Living In The Age of Commoditized Friendship
Is this our lives now?
What do you think of you when you think of paying for friends? I don’t just mean with money, I mean with social currency, attention, power — anything that would facilitate the transaction between two people that isn’t a genuine human connection. Perhaps it’s something we’ve always done, whether through covert contracts, or more literal, overt transactional ones. Maybe friends have always been performative acts driven by quid-pro-quo principled trades. We sometimes clap other posts, or follow other creators, with the expectation that they should then interact with the things we’ve written as well. Are we even reading the posts anymore — or just clapping down the for you page in order to increase engagement for ourselves. Maybe it’s also the fact that people require more, because there is less available. That is a pretty general statement, I know but hear me out. It feels to me as though the majority of people have less money, less power, less property than ever before — at least in the U.S. We’ve also been improperly indoctrinated through culture or creed to ‘get ours’ and that success is a zero sum game. It may also the case that people have found some of their need for belonging and validation through parasocial relationships.
The term parasocial relationship refers to a relationship that a person imagines having with another person whom they do not actually know, such as a celebrity or a fictional character.
This often involves a person feeling as though they have a close, intimate connection with someone whom they have never met due to closely following that person (or character) in media, such as TV shows, videos, podcasts, etc. For example, a child may feel as though they are friends with a fictional character due to frequently watching the character on a show, or a fan may feel as though they have a relationship with a pop star due to their emotional investment in the star’s career and life. (https://www.dictionary.com/e/tech-science/parasocial-relationship/)
I myself struggle with relationships, I’ve never truly understood how people relate to each other. I’ve always secretly envied those who have lifelong relationships, because I’m not someone who maintains them. My friendships are transient, and my romantic relationships either fizzle out or explode due to my own personal faults and incompatible coping mechanisms. (Which still doesn’t excuse my nature or the work I need to do to overcome it) Maybe it’s some sort of rationalization, but these things led to me using transactional relationships as a way of fulfilling my intimate needs, while skirting the reality that I’m just not that enjoyable to be around, at least for long periods of time. I’ve also understood for most of my life that I’ve had a different brain, not better, not worse — just different. What’s important to me has typically not been important to others, and what’s important to others typically hasn’t been a priority for me. I don’t experience stress in the same way or as often as others, but I feel extreme stress under conditions where some people may feel nothing at all. Like word selection, I feel extreme stress when I’m vocalizing words, because otherwise it would feel wrong. When I choose incorrectly, it’s like living in dissonance with reality, I will fixate on it, and I may even correct that word minutes, hours or days later.
Me: “Remember when I said that deer hopped over the guard railing last week? I really mean it vaulted.”
Them: “What?”
I am weird.
I feel like more people are weird today than in most times in recent history, but in a different way. I feel like people are weird because real human connection is less of a priority, and material success is coveted by most. I thank god that I learned the lesson at 30, rather than when I’m on my deathbed that a life well lived is a life that’s defined by the memories you’ve had with others, the people you’ve fervently served with your passions and the lives you made even 1% easier by doing something that cost you nothing.
Cost.
What is the Cost of Friendship?
It used to be vulnerability. Something that is missing with a lot of people today. In order to survive, we have to put on an appearance, we have to be confident, and we have to have all of the answers.
How did the ‘conman’ get his name?
By putting on an appearance, being confident, and having all of the answers.
We’re conning ourselves into believing the front we put on is who we are, then are confused when we look inwards and we don’t know what we want. Of course you don’t know what you want, when you’ve been someone else your entire life. When we don’t know what our goals and desires are, it’s easy for anyone to come in and start telling us what we want. It’s similar to the innocence of children, or the naivety of the gullible.
This is how many of the parasitic, parasocial relationships begin. It begins with someone telling who you should be in order to attain the self, health, wealth that you need to be in order to succeed in the world. They then validate you by giving you something to relate to because in the whirlpool of opinions, judgements and perspective, is now the worldview you identify with. This inherently distorts who you are, and you are now at odds with yourself, drowning in the sea of content that holds the poison and the cure. The effect is multiplied when the discordant group of followers becomes a harmonic choir of voices — all preaching the same beliefs, the echo chamber.
A part of me believes that humans are inherently rebellious. We rebelled against nature, we rebelled against other people, and now we are rebelling against ourselves.