Smarter Faster: The great friendship collapse
Why are we spending more time alone than ever?
with Stephen Johnson • Thu 26 June, 2025
Hey Big Thinkers,
After three hours of recently playing electric guitar too loudly with an old schoolmate, a weird fact hit me: This was the first time I’d been with a friend in a month. It’s not that I wasn’t in touch. I saw their faces on video calls, heard their voices, and read their texts. But old-fashioned, three-dimensional hanging out? A rarity these days.
The strange part wasn’t that 30 days had passed. It’s that I didn’t notice. Screen friendships may seem like a close-enough substitute, but they flatten the fresh-paint scent of your friend’s new basement, his 4-year-old daughter throwing a drumstick at the TV, the feedback whining from an overworked amp, and the sight of a grizzled German shepherd somehow napping through it all.
Technology has obviously transformed our relationships. What’s less obvious is how it might be eroding our instinct to seek them out at all. This week, journalist
unpacks what he calls “the Anti-Social Century” — a time when we’re more isolated and increasingly content to be.Read on,
Stephen
THE BIG EPIDEMIC
The great friendship collapse: Inside The Anti-Social Century
with
Today, the average American spends 20% less time socializing in person than just two decades ago, and a record amount of time alone. In this Big Think Interview, Thompson traces how technology, convenience, and culture have quietly reshaped our relationships, arguing that the rise of generative AI will likely make things worse. The good news? The antidote is simple and free.
Fast Stats
8 — The steps to revitalize any conversation, according to Emily Kasriel.
4 — The ways leaders can boost their “CQ” (cultural intelligence).
3 — The CIA’s official levels of secrets (confidential, secret, and top secret), based on the damage they’d cause if exposed.
17 — The number of years wild crows can remember a human face.
THE BIG GIFT
“Otroverts” and why nonconformists often see what others can’t
Some people can’t — or won’t — follow the crowd. In The Gift of Not Belonging, psychiatrist Rami Kaminski calls these people “otroverts” — independent thinkers who stand apart from groups, resist conformity, and sometimes see what others can’t. “Otroverts cannot be convinced of the validity of an idea sheerly through the number of people who hold it,” writes Kaminski. “It is the idea itself that matters.”
MINI PHILOSOPHY
3 ways to have more meaningful conversations
By Jonny Thomson
Steve, editor extraordinaire and Smarter Faster compère, is in the UK this week. We met in London on Tuesday night, pulled in a few Big Think friends, and talked for six hours. It’s not always easy to talk for six hours, but this wasn’t hard at all.
Conversations have their own energy. Sometimes, as on Tuesday, they just flow and pull you along in their current. At other times, a conversation can feel like some cruel affliction. These are the conversations that are so tediously inert that you’d pay good money for the chance to watch paint dry instead.
A lot of it has to do with the physiology of the conversational participants. Are they awake, refreshed, happy, positive, calm, or somewhere between tipsy and bladdered? But it also has to do with personality types and experience. On Tuesday, almost everyone was, in some ways, Socratically trained. They knew how to ask questions and how to steer a conversation.
If you want to find out more about what that means, read this week’s Mini Philosophy article.
Subscribe to Mini Philosophy on Substack for even more from Jonny Thomson.
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Stephen Johnson is the managing editor at Big Think.
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Interesting contrast with Otrovert piece. There seems to be a lot of hopping on the bandwagon stuff these days about something wrong with being alone, akin to Brooks' Weave project. Could it be healthy to remove oneself from the noise and conformist pressures of society? There's a body of evolutionary theory that suggests a great tension between individuality and belonging (with the conformist-herd thinking that comes with it).
Probably the nasty but oh so fashionable habit “of ghosting” has quite a bit to do with this as well