The Friendship Recession

The sheer reality is that a lot of Americans don't actually prioritize friendship as adults.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term “friendship recession,” it’s most associated with a guy named Dan Cox, and subsequently more associated with men than women. There’s been a lot of discussion, from nuanced to hand-wringing to superficial, about the state of friendships in America and beyond over the last five or so years. The normal culprits in this discussion are:

• Screen time

• COVID

• Neighbors don’t interact

• Convenience of modern life, but also…

• … busyness of modern life

• Etc.

That’s definitely a huge part of the picture, but it’s not the entire picture. I’ve written a ton about friendships in the past three years. I won’t link everything for you, because that would be utter overkill, but I’ll give you two that probably matter somewhat to this discussion first:

• A semi-comprehensive guide to modern friendship

• This moment in male friendships

Now let’s go to some other sources. First up, we have Richard Reeves (Reeve?) promoting a book about masculinity and discussing this “friendship recession:”

Now we’ve also got

Anne Helen Petersen

writing an article about — hey, you’d be happier living closer to friends, so why don’t you? Within said article, she gets to the root of the core issue: