Friendship. This is the kind of love that we choose. This is the family that we form by choice. This is the companionship which keeps you going when you have troubles with your biological family or your significant other. In simple words, we get by with a little help from our friends.
But in today’s world of advanced technology and social medias, we have become anything but social. We have ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ on facebook and instagram or twitter respectively. But we have lost that friendship which we see in our parent’s generations. The tale of friendships which began with a stick and a wheel and the need to game of pushing it forward and keeping it moving.
If you ever sit down with your parents and ask them about their friends, you will discover thousands of stories of the little adventures they used to go to. It may be a little exploration of the forest behind the house or jumping in the river just for fun. In fact, the generation following them also had a great sense of friendship as their cycles were replaced with bikes but the value of relations remained the same. They could openly sing “tere jaisa yaar kahan, yaad karegi duniya”.
127 our experts are availableright now
But now for millennials, with technology making everything a swipe away, the quantity may have increase but the quality has for decreased. This is the friendship in which you share memes and not conversations. This is the friendship where you feel more comfortable sharing things with a stranger on the internet but not someone from the real life. This is the friendship where hide from our lives and mask it with our virtual lives. But is this friendship?
You can in fact see the lack of friendship in the youngest generations with the increased loneliness and depression. We have no one who knows us inside out. If someone actually goes out of their way to do something for us, we are shocked and eternally grateful. Even childhood games have now changed from a ball with which you could play with the other kids in the neighbourhood to single player video games.
We basically don’t have friends. We have people on the internet we can call ‘bae’ but not someone with whom we can let our guards down completely. We have become so desperate in our quest to find true friends, which a relation always glorified in Bollywood movies, that we have let our standards down so low that it basically becomes a bunch of compromises. The socially stunted growth of childhood makes it even harder to communicate later in life as adult.
And the saddest part is, we are lonely and we know it.
