Modern Lifestyle Essay 1000 Words

[Katariina Washuk]

Variousfactors affect our lifestyles. Since the bygone days, life, in general, has changed a lot. Modernization has been one of the most important elements of this change. Changes are visibly seen in transportation, urbanization, pollution, and numerous other fields. There are certain similarities between the old and modern lifestyles worldwide but there have been several drastic changes that have led to the differentiation between the two.

Talking about similarities, there are very few of them. Firstly, the climate around the world still has four seasons namely, summer, winter, fall, and spring. In the North Pole, the weather has been extremely cold throughout the year for more than a hundred years. Deserts like Sahara, Kalahari, Arabian, etc. still have severe high temperatures during summers. Secondly, the beliefs of Monotheistic religions still exist. For instance, Christians still have faith in Christ and Muslims still believe in Allah (SWT). Finally, people in most nations still adhere to wearing their traditional clothes. For example, Scotland males still put on their traditional kilts (skirts) on special occasions.

We all strive for the betterment of our children. We send them to the best possible schools. In older days, good schools were numbered (limited). And only the privileged ones could afford to send their children to such schools. But today there are ample options for education. Thanks to the developments that mankind has made. Now our children can get the best of education which in turn shall help them to become responsible citizens with good moral values and ethics.

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It would be easy, correct even, to solve this friendship riddle by blaming all of the above and move on with my life. Join some workout classes and friend-finding apps. Go to mom groups. Make an effort with new people etc.

For us as adults, that means talking to people in the queue with you, talking to people on the subway, talking to people when you create any kind of group. Book club, movie club, sports club. You stay in the practice of experimentation, doubt, of the paradox of people: You need people very much but the very people that you need are the ones that can reject you.

And friction is not just interrupting your day or life to help out a friend, but also admitting you need the kind of help you cannot pay for or order yourself. To pierce through your veil of seamless productivity and having-it-together to say: I need something from you, can you help me?

So is it really any wonder that we might not be inclined to text our friend back about that plan four Thursdays from now, in between consuming images of genocide presented without any context or verifiable information, while trying to order dinner on our phone, and answer a Slack message after hours?

One of things I try to do in this newsletter is connect the many seemingly isolated problems of the current moment with the broader meta crisis of our time. And I think this one has huge implications, far beyond the idea of friendship or loneliness. As Bill McKibben wrote recently, the best thing you can do to prepare yourself for climate change is live in an area with a high degree of social trust.

Living now in a small farming town in New England after being a global nomad all my life, I realize that lots of Americans have had that stable interconnectedness of community that I never experienced in cities and suburbs. Town government, church, volunteer Fire & Rescue, annual festivals etc all require hours of interaction with fellow townsfolk. A barn fire or loose animal rallies neighbors' help and covered dishes are brought to the sick or grieving. Problem is, not many people under 70 are carrying on any of this. The younger generations have moved out or do not participate. It took a few years but now I know that behind the Norman Rockwell scenes, a lot of these folks despise each other. They smooth things over and show up to the raffle or the funeral anyway because of a sense of duty and fear of social censure, sentiments lost in more individualistic, anonymous cities and suburbs. I admit to plunging in as a newcomer only to find that the busybodies who run everything want my labor, but have their own friend and family circles and are not open to outsiders for close friendships. They bonded long ago over babies and can't understand my life. Conformity seems to be the entry fee for most communities, always a challenge for free thinkers. No tidy lesson I'm afraid, just another perspective on the struggle for connection in our atomized times. Thanks for your thought provoking piece!

Recently I\u2019ve been thinking a lot about what\u2019s going on with my friendships, or to be more specific, my lack thereof. I\u2019m not quite sure when it happened, but I\u2019ve felt the presence of friendship dwindle in my life in the past couple years.

One reasonable diagnosis of the problem is that it\u2019s entirely down to my own life choices: At 30, I moved to a smaller place away from London, where I made most of my friends in my 20s. I am in a long term partnership and I have a toddler, which means I am strictly beholden to a bedtime routine for the maintenance of our collective sanity. Despite charading as a bubbly extrovert for years, I realized during the pandemic that I\u2019m actually an introvert. I stopped going to an office and the after-work drinks that perpetuate many urban millennial friendships. That sort of thing.

But beyond the fact that I have done all that and then some, I think something else is going on here. A lot of people I speak to \u2014 people who live in cities, and haven\u2019t moved away from their networks, people who don\u2019t stay indoors after 6pm \u2013 are not happy with the state of their social lives.

My sister, who lives in San Francisco, says that despite knowing many people who live nearby and share her particular life stage, she can barely get someone to commit to something as casual as a walk with a coffee later in the week. Another friend said having dinner with friends in south London midweek \u2014 a 60 minute commute \u2014 ends up being more of an energy drain than a nourishing social interaction. She craves more of the kind of friends that can pop over for an hour on a Sunday afternoon without planning weeks in advance. So do I.

And yet it seems normal now that plans are made far in advance \u2014 scheduled around myriad travel and wedding weekends and kids and work commitments \u2014 and then canceled right before. Someone doesn\u2019t follow up, or cancels and then never proposes an alternative plan. Similarly, promising new adult friendships never seem to blossom into the kind of quotidian check-ins and week-to-week ephemera that the friendship of our younger years is based on. Life-long friends make new life choices, drift apart. The friendship fizzles into WhatsApp volleys back and forth, and then someone doesn\u2019t answer the last message, and then it\u2019s a year before you ever talk again.

Much has been written about the struggle to make friends once you enter your 30s and beyond, so in some sense this is all nothing new. But for a long time, I\u2019ve detected a level of avoidance, a pathological burnout among many people I know, and in myself \u2014 something that suggests a deeper cause is at the core of this. I know I can\u2019t be the only one craving a kind of social connection and nourishment that the seven messaging apps on my phone don\u2019t provide.

I want to be clear here that the point I am making is not Millennials Killed Friendship. Nor am I calling out any particular friends of mine; I am as guilty of this as anyone. But I am trying to figure out the matrix of factors that leads to a situation where in theory, I have friends \u2014 actually loads of them if you look at my phone \u2014 but in practice \u2014 in the kind of relational, low-stakes, intimate way I crave \u2014 there\u2019s a lot to be desired.

I\u2019ve been thinking about this for months, and then one day I heard the eminently quotable Esther Perel address it on a podcast (interview starts at about the 50:00 mark). I\u2019m going to quote her heavily, because I hope the words will stay with you as they did me.

\u201CModern loneliness masks itself as hyper connectivity. And so people have easily 1000 virtual friends, but no one they can ask to feed their cat. That loneliness, which is really a depletion of the social capital, is extremely powerful. [\u2026]

One question I keep asking that I had no idea was going to be so pertinent: When you grew up, did you play freely on the street? \u2026 And the majority of the people learned to play freely on the street. They learned social negotiation. They learned unscripted, un-choreographed, unmonitored interaction with people. They fought, they made rules, they made peace, they made friends, they broke up, they made friends again. They developed social muscles. And the majority of these very same people\u2019s children do not play freely on the street. And I think that an adult needs to play freely on the street as well.

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