Woman reflects on why Gen Z is so bad at friendship: ‘There is a huge need for belonging, but very little tolerance for other people's mistakes’

Are the youngest generations bad at making friends, or do we just not understand them?There are a couple of reasons why Gen Z might seem worse at relationships than previous generations. By now, we've all realized that social media has created new forms of intimacy that have reshaped how we think about relationships.We can know what someone ate, who they're with, and what they like in real time. This can create the illusion of closeness while they're not sharing that exclusively with us, and they might not even know we're watching. The thing is, our bodies don't know the difference between a real friend we see all the time and someone we're seeing all the time, only virtually.Social media becomes particularly interesting from this perspective because it doesn't merely allow us to communicate with one another; it changes what intimacy looks like, and what kind of relationships become possible.Right now, there are more types of relationships than there used to be, for sure. What would be the equivalent of somebody you only interact with via likes before? It didn't exist. It also wasn't normal for us humans to have so much proximity without reciprocity as we do now with influencers o…

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