Friendship is overrated

Or as Marcel Proust put it: "Friendship is a lie which seeks to make us believe we are not irremediably alone"

This week's discourse seems to be about Jonathan Haidt, and his recent book about how modern technology is making kids uniquely anxious, depressed, etc. I've seen a lot of talk going back and forth about these ideas. General consensus seems to be that the book overstates the data in favor of its hypothesis, but that the hypothesis nonetheless seems plausible.

I don't think it's controversial to say that people nowadays are lonelier than they used to be, and that kids in particular seem quite lonely--that America has a large and growing population of disconnected shut-ins. And that people feel trapped--desperate for friendship and community, but unable to find those things.

And I'm no stranger to those feelings. I went to a tiny high school where, even if you weren't friends with everyone, you never felt alone: you could sit down at any table and talk to anyone and always be included. You always had a place, were always visible. I think the reason many people are worried about the kids is that they, like me, experienced our K-12 years as the last time they were genuinely part of a community.

That feeling evaporated the moment I stepped foot on a college campus, and I suddenly became aware of the very modern feeling of being ancillary, invisible, socially dead—my presence was totally unnecessary to the proceedings on this campus, and if I disappeared, nobody would notice or care.

My response to loneliness was to become something of a social climber—to spot a community from afar and to wriggle my way into it. Perhaps this is why I love Proust: this is exactly what both his narrator and so many other characters do during the course of the novel. During the second book, for instance, he becomes so fascinated by the Duchess de Guermantes that he essentially stalks her, showing up in her path so often that he becomes repellant to her, and she goes out of her way to cut him and avoid him.

Later on, he only makes her acquaintance once he no longer wishes to—at that point, the introduction comes quite easily and naturally and they become great friends.

But, like Proust, I tend to be dissatisfied with the communities I enter.

I lived in a vegetarian co-op in college where people got very high on communal living and how America was sick and we needed to form our own radically radical sharing-type communities. Many of the friends from that co-op became burners, and many of them still live together or in little communes, still go to raves together, still camp together, have even experimented in co-parenting and having poly relationships with each other.

It seems to work out fine for them! At the time I thought all their pathetic dreams were doomed to be crushed by capitalism, but it's twenty years later, and they're still gleefully doing their own thing, and doing it together.

Nonetheless I had an inkling even then that this kind of community didn't have space for me. The thing is, community is conformist. Burners are very conformist. You have to drink the kool-aid. You have to think you're boldly reinventing marriage. You have to wear the flashy lights, listen to the music, dance those boxy little rave-dances, and engage in all the other communal rituals. (This cultural mismatch became one of the inspirations of my first novel for adults, The Default World [Out May 28])

I've cycled into and out of various communities since college, but in all of them there are shibboleths you must speak to gain entrance. I think for some people that's not a problem, because they naturally exist at the center of that community's norms. For instance, I recently went to a happy hour at my coworking space and discovered it was also a letter-writing session for Gaza. I started writing a letter asking for a ceasefire, but then my neighbor said "Who should we address it to?" And someone else said, "I'm sending mine to Scott Weiner."

I said, "Our state senator? Can a California legislator really effect a ceasefire in Gaza?"

Anyway I stopped writing my letter. It left a bad taste on my mouth to harangue the city's top Jewish pol for his Gaza stance (Weiner is anti-Netanyahu and wants peace in Gaza, but not in precisely the right terms that the left would prefer him to express those opinions). But to most of the people at the table it was infuriating that one of our city's politicians wasn't 100 percent in the Gaza camp—they had no need either to fake their participation or to hold back on their criticism.

Similarly, when I get together with other parents of kids at my daughter's preschool, they're often discussing, I don't know, summer camps or the terrible crime in SF or their house renovations. Not a problem at all! I get along fine with them, and am happy to talk, but they can sense that I'm just not really on the same page, I'm not part of the community.

