Art by 竹壹 (CHOo1NE)
In my previous article, which you can find here, I talked about the relationship I've observed between Americans and money, and how that can impact your friendships. Let's explore more reasons friendships in America are hard.
Reason #2: Americans don't really care about being on time
A consequence of depending on only yourself for transportation is that you grow very accustomed to being late for things. After all, your car doesn't care if you leave at 8:40 or 8:42 or 8:47. It's not going to leave without you. Therefore, people not being ready when you come to pick them up is normal. People showing up after the time you asked them to show up is normal. At Microsoft, nobody schedules meetings for 10:30 or 11:00. They are scheduled for 10:35 or 11:05.
But that means, if you're carpooling someplace, every person you pick up adds another 5-10 minutes of just waiting for them to be ready. It can easily take me over an hour just to pick up 4 people to go somewhere, because I have to drive to houses located in entirely different parts of the city (often different cities), and then wait for several minutes at every house. A few people are prompt, but by and large nobody cares about this. Nobody will be mad at you for being late and you should always budget for everyone else being late in all your plans.
If you are going to insist on people being more timely, people expect you to have an actual reason for it besides "I don't like waiting". If you point out that it's a little bit disrespectful to make a car full of people sit around for 5-10 minutes because you couldn't be bothered to look for your shoes until everyone literally arrived at your door, people won't really argue with you. But they're definitely going to think you're being needlessly difficult about something that doesn't really matter.
Now, you don't necessarily have to get one person to pick everyone up. That's the most efficient thing to do in terms of cost, but it wastes a lot of time. You could waste fuel instead, and make everyone drive separately. Assuming nobody is planning on drinking much. And assuming wherever you're going will have plenty of parking. And assuming that everyone has a car in the first place. But again, people don't really care about being on time. And if everyone is driving separately, there's even less pressure to show up at the agreed-upon time. Or in some cases at all.
Now, to be fair, this seems to be mainly a west coast thing. I get the impression that people on the east coast tend to be much more prompt. I also recognize that my specific friend group is uniquely terrible in this regard, and that's definitely influenced my perception. But I've also definitely observed this tendency in my midwest friend groups, and I've heard of similar things happening in the south. So I don't think I'm off base here.
At this point, you might be identifying a theme. Let's keep going.
Reason #3: Black Mirror In Your Pocket
One of the most common reasons I hear for people not going to events is that they don't have time for it. Everyone seems to have become extremely busy. But if you actually interrogate this a bit, you'll quickly discover that most people are not actually able to account for the huge holes in their schedule. Some people have shitty jobs, but even the biggest workaholics I know are not working 16 hours every day, 7 days a week. Let's do some math. There are 168 hours in a week, let's say you work two full-time jobs, so 80 hours a week, and you sleep 8 full hours every night, so 56 hours week. Then you spend, let's say, a full hour on dinner every single day. And another hour on breakfast. And another hour doing chores. Every day. Somehow. So 21 hours a week on all of that. That's 157 hours. Which leaves 11 hours a week still unaccounted for, even with this utterly psychotic schedule. Even this person should, if they manage their time well, have enough time to hang out with their friends for a few hours every week.
Most people are obviously nowhere near this busy. Most people are working half this much, and are probably spending zero hours on chores and breakfast most days. So there's probably 60 or so hours worth of time each week that cannot be explained by merely being busy with life. At the same time, when people say they don't feel like they have any free time, I don't think they're lying. I fully believe that they believe that. Yet they largely seem unsure what is actually making them so busy. What could possibly be swallowing up dozens hours every week in a way that people don't even notice it?
I already gave away the answer in the heading. I am convinced that a huge factor in people "not having time anymore" has nothing to do with work and a lot more to do with the internet. When I share this sentiment with people, I tend to get mixed responses. There is usually an acknowledgment that phones are taking up more time than we'd like to admit. But most people seem hesitant to say their screen time is causing them to socialize less.
Generally, people are not consciously choosing to go on Twitter instead of grabbing dinner with their friends. Also, people were addicted to their phones in college too. And they were spending lots of time with their friends back then. So it can't be that, right? It's gotta be work. That's what changed. But does this really make sense? In my case, I went to an extremely harsh college with a notoriously high workload. Around half of the students dropped out in the first year. And the schedules, being college, were basically random and completely different for each person in our friend group. So when we transition to a 40-hour work week, with fixed, nearly-identical schedules, and eliminate all homework, we should end up with way more free time. Not less.
I agree it gets worse once you enter the workforce, but when most people say that, the implication they're laying down is that work is taking up more of their time than college did. But I don't actually think that's what's going on here. Instead, I think what's really going on is that the structure of a standard 9-5 is very effectively masking a widespread, ubiquitous phone addiction.
Your phone tracks how much you use it. You can check the amount of screen time you're getting right now if you don't believe me. I consider myself to not be addicted to my phone. And yet, the numbers don't lie: I spend between 3 and 6 hours looking at it every day. That's around 30 hours a week I spend just checking messages, watching videos, and browsing the internet. That is very close to qualifying as a full-time job under American labor law. At least for me, this number almost perfectly explains the time in my schedule that I can't account for.
I think we can agree that the correct amount of time to use a phone is probably not zero hours. But it's definitely gotta be less than 30 hours a week. I can only assume most of my friends are using their phones just as much, if not more. I think most of us know at least one person who, even when they are in the middle of hanging out with their IRL friends, will be simultaneously texting someone who's not there, scrolling, or sometimes even watching videos on their phone. Always. It is incredibly jarring to have an IRL conversation interrupted by a video playing because someone accidentally left their volume up. And more than once I've seen someone then turn the volume down, but not off as the video continues to play. Is this normal? I hope not. But It's no wonder they don't feel like these hangouts are doing much for them. They're barely participating anyway.
We tolerate this.
What I'm trying to say here is that people are not busy with work. And my evidence for it is very simple. If work is the problem, then the people in my friend group with the worst working hours should therefore be the most flaky, right? But it's the complete opposite: The guy who works essentially a split shift every day, with a 60-hour workweek, is also the only person who shows up to our hangouts every single time. You can basically draw a straight line showing the relationship between how awful someone's schedule is and how much free time they apparently have. The people with the best schedules are, paradoxically, the least available. And I think this is happening because of technology.
The issues with today's technology are well-known at this point and have been talked about to death. But there is one specific effect that I think is responsible specifically for people spending less time together. Phones, being addictive, tend to crowbar themselves into the tiny gaps in your schedule. Then, once there, they expand.
Here's what I mean by that. You have a work meeting at 10AM. It ends at 10:31. You have another meeting at 10:35. Oh no, that's not enough time to get any work done. You'll have to do something else for 4 minutes. Before you can even finish piecing this thought together, the phone is already in your hand. But the issue doesn't stop there. Because now you lose track of time while scrolling and your 4-minute gap has turned into an 8-minute one. And you're now late for your meeting. But that's okay. You're only 4 minutes late. And this is America, so you're basically on time.
Of course, this is only a few minutes. And maybe you wouldn't be late to a work meeting over this. They tend to be pretty fixed in the day. You'd probably just join the meeting on time, but continue to be on your phone, and end up not remembering anything about the meeting at the end. But now imagine that instead of a work meeting, it's you doing your laundry. You're checking your phone while folding your clothes, checking your phone while putting your clothes away, checking your phone right before and right after starting the washing machine. Without even considering what you are doing, you end up on your phone for 40 more minutes until the washing machine is finished running. And then you don't get to it immediately, it takes you another 15 minutes to pry yourself away from the screen long enough to actually walk over to the machine and start moving your clothes. Maybe you forget entirely, and your clothes stay there until you randomly remember it an entire day later. Then, at the end, you can't even begin to fold your clothes until you've first spent a few minutes selecting a podcast to listen to. And if you finish before the episode is over? Well, you're not going to just stop halfway through an episode, right?
But now, this task, which should really be a 5-minute effort, followed by a 2-minute effort, followed by a 10-minute effort, has somehow taken three hours over the course of two days. But you don't really notice this, because you're still in the miasma of internet content. And your schedule kinda looks the same. The total amount of time it took for the clothes to become clean is more or less what it should be. You don't notice that all the time while the washer and dryer were running, which should have been free, has quietly disappeared. Instead, what you notice is that you finally finished all your weekend chores, and it's somehow already 4PM on Sunday. "Too bad these chores take up my whole weekend", you probably think to yourself. "Being an adult really means having no free time, huh?"
I know this is true because I do it. I have literally watched people do it. And then, when I point out that they are doing it, literally as they are doing it, they insist that they are not doing it. It makes me feel like I'm fucking crazy. Seriously, next time you have chores to do, make a list of them, and then try doing all of them, back-to-back, without using your phone or computer until you are done. At the end of this exercise, measure how long it took. You might be surprised at the results.
We waste an ungodly amount of time doing things in ridiculously inefficient ways, entirely because we are just that disengaged. Even 60 seconds of critical thought about how we spend our time each day could save many of us several hours a week. We are wasting our lives.
And chores are just one part of your life. Remember, I have 3-6 hours of screen time a day. And I hate using my phone! People are busier now than at any point in human history, while simultaneously doing less than at any point in human history.
Part 4 will be posted next week.