- Thank you Squarespace
for sponsoring this video. Hello, my beautiful doves. My name is Mina and on this
channel we talk about fashion, culture, film, and I guess whatever
else I wanna talk about, which includes today's topic. (laughs) (gentle instrumental music) Okay, also, the sun is currently setting right now as I'm recording this, I don't know why I decided to record this now, maybe because I'm just
like so highly professional and good at my job. But if you notice that the lighting just changes over the course
of the video, that is why. Okay, so I made a TikTok
about friendship recently and how a lot of my 2024
ins and outs lists items have to do with friendship
and socialization. And I got a lot of comments
from people feeling the same way as I did, so I thought I'd just make a longer video about this topic on main. To give the genesis of all this, in case you don't follow
me on any other platform. Shame. (gentle instrumental music) My inner dialogue about alienation and loneliness all came
together when I read "The Friendship Problem",
which is a Substack essay by Rosie Spinks. In this essay, she addresses
many of the reasons for why people are so lonely today. A lot of it has to do with the
usual suspects, capitalism, technology, and social media. - I knew it. I knew it, I knew it. - Then a few other things
in the news came up. First we have the Stanley cup drama. Stanley cups are these big
insulated drink tumblers that have a cult following, mostly from what it seems
like among suburban moms. Anyway, Stanley the company collaborated with Starbucks earlier this month on a limited edition winter pink hue that was sold exclusively at Target. And people staked out for this cup. There were long lines that started before the stores even opened, Black Friday esque style
fighting was breaking out, and people were jumping the counters and stealing the drink tumblers. And of course, these Stanley cups have made it to resell sites, selling for $300 when they
originally retailed for 49.95. - Just looks like a huge
cup that's way too big. - Everybody has one.
- Why? - That's the first news soundbite. Second, we have the mean
preteens of Sephora. So for any non-Americans who may not know, Sephora is a mega retailer of virtually every major beauty brand. Whenever I step into a Sephora, it's like that episode of
SpongeBob where SpongeBob and Patrick are running
through the perfume department. It's just really loud, and bright, and chaotic. I find it suffocating. Usually I do my Sephora shopping online, so I actually didn't know that there was a problem arising in
physical Sephora stores. So the online discourse was started by a TikTok user named
Chloe, who posted this video. - Has anyone else noticed that, like every time you go into Sephora now it's just all little girls? Like, literally the other day
I was at a mall by my house and I went into just
grab, I think nail polish, and I get in line and there was this cute little girl with her mom, she must have been, I don't know, like maybe seven, like, and I hear her start yelling at her mom. And her mom told her that she could only get
one kind of concealer. Meanwhile, this little girl
does not have a single blemish, I don't even think her
pores have opened yet. She literally doesn't have a
single pimple, under eye bags, nothing, and like, they're getting concealer for her. And she was literally upset that she couldn't get
more than one concealer. I don't know if this is
like everywhere lately, but I swear, every time I
go into these expensive, expensive makeup stores, it's just all really young little girls, which is really upsetting to see. - Chloe's video sparked others to talk about their own
experiences at Sephora. They rant about how
products from viral brands like Drunk Elephant and Sol de
Janeiro are always sold out, about how girls are just given free rein with their parent's Amex credit cards, about how 10 year olds don't need to be buying anti-aging
skincare in the first place, which is like a whole
nother dystopian topic, and also about how rude many
of these preteen patrons are. A lot of it gets brought back
to the harms of social media and how these girls are
part of the first generation of iPad kids, and how we're all screwed. And look, there will
always be generational fear towards kids, but I do
think there is some truth to the newest generation being raised in a worse environment. It reminds me of this Kyle Fitzpatrick newsletter essay I read a month ago. He wrote, "Shit rolls downhill. In our jobs, more work is
placed on us for less money as people at the top seemingly
profit off our labor. In our free time, we watch
videos and play games and don't have any time to read. We bully each other across generations, for whatever reason.
