Your Flaky Friend is Right
Avoidance as a symptom of an alienated, repressed cultural moment.
Right now, enormous amounts of people are surviving; life as a minefield of "shoulds." Should I do this or that? Talk to this person or that person first? Who will get more mad at me? What can I put off until later?
I saw a few therapists on TikTok speaking on the same thing - that their clients are lonely, having many friends flaking on them repeatedly, taking days to respond to texts, being emotionally numb but acting fine. My real-life therapist has echoed similar sentiments. (I'm wary of the tendency to use anecdotal, secondhand TikTok evidence as common sense; my use of it here is self-serving).
This resembles my own social life right now. I could simply be a friendless loser, that would be okay. I've been awkward long enough to know I may have misread a vibe, or clocked the tone of a friendship inaccurately. I don't think I am, though. I think we have huge amounts of numb, scared, overwhelmed people in denial, sitting and scrolling at home.
Rebuilding my social life after amnesia last year was a grueling task. I'd ghosted so many people, so many times, that I knew I'd worn out people's patience. I was also feeling flaky, frustrated, and a little disobedient. There's an emotion lurking in this thorny crevasse of social isolation that says: I resent having to heal. I resent not already being enough. I resent perfectionism, politeness, adult life's hegemony.
For people in this fragile, lonely place, controlling or abusive individuals provide a clear roadmap for how you can become likeable to them, and how to remain in their good graces.
Without playing sympathy for the devil, I do think Christianity and Conservatism provide precisely this promise. Becoming good is possible, no matter what, evangelical Christianity says. Conform exactly as we want you to and we can fully accept your ugly self, Conservatism says. No self-improvement required.
This is a farce; of course self-improvement is required. It's demanded in the very conformity that is a basic requirement for entry. But I believe that isn't how it feels for the recruit, just as an abusive relationship doesn't feel like a lack of love, but like finally and fully being loved.
You are not required to entertain your flaky, distant friends. I am merely pointing out that emotional numbness and avoidance can be the personal buck of disobedience, the death knell of belief things can get better, the slow succumb into and towards logics of domination.
People don't become reactionary anti-intellectuals for no reason. Clear simple words can feel like the other person is being honest with you. Clear simple words make it feel like they respect you. Clear simple words make it feel like you are smart, not slowly becoming disabled, not broken.
Your friends only talk to you once every two weeks. Some of your reactionary, right-leaning acquaintances are shotgunning beers in the yard every single evening. Gambling buddies are meeting up twice a week, actively asking after your company, ask me how I know. The churches and cults are enthusiastically seeking you out.
In so many ways in adult life, people will relish giving up on their own personal minefield of "shoulds." They will pick different shoulds, or turn towards tradition and give up on thinking they could have done it better. They will believe that, on certain fronts, people should muddle through; that neither they nor others really deserve care simply for being human.
This will all feel like bucking the trend, like disobedience, no matter how traditionalist it is. Never ever underestimate what any person will do to get people to talk to them every day.
Nobody is required to sympathize with these closed, numb, avoidant tendencies. Yet a cultural moment in the U.S. where many people have them is one of slowly emotionally dying, and believing you are fine. Millennials and Gen. Z will eventually be like the Boomers.
People will ask us what happened, how it happened. No one will have an answer. People will not be able to articulate the trillions of small violences done to them, or the lack of social precedent for permission to name it all.
We will try to be nice people. We will, under capitalism, attempt to still have friendships. We will not ask ourselves what pulling long hours - in brutal conditions, or in the social straitjacket of corporate surveillance and passive-aggression - does to how we relate to each other.
And one day late at night, our oldest, closest friend will ask via text how we are doing. We'll open it, feel the anger that we don't know the source of, feel the buck of disobedience, and we will ghost them, crushed by all the niceness, hoping desperately that anyone still loves us enough to chase after us, and slightly hating them for it.