I tend to deconstruct social and psychological behaviors into an attempt at finding the biological, cultural, and evolutionary reasons why they appeared, rather than adhering to manufactured, arbitrary ideas and ideologies surrounding them. We often only judge and think about behaviors in the context of very contemporary reasons, rather than taking a more objective look at ourselves. In many ways, most people are unable to see past the cultural influences, pointing towards very specific and emotionally biased constructs of why something is.
What is friendship? It is a question I’ve been thinking about in the context of how a large portion of society seems to suffer from loneliness, and why people have such a hard time finding new friends, especially when social media and the online world should produce the opposite conditions. How exactly is friendship established, and why does it not happen in the way society expects it to?
Philosophers from Aristotle to modern times discuss friendship more in terms of what they need and their sociological functions, without actually defining how they arise. In psychology, friendship has been studied for the consequences of mental health and the sensation of a good life, but still not why, although evolutionary and sociological studies make a point of the group’s formation of shared risk and shared knowledge.
But still not how they form, or why they actually form between specific individuals. Some point to shared interests and ideas, but friends can still form without sharing even that.
This is a reason why we have no real solution for the so-called loneliness epidemic. Politicians, philosophers, authors, journalists, etc., attempt to find solutions but seem to struggle as they haven’t really understood what forms relationships into actual friendships. Why don’t people become friends at work? Why do young people struggle with it in schools? Why don’t people actually connect online?
What I think is missing is the concept of projects.
I don’t mean projects as in work and necessities of society. Because society as we have it today has been formed around concepts that aren’t connected to the necessities of the people or the close communities around them. Many of us don’t work in a profession that is formed by the necessity of our close community. Even in occupations which do necessary work, the need has been outsourced to a system. We don’t construct houses, provide food, healthcare, or anything of the sort as a form of community; we do it because it’s an outsourced action. We’ve built our modern society on the outsourcing of our needs. Every vital part of our life is handled by a system; a company lets its booking service attach a handler to the job, and the needed help is handled by someone who are even dictated to not waste time connecting with the client. The job needs to be done, nothing else.
We’ve essentially outsourced ourselves to the point we’ve lost the necessary foundation of where friendships are formed.
Because the projects I’m speaking of are the ones found in more local and isolated communities. These projects do not have a monetary gain or exist within a detached individuality where one part gets the job done and the other something else. These projects extend their consequences beyond the project itself, a communal gain as a whole.
They’re formed on another kind of trust than just an exchange of labor or ideas. It’s a form of trust in the continuity of the communal spirit. The primary function of the project is not just to build the house for one member, but to build the necessary ground for the communal experience for all.
Here, many stop and roll their eyes thinking, “Oh, another argument for communism.” But this is where politics also fails as it’s just another form of systemic transformation of an underlying social need. While capitalism tries to make a system out of social investment (failing at it as well), communism tries to build a commune and social structures through systemic demands as well (equally failing at it).
No, the communal projects have to flourish from an honest individual place, a need for a solution to a problem that one seeks the trust of others to help them with. If this is handled by hiring an outsourced handler, the problem might be solved, but there’s an alienation between the hired hand and the one who hired them.
If the job is done by someone who doesn’t gain anything material by it, and who exists and lives in the proximity of the person they help, something else happens.
The world was once filled with such projects, and we’ve paved over most of them. Hyperindividuality has reshaped our values into optimization, a byproduct of capitalist goals of problem solving. Find the most efficient solution to a problem and, for the sake of personal gain. This is an antithesis to the projects I speak of. It’s the pavement, the asphalt, and concrete, being poured over a communal drive which were once at the center of our existence.
If we look further into the biological drives and evolutionary consequences of these projects, they have connective tissue into what happens to our psychology. As we connect to others through helping them without expectation of getting anything back, but experience the result of having helped them, and they form the same foundational drive to help back, causing a weave of actions and reactions within the community, the stronger this weave gets, the more we act as a new layer of consciousness.
It starts to look like the collective intelligence of hive insects and animals who aren’t acting individually, but as a pure collective. It’s as if we tap into a residue of an ancestral evolutionary trait of communal psychology, in which we extend our mind and body towards another individual, rather than just an exchange between two individual needs.
