Friend

FOMO, or fear of missing out, isn’t just a painful feeling—it’s also a big phishing vulnerability for young adults on social media.

Two recent studies of Instagram users between the ages of 16 and 29 show that the promise of a social opportunity can be so alluring that it can cause many young people to let down their guard and fall for a phishing scam.

The lead researcher on one of these studies said:

In my study, 82.9% fell for a suspicious link in a message at least once, and particularly for those that appeared to be from a friend or a follower. They interacted without a second thought because they trust the Instagram platform.

Additionally, young adults in particular have an intense fear of missing out on social experiences. One of my studies showed that phishing messages promising social opportunities—like an invite that says, “Check out this private event happening tonight!”—were the most successful. FOMO drives impulsive decision-making, making young adults particularly easy targets for social-engineering attacks.

A young woman writer in England named Freya India (see her Substack called “Girls”) writes:

Since I was teenager, it seems like everyone has been selling a solution to Gen Z’s loneliness problem. One app after another to find new friends! Constant hashtags and campaigns to bring us together… But I’ve noticed that, recently, the latest “solutions” … aren’t encouraging face-to-face friendships.

[Instead], there are the imaginary boyfriends and girlfriends. There are imaginary therapists, a “mental health ally” or “happiness buddy” we can chat with about our problems… There are even entirely imaginary worlds now. Metaverse platforms might “solve the loneliness epidemic,” apparently. VR headsets could end loneliness for seniors. But by far the most depressing invention I’ve seen lately is a new app called SocialAI, a “private social network where you receive millions of AI-generated comments offering feedback, advice & reflections on each post you make.”

I remember me and my friends spending hours after school writing our own songs, coming up with lyrics and drawing album covers—now we would just generate it with an AI song maker. Children are playing together less, replacing free play with screen time, and creativity scores among American children have been dropping since the 1990s. Part of that may be because children now depend on companies to be creative for them. Their imaginary worlds are designed by software engineers. Their imaginary friends are trying to sell them something. My imaginary world wasn’t trying to drag me anywhere, while algorithms now transport kids to darker and ever more extreme places.

A cafe in Amsterdam is filled with people on a Sunday afternoon, but there’s not a laptop or cellphone in sight. Those meeting are part of the Offline Club, where a Wi-Fi signal is not needed, whose members check their electronics at the door, grab a coffee and a seat, and pretend like it’s the '90s.

Each meeting starts off with quiet time for reading, crafting, or just relaxing with your beverage. Then it becomes social for people who want to engage with others.

Co-founder of the club, Ilya Kneppelhout said, “The Offline Club is a way for people to detox from their rushed daily lives and ever-connected lives with notifications. And it is people who are unhappy with their social media usage or their phone usage and screen time and want to decrease that and get back to real connection."

It’s a simple concept, but participants say they really look forward to it. “You get to be very present in a way you didn’t come in realizing,” one member said. Kneppelhout added, “It felt a bit like traveling in time and made me feel nostalgic about the way bars and cafes used to be. Because nowadays, those are places we’re only going to with friends and people we already know and spend time doing digital things like work.”

The founders say they think the concept would work well in other cities, too. “We’re getting together with a franchising concept and we hope to have offline detox events in the entire world for people to reconnect.”

Did you know horses have friends? They do according to writer Sterry Butcher, who lives on a Texas farm with horses.

According to Butcher, horses form friendships, and these friends stand nose to rump to cooperatively swish flies from the other’s face with their tails. They’ll rake their teeth against the other’s withers or back, scratching places the other cannot reach on his own.

And not only do horses scratch each other’s back. They watch each other’s back. In the wild, they spend the entirety of their lives within the eyesight of another horse. Even domestic horses, who don’t venture beyond their pasture, will take turns staying awake while others sleep. It’s like shifts on guard duty.

What horses have is what we need. Every one of us needs a friend. Someone who will swish away the annoying biting flies that come toward us in life. Someone who will scratch our back, helping us with the things we can’t reach or do on our own. Someone who will stay awake and protect us from dangers.