resulting in a ridiculous, this is in, this is out cycle. We don't have time to have our own lives. We don't have time to parent. Imagine then what it
means to be a kid today, to observe, and learn, and witness all this. Imagine then what becomes the children, who like any living creature, are a collage of their surroundings. Why would kids be readers or
kind when the world we live in is increasingly without readers. We may complain that we want kids to read, yet intellectualism thinking and higher education are increasingly being met with contempt and hate." Similarly, we can make the connection that the Stanley cup
fiasco is not necessarily a problem affecting a small
demographic of people, but a reflection of today's larger issues. Najma Sharif posted about it on Twitter. "Why can't people make
the connection between the lack of third spaces
and hyper consumption? These people have no time, few friends, and nothing to do. They're going to collect
cups and other things they don't need to feel alive. They're crying out for help." I've made videos referring to
overconsumption in the past, and they've mostly focused
on brands and influencers, but I'm starting to think that many of us have our own Stanley cups. Okay, like not like literally, but many of us are plagued with the issue of buying things purely to
fill a void, me included. - You do whatever you do to
make yourself feel better. (gentle instrumental music) - But what I've come to
realize is that the antidote to to this frivolous overspending and micro trend cycles
is less about finding your own personal style, though that's definitely part of it, if clothing is your way of overconsuming, if clothing is your Stanley cup, but the antidote overall is
more about finding a community. So let's discuss. (video beeping) If you've been looking for
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purchase of website or domain. (video beeping) (gentle instrumental music) I've moved around a lot. After high school, I moved to Canada, then to Florida, then to Australia, then to New York, then
back home to Maryland, then back to New York again. Long story short, I've started over again, and finding and building a
community relatively more often than some other people, particularly people of
my parents' generation, who for the most part stayed in the same place as where they grew up. My parents still have
friends from childhood and from college, and I honestly
think that's really cool, and I'm jealous of them, but that's becoming less
of a majority experience, as more and more young
adults travel around, relocating from city to city. There are systemic reasons for this, of course, housing is really expensive. Many of us still pay rent
at the age our parents were buying property, and
if you don't own a house, you have more freedom to move, Or if you're, in my case, you just get a string of
really shitty landlords who don't fix anything, which
force you to move every year. Many of us also work remote
jobs due to the pandemic, which also gives us the
freedom to relocate. And then social media and
the internet have made the concept of moving much easier. You have hundreds of guides
online from travel vloggers and writers who tell you
the ins and outs of how to live like a local in another country. You have sites like LinkedIn and Indeed, which allow you to job search in DC while still living in Chicago. And you have social media.
like Facebook groups. and Reddit pages. and Discord servers. and I don't know Bumble BFF,
which dangle in front of you the promise of helping you establish a community in whatever
location you decide to move to. And these services, these
social media platforms, would make it seem as
though it's really easy to set up a new life somewhere. But come on, it's never that easy. And cities, despite being
densely populated areas of the world can also be very
isolating places to live. Compared now to New England
during the early 19th century, a time that historian
Karen Hansen describes as being "A very social time." Visitors took afternoon tea,
made informal Sunday visits, attended maple sugar
parties and cider tastings, stayed for extended visits, offered assistance in giving birth, paid their respects to the
family of the deceased, participated in quilting parties, and raised houses and barns. Visits could last anywhere
from a brief stop over, or a call as they called it, to a leisurely afternoon,
to a month long stay. Visitors frequently stayed overnight, because traveling was
difficult and arduous, especially in the wintertime. And your options for
travel were by foot, horse, stage, wagon, or train, which were, you know, not so convenient. But one could argue that
because it took so much effort to see someone, contact
with your neighbor's, friends, and family was extremely valued. But according to Robert Putnam
in his book "Bowling Alone", friendship has been on the
decline over the course of the 20th century. In the mid to late 1970s, according to the DDB
Needham Lifestyle Archive, the average American
entertained friends at home about 14 to 15 times a year. But the late 1990s, that figure had fallen to eight times a year, a decline of 45% in barely two decades. Also, during this period of time, the fraction of married
Americans who say, definitely, that our whole family
usually eats dinner together, declined by a 1/3 from about 50% to 34%. According to the General Social Survey, between 1974 and 1998, the frequency with which
Americans spend a social evening with someone who lives
in your neighborhood fell by about 1/3 from about 30 times a year to about 20 times a year
among married couples, and from about 50 times a year to about 35 times a year among singles. Part of the reason for the
shift is that over the course of the 20th century, leisure
started to become privatized. Rich Heyman, an American studies professor at the University of
Texas told "The Atlantic" that, "As living conditions improved, people chose to sit with
their nuclear families in front of televisions." But I guess at least the family was still watching TV together. Nowadays, there are people who are all on their separate phones
eating at the dinner table. The American Community Life
Survey reported last year that only 25% of people living in areas with very high amenity access socialize with strangers at least once a week. COVID 19 has also definitely
accelerated the problem. Community and human connection is obviously really important,
but I'll explain it further. Putnam talks about the concept
of generalized reciprocity in his book. Generalized reciprocity
is like raking your leaves before they blow into your neighbor's yard or lending coins to a
stranger at the parking meter, buying a round of drinks for your friends when you got paid overtime, or pet sitting for your
friends when they're traveling. It's doing a favor for someone
else without the expectation that they'll do a favor for you. But to offer favors
requires us to be present, present enough to notice that there's a stranger struggling to
pay their parking meter, or to notice that the
senior man living next door needs his backyard raked. My friend lives in the city with her 90 something year old grandma, and she tells me that on public transport people don't automatically offer
their seats to her grandma, because they're all on their phones and they like are not noticing that there's an elderly
woman who needs to sit down. But doing tasks for other
people is important, because it leads to
larger community trust. And studies have shown that people who trust their fellow
citizens volunteer more often, contribute more to charity, participate more often in politics and community organizations,
give blood more frequently, and display many other
forms of civic virtue. Something that has been brought up a lot in TikTok discussions is
the idea of the third place and how we don't have
many of them in America. To recap, the first place is the home. The second place is the work setting. And the third place is
a sort of public space that people can gather and
socialize on equal footing and with low cost to entry, think a diner, a cafe, a public park, etcetera. For those of us who freelance
or work for ourselves, we don't even have the second place, we just have one place. (laughs) Ray Oldenberg introduced the idea of the third place in his 1989
book, "The Great Good Place". He writes that, "Third
places thrive best in locales where community life is casual,
where walking takes people to more destinations than cars, and where there's an interesting diversity of people in the neighborhood." He says, "In these habitats, the street is an extension of the home. Attachment to the area
and the sense of place that it imparts expand with the individual's
walking familiarity with it. In such locales, parents and
their children range freely, the streets are not only safe, they invite human connection." This is definitely a more common layout in modern places outside
of America, but in America, many homes have no sidewalks out front, people are expected to come and go in the privacy of their cars,
and by traveling in a car, people cross an environment without ever becoming part of it, leading us to feel disconnected
from our neighbors. If we don't have real third
places, what do we have instead? Oldenburg calls what
we have as non-places. In real places, a human being
is a unique individual person. In non-places, individuality disappears and you're either a customer, a client, an address to be billed,
or a car to be parked. Places have now mostly been
reduced to consumerism. Allie Conti wrote for "The Atlantic" about what she calls ersatz third places, AKA establishments that are either to expensive for the average American or apparently designed to
disincentivize lingering, think carefully curated faux dive bars that serve $15 beer and shot specials or parks like New York's
high line that are built to be moved through in a linear fashion. She also includes co-working spaces or corporate amenities, like
employee only coffee shops, that give the illusion
of an out of workplace, but are actually constructed to extract more productivity
from its workers. For example, if you have
an in-office coffee shop, going to get coffee
there during your breaks is going to prevent you
from leaving the building and taking more time away from your work. She writes, "In these
privatized third places, there's an expectation that all conversation
will be centered on work. There's the underlying
anxiety of being on the clock, the antithesis of just hanging out. And the possibility of a
wildly unexpected encounter is slim given that most
people in attendance will be in roughly the
same socioeconomic stratum because they work in similar jobs." A lot of people realize the follies of the ersatz third places,
but have no other choices, especially because city
living is so expensive. If you're a New Yorker
who wants to be depressed, I suggest reading the curved article, how much does it cost to live like this, where basically the reporters interview a number of people on
what their ideal lifestyle in New York City would entail, and how much that lifestyle
would actually cost for them. But overall, according to
the Council for Community and Economic Researchers
Cost of Living Index, living costs in Manhattan are 122% higher than the national average. So even if you don't wanna
talk about work all the time, living in a city like New
York means you have less time to engage in other hobbies
because you have to make money or you just can't afford
to do the extra hobbies. Ersatz third places can also be expensive, so think Soho House. So people who can't afford
to hang out in one of them have to make do with under maintained, bare minimum public places. Oldenburg notes men drinking beers outside convenience
stores in the parking lot because there's no seating
actually inside the stores or teens gathering in a
local spot in the woods before it gets bulldozed to
build more suburban houses. Granted, Oldenburg wrote his book in 2000, so probably the more common
