Why does loneliness seem to be on the rise? In part because we’ve made life frictionless and efficient
By Roland Fryer. He is an economics professor at Harvard. Excerpts:
"sometimes waiting does something useful: It forces people into the same
place, with nothing to do, long enough for conversation to begin."
"Some inconveniences aren’t merely costs. They are the hidden scaffolding of social life."
"Proximity matters most when it recurs. Idle time matters most when nobody is trying to impress anyone."
"friendship is often a product of something else: work, school, church,
children, sports, errands, waiting rooms. It is produced not by misery,
but by enough common friction to make conversation natural. Modern life
has spent decades eliminating that friction. We can work without
offices, shop without stores, exercise without gyms and communicate
without looking anyone in the eye. Each improvement is defensible, some
phenomenal. Together they have made interaction with other people
increasingly optional."
"Can we prove that the pursuit of frictionless living has contributed to
an unintended loneliness epidemic? Not easily. But the data fits better
than I expected. Using state-level loneliness measures from the U.S.
Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, I compared loneliness with three
proxies for modern convenience: working from home, broadband-enabled
living, and the share of commuters who still move through public or
pedestrian space."
"States where more daily life can be conducted privately—at home, online,
on a screen—tend to report somewhat more loneliness. States where more
people commute by public transit or walking tend to report less. Places
built around private convenience look lonelier than places where daily
routines force people to bump into one another. After accounting for
age, income and who lives alone, the relationship weakens but remains
statistically significant."
"When the ordinary logistics of life no longer require us to encounter
one another, the ties that begin in those encounters become harder to
form."
"there is no clean market for friendship. That isn’t because friendship
lacks value. It is because friendship is hard to sell directly."
"The moment one says, “I am here to buy friendship,” the thing being
purchased changes. Markets are powerful when the good is clear, the
price is observable, and the transaction is socially acceptable.
Friendship fails on all three margins."
"friendship is usually produced indirectly"
"[frictions] put us near one another often enough that trust can accumulate without anyone having to announce that trust is the goal."
"Potential friends are everywhere; good matches are hard to find"
"there is no résumé for a good friend. Institutions reduce those search
costs. The office hallway lowers the cost of a first conversation. The
school pickup line does the same. So do the church basement, the
neighborhood barbecue, the youth-sports sideline and the ferry queue."
"Cities should build and preserve libraries, parks, playgrounds,
walkable streets and mixed-use spaces as amenities and places where
low-stakes contact can happen." (this raises the question of should the government help provide us with a social life and how much does that cost and is it worth it-those may not be easy questions to answer)
Related posts:
Venmo Etiquette: How to Navigate Digital Debts Between Friends: Payment apps make it so much easier to share expenses with people. But that leaves us with a lot of difficult questions (2025)
If
a Friend Bills You $4 for a Favor, Are They Really a Friend? Surprise
Venmo requests are souring relationships and revealing just how closely
some of us keep score (2024)
More on the social aspects of Venmo (2018)
Is Venmo Affecting Friendships? (2017)
Who Pays on the First Date? No One Knows Anymore, and It’s Really Awkward (2017)
Yes, You Can Have Too Many Friends (2009)
You Think You’re Doing Fine in Life, Until You Hear a Friend Is Doing Better (2024)
If It Pays To Have Friends, Can You Pay To Have Friends? (2013)
The Incredibly True Story of Renting a Friend in Tokyo (2020)
Would You Pay $250,000 To Get Your Friends' Respect? (2011)
Excerpt: But here is something interesting about one student, who is now $250,000 in debt:
"Mr.
Wallerstein, for his part, is not complaining. Once you throw in the
intangibles of having a J.D., he says, he is one of law schools'
satisfied customers.
"It's a prestige thing," he says. "I'm an
attorney. All of my friends see me as a person they look up to. They
understand I'm in a lot of debt, but I've done something they feel they
could never do and the respect and admiration is important.""
