By Lexie Rodenbaugh | Arts & Life Writer
My least favorite phrase is the inevitable: “So what should we do?” I hear this in my nightmares, haunted by the idea of my friends not knowing me well enough just to sit around and talk. It usually comes after an hour of doom-scrolling “together,” with the occasional giggle and glance at the other person’s phone — nothing longer than the length of an AI-generated TikTok.
The problem is that our friendships are being reshaped — and quietly weakened — by the attention economy. Between constant notifications, endless scrolling and digital multitasking, we’re giving away the one resource friendship actually needs: our undivided attention.
While we were designed for human interaction, even connection can’t compete with the dopamine spike that social media provides. The attention economy has made focus a rare commodity. Every app is engineered to pull us back in, fragmenting not just our time, but our relationships. Friendship now competes with algorithms designed to hijack our curiosity. The result is a generation starved for closeness.
You hang out with friends, but everyone’s half-looking at their phone. Conversations are chopped up between scrolls and group chats. We’re “together,” but never fully present. We start to feel lonelier despite being constantly “connected.” Friendships become surface-level updates instead of shared experiences.
The attention economy creates an unfortunate system that profits off how long we look at our screens — it has rewired how we relate to one another. Every vibration and notification is designed to capture your attention. Social media thrives on keeping us in a trance, often at the expense of genuine connection. We’ve turned moments that used to belong to each other into moments owned by algorithms.
In the past, friendship was built on shared time and undivided presence. Now it’s built on shared content. Instead of asking how our friends are doing, we watch their stories. Instead of catching up over coffee, we send a quick “miss you” text and double-tap a photo. These micro-interactions feel like connection, but they’re really just digital echoes of it.
It’s not enough to simply interact on social media with the people you call your friends. Sending memes back and forth doesn’t constitute friendship — it’s a cop out from the inconvenience of actually speaking to each other.
The irony is, we know it doesn’t feel good. Studies show heavy social media use is linked to higher rates of loneliness, anxiety and decreased empathy. Still, we can’t seem to stop. We’ve been trained to value accessibility over depth, speed over sincerity.
And yet, the friendships that matter most require slowness. They need silence, eye contact, inside jokes that aren’t recorded for TikTok. They need our full, inconvenient attention.
If the attention economy thrives on distraction, then genuine friendship might just be an act of resistance. It’s choosing to put the phone face down. It’s asking a question and actually listening. It’s being fully there — not just online, not just on read.
In order to reclaim our friendships, we must reclaim our focus. Because when we trade our attention for endless scrolling, we’re not just losing time — we’re losing each other.