In February 2020, BBC journalist Vicky Baker jumped on the Eurostar to Paris, motivated by a sudden urge to have dinner with a friend. American Jim Haynes had entered his late 80s and his health was declining, yet she knew he would welcome a visit. Jim always welcomed visitors to his home in Paris.

She was far from the only guest wandering into the warm glow of his artist's workroom on a wet winter's night. Inside, people were squeezing, shoulder to shoulder, through the narrow kitchen. Strangers struck up conversations, bunched together in groups, and balancing their dinners on paper plates.

Jim had operated open-house policy at his home every Sunday evening for more than 40 years. Absolutely anyone was welcome to come for an informal dinner, all you had to do was phone or email and he would add your name to the list. No questions asked. Just put a donation in an envelope when you arrive.

There would be a buzz in the air, as people of various nationalities - locals, immigrants, travelers - milled around the small, open-plan space. A pot of hearty food bubbled on the stove and servings would be dished out onto a trestle table, so you could help yourself and continue to mingle. It was for good reason that Jim was nicknamed the "godfather of social networking." He led the way in connecting strangers, long before we outsourced it all to Silicon Valley.

At the dinners' peak, Jim would welcome up to 120 guests, filling his home, and spilling out into the cobbled back garden. An estimated 150,000 people have come over the years.

"The door was always open," says Amanda Morrow, an Australian journalist. "It was a revolving door of guests - some who wanted to stay over, and others who just wanted to say hello. Jim never said no to anyone."

Amid the outpouring of online tributes since his death in his sleep on 6 January 2021, these words from his son Jesper stand out:

The only thing that really got Jim down was people leaving. He struggled with that. He didn't like being on his own... His goal from early on was to introduce the whole world to each other. He almost succeeded.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Fellowship; Home; Outreach – Imagine the results if church members would invite others to share in an informal meal at their home. Neighbors, friends, church members, visitors to church all welcomed to mingle and fellowship in the warm, cozy atmosphere of a home.

Shifrah Combiths, a freelance writer and mother-of-five in Tallahassee, Florida, wrote about a baking hack for the website The Kitchn that was so valuable it was picked up overseas by the British tabloid The Mirror.

Combiths had a mom who used to love eating the last slice of bread in a loaf, often referred to as “the heel.” (“Save the heel for me,” her mom was fond of saying.) Later in life, Combiths was surprised to find out that her mom’s enthusiasm for the final slice of bread was a bit unusual. So, her tip is for people who don’t enjoy eating the heel.

“It’s simple,” she writes. “Use that heel of bread to keep your soft, homemade cookies, well, soft … cookies that are supposed to be soft and chewy are disappointing when they become crunchy and stale!”

Combiths says the hack works because the moisture in the bread, when in close contact with the cookies, will eventually transfer over. She even says it can be a last resort to restore some chewiness to already-hardened cookies.

“Use this cookie-saving tip when you make big batches — or you need to make baked treats the night before a gathering of friends and family.”

Combiths does offer a brief warning, however. “It’s crucial to ensure the bread is plain,” she says. “Unless you want garlic-flavored cookies.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

The love of God has the power to influence others. For maximum effectiveness, remain close to God and watch his love spill over to the people in your immediate circle of relationship.

Fifteen-year-old Aaron was going through a dark time at school. He’d fallen out with his friends, leaving him feeling isolated and alone.

At the time, it seemed like the end of the world. “I used to cry every night,” said Aaron. Eventually, Aaron turned to his computer for comfort. Through it, he found someone that was available around the clock to respond to his messages, listen to his problems, and help him move past the loss of his friend group. That “someone” was an AI chatbot named Psychologist.

The chatbot’s description says that it’s “Someone who helps with life difficulties.” Its profile picture is a woman in a blue shirt with a blonde bob, perched on the end of a couch with a clipboard clasped in her hands and leaning forward, as if listening intently.

A single click on the picture opens up an anonymous chat box, which allows people like Aaron to “interact” with the bot by exchanging DMs. Its first message is always the same. “Hello, I’m a psychologist. What brings you here today?”

“It’s not like a journal, where you’re talking to a brick wall,” Aaron said. “It really responds.”

