Name: The friendship recession | Richard Reeves
Uploaded: 2023-04-02T07:58:47.000Z
Duration: 8 min 2 s
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- There are some studies that suggest, for example,

that being without a close friend, being lonely,

is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

a certain number of friends, what does that mean?

Does it mean how many friends they have on Facebook?

It is difficult to get at this quantitatively,

and also people I think are a bit reluctant

to admit sometimes to not having friends.

Loneliness is in some ways quite a stigmatized condition,

and so actually getting people to admit to loneliness is

something that social scientists really struggle with.

whether we are facing a 'friendship recession.'

a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute,

has used to describe this rise in a number of people

who lack a certain number of close friends,

who have fewer people to turn to in times of crisis.

or at least someone to have a conversation with.

That's less and less likely to be a friend now.

And as society changes in all kinds of ways,

technologically, economically, then I think it's important

that we pay attention to what is very often

Friendships come in all shapes and sizes,

in very different ways and in very different places.

One way we form friends is just by being at the same school

as somebody, by growing up in the same place.

They're also friends that you form through activities

that are chosen, so through a volunteer activity

Those are friendships that are formed through a screen

or over the internet in one kind or another,

without necessarily ever physically meeting that person.

which is somewhere in the teens, say between 12

and 15 perhaps is a reasonable number to think about.

Some people of course have no close friends,

but most people have at least a close friend.

And most people would say that the ideal number

Friendship was something that the ancient philosophers

If you go back to Aristotle, for example,

in some ways seen as the ideal relationship,

and one of the reasons why friendship is,

'cause it's a relationship of genuine and radical equality,

and one in which you're not in the friendship

in order to get something out of it for yourself.

It's not a transactional relationship in any way.

relationships do contain some kind of transaction,

But the definition of a friendship is a relationship

We've seen a decline in lots of traditional institutions

including the family, people marrying later

in areas like religion, in some cases the the labor market.

And so, what that means is there's more of a need

connections outside of those institutions.

That's where friends are hugely important.

we've seen a real decline in the number of people

who say that they have a number of close friends.

There are a number of factors that could be getting

moving to big cities or career opportunities

which necessarily stretches their friendship network.

Parents are spending quite a bit more time on parenting,

on looking after their kids, which squeezes

There's also a lot of emphasis on work and careers,

which is a sense that your identity is so what wrapped up

in your work that you don't have as much energy

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The friendship recession | Richard Reeves

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