- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
I do appreciate solitude; I enjoy reading, cooking, and all forms of exercising on my own. Yet I do also need to have meaningful connections and conversations in my life, and I've found that those have started to disappear.
I'm unsure if their gradual disappearance is due to my age (39), or to the fact that I'm still single (and thus have lost social viability), or to fundamental changes in society (cell phones, internet, and so on). I used to have quite a full and vibrant social life (up through my early thirties), but these days I repeatedly encounter the following: people who respond to emails or phone calls weeks or months after receiving them; people who only contact me when they need audience members for performances or are otherwise trying to sell something; women who seem quite interested in getting together until a potential boyfriend appears on the scene. There is one particular "friend" who starts every phone conversation with the phrase "I only have ten minutes because," which makes me want to punch her. I had an extremely close friend cut off all contact for two years with a vague reference to "things she was going through" only to suddenly reappear two years later, expecting the friendship to resume where it had left off without a hitch. This is on top of a brutal dating scene in which a lot of men communicate their disinterest by completely vanishing (okay, that one may be somewhat unique to Los Angeles, but I've encountered the other behaviors in different areas of the country).
I really have to wonder if anyone is interested in having friendships of any depth any more, or if we have become a totally mercenary culture, where meaningful conversation is worthless because there's no cash value associated with it and it can't "get you ahead."
