Death of Connection
If scrolling their posts counts as catching up, are you still mates, or just followers?
Written with AI, not by it.
You want to know the best thing about getting off social media? You find out which of your friendships were running on it.
The ones that lasted are the ones where someone will still answer a text at length. A real reply, with something in it. And a few where we barely text or call, but when we see each other, shit gets real.
The others didn't end. There was no falling-out, no last conversation, nothing I could point to and say that was when. They drifted. The remnant is a catch-up that hasn't been cancelled and isn't coming. On the feed, keeping up with someone's posts has become a proxy for seeing them. I'm not on the feed, so there is no stand-in. The friendship just dissolves.
From the outside, I can see the gap the feed was filling. From inside, I doubt it looks like a gap at all. When a cheaper imitation of something human feels good enough, it doesn't just replace the real thing. It lowers our standard for what the real thing is.
Close enough
Closeness runs on a handful of things that are easy to name and expensive to supply: attention, being a bit vulnerable, keeping it going when the other person can't, calling each other out on the bullshit. Take these out and what's left can feel pretty good while carrying none of the weight. You can build a very convincing model of a bridge. Awesome. Try driving across it.
The proxy strips most of them and keeps what you can see. A double-tap costs nothing, risks nothing, promises nothing. But it lands. Someone thought of you, for a second, and you know they did. And it goes both ways — you see their kid's birthday, the holiday, and you feel informed. You feel in the loop. Awareness, in the moment, feels very fucking close to connection. Close enough, anyway.
I've watched one of my oldest friendships degrade into memes. A meme does one thing well — saying ‘thinking of you’. What it can't do is carry anything that costs something to say.
I live abroad, so the friendships I still have mostly run on text or video calls. A long message with a fear in it counts, as does an unfinished thought or a vulnerable ask. The line runs between an exchange that carries something and a feature that says you noticed, or that you've been noticed.
So the call never gets made. There was contact, and it felt like enough. The space where the conversation would have been is already occupied by something that looks like one if you squint, which is why the absence never registers.
The silent engine
A call needs a time that suits you both, some headspace, something worth saying and a willingness to listen. A double-tap needs a thumb. Put the two side by side, where the outcome seems the same, and the easy one wins every time the choice comes up, which is all the time. It goes like the flow of water, by the easiest route, without anything that feels like a decision.
Think of this like a flywheel. In the beginning there is resistance, so getting it spinning takes considerable effort. Once it's turning, though, it's every bit as much of a bastard to stop, and minor pushes against it barely register. The algorithm is the motor turning the wheel. It keeps pushing, harder and faster, and it's deadly quiet.
The chain loops
Run that long enough and it changes more than habits. The things closeness asks for are skills as much as choices, and a skill you stop using goes soft. So if and when people want to truly connect, they may find themselves pretty shit at it.
A friend that says they don't have time to talk, then spends hours scrolling. The time is there, just not the headspace, and the scrolling is what stole it. They've become comfortably numb with the anaesthetic the feed supplies. It soothes, and next to it, a real conversation feels too hard. Wanting to and being able to connect have come apart.
And the drift turns into a loop. The proxy feels sufficient, so the behaviour that keeps a friendship alive drops away. Capacity goes with it. The real thing starts to feel heavier than it used to — depth begins to feel optional, even excessive — and the heavier it feels, the better the proxy looks the next time round. Each drop in the standard makes the next substitution easier to accept.
Everyone's talking about it
And yet loneliness is one of the most talked-about things out there. Almost anyone will tell you they should call more, catch up more, ask more. If the standard had really dropped, nobody would be complaining. An erosion everyone is shouting about is a weird thing to call silent.
The friendship we describe if anyone asks is the ideal: the long call, the person who turns up. What we accept on Tuesday is the standard. The standard has dropped. The ideal stands.
The talking both blinds and erodes. Saying we should call more feels a little like calling. Like when you remember that you need to do something later and then don't do it? It's as if your brain counted remembering to do it as doing it. Your internal to-do list ticks it off and you move on. Job done.
Talk about connection often enough and it starts to feel like connection, which makes all that complaining just another brick in the wall.
That said, making every complaint about loneliness all the more evidence for it is maybe a little too convenient for my argument. There are a couple of things I can see that might prove me wrong.
One. If people who grew up inside the feed turn out to have friendships that hold to the old standard: the long call, turning up, sacrifice, saying the thing that costs something to say.
Two. If people's sense of connection, and what it does for their wellbeing, holds steady. It would have to show somewhere that's harder to talk around: health, behaviour, what people do when a crisis forces the question. Asking won't settle it — a lower standard for connection may bring a lower standard for feeling fine.
I'd love to see evidence that either of these is happening.
A choice nobody made
A loss like this only shows if someone goes looking for it, which no one does. The attention that would notice is spent on the feed. There's nothing left to look with.
Ignorantly or not, we're complicit. Collectively, we've become too fucking lazy, and the feed hides that too. Call it weakness or a lowered standard: it's both, running together, and neither shows up as a choice. If there's a choice in it at all, it's one nobody made, assembled out of a thousand tiny defaults.
Hard and brittle
None of this is sealed. Early on, the wheel is barely turning, and a small push will stop it. Simple awareness can be enough. Once it's up to speed, though, it takes disruption at the level that knocks a life off its axis.
The longer the loop runs, the harder it sets. Arteries on a bad diet. Rubber left out in the sun. It's not going to reverse on its own, and whatever does reverse it has to be sharp enough to force change. The sharper it needs to be, the more it's going to hurt.
Awareness has to be on both sides. One person noticing, and making the effort, might wake the other up. Yet one person alone can't hold a friendship open forever. I haven't seen it done, and I doubt it happens often.
Disruption alone is often not enough. Sometimes it brings the awareness and motivation needed, sometimes not. A life can be turned upside down and the wheel keeps turning. I think about the friend with the time and not the headspace. The push needed to stop their wheel hasn't come yet.
Left unchecked, it's inevitable. And the checks get more expensive the longer it runs, until the only things strong enough to break it are the heavy ones. Death. Rock bottom. Life-changing trauma. No one wants to pay that price.
So friendships stay on paper, and die in every way that counts.
What are we aiming for?
Some of us still feel the gap and talk about it, and the talking passes for the real thing. Some of us don't feel a gap at all. The standard has dropped far enough that what's left feels like enough. And some of us know, at some level, and keep our heads in the sand, because facing it would hurt, or take more effort than we've got left in us.
Whichever way we got here, we've ended up in the same place. We no longer clearly recognise what real connection is. The cheap version moved the goalposts, and we've been aiming at them ever since.