third place people visit today is actually social media. With the lack of physical third places, Americans have resorted to investing in their home amenities, so constructing private
pools in the backyard, building out movie theaters
in their basements, planting a garden, etcetera. All these things are nice in theory and all things I would personally love to have in my own home, they don't make up for
the community aspect that third places offered. Patrick Goldring wrote a
social commentary called "The Broilerhouse Society" in 1969, and follows the recent history
of the chicken, stay with me. Chickens before industrial
farming would range freely in the yard, pecking and
scratching whenever they please. They had contact with the natural world and were aware of time passing throughout the day and seasons. They were happy little chickens, they enjoyed chicken's rights. But with the introduction
of factory farming, most chickens now are hatched and combined under tightly
controlled conditions. Climate, time, like night and day, are
artificially controlled, and these chickens are
barely allowed to move. They eat tasteless food and are overall more stressed
than the roaming chicken. Goldring compares the broilerhouse chicken to a citizen in Britain. He says, "Broilerhouse man, living on what is often
tasteless and flavorless food, lives a life." (laughs) Sorry, I'm like, that's such a read towards British food. I've never been to Britain, but like the stereotype is that the food is not that flavorful, right? "Lives a life which is
increasingly better organized, but is also becoming tasteless
and flavorless as his food. The English man's home
today is not his castle. It is his centrally-heated, bright, combined nesting-cage and exercise run. The family-sized television
replaces the crowded cinema, the bottle of beer from the off-license, the visit to the pub,
the telly discussion, the pub argument. Furnishing and decorating
the home have become subjects of absorbing interest to the nation, while public architecture has degenerated into a featureless bore." And the more beautiful or
the more like personalized we make our home, the uglier our neglected
city looks in contrast. And when we associate the home with safety and the public space as
being chaotic, dirty, or ugly, it leads us to think
of people outside our home, AKA, our neighbors, as similarly chaotic, dirty, and ugly. Think of the way that the word
street has become derogatory. The term street often refers
to networks of hostile people and illegal, corrupt activities. As Oldenberg writes, "We
come dangerously close to the notion that one
'gets sick' in the world beyond one's domicile and one gets well by retreating from it." Thus, while Germans relax
amid the rousing company of the beer garden or
the French recuperate in their animated little bistros, Americans turn to massaging, meditating, jogging, hottubbing, or escape fiction. While others take full
advantage of their freedom to associate, we glorify our
freedom not to associate. Again, Oldenberg wrote his
book prior to social media, but I think the problem
has actually gotten worse, because these apps have made it so we're basically always
interacting with people online, which eventually leads
us to a sense of fatigue. If we spent all morning
texting in group chats and commenting on TikTok videos, the idea of rest becomes
associated with rotting in bed for the rest of our day by ourselves, not going out to meet more people. The problem though is that
online social interaction is often not meaningful enough, and I'll actually talk about this later. But going back to the dream house. Architect and urban
planner, Dolores Hayden, has written a lot about
the dream house replacing the ideal city. She notes that in the decades since 1950, our dream houses got bigger and bigger until Americans enjoyed the largest amount of private housing space per person ever created in the history
of urban civilization. In 2016, CNBC reported
that there are over 9.4% more bedrooms in the US than people, 357 million bedrooms, but
only 323.4 million people. That leaves at least
33.6 million spare rooms and there are likely
even more extra bedrooms, since many couples share a room. For people who can't afford
to design their dream homes, they rely on curating their social media. It's absolutely not lost
to me how many young people and teenagers, an age
group that has considerably lower disposable income unless
your parents are the type to promote your Sephora obsession, are so focused on aesthetics and creating online the lifestyle that they actually want offline. What this means for society is that the rich stay
comfortable in their homes and the poor suffer from low
investments in public spaces. But we all suffer,
regardless of income level, in the sense that we lose social skills when we constantly retreat to our homes. And bringing this back to friendship, third place friendships are important because they offer affiliation or casual connection to a group of people. Oldenberg explains that we need both
intimacy and affiliation. If we don't have intimacy, affiliation only dulls the ongoing sense of emptiness in our lives. But if we don't have affiliation, then only having intimate human contact makes it feel like all
human contact is a burden. What third places offer
is an easy meeting point. You could see different
people every day that you go and you don't have to schedule in advance with anyone in particular. If someone cancels on you, you can still go and have a good time. Third places offer the most
reliable forms of friendship. There's this Chinese proverb, "A humble friend in the
same village is better than 16 influential brothers
in the royal palace." Basically it's saying that one of the most
important characteristics that friends can possess is availability. Third places make friendship easy, and when we lose them, friendship becomes
difficult and high effort. (gentle instrumental music) - Can we please be friends? - Absolutely. - Friendship has always
