Young people are lonelier than ever
vice.com
vice.com
You need the right "optics and sonics" to be a viable and valuable friend. Otherwise you are just an awkward country cousin without any connections that need excuses to made whenever in civilised company.
It seems like people have taken the saying "you become like the five people closest to you" to heart, but so few people today are desirable role models for anyone.
I feel like the natural progression for communities where this pattern occurs is for the misfits to band together and form a counterculture.
They do, but they do it online, and across the entire globe, rather than by finding common cause with other local misfits, which leads to more social isolation, and the wheel keeps spinning.
Having that trust in an other person can be quite difficult in an generation where everything is, and has to be on social media.
Love is a selfish pursuit. The vast majority of people, historically and in modern times, didn't pursue a relationship out of the goodness of their heart.
“According to a 2012 study by Statistic Brain, 53.25% of marriages are arranged worldwide. The global divorce rate for arranged marriages was 6.3%”
I also have a theory that people often clump together in larger groups of givers/cooperators versus groups of takers/defectors. The giver groups usually exclude selfish people. The takers still end up in a social grouping, and may cooperate in the short term, but they just seem unaware that they are actually part of a group of fundamentally selfish people (what’s in it for me?) or rationalise their group as givers when they are actually takers (obvious religious and political examples).
So many people are just not interested. Or maybe they're too afraid to be interested. Or maybe they have distorted expectations of themselves before they think they'll be cool enough to show interest. Starting a conversation feels like a massive risk.
And all of this existed before the pandemic started. Add all the social distancing to the mix and we have a population of introverts.
This is backwards. Rather, unsolicited DMs are only acceptable if you are already deemed interesting, ie some sort of social media "celebrity".
To quote an old song, ""What good is sitting alone in your room? Come hear the music play. Life is a Cabaret, old chum,Come to the Cabaret."
If you go out trying to be a friend, friends are everywhere."
-- Zig Zigglar
I also wouldn't be surprised if 30% was a normal number historically.
I've seen this with employees as well - they can't do the more basic tasks like calling a customer or "playing nice" with other employees as a team.
And all we have to protect ourselves, is our over-exerted self-control mechanism.