> It seems that everyone these days is aware that friendship is on the decline, but so few actually seem willing to do anything about it. Maybe people really do love their Disney+, their Oculus, their Doordash, and their Cheeto-dust more than they do their relationships with other people. If so, that seems to be the way of the world from which there is no turning back.

The "metaverse" is already beginning to set in, and it's like a drug--no issue in moderation, but destructive if you get addicted, which is extremely easy to do. Do people love drugs more than relationships with other people? Well, drug addicts do, but we understand that as a neurological twitch (an illness, even) more than a high-minded desire.

> The reason that college works in forming friendships and romantic relationships is the artificial environment it creates where people are obligated to show up and mingle with people who are from different backgrounds, and for at least 2 years.

I'm not sure I agree. College doesn't "obligate" this, and it doesn't always happen. People of low social classes feel isolated and excluded (often without the excluders knowing what they are doing that alienates them) and people of high social classes have already set up their barriers. The middle classes are latest to form social class identity--around 19-21 in the US, as opposed to 15-18 for the lower and upper [1] social classes.

However, college is the closest thing we have in the US to an attempt at communism [2] (even if it is artificial and expensive, therefore indicative of what David Graeber calls the communism of the rich). The influences of pre-existing social class and personal wealth (which most college students don't have yet) are not completely blocked, but at a minimum--those things matter less than they did before college in terms of a person's living standard, and less than they will after college.

> Some people truly desire strong bonds, but it seems that most people decide that the strong bond with their spouse is good enough.

Sadly, I don't think most people in America have even that. They might think they do, but what's going to happen if they're unemployed for 12 months? Ultimately, even the family, as an institution, succumbs to corrosion in a bourgeois society. Unlike Marx, I don't seek to abolish the family--as somewhat of a tradleft, I'd rather protect it--but I agree with the Marxists that this form of capitalism creates a society in which all bonds are negotiable when living under a socioeconomic system that has no moral restraint when it comes to applying financial pressure.

You can still find a ride-or-die spouse in parts of the country, but in Silicon Valley? If you met her at a tech company, then as soon as you lose your Jira job, she's going to find a crypto bro.

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[1] I'm not the first to observe that the lower and upper class have more in common with each other than either does with the middle. At the extremes, people tend to be class realists who understand how much money matters in daily life. It's those in the middle who can afford to indulge in naivete.

[2] No, not USSR or CCP "communism", which neither of those systems even managed to approximate; rather, by communism I mean a post-scarcity social arrangement in which people form bonds and pursue interests for non-financial reasons... that is, a society free of economic totalitarianism. Since the USSR and CCP are merely another form of economic totalitarianism, run by the state rather than private employers but otherwise just as oppressive as our society, they don't qualify.