Lonely America
The Wilson Quarterly: America: Land of Loners? by Daniel Akst (via HN) describes the value of friendship, and the modern American man’s increasing refusal to maintain friendships. (Sidenote: I’m getting really sick of question-mark-titles. You either believe whole-heartedly in what you are writing and you are setting out to support it, or you are debunking a myth. You can’t launch a very effective piece of writing by saying “hey, maybe we could think this!”) This friendship-abondoning really made me feel rather sad because I’ve done a horse crap job of maintaining my friendships. I’m looking to improve that, salvage what I have left. Anyhow, on the whole, we don’t have people to talk to:
While most of us wouldn’t last long outside the intricate web of interdependence that supplies all our physical needs—imagine no electricity, money, or sewers—we’ve come to demand of ourselves truly radical levels of emotional self-sufficiency. In America today, half of adults are unmarried, and more than a quarter live alone. As Robert Putnam showed in his 2000 book Bowling Alone, civic involvement and private associations were on the wane at the end of the 20th century. Several years later, social scientists made headlines with a survey showing that Americans had a third fewer nonfamily confidants than two decades earlier. A quarter of us had no such confidants at all.
Here’s one I love: the “conspicuous busyness” idea from Barbara Ehrenreich (she wrote Nickel and Dimed):
Developing meaningful friendships—having the kind of people in your life who were once known as “intimates”—takes time, but too many of us are locked in what social critic Barbara Ehrenreich has called “the cult of conspicuous busyness,” from which we seem to derive status and a certain perverse comfort even as it alienates us from one another.
Now, while I have been truly busy in the past few years, I’ll be fooling myself to say that in the next two years I’ll be too busy for friends. Two points:
- FRIENDSHIP THEORY OF BAD TIMING: We consider ourselves too busy for friends right when we need them most.
- FRIENDSHIP THEORY OF TIME MANAGEMENT: We grow in our value to others when we learn how to help them while still maintaining our own lives.
When I posted that recent update Regrets of the Dying, one of those recurring regrets went thusly: “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”