Character.AI is an AI chatbot service launched in 2022. Character.AI’s website attracts 3.5 million daily users who spend an average of two hours a day using the platform’s AI-powered chatbots. Some of its most popular bots include characters from books, films, and video games, like Raiden Shogun from Genshin Impact or a teenaged version of Voldemort from Harry Potter.

Aaron is one of millions of young people, many of whom are teenagers, who make up the bulk of Character.AI’s user base. More than a million of them gather regularly online on platforms like Reddit to discuss their interactions with the chatbots. The competitions over who has racked up the most screen time are just as popular as posts about hating reality, finding it easier to speak to bots than to speak to real people, and even preferring chatbots over other human beings. Some users say they’ve logged 12 hours a day on Character.AI, and posts about addiction to the platform are common.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Since young people describe feeling addicted to chatbots, they might find themselves sitting in their rooms talking to computers more often than communicating with real people. It raises questions about how the AI boom and what the future could hold if teenagers—and society at large—become more emotionally reliant on bots.

The dining room is the closest thing the American home has to an appendix—a dispensable feature that served some more important function at an earlier stage of architectural evolution. Many of them sit gathering dust, patiently awaiting the next “dinner holiday” on Easter or Thanksgiving.

That’s why the classic, walled-off dining room is getting harder to find in new single-family houses. It won’t be missed by many. Americans now tend to eat in spaces that double as kitchens or living rooms—a small price to pay for making the most of their square footage.

But in many new apartments, even a space to put a table and chairs is absent. Eating is relegated to couches and bedrooms, and hosting a meal has become virtually impossible. The housing crisis is killing off places to eat whether we like it or not, designing loneliness into American floor plans.

According to surveys in 2015 and 2016 by the National Association of Home Builders, 86 percent of households want a combined kitchen and dining room—a preference accommodated by only 75 percent of new homes. If anything, the classic dining room isn’t dying fast enough for most people’s taste.

If dining space is merging with other rooms in single-family homes, it’s vanishing altogether from newly constructed apartments. Americans might not mind what’s happening to their houses, but the evolution of apartments is a more complicated story.

Floor-plan expert Bobby Fijan said “For the most part, apartments are built for Netflix and chill.” Even though we’re dining at home more and more—going to restaurants peaked in 2000—many new apartments offer only a kitchen island as an obvious place to eat.

This is partly a response to shrinking household size. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the share of one-person households more than tripled from 1940 to 2020. A dedicated dining space might feel wasted on someone who lives alone.

As households and dining spaces have contracted, the number of people eating alone has grown. According to a 2015 report by the Food Marketing Institute, nearly half the time we spend eating is spent in isolation, a central factor in America’s loneliness epidemic and a correlate to a range of physical- and mental-health problems.

Possible Preaching Angle:

In an age when Americans are spending less and less time with one another, a table and some chairs could be just what we need for fellowship and human interaction. Make an effort to invite people over, especially during the holiday season, and especially those who live alone.

A Snapchat feature lets paying users see their position in their friends’ digital orbits. For some teens, whose friends are everything, it’s adding to their anxiety.

Snapchat+ subscribers can check where they rank with a particular friend based on how often that friend communicates with them. The result is automatically rendered in a solar-system metaphor: Are you Mercury, the planet closest to your friend? Great! Uranus? Bad sign.

“A lot of kids my age have trouble differentiating best friends on Snapchat from actual best friends in real life,” says 15-year-old Callie Schietinger. She said she had her own problems when a boyfriend noticed that he was Neptune in her solar system. He asked who held the Mercury position and when she told him it was a guy friend, he got mad.

More than 20 million U.S. teens use the app, though most don’t pay for Snapchat+. Young adults with those paid accounts have seen friendships splinter and young love wither due to the knowledge that someone else ranks higher on the app. Now, lawmakers, doctors, and parents are giving fuller attention to these apps and how they broadly affect kids’ mental health.

Callie and her boyfriend have since broken up, for other reasons. But that stress and the misunderstandings she has seen other friends experience have soured her on the feature. “It’s everyone’s biggest fear put onto an app,” Callie says. “Ranking is never good for anyone’s head.”

