The Ministry of Happiness

Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light. ~ Helen Keller

Happiness and Friendship

Friends are important in life and one of the key things they do is help prevent loneliness, and I think it goes without too much explanation, that it’s hard to be happy when you’re lonely. A recent study has shown that there is in fact quit a bit of loneliness in America, the Surgeon General has even called it a loneliness epidemic. In a large survey, for every age group, at least 20 and up to almost 30% of Americans felt lonely. Loneliness as you age does make some logical sense, when you’re a kid, you’re in school, and even for those of us who felt a bit like aliens in that environment, there’s enough numbers to find people who you have something in common with. Then of course there are activities and sports and you have family events, all bringing you together with other people, so it’s easier to make connections. This holds typically through high school and college if you attend, then you move out into the working world.

Once you go to work, things start to change. Unless you are working for a large company or a large university, most of the people you work with are not likely to be your age. And if you’re single, and typically most of them are not, you start to find it harder and harder to find people to connect with. And the older you get the harder this becomes and the less choice you have in making friendships. Your life starts to narrow, the people you encounter are the people you work with, if you’re married, the people you meet and connect with are as a couple, once you have kids, your friends become the parents of the kids, your kids are connected to and so on. It takes time and effort to break out of those circles and meet new people and often that’s time and effort people don’t have available.

And while I wanted to acknowledge the realities of loneliness as an adult for a lot of people, and I’m included in that group, what I really wanted to talk about tonight is social media and friendships. In some ways, it would seem that the advent of the internet, email and social media would actually make friendships easier and reduce the loneliness in our society. But in fact, it seems not to have done that and I think I understand why.

First, let me take a little detour into my own particular circumstances. If you’re a regular reader you know that I’m a bit of a nomad. Over the last twenty years of my life I’ve typically lived and worked someplace for three years, then I quit, take six months to a year to travel, come back and do it all over again but almost always in a new place. Over my long life I have made some really good friends, but as a nomad, I’ve made those friends literally all over the world. A fair number of them are nomads as well, so the people I care about are scattered and rarely near me. So for me, under these circumstances, the internet has really been a blessing, because email and social media has allowed me to stay in contact with people who otherwise I wouldn’t be in touch with.

But the internet and social media have replaced the way we formally stayed in touch. Pre-internet we kept in touch by visiting, by writing letters and with phone calls. Visits haven’t change all that much with the internet, but letters have been replaced for the most part by emails, and phone calls in a large way by texts. The thing about letters always was that since they were low in frequency and it took time for replies, they had a tendency to be longer and deeper than emails. Not that emails can’t have those qualities, they certainly can, but it seems over time that emails have gotten shorter as social media and texting have become more prevalent. Phone calls have always seemed, outside of physical visits of course, to be the fullest type of connection. The combination of real time interaction and the ability to get tone and emotion in conversation make it a very close form of communication and connection. More and more it seems that we are relying less and less on letters, longer emails or phone calls and connection is increasingly happen by short texts and online comments on social media.

As we get older our lives get increasingly complex and busy, work, family and just all of our day to day obligations eat up our time and attention. The upside of our technology is that in busy lives with smartphones at our fingertips we can dash off a quick text, a photo or even a short video to someone. But increasingly is seems the emphasis is on quick and short. This allows relationships to lose depth, even people who you stay connected to, and know what is happening in their lives, it becomes more and more surfacy.

A phenomenon I have noticed is that increasingly a new type of relationship has started to occur. I call it a followship. People who you once used to visit, who you used to talk with on the phone from time to time, then email fairly regularly, then are connected to on Facebook, Instagram or X (formerly Twitter) and then one day you realize you’re really not interacting much at all. What I think allows this is the fact that social media allows you to know to a degree what’s happening in people’s lives so you feel connected, but in fact, you’re not really interacting outside of the quick comment on a photo or a post.

I’m someone who periodically cleans out their social media, particularly Facebook. I keep my Facebook page primarily private except for these posts. This means only my friends see what I post and so it’s where I can fully be myself, or at least as close as I’m going to be online. So every six months or so I go through and do a little spring cleaning. What I do, is that I unfriend the followships and the lurkers. Basically the people who do not every directly reach out, don’t post often, and rarely or never comment on post. Inevitably when I do this I suddenly get a message from someone, typically someone who is angry that I’ve unfriended them, sometimes even though we’ve had no contact on the platform for months or years. It seems for many people followships have replaced friendships, and maybe for some people that’s enough, but it doesn’t work for me. Not for friendships. Sure, we all have those surface level acquaintances we call “friends” and we’re fine with that surface level connection. But what hurts us, where loneliness comes from is when we lose those deeper connections, or those connections become shallow and less meaningful.

So my advice tonight is that for those people who you want to be connected to as true friends, do what you can to keep those friendships from turning into followships. Don’t let the ease and convenience of our technology allow you to water down your relationships and create distance. Time goes by so fast, that it’s easy to find yourself distant from those you don’t want to be distant from and on the path to being lonely. Loneliness does not make for happy days my friends. ~ Rev Kane