The Generation Of Flakes

Did you know that making plans in 1996 meant you were actually expected to follow through? No, it’s true. A disquieting but incontrovertible fact. Back in the day, you didn’t have this plausibly deniable golden ticket that is the smartphone, an apparent modern get-out-of-jail-free card. You had your housebound telephone, your email, carrier pigeon, things like that.

If you made friends with your neighbor down the street, then great, you could probably just walk over to let them know your kid is sick. Otherwise, you weren’t getting out of your plans. With no smartphones, no texting, no Instagram stories, and usually no GPS, you were showing up to those afternoon plans with nothing but your word and a prayer. This was inconvenient and time-consuming, sometimes even oppressive. Plans required foresight, follow-through, and a willingness to show up even after the desire had passed.

Were people more choosy about their plans back then? Maybe. Getting lunch with your friend wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment Snapchat. It was planned. You had to think ahead, keep to your word, and show up whether or not you wanted to go anymore. You probably couldn’t get a hold of them whenever you wanted, and you had to get your bearings the old-fashioned way. Get lost? Time to ask a stranger for help. We’re getting there, whether it kills us. You probably didn’t have much else going on anyway. You definitely didn’t have an entire virtual cosmos vying for your participation.

Compare that to today’s social expectations. We agree to plans with friends, to dates with strangers, to lend family members a hand, but the promises mean little. There’s an implicit understanding when saying yes in the moment that we have one foot in, one foot out. “Yes” isn’t a sure deal anymore, more like a temporarily optimistic “probably not.” These promises feel like we’re kids secretly crossing our fingers behind our backs.

We hope to get away with the appearance of being supportive and present without ever actually having to be. With community and no virtual substitute, just people raw dogging life, people would show up to your kid’s birthday party or the celebration for your husband’s promotion or your dog’s bat mitzvah in the spirit of being there for each other. Now, showing up for earlier-arranged plans indicates, at most, that nothing better came up.

People on dating apps complain that people ghost them so often by silently unmatching or standing them up on dates. There’s now a protocol around reconfirming plans as the day and time approach. Friends feel more like Instagram mutuals than present companions in your life. Parents are overwhelmed by the ever-shifting standards for what makes good parents, but have never been more alone, atomized, and overwhelmed. This is where the saying “everyone wants a village, but no one wants to be a villager” comes from.

We hope to get away with the appearance of being supportive and present without ever actually having to be.

Is it because it really sucks that much to spend time in the company of other people when you could be living out your wildest Wall-E fantasies, or is it because plugging back into community when no one else is interested involves a net individual drain for no return? Writing for Slate under the pseudonym Clare-Haber-Harris, culture writer Cartoons Hate Her argued that many people don't actually seem to want a village, as evidenced by their lack of village-like behavior.

People move far away from family for work, and rather than socializing with friends and neighbors, they insist they're always too busy or going out of town. When people do have free time, they seem to prefer spending it with their nuclear family or traveling rather than helping a neighbor move. Then there are the increasingly stringent standards for caregivers, who must always be on alert for potential dangers to their children, which apparently lurk everywhere, including letting your children sleep over at other people's houses or letting anyone besides you or your husband watch your children.

These shifting standards are clearly at odds with an expansive village, especially as even family members are getting the cold shoulder when it comes to the extensive boundaries around the birth of a child and the rules they have to abide by to visit. CHH argues that while people like the idea of a village, they like it in the way people curate a neighborhood in The Sims: people who behave predictably because they've been pre-programmed to do what we want them to.

Not when it's your annoying, invasive in-laws or your 14-year-old neighbor looking for babysitting experience. You know, the people who are actually around us. But even if you do want a village and are willing to be a considerate villager to others, even if that involves inconvenience and strong characters, nobody else seems to be interested. You can’t have a party with no guests or a village with no villagers. Maybe this is just the way things are now, but do they have to be?

Everyone for Themselves

For The New York Times, Louise Perry traces the history and loss of the village model that made up more than 95 percent of our species’ history: living in small bands, constantly surrounded by others, with childcare duties falling to multigenerational women. While she describes various iterations popping up in modernity, real estate platforms advertising “multiplayer housing” like Live Near Friends, mommunes, female-only feminist communes of the ’70s, and multigenerational housing, they’re nameable because they’re rare.

Though Perry seems far more sold on the material and psychological benefits of the village of yesteryear, she’s just as skeptical of our supposed desire for it. “I suspect that what we actually want is something closer to a paid service, a community that we can subscribe to when it's convenient and back out of when it no longer works for us.” She contrasts her burden-free adolescence with her current life as a mother of two. She wishes she could pull her younger self away from her idleness and ask her to hold the baby for a moment while she puts dinner on. She fantasizes about recruiting her into her village but worries that she would say no. No one cares about being a good villager until they need a village.