In a world where genuine connections seem elusive, Jancee Dunn, in her heartfelt piece for The New York Times, suggests that perhaps the key to meaningful connection is simpler than we think. She proposed the eight-minute phone call.

‌Apparently, an eight-minute phone call is the perfect amount of time to connect with a loved one or a friend— it is the ideal time frame, not too long and not too short.

Studies have found that when participants received brief phone calls a few times a week, their levels of depression, loneliness, and anxiety were “rapidly reduced” compared with people who didn’t receive a call. Harvard professor, Dr. Waldinger writes, “a few adjustments to our most treasured relationships can have real effects on how we feel, and on how we feel about our lives — a gold mine of vitality that we are not paying attention to.”

Actress Angelina Jolie claims, “I don’t really have … a social life.” Instead, she admits, “I realized my closest friends are refugees. Maybe four out of six of the women that I am close to are from war and conflict.”

She explained what refugees have to offer that the shallowness of Hollywood does not offer:

There’s a reason people who have been through hardship are also much more honest and much more connected, and I am more relaxed with them. Why do I like spending time with people who’ve survived and are refugees? They’ve confronted so much in life that it brings forward not just strength, but humanity.

Possible Preaching Angles:

Angelina Jolie may not be a follower of Jesus, but she does have some biblical truth here—suffering can make us deeper and more compassionate people.

Life for a 19th-century sailor was hard: Months at sea were accompanied by constant danger and deprivation. To make matters worse, mariners saw the same few people all day, every day, in a radically confined space where they were expected to get along and look after one another. On a long voyage, one obnoxious person could make life utterly miserable for everyone.

So, sailors used a tried technique to deal with an offender: the silent treatment. They would ignore him completely for weeks on end. That might sound like an innocuous action to you, but in truth, it was far from it. According to author Otis Ferguson (1944), the silent treatment was “a process so effective in the monotony of ship’s life as to make strong men weep.”

Of course, the silent treatment is a technique used not only by sailors. It can be encountered anytime, anywhere, from home to work. You have almost certainly experienced some form of it. Long-married couples will go for days without speaking. A person will give their oldest friend the cold shoulder. A father who refused to speak with his daughter for 30 years.

Silent-treatment inflictors do it because, as the sailors discovered, it was devastatingly effective in imposing pain on the recipient. So much pain, in fact, that it can leave a person scarred and a relationship in ruins.

Given how destructive the silent treatment is, like physical abuse, it can wreck relationships. According to the Gottman Institute, which conducts research on the success and failure of marriages, the act of cutting off your partner by stonewalling can be a contributory factor to divorce.

Possible Preaching Angle:

You have probably inflicted the silent treatment on someone—two-thirds of us have done so. We use it for two main reasons: The most common one is to punish someone for something they said or did. The next most common is conflict avoidance; you might go silent to avoid a major blow-up. But this is not how God intends for his children to relate to others. God intends for us to humble ourselves, take the first step to reconciliation, and begin a conversation without defensiveness or blaming. “Don’t let the sun go down on your anger” (Eph. 4:26).

Most people continue to use AI programs such as ChatGPT, Bing, and Google Bard for mundane tasks like internet searches and text editing. But of the roughly 103 million US adults turning to generative chatbots in recent months, an estimated 13% occasionally did it to simply “have a conversation with someone.”

According to the Consumer Reports August 2023 survey results, a vast majority of Americans (69%) either did not regularly utilize AI chat programs in any memorable way. Those that did, however, overwhelmingly opted to explore OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Most AI users asked their programs to conduct commonplace tasks, such as answering questions in lieu of a traditional search engine, writing content, summarizing longer texts, and offering ideas for work or school assignments. Despite generative AI’s relative purported strength at creating and editing computer code, just 10% of those surveyed recounted using the technology to do so. However, 13% used it to have a conversation.

The desire for idle conversation with someone else is an extremely human, natural feeling. However, there are already signs that it’s not necessarily the healthiest of habits.

Many industry critics have voiced concerns about a potentially increasing number of people turning to technology instead of human relationships. Numerous reports in recent months highlight a growing market of AI bots explicitly marketed to an almost exclusively male audience as “virtual girlfriends.”

