CLICK TO ACCEPT CHANGE

What is happening these days with people? Has friendship gone out of style?

Things that have happened in the past few weeks have made me understand that some people whom I’d counted as friends are nothing of the kind… mere acquaintances, instead, or co-existors in the small centre of the common universe of work.

Because a friend, defined, is someone you can trust, rely on… and when you suddenly discover that someone can’t be called a friend although you thought for years they could,
it’s simultaneously the loneliest and the most liberating moment. The feeling of acceptance has gone, and with it just a little bit of your confidence, but at the same time the ability of that person to hurt you has gone too, because anything they do, once the friendship has died and been resurrected into indifferent co-existence, won’t hurt any more, because you won’t expect any different.

Last week, someone showed me a new method of online commentary on a text shared between different writers. Teachers could use it for online marking, or editors might like it, or proof-readers. Highlight text; go to the insert menu: ‘insert comment’. The cleverness of my computer will put my name above my comment, and offer the reader two options: an x and a tick. Click to delete, or click to accept change. Beyond the usefulness of the technology, that phrase stayed with me: ‘click to accept change’. Accepting change has never been a strength of mine. Even as a small child, I was prone to cling to expired friendships. Looking for acceptance, I suppose, which some would term ‘classic only child behaviour’ in that condescending way in which so many people talk about sibling-free children. I’ve got to keep getting better at it, even now: click to accept change. Keep moving – that awful phrase I hear too much these days: ‘get with the programme’. When another subtle betrayal returns a friendship autopsy report of ‘dead’, I need to get better at ‘clicking to delete’. Don’t agonise about it. Don’t expect any different. Don’t expect friendship at all, in fact, because in a world where everything is about status and lifestyle and where we are and just how envious other people are of how we’ve got there, then friendship is one of the first things to be sacrificed in order to be more than the sum of our own parts. Or so it seems. Some days I feel so trampled underfoot, whether by so-called friends or by total strangers, that I actually check my body for bruises. Whether it’s the pushy self-important drivers who tailgate me when I’m driving right on the speed limit, because they’ve just got so much to do and so many places to be, or the pushy self-indulgent shoppers whose need for that last croissant on the bakery counter is so much more important than mine that they’ll actually knock me physically off balance to get past me in the queue on Sunday morning, or the person at work who has issues, and who doesn’t accept that everyone has issues, and that actually everyone, not just them, is human, and not just a resource… and that if things are perfect for one person, by definition they’ll be imperfect for someone else, and so on, until, like toppling dominos, without some spirit of universal compromise we’ll all fall down like something from a children’s nursery rhyme…

Where is friendship in all of that? Deprioritised. If life is about satisfying relationships, having a colour supplement picture perfect lifestyle is about something different: the glