how to make friends with real people

the secret power of sincerity

Last week on X, user “Abby Govindan” asked “how do I form meaningful friendships as an adult without enrolling in grad school or joining a cult[?]” 

It’s an understandably common question, one I keep hearing from fellow zillennials. It’s no secret that formerly robust social institutions have been hollowed out in several different ways, for all the reasons we’ve been hearing about for years on end: shrinking family size, lukewarm religiosity, the iPhone, decimation of single sex spaces, and the general decline of social trust and enthusiasm that follows obvious corruption and criminality. Put simply, a social life doesn’t just “happen” by virtue of checking all the right boxes. Did it ever? 

The reason Govindan can’t make friends is clear from the tweet itself. Immediately, reflexively, like a well-trained dog, she demeans faith.  

The first step to getting past loneliness is to completely dispense with the kind of cynicism that Govindan, many of her default liberal peers, and even many conservatives, harbor — the kind that would lead someone to reframe religion as a cult. Or the kind that reframes marriage as slavery. Or the kind that makes someone think running for local office is “cringe.”  

I think nineties sitcoms played a major role in memeing into reality a sort of black, sardonic humor based on the snobby and solipsistic denigration of all things carrying the slightest whiff of wholesomeness. Sarcasm and scorn is the air we breathe now, but no matter how much fun we want to pretend we’re having when we use it, it suffocates honest human connection. If we want to form meaningful friendships, I think the first step would be to collectively excise this faithless (ironic) detachment from our hearts.

St. Thomas Aquinas calls the thing I’m talking about derision. He distinguishes it from calumny (“less grievous than backbiting or reviling”) and also concedes that it may happen non-contemptuously in jest, but writes:

the derision of good persons is grievous, because honor is the reward of virtue, and against this it is written (Job 12:4): "The simplicity of the just man is laughed to scorn." Such like derision does very much harm: because it turns men away from good deeds, according to Gregory (Moral. xx, 14), "Who when they perceive any good points appearing in the acts of others, directly pluck them up with the hand of a mischievous reviling."

I confess this kind of reflexively contemptuous attitude toward boomers. So let me offer them some honor while I’m at it. “Just put yourself out there,” the cliche to end all cliches, may be trite, but this favorite piece of advice from older generations is actually profound true. There’s something to it, and that “something,” I think, is sincerity.

Sincerity is in a thank-you card. It’s in fresh baked cookies. It’s in investing your time and talent in things greater than yourself. It’s in running for office on the positions we’ve been raised are simply too embarrassing to hold.

There’s social capital to be built privately and in public this way. One could argue (Robert Putnam did) that the decimation of our social lives is the basic reason for most other kinds of dysfunction. The roadblocks to conviviality may seem high, but the stakes of throwing up our hands in acerbic exasperation, letting our social world disintegrate, are much higher. Giving up is giving in — to disdain, contempt, and the root of all evil, pride.