways our brains were designed to connect through.

At the same time, I sense many of the people in my age/income cohort are collectively reaching the upper limits of the lifestyle we all invested so heavily in during our 20s. I know I certainly have. The career mindedness, the self optimization, the adventures, the travel, the trying to survive in desirable places to live which become comically expensive to do so — all of it has left us very tired.

Despite the tremendous privilege involved in living that lifestyle, it usually means living in places far away from where we grew up, or in a series of new places where we’re effectively starting all over. Those of us who have kids are realizing how insane it is for two income-earning adults to attempt to raise a child without the unpaid, accessible help of family or community close by. People outside the constraints of modern western capitalism have typically not done this because — I’m just going to say it — it’s not really possible to do it without losing your mind.

And let’s not forget, as we all bumble along, burned out, isolated, and drowning in the demands of whatever life or career stage we’re at, we’re also expected to constantly consume and metabolize horrific world events in the background. This over-reliance on tech for every aspect of our lives “opens us up to new vectors of anxiety,” as this great post by put it, with “[our nervous systems] now plugged into a neurotic and hypersensitive globe-spanning information system that’s constantly pushing unnecessary things into your consciousness.”

So is it really any wonder that we might not be inclined to text our friend back about that plan four Thursdays from now, in between consuming images of genocide presented without any context or verifiable information, while trying to order dinner on our phone, and answer a Slack message after hours?

【译者注：Slack是一款专为工作团队设计的协作工具，它提供了实时消息传递、文件共享和搜索功能。】

I feel like I say this all the time, but it bears repeating: Our brains were simply not designed to operate this way. The oft-cited Dunbar’s number — that our brains have a cognitive upper limit of about 150 relationships we can actively maintain — can easily be maxed out by a morning Instagram scroll and answering your email and WhatsApps.

And there, I think, lies the crux of the friendship problem: We are so burned out by the process of staying afloat in a globalized, connected world that we simply don’t have the energy for the kinds of in-person, easy interactions that might actually give us some energy and lifeforce back.

One of things I try to do in this newsletter is connect the many seemingly isolated problems of the current moment with the broader meta crisis of our time. And I think this one has huge implications, far beyond the idea of friendship or loneliness. As wrote recently, the best thing you can do to prepare yourself for climate change is live in an area with a high degree of social trust.

We’ve come through 75 years where having neighbors was essentially optional: if you had a credit card, you could get everything you needed to survive dropped off at your front door. But the next 75 years aren’t going to be like that; we’re going to need to return to the basic human experience of relying on the people around you. We’re going to need to rediscover that we’re a social species, which for Americans will be hard.

在过去的 75 年里，邻居似乎变得可有可无：只要你有一张信用卡，几乎所有你需要的东西都能送到家门口。但未来 75 年，情况将大不相同；我们还是需要对身边的人有依赖感。我们将需要重新认识到，作为一个社会性物种，这对美国人来说可能是个挑战。

Becoming a parent and engaging in the grueling work of caring for another human has brought me to the visceral realization that what this world is lacking — what we actually need most — is each other. It sounds hippie-ish and obvious, but as McKibben hints at, it’s going to become ever more serious and tangible. We are relational creatures designed to live with the physical, practical support and fellowship of other people, be it family, friends, built villages and communities, and chosen families.

I spent the first decade of my adulthood amassing a network of talented, connected friends all over the world, people who I could summon with a smartphone. Beyond that, I believed I needed to rely on no one but myself. So realizing all of this has been an identity-based shift for me, but it’s one I’m very grateful parenthood has given me. We’re in the process of figuring out how to re-orient our family’s life around this idea, and making those changes feels scary but good. As we do that, I’ve been comforted and energized by this idea — which I first heard in this interview with the novelist Zadie Smith — that caretaking is a kind of liberation.

It’s liberation from the idea that we can self-optimize ourselves to the point of not needing anyone else. That if we work hard enough to survive in a competitive economy, we’ll be able to buy, order, or summon anything we might need within 24 hours, and that is somehow progress. That instead of asking for help and support from the people and friends we know — they’re too burned out, don’t want to bother them, they live too far away — we should invest heavily in self care to inoculate ourselves from needing to ask anything of anyone.

These are all ideas that capitalism loves — more people living in their own atomized fiefdoms means selling more stuff and services and meal kits to keep up with the relentless pace of life — but are fundamentally antithetical to the ways that humans are designed to flourish.

It’s certainly no coincidence that my childhood was defined by “playing on the street,” as Perel called it, which is perhaps why I miss the adult version so much. I think we have to choose to go into situations where we don’t know how they might pan out. Be willing to talk or engage with people who don’t share the carefully calibrated views that we broadcast online. In addition to making the effort with friends — new, old, promising acquaintances — and asking for the kind of help and support we need, as well as providing it in return. These are all muscles we need to rebuild.

But in order for this all not to feel like yet more admin, it’s crucial to remember we are not machines. We need to make changes to regain the capacity to show up for these kinds of interactions and relationships. I know if I want to be available for more of the kind of recurring, place-based relationships where I can give and receive support, that means I have to be less available for other things. Mostly, the shiny things inside my phone that loudly insist someone else, somewhere else, is doing or saying or something I should know about.

作者：Rosie Spinks

原文：https://rojospinks.substack.com/p/the-friendship-problem

【点击查看社群介绍】加入曹哲万人成长社群，装备专属你的成长智库：这个世界一切都有了，您只需要把它找到，用就行了！

隐藏内容为会员内容，想改变先学会付费。先看免费内容，有收获再付费。前1000名200元终身，满额后改为年费。会员务必加微信，拉入群内分享更多精彩内容。