We’re probably not returning to multi-generational living, and those of us more averse to cult tactics probably won’t join a commune, either. Unfortunately, more than the village has been lost. Community itself seems to be on the way out, with romantic relationships on the decline, along with marriage and birth rates. That means more people are aging while single and without families of their own. While studies show that you can get your needs for companionship met through friends, they don’t have those, either. All forms of socialization are on the decline, including attending house parties.

No one cares about being a good villager until they need a village.

Gen Z is in a “friendship recession” and in a loneliness epidemic, according to surveys that reveal 43% of Zoomers have no close friends and 60% regularly feel lonely. Digital interactions lack the depth and vulnerability that create lasting bonds, so why are so many young people opting for a hollowed-out version of companionship? Maybe they’re foregoing companionship altogether. It’s easier to have followers than to have friends, asymmetrical rather than symbiotic relationships. For a generation that has grown up on the internet, mainly in isolation, that asymmetry seems to be their relational preference, and that’s the problem.

In 2023, Bustle published a defense of canceling plans at the last minute. The author argues that despite being a frowned-upon social faux pas, it's “almost always a good idea” and gives seven reasons why there's “no excuse too small to bail out at the last minute.” Funnier than the tone-deaf list composed of such compelling reasons as “It saves money. No girl math required,” is the author’s belief that this behavior is reasonable because they're healing their “people pleaser” tendencies.

To that, I invoke Keara Sullivan's warning to “be really sure that you're pleasing people before you call yourself a people pleaser.” But that gets to the heart of the problem. We expect our individual needs, in this case course-correcting a pathology we created, to supersede everything else. It’s okay to selfishly cancel at the last minute because you’re “healing your relationship with people pleasing.” That’s really convenient. You see, it sounds like you’ve developed ideological immunity to just being an asshole, but now that I know you have a history of overextending yourself to others, I’m glad I’m the one being punished for it.

In that vein, you could say the culture of flakiness we have on our hands is downstream from a bigger problem: the breakdown of the social contract. We no longer seem to feel meaningfully responsible to one another. We flake on friends even for major life milestones like engagements, weddings, and baby showers with increasing nonchalance. Reports of last-minute cancellations, even on the day of, are becoming common.

It’s a real source of frustration for people with small circles or who reach these milestones later in life, with friends who’ve been married for years or already had children five to ten years ago. It’s like they feel as though, because they’ve already had their cake and eaten it, they have no duty to show up for their friend for whom it’s finally happening. What’s insulting is the pathetic excuses, running the gamut from vague feelings of unwellness to their kid getting sick or even “it’s too cold outside.” This is blatantly disrespectful and poor social etiquette, so why is it an epidemic right now?

Why Are We Okay With Being Flaky?

A few potential reasons: the internet has made us lazy because we no longer have to inconvenience ourselves, virtually ever. If you want a girlfriend, you can match with girls on an app. There's no need to cold approach one in real life. Hunger has a quick “delivered straight to your door” fix. Want connection? Join forums of thousands of like-minded people just like you, spread all across the globe, whom you never actually have to meet but can talk to night and day. We have too much convenience, to the point we now wonder why we should ever elect to inconvenience ourselves at all, even if the short-lived pain is a worthwhile investment.

Our self-reported feelings of dread in the moment are terrible predictors of how much we’ll enjoy actually following through. How many gym sessions have you loathed going to, only to be thankful you stuck it out and left the gym feeling refreshed and accomplished? How many assignments have you procrastinated only to find out writing that paper wasn’t that bad and didn’t take that long? We’re just as unreliable at judging how much we’ll hate going out when we don’t feel like it.

Convenience culture makes us lazy and selfish in our relationships because it trains us to be lazy and selfish in every facet of our lives.

Sometimes, to be a good friend, you really do need to “do it miserable.” You might find your anticipated misery never arrives. It’s just that we’ve conditioned ourselves to expect frictionless rewards, free dopamine for minimal effort. But the most meaningful things in life carry steep upfront costs. To find the love of your life, you have to go on some bad dates. To have a loving family, you have to go through childbirth and clean up vomit. To get shredded, you have to be vigilant about your diet and lift weights. To have deep friendships that mean anything, there will be times you have to show up when you don’t want to.

Convenience culture makes us lazy and selfish in our relationships because it trains us to be lazy and selfish in every facet of our lives. As a consequence, we have a selfish, me-first, hyper-individualist mentality that is often justified in therapy-speak, like “protecting our peace” and “setting boundaries.” At the same time, belief in the sacredness of institutions such as marriage, motherhood, and even love has eroded. Many young women now frame opting out of these roles as a form of self-advocacy or self-protection, sometimes expressing anger that previous generations of women, such as their own mothers or grandmothers, failed to “warn” them.

