5. What happened to deep meaningful relationships?
I’ve been watching a lot of Simon Sinek videos recently. He’s a great speaker, and I genuinely admire him.
In one of his videos, he said something that really hit home for me. Discussing a topic of millenials, he stated ‘Millenials nowadays want everything instantly. You want acknowledgement — BAM — instant gratification. Except job satisfaction and deep relationships — those take work and long interaction.’
That’s a very bad paraphrase, but you get what I mean.
Deep and meaningful relationships are rare. Sure, we have friends. We can have fun with our friends. But we don’t trust our friends. We secretly harbor hatred, we smile unsincerely, we laugh hollowly. Our relationships are based more on virtual characters typed in rather than lengthy conversations.
I honestly feel this rings true for me. I rarely feel like I have friends I can trust. When I have problems, I don’t turn to a certain person and spill my sorrows. I choose to post vague sentences on social media. My coping mechanism is not in the form of discussing my problems, but rather in the form of brooding in silence.
But I’m not the only one.
Flip through your Snapchat and Instagram Story and you’ll find at least one of your friends has posted a photo of a white sentence on a black background, usually made so small no one can read it or turned upside down or both. We don’t want people to read our feelings — hell we don’t even want them to respond. We want to get our feelings out there, regardless whether people care or not.
In any other situation, this would be considered as emotionally disfunctional right? Instead of looking for a solution or comfort by telling our friends, we decide to treat our feelings similarly to how we treat a bowl of food or a selfie — we upload them. Sadly, this is not considered a disease or a virus.
It’s a social norm.
However, this is not entirely our fault. We were ‘dealt a bad card’. Born in a world where our interactions happen more on the Internet rather than face-to-face. Born in a world where information is instantaneous and without obstacle. Born in a world where the most prominent addiction is not alcohol nor drugs — it’s phones.
To say that deep relationships are non-existent is unrealistic. It’s likely you still have that one friend you can count on most of the time.
But to say that deep relationships can and should become the social norm is idealistic. We enjoy virtual interaction so much that we can’t shove it to the side. Chatting with our friends two islands away while sitting with our friends eating dinner is no longer something odd. Everyone else is probably doing it too.
But we can try.
Leave your phone when you go out. Charge your phone in the living room. Turn your phone off from time to time. Keep it in your bag rather than your pocket. Put down your phone while in the car and try to strike up a conversation with your buddy. Just because no one else is changing, doesn’t mean we can’t try to.
Because trust is not built on serious virtual chats and Instagram likes, but on pointless face-to-face conversations and shared laughter.
