Friendships happen to be one of the  most essential parts of my life. I value my relationships in varying degrees over the past few years but more so recently. I’m learning the essence of creating community, the art of checking in and being closer even if we are separated by distance. 

It’s not easy to grow in relationships because they challenge us. Inconvenience is the currency we pay for community. You are training yourself to hold space for others so they do the same for you. Instead of taking forever to respond, you do it now because you understand that people, although busy, create time for people who matter. 

With a daily screen time average of 10 hours, are we really unavailable or have we replaced responding to well intentioned texts with doom scrolling? Little wonder why we feel drained when we’ve spent all day looking at thousands of people living their lives while we sacrifice ours for a 10 second glimpse into theirs. We’ve forgotten that these little computers we carry around were designed to facilitate communication not inhibit them. 

With our for you pages being forever refreshed, we never need to log off the app because just as ‘it’s 5pm somewhere’ is the universal excuse to drink at any time we please, ‘someone’s always updating’ is our reason to never put down our phones. We have more than enough time to get things done we just never get around to doing so because we are always on our damned phone. Our parents were right, it is the phones. 

We can barely hold conversations, or make eye contact, or worse we use AI to do everything from responding to work emails to doing research projects. ‘it’s easier’, we tell ourselves but in truth we’re just becoming dumber. But isn’t that the aim of capitalism? Like a toxic partner aiming to isolate us from the world around us so we turn to overconsumption to fill this void. We scroll endlessly because that is better than being forced to acknowledge that we have a real problem, an addiction. 

We say we’re low maintenance friends but in reality we’re not friends at all even though we are surrounded by the constant bustle of others living on. We haven’t talked in weeks but delude ourselves into thinking we’re still holding space for each other. What we fail to see is we’re always growing, life is always happening and we are not the same person we were months ago. So much has happened and inevitably we fall out of sync with one another. 

I’ve never been a low maintenance anything, talk more a friend. I like my connections, real. I like to have friends in every sense of the word. People who I can text at any time, trade ideas with, have spirited debates, learn, grow, laugh and age together. 

It’s not always easy as after a long day the last thing anyone wants to do is have their ears talked off but that’s the price you pay for the ones that really matter. As life is best when we have people to share it with.