Notes ·
My Small Answer to the Friendship Recession Is to Tell My Friends They Matter
Joshua MorrisNick Gray has been documenting what he calls the friendship recession, and the numbers are pretty depressing. In 1990, only 3% of Americans said they had no close friends. By 2024, that number had climbed to 17%. We are spending less time with friends, maintaining fewer close relationships, and apparently getting worse at making new ones as adults.
I don't think there is one simple explanation for that. Work changed, families move farther apart, and a lot of the places where people used to regularly bump into the same people have disappeared or changed. The internet connected us to almost everyone while somehow making it easier to lose track of the people we actually know. Social media gives us the strange feeling that we are keeping up with somebody because we saw a photograph of their vacation six months ago, even though we haven't actually spoken to them in years.
I know I have been guilty of that.
Nick recently invited me to make a /friends page for my personal website. The idea is wonderfully simple: put a page at /friends, link to people you know and care about, say something about them, and give other people a path into their little corner of the internet. It is basically an old-fashioned blogroll with more emphasis on the people behind the websites, which is probably why I liked the idea immediately.
I miss blogrolls and the older web where personal sites constantly pointed at other personal sites simply because somebody thought you should go see them. But once I started building my own /friends page, it became much more personal than a collection of links. I had to sit down and actually think about my friends.
Not followers or contacts or LinkedIn connections, but people I have known. People I worked beside years ago, built things with, learned from and laughed with. People I met through programming groups, games, work, the early web, and all the other strange places life puts people together. Some are people I still talk with regularly, while others are people I realized I had allowed far too much time to pass without saying hello.
That has been the unexpectedly important part of building the page. A link is not a friendship, and putting someone's name on a website does not maintain a relationship. The useful part is what happens when making the page reminds you of someone and you decide to tell them they are there.
I don't want the people who have mattered to me to have to guess whether they mattered.
We are pretty bad at saying this stuff
I think adults, and probably men in particular, can become remarkably bad at telling our friends what they mean to us. We will tell stories about someone, recommend them for a job, remember something funny they did twenty years ago, or think about calling them because something reminded us of them. Somehow that thought doesn't always make the final jump into an actual phone call or message.
Nothing dramatic has to happen for a friendship to disappear. Nobody gets angry and there is no falling out. A few weeks become a few months, then a few years, and eventually somebody who used to be part of your everyday life becomes a person you haven't spoken to in ten years. Life simply accumulated between you.
I think that may be one of the saddest ways to lose a friendship because nobody actually decided to lose it.
Building the /friends page has already made me go looking for people again. I have been remembering names, searching for old websites, reading what people are working on now, digging through old email, and reaching out to people I haven't spoken with in far too long. Some of those searches have brought back entire periods of my life I had not thought about in years.
That is worth considerably more to me than whatever SEO value a page full of outbound links might have.
The old web understood something about people
There is also something about /friends that fits perfectly with why I have been enjoying personal websites again. The older web was full of links that existed because somebody simply wanted you to see something. Here is my friend. Here is the weird thing they built. Here is somebody whose writing I like. Go look at their website.
Modern platforms flattened much of that into follows, recommendations, engagement graphs and algorithms. We have systems capable of identifying thousands of people we might theoretically know while somehow making the relationships themselves feel less visible. The person becomes another account in a feed, and after enough time it is surprisingly easy to forget that there is somebody you actually knew behind it.
A /friends page is almost comically small by comparison. It is just one person pointing at another person and saying that you should know about them. I like that.
Slashfriends.org makes those pages easier to discover by putting them at the same predictable address across personal websites and collecting them into a directory. There are already well over a hundred sites participating, and wandering through them feels a little like following old blogrolls. One person's page leads to another person, which leads to another small website you probably never would have discovered through a search engine or social feed.
That is good for the independent web, but I am starting to think the more important part may be what it does to the person making the page. You have to stop treating your social world as an endless collection of accounts and ask a much more human question: who are my people?
My friends should know
I don't expect a Markdown file on my personal website to solve the friendship recession. That would be putting a lot of responsibility on a fairly small piece of HTML. But I do think there is something useful about deliberately taking inventory of the people who have mattered to you and then doing something with that realization.
I want to keep adding people to my /friends page, but the link is only part of it. When I add somebody, I want to reach out and tell them they are there and why. Maybe we worked together twenty years ago and they taught me something I still use. Maybe they were there during an important part of my life. Maybe we haven't spoken in years and I simply miss them. Maybe they make something wonderful and I want more people to know about it. Maybe they are somebody I talk with all the time and I have simply never bothered to say plainly that I appreciate having them in my life.
There doesn't need to be an occasion for that.
One of the things I have been reminded of lately is how quickly years disappear. Waiting until a retirement, a reunion, a funeral, or some other major event to tell somebody what they meant to us seems like a pretty terrible system. I would rather tell them while we are both still here to have the conversation.
If there really is a friendship recession, I don't know how to fix it nationally. I can't manufacture community for millions of people, and I don't think another social platform is going to do it for us. But I can call an old friend. I can send an email. I can make an introduction. I can put somebody's little website on my little website and tell them, plainly, that they matter to me.
That seems like a reasonable place to start.
Read Nick Gray's work on the Friendship Recession.