By Itxu Díaz
Sunday, August 31, 2025
The great paradox of the communications age is that we
are more connected and yet lonelier than ever. (No, ChatGPT, Netflix, or @SexyKitten84
don’t count as “friends.”)
The share of Americans with no close friends has
quadrupled since 1990, reaching 12 percent, according to a survey conducted shortly after the pandemic. Meanwhile, the
number of people who reported having ten or more good friends has dropped to a
third of what it was 20 years ago. To blame this trend on a single cause would
be simplistic, but there’s a common thread that connects these warning signs of
a social crisis: progressive ideas.
And we shouldn’t be surprised. In the left’s most
ambitious experiment, the Soviet Union, the regime promoted “friendship” as an
ideological tool of fraternity among socialist peoples, and valued camaraderie
in struggle and at work, but distrusted private friendship between individuals
outside supervision, seeing it as a breeding ground for conspiracy.
Today’s progressivism is even more corrosive to
friendships. Traditional values that the left despises: loyalty, fidelity,
rootedness, ideological tolerance, sacrifice, and reciprocity. Postmodern
values that animate the left: freedom from commitments, moral relativism,
rootlessness, fluidity, globalism, cancel culture, self-affirmation, and
sentimentality.
The postmodern left dissolves the individual into a soup
of identities and communities, erases him as a person, dehumanizes him, and in
doing so makes sincere bonds impossible — because only individuals can have
friends. No matter what Stalin said, a “collective” is about as capable of
friendship as my ironing board, which I’d be very surprised to find having a
late-night chat with the dishwasher.
You can get furious with a close friend — probably
because he or she matters to you. As a kid, I once got into a fight with my
best friend, and we didn’t speak for six months. We passed practical messages
through go-betweens: “Do you have yesterday’s math notes?” “Are we going to the
party on Saturday?” He’d reply, “I’ll give them to your mom,” or, “Okay, you
sit in the back and I’ll be at the bar up front.” One day we tried to talk it
out, only to realize that we couldn’t even remember what had caused the fight.
Since then, our friendship has been as solid as that ridiculous childhood
quarrel.
The late sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argued that today our
relationships are liquid — our bonds, our anger, and our goodbyes are liquid.
He also noted that the technologies that keep us connected to people who are
far away also make it easier for them to stay far away. I suppose that
if what happened with my friend had happened today, he would’ve blocked me on
Instagram, and I would’ve trolled him from a burner Twitter account.
The fear of commitment isn’t just a plague on love. It
poisons friendship and work, too. “In a liquid modern life there are no
permanent bonds,” Bauman wrote, “and any that we take up for a time must be
tied loosely so that they can be untied again, as quickly and as effortlessly
as possible, when circumstances change — as they surely will in our liquid
modern society, over and over again.”
Much has been written about how progressives have
undermined family, marriage, and relationships, but little about how they’ve
also damaged friendships. The erosion of traditional values, secularization,
and relativism share blame. Empty souls quickly try to fill their loneliness
with technology and the illusion of social connection, dulling the pain of
isolation.
Without wanting to scare off the TikTok generation, I
think that one of the best analyses of friendship is found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean
Ethics. The philosopher identifies three kinds: friendships of utility,
common but fragile; friendships of pleasure, in which enjoyment matters most;
and friendships of virtue, the ideal form, grounded in loyalty and trust. I
would add a fourth type: political friendship, which can be summed up in one
word — nonexistent.
What once sustained friendship was a code of honor.
Today, relativism erodes honor and commitment because it claims that there are
as many truths as there are people and circumstances. What one person sees as
betrayal, another may not. The corollary: When everyone has his own truth, you
can kiss friendship goodbye.
Ties to people and places once shaped social bonds.
Today, progressive ideas distrust roots, encourage vague globalism, and promote
dynamic identities that are often imaginary. The secularization of society has
created a more hedonistic culture that prevents selfless friendship, while the
breakdown of old codes of civility has eroded even common courtesy: Small
gestures for others, though ornamental, once smoothed everyday life. Instead,
we’ve inherited from progressive psychology a flood of self-help books and
therapies that tell people to “empower” themselves, convincing them that the
world owes them and that they can treat human relationships like supermarket
goods: If it doesn’t add value, take it off the shelf. If only we could do the
same with politicians.
Of all the poisonous ideas in the coffee-mug self-help
literature, perhaps the vilest is the concept of “toxic people.” Toxic would be
to drink bleach or swallow your phone battery. Your brother-in-law Charles may
be an idiot, and maybe you should steer clear of him, but he’s not “toxic.”
This cheap philosophy dehumanizes people, leaves them more vulnerable to
loneliness, and makes them forget the real value of close friends. Suffering
alongside a friend has become unthinkable in an age when people drop friends
who are struggling because, for example, as I once heard an “influencer” say,
“they give off bad energy and that could hurt my skin.” In the end, when all
her troublesome friends are discarded, I hope that girl has a loyal cat to turn
to for advice about loneliness.
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