When a friend was going through a difficult work situation recently, I was lucky to be a sounding board despite the fact that we live thousands of miles apart and in different time zones. We keep in regular contact via Whatsapp and Instagram, and we chat via video call. The messages came in at all hours – “I’m heading into the meeting now. Wish me luck!” “They just sent this email – how would you interpret the second paragraph?” “Do you have time for a chat today? It’s been a rough week.”
The technology allows us to maintain a long-standing friendship, despite the physical barriers. When we are occasionally in the same place, we meet up, laugh, eat cake and talk about one another’s lives with voracious interest. There’s immense meaning in the friendships that allow us to be comfortably ourselves in the company of another person, and that make life more purposeful in the knowledge that we can help friends when they need it. Good friends reinforce the best version of us.
Yet, we live in an unprecedentedly lonely time. Twenty per cent of Irish people have reported feeling lonely most or all of the time, the highest level in the EU, where the average is just 13 per cent. In a 2019 UK YouGov survey, one in 10 people reported that they have no friends at all. While loneliness among older people is a concept we’re all familiar with, widespread youth loneliness is newer. In the UK, people between the ages of 16 and 29 are more than two times as likely than people over 70 to report feeling lonely “often or always”. Those aged 30 to 49 were not far behind their Gen Z counterparts (the eldest of whom are now around 27 years old).
[ On Solitude by Michel de Montaigne: Get off Netflix and self-isolate with thisOpens in new window ]
In 1580, the philosopher Michel de Montaigne wrote about his beloved friend, the magistrate and writer Étienne de la Boétie, in his essay Of Friendship. The piece speaks to the powerful intellectual and emotional bond between the two men and was written 17 years after de la Boétie’s death. Montaigne, who had been at his friend’s bedside when he died, inherited his library.
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“There is no action or imagination of mine wherein I do not miss him,” writes the philosopher, “as I know that he would have missed me: for as he surpassed me by infinite degrees in virtue and all other accomplishments, so he also did in the duties of friendship”.
In the essay, Montaigne writes powerfully on the privileges and duties that deep friendship entails, and how great friends contribute more enduringly to our lives than any other kind of relationship. He laments false and one-sided friendships and talks about how we are reinforced and made better by the people who really see and love us, and who allow us to see and to love them.
These sorts of friendships are rare for any of us, but the current epidemic of youth loneliness makes sense. Millennials were the last generation born into a world without the internet and also to experience any significant element of agency or unsupervised recreation time in childhood. Young people now spend less time in one another’s physical company than ever before and the experience of successive lockdowns deprived them of crucial social development.
Social media is primarily evaluative – about putting ourselves forth for judgment. Since we know this, the self we put forward is never a real one
It’s hardly surprising that as the world becomes more atomised and digitised, the nature of friendship changes, and that many people – especially younger people – struggle to connect with others and make friends. In a cost-of-living crisis, an absence of cost-free or low-cost places to socialise and meet new people can make forming in-person connection even more difficult. Sociologist Ray Oldenberg coined the term Third Place in 1989 to describe “homes away from home where unrelated people relate”.
While it may be a useful means of connection where we increasingly encounter other people, social media is primarily evaluative – about putting ourselves forth for judgment. Since we know this, the self we put forward is never a real one. Followers become a proxy for connection and being seen. The status they afford becomes a proxy for understanding or love – a way of aping friendship without either the obligation or benefit that true connection entails. Online, we use signalling and status as a salve for real-world loneliness.
For younger people, who have less access than prior generations to the sort of friendship that Montaigne writes about – deep connection based on reciprocity and immersion in the moment – a feeling of disconnection is not surprising. Friendship is harder and more complex for all of us these days, as we try to reach one another across distance, amid loss of Third Places and our universal addiction to our digital lives. We could all use a friend like Montaigne.
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