On TV We Have Friends. On The Internet We Have Friends. In Real Life We Live Alone.

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On TV, the group of friends is the base set of humanity. From Seinfeld to Friends to Sex and the City to Glee, there are a whole bunch of friends in close intimacy with each other, wandering in and out of unlocked apartments, a fierce closeness. Neil Gabler (who is one of those guys you should read all the time, smart, he is) has a piece in the LA Times, about how that TV version of American social life is not only a distorted vision of reality, it's more of a bizarro, opposite view of how we actually live.

One study found that Americans had one-third fewer nonfamily confidants than they had 20 years earlier, and 25% had no one in whom to confide whatsoever. Another study of 3,000 Americans found that on average they had only four close social contacts, but these included family members like one's own spouse.



This decline in real friendships may account in part for the dramatic rise of virtual friendships like those on social-networking sites where being "friended" is less a sign of personal engagement than a quantitative measure of how many people your life has brushed and how many names you can collect, but this is friendship lite. Facebook, in fact, only underscores how much traditional friendship — friendship in which you meet, talk and share — has become an anachronism and how much being "friended" is an ironic term.

Call a friend today, for no reason, just to catch up. Humans are not meant to bowl alone.