Can We Still Be Friends After Lockdown?
The pandemic has made me realize how much I miss my not so-called friends.
Two months ago, with the devastating economic and social disruption caused by the pandemic, I could watch the final series of ‘Keep Up With The Kardashian’. I saw the episode about Kris Jenner, Kris & MJ’s Zoom date, and was almost immediately attacked by an intense desire. Not for travel, nor for the opportunity to wear fancy clothes — two commonly cited high points in the show — but for the entertainment. I have spent much of my adult life traveling and working out with friends at the gym. I realized how much I missed it, and especially how much I missed all those people I knew.
I miss how easy it is to see who I want when I want — although I also realize how rarely I see my best friends. The joy of dining in a restaurant was overwhelmed by the logistics of security, the concerns of the exhibition. My friendships are always the center of my emotions, but not of my physical life. Now they occupy the spatial edges.
In the weeks that followed, I often thought about other people I had missed without fully realizing I did. Very good friends with whom I mainly did things that were no longer possible, such as trying new restaurants together. Colleagues I didn’t know very well, but who I talked to in the shared kitchen. Employees in local cafes or sandwich shops who could no longer speak to.
The depth and intensity of these relationships varied widely, but these people were all my friends and there was no substitute for them during the pandemic either. Video calling apps like Zoom and FaceTime, useful for nurturing closer relationships, couldn’t recreate the ease of social serendipity or bring back the activities that kept us together.
Much of the energy spent on issues of pandemic social life has been spent keeping people in touch with their families and best friends. These other relationships largely faded after the places where they hung out closed.
The pandemic has evaporated all categories of friendship, exhausting the joys of human life — and improving human health. But this presents an opportunity. As we reintegrate people into our lives in the coming months, we will know what it’s like to be without them.
These are the people at the edge of your life — the guy who’s always with you at the gym, the barista who starts placing your usual order while you’re still at the end of the line, the coworker from another department with whom you make small conversations in the elevator.
Casual friends and acquaintances can be fairly just as important for well-being as family, romantic partners, and your best friends.
There are also people you may never have met directly, but you have one important thing in common: you go to the same concerts or live in the same neighborhood and visit the same local stores.
You may not think of all your weak bonds as friends, at least in day-to-day usage, but they are often people you are friendly with. Most people are familiar with the idea of an inner circle, but we also have an outer circle which in its own way is vital to our social health.
Over the past year, I often feel like the pandemic has come to everyone except those closest to me. There are people on the fringes of my life for whom the concept of “keeping the beat” makes little sense, but there are also many friends and acquaintances — people I could theoretically spend time with hanging out or on a video chat, but video apps just don’t feel right.
In my life, this perception seems to be mutual — I am not turning down invitations from these people to Zoom chat and walks in the park. Instead, our affection for each other is in a period of suspended animation, alongside dining and international travel. Sometimes we comment on each other’s Instagram stories.
The degree to which individuals are separated from their moderate and weak ties during the pandemic will vary depending on their location, job, and willingness to endanger themselves and others.
But even in places where it is possible to exercise in gyms and eat in restaurants, far fewer people take part in these activities, which changes the social experience for customers and employees. And even if you have to come to work, you and your colleagues are likely to adhere to some sort of protocol designed to reduce interactions. Masks, while necessary, mean that you cannot tell when a person is smiling at you.
Friends are sometimes limited by how we met or the things we do together — work friends, old college buddies, book club members — but they’re all friends, and Rawlins thinks it’s for the best. Living well is not a secluded retreat with just a few people. “The way worlds are created is through people who share things and recognize each other. Many types of relationships are important, he says, and people don’t thrive on close friendships alone.”
This consciousness, though new to me, is also somewhat new to the general understanding of human behavior. Close relationships have long been viewed as the essential component of human social well-being.
Casual friends and acquaintances can be fairly just as important for well-being as family, romantic partners, and your best friends. For example, in his first study, he found that most people who got new jobs through socializing did so through people on the fringes of their lives, not through close relationships.
Indeed, some of the most obvious consequences of our long social breakthrough may arise in the professional field. I started hearing these concerns months ago when I wrote a story about how working from home affects people’s careers.
According to experts, losing the occasional and repetitive social interactions that physical workplaces foster can make it especially difficult for young people and new employees to establish themselves in a workplace’s complex social hierarchy.
Losing them can make it more difficult to advance the job access development opportunities and be recognized for your contributions. (After all, no one can see you or what you’re doing.) These kinds of setbacks early in your career can be especially devastating, as the losses usually get worse — falling behind from the start and more likely to stay there.
Losing these interactions can also make the day-to-day reality of work more frustrating and destroy rather pleasant relationships. How much each participant in a conversation speaks while one guides the other on how to finish a task. These situations — common between managers and employees at work — they used unstructured time, if available, to balance the interaction. When this happens, both people reported feeling happier and more satisfied afterward.
Today, I fear that reciprocity has been largely lost. Zoom calls usually have a very defined purpose, and with that purpose come certain expectations of who will speak. Other people sit down and have no chance to donate their two cents. It leaves everyone with this overwhelming feeling of almost isolation, in a way.
This loss of reciprocity has spread to non-digital life. For example, friendly discussions between customers and delivery staff, bartenders, or other service workers are rarer in a world of contactless delivery and sidewalk pickup.
The psychological consequences of losing everything but our closest connections can be profound. Peripheral connections connect us to the world; without them, people fall into the growing likeness of closed networks.
The disappearance of these interactions may be one reason for the growth of conspiracy theories on the Internet in the past year. But while online communities of all kinds can provide some psychological benefits of meeting new people and making real friends, the conspiracy echo chamber is another source of isolation. A lot of research shows that talking only to people who look like you further alienates your opinion from other groups. “This is how cults work. This is how terrorist groups work.”
Most Americans were unprepared for the sudden loss of their weak bonds. The importance of friendship, and especially low or moderate strength friendships, is generally downplayed in the country's culture, while family and romantic partners are considered the ultimate solution.
Scientific evidence suggests that we need different relationships in our lives and that different relationships or social roles can meet different needs. People maintain their hygiene, take their medications, and try to keep themselves at least partially together because these behaviors are socially necessary and their repetition is rewarded.
Take away those incentives and some people get desperate because they cannot perform some of life’s crucial tasks. In people at risk for disease, the lack of interaction can mean that symptoms go unnoticed and medical attention is not being provided. People are meant to be together, and when we aren’t, decomposition manifests in our bodies.
The little joys of meeting a former colleague or chatting with the bartender at your local bar may not be the first thing that comes to mind when imagining the value of friendship — images of more deliberate celebration and comforts, such as birthdays and movie nights, may come to mind more easily.
Both types of interactions respond to our fundamental desire to be known and perceived, to allow our own humanity to be reflected on us. A culture is only human if its members are confirmed. The people we see doing some daily activities say, Hey, how are you? It’s a mutual affirmation, and it’s a global part of our world that I think has been largely lost.
Friendship is about choice and mutual consent, and the broad ability to pursue and navigate these relationships is an indicator of your ability to determine for yourself. Widespread loneliness and social isolation is usually a sign of some greater decline in society.
Some researchers hope that this long hiatus would give people a better understanding of how important many friendships are to our well-being and how everyone around us contributes to our lives, even though they hold positions that the culture of the country does not respect many such as service workers or shop assistants.
Hopefully, people will realize that there are more people in their social networks who matter and provide value than those few people you hang out with who you probably kept up with during the break. America was a lonely country even before the pandemic. It is unnecessary. The end of our isolation could be the beginning of beautiful friendships.