Warn them of what, exactly? That such lives are marked by sacrifice. By obligation. By putting someone else first repeatedly and without guarantee of reward. This helps explain why there’s so little sense of duty toward the women who do choose these paths, who become wives and mothers anyway. These roles are increasingly understood as foolish self-sacrifice, if not outright self-harm. And so those who inhabit them are treated the way one might treat a friend in an obviously bad relationship: with pity, impatience, and eventual compassion fatigue.

Nothing is sacred. Nothing is important. Nothing is real. (I mean, how could you believe a pregnancy is sacred, or that a marriage will last, or that men aren’t trash?) So it’s no wonder your best friend doesn’t show up to your engagement party, your wedding, or your baby shower. In her eyes, your celebration is antiquated and illegitimate, and you, unfortunately, are a sucker for having believed in it. As wrong as it may be, it’s hard to deny that our culture consistently rewards the more Machiavellian option. You could even argue that choosing it is rational.

Some people are fighting back by encouraging people to be the villagers you’d want in your own village. Reminders like “inconvenience is the cost of community” circulate online, often accompanied by footage of people doing tedious tasks for their loved ones, somewhat begrudgingly, in hopes of being similarly indebted to them. I’ve given the same advice: that you have to give to receive. The advice is no less good or true than it was when I first said it, but it’s worth interrogating the intentions behind it.

When I spell out that to be the beneficiary of community and the various rewards that entail, you need to have something to offer, I’m approaching it like an academic study. I’m a culture writer dissecting sociological trends, which requires a degree of impersonal objectivity. But I’d like to point out that in my day-to-day life, I’m not consciously thinking about such things analytically or entering relationships for utilitarian gain.

What I worry about is that so many are. That we’re aware of the problem, of our own insufficiencies, of the things we should want to do and how we should behave, but that these aren’t borne out of the soul. They aren’t earnest. They’re opportunistic. Transactional. Old norms were more prosocial, not just because we didn’t have the internet and were all just forced to hang out with each other, but because we had a real investment in our relationships. We wanted to see others thrive, to be there for each other, to bear witness to our loved ones’ highs and console them at their lows. It was what people did, for its own sake. Now, people are doing it because they've internalized discourse about why showing up is instrumentally useful.

Wisdom from Happiness Expert Arthur C. Brooks

Arthur C. Brooks, author, columnist, and one of the leading experts on the science of happiness, once described this problem in The Atlantic as the difference between “deal friends” and real ones. Writing about what he calls “expedient friendships,” he argues that too many modern relationships are maintained not for their own sake but for what they can provide. They are “instrumental to some other goal, such as furthering one's career or easing a social dynamic.” He casts this type of friend as the lowest rung of the friendship ladder, as Aristotle describes it in the Nicomachean Ethics.

At the bottom rung are deal friends, where emotional bonds are weakest and happiness benefits are lowest. These are friendships based on utility to each other in work or social life. Above this rung are friendships based on pleasure, where each of you is bonded by your admiration for some possessed quality like humor or intelligence. The highest aspirational level of friendship, however, what Aristotle called “perfect friendship,” is pursued for its own sake, not as an instrument to anything else. He would say they are “complete” in that they are pursued for their own sake and fully realized in the present. Deal friendships are incomplete partly because they don't involve the whole self.

Until we relearn how to show up without keeping score, no amount of discourse will bring the village back.

If you are friends for the sake of networking, this limits your ability to behave outside of a professional capacity. Such a relationship precludes the intimacy of difficult conversations, confrontation, and vulnerability. Brooks suggests our culture pushes us further toward “deal friendships” because of our work culture, which involves spending most of our time with work colleagues and leaves us little time to invest in other types of relationships. Forming real friendships is also more difficult for men, whose relationships tend to be based around shared activities rather than social and emotional support. This can cause us to lose sight, he argues, of the most basic of human needs: to know others deeply and to be deeply known by them.

Brooks says the key to building perfect friendships is to see relationships not as stepping stones to something else but as “boons to pursue for their own sake.” He suggests making friends outside of all professional and educational networks, such as a house of worship, a place you engage in hobbies, or a charitable cause unrelated to your work, where you truly cannot provide each other with anything of material utility, only good company and genuine caring. The purest form of love, Brooks supposes, is to love someone you don't need. We have it backwards and are paying the price. Until we relearn how to show up without keeping score, no amount of discourse will bring the village back.