Returning to the Streets
In every house on my street, there was a kid my age. My childhood consisted of knocking on doors and gathering small troops of neighborhood kids to play fantastical magic games. We would play until our parents called us in for dinner, begrudgingly shuffling home heads hung in defeat, hands covered in chalk, shoes caked in dirt, and the battle scars of asphalt-scraped knees. The sadness never lasted long because every day we would return to the street, an expansive place of limitless possibilities for our imaginations to run free. I never had reservations about knocking on doors or yelling over fences because I knew that eventually, someone would run around with me. The camaraderie was so easy, perhaps it was from a place of convenience but there was an effortless nature about it. That's not to say that there wasn't constant bickering or the occasional fight, but there was no contempt.
Eventually, everyone moved away, I stopped riding my bike, and I started middle school. My days of playing outside were coming to an end and I retired to my room. Getting a phone really seemed to seal the deal. Now the street is hardly an expansive place, I don't remember the last time I touched chalk, reaching out to a friend can feel like a daunting task, and I am full of petty contempt.
It’s when I began to transition away from play that loneliness crept in on me, I lost a sense of limitless possibilities. Now I am bound by choices and loneliness feels like a dichotomy, solitude amongst hyperconnectivity. I know more people now than ever yet it seems as though no one is just a door knock away. I can't help but wonder if this is just a matter of maturing or if this is the nature of relationships in the digital age.
I would argue that while the nature of relationships is bound to change as our lives do, the internet has fostered inhumane social scapes that aren't designed to allow relationships to flourish. Our lives have been streamlined into a timeline that couldn't conceive of the nuances and multiplicities that friendships have to be sustained. Social media paradoxically has dulled our social muscle. In just a few swipes through Instagram, TikTok, and your email, you could have “interacted” with more people in minutes than people used to in a year. Whether you are conscious of it or not– this level of connection is exhausting. Then coupled with schoolwork, jobs, clubs, etc. maintaining relationships begins to feel more like work becoming increasingly less “low stakes” and nourishing. It becomes increasingly easy to become dependent on yourself in order to avoid the added stressor of conflict in relationships. But this line of logic has led to frictionless friendships, relationships devoid of the beautifully mundane vulnerable aspects of relationships that humans have historically relied on. As Rosie Sprinks points out in her essay The Friendship Problem “Friendships are, by their very nature, made of friction.” an attempt to eliminate this has contributed to an increasingly pervasive “social atrophy” where we are no longer capable of casually interacting with each other. She argues that we need “to rediscover ourselves as a social species”.
I believe this rediscovery comes in the form of recontextualizing our relationships as a place of play and work. For many of us streets and playgrounds are where we grew our social muscles, playing was our work. It is where we learned to solve conflict, ask for help, and be ourselves. It is in this understanding of friendship that nuances and friction are allowed to thrive and the limitless possibilities that we held as children are welcomed to return. Our generation is the first to navigate friendships in these increasingly prevalent digital scapes. We are on a new frontier of friendship “a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils -- a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats”. By remembering the origins of friendship as play we become less susceptible to the threats presented by technology allowing ourselves to thrive as the social beings we are meant to be.
Sources:
Kennedy, John F. Acceptance Speech of the Democratic Nomination for President. Delivered at the Democratic National Convention, Los Angeles, CA, July 15, 1960