Loveless Generation
Friendship is such a strange and fickle thing these days. Maybe I got it wrong somewhere, or maybe I just have bad luck, but friends are seeming to get more and more temporary. Loyalty should be firm and withstanding, but it seems so unsteady and loose these days. Yes, we shouldn’t be swearing on earth or on heaven to be best friends forever, but I still believe our ‘yes’ should mean ‘yes’ and our ‘no’ should mean ‘no’. Or am I just too sentimental for the times?
I’m not trying to throw myself a pity party – let’s get that straight. I have a family that loves me and I have a handful of friends that I feel like I can rely on. But, and I feel like I’m speaking not only for myself here, I’ve also had a lot of people that let me down whom I never thought would. I realise this is all a part of life, but it’s starting to seem like our generation is heading down a winding path of me-myself-and-I.
I’m sure there have been moments where my loyalty has wavered, and I want to believe a small part of that is humanly natural. But right now, I’m simply discussing patterns of behaviour I’m noticing around me, because I’m scared of where these patterns lead to. Growing up, I loved primary school. I loved the group of friends I had, and everyone was pretty civil with one another. Sure, there were bullies and silly fights – but nothing that killed my memory of the good friendships I made during that time of my life. Everyone was invited to pretty much every party and there weren’t many people that were excluded. Then there was high school, and the beginning stages of it was similar to my feeling during primary school. But something changed – and I think that change is a mixture of growing up, puberty, and what I like to call, the start of our Loveless Generation.
Maybe my problem in high school was that I observed too much. I’d sit with a group of people, and most of the conversation was centred around gossip. Gossip about people not there, people in different schools, and a lot of the time, about people sitting right in that circle. Although I longed to feel a part of something, I started leaving those kinds of groups because I didn’t want to be a part of something exactly like that. Then I started realising that the people I thought were loyal to me, were not actually loyal to me, and were only loyal to a painted picture of me. I wasn’t a part of this group anymore, so their loyalty towards me expired. Anyway, high school is a place filled with a bunch of teenagers trying to figure themselves out, so it’s really not fair to judge this time of our lives.
But now, here I am in university, and I think I’m starting to really see our generation as the Loveless Generation after all. People make plans and then cancel them last minute or don’t show up at all. Friends post on their Instagram Stories daily but forget to reply to you for weeks on end. Or even worse, friends love to put you on their Story for your birthday, but always have a reason not to actually hang out. People pretend that they want to be involved in your life, but really, everyone is only involved with themselves.
And it’s not all our own faults, we’re being brainwashed to think more about ourselves than others anyway. Am I going to be successful one day? Am I popular enough? Is being friends with them going to ruin my image? Am I hot enough? Is this event going to look good on my story? So we continue to follow each other on Instagram, love our friends’photos on Facebook, and scroll endlessly on TikTok. Look, I’m not here to be that person that hates on social media. Social media has great value in today’s age, and I would be a hypocrite to judge it when I use it just as often too. It’s just, I always thought that the point of social media was to connect us, but yet I feel our generation disconnecting more and more from one another each day.
I feel like I know that all of this is not a growing up thing but a generation thing. My mother has kept way more loyal friends from high school to date than I have. I can literally count the people I’ve kept from school on less than one hand, and it decreases quite often too. Maybe I’m the problem, I don’t know. But when someone in your family, let’s say your grandmother, passes away, I’m sure we all have a few people we’d expect at least a message from. My mother didn’t even tell anyone about the loss, and she received a million messages and phone calls. For me, this was another situation where I could count my friends on less than one hand. That expectation is there because you know if the roles were reversed, you would do anything to be there for that particular friend. And actually, that expectation is there because you have been there for that particular friend in a similar situation. Well, instances like this has just proved to me time and time again that our generation is rapidly losing love. People only love you when it suits them.
If there’s anything I’ve learnt about love and loyalty from my family, and from some people that have actually chosen to stick around, is that love stays even when the person doesn’t really feel like loving you. That means that if after 12 years of friendship, even if it feels like there is no point in staying, because you’re bored of the person or they no longer fit into your life, you stick around anyway. Because you love them. Love doesn’t get to decide when or when not to show up – because if it’s there, it’s there. Maybe I read the recipe for friendship wrong, but I’m pretty sure loyalty was an ingredient.
The problem is that we’re all (or a lot of us are anyway) trying to be influencers. Our generation is so focused on getting their name our there, being successful, popular, liked and noticed that we forget about our human responsibility to be human. Humans are made for social interaction. Real social interaction. Again, not putting social media down here, but instead of just mentioning a friend on your story or sending them a million memes a day – why don’t you actually call them? Or reply to their message they sent you two months ago? We should be trying to interact with one another and not just simply gaining engagements.
I know a lot of people will probably relate to this piece of writing. I think most of us currently feel that we don’t have many genuine friends, that people keep letting us down and that we feel isolated and lonely most of the time. But if so many people are feeling this way, are we not maybe doing it to ourselves? Here’s the thing – maybe we’re all victimising ourselves way too much to realise that we’re actually the persecutors. You need to be a good friend to have a good friend. And maybe you’ve tried and tried with some people, but it just never works. Listen, if you’re chasing after Anna to be your bestie but ignoring Kayla who’s been trying to be your friend for ages, you’re just as guilty. I once heard that we often don’t receive love back from the people we give it to, but we’ll always receive that love back from someone. So it’s our responsibility to love everyone in our lives, even if they don’t love us back. I know it’s hard – but we need to stop feeling sorry for ourselves when there’s a bunch of people feeling exactly the way you feel because you’re doing the same thing to them.
So this is my challenge to you – stop trying to search for the better, more popular, prettier or hotter friend – appreciate and love the people that are already there. Let people know you for your loyalty, not just your handle. And maybe, just maybe, a little bit of love spread around will turn our Loveless Generation into the Loved Generation.
Written by Mila Ottavini