Friendship is up! Renegotiating the rules of being together in times of crisis

“I realised I simply did not want to inherit loneliness.”

The past year, particularly, I’ve noticed a surge of videos and wholesome memes across social media sites about friendship. This may be my algorithm just doing the algorithm thing (anyone who knows me knows I am chronically obsessed with friendship) but still, it had me thinking. 

One creator’s TikTok in particular stands out to me. They note that while romantic relationships are declining, the job and housing crises loom over our generation, it seems the “friendship market” seems to be, as they put it,  up. This had me thinking because over the past few years, I have become obsessed with thinking about the politics of friendship, and this TikTok made me wonder if maybe I wasn’t the only one. Why are Gen Z and Millennials increasingly valuing friendship? Whereas older generations may have put it beneath familial or romantic relationships in the social hierarchy of love. I decided to ask no other than some of my own friends about what they thought of this.

My friends’ responses came through voice notes, late-night texts, and sporadic facetimes. I asked them what friendship means to them compared to our parents’ generation, what friendship means to them in times of crisis and political uncertainty, and how friendship has shaped them.

“I think we’re in a really miserable time, and it’s forced us to form these communities to maintain sanity”, one friend tells me. Many friends responded by assessing friendship as a tool of absolute survival. Seeing how increasingly isolating and idealistic modern life has become, Gen Z seems to be reorienting how we relate to one another as a means of survival, realising that the current state is no longer sustainable. “I think with my parents migrating to the UK, our family became very on survival mode—especially with the financial pressures that came with that, our nuclear family became very insular and hyper independent” one friend tells me about her parent’s relation to friends. She follows: “but interestingly I feel like my grandparents were much more reliant on their friends and they were so community oriented, it’s like our parents’ generation were forced to abandon the village, literally and figuratively, but we’re now realizing how badly we need the village” Similarly, another bluntly tells me “I realised I simply did not want to inherit loneliness”

When I think about the worlds we’re trying to build, or maybe the worlds I dream of, I realise they will require mutual aid and the teachings of abolition leaders to start in our interpersonal relationships, first. As one friend puts it “my friendships push me to meet people with more care, forgiveness, and understanding. Realizing that my deepest platonic relationships were rooted in those qualities from people who started as strangers, prompted me to bring that forward in the way I view social interaction overall” That line stays with me. I often notice a gap in peoples’ politics and the way they are in their most intimate relationships, often “sitting side-by-side instead of in front of one another” as one friend frames it. 

While the lines between friend, family, and lover are rarely clean and they often overlap, dissolve, and change, it is friendship’s porous, undefined structure which make it the perfect site of experimentation. Friendship is fertile ground to rehearse new ways of living together without the social prerequisites’ other relationships demand. Of course, this is also exacerbated by our current living conditions which force so many to live with friends to afford rent or share other resources in order to get by. 

However, one thing all my friends’ answers shared was that they thought of friendship as conditional. In fact, it’s that we choose each other despite those conditions that make the relationship malleable and nuanced. It’s platonic bonds where we find ourselves most comfortable to renegotiate what we ask of our relationships, and sometimes where we see ourselves mirrored and confronted with how we need to show up for others, too. Another friend notes: “Like imagination, friendship is a muscle to be strengthened, something to be expanded… Maybe you don’t need friendship with someone you know. What if we thought but thought about it as sort-of being friends with humanity? A kind of practice in being more trusting and more kind with everybody.”

When talking politics, friends told me that friendship makes them see vastly different life experiences up close, but also gives them the courage to stand steadfast. One friend says: “I think I used to be very averse to risk until I went to uni and met the right friends, because knowing I had a safe place to return to if things hit the fan made me so much more experimental and daring, either through fashion or politics.” Another adds: “friends can be gateways into new places and push me to take up space. I had never gone to a protest before meeting friends that aligned with me. In fact, I always felt like I had to be as invisible as possible.”

Friendship might be our last true rehearsal for a more community-driven world. In a world where villages have collapsed and capitalism isolates us, chosen families endure — holding space for love, care, and solidarity. Their radicality lies in how Mariame Kaba argues that abolition lives in the everyday acts of care we share, and how bell hooks insists that friendship, especially between women, is the bedrock of feminist resistance. In the intimacy and sometimes difficult politics of care within friendship, we glimpse a better world — and practice how to bring it into being. 

For me, I started believing in a better world because I saw it in my friendships. Growing up a migrant, I never felt like I had a community or saw what communities do for one another. It wasn’t until I went to university and over the years (brick by brick!) built my own community, that I began to understand that friendship is intuitively political, and deeply structural. Friendship reveals how we relate to one another, what we build together, and the way we envision belonging and living together.