- There are some studies
that suggest, for example, that being without a close
friend, being lonely, is as bad for your health as
smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It's quite hard to measure friendships. What's the quality of that friendship? What's the quantity? When people say they have a certain number of friends,
what does that mean? Does it mean how many friends
they have on Facebook? It is difficult to get
at this quantitatively, and also people I think
are a bit reluctant to admit sometimes to not having friends. Loneliness is in some ways
quite a stigmatized condition, and so actually getting people
to admit to loneliness is something that social
scientists really struggle with. I think a big question now is whether we are facing a
'friendship recession.' That's the term that Daniel Cox, a scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute, has used to describe this
rise in a number of people who lack a certain
number of close friends, who have fewer people to
turn to in times of crisis. You need a shoulder to cry on, or at least someone to
have a conversation with. That's less and less
likely to be a friend now. And as society changes
in all kinds of ways, technologically, economically,
then I think it's important that we pay attention
to what is very often an underappreciated human relationship- which is the friendship. Friendships come in all shapes and sizes, and are also formed in very different ways and
in very different places. One way we form friends is just
by being at the same school as somebody, by growing
up in the same place. Another way is through the situations you find yourself in, through work. They're also friends that
you form through activities that are chosen, so through
a volunteer activity or a sport, athletics. The fourth is online friendships. Those are friendships that
are formed through a screen or over the internet
in one kind or another, without necessarily ever
physically meeting that person. Across human history, there's always been a tribal size, I think to friendship groups, which is somewhere in
the teens, say between 12 and 15 perhaps is a reasonable
number to think about. And then there are close friends. Some people of course
have no close friends, but most people have at
least a close friend. And most people would
say that the ideal number of close friends to have is somewhere around the three or four number. Friendship was something
that the ancient philosophers used to take very seriously. If you go back to Aristotle, for example, in some ways seen as
the ideal relationship, and one of the reasons why friendship is, I think so important and so idealized is 'cause it's a relationship of
genuine and radical equality, and one in which you're
not in the friendship in order to get something
out of it for yourself. There's no sense of dependency. There's no sense of exchange. It's not a transactional
relationship in any way. And in most other occasions, relationships do contain
some kind of transaction, some kind of "what's in this for me?" But the definition of a
friendship is a relationship where there is nothing in it for you other than the relationship. We've seen a decline in lots
of traditional institutions including the family,
people marrying later if they do marry, obviously, in areas like religion, in some
cases the the labor market. And so, what that means
is there's more of a need for people to have social relationships, connections outside of those institutions. That's where friends are hugely important. But during the same period, we've seen a real decline
in the number of people who say that they have a
number of close friends. There are a number of
factors that could be getting in the way of forming friendships, particularly in 21st-century U.S. Number one is geographical mobility. People moving away from their homes, moving to big cities
or career opportunities which necessarily stretches
their friendship network. Parents are spending quite a
bit more time on parenting, on looking after their
kids, which squeezes out the time that they might have had for friendships before. There's also a lot of
emphasis on work and careers, what some scholars call 'workism,' which is a sense that your
identity is so what wrapped up in your work that you
don't have as much energy and time left over for friends. And then lastly, I'd point to
the breakdown of relationships as marriages break up or couples separate that can be really fracturing
of friendship groups that have been formed as a couple. Once they break up the friendship groups very often get shattered as well. There are a few downsides
to being without friends. One is lack of access to opportunities. It turns out that many
people get a lot of jobs and opportunities and
chances to go and do things through their friends- so friends do act as a
communications information channel. But there are some quite
profound effects on health, too: Mental health, and even physical health. It's not exactly clear what
the causal relationships are, what's going on, but it is
clear that having friends is protective of your
health in various ways. And so it's not just that
being without friends can make you isolated
in a sort of economic or a social sense, but
it can also make you sad. And being sad it turns
out is also bad in terms of your physical as well
as emotional health. Today, 15% of young men say that they don't have a close friend. That was just 3% back in the 1990s. And so, we're seeing a fivefold increase in the number of men
have no close friends. Back in 1990, almost
half of young men, 45% said that if they had to turn to someone in a time of trouble, it
would be to a close friend. But now that's dropped to about 22%. And in fact, there are more men, about 36% who say that they would
go to their parents. And so that's a quite a
radical transformation in the social networks that we've seen,
particularly of young men. The pandemic has been
a sort of stress test for our friendship networks. Interestingly there, we see that it's women
who've been most affected: with more than half of women
saying they've lost touch with at least some of their friends. I think that's because female
friendships are more based on physical relationships
on face-to-face time, whereas male friendships
tend to be more mediated perhaps through activities or technology. We don't know for sure, but
that gender gap is suggestive of the fact that women's
friendships are more in need of more regular physical contact
than male friendships are, which is maybe why women's
friendships are born the brunt of the impact of COVID on those friendship networks. There's obviously a dystopian version of how these trends
could continue, which is a world of essentially atomized
individuals without friends, isolated, sad, lonely,
perhaps in ill health. I think that's why we
have to pay real attention to these trends, and to
recognize that friendship is incredibly important
for human flourishing, and that people want to make friends. We are wired to want
to be social creatures and to be friends- but that it might be harder for us to do so in certain circumstances. Circumstances where we're
under too much pressure, where we're too segregated,
where the opportunities to cultivate friendship are not there. A key lesson that we learn is that friendships don't form themselves. Friendship is not a flower that
just blooms all on its own. It's more like a woodworking
project that you have to carve out and continue to work on. One of the necessary
steps to making a friend is to admitting that you
want to make a friend, to being open to that. That requires a certain vulnerability. It requires you, in some ways,
to reveal a need, a desire. And I think as we get older,
there's sometimes a sense of shame that comes along
with not having enough friends and actually saying, "I need a friend," is maybe one of the hardest sentences that any human being can utter. - Get smarter, faster, with videos from the
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