Somewhere between “drop a pin” and “drop a like,” friendship got… flatter. We DM like poets, comment like cheerleaders, and send voice notes long enough to qualify as podcasts. It all feels connected, until you’re celebrating something huge (or feel like you’re falling apart) and realize your “besties” can’t meet you at the bar, watch your kid for an hour, or sit with you while you say the hard thing out loud.

This isn’t an anti-internet rant. Online friends can be real friends. But it’s rare. Because when most of our connection lives on platforms built to maximize scrolling, not staying, the quality of our friendships drop. We trade depth for frequency, endurance for engagement, and belonging for visibility. We are present for the performance, not the person. And that swap has a cost.

Social media makes intimacy feel instant: you share, I heart, we exist inside the same joke. It’s low-risk, low-friction, and (let’s be honest) wildly convenient. You can maintain dozens of “friendships” between emails, in line at Sweetgreen, or at 1:03 a.m. from bed.

But friction isn’t a bug of friendship—it’s a feature. The logistics of meeting up, the awkwardness of a first coffee, the silence between sentences—those are the places where trust grows. Apps optimize away all that “wasted time.” Then we wonder why everything feels disposable.

The Cost: Loneliness in a Loud Room

When friendship lives mostly on screens, our social muscles atrophy. Asking, planning, and hosting start to feel like heavy lifts instead of simple gestures, so we stop practicing them. And then we stop believing we can.

Then, we lose context and nonverbal truth - the room’s temperature, the server’s eye roll, the playlist, all the small atmospheres that glue people together. We also get conflict-averse. It’s miles easier to mute a chat than repair a relationship. Screens let us disappear mid-disagreement and call it “space,” when what we actually needed was an awkward apology, a clarifying question, or ten quiet minutes across a table until the heat in our chest dropped a few degrees. Face to face forces reps in rupture and repair, DMs reward avoidance.

Ritual disappears, and with it, that gentle staircase from acquaintance to “text me when you get home.” Without third places—the bar, the café, the studio, the park—we lose the casual repetition that quietly turns proximity into history. And eventually we start to feel replaceable. In feeds, you’re one swipe from someone shinier, wittier, more “on.” Across a table, you’re one honest conversation from being seen. Algorithms reward novelty; friendships reward continuity. That difference changes how brave we are with each other.

How to Tell It’s Happening

You “talk” to people daily but can’t remember the last time you sat across from them. Plans feel heavy while reacting to Stories feels “enough.” You’re more comfortable typing a thoughtful paragraph than sending a three-line invite. You feel oddly jealous of people you never see. Your last five “hangs” were plans that never left the chat. If you’re nodding, you’re normal. But normal isn’t the goal. Connected is.

If you’re thinking, “But I love the internet,” great. Same. Keep it. Just use it as the tool it was intended to be, not a town square. This isn’t a call to delete apps; it’s a call to rebalance them. The best way to start, in my humble opinion, is with the 3–2–1 rule each week: aim for three light IRL touchpoints—a coffee, a walk, a class, a quick drink—then send two new, low-lift invites with a specific time and place, and protect one deeper hang where phones stay away and the window is longer.

Then, make lingering legal in your own routine. Choose two third spaces you genuinely like and show up at the same time each week for a month. Set phone culture, not phone bans: a bowl for devices at dinner, make the last twenty minutes of your day screen-free, or chuck it on airplane mode for one weekly walk. It’s astonishing how quickly these little habits can rewire your social life.

At the end of the day, friendship isn’t built by better captions; it’s built by better calendars. Pick a person, pick a place, pick a time, and go - awkward, underdressed, five minutes late, whatever. Order something to share. Ask one real question. Book the next one before you leave the table. Get the fuck off your phone and look up. Look around. Because whilst the internet can be where the spark starts, let your life be where the fire lives.

Until next time x