MY friend Meena came to visit with her family, and it was the right cheer I needed from the usual dreariness that comes with consuming news and being online 24/7. Nothing compares to spending time with your best friend or, as the kids call it, my ‘ride or die’.

We had breakfast a few times together, we caught up with our friends and extended family; we discovered new places, revisited old haunts; we attended a qawwali, listening to a new troupe she’d not heard before, and, of course, we ate a lot of barbeque, ma­­ngoes and paan. And her daughters taught me what the kids are saying, doing, uploading, which proves handy when teaching.

We all have those friends with whom we enjoy a special bond. You can go months, maybe years without speaking to them, but then pick up like you’d been in touch forever when you reconnect. Unlike childhood, where friendships are formed around play, as we grow older our priorities change, and sometimes friendships change too, but what we want from them, doesn’t.

A relationship expert in 2020 told The Atlantic magazine that “young adulthood is the golden age for forming friendships”. It is usually our first time as independent adults outside home and school, navigating life. We choose our friends and learn concepts of intimacy and care with them.

This generation born into a screen world has different challenges.

While Meena was here, I noticed a reduction in a chronic pain condition I have been afflicted with for years. I wasn’t always reaching for the pain relief balm, whose menthol smell has come to be associated with me. I wasn’t waking with the same stiffness, or doing my exercises every two hours for pain management, etc. Of course, I recognise that a change in routine can uplift the mood, as it does each time I meet friends MS, ZB and HZ here, whenever we can manage.

There’s science to back up my claims. Research shows people with “thriving social networks” tend to be healthier. It is down to understanding the biopsychosocial model of health, which examines health and wellness through biology, psychology and environment. It is no longer the purview of kooky science and the amount of research into this, from the 1960s, has shown how social connections can play a role in a person’s longevity.

In short, your friends can influence your immune system’s strength and your heart health, according to a story in the BBC. They help you live longer — along with a moderate, balanced diet, limited drinks and snacks, no tobacco, good sleep and exercise. Social connections are just as important, new research tells us, and they have been documented “using multiple methods to quantify people’s social connections” across different populations, using different measurement types, says the BBC. What’s more, research has seen “parallel effects in other social species” like dolphins, chacma baboons and rhesus monkeys. “The more integrated an individual is within its group, the greater its longevity,” the BBC says.

If our friends can increase our longevity, is the opposite also true?

Social media has also changed the meaning of a friend. You wouldn’t invite a stranger to your home but you are adding friends of friends you’ve not, people you just met, sometimes strangers, on your socials. These online communities have benefits — they help us through difficult times, make us feel less alone, etc, but they cannot replace familial connections. They keep you in a silo, as you’re only friends with people online because of a shared value or belief. Think of rabid political party supporters or incels online who lack intolerance. This is not the case in the real world, where you will likely not have the same opinions, for exa­m-­ple, on gender iden-tity, but can still talk about it without resorting to abuse.

The slow eros­ion of communities, that consisted of friends, families, neighbours in the mohalla, has chan­ged the way we communicate with each other. Especially as internet penetration has grown in the country — by 24 million from January last year to January 2024, according to Kepios. If we’re only being angry and resentful online, that frustration is going to show up somewhere. We’ve seen that intolerance for different views and misogyny online also convert to violence in real life. People have used social media to groom young people into doing illicit drugs, hating, and organising violent encounters.

Who amongst us was not warned about the one friend in their group that was a bad influence? We learned, sometimes the hard way, but came out stronger because we had communities looking out for us. However, this generation born into a screen world has different challenges.

How can we use our elders and our friendships as models to “expand our conceptions of intimacy and care” as The Atlantic wrote? Teaching by example yields the best results. Our kids need our friends as much as we do.

The writer is a journalism instructor.

X: LedeingLady

Published in Dawn, August 11th, 2024