Why it’s harder to make friends.
I read an article recently in the BBC titled, “Can Gen Z make friends in the pandemic era?” The article offered some interesting ideas: one perspective I hadn’t previously considered was the challenge of making friends after college when more jobs are adopting a work from home structure. For many in my generation, friends in our 20s came from work and higher education, and so I can see how this becomes a hurdle when both have gone online. However, I believe the difficulties of socializing aren’t only a consequence of fewer opportunities, but rather socializing has become more difficult because of systemic challenges in our current culture that has created “the other”.
What do I mean by “the other”? Let me explain what the opposite, “the same,” is first. It is only in recent times that we’ve had so much information—facts—about a person’s life, so readily available. Before this, we interacted based on a singular notion of sameness: we’re in the same religious group, we have the same friends, our families grew up together, we took the same golf course, we live in the same building, we both love to paint, and so on. All we had, initially, was our similarities, and on that basis, we created relationships.
While we do continue having these small communities with similar interests, we also have all our differences handed to us at our fingertips—piles of information about an individual’s life experience, and very little information about their personhood (what makes them human and like us). Our understanding of others is formed relative to our understanding of ourselves, and the contrast has become so much more apparent now: we’re in the same religious group, but we work in different places and he’s part of a different social group and we went to college in different states, etc. etc. This is the creation of “the other”.
Perpetuating cycle of “the other”
Our minds love to create narratives of who these other people are, and the more information we have, the more we’re able to create a persona…a persona very different from our own. I’d say that what’s really stopping us from socializing is ourselves. We survey and we draw conclusions based on differences rather than sameness…and the more someone seems different, the more isolated we feel. Now not to rub salt to the wound, but the more isolated we feel, the more this cycle burgeons, and we become more conditioned to evaluate and find differences as well.
Although this sounds pretty hopeless, it communicates two important things: 1) there’s absolutely nothing wrong with you, it’s our difficult culture, and 2) there are ways to shift away from this mindset. To learn ways to counter this thinking, please see my video here (also linked below this article).
In summary here, socializing is getting tougher because superficial differences appear to outweigh similarities, leaving us feeling more alone. This is happening for everyone…socializing itself is taking a hit because it’s becoming harder to see ourselves in another, not just for Gen Z.