#3: On friendship, loneliness and illegal train-hopping
Is adulthood where friendships go to die? And why does loneliness feel like a personal failure?
Hello my precious fellow humans! (This is me trying to bypass the spam filter that automatically sends my emails into the ‘Promotional’ tab in Gmail, in the hopes that it’ll be easier for you to see it. Pardon me.) Thanks for sticking around! I know this one’s a bit late, but that’s because edition #3 sits pretty close to my heart and I wanted it to be as good as possible.
It all started with a piece of artwork that a friend sent me.
Two women are caught in embrace, and neither of their faces can be seen. For a brief moment, they’re blind and deaf to everything else, and the world exists only for them. The artwork is accompanied with an excerpt from Hanya Yanagihara’s novel, A Little Life,
Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified.
Yanagihara picks apart the essence of friendship : Two people, choosing again and again to hold on to the connection they have in a largely lonely world. We live separate lives in our heads and eventually have to face death alone, but in friendships we allow ourselves to be seen. Bound together by nothing, and gaining nothing save for the pleasure derived from another’s company. Or, as a friend of mine so succinctly puts it,
If friendship was like a contract, it would be eternally renewable, but also comes lacking a two week notice. One can break this contract at any time, no repercussions, no questions asked. I often think about the friends I once spoke to on a daily basis, that I no longer really keep in contact with, beyond the odd Instagram interaction. Today, none of my closest friends were made before the age of 13. I wonder how this list will look like in my 20s, my 40s, and even my 70s, how many of these contracts I will keep until death, and how many of them will eventually get swept up in the bustle of daily life and fade away.
The Evolution of Friendships
Childhood friendships revolve around playing together and are decided by proximity—desk mates, kids on the same school-bus, classmates. If we had the same interests, hated the same things, or even just saw each other frequently, we were automatically good friends.
The interests thing was huge—when I was seven, I used to pretend to like High School Musical much more than I really did, because everyone was absolutely obsessed with it and I desperately wanted the bond that communal obsession seemed to breed. To this day I wonder if everyone liked it as much as they said they did, or if it was a domino peer pressure effect thing that snowballed and got out of control. In fact, I got so caught up in my little exaggeration that almost all my friends bought me HSM merchandise for my birthday party. I still look back and this and chuckle.
As I entered adolescence though, friendships became more about identity. You were friends with the people that represented who you were, or sometimes, who you wanted to be. At fourteen I was part of the kids who centred our identity around liking a certain kind of music. In retrospect, our identity was more about what we weren’t, than what we were. All this came from a desire to set ourselves apart from the cookie cutter kids we believed our environment was attempting to mould us into. We wanted to be different.
It felt like a form of rebellion and self-expression and I relished every moment of this newfound identity I’d built, as cringey and awkward as it was. I’d spend countless hours watching live performances on YouTube, interviews, and reading fanfiction. I even wrote a fic or two, though I never finished them. (I still get the odd notification of someone commenting and begging me to update. I promise I carry that guilt around everywhere I go.) I eventually got over this phase, though a part of me occasionally does still play out that dynamic.
Then I moved to college. Meeting new people is exciting. Freshman year is effortless; you mindlessly gabber to people you meet on the dance floor at freshmen events and at school clubs, and your friends introduce people who introduce other people, and your allocated flatmates aren’t that cold, at least not in the first few months. And it’s easy, seeing the same people in class again and again. 2am Tesco runs are spontaneous, feel like a mini-adventure (will we get stabbed en-route? God knows) and most of all, are effortless when you live literally 2 minutes apart. Geographical proximity means investing a lot of time into the same people. According to Rebecca G. Adams, a professor of sociology and gerontology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, the three critical conditions for making close friends are : proximity, unplanned recurring interactions, and a setting that allows people to let their guard down and confide in each other.
It was also around this time that I started to seek out people who I believed could see me for who I was, people who I felt were on the same wavelength as me. I craved the inherent intimacy of being seen. Of being understood. I wanted to find friends that felt like soulmates, like family.
But that’s hardly an easy task, even as I began to mentally whittle down the list of people I considered close friends, in some vain attempt to sift through the ‘true’ and ‘false’ friends. But such a dichotomy doesn’t exist. A rejection to an invite may target a deeper, more painful part of us, (especially those of us with friendship complexes left over from childhood) but that’s only because we are engineered to be social creatures. As this Kurzgesagt video will tell you, we used to live in tribes where social rejection meant certain death because we couldn’t survive alone. We adapted to prioritising approval because that was the only way we’d survive.
And even knowing this, as I visited home for the first time after spending half a year at college, the feeling that something had changed profoundly and would never quite be the same again still hurt. With the people I had FaceTimed regularly, picking up where we left off was effortless. But for the never-could-find-time-to-call friends, things never really bounced back to the comfortable ‘before’. I made attempts at trying to put together something, anything, but it became clear after a while that such friendships were seasonal—we were friends for a time, and once that time had passed so did any real reason to renew the contract we once had. The strings holding us together had loosened, and no one retied them, for whatever reason.
The hardest part was probably admitting to myself that it was over. There would be no futures, no wedding day invitations and Were we really like that ten years ago? conversations and no jetting all over the world to visit each others. And there was no big argument or goodbye that really sealed it, the only indicators I got were read messages and “Another day then?” texts, both of us promising we’d make time for each other someday, neither willing to admit that it would never come.
