The Friendship Industrial Complex

Self-careifying our way out of systemic social failures

✨ Thank you for joining the community craft conga line that is GROUP HUG! I am so glad you are here. ✨

There’s a man hunkered alone at the bar, getting a refill on his drink. More to himself than anyone else, he starts singing. Suddenly, someone nearby – also drinking alone at a table – joins him. “Hands, touching hands…” Within seconds, the entire bar has caught on, “Reaching out, touching me, touching youuuuu!”, and the bartender and awkward first dates and even the manager in the back room with his feet kicked up on the desk, everyone is laughing and slinging their arms over each other and giving wet kisses on smiling cheeks belting out Sweet Caroline.

People Are Good For You is the text that pops up just before the Jim Beam logo appears next to a bottle of their whiskey.

I am just trying to watch a YouTube video about frogs, I thought to myself.

Maybe you, like me, have begun to hear the same howling about social isolation everywhere. Loneliness. Friendlessness. Lack of third spaces. Before the pandemic, actually, so even gnarlier since then. Worse for us than cigarettes. (“So does that mean you can smoke cigarettes with friends and be healthy?” usually follows.) A public health crisis. The Surgeon General has even said so.

I remember feeling the meta-awareness of this story wrap its roots around my own personal narrative (like so many other moments: did I feel this first or did I just read a think piece about it?) in 2019. I had just moved across the country back to where I grew up three months before the pandemic and, as everything shut down, felt an animal panic about my chances of making real friends again in a place where I was already scared to run into my high school bullies. What if I already peaked, I’d wonder while scrolling the feeds of friends I left behind in Santa Cruz, where I had spent most of my twenties building a community so pervasive I devised complex walking routes so as to occasionally not run into people. What if that was a one-off? A fluke? 

Luckily, against all the odds, I made friends in New Haven. I am crummy at sustaining gratitude practices but find myself regularly feeling a gut-deep, thankful warmth after dinner with a friend, or seeing the same older woman I see on my walk around the block every day shrug and say “can’t complain!” about the weather no matter the temperature, or returning to the bike co-op for the third night in a row for a meeting about strategic planning for the future of our shared space.

I’m grateful because I know how endangered these experiences have become. I know it because I hear about it all the freaking time.

And it’s true: we are more isolated, lonely, and friendless than ever. We’re getting better at measuring and articulating the contours of it; in The Friendship Dip,

Anne Helen Petersen

traces the decline of our close relationships as early as our late 20s. 

But it’s what comes after these stories that feels hinky to me. 

Because suddenly, it seems like everyone’s got a solution! There are the books on how to make friends. Urgent articles about club-ifying your friendship circle and why it’s okay to live further away from our friends but actually we should move closer to our friends too.

And then there are the offerings that feel especially dystopian; "friendship bootcamps" that will connect you with others for a meager $249. Silicone turquoise rings that claim to eliminate the need for dating apps as long as you…buy their rings? Exclusive $50/month group chats for “the woman who is looking for the fast track to making friends within her community.” Members-only social clubs backed by Airbnb investors that operate like an Elks Lodge but…for $200 a month with a waitlist. (Shudder-worthy interview with the club’s founder about their accompanying social app: “There’s a lot of data that’s gone into that match, or that peering or that circle, that we put you with everything—from shared interests, to demographics to all the information we have on you. [We want you to feel your match] is the sort of person you’ve felt like you’ve known for your whole life. Getting incredible at that is all we think about every day. That’s our mission, that’s our IP, that’s what we care about.”)

There’s also the ads! Cars with more seats for…community? Go to Starbucks because you see acts of human kindness that disprove our disconnectedness through their windows? Don’t even get me started on every brand asking you to join their community when they mean to simply say e-mail list.

It’s these friendship products – and physical products sold on the vibe of friendship –that make me feel especially gross inside.

And then it hit me why that was: It’s just like self-care discourse.

If self-care is – at its most surface, capitalist interpretation – about spa daying your day away from burnout and grief and overwork, then the rising chorus about hacking, upskilling, and spending your way out of social isolation is its sister narrative.

We’ve learned to squint at pedicures being a self-care solution because we know pedicures won’t solve for your boss verbally harassing you, or living paycheck-to-paycheck, or your heart getting pummeled on the daily in a violent, oppressive world. It’s not that you don’t deserve a pedicure. (Sure you do!) But it is about how your stress, frustration, and sadness might be manipulated into getting you to buy more stuff and engage completely in individualistic solutions that avoid their larger, systemic causes.

What happens when that same formula is laid over our social lives?

Will we buy Jim Beam to make friends? Will we spend fifty dollars a month to receive step-by-step templates for parties? Will we buy the books, scour the articles, hire friendship coaches?

