The WHO estimates that 1 in 6 people worldwide report feeling lonely. This epidemic causes over 81,000 deaths annually, roughly 100 deaths every hour! Internet and social media has withdrawn people from real life friends into a circle of virtual friends. AI has gone a step ahead and made our youngsters withdraw from the real world into an imaginary world with AI confidants, AI partners, and AI alter egos. And then there are Ani and Valentino, the AI flirts that live on social network X and real life robots that have become man's best friend.
Besides
propagating a weird social behaviour pattern these AI inventions are creating
ethical dilemma, social withdrawal, delusional behaviour, gnarly privacy and IP
rights, these AI friends push us towards unnecessary purchases, extreme
political viewpoints or even suicidal tendencies.
We
all fell in love with the American Soap Opera of the 90s, Friends. This was a
story about 6 besties. In today's world, having 5 best friends is a luxury only
a handful can boast of. According to American Perspective Survey 12% have no
close friends! [1] For decades,
Americans consistently spent about 6.5 hours a week with friends. Then, between
2014 and 2019, that number plummeted to just four hours per week. Americans are
spending more time at home and economic realities of life have eaten up their
time for friends.
The rise of the gig economy and the economic pressures have made free time a luxury. These factors have made friendship more difficult, and policy makers, urban planners, and venture capitalists are searching for solutions. Can you imagine, Stanford University is now offering a course called Design for Healthy Friendship, dedicated to helping students structure their social lives with intention!
The Indian Scenario
In
urban India the situation is fast changing. In our childhood we spent most of
our time either on the mango and guava trees in our lawn or playing a bunch of
outdoor games. Our children were precociously career conscious and would spend
the same time either in tuition or guitar lessons or dance classes. Their
children spend the time playing video games on the console or on their parent's
phone. There is a huge social crisis looming ahead, a friendship recession, which
will surely derail the society.
Rural
India too has changed remarkably, but the society still is reasonably close
knit. As taps at home have replaced wells in the common ground, as people bathe
and wash clothes at home and not in the community pond, the social interactions
are decreasing, but they are still present. The elders are respected, and the
lit cigarette is either thrown away or hidden when they are around.
Cities
however have changed tremendously and in high-rise buildings very few
intimately know their neighbours. Both our neighbours are more than five
decades old; we grew up together and are the best of friends. They both lost
their mothers early, and when they got married the only mother-in-law their
wives knew was my mother, and she commanded that respect as long as she was
around. Our children know each other, but their friendship is nowhere near
ours.
The government slowed down its investment in and construction of third spaces such as community centres, parks and coffee shops, which has left fewer spaces for organic social interactions. Incidentally, the first space is where you live, the second space is where you work, and the third space is where you meet with friends socially - in parks, baristas, etc. I have, in the past, written about these Third Spaces in a blog, which you can read by clicking: https://surajitbrainwaves.blogspot.com/2023/10/the-third-places.html
Robin
Dunbar is an anthropologist who has worked extensively on friendship and in
1992 he published that humans can't have more than 150 casual friends and of
them beasties can be five. He felt that this limitation was there because
remembering faces, names, traits, histories, likes and dislikes, conversation
points require brain power, which is limited in us. Today, because we are not
using our brain to accommodate so many casual friends and beasties, this part
of our neocortex is in disuse. And, you know what happens when an organ in the
body is in disuse, it atrophies like the appendix.
Not
having friends impacts our physical and mental health. In fact, one of the
leading causes of death today is solitude and friendlessness. When a data of
308,000 people was analysed, not having friends at all, or having poor quality
of friends was found to be more damaging than smoking 20 cigarettes a day! Good
friends reduce stress, thus producing better control of blood pressure. They produce
endorphins, which keep us happy and healthy. Tough task seems easier with
friends, academic learning, trekking, hiking, marathon running, long distance
swimming are very difficult if tried alone, but tend to get easier with
friends. In an experiment people perceived a hill to be less steep when
climbing with friends!
Jeffrey
Hall, a professor in the University of Kansas is of the opinion that it takes
50 hours of together time to become casual friends (getting infatuated by the
opposite sex takes 50 seconds, perhaps) and next 90 hours to become a closer
circle of friends, and perhaps 200 more hours of together time to become
beasties! Are we ready to invest such amount of time in friendship today? And,
let me remind you, just as taking the children together to school doesn't count
as a date, working together in an office or a hospital doesn't count as
friendship time.
But,
there are more challenges in the life of friendship; becoming friends is just
half the job done, friendship thrives on rituals and repetitions. The blog that
I send you every week is my friendly gesture towards you. Your 'thumbs up' and smiley
emogies are your reciprocal gestures, that keep us friends till we meet again
in person. This is our virtual friendship bridge which we both maintain.
As
we have defaulted to working long hours, solitude has become our natural
preference. This invariably leaves us friendless, and what is even worse, we
are forgetting how to befriend strangers and even maintain old friendships. So,
we are neither establishing new friendships nor sustaining old ones. Humans
were social animals, but now they are becoming non-social. If we don’t
consciously reshape our priorities and re-learn how to cultivate meaningful
relationships, we risk a future where connection—one of the most fundamental
sources of happiness and well-being—fades into the background of our lives.
Real Friends and Virtual friends
Online friendships require a different set of social behaviors than in-person ones. Maintaining a friendship online relies on skills like crafting the perfect message, interpreting text-based interactions, and engaging in asynchronous exchanges with multiple people at once. In contrast, in-person friendships thrive on undivided attention, and are built through spontaneous moments, reading body language, and navigating the vulnerability of face-to-face connection. It won’t be wrong to suggest that young people, growing up immersed in digital interactions, are losing the opportunity to develop the in-person social skills that once defined deep human connections. This can not be good because a socially underdeveloped childhood leads to a socially stunted adulthood.
As people have fewer friends, they are spending more time at home. So, what are they doing with this extra home time? Are they spending good quality time with their family? If yes, then why are the divorce rates, substance abuse and child suicide on the rise? In fact, minus friends people are retracting inwards, spending more time online, and engaging with virtual friends on social media. Each member of the family is busy in his/ her own virtual social circle or aimlessly watching bot generated, reels which try to entrap them in indoctrinated socio-political echo chambers, which only give anxiety and depression. Now imagine what they have traded this against - real world friendship, which releases the feel good endorphins that fights pain better than morphine, anxiety better than anxiolytics, and depression better than antidepressants! A very poor choice, indeed!!
References:
