science · the day's top 10 · june 4th

We have reached the point where people say they are “investing” in a friendship and do not hear themselves do it. Over a coffee booked three weeks ahead, someone will tell you that a particular person is “worth the energy”, that some other relationship has stopped being “a good use of their time”, that they are “protecting their peace”, that they are trying this year to be “more intentional” about who they let into their life, which always turns out to mean fewer people and better-credentialed ones. I used to find this depressing. I find it familiar now, which is worse, because familiar means the vocabulary climbed into me too while I had my back turned. We did not stop having friends. We acquired a network instead, and a network is friendship’s understudy; word-perfect and feeling none of it. A relationship wants to know who you are. A network wants to know what you can do, who you happen to know, whether you might prove useful eighteen months from now when the wind changes. That second curiosity does no obvious harm. It is simply tireless, and it has steadily devoured the first. This is the dialect of middle management applied to the heart: connections, leverage, social capital, value exchange, synergy (God help us all!!!), networking opportunity, audience, reach, collaboration potential, emotional labour, bandwidth, boundaries that apparently need “maintaining” like a suburban hedge. A worrying amount of modern friendship reads like a LinkedIn profile that has lately discovered the word “vulnerability” and is deploying it for engagement. People did not get worse, whatever the weekend columnists imply. People are about as disappointing as they have always been, which is to say lovable and tiring in roughly equal and entirely unpredictable proportion. What shifted is that we grew frightened of imbalance. We want the message answered, the favour returned, the dinner reciprocated inside a socially respectable window, the emotional effort clocked and, ideally, matched. Keeping the books feels safe. It feels grown-up. It feels like insurance against being the idiot who loved more. And friendship, the real and inconvenient friendship, is the one bond that flatly refuses to keep an honest ledger. You will always have given more to one person and less to another and you will mostly never find out which, and the never-finding-out is not a flaw in the arrangement. It is the arrangement! There is something sadder folded underneath the fear, though. A great many people have forgotten how to move towards another human being without a reason in hand. Need hands you a script. “I’m calling because.” “Wanted to pick your brain on.” “Sorry to bother you, quick one.” We have all had the text from the friend who materialises only when they are moving flat, job-hunting, freshly dumped, or simply bored and trawling for company, and we resent it, reasonably. But the resentment covers something bleaker, which is that for a lot of us now the friend-who-only-rings-when-they-want-something has stopped being the exception. For many of us that friend is the only register left. The visit with no purpose, the call about nothing in particular have become genuinely frightening. What would you even say? What is it for? Aristotle, who thought about this more clearly than our entire wellness economy combined, set friendship near the very top of a life worth living, well above most of what we would now file under success. He meant the demanding kind, the friend you choose for the sake of who they are rather than for what they slip you under the table. He understood the lesser kinds perfectly well, the friendships of usefulness and the friendships of pleasure, the people we keep close because they are handy or because they are fun, and he was not sniffy about them. He simply noticed that they evaporate the instant the usefulness dries up or the fun gets boring. The higher sort does not evaporate, having never been bolted to a function to begin with. Friendship, after all, produces nothing. Nothing ships. Nothing scales. You sit. You grumble about the same colleague you were grumbling about in 2014. You squander an entire grey afternoon and at the end of it there is no deliverable, no asset, no metric to send upwards, nothing to report at the stand-up, and yet that squandered afternoon turns out to be holding the weight in a way none of your achievements ever quite manage. (Cioran, my fellow insomniac, claimed to despise almost everyone and then spent decades writing them letters. The misanthrope’s secret is that he keeps the appointments. I find this enormously comforting, which probably says something about me I would rather not examine right now.) C.S. Lewis, no sentimentalist, made the point that friendship is the one love with no survival value at all. The species does not require it. You can eat, breed, rear your children, hold the perimeter, and go to your grave without ever once having had a real friend.