Many people assumed that with digital society, people have many opportunities to make friends. Urbanization makes people live close to each other. Why do we feel loneliness than before? There are many reasons for people have less close friends nowadays.
People now have more friends than our previous generations, but people have less close friends than before. Because of that, people feel lonely. The most of friends are situation friends where we make friends on occasions. For example, gym friends, part time job friends, hiking friends, travel friends, social media friends, etc. We rarely meet those friends, so people often call them as acquaintances. According to some surveys, 49% of Americans have less three close friends. Why the number close friends diminished over three decades ago, when we often had 9 or 10 close friends. There are many reasons to explain for that. First, people spend more time for work and study than before. Second, people spend more free time for social medias than friendship. Why? Long time ago, when you didn’t know some things, you often asked your friends. Now, Google and YouTube are your best friends. Third, we live in competitive society, our friends may unfriend us when conflict interest of friendship arise.
In globalization, friendship doesn’t limit in city or country. Many people because of their jobs, they have international friends. This is the good thing, because people from different cultures can exchange information, they often have open-minded than people who have never lived or worked outside their countries.
Whenever we see other people’s cellphone contact lists, we shouldn’t assume that they have a lot of friends. Friendship is different with acquaintance. Friendship needs time to build and grow while acquaintance is not. In general, people often befriend with other people based on their beliefs, political ideas, same organization. Friendship with people with different ideas may not be bad as we assume.
I hope in this article, people can understand basic nature in friendship. We should balance our time with family and friendship, so we don’t lose one or another. Please leave comments and share.