Plus: Melinda and I share our first thoughts on “Saying No to College,“ by Paul Tough
Happy Thursday, loyal readers. In case you’re new here, or the holidays scrubbed your memory: Hi, I’m Mark, an educator in Oakland, and for the last 8-plus years, I’ve been sharing with you the very best articles on race, education, and culture. Thank you for being here.
This week, let’s read, listen, and talk about friends. Or to be more specific, let’s reflect on the friendship problem — how many of us say we want to spend more time with our friends, but rarely do. Scroll down to explore:
What’s going with our friendships?
Interested? Read this week’s lead article, “The Friendship Problem.”What can we do to decrease our loneliness and improve our friendships?
Interested? Listen to this week’s podcast, “The Quiet Catastrophe.”
Then, after you read and listen, I’d love it if you shared your thoughts. Our reading community is full of kind, thoughtful people. My hope this year is that we forge deeper connections through shared reading and conversation.
➡️ Do you wish for more or stronger friendships? What’s getting in the way?
➡️ What can we do to address “the friendship problem?”
⭐️ Join us for this month’s discussion of “Saying No to College,” by Paul Tough. It’s a great article about why more Americans are questioning the value of college. ICYMI, here’s last week’s issue with more info.
We’re meeting on Zoom on Sunday, January 28, from 2:00 to 3:30 pm PT. So far we have 18 people signed up (with a cap of 24), so if you’re interested, I urge you to take the leap — especially if you’re a parent, student, educator, or first-timer.
📚 If you’re already a yes: This week, let’s annotate the article together.
🤔 If you’re a maybe: Listen to fellow Article Clubber Melinda and I chat about the piece in this podcast episode. Don’t worry, there aren’t major spoilers!
1️⃣ The Friendship Problem
Rosie Spinks is a millennial mom living in London. This means we’re in no way alike. But the way she writes about friendship — it resonated deeply with me. And I have a feeling her essay will do the same with many of you.
Ms. Spinks explores what’s changed with modern friendships and why she feels less interested in making plans. It’s tiring, she writes:
It seems normal now that plans are made far in advance — scheduled around myriad travel and wedding weekends and kids and work commitments — and then canceled right before. Someone doesn’t follow up, or cancels and then never proposes an alternative plan. Similarly, promising new adult friendships never seem to blossom into the kind of quotidian check-ins and week-to-week ephemera that the friendship of our younger years is based on. Life-long friends make new life choices, drift apart. The friendship fizzles into WhatsApp volleys back and forth, and then someone doesn’t answer the last message, and then it’s a year before you ever talk again.
Has any of this happened to you? (For me, all of it.)
But instead of blaming motherhood, or the pandemic, or inflation, Ms. Spinks explores the “matrix of factors” that figure into the friendship burnout she’s experiencing. For guidance, she turns to Esther Perel (maybe we all should?), who explains that hyperconnectivity is to blame. “People have easily 1,000 virtual friends,” Dr. Perel says, “but no one they can ask to feed their cat.”
What to do, then? It’s time to remember our childhoods, Ms. Spinks suggests, especially as late-stage capitalism atomizes us into our lonely fiefdoms. It’s time to “play freely on the street.”
By Rosie Spinks • What Do We Do Now That We’re Here • 13 min
Say hi to loyal reader Rebecca (right), sporting the new Article Club T-shirt, and loyal reader Mike — who seems happy but is secretly jealous of Rebecca.
2️⃣ The Quiet Catastrophe
Picking up where “The Friendship Problem” leaves off, this conversation between Ezra Klein and Prof. Sheila Liming examines the structural issues underlying our friendship and loneliness crisis. In a freewheeling conversation, the two talk about a raft of problems, including the housing crisis, children living far from their families, the nuclear family itself, the ubiquity of phones, the rise of social media, the pervasiveness of AirPods (and the Sony Walkman!), and the loss of public spaces.
In our modern world, casual conversation, much less deep friendship, is now an intrusion, Dr. Liming suggests.
The remedy — hanging out with people, ideally in unplanned, unstructured, spontaneous ways — is easier said than done. After all, as Mr. Klein points out, class matters. The rich can hire a babysitter for a friends’ night out. They can pay a housecleaner while they grab a coffee with a bestie. But despite the inequities, Prof. Liming reminds us, friends don’t come easily. We have to keep reaching out.
With Sheila Liming • The Ezra Klein Show • 64 min • transcript • Apple Podcasts
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