OK? Worth reading in its entirety, even if it's long and rambling

The ferry crossing from Chappaquiddick to Edgartown, Mass., is only 527 feet long. But no matter how rich or important you are, you have to wait to get on the boat. Sometimes you wait in your car. Sometimes you get out. Someone complains about the line, the weather, our politics or the UPS] driver who goes to the front of the queue. Someone else laughs. A conversation begins. This isn’t a defense of bad maritime logistics. But...

"spending time around that ferry has made me wonder if modern life has undersold inconvenience.""spending time around that ferry has made me wonder if modern life has undersold inconvenience."

We treat waiting as wasted time. Often it is. But sometimes waiting does something useful: It forces people into the same place, with nothing to do, long enough for conversation to begin.

uh-huuu #1506425, #1477313

Loneliness has become one of the stranger problems of modern life. In 2023 the U.S. surgeon general called loneliness and social isolation a public-health problem(https://archive.md/o/r522l/https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf). About half of American adults have reported experiencing loneliness.

In 2010 research, Julianne Holt-Lunstad and her co-authors pooled evidence from 148 studies and found that weak social relationships predict mortality at a magnitude comparable to smoking and greater than obesity or physical inactivity. Loneliness has been linked to higher risks of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety and premature death

States where more daily life can be conducted privately—at home, online, on a screen—tend to report somewhat more loneliness. States where more people commute by public transit or walking tend to report less.

Not the world's most impressive science, but OK I take their overarching point. Being a good economist, Mr. Fryer naturally looks at some empirics and develops a hypothesis/theory:

The friction theory of friendship.The friction theory of friendship.

The idea is simple: Some inconveniences aren’t merely costs. They are the hidden scaffolding of social life. If I had to estimate my own production function for friendship, it would look something like this:

"friendship = (proximity × repetition) + (idle time × low stakes) + shared irritation.""friendship = (proximity × repetition) + (idle time × low stakes) + shared irritation."

Proximity matters most when it recurs.

unclear why there's multiplication, and like that. I can see a case for "shared irratation" be a multiplicative factor of e.g., proximity or whatever. And:

Places built around private convenience look lonelier than places where daily routines force people to bump into one another. After accounting for age, income and who lives alone, the relationship weakens but remains statistically significant.

Here's the point the author gets at:

This is why friendship is often a product of something else: work, school, church, children, sports, errands, waiting rooms. It is produced not by misery, but by enough common friction to make conversation natural. Modern life has spent decades eliminating that friction. We can work without offices, shop without stores, exercise without gyms and communicate without looking anyone in the eye. Each improvement is defensible, some phenomenal.

"When the ordinary logistics of life no longer require us to encounter one another, the ties that begin in those encounters become harder to form.""When the ordinary logistics of life no longer require us to encounter one another, the ties that begin in those encounters become harder to form."

Is this why Twitter discourse is so maddening and aggressive?

Markets are powerful when the good is clear, the price is observable, and the transaction is socially acceptable. Friendship fails on all three margins. That is why friendship is usually produced indirectly. People go to school to learn, to the office to earn a living, and to the ferry line to get to the other side. Yet these settings solve the hardest problem in friendship formation: proximity multiplied by repetition.

The usual response is to blame phones. That is too easy. The deeper force is the war on friction. Remote work, delivery apps, online shopping, online banking, self-checkout, telemedicine and private exercise platforms each solve a real problem. But they also remove tiny moments of shared dependence.

Hm, worth contemplating.

archive: https://archive.md/r522l