To be super duper clear: we all deserve friends. Good ones. We deserve to feel like we belong, and that we are loved, and safe, and that we are cared for. We deserve to feel that in every facet of our lives: in our homes, in our workplaces and schools and community spaces, and on the streets of our cities and towns. We deserve nearby close friends and run-in aquaintances and pen pals and internet admirers and neighbors we can call up and gossip to about our local megalandlords. Like, we really really deserve all of this and then some. 

And because we deserve this so much, we also need to be razor sharp in our skepticism about how friendship-making narratives or “solutions” can distract us from the core origins of our isolation in the first place – and actually prolong its persistence.

Here are a few things to look out for the next time you see a promotion for a $5000 friendship training intensive (made up but it probably exists): 

• It makes you feel like you’re the problem. Sure, our relationships could all benefit from learning how to listen better or move through conflict. But that’s rarely the pitch. Instead, friendship is framed as being achievable only once you’ve joined this specific club, opted for this specific brand, followed this trademarked 5-step program, signed up for this app. You have a problem that only this product can solve. 

• It compels you to spend a lot of money. What better way to balm that “I’m the problem” feeling than buying something? I’m tingling just typing that and I’m not joking. The consumptive instinct is a powerful one when experiencing something as painful as loneliness. Whether it’s an expensive online class about building deep connections or an advertisement for tortilla chips, we are being targeted in a whole new way to spend away our sadness.

• It individualizes the solution just for yourself. Most grating for me is how once we “productize” a solution to social isolation – meaning when we create the bootcamp, paywall the guides, re-brand the car – we are the only ones to experience its theoretical benefits. It’s all about me upskilling, me and thirteen others who dropped $500 getting to go to a mixer, me buying the expensive throw pillows I imagine future friends will clutch on my couch if I ever have the time to meet actual people my age. It also often focuses power on one central figure who holds the key to the answer, or who needs to be paid for some reason in order for you to meet other people. In my notes for this piece I wrote “It’s giving bunkers” and I think that sums up this point perfectly. 

Maybe you’re interested in a program or product that checks every one of these boxes and you still go ahead with it. This is great! You should do it! To be clear, I don’t think every paywalled friendship product is manipulative and opportunistic; many of them are thoughtful, well-meaning offerings to help navigate a landscape that’s become next to impossible to do by ourselves. That’s why they’re so attractive.

But if you’ve tried some of these things and they never quite stuck, or if they actually instead enhanced that burdensome feeling that you’re alone and it’s your fault if that’s the case, then I invite you to join me in giving ourselves some grace. 

Because the reason we’re lonely isn’t because the next great friendship product hasn’t been invented yet. It’s because of lack of third spaces, infrastructure and housing and streets deliberately built to separate us, work that robs us of time, apps that rob us of our attention. There is not one perfect DIY alternative to these emerging friendship products, and that might be sort of the point. 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. 

“Silent Barn is People” a poster from the legendary Silent Barn (RIP) that reminds us that what makes our precious institutions exist, much like soylent green, is people

Instead, maybe we fix the scaffolding problem with a scaffolding solution. Many behaviors and many habits and many actions over lots of time to repair the social life we want in this world. We need to repeat them over and over again, complicated by strangers and buoyed by delight and crushed by awkwardness, so that we might reawaken our sense of community and connectedness.  

Put another way, the social experience you wish existed in your town needs you to make it real. 

The walking club and independent radio station, the community choir and book club and cat rescue and organizing group, the library and freaky arts collective and historical society and mutual aid groups and co-ops. They need our participation – as volunteers, as stewards, as energy – to literally continue existing. Or to begin in the first place.  

Ultimately, it’s about scanning our own impulses and asking: What does this [insert product or social offering here] make me want to do? Buy glassware or meet strangers? Who (or what) is being positioned as an expert or convener here, and do I want them to hold the keys to my social well-being? Does this make me feel like the burden of loneliness is on me alone to solve, and the successes are for me alone to enjoy? Is this keeping me from trying out something free and less aesthetically pleasing in my own neighborhood? 

So many friendship products – like Bumble BFF – appeal in part because they live on the phones we’re already on all day, often copying mechanics we’ve practiced a billion times on dating apps, and scrub and categorize people into friendship categories like bad plant parent or emotionally reliant on my cat. 

It makes me wonder: What friction is this designed to erase? And isn’t that friction sometimes cool and important?