been difficult for adults. You have more
responsibilities as an adult, and once you have a family,
you have other humans to take care of and to plan around, and that's really the root of it. There's just too much scheduling
and planning in adulthood. And while I'm sure there's some people who are thriving by scheduling
time for their friends, scheduling fatigue is a real thing. Relationship expert, Shasta Nelson, said that regular contact is one of the strongest
requirements in any relationship, and without consistency, the relationship will naturally atrophy. Scheduling fatigue can prohibit people from maintaining consistency, which means it makes it harder for people to maintain adult friendships, period. Tori Latham wrote an article for "The Atlantic" about friend groups who actually share their calendars to make hangout scheduling easier. And if you're kind of a
private person like myself, that sounds completely nightmarish, but I guess it does make
coordination easier, so you probably end up hanging out with your friends more often than people who don't share calendars. Latham also interviewed
long distance friends who also shared calendars as a way of passively letting each other know what's going on in their lives. Camilla Heart, a long
distance calendar sharer, makes the case, "The time
that we do have to speak with each other is so precious that I'd rather talk about other things. Having a shared calendar
allows us to focus on how the others are
feeling or other details." So yeah, in the sense
that she's like talking about just wasting time
catching up with people by talking about what you've been doing. One of my TikTok commenters
actually lamented about how their hangouts have
become more about recapping what they've done over experiencing and making new memories together. Having a friendship where you recap with each other isn't inherently bad, but I think it's bad if this is all you do with all your friends. Julie Beck wrote about friendship and delineates three
different types of friendship, active, dormant, and commemorative. Active friendships are the ones where you keep in touch regularly and can rely on them
for emotional support. Dormant friendships are the ones where there's a shared history, so you haven't spoken a while, but you still consider them a friend, and if either of you reached out, you would meet up, like for sure. A commemorative friend is like a friend you met at a summer camp. They're not someone who's
really in your life anymore, not a person you expect to hear from or maybe even like meet ever again, but they were important
during an era of your life, and for that you consider them a friend. Humans have always had these
three types of friendships. The difference now though
is with social media you can keep all these
friendships in one place. But by keeping these dormant or commemorate friends too close, it can make us feel overwhelmed, like we have too many
friends to keep up with, preventing us from achieving
intimacy with like anyone. Honestly, a lot of the relationships we maintain over social
media are not intimate. Before social media, you would have to at
least call on the phone or physically meet up with a friend to know
what they were up to. Nowadays you can just like scroll through someone's public Instagram stories and it gives you the
illusion of maintaining that friendship, even though
you didn't actually talk. Marlon Twyman II, a
quantitative social scientist at USC Annenberg who specializes
in social network analysis, said, "That social media is powered by the appearance of social connection." He said, "Human
relationships have suffered and their complexity has diminished. Because many of our
interactions are now occurring in platforms designed to promote
transactional interactions that provide feedback in the
form of attention metrics. Many people do not have much experience or practice interacting
with people in settings where there are collective or communal goals for a larger group." He also adds that this has also led to people being more image conscious and identity focused in
real world interactions. Look at the Sephora tweens. As a tween in the 2010s, of
course I cared about image, it's the plague of being a
girl, but I was comparing myself to other 12 year olds at my school, not with the girls and women
of all ages all over the world, it's just too much. Another interesting trend as of recent is that people are posting
less original content but consuming the same
amount of content as before. So rather than consuming your
friend or family's content, you're mostly consuming
influencer content. This is because over time
Instagram has encouraged the sort of aesthetic driven collective consciousness encouraged by influencers with their
carefully curated feeds. But especially over the
pandemic, normal people started to post less because they were doing less. Influencer strategist
Andrea Casanova said, "That when people were
confined to their homes, the app saw an influx
of photos from people who either have a specific lifestyle or had specific talents." This in turn reinforces
typical people's decisions to not post on their own feeds, because they assume the bar for what people wanna see is higher. So these photos are all like supposed to resemble the best moments of your life, and whether or not you're an influencer, the effects trickle downstream
conveying the message that you shouldn't post unless you have something
really spectacular to share or something to sell. And for the most part, if
most of our lives revolve between home and work, there's
not much to share is there? So with social media not serving us, what is the online third place? Some will say group chats
and forums, like Discord, act as the new virtual third place, but regardless of wherever it is, an online third place is
still limiting in principle. (gentle instrumental music) - I never had many
friends, and that's sad. And as I've gotten older in this world, it's just gotten more sad.
