Remember That Species Called “Friendship”?

Ah! Finally the weekend. Some respite from office work. Time to make the most of it and hang out with “friends”.

You make a plan. Meet friends. Talk about how sad/happening your life is. Discuss other people. Abuse the society. Eat. Drink. Click pictures. Come back home. Spend an hour editing them. Upload the pictures. Tag the people. Add 30 cool hashtags. Wait for likes. Receive likes. And that’s that.

Now repeat the same procedure next week/month with another group of “friends”.

An acquaintance of mine came home last week and we spent some quality time together. We had a long discussion on friendships and how they’ve transformed over time. At the end of the discussion, I had an epiphany that – “In today’s day and age we don’t have friends, we just have hangout buddies”.

Not generalizing here, this was merely an observation.

An observation that was knocking the doors of my conscience in a hushed manner, until it became so powerful that it broke the door open and stared at me right in the face.

Why am I saying that?

Take a look at the amount of people suffering from depression. Why are people increasingly feeling isolated and depressed?

One of the major reasons for depression is loneliness. People don’t have anybody to talk to, share their lives with. They’re dealing with everything by themselves. They’re feeling extremely burdened even with the smallest of things. And all this is because they don’t have a person, a friend that can stand by them in adversity, comfort them, and act as a pillar of moral and emotional support to them.

As a result, people are increasingly becoming introverted and conversations in general just float on the surface. They don’t hold any weight or value. Social interactions are becoming a formality and friendships are becoming a decorative term on “Quote Pages” on Facebook.

Real friendships are strengthening in nature. They’re nurturing. They take care of you. They elevate you to a pedestal of ecstasy when you have achieved something in life and magnify your happiness by sharing your joys. They also stand with you like a rock and somewhat reduce your sadness when you’re going through your worst phase in life and are in the most vulnerable state.

Thus, they’re healing too. Real friendships keep you mentally and emotionally stable.

But where are these real friendships? Why are we losing them?

There are quite a few reasons to it.

• For starters, we have no time. We’re constantly busy or at least putting up an impressive act of being busy. We have set our goals real high and that’s great but pursuing them is taking away all the little joys of life. One of the joys being – spending time with a friend. Spending quality time with a friend has become similar to sighting a Halley’s Comet. Not once in 76 years but definitely a rarity. So, it’s high time that we don’t let our obsession for achievement take over our lives and stay connected to our friends in reality.
• Secondly, we have married the mobile phone. Busy with work or not, I don’t think we’re as touchy-feely even with our better halves as we are with our phones. Phones take up all our free time and make the CEOs of Instagram, Facebook, Netflix, YouTube and Amazon Prime richer by the day. We’ve become so lazy that we’d rather sit at home in our pyjamas and watch a good series all night than meet anybody. In a way, we’ve isolated ourselves and this isolation is only increasing by the day. The only friends we’re making out of all this are dark circles.
• Thirdly, we are increasingly becoming an impatient society. Be it your Wifi’s data speed or your food delivery from Zomato, you want everything quick. When you’re processing so much information at a rapid pace each day, you don’t have the patience to create something productive or wait and work towards something when there’s an easy alternative available. You want instant results. It’s either My Way or My Way (P.S. the highway is under construction all year).

So, if you have a choice between

a)      Making a plan to meet 5 friends which involves

• forming a WhatsApp group,
• selecting an activity which everybody likes,
• choosing a date when everybody’s free,
• coordinating the timings with each one’s working hours,
• managing last minute plan cancellation and people ditching on you

and

b)      watching the latest Netflix series that has just released,

then you & I both know which Netflix series we’re watching.

To summarize, technology and ambition have distanced us from our friends and have confined “friends” to receivers of memes online.

I hope this trend of “losing touch” and just meeting once in a blue moon loses the battle to true friendship. “Out of sight, out of mind” way of living can kick us out of people’s lives without us knowing.

So, let’s not take our friends for granted and just confine them to a hang out and a tag on a picture or a meme.

Let’s connect. Let’s talk. Let’s romance the idea of an accomplice. Let’s bring back the lost art of friendship.

Because you don’t want to be watching a sad documentary of “Extinction of friendship” on the History Channel or replying “Thank you” to the hundreds of irritating “Happy New Year” forwards on your phone.

You’d rather be fighting with your friend about which famous actor deserves to date you and have a laugh about it with a pizza and some wine in your drawing room this New Year’s Eve!