I realized something recently.

One Saturday, I accompanied my dad to a men’s luncheon where he was the speaker. During his sermon, he showed a picture from his younger days: Dad, the church’s senior pastor, and a couple of guys in the audience posing together. They’d made an accountability group back in the day, Dad explained, accompanying one another to church and Bible studies, playing games of pick up basketball, and keeping each other on the straight and narrow.

Looking at that photo, I thought of the novellas I write about a friend group of kids who become superheroes…and my developing novel about a group of friends caught up in a murder mystery…and my theoretical second novel about a high school football team. I sensed a pattern, which in turn got me thinking about social diffusion.

Never heard of it? You shouldn’t have—I made it up for this post. It’s my term for the decentralization of people’s social lives, the way human interaction has changed with the rise of the Internet, social media and the availability of computers and smartphones.

Social diffusion isn’t an inherently bad thing. It’s happened before. Other older methods of communication—the telegraph, the telephone, online chat rooms—also irrevocably changed how people socialized and formed communities. However, social diffusion comes with pros and cons.

Pros: it’s so much easier to keep up with people now than it was at the time of my dad’s photo. Thanks to the power of texting and social media, I can near-instantly talk with my friend Rob in Nashville, my friend Cami in LA, my aunt and uncle in Charlotte, and my friend Maddie living abroad in France, all for the low price of my phone bill, or in Maddie’s case, WhatsApp’s even lower cost of free.99. You can (in theory at least) find friends and relationships at your convenience, be it through finding fans of what you’re a fan of on Tumblr or Reddit or in a Facebook interest group, signing up for a dating app, or searching out people with mutual interests on Meetup.

Cons: the new social avenues paved by the Internet have come at a cost. Literally. Much ink has been spilled about the decline of third spaces; I guess this is my contribution. If you’ve never heard of a third space, they’re “the places outside of the home (the first place) and the workplace (the second place) where people go to converse with others and connect with their community,” so says this University of Chicago article. They’re everywhere in pop culture. The Angel Grove Youth Center in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Central Perk in Friends. The Drunken Clam in Family Guy.

Across the board, third spaces, places and ways people used to expand, or even have, a social circle, are in decline. Church attendance has been steadily dropping for decades. Sports leagues are struggling for members. Rising expenses and stagnating wages means places you could meet people—coffee shops, gyms, bars, etc.—aren’t in a lot of people’s budgets. Even family isn’t a guaranteed social outlet. With the rising awareness of familial abuse and the eternally sharpened social cleaver that is today’s political stances, going low/no contact is not only common, it’s seen by many as empowering.

All of this was true before the COVID-19 pandemic. You can imagine how the whole world’s social life going on pause for an extended period of time exacerbated what was already trending downward.

So, a lot of people have it where their social life is mostly online.

While that’s not inherently bad, I don’t think it’s necessarily good either.

Humans are social creatures. Babies can suffer permanent developmental damage if they don’t have enough skin-to-skin contact with their parents in their first days. Recent medical studies have concluded that loneliness and social isolation can be as bad for you as smoking or obesity. Even people who box themselves off from society—in monasteries, convents, or hermitages; in cults or hate groups; or living a life mostly off the grid—do so with other people. More importantly, they do it face-to-face.

That, in my humble opinion, is a thread tying together the variety of reasons so many people feel alone in what’s supposed to be the most connected time in human history. Not the only thread, but a key thread.

A mostly-/completely-online social life feels to me like drinking soda when you’re dehydrated. It’s a liquid, so it’s better to drink a Coke than drinking nothing, but it won’t invigorate you the same way a bottle of water will. Similarly, four years of texting and FaceTiming my best friend pales in comparison to wrapping her in hugs, sitting down to a meal and taking pictures together. There’s some aspect of being human, some primal need for face-to-face connection and physical contact that no amount of DMing, texting, or phone calls can fill. An aspect that a good chunk of people, and especially members of the younger generations, are missing out on to their detriment.

This weird dissonance—social media and online hubs that were supposed to upgrade our social lives instead leaving a bear hug and brunch-shaped hole in many of us—is a reason for the spike in mental illnesses, the so-called “male loneliness epidemic,” and a host of other social problems. Not the only cause—living in a capitalist oligarchy nightmare, anybody?—but a prominent cause.

I can’t help but feel like my generation and our successors, through little fault of our own, are Gen L—the loneliest generation.

All this from a photo my dad showed for thirty seconds.

The rest of the event was great. We sang songs, ate lunch, and had a great discussion about both men’s mental health and how the church responds to mental health versus how it should.

Since then, my social life has continued on. I hang out with my church’s young adult group and my fellow youth leaders, I call my best friend Brooke every second Sunday, and every so often I pick a random contact in my phone and shoot them a text asking what’s up.

But a nagging voice in the back of my head still tells me the social life I have is a pale facsimile of what it could have been in a different era.

And I’m not sure what to say or do to shut it up.

Noah Keene

Noah Keene graduated from Calvin University in December 2021 with a major in creative writing and a minor in Spanish. He currently resides in his hometown of Detroit, Michigan. He spends his free time reading and putting his major to good use by working on his first novel. See what he’s reading by following him on Instagram @peachykeenebooks and read his other personal writing by going to thekeenechronicles.com.