- Okay. - Early last year there
was online discourse on the etiquette behind
picking your friends up at the airport. I believe Twitter user, Codie Sanchez, sparked this discourse with her tweet, "As an adult, don't ask your friends to pick you up from the airport. Use Uber, save a friendship." (laughs) So before I give my
own opinion about this, I think this line of thinking stems from our productivity culture. Speaking of Uber, service apps in general, which are supposed to
streamline our own productivity, affect our friendships
because they make the idea of helping transactional. If you don't wanna go
to the grocery store, you can just Instacart and pay an extra fee for someone to shop and deliver groceries to your door. If you need someone to
help you move apartments or pick up a piece of furniture you bought from Facebook marketplace, you can go on TaskRabbit and pay someone to do
those things for you. I'm not saying that these
apps are net terrible, they do wonders for disabled people and they offer convenience
that all of us need sometimes. But I also think these
apps can alter the way we view asking for favors. I'm not saying that we should
always jump over hurdles for everyone and for everything. Sometimes we would like
to help but we're busy, or we don't have money, or we're sick. But I think what bothered
me about the picking up your friends at the airport discourse is that many people
don't like the principle of helping their friends for free, because when you're used to
paying people for services, every act of help feels like
payment should be involved. What are you gonna do for me? There is no more generalized
reciprocity in this context. I also think that with
the growth of technology and capitalism, we're told to maximize
productivity constantly, we're told we need to be doing the most with the 24 hours of our day. And so spending a few
hours helping out a friend with a task, when you could be
theoretically working towards your side hustle, or cleaning your house, or reading a book, doing
things that correlate with your individual self-improvement, helping someone else in this context feels like a lot of effort
for not a lot of reward. - So if someone's like, hey, can you pick me up from
the airport tomorrow? For me, like you are asking me
to drop thousands of dollars, basically, to come pick you up. I've already obligated my time, especially in two, three weeks out, like it's already all spoken for. - But the thing is, it
actually is very rewarding. We need these kinds of interactions to build solid friendships and to build trust in other people. We also feel good when
we help other people. In a 2017 study published in the "Proceedings of the
National Academy of Science", participants' brains were
monitored by MRI scans while they made decisions
about donating money. When participants chose to donate money, the brain's mesolimbic, I
don't know I'm pointing here, I don't know where the mesolimbic
system is, was activated. The same part of the
brain that's activated in response to monetary rewards, sex, and other positive stimuli. Choosing to donate also activated the brain's subgenual area, the part of of the brain that
produces feel-good chemicals, like oxytocin, that
promote social bonding. Another thing people love to say online is you really need to go to therapy, which is sometimes weaponized to mean, I, your friend, don't wanna
help you with this situation. Not all the time. I think everyone also, objectively, would benefit from therapy. And I also think that
not everyone is equipped to deal with every single situation that their friend is going through. Like if my friend is suffering
from addiction issues or an eating disorder, I'm not qualified to be the only person that they talk to. But the problem is
overlying on this phrase so that we don't have to hear about or deal with someone else's
tough situation at all. Again, I'm not blaming anyone for feeling like a friend
in crisis is a lot of work, because it is. But I think that we have a lower
tolerance for the work now, because we're so overwhelmed and overstimulated by social media and this idea of productivity. We all have work, romantic partners, family members, pets,
hobbies, other friends, it's a lot to juggle,
made worse by the fact that being online and having 24/7 access to the tragic news cycle makes it so when we're with our friends, we want it to be easy and positive only. But once again, I think that
the best friendships arise from struggle, because struggle
means there's vulnerability, which means there's trust involved. If your friend held your hair
while you were throwing up in the bathroom on a night
out, wasted out of your mind, and managed to shuffle you
home safely to your bed, that's a deep bonding moment. So one way we've removed
struggle from our friendships is by ghosting people we don't wanna be friends with anymore. I think we all like to think
that if we don't like someone, the feeling is mutual or
they'll just somehow understand why we don't wanna be
