Why do our friendships suddenly feel like... work?
A Google Meet invite from my brother recently pinged into my inbox. ‘Catch-up’ read the subject line, alongside the silly nicknames we have for one another. He lives in a different time zone, has young kids and is often stuck in back-to-back meetings, so — I get it — it wasn’t a completely left field thing to do. But instead of looking forward to a casual chat, filling each other in on the mundanities of our lives, the harmless invite made me feel a little, well, scheduled in, like I was allotted a time slot. Just one thing in a long line of chores. It also reinforced this creeping feeling I’ve had for a while now, that our relationships are becoming increasingly workified.
If you’re anything like me, you wake up to a roll of notifications: Instagram DMs, WhatsApps, emails, texts, and news blasts. Whether it’s responding to hangout plans, remembering to transfer someone money for cocktails, or checking in on a relative, all while updating that Excel budget sheet ahead of a morning meeting, everything can blur into one big mental to-do list. Which perhaps explains why our friendships — once anchored by impromptu group hangs at someone’s house or ambling pub visits that stretched on from Saturday afternoon into Sunday’s early hours — have become as structured as conference calls. We even market social events like businesses: engagements and weddings have hashtags; and scheduling tools are used to tackle the mammoth task of finding a mutual date for a group chat meet-up.
From the boardroom to the bedroom
I decided to get to the bottom of why our social lives have become so… anti-social. I was overwhelmed by how many of the Gen Z readers I spoke to use Slack, LinkedIn, and other (imo) workplace tools to take organised fun to a whole new level. You may have even seen the ‘PowerPoint party’ trend on TikTok, where friends put together slide shows on their fave topics (this format has even been adopted by dating events, in which people use PowerPoint to pitch their single friends to a room full of strangers). Couples calendar sharing tool Cupla has boomed in popularity since its launch in 2020, with an average of 250,000 downloads each year. As per Cupla’s stats, 62.5% of users say that the app has reduced barriers to spending quality time together. Meanwhile, multiple people I spoke to use Notion and Trello in their relationships or house-shares to divvy up chores. No wonder the latest iOS update added a function to schedule texts to mates as you would emails.
In some ways, it’s no surprise we’re adopting these platforms in our personal lives. During the pandemic, our professional and personal relationships blurred beyond all recognition, with one woman telling me how her and a colleague would regularly voice note each other where once they’d have simply leaned over the desk. Meanwhile, with so much now screaming out for our attention, is it so crazy to apply tools designed to streamline the overwhelm of work in our increasingly overwhelming personal lives? After all, the tools are useful! Life is busy and stressful!
For Amelia, from London, while such tools do feel “a bit gross, worky, and formal”, they’ve actually proved invaluable in her relationships at “a life stage when people often have a lot of commitments — with their partners and partner’s friends, weddings, baby stuff, and big birthdays”. A chaotic work schedule of her own, often involving out-of-hours events, means the fashion stylist swears by Doodle (for date scheduling) and iCal to ensure she can keep up with friends. When a date recently invited her to collaborate on list-sharing app Google Keep, instead of getting the ick, she saw it as a “major green flag”.
“He’s six hours ahead in a different time zone, so we have long phone calls when we can and our conversations often break off into a million tangents,” she says. “This way, we can remind ourselves of things we don’t want to forget.” To Amelia, the shared list idea was a sign of things to come. “Honestly, I love that he thought to do that. I think it’s cute and shows investment into our shared relationship. It’s also important to me that my future spouse can share the mental load of family life, so this to me is a signal towards being capable of that.”
