Recently, a close loss forced me to stop and evaluate how I show up for the people I love. I think it made me realize how easily we drift from those who matter most, and how, as we grow older, maintaining connections becomes a more intentional task. I decided that I need to take the time to reconnect with people.
This was around Christmastime, and I remembered the old Christmas cards I was ‘forced’ to write for my family and friends. It used to be such a pain to sit there for hours, struggling to remember the year’s highlights and find the right words while my parents watched over my shoulder with judging eyes.
But I pushed through because I remembered what it felt like to be on the other side: I enjoyed reading letters from friends and family, and I remember the specific weight of their words. I had come to appreciate the time spent thinking about people who matter to me.
Yet, as I grow older, I find myself becoming more estranged from people I once saw every day. I believe there is a strange kind of alienation that settles in as we move through our 20s. A feeling that, despite the ‘better’ technology at our fingertips, we have become spectators of each other’s experiences rather than participants in their lives.
We are so connected to the image of a life, yet so detached from the reality of it. So, as a reminder of the past, I decided to handwrite Christmas cards to my best friends, and other people who have made an impact on my life. This time, I wouldn’t do it for the sake of tradition.
I’ve realized that I am not doing enough, and I believe that our modern ways of staying ‘in touch’ are failing us. For me, this effort boils down to two main convictions.
Firstly, I find that we need to reconnect with people and rebuild that organic community that we are losing to technological life. Connection matters. To show care we need to learn how someone thinks and feels.
In his landmark study Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam famously argued that our civic and social ‘muscles’ are atrophying because we have moved from collective, face-to-face activities to individualized, screen-based ones. And so we are ‘bowling alone,’ or in our case, ‘scrolling alone.’ As we lose these organic spaces, we lose the warmth of a life lived in community.
I believe that as we get older, friends begin to spend more and more time apart, and are involved in more obligations, work, school, or even, in my case, on other continents. Being apart starts to feel normal, and hanging out becomes a Herculean task.
In today’s world, social connection is being squeezed by two major forces: a ‘productivity-first’ work ethic and the rising cost of living: friendflation.
I begin to unconsciously assign values to activities in our friendship through cost, a dinner, a pub night, a movie out, every hangout has a price value attached to it, influencing our perception of friendship. Remember when we were young, when we were in school, there was no difference between hanging out on the field or inside playing card games. They were different kinds of fun, but equally meaningful, as neither was measured by money or productivity.
It’s important to realize that a handwritten card or a simple check-in that costs almost nothing carries immense value. We need to return to that playground mentality and forget that ‘pay to play’ part of modern adulthood.
I also find that the world nowadays is quite in juxtaposition; we are so connected yet so disconnected at the same time. This is most obvious on platforms like Instagram, where I see people casually scrolling past each other’s lives. I find that due to the advent of technology, we don’t really talk anymore, not in a way that asks, “How are you, truly?” and to connect with others in a genuine way.
It seems unnecessary to think about, but I could imagine two long-lost friends who still follow each other on social media going a decade without ever exchanging a word. As we become comfortable with the image that is shown to us, there is no desire to learn and connect with people. We know where they went on vacation or what they had for lunch, and we feel like the ‘need’ for conversation has been satisfied. Yet more often than not, we are unaware of the other person’s struggles and difficulties as they hide behind the screen.
As such, we’ve become spectators of each other’s highlights, but strangers to each other’s realities.
I hope people can get back into the habit of checking up on their friends. There is a self-imposed barrier of insecurity that often tells us reaching out is weird or that showing care makes us look vulnerable in a way we aren’t comfortable with. We hide behind a wall of apathy, assuming that if someone needed us, they’d post about it.
But true connection doesn’t happen in the comments section; it takes action. By handwriting a card or sending a text that bypasses the ‘feed,’ we are telling our friends that they don’t have to be ‘right’ or ‘marketable’ to be worth our time.
They just have to be them. We need to stop being satisfied with what is ‘shown’ and reconnect with the parts of us that can’t be captured in a photo.
So, skip the scroll. Pick up a pen. And please, write that card.
Roy Su is a fourth-year student studying communication, culture, information & technology and computer science at UTM, and is the What’s New in News Columnist for The Varsity’s Opinion section.
