Friends

Nepal deserves more than a passing mention. In Kathmandu this month, thousands of young people, many of them college students and recent grads, took to the streets after their government banned TikTok. For them, TikTok was the spark, but the protest was really about freedom of speech, the determination to be heard, and the insistence that young people have a rightful place in shaping the system that governs them. Moments like this remind us that friendship and solidarity are not just personal bonds, but the foundation of collective action.

Charlie Kirk’s death is a reminder of how fragile life is and how unnecessary so many deaths are, regardless of what you believe. The person who pulled the trigger almost certainly would have benefited from the very mental health services that politicians praise after a tragedy but starve of funding before it. Time and again, we hear calls for healing only after the blood has dried, while prevention budgets are quietly cut.

But in all that, this is the real problem — humanity is in an era where people are talking to one another less. And it is not just in politics or at school board meetings. It is in our homes, our neighborhoods and our everyday lives. A few decades ago, one-third of Americans reported having 10 or more close friends. By 2021, that number dropped to just 13%. More people today report having no close friends at all than at any point in our living memory.

The pattern also shows up in how people socialize. Nights out are vanishing. In the U.K., 1 in 3 young people are cutting back on going out, trading bars and concerts for streaming and online hangouts. American data is not much different: the share of people who say they spend time with friends in person has dropped by nearly 20 percentage points. What disappears with that decline are the spontaneous collisions of life — the late-night diner run, the joke that only works in person, the tiny moments that you remember forever, the stories we pass on when our kids are old enough to hear them.

Put all of this together — fewer friends, fewer nights out, less intimacy — and you see the shape of a cultural crisis. Loneliness has become so widespread that the U.S. surgeon general labeled it a public health epidemic, citing risks comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Social isolation is linked to higher rates of heart disease, dementia, depression and premature death. Friendship is, at its core, critical to survival, and we need to treat it that way.

And yet, friendship is what people treat as most optional. In childhood, it is constant, messy, daily, unavoidable. As adults, it gets scheduled like a haircut, penciled in once a quarter if calendars line up. Texts, memes and group chats substitute for time together. They keep the surface buzzing but rarely get below it. And like my friend Lisa says, “it takes effort, but the rewards are deep.”

This is not just about personal well-being. Friendship is the smallest unit of community, and community is the smallest unit of democracy. When people have friends, they argue differently and show up differently. They volunteer, they protest, they compromise. They can disagree about zoning or redistricting without seeing the other side as the enemy. Humanity’s ability to hold civic life together rests on whether we still know how to practice friendship in its most literal sense: being a friend, which is as much about listening as it is about being listened to.

So yes, roads and bike lanes matter. Democracy matters. Every person’s death matters. But underneath all of it is the question of whether we are building societies where people still know how to be in relationship with one another because when friendship erodes, everything else frays with it.

Maybe the antidote to this week’s overwhelming news is not another hot take but a simple invitation: call your friend. Take the walk. Say yes to the coffee, the hike, the trivia night. Be the person who starts the group text, but also the one who insists on taking it offline.

Humanity needs more roads that lead back to each other, and that begins not with policy and politics but with the choice to prioritize friendship as the essential infrastructure it has always been.