The result is that we are essentially extending our identity and individuality into becoming a part of a higher being. Two beings acting as one in the way two organs in the body, who are individual, form the basis for a higher being.
This is friendship.
This is what both capitalism and communism has been trying to tap into. The power of friendship for the drive to build something new, a project. But their failure is in trying to make a system out of something that requires an emotional and psychological obviousness in interdependence. They miss the foundational part in why people make projects together and why such projects work long term.
And these systems have become the dominant part of how we think about the world and ourselves. Hyperindividuality or a total abandonment of individuality.
Of course, these political ideas here can be adjusted to function as a system, but the point is not the political, but the effect it has had on our psychology.
We no longer view projects as communal necessities for ourselves and the community; we only view projects as “work,” as exchanges of material gains, or as a dictated direction that the individual had no part in deciding.
All agency of the individual has been lost, and all communal gains are artificial.
We no longer conduct projects that come naturally to us as being part of something or as an ask for help. Such projects become a pleading onto others to abandon the values and ideologies they live under.
Rather than it being natural to help each other within a community, we have to ask for help, and people are often retreating from helping others. Because without the material gain or a sense of exchange, we are terrified. We view it as someone taking advantage of us, someone bypassing the monetary exchange.
The value of the project becomes something alien to us. Because we are not aware of the positive psychological effect it has on us.
And it is this effect that is forming friendships. Through these projects of untold exchange values, we start to extend ourselves into the other. The problem-solving mechanics that become a back-and-forth without demand of equal exchange values or arbitrary monetary values of the exchange, we get lost in the action and reaction.
It becomes an antithesis to the cycle of violence. Equally in its confusion of who started it, who made it worse, what action was the worst, etc. Friendship causes the same confusion in the opposite positive way. You start to get lost in who did what and what was the most good and what was the worth, things… just are.
If war is the reason we have cycles of violence, then naturally appearing projects is the reason we have friendships.
If a community is built around such naturally occurring projects in which people help each other for the sake of stability of the community, then strong friendships are born out of it.
Look at school and education.
Did you and your best friend become friends because school forced you to work together on a project? No, that was never the actual project. You probably formed an unseen project underneath, where you helped each other beyond the demand of school. As this progressed, either in play or in other things like sport and hobbies, you got lost in the exchange. It was no longer part of society’s (the school’s) enforcement of a project, but a natural project which formed out of your own individual needs and then weaved together into you and your friend becoming a collective organism.
So what about the loneliness epidemic?
With the political ideologies and economical models forming how we think about life and work, with the outsourcing of projects into unnatural behaviors (compared to how they usually grew naturally), with the inability to form stability in communal projects online and rather alienate us more with conflict-focused algorithms of social media—we have been conditioned to not form projects that lead to friendships anymore.
We are psychologically unable to form the trust needed within non-exchange projects to form strong friendship bonds to the point of elevating ourselves to a collective being. And so, we retreat into the comfort of antisocial behavior.
If the systems of society remove the foundation of what causes friendships to form, then all we have left are the systems themselves. We become a cog in that system, and it becomes a system which benefits no one.
It also makes us unable to value projects aimed to solve major problems of the world. Even facing something like climate change, even as we are seeing the first major effects of them right now, do we form projects to solve it? Because we aren’t making any friends.
Because it is out of friendship we form projects to solve such problems. And it’s because of such problems we need friendship.
The solution would be to start finding local projects. Within the closest people around. Then expand. Help someone, but don’t expect anything back. You do it for the sake of the two of you as a whole, not yourself or just the other person. The longer the two of you do it, the more likely it is that you form a friendship.
Then extend it. What else is there to do in the neighborhood? Then extend it further, what problems need to be solved in the larger community?
It starts with the small projects, naturally arising, into friendship between a few. Then friendship with more people. Not all have to be friends, not all function as friends, but projects build friendships. And friendships build projects.
This may not entirely solve the loneliness epidemic, but it identifies a missing condition of society; the disappearance of organic communal projects through which trust, dependence, and friendship can naturally form. And further points towards how important friendship is in the equation of solving many of the world’s worst problems right now.
