Friendship is lame now

Lamentations on a juvenile and sociopathic town square.

One of the big themes my husband and I have been sporadically discussing over the last few months is that of friendship. More specifically, we’ve been lamenting changes in the culture over the last several years that have apparently culminated in people mostly just not being friends, trying to have friends, or trying to be someone to befriend.

The thing that really stinks about this development is not so much the loss of friendship itself as it is the false implications that seem to abound as to why people flake. Ghosting—a terribly antisocial behaviour that has not magically become less antisocial with the advent of smartphones or the incidence of more people doing it—creates this impression that you have committed some kind of transgression or mistake to deserve being suddenly ignored by someone who was as friendly as can be to you the day before. It also poses a practical issue in that it cannot be forcefully arrested; one does not simply say, “why the fuck are you ghosting me?” This keeps happening because people simply don’t care what they are missing in doing this, treating it as a non-existent thing, as if we are all on call these days through technology to simply be forgotten about until someone wants something out of us. I shouldn’t have to explain how awfully corrosive this is to one’s soul.

The other thing that fascinates me is how predominantly immune to it old people appear to be, especially those few remaining at this point who were born before the end of World War II. I recently attended the funeral of a relation of mine—my grandfather’s first cousin—and honestly, the bigger cause for my connection was not the blood relation, but our friendship. I talked constantly with this man every time I came up to Princeton, spending the whole day until it got to about 5pm and he had to go home to tend to his wife. He would do this even when I showed up unannounced and unexpected at his museum, and he would always pick up the phone when I called. He read my text messages as soon as he actually had time for them. As far as I’ve ever been made aware, this is normal for anyone who has a smartphone.

Tony wasn’t the only old person I knew who is like this. Before I befriended Tony, I befriended my landlord when I lived downtown years ago as I first got married. He was a baby boomer and a born again Christian who didn’t make a fuss to anyone about it, and he really admired me as what he thought of as a clean, good-spirited young man. That led him to start an electronics repair business with me out of the basement of the house we leased an apartment in. He would later pass away from cancer, and I found out at his funeral something you can never learn from the movies: it’s quite possible that you care about someone more than their entire family does. It was horrible and was soon actualised as his wife allowed her sons from another marriage to basically loot everything he had spent his working life building. They got all the money selling everything he owned and never even knew the man while he was alive. To me it was a cautionary example of the importance of preparing for death – he simply didn’t want to die, because in truth, he had never been truly living until he hit 40 and entered into Alcoholics Anonymous. He died as a man spiritually in his 30s even though he was over 75. So, I was immensely relieved to witness Tony’s lionesque acceptance of mortality in contrast to this – Tony left his family in as perfect of a position as he possibly could have.

I wish I could say this about younger people, but so far the list of people who have basic social decency about this is astonishingly short. Once you start dealing with Generation X and younger, the rot really sets in and it starts being less of a thing people just do and more of a game that everyone is trying to play against one another. The most egregious and embarrassing example of this that comes to my mind is Kevin O’Leary’s TED talking point about how he has two phones – a meaningless pile of drivel no one could hope to learn from that was essentially bastardised from Steve Jobs’s old schtick about how he would always answer the phone. People sit around and clap for this shit anyway somehow, or maybe they don’t and this is another kind of false popularity the tech mafia is concertedly lying about.

Rewatching Steve’s clip is a searing reminder of how much social cohesion and ‘giving a shit’ we’ve actually lost in the last 15 years or so. He plainly and confidently said, “I’ve never found anyone who said no or hung up the phone when I called. I just asked. And when people ask me, I try to be as responsive, you know, to pay that debt of gratitude back.” I can’t even begin to count the number of experiences I have contradicting this, and how normal they were. Like it was expected! As if to say menacingly, “who do you think you are?”

I don’t think that this degradation is happening for any good reason and I’m not just asserting that in the sense that it’s morally wrong, though it obviously is. I would go even further so as to assert that everyone doing this is basically insane because it actually makes no sense at all when you think about it. I became resoundingly convinced that this was a soft psychosis when I observed several key instances of people—mostly Gen Xers as they have the most material potential to reveal any delusions, being the wealthiest—simply choosing whatever option resulted in the most pain or social ruin for the other party, because their frame of thinking revolves entirely around appearances, aesthetics and ego. In other words, you were fucked in their minds the moment you had to ask, regardless of the facts and often even regardless of how much they could profit from not treating you like a dog for asking. (Unless it’s a whole lot, in which case they suddenly get ‘smart’ for taking advantage of that and then brag to their fake friends for the next 30 years about it as if noticing truckloads of money was a skill.)

Here’s a tame example: a couple of years ago, my husband and I lived with my mother, and we had a project as a family to financially cooperate to maintain our extant standard of living, continue getting to work, and try to save back some money so we can eventually think about buying some property. For reasons of good precedent that all of us wholeheartedly agreed with, we decided it was best for my mother to move her direct deposit into an account all three of us had access to; this we called the ‘triple joint’ account. My mother was content to work more at her factory job at Kellogg’s while my husband also worked there the same, and my job was to look after the house, run errands for everything as needed and keep up with basically everything else. This fell apart as for months on end my mother did not hold up her end of things, constantly calling out of work, cutting her own overtime terribly, and the result was very well reflected on her pay cheques. She also refused to switch from 8 to 12 hour shifts even though we all understood that we will not make enough money to do this if she doesn’t. In the end, this all falls apart as expected, and she moves out into some roommate situation leaving us to fend for ourselves. My credit card debt exploded to cover all the losses incurred by all the money she wasn’t making, and it has been basically maxed out ever since. Compounding matters was her buying a lemon car at an eye-watering 37% APR from a buy-here-pay-here place because she was absolutely obstinate in wanting something for herself even though we could not yet afford it. The whole time she is complaining to us, starting drama at home out of spite for not being given what she wants, and fostering this delusion that she has been paying for everything this whole time even as my husband had been bringing home cheques double hers in size for the whole time. Him and I ate all of the losses from this, and this was just the encore for a collapsing roommate situation where some younger, equally-selfish people decided to up and leave after starting drama in the house over nothing. Someone I befriended a month or so ago remarked upn hearing the cliffnotes of this that they should have all had stock market marquees bolted above their doors that simply flashed how much rent they were paying each month to live there: in some cases as little as $300/month. The highest was $500.