But that’s the thing, isn’t it? Because a friendship is simply two people bound only by a mutual commitment, when one decides to let go, that’s it.
And the resulting loneliness feels almost taboo. Losing friends is hard enough, but losing friends in a time when you can reach over and glimpse into the curated lives of hundreds, replete with candid film photos and bustling five people parties (thanks Covid-19!), minus anything remotely imperfect or god forbid—lonely? That’s a recipe for loneliness written by God himself.
Admitting any hint of loneliness feels like a personal failure. There’s an irony in our appreciation of honesty coupled with our subconscious revulsion to anyone that dares admit to harbouring this dreaded emotion. Of course, context matters, and a close friend confessing that they haven’t been feeling very connected lately is much more well received than a work colleague yelling it at the pub, five pints in.
And with the way we treat loneliness, you’d think the lonely were almost pariahs, but the Cigna U.S. Loneliness Index found that 73% of Gen Zs aged 18-22 report sometimes or always feeling alone. That’s far too many of us feeling this way for us to act like loneliness is something shameful that we should never feel. Because it isn’t. It’s human. It’s normal. And it’s a biological response to our fundamental need for human connection that isn’t being met by the systems that we live under. And I’m not trying to sound all We Live In A Society, but we really do—even our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult than they already are.
For the vast majority of Homo sapiens' history, we lived in small, nomadic bands. The tribe, not the nuclear family, was the primary unit… It's only been comparatively recently (about 10,000 years ago) that we… were thrown into cities, crammed up against people we barely know.
But loneliness discredits its victims; it is not enough that they feel it, they are also burdened with the insinuation that they somehow did something to deserve it. It’s not the cats that make the crazy cat lady off-putting, it’s the suggestion that she’s too much for anyone else to want to stick around.
And in some perverse way, lonely people do actually contribute to their involuntary solitude. According to psychologists, loneliness warps our perception of social interactions, causing us to see the world as more hostile than it really is. This triggers a cataclysmic vicious cycle that eventually results in one withdrawing even more, becoming more isolated than ever.
But the good news is that even recognising this mechanism at play means we have power in the conscious choice to work against this cognitive bias. In choosing to deliberately brush off disheartening social scenarios and give mental precedence to positive ones, we begin the slow but necessary work of rewiring our brains.
At my lowest points, I’m thankful that the one thing I refused to do was self-isolate. I hated dragging myself out of bed on 7°C mornings for coffees and overpriced Pad Thais, but I did it anyway. I said yes to dinners and movie nights and went out of my way to hang out with people. I even requested one of my closest friends bring me along to lunches so I could meet new people in a foreign city. It was exhausting fighting against my own impulses and countering every pessimistic thought with an opposing force but my god, was it fucking worth it.
At the same time, battling loneliness shouldn’t be solely up to an individual. I don’t have the antidote, nor am I intelligent enough to come up with anything resembling a competent structural plan. But I do know even the simple act of talking about loneliness and admitting it can help alleviate some of the stigma attached to it. And destigmatisation works like a flu spreading, slowly at first as the idea (or virus) works its way through a small group, then all at once, as the graph curves upwards exponentially.
We are animals, even if we’ve clawed our way to the top of the food chain and grossly manipulated our environment to our whims and fancies. And our cars and houses and fancy gadgets may have evolved drastically from the stone tools our ancestors used, but relatively, our brains have hardly changed. And it means accepting that we have needs that we can’t ignore or reason our way out of. We need connection. We need a shared humanity and love and all of these other things.
I leave you with this quote by Olivia Laing in her book, The Lonely City.
Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. Loneliness is collective; it is a city. As to how to inhabit it, there are no rules and nor is there any need to feel shame, only to remember that the pursuit of individual happiness does not trump or excuse our obligations to each another. We are in this together, this accumulation of scars, this world of objects, this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell. What matters is kindness; what matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open, because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last.
The 5 Best Things I’ve Consumed This Week
Videos by renowned train-hopper, illegal explorer and urban exploration itch-scratcher who goes by the pseudonym Shiey on YouTube. He’s been demonetised for all the illegal things he gets up to, but as a woman and a certified pussy, I live vicariously through his videos. There’s something incredibly cathartic about watching someone go into places he shouldn’t be and climb on trains and run from security. It’s like a movie, but real life. In the video below he wades through rivers and sleeps in abandoned villages to explore the ghost town of Pripyat, in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
This interview with Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting, a “violent black comedy about working-class heroin addicts in Edinburgh” that inspired its namesake movie. Welsh is every bit as chaotic as you’d imagine, if not more.
It’s a common malaise people feel. They search for something, they get it, then they think, what the fuck was all that about? Was it worth spending all the time and energy on this quest?” That’s another of Welsh’s obsessions: always wanting something new, better, different, and destroying what we have in the process.
This comic I found on Pinterest about emptiness.
This beautiful 4 minute video by Hank Green about the universe’s indifference to us. (Or not.)
A bowl of chocolate ice cream I stress ate after attending my first Zoom lecture of the year and realising that this entire fucking semester was going to be exactly like that. Cheers to all the students out there paying tens of thousands of dollars just to get the privilege of staring at a screen for hours every day and teaching themselves the material.
That’s it for this week then. Thanks for waiting for this piece. If you enjoyed it, please give it a like or a comment your thoughts. And subscribe if you haven’t. And send it to all your friends. It all encourages me much more than you’d think. :)
Love always and see you next week (or not),
Isabella