This feels like such a random read and response, but its what I’ve been mulling over these past couple days. In a Globe and Mail article penned by Canadian author Katherine Johnson, she laments a culture in which “we are living in a time when people do not take social invitations seriously.”
Or, as she labels it,
We’re in our ‘sorry, I can’t make it tonight’ era
She goes on to describe the many stories she recieved in response to publicizing a moment from her own life of being “stood up.” She mentions the ease by which people have become accustomed to holding commitments fast and lose, the emergence of technology affording us a plethora of ways in order to pretend to ignore such obligations. The most striking thing is, it seems evident that we have normalized making excuses valid even when we know they aren’t valid or true. They are worded just ambigiously enough to make them feel valid or true.
To the point where even the need to make excuses has become passe. If we are a proper citizen of the modern, Western world, we should just assume this to be the new norm and expect that obligations must and should be held loosely.
Although this deviates a bit from the direct subject of the article, I found myself wondering if there was more to the context of this article’s subject matter than first appearances might allow. I wonder if behind this change in social norms and expectations lies an even more difficult problem- social hierarchies.
Because here’s the truth. Even in such an era, it remains true that if a relationship serves someones social status and social needs/desires, they are likely to show up. On the flipside, the most telling sign of where you fit in the social order is whether someone deems it necessary/valuable to prioritize your relationship. And this can be true for good friendships as well as aquaintances. Those who experience the excuses intuitively understand that they are on the outside looking in, even if they are unable to articulate that in precise terms.
I brought this up in conversation with my pastor a while back. Thinking about my life today, in this present moment, its striking how devoid of friends it actually is. And I don’t mean that in a self pitying kind of way, rather as an actualizing, reflective insight that I needed to grapple with. When I think about who those people are that I would call in important moments, I can fit it in one hand. If I push that further and wonder about which of these friendships are naturally present on a daily basis, meaning those relationships in which one doesn’t need to think about it or necessarily plan it, they just exist as mutally shared, accepted, necessary parts of our lives- the kind you would just wake up and take a trip with, for example- the number dwindles even futher.
And then I account for the ones that have relocated a long time ago and are living a long ways away, and the stark reality is a life in which friendship has largely been relegated to the art of social invitation. And its precisely this art that emphasises the social hierarchies running underneath the above article.
As I was pondering this, I recognized that there are reasons for this. Part of it is the natural outcome of our dependence and acclamation to modern, technological tools. If these tools allow us to foster relationships within set parameters, and if they enable us to control the relationships in our lives without responsibilities or consequence, they also foster and create this kind of reality for us. We are the product of the world we live in every bit as much as the world is the product of what we make.
Another part of it is the further alienation that comes from the loss of our social customs. Which is a bit ironic, becauase a big part of where I am in my life today flows from those once tightly embedded social customs. Because I got married later than most of my friends, and because I moved out of my parents later than most of my friends, and because my wife and I weren’t able to have children like most of my friends, and because we moved to the north end rather than the more homogenized neighborhood of middle class, conservative family homes, the ensuing years were one long thread of disconnect from the relationships built on those important, formative, 20 year plus long investments. The people who know you grow apart the minute life begins to formulate into who you are becoming. Hence why those social customs become so important for bonding you along those emergent lines. However, when you find yourself on a different path, the distance covered in a very short amount of time is palpable, leaving anyone who deviates isolated from the masses. To the point where you suddenly blink, wake up and begin to wonder where everyone has gone and how its even possible to start over.
Life then becomes a series of social obligations and connections. I have my “friends” from work. I have my “friends” at church. I have my “friends” in various hobby groups. But these are not the same thing as friends in the truest sense of the word. They not only require those contexts to be maintained, they are relegated to these worlds, held captive to these worlds, and they are ultimately defined by the necessary hiearchies they expose.
But the thing is, as I’ve watched the world change over the years, I have found that a world in which these kinds of social customs and expectations have largely been challenged and deconstructed- marriage is no longer a thing, the notion of children has been reformatted as a matter of individual choice and identity, family has evolved form the once “broken” terminology that captivated the early years of deconstruction to being so ambiguously applied that it has lost any sense of relevance and meaning, moving out and buying a home is not longer the way, let alone a way- is in some ways even harder to navigate. Not only has the notion of social customs become politicized, the language of covenant and commitment, the language of family and relationship, the language that creates the space for friendship to emerge “over time” and with a shared language and within the framework of expectation and consequence, is no longer part of our venacular. So its not only about that feeling of looking in from the outside at the different hiearchies, the hiearchies themselves have become a constant, moving target serving a hodge podge of individuals. It has largely become about what’s making one happy now, in this moment, and who is skilled enough to achieve that. Which makes the whole game of “friendship” far more bound to ones accomplishements and works than I think its been at any other point in human history.
Which of course would create a silent epidemic of depression and anxiety, which I think the data bears out.
Coming back to the article then, it seems to me like there is far more at stake than simple social etiquette. What the author is picking up on is a feeling that I think is symptomatic of that increasingly hyper-individualized social trend. I once heard it said that the best friendships are the ones where you can go months, sometimes years, without connecting and still pick up right where you left off. I think this is absolutely true. This defines my closest friendships. I think the reason for this is, these friendships have a way of resisting the push and pull of life’s inevitable progression. No matter who you become, these sorts of friendships have the power of always measuring that evolution against the person that you are. They preserve the necessary context of where you started.
And yet, these friendships are also limited. Necessary, but limited. The question that emerges from a world wrestling against social expectation and obligation, and often resisting it, is, where do you find the sort of friendships that can develop with you in the day to day over time. That you are shaped with and bound by. Or perhaps further to the point, how do you learn to find and cultivate this in a world that is designed to tell you, rather consistently, that if you aren’t a, b, and c, you aren’t worth enough. good enough, necessary enough, accomplished enough, to be prioritized in that way. That, I think, is the draw of treating social obligation with the sort of distant and casual dismissives that has become so rampant. Its far easier not to put yourself in a position that stands to tell you where you sit on that hiearchy than to risk it telling you that you are on the outside looking in.
The Stories of my Life 