It’s easy to think the difficulty lies in you, but more often than not, the problem is structural. Friendship itself has been hollowed out by the systems in which it now has to exist. Communication has shifted into commercial frameworks where attention, presence, and even intimacy are reduced to tokens of exchange. Whether or not money is directly involved, the same dynamics creep in: what is visible, what is valued, what circulates. Relationships become less about mutual connection and more about fitting into patterns of performance, recognition, and measurable worth.
This distortion leaves us struggling with the wrong question. Instead of asking, “Why am I broken?” it makes more sense to ask, “What has happened to friendship?” Once value is defined in terms of circulation—likes, responses, metrics—then it stops being about the messy, uneven work of showing up and caring for each other. The baseline for any sense of integrated, sustainable, or even worthwhile friendship collapses, because what makes one person feel good may come at another’s expense, and the system has no way to resolve that contradiction without creating new ones. Friendship becomes fragile, unstable, and often disappointing. If you’re having trouble making friends, it isn’t necessarily your fault. The conditions under which friendship thrives have themselves been compromised.
Daedelus Kite 