According to Consumer Reports survey results, an estimated 10.2 million Americans had a “conversation” with a chatbot in recent months. That’s quite a lot of people looking to gab.

Twenty-year-old Henry Earls dresses up to go to the library. He picks out cozy knitted sweaters and accessorizes with well-worn copies of classic books. Earls looks like an adjunct English professor. He said, “I want to cultivate an aesthetic when I go to the library. And, honestly, I dress up to see if someone will come up to me and say hi.”

Gen Z seems to love public libraries. A report from the American Library Association found that Gen Z and Millennials are using public libraries at higher rates than older generations. More than half of the survey’s 2,075 respondents had visited a physical library within the past 12 months. Not all of them were bookworms. Almost half don’t identify as readers, but those non-readers still visited their local library in the past year.

Libraries have never been just about books. These are community hubs, places to connect and discover. For an extremely online generation that’s nearly synonymous with the so-called “loneliness epidemic,” libraries are increasingly social spaces, too.

“Coffee shops get so crowded, and you have to spend money to be there, but libraries are open for everyone,” said Anika Neumeyer, a 19-year-old student. “There’s a lot less pressure to be doing something in the public library. No one’s going to judge you.”

Fifteen-year-old Arlo Platt Zolov says, “A lot of people my age are surrounded by tech and everything’s moving so quickly. Part of me thinks we’re rediscovering libraries not as something new, but for what they’ve always been: a shared space of comfort.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Fellowship; Small groups – This is a golden opportunity for the small groups in the church to provide the fellowship and gathering opportunities that so many are missing. Small groups meeting in homes, perhaps with a meal, can be very attractive to disconnected young people.

A California startup claims it has a solution to loneliness. Groundfloor, which began in the Bay Area and will soon open a location in Los Angeles, is a social club with a focus on friendship.

Groundfloor co-founder Jermaine Ijieh says the club provides space for work (meeting rooms and phone booths), wellness (classes, gym space, and meditation circles), and socializing. There are karaoke nights, member-led special interest groups and craft workshops. It’s not aiming to compete with WeWork or elite social clubs, Ijieh says. Instead, he likens it to “an after-school club for kids,” but designed primarily for adults over 30.

“There’s always been an issue once you start to hit this age range,” he says. “We start to lose institutions where we used to build communities, such as places of worship, colleges, offices, schools … Once you leave your 20s, it sort of feels like a social purgatory.”

The pitch is working: Groundfloor’s new location in Los Angeles already has 2,000 would-be members on its waitlist. Perhaps that speaks to the isolation of a city of endless traffic, few pedestrians, and its own scientific scale for loneliness. But the club also has three locations in the San Francisco Bay Area that almost 1,000 people have joined. Those numbers underline the reality of the loneliness crisis, especially when you factor in the club’s price tag: $200 a month.

The pandemic has brought many changes to businesses, schools, and churches. Another way the pandemic altered America: It has created what might be called the “Introvert Economy.” Data from studies appears to show that most people’s social lives continue to dwindle.

During the pandemic, a lot of Americans had to stay home—and many discovered that they preferred staying in to going out. And odds are it will stick: It is the youngest adults who are going out less, and when they do go out, it is earlier.

Technology has also speeded changes in social habits. There is evidence that TV schedules once had a big impact on people’s schedules. Now that more content is streamed on demand, people may be thinking about their time differently. More choices of at-home-entertainment also may decrease the desire to go out or stay out. This is another trend accelerated by the pandemic—perhaps because when more people work from home, they save time on commuting and can go out to dinner earlier.

There was a bit of a bump in socializing in 2022, probably in response to years of pandemic isolation. Yet the long-term trend is clear: More time watching TV or playing video games at home.

Possible Preaching Angle:

One small upside to the data. Chances are everyone else is having just as uneventful of a weekend as you are. Your friends aren’t all that busy and would love to hang out with you.

How many people do you know? You’ve probably never counted. Well, now you don’t have to. Tyler McCormick has worked it out: around 600.