And when I post about trans stuff, I often get a severe backlash from other trans people, who can tell, just from how I talk, that I'm a liberal, rather than a leftist (for instance, I operate from the assumption that no trans teen can or should take hormones / puberty blockers without parental consent). Again, it's totally fine for us to disagree, but it means I'm not a core part of these communities.

I don't want to take up a heroic pose. I don't think I'm an iconoclast—I'm actually a very typical member of my class—but there's just a mismatch of cultural markers that means it's hard for me to get close to a lot of other people. I have no idea why that is. I do attempt to conform. I'm definitely willing to write a Gaza letter, for instance. Or to humor someone when they discuss how opening up their marriage is what finally saved it! But to really belong, you need to do more than humor—you need to participate. Maybe I just don't participate enough.

Proust also has something of the frustrated idealist in him. He wants to experience some deep communion with his friends, but ultimately concludes such a thing is impossible. When his narrator makes friends with the young nobleman Robert de Saint-Loup, he realizes that he experiences no pleasure from the friendship and feels no connection with the man. And yet, whenever they are apart, the friendship somehow expands in his mind and becomes a treasured object.

As he writes later:

I had reached the point, at Balbec, of regarding the pleasure of playing with a troop of girls as less destructive of the spiritual life, to which at least it remains alien, than friendship, the whole effort of which is directed towards making us sacrifice the only part of ourselves that is real and incommunicable (otherwise than by means of art) to a superficial self which, unlike the other, finds no joy in its own being, but rather a vague, sentimental glow at feeling itself supported by external props, hospitalised in an extraneous individuality, where, happy in the protection that is afforded it there, it expresses its well-being in warm approval and marvels at qualities which it would denounce as failings and seek to correct in itself.

In other words, because friendship forces us to try to communicate the parts of ourselves that are incommunicable, it cheapens our souls.

In his own life, Proust retreats from the social world and starts hiding in his study, avoiding parties, purely so he can write these hundred-page descriptions of parties. In the memoirs of his housekeeper, Celeste Albaret, she says sometimes Proust would forget a detail he needed and only then would he rush out to a party and find the person he was writing about and watch them intently until he was certain he had fixed in his mind that one perfect gesture of theirs, and then he would return home to his solitude to write about it.

I think in Proust's mind, friendship, like all human experience, only gained meaning in his memory. It was the art of expanding and toying with and reliving these relationships that brought them a nobility that they lacked in life.

Personally, I think of friendship and community as animal needs. Mankind simply can't be alone. We are social animals. That's why I tend to seek out in-person friends and in-person community over online community. There's something about seeing and hearing and smelling another human being that's inherently more satisfying than exchanging text messages with them. Friendship is like eating or drinking--it's a necessity that isn't always a pleasure.

To bring things back around to phones and to loneliness, I just think there's a fundamental opposition between individualism and community. The more you're acculturated to think for yourself, determine your own values, and take nothing for granted, the less you'll be able to fit easily into any community and confidently affirm its values. To be community oriented you have to be what David Riesman calls “other-directed". Which is to say, exquisitely sensitive to the conventional wisdom.

In my case, the differences between me and surrounding communities are incredibly slight, and there ought to be some mechanism at work in me that unconsciously forces me into line—I ought to notice my opinions and behaviors slowly converging with those of people around me. And they do tend to, over time, but the action is extremely slow, such that I'm always about five years behind where I ought to be. For instance, I thought polyamory was extremely cringe back when all my friends started doing it, whereas now I feel more accepting of it, but it's kind of too late, and they've had kids and have moved on. I'm not an iconoclast, I'm just kind of slow to get with the program.

But there's also a sort of pleasure in being a curmudgeon, in being out of step, in thinking differently. I absolutely adore my Scott Weiner / Gaza anecdote, as you can tell, because it's so ridiculous, and because nobody else at the table saw the slightest problem with it. As Proust would note, friendship is often dull in the moment, and it's only in our memories that it become sharp.

