We Have Access to Everyone and Intimacy With No One

Eleanna Liaskou

Aug 30

4 min read

Social media gave us constant access to our friends' lives, but quietly replaced the conversations that made us feel close.

Your friend uploads an Instagram Story. You watch it while waiting for the bus, react with a heart, and continue scrolling. By the end of the day, you've seen where they spent the weekend, what they ordered for brunch, and who they were with. Weeks later, you realise you haven't actually spoken to them.

Somewhere along the way, watching began to feel like catching up.

Social media promised to make staying connected effortless. Instead, it quietly redefined what connection looks like. Today, many of us experience our friendships the same way we experience celebrities: through carefully curated updates that require nothing from us except attention. We consume the lives of the people closest to us between cooking videos, fashion reels, and strangers documenting their morning routines. The line between friendship and audience has become surprisingly thin.

The strange part is that this no longer feels unusual. It feels normal.

Friendship Became Another Form of Content

For years, conversations happened in real time. Friends told each other stories, repeated details, interrupted each other with questions, and laughed at moments that rarely made sense outside the conversation itself. The value wasn't simply exchanging information. It was participating in someone else's experience.

Social media changed that rhythm.

Instead of telling our friends about our lives, we often publish them. Instead of asking what someone has been doing, we watch the highlights before the conversation ever has the chance to happen. Without realising it, we have started consuming our friends the same way we consume influencers, celebrities, or reality television personalities. Everyone has become both broadcaster and audience.

This evolution wasn't accidental. Platforms gradually shifted from prioritising communication to rewarding publication because publication keeps people scrolling. Passive consumption generates attention, attention generates advertising revenue, and advertising revenue sustains the platform. Genuine belonging, on the other hand, has very little commercial value. A two-hour conversation between close friends doesn't produce endless impressions or encourage someone to keep refreshing a feed.

The platforms sold us connection but optimised for content.

As a result, friendship increasingly happens through observation rather than participation. We remain informed about each other's lives while becoming less involved in them.

We've Seen This Story Before

Technology has followed this pattern before.

When television became a household staple, it was often presented as something that would bring families together. People gathered in the same room every evening, sharing a screen and a routine. Yet television gradually replaced many of the conversations it was originally meant to accompany. Families remained physically together while becoming increasingly silent, each programme filling the space that discussion once occupied.

Social media repeated the pattern, but this time it happened inside our friendships.

Instead of asking a friend how their holiday went, we've already watched the recap. Instead of hearing about their new apartment over coffee, we've seen the photo dump. Instead of discovering what made someone excited, nervous, or disappointed, we've consumed a polished version of the outcome before they ever had the chance to tell the story.

Information has quietly become a substitute for interaction.

Knowing what happened is not the same as hearing someone describe why it mattered to them. Stories create facts, but conversations create relationships.

Perhaps that is why many friendships today feel strangely maintained and strangely distant at the same time. We know an incredible amount about each other's lives, yet sometimes very little about how the people in them actually feel.

The Return of Belonging

It is no coincidence that book clubs, supper clubs, craft nights, neighbourhood cafés, and community events have become increasingly appealing. In a culture saturated with visibility, people are searching for spaces where participation matters more than performance.

These gatherings are not simply nostalgic reactions to a digital world. They represent something social media cannot easily replicate: the experience of being genuinely present with other people. No algorithm decides who speaks next. No audience watches from the sidelines. There is no pressure to package the moment before living it.

The popularity of these spaces suggests that people are not experiencing a shortage of information about one another. They are experiencing a shortage of shared experiences.

Belonging has quietly become a luxury.

Not because friendship itself has disappeared, but because the conditions that allow friendship to deepen have become increasingly rare. Real relationships ask for time, attention, repeated encounters, awkward silences, forgotten phones, and conversations that unfold without an audience. None of these things fit particularly well into a platform designed to maximise engagement.

After more than a decade of scrolling, many of us are discovering that what we miss was never access to other people's lives. We have plenty of that already.

What we miss is participation.

The platforms promised to keep us connected, and in many ways, they succeeded. We have never known more about the people around us. Yet somewhere between Stories, photo dumps, and endless updates, we confused witnessing someone's life with sharing it.

Perhaps that is why belonging feels increasingly precious today. Not because it disappeared, but because it can no longer be passively consumed. It still has to be built, one conversation at a time.