Or more precisely 611, according to estimates by McCormick, a professor in the statistics and sociology departments at the University of Washington. That’s a national average, but McCormick can actually compute an estimate for you, or anyone.

Asked how many close friends they have, about half of Americans say three or fewer, according to a 2021 survey. The British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, drawing on studies of the brain sizes of humans and other primates, estimates a person can only maintain about 150 relationships. The so-called “Dunbar number,” he has said, “applies to quality relationships, not to acquaintances.” A Pew Research study found adults on Facebook had an average of 338 friends on the site.

The number of people you know, without considering them friends, is probably much larger. McCormick’s definition: “that you know them and they know you by sight or by name, that you could contact them, that they live within the United States, and that there has been some contact” in the past two years.

Possible Preaching Angles:

(1) As a negative illustration, this could show our need to develop deeper, more intimate friendships in the body of Christ. (2) As a positive illustration, this could reveal that our support system may be stronger and broader than we realize, especially in the church.

A lot of things about work that we long took for granted have changed for good, as we settle into our remote and hybrid reality. While many of us are happy for the reduction in long commutes, sad desk lunches, and uncomfortable “business casual” clothes, there are some things we’ll miss.

There is also the importance of office friendships. Having a close relationship with people you work with not only increases your job satisfaction and loyalty, but productivity, as well. And creating and maintaining those relationships is a driving reason so many bosses claimed to want employees back in the office.

But after years of being away from the office, those relationships have eroded or disappeared. The Wall Street Journal reported the percentage of hybrid workers who claimed to have a best friend at work fell from 22% to 17% between 2019 and 2022, perhaps finally signaling the end of the “work spouse” era. While we miss out on having someone to confide in or commiserate with, more people are realizing a difficult truth: Work was never your family.

Companies, when trying to force “fun” activities on their employees as a way to entice them back to work, are seeing that many would rather spend time with their actual friends and families. If the end goal for both bosses and employees has always been a happier, more productive, more engaged workforce, then maybe it’s time we let employees prioritize a healthy disconnection from the office.

Possible Preaching Angles:

Family; Friendship; Church Involvement – This is a good reminder that our first responsibility, and true lasting relationships, are found with our “real families” at home and at church.

In 2023, an Australian man said that a chatbot had saved his life. He was a musician who had been battling depression for decades and found companionship with an AI through an app called Replika, and everything changed. He started playing the guitar again, went clothes shopping for the first time in years, spent hours conversing with his AI companion, and laughing out loud.

Though the musician felt less alone with his AI companion, his isolation from other people was unchanged. He was adamant that he had a real friendship, but understood clearly that no person was on the other side of his screen. The effect of this bond was extraordinary.

Replika, and other chatbots, have millions of active users. People turn to these apps for all sorts of reasons. They’re looking for attention and for reassurance. But the apps’ core experience is texting as you would with a buddy. They’re talking about the petty minutiae so fundamental to being alive: “Someone stole my yogurt from the office fridge;” “I had a weird dream;” “My dachshund seems sad.”

To Replika’s users, this feels a lot like friendship. In actuality, the relationship is more like the fantasized intimacy people feel with celebrities and influencers who carefully create desirable personae for our screens. These parasocial bonds are defined by their asymmetry—one side is almost totally ignorant of the other’s existence.

Jesse Fox, a communications professor at Ohio State University, said that if we continue relationships that seem consensual and reciprocal but are not, we risk carrying bad models of interaction into the real world. Fox is particularly concerned by the habits men form through sexual relationships with AIs who never say no. “We start thinking, ‘Oh, this is how women interact. This is how I should talk to and treat a woman.’”

Sometimes the shift is more subtle—researchers and parents alike have expressed concern that barking orders at devices such as Amazon’s Echo is conditioning children to become tiny dictators. Fox said, “When we are humanizing these things, we’re also, in a way, dehumanizing people.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Church; Fellowship; Friendship - This illustration highlights the wise exhortation of Scripture to “never neglect meeting together, as is the habit of some, but encourage one another” (Heb. 10:25). God did not create us to be alone (Gen. 2:18) but to find fellowship, encouragement, and love in the company of others.