friends with them anymore. And also, like I've ghosted people, like I'm not like trying
to be holier than thou. I regret it, but I have. Because ghosting is actually really harmful for the other person. Dr. Spann notes, "Ghosting
takes away the opportunity to talk and process,
which can allow healing. But without conversation
it can cause someone to question their worth,
what they did wrong, and if the person ever really liked them. This can lead to trauma
and other severe emotions like depression or anxiety." Ghosting is made easier because
of the lack of third places. You have a lesser chance of running into someone
at a communal place. By the way, I kind of
like made another TikTok sort of talking about this. I think the reason a lot
of people end up ghosting or like slow fading a friendship
rather than actually, like, putting up with a mess
to repair a friendship is because we live in a time
when connection is abundant. Some people felt like really
upset and they were like, oh, well, you know, I've tried to
talk about it with someone, and sometimes ghosting is the only option because it's not clicking. And for me, I think what I'm
advocating is not necessarily saying like you have to repair
every single friendship, because some people just are not meant to be friends anymore, and that's totally fine. If you've tried to make
amends with someone and the message isn't clicking, like, that's still an act of trying. I'm really referring to the
cases when someone's like, hey, do you wanna hang out with me? And in your head you're like, I don't like this person anymore. Like, this person gives
me bad energy or whatever, and you just don't say anything, and there's no like buildup
to get to this place, if that makes sense? But there's always
exceptions for everything. I'm just like speaking in a
totally, totally general sense, and also, no one has to listen to anything that I say, ever. (laughs) Back to communal places. Being trapped in a communal
place is actually why kids tend to have better conflict resolution skills. As psychotherapist Esther Perel said, "The majority of 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. 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. Speaking of predictive technologies, even when we do try to solve problems, it can sound AI generated, which is why everyone was
making fun of that person trying to set their
boundaries with therapy speak. - I've treasured our season of friendship, but we're moving in
different directions in life. I don't have the capacity to invest in our friendship any longer. - Algorithmic fragmentation
on apps also leads people into echo chambers where they don't have to learn how to talk with
people who disagree with them or have different interests. It also gives us the impression that everyone on the internet
has the same knowledge that we do, which can
lead to a lot of anger and misunderstanding as well. Talking online is
literally like the opposite of playing on the street,
because it only gives you partial connection to someone. You know, we write our
comments to someone online, we don't have to look at their response. And so we don't actually see the consequences of our actions. When we're texting someone about an issue, we don't see their physical
reaction to this message. One thing I learned in my acting classes is that the closeup shot is so powerful, because the audience's connection with the character becomes more intimate when we see everything in their face. 70-93% of human
communication is nonverbal. Social media also brings
a facade of abundance when it comes to intimacy, we're connected to so many
strangers on the internet, so theoretically we
think we have the ability to make new friends whenever we want. And because of that we
become less invested in repairing a discordant friendship. There's this idea that we
can always find someone new. And sure, connection is abundant, but intimacy takes a
lot of work to develop. And once again, I'm not saying, like you have to keep your
toxic, abusive friend, or whatever. Like, I'm just saying like
in a very general sense, extremely general. I don't even blame
everything on social media, like social media has made
things worse, for sure, for all the reasons that I mentioned. But much of our friendship. (car hooting) (car revving) Social media has made
things worse for sure, for all the reasons that I mentioned, but much of our friendship
failings also stem from Western cultural values. We prioritize conflict resolution with romantic partners over our friends, because the media and Christian values, which is what a lot of
American values are rooted in, emphasize the importance
of marriage and family. Happily ever afters show Disney
princesses running off into the sunset with their princess while their friends get left behind. And that's also why, social media aside, middle age has always
brought more loneliness, because people have more family demands during this time that take
