Is catch-up culture slowly killing our friendships?
Every week, PhilSTAR L!fe explores issues and topics from the perspectives of different age groups, encouraging healthy but meaningful conversations on why they matter. This is Generations by our Gen Z columnist Angel Martinez.
After numerous attempts to sync our schedules, I finally caught up with a friend last week. Of course, as anyone who's met up with me before would know, I came to the function prepared with bullet points in my Notes app: Who I’ve been crushing on, where I’ve been going, what I’ve been working on, what I’ve gathered on people of common interest—all of that and more, condensed for a one-to-two-hour meet-up. My companion knew to arrive just as prepared.
It was fun as it was happening, don’t get me wrong. But as I walked home, I realized that dinners squeezed in after work or quick midday coffee runs admittedly don’t make a dent or deepen what we already share. Often, we only end up listing whatever happened since we last saw each other, like we’re reading off the minutes of the meeting.
Enter the trap of catch-up culture: the hamster wheel of recapping our lives to loved ones, instead of living it alongside them. This can leave our friendships feeling suspended, as if “you only really pick up the meal where you left off last time, which could be months,” says Michelle Elman, who coined the term in her book aptly titled Bad Friend.
Not everything can be explained away with “You’re a bad friend.” Many conditions shape the contours of modern-day relationships: for instance, being—frankly speaking—tired and broke. A recent article for Vox discusses the concept of time confetti: the feeling that our hours are fragmented into tiny little pieces that feel unproductive and fulfilling.
Multitasking leaves us with so little energy left that we have less capacity for the things that are actually worthwhile. Make an audit of your most recent conversations: How many of those were merely an endless exchange of how are yous?
Scarcity also reflects in our finances: While most of us yearn for in-person connection, rising costs of basic necessities force us to put a hard stop on frivolities and shift our priorities. It’s not just what we can afford to buy right now, but also who we need to see first once we have financial breathing room.
Some also tend to allocate their limited energy reserves towards nurturing their romantic relationships, so much so that they tend to forget their friends. In my circle, when all of us were still young and single, possibly in university or in the early years of our careers, our worlds revolved around each other. Spontaneous sleepovers and weekend brunches filled up our daily schedules.
But as some turned into other halves, they’ve swapped these out for date nights. I lose my girls to boyfriends at an alarmingly consistent pace: Soon, they start postponing plans we’ve made long before, until they peter out completely. I’m left to watch their life in pictures, witnessing a new character enter the scene and fill in my spot.
This doesn’t strike most of us as a reason for concern. Sometimes, social media makes us see surveillance as a substitute for time well spent. We seem perfectly content with learning of career milestones through LinkedIn updates or waiting for hard launches to appear on our feeds. But if we keep this up, our relationships turn stale—and if your quality hangouts have devolved into quick catch-ups, that might be the case already.
Without regular, shared experiences, friends may soon run out of things in common, leading to stunted conversations that linger mostly in the past and the present. I’ve experienced agonizing chit-chat with a friend that I had outgrown; someone I wanted to see again for the sake of the memories we’ve shared. But we were around half an hour into the conversation when I came to the conclusion that was in the back of my mind all along: I don’t know who this person is anymore. I guess she didn’t either, since we mutually stopped contact right after.
Now, consecutive catch-ups aren’t a sign to immediately cut off long-term connections. Hopefully, noticing the pattern prompts us to reflect on what we can do and how else we can show up for those we claim to care about.
For instance, I used to save all of my biggest life updates for in-person chismis sessions, thinking that reactions are best witnessed face-to-face. However, it became impossible to align our schedules, and I had no choice but to start sending them in increments. Even snippets of my thought process, photos of what I’m doing, and memes that remind me of them have helped to bridge the gap.
At this point, packing our calendars with expensive, labor-intensive projects sounds like the way to go. Who wouldn’t want a joint pilates session or book club meeting with the girls? But we actually don’t need to spend more time with the people we love, quantitatively speaking, nor do we have to spend all of it doing fun activities for each other. “But we can do a whole lot of good by focusing on the quality of attention we offer while we do literally whatever we happen to be doing when [they’re] around,” Sigal Samuel writes on Vox.
Regardless of whether we’re going for a matcha run near my apartment, shopping for vinyl records, or taking on a new side quest, my focus will be solely on whoever I’m with. And once we go past the trivial and inconsequential, that’s where I am reminded of their thought processes, their tastes, how they would react in certain situations—basically everything that made us friends in the first place.
Generations by Angel Martinez appears weekly at PhilSTAR L!fe.
