Un-commoditizing Friendship

A charred Redwood in Big Basin State Park, new green growth emerging from branches at the top of the tree.

Much has been written about young people recently: our pathetic work ethic, distractibility, and self obsession. Republicans nakedly disdain us, waxing poetic about how we are lazy, and too comfortable, despite, when adjusted for inflation, us having a fraction of the wages and wealth compared to boomers at our age. Most Democrats give good stump speeches about economic inequality while quietly legislating on the motto shared by politicians across the political spectrum: that the poor are too rich and the rich too poor. Where I live in Massachusetts, newly minted Governor Maura Healey’s first budget is defined by its hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tax cuts for the uber wealthy.

So despite oligarchs like Elon Musk and whatever billionaire owns “Business Insider” attempting to incite moral panic over young people quitting dead end jobs and working from home, the truth is that, unless you are severely disabled or severely rich, you work in this country. We may not all slog downtown to sit in an office with the ambience of an interrogation room for 8 hours a day, but we still exist within the same parasitic economic system that demands participation or destitution, eagerly slurping our productivity and transforming it into levels of wealth that would make Carnegie and Rockefeller blush. The difference between our parents' generation and ours is perhaps that the ruling class has given up on any pretense of hiding their contempt for us.

Much ink has also been spilled on the doom spelled by our use of social media, delivery services, and video games. And while I’m as disquieted as the next person by my addiction to double screening reality T.V and Instagram while eating factory farmed fried chicken on a Saturday night, I’d argue that these habits are as much symptoms of the exhaustion and anxiety generated by living under capitalism, as the products of technological innovation.

While the term “emotional labor” is often used colloquially to describe any social interaction that drains us, it was originally coined by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild to describe the effort it takes to manage emotions and physical expressions to meet the requirements of a job. The classic examples of this are service jobs like cashiers, baristas, and front of house restaurant workers; jobs often held by women who are forced to face the additional, constant threat of sexual objectification and harassment from bosses and customers alike. And while I think the emotional labor demanded in service work is especially vicious, I’d argue most office jobs require varying levels of emotional labor as well. We are all expected to show up day in and day out–in person or on zoom–and nod and smile as our managers use us as emotional punching bags, knowing we can’t dare punch back.

The damage that comes from the constant, vigilant regulation, (and often suppression), of our nervous systems cannot be overstated, and it is this that I would argue creates the conditions for loneliness, alienation, and despair that lead us to binge-watching and doom-scrolling, not the other way around.

So what’s the antidote to this? Authentic, human connection? Spending time with people you actually like? People with whom you do not need to embellish your laughs or smile extra big or ignore your instincts to challenge them or simply say “no?” But perhaps this is easier said than done these days. Of course there is always some level of performance in any human interaction, famously performance of gender or the burden for people of color code-switching amongst white peers. But on the spectrum of job-interview to hanging with your bestie, there is hopefully a chasm of veracity in between. As our professional, semi-professional organizing, and personal lives increasingly meld, net-working, “one on ones,” and organizing meetings can become harder to distinguish from just hanging out.

The hyper-vigilance described earlier within the workplace can be hard to turn off, especially when our work (be it actual paid jobs, or volunteer movement work) follows us around at almost all waking hours in the form of email, slack, signal, etc. When we are forced to constantly compromise our integrity to stay employed, is it a shock that these dynamics might bleed into our personal lives, even among those of us committed to a critique of capitalism?

In a world where the super wealthy have figured out how to make everything from healthcare to water something to be bought and sold, at its worst, friendship, might be seen as something to be acquired, traded for, or otherwise won in the rat race of life. We carefully curate social media personas to embody whatever virtues are desirable in our particular social milieu and may find ourselves going out of our way to get coffee with someone we have no interest in being close to aside from their connections.

But at its best, friendship undermines everything that Capitalism tries to stamp out of us. The best friends are the ones with whom you feel no need to perform and are there for you without condition or judgment. When your close friend shows up at your house after your cat dies, flowers and tissues in hand, they aren’t there to win your approval or curry your favor. They also aren’t there because you’re cool, have the sharpest political analysis, or make great art. They are simply there because they care about you, holistically. When we have to wake up everyday, ready to cosplay loyalty to some company that actively trades in our well-being, happiness, and dignity for a buck, nothing is more healing than a real friend.