For example: there’s a club of volunteers that meets every Tuesday morning in the city park right by my apartment. I have been intending to go for two entire years. I would love to spend my morning putting chip bags in a trash bucket, learning about local plants, and making small talk with other people who care about Edgewood Park. But it’s unclear from their website if they meet every week, or where exactly they meet, or how this changes with the season (aka the seasons which pass by as I don’t go to this meetup.) And here’s the thing: I could just walk into the park and chance them not being there. But I don’t. The solution is not me finding a millennial parks club with a super accurate Instagram presence (I actually specifically don’t really wanna hang out with more young people!) It’s about walking into the park at 9am and being okay with finding nobody. And trying again the next week. And maybe eventually emailing them or wandering around screaming into the night until I find a park ranger if I can’t figure it out. 

But it’s all those in between behaviors and fears – the website’s not accurate, no immediate social media presence to check in on, the physical act of actually showing up – these are all unpracticed, or practiced far less than the alternative experiences we’ve become so used to with freakishly up-to-date social media pages and communication cadences that match the frenetic clockwork pace of Taco Bell menu drops. (And this isn’t to romanticize obscuring basic information about an event or a space; sharing clear details ahead of time is essential for people with any accessibility needs, and also does a lot to ease anxiety we might have for any billions of reasons we might feel anxious. Showing up to a new thing requires a lot of bravery no matter who you are, so I don’t want to glamorize walking into vague social experiences too much here without emphasizing the importance of some good clean info on a basic ‘ol website or flyer shared beforehand.)

What happens if we turn our social lives entirely over to the apps, the costly clubs, the exclusive meet-ups? I think about the ways we already have and the sinister trade-off of it all; the pull of Instagram from the beginning (and the compulsion to not quit now) is that it connects you to your friends panoptically at a huge scale. If you’re off, you get this feeling like you don’t know what anybody is up to anymore. You might miss a message. You don’t know how to find out about shows or events or new clubs in your area. You’ve lost the knack for it all. It keeps you scrolling while your real life social well-being suffers… which makes you feel like you need it all the more. When I first got off, it took months to retrain myself on texting, phone calls, showing up. It was hard but worth it and reminded me that my better relationships were never on the app. 

We deserve for our friendships to not be one step in a start-up’s growth plan. Or a marketing campaign from brands partially funded by investors who have slowly been chipping away at the social infrastructure and got us here in the first place (inserting my favorite joke about vertical integration here). 

When we build our friendships for free, we might notice more about the social fabric of our lives and communities. Notice the environments where it’s easier (i.e. public parks) and where it’s so damn hard (i.e. spaces of extreme commerce). Notice the ways of being that make us feel better about our connections and the behaviors that keep us from making or sustaining them in the first place. Julie Beck on the podcast How to Talk to People: “They’re selling you a coffee; they’re selling you a sandwich. There are several cafés in D.C. that I really like that just don’t offer Wi-Fi, or they give you a ticket where you have like a couple of hours of Wi-Fi after you buy something…That may well be good business sense. But if those are the only spaces that you have to maybe just mingle and get to know people that are in your neighborhood, what are the spaces where you can just have friendly mingling, and that’s the point?” 

Maybe it makes us care a little bit more about those friendly environments and ways of being, make us more curious to preserve them, learn more about them, because they start to feel inseparable from our idea of community. 

We become sensitized to what supports human beings connecting and what doesn’t, which might make us want to invest a little bit more in the spaces, skills, and attitudes that help us preserve the friendships so essential to us being well and loved and cared for. 

It’s not our fault that we’re experiencing the immense loneliness that we are today. But if we think we can buy ourselves out of the place we’re in, I know there are some community spaces who will miss you, strangers who will wish they could have met you, and a social world that will be a little more productized than the open and free one we all deserve. 

Thank you to my friend Ever Barnett for reviewing this with me. I am so glad I waved to you across the street in 2013 and didn’t pretend to not see you.

What if you shared this with someone you’d like to build some homegrown, paywall-free community with in your town?

🇵🇸 Continuing the call for a permanent Ceasefire Now. I keep calling my reps so often their staffers say “oh I remember you!” which is sweet but makes me wonder if I am being annoying until I remember that this is the point and it’s a numbers game, everything is a numbers game. Feeling gratitude and the only small slices of hope possible because of every organizer and person taking any action right now.

✨ My emerging winter playlist full of songs about love and aliens and hope and too much Ovlov.

💫 Thanksgiving meals on the subway and an entire house hunters episode about living close to the gym

⚡️Experience Design: A Participatory Manifesto by Abraham Burickson of Odyssey Works is lighting my brain on fire every morning (this is a good thing). If you love world building, transformative social experiences, and thinking about the malleability of our world, you’ll love this book and need to text me about it ASAP.

🚲 The winter fundraiser for my beloved Bradley Street Bicycle Co-op is in full swing and I’d be a fool not to mention it because without this space, I would not be writing this here blog. Even a gift of $5 will be doubled! How cool!