None of these people ever had any kind of atonement for their part in things. The roommates have self-relegated to being Facebook friends who never talk, and my mother is stuck up in Ohio living with her mom, which is insane for someone in their 50s who is not retired. To add insult to injury, my sister even believes the whole faerytale my mother spun about this debacle and torched her relationship with me permanently in a Facebook comment, because she took massive issue with a post I made about taking responsibility for my life and not tolerating bad people anymore. It’s just mental how married bad people are to their sins.

There are many more examples I can give you of this. Many of my more career-focussed ones have already been laid out on this very weblog:

Speaking of career, one time I had managed to actually convince someone online to sponsor me on GitHub just by earnestly and thoroughly demonstrating to them that their carelessness is, in part, the cause for all of the shittiness and ruin haunting the stuff they enjoy. They complained about this, as so many do, and I patiently and selflessly explained it to them. “Hey, I’m working on this and the nature of that work is more comprehensively addressing the root of the problem here than anything else we are aware of. If you want to see it solved, you need to help me do it.” Thereupon, money changed hands. That’s supposed to be the undeniable bottom line in this shitty, materialistic world we’re living in nowadays. “Can’t argue with money,” they always like to say. Anyways, after a few months he just quietly cancelled the subscription. I guess the temptation of believing in whatever you want to hear instead of what’s actually going on got the better of him in the end. The problems of shitty computers or whatever it was just didn’t matter that much after all.

Another egregious example of this kind of television-esque madness was something that transpired about a month ago. As my husband’s first roofing employer was collapsing, we were brainstorming alternate routes to keep being able to make sales. Then we remembered we knew a couple of good fellows from back in college whose dad owned a roofing company around here, and a commercial one at that. Our situation at the time was that we had some pretty large leads on the hook, and we wanted to talk with him about making a sale because they have the skills to physically get the job done. What we encountered on the phone was as insane as it was insulting: this man, whom we were basically offering large amounts of money to, turned the whole conversation around and told my husband to go down to his office and get a job application. Ran his mouth on all this feel-good bullshit about how you need to physically put roofs on to sell them or some shit. Not true on its face because we are literally right in front of him literally selling roofs, but you know, reality is no burden to people like this.

The stories of family and former friends are sobering reminders of the banality of evil, but the ones about business also show you just how much staying power delusional people can have. Near as I could tell, the roofing dad has his company because he’s in an informal network of Southern good ol’ boys, and his fellow Bible study goers all faithfully bring whatever jobs they have to him. So, their success is founded less on honest work and more on the kind of petty corruption guys like Paul Newby are known for. There isn’t really roofing salesmanship in that company in the sense you would hear about it from credible professionals like Deshaun Bryant or Adam Bensman. It’s just some mobbed up Southerner raking it in for every random schoolhouse project that comes up in the area.

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One of the other big things I was thinking about in the car ride mentally drafting all of this was self-checking to see how much of a friend I am to others as far as I can tell. I empathised with an acquaintance who had recently ghosted me after I asked him a question relating to an earlier conversation we had in person – I really thought about how I would feel as him, with that question I sent waiting in my SMS inbox, just not responding to it at all. I would feel bad enough to just want to reply – something, anything. I could not just ignore someone else I met showing overt interest and curiosity in my life like that. Even if I wasn’t in the mood to entertain it, I thought, “surely I would say something.” As I checked my other messages, I discovered that I do. I don’t do this kind of shit to people. He is being shitty after all, it’s not just me second-guessing myself into friendlessness. I have not made some microaggression or error in tact. Actually, I have done something that is not only positive but increasingly rare these days: I reached out and gave another person ample leverage to pull themselves up back into society. I made the conversation about them and asked them a question that is incredibly easy and enjoyable for them to answer. It was basically the epitome of selflessness in that moment, and I got ignored for it.

When confronted with these kinds of things, my husband often says that these days, people view reaching out as some kind of weakness. They operate like people who ask or reach out have some kind of problem or are inherently desperate. This just goes to show how sociopathic people have allowed society to become, because again, this just blatantly contrasts with how things were even as recently as the 1980s. Steve Jobs picked up the phone until it was physically impractical for him to do that any longer. Now, Kevin O’Leary brags about having a second phone he doesn’t answer and all the magical shit that supposedly accomplishes.

Even besides the economic problems we’re all staring down, it’s never been more unreasonably difficult to get a hold of someone than it is right now. Actually, perhaps that’s the real issue in the economy: nobody wants to start giving a shit to answer their calling. (Literally.) As I drove my Skyline around to get groceries today, I reflected on all the countless times I got the thumbs-up from passersby. I remember an impromptu JDM meetup I found and how none of the people there ever even got my name, even as I tried adamantly to connect with them, trading numbers, asking what social media they’re on if any, and so on. Nobody cares, and if no one cares, what’s the point in all of this anyway? Is real life just a pornographic montage to be masturbated over now, or is there somewhere I can still find people who are trying to give a shit for the sake of tomorrow?