In my own life, I’ve been part of a friends’ Slack before, with its #music and #memes channels, and my fiancé uses the same to-do list for his personal life and work, meaning his reminders to book a table for a date night dinner sit next to a note to file an invoice. It might not be my choice, but it works for him. But as work and leisure are steadily emulsifying like the shaken-up layers of a salad dressing (reluctant, but forced), how is this impacting our relationships? Though organisation in an increasingly busy life feels essential, isn’t there something to be said for a spontaneous ‘meet at the pub at 8’ or a low-stakes, directionless hang? And what’s it doing to us psychologically when all our plans are meticulously structured? Are we likely to dedicate more quality time to one another once it’s all locked into the calendar? Or are our friendships headed down a path of efficiency, tight-ship organisation, and, well, towards the death of realness and spontaneity?
Where spontaneity goes to die?
“I have a friend who sends me a calendar invite once we’ve set a date to meet up and it really irks me,” says Alex. “It feels like it’s adding a boss-employee dynamic to our relationship, as if she’s implying that I’m disorganised. It moves our friendship into a judgemental space when, in reality, I rarely double book, mess up, or cancel seeing my friends.” Alex also points out that “everyone has different ways of organising themselves and different systems in place, which this approach doesn’t allow for”. She is trying to consciously move her friendships away from over-scheduling. “It’s totally sucking the spontaneity out of our relationships. Increasingly, people want to schedule, schedule, schedule, and my friendships are turning into constant calendar-checking, rather than on-the-hoof hangs,” she says.
Psychotherapist and author Charlotte Fox Weber warns that despite the objective usefulness of applying our work organisation to our personal lives, a structured approach to our friendships could risk us losing out on some of the more impromptu elements that make such moments special. “There’s nothing better than wandering around without purpose with our loved ones — it allows for discovery and surprise,” she explains, adding: “It’s hard to play and connect freely under pressure.”
Weber advises against making friends feel ‘scheduled in’ like a work commitment, saying, “One of the joys of friendship is adventure, humour, and mischief, and it’s hard to pack these qualities into rushed encounters.” However, she acknowledges, it’s not always so simple. “Sometimes it’s paradoxical: we have to be contrived and intentionally ring-fence time for freedom and spontaneity.” The key here, she explains, is “elbowing your way to make space for this kind of playful time. Unless you’re intentional about it, quality time with a friend is unlikely to just happen. Children are encouraged to play, socialise, and connect; in adulthood, we have more sovereignty in our scheduling, but we have to make a point of letting friendships matter. If we act like we don’t care, it’s upsettingly easy to stay disconnected”.
What’s next?
This endlessly ‘on’ culture that has arisen in the digital era (and was exacerbated during the pandemic) is starting to shift, with the UK Government even introducing a ‘right to switch off’ policy in August this year to discourage companies from encouraging poor work/life balance. But how do we manage social burnout, which is increasingly exhausting us all? A recent TikTok video by author Jason Pargin blew up after he responded to a question about feeling a sense of overwhelm from our friendships. “The way you’re being asked to live right now is objectively insane,” he said. “In the entire time this species has existed, no one was ever asked to be on call 24 hours a day to everyone who knew them.”
He talks about how, in the past, the only people who were required to be contactable at all times — via pagers or brick phones — were individuals with extremely high-pressure jobs, the kind of people who were “one minute away from a heart attack”. In the comments section of his video, one person wrote, “Every day I’m consumed with guilt and shame over all the messages I haven’t answered”, while another said, “The pressure of having to answer people burned me out so hard I went into self-isolation for years”.
Perhaps this formal spin on socialising isn’t an entirely bad thing? Particularly if it allows us to create social time when we’re ‘on’, but also ring-fences downtime when we can totally switch off. The key may be to manufacture more ‘unstructuredness’ in our friendships, while being honest about our busy schedules. “In adulthood, spontaneity rarely happens spontaneously,’ Weber says. “Planned and structured friend encounters may feel a little contrived, but that doesn’t diminish the experience of connection. We are more playful when we are at ease, and some relationships do better with a rough sketch of a plan.” Ultimately, it’s about balance and communicating honestly with your loved ones when you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just don’t ask me to ‘circle back’ or ‘touch base’ when you invite me to the pub.
You Might Also Like