And I wonder if today's lonely, anxious, and depressed people aren't themselves at least somewhat the victims of their own individuality. I've come to accept that to some degree I cling to my own loneliness, and perhaps that's true for the kids as well. Which doesn't mean the fault isn't our phones, but perhaps the phones don't create loneliness so much as they create a kind of independence that makes connecting to people feel both more difficult and less necessary.

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Personal Notes

• Thank you to the astonishingly large number of people who’ve subscribed in the last month. No idea where you all came from, but I’m pleased to have more readers. This blog was comfortably getting about 30-40 subscribers a month, but for the past few months it’s been more like 100.

• I had an essay come out in Slate, about how trans care bans rob families of the chance to come together and slowly explore the idea of a child transitioning.

• Appeared on the Write-Minded podcast. This one was a good one. I think the most productive exchange was about the idea of social responsibility in fiction. The podcast hosts tried to tell me that in literary fiction writers are told to “write to the question, not the answer” (i.e. embrace ambiguity). I said sure that’s the rhetoric, but if that’s the case, how are people producing so much fiction with such bland liberal politics? The example I used was that there’s no chance I’m going to read in Ocean Vuong that America was right to intervene in Vietnam actually. There are plenty of questions that literary fiction is pretty afraid to ask. I said that ultimately most literary writers have such bland politics that they don’t really need to worry about self-censorship—it’s only people like me, who genuinely do risk running afoul of speech codes, that have to worry about what we ought to or ought not say. Also talked about a bunch of other stuff, including the fact that so many writers have money they don’t talk about

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Reading

Finally got back around to reading Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketches. Am very happy I read that book on 19th-century Russian history first, because now I understand better than Turgenev was a Westernizer. In this he stands in contrast to the other major writer of his era, Gogol, who was a Slavophile. I also understand better that Turgenev was writing before the Crimean War and before the liberation of the serfs—two events that dramatically altered Russia’s conception of itself.

This is essentially a short story collection: the Turgenev character is a hunter in the Oryol district, between Moscow and Ukraine, and he just wanders around and tells us stories about the local gentry and peasantry that he runs into. The book is very dense—it makes no concessions to a foreign audience, and it’s really lacking in footnotes and explanatory materials. But it’s also beautiful and shockingly modern—it’s a work of straight realism, written almost ten years before Madame Bovary. Heavy on physical imagery in a way that’s extremely rare in 19th-century literature (I think it’s very influenced by pastoral poetry), and with an understated touch—situations and scenes are allowed to speak for themselves and to stand alone. Overall a very eerie, strange effect.

One of my favorite quotes, describing a nobleman who’s curiously lacking in many of the enthusiasms that rural gentry tend to display:

I was struck by the fact that I couldn’t find in him any passion for food or wine or hunting or Kursk nightingales or epileptic pigeons or Russian literature or trotting horses or Hungarian jackets or cards or billiards or going dancing in the evening or paying visits to the local town or the capital or paper and sugar-beet factories or brightly decorated gazebos or tea parties or trace-horses driven into bad ways or even fat coachmen with belts right up to their armpits, those magnificent coachmen whose every movement of their necks, God knows why, makes their eyes literally pop out of their heads … ‘What sort of a landowner is this?’ I thought. Besides he gave no impression whatever of being gloomy or dissatisfied with his fate. On the contrary, he literally radiated indiscriminate goodwill, cordiality and an almost shameful readiness to make friends with all and sundry. It’s true you had the feeling at the same time that he couldn’t really be friends, couldn’t really be on close terms with anyone, and he couldn’t not because he didn’t really need other people but because his whole life had been turned inwards. Studying Radilov closely I couldn’t ever imagine him happy, either now or at any time. He was also not endowed with good looks, but secreted in his eyes, in his smile and in his whole being there was something extraordinarily attractive – and yet it was secreted. So it seemed you wanted to know him better and really be friends with him. Of course, from time to time he showed signs of being the landowner and steppe-dweller he was, but as a man he was nevertheless a splendid chap.

Turgenev, Ivan. Sketches from a Hunter's Album: The Complete Edition (Classics) (pp. 66-67). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.