To belong

There have always been cliques. 

When I went to school, there were jocks and brains and artsy types and nobodys.  In my school, at least, the different groups interacted well.  It was usually pretty obvious to what group someone belonged, but this belonging did not include complete, overt exclusion.  The brains played sports with the jocks and invited the artists to parties.  The cheerleaders, though very sporty, sat next to and studied with the brains in Calculus and Spanish 4.  Sure there was teasing and rumors, but that’s just part of coming of age, right?

I think the tide has changed.  With the emergence of social networking and cellular communications and skype, just to name a few, everyone has to strive a little bit harder to find that place where they belong, the group of people with whom they feel they fit in. 

This is just another example of the cable phenomenon.  I can’t recall the number of times I’ve had this conversation.  When I was a child, we had 5 or 6 channels.  There was an ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX affiliate, along with PBS and maybe one other channel.  Needless to say, flipping through the channels offered few possibilities and took very little time.  Yet, rarely did I find myself at a loss for something to watch.  Today, the average American has over 200 channels.  Research shows that a normal family watches shows on around 50 different channels over the course of a week.  And how many times have I sat in front of my television wonder why I can’t find anything to watch.  With an increased number of options, I have set my standards somewhat ridiculously high and now I find myself clicking away, unsatisfied.

People often find the same situation when they go off to college or move to a new town.  They find that a lot of their friends, the people they were close to, they don’t really keep in touch with once there is distance.  It leaves you wondering, was I only friends with them because we were close?  Do we choose many of our friends by proximity? 

This process, of choosing our friends, has also been affected by mass media.  Why be friends with those around you when you can have friends so much more like you on MySpace or Facebook or wherever.  But, then a new problem arises: if I have 12000 friends online, how good of friends can they be?  Thus a new set of echelons of friendship were born.  On a daily basis, I hear students in my school calling someone their son or daughter, mother, father, aunt, uncle, whatever, to describe their friendships. 

As has been said over many a generation, blood is thicker than water.  So, with the creation of these new “families,” we been excluding individuals that are our close friends, because they are not part of the “family.”  Beyond this, with the great number of friends that we could have, we expect more and more from someone that we call friend, or “family.”  Instead of acknowledging that everyone is a little different and relishing these differences, we start alienating anyone who rubs us the wrong way in any way.  We start becoming more extreme versions of ourselves and getting angry and irate when when people don’t respond in a good way to our new “personality,” the caricature we put on as a mask.  

Also, with all the different ways we communicated, we have become lonelier as people.  I’ve become so good at texting, that my face-to-face conversation skills are diminishing.  I’m so used to being able to talk to someone through chat, or fb comment, or text, that when I’m not talking to someone, there’s an emptiness, a vacant feeling.

With everything we have set up to be stacked against us, it’s no wonder that so many people feel alone.