The Friendship We've Lost
(And How to Get It Back)

Something strange is happening to friendship. We have more ways to stay connected than any generation in history, yet we're lonelier than ever.

The numbers are stark. The average American has fewer close friends today than at any point in recorded history. In 1990, 33% of Americans reported having 10 or more close friends. By 2021, that number had dropped to 13%. The share reporting zero close friends quadrupled — from 3% to 12%.

Men are hit hardest. Only 21% of men reported receiving emotional support from a friend in the past week, compared to 41% of women. One in five men say they have no close friends at all.

This isn't about being antisocial. Most people want deeper friendships. They just don't know how to maintain them.

What happened

Three things converged to make friendship harder than it's ever been:

Geography fragmented. We move for school, for jobs, for partners. The friends we made at 22 scatter across time zones. Maintaining relationships across distance requires more effort than maintaining them when you're in the same dorm, the same office, the same neighborhood.

Time compressed. Work expands. Kids need everything. The commute takes longer than it used to. By the time you have a free evening, you're too tired to do anything but watch something. Friendship moves to the bottom of the list because it doesn't scream at you the way email does.

Technology substituted. We replaced the substance of friendship with the appearance of it. Instagram lets you feel like you know someone because you saw their vacation photos. The group chat creates the illusion of connection — everyone's talking, but nobody's saying anything. We optimized for staying “in touch” without actually touching.

The illusion of connection

Here's the trap: the tools we use to stay connected were never designed to deepen connection. They were designed to maximize our attention.

Every major social platform makes money from ads. Ads require attention. Attention requires engagement. Engagement requires triggers — FOMO, outrage, validation-seeking, status games.

So we scroll past a friend's post about their new job, maybe double-tap if we're feeling generous, and move on. We know the headline of their life but none of the paragraphs. We have 500 “friends” and no one we'd call if something went wrong.

The group chat is better but still broken. Important things get buried under memes. The person going through something hard doesn't want to bring it up because the vibe is light. Everything blurs together into an endless stream of logistics and jokes.

We're constantly connected and deeply alone.

What friendship actually needs

Real friendship — the kind that sustains you through hard times, that makes life richer, that you remember on your deathbed — requires things that modern life makes difficult:

Time. Not infinite time, but regular, undivided attention. Thirty minutes of real conversation beats hours of passive scrolling.

Depth. Knowing not just what someone did but how they felt about it. Understanding their struggles, fears, hopes. The kind of conversation that can't happen in a group chat.

Memory. Remembering what they told you last time. Following up. Showing that you were actually listening. That you care enough to keep track.

Presence. Actually seeing each other. Sharing a meal. Being in the same room. The algorithm can't replace the feeling of sitting across from someone who knows you.

A different approach

What if we built technology that actually helped with this? Not technology that pretends to connect us while harvesting our attention. Technology that makes the hard work of friendship slightly easier.

A place where you can write what you're really thinking — not a caption for strangers, but an actual thought for the people who matter.

A place where conversations don't get buried. Where the question “what's actually going on with you?” has somewhere to live.

A place that helps you remember what your friends are going through, so you can be the friend who follows up, who notices, who cares.

A place that makes it easier to actually see each other — not through 47 messages figuring out when everyone's free, but through tools designed to make gathering happen.

Private. Encrypted. Not trying to maximize your time spent. Not showing you what an algorithm thinks you want. Just you and the people you actually know.

The point

We're not going to solve the friendship recession with an app. The solution is the same as it's always been: show up, pay attention, make the effort. Friendship is work. Good work, but work.

But maybe the tools we use don't have to make it harder. Maybe they could make it slightly easier. Maybe there's room for technology that respects what friendship actually is — not a game to be optimized, not a metric to be maximized, but a practice to be maintained.

That's what we're trying to build.