them away from their friends. (gentle instrumental music) Part of my New Year's resolutions was to create more frequent
third place meetups with my friends, either
at a cafe we all like or a park or something,
because it takes the burden out of scheduling in person hangouts. I know I talked about how America is not third place friendly, but third places do still exist, there's just not as many of them as there were in like
the early 20th century. And actually, I came
across this podcast episode from "On Point" where they talk about how third place is maybe on the rise as an aftermath of quarantine. Jorge González-Hermoso, research assistant at the Urban Institute's
Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy
Center explains on the pod. - [Jorge] I just wanted to leave us with a little bit more of a positive note, that despite all of these closures, we've also seen, since 2021, a record in the rate of new
business formation in the US. So we are creating new
businesses at a rate that we hadn't seen in years. Obviously, these not necessarily
will become third places, 'cause they don't necessarily have to be brick and mortar places, but it's definitely a promising data point that I just wanted to include for us. And going back to your
question, definitely, the pandemic showed us the
importance, for example, of parks, because you know, as public spaces we all
wanted to be outdoors. For me personally, picnics at the park was not a thing that I used to do, and now me and my friends,
we do it very often and it's very, very nice.
- Hmm. - [Jorge] And there's definitely a lot of open-ended questions here, and with other very interesting trends, because we also start seeing, for example, the first and the second place
starting to merge, right, we're all working from home. And so I wonder if
we're gonna start seeing the third place differently,
we are gonna think, well, now there's only
gonna be two places, and we really need to pay
attention to the second place. Now this being the public
space where we come together. So yeah, the pandemic really
brought a lot of changes and it's gonna be very interesting to see what happens in the coming years. - Another thing that I'm trying to do is more experiential stuff with my friends who live near me. So like playing board games together or trying a new recipe together. Also something that I read, I can't remember if it was "Bowling Alone" or "The Great Good Place", something that I read
was connecting the fact that playing cards with your friends has declined as a social activity, because people stopped hanging out with their friends as much. Like that was just something
that people always did, like they were like, okay, we're just gonna like
play cards or whatever. And card sales like took a huge dive once people started prioritizing
their own private leisure. Anyways, I just think it's important to do things other than just
reporting about our lives over a restaurant dinner. Again, I think there are
multiple kinds of friendship, and so I'm not against
the kinds of friends where you just check in with each other, and usually this is what I do
with my long distance friends. But I think doing that with all your friendships
feels exhausting, and sometimes you just like wanna unplug and not think about all this stuff that you've been doing
the last couple months. I also think it would be cool to discuss the kinds of boundaries
we have with each other. I'm a person who loves a
random phone call of the day. I don't always pick up,
'cause sometimes I'm like busy or on do not disturb, but
I like a random phone call. I also grew up in the suburbs, so people would just call
me sometimes and be like, can I come over in 10 minutes? And then just show up at the door, which was really fun and spontaneous. And so if I have a friend now
who would do those things, it would make me really happy. I also know a lot of friends
who don't like phone calls or who get stressed
about entertaining people in their apartments, but I think having these kinds of conversations and knowing what would make
a friendship better or worse is important and can
only benefit all of us. One of the problems that adults face in their friendships is
we're so much more concerned about intruding in other people's space. And so that's why I think
we've like lost the practice of just like bursting into
your friend's apartment, "Seinfeld" style,
because that's not always going to be wanted by the other person. Which is why I think like establishing our own individual boundaries and like things that make us happy or things that make us
uncomfortable is really important, and stuff that we should
do more regularly, 'cause we do it with
our romantic partners, and friendships definitely deserve, like, this amount of attention, I think. Okay, that's all I have
for you today folks. Thank you so much for
listening to me ramble. Yeah, thank you, I dunno. (laughs) Talk to your friends, kiss them, hug them, make plans with them, and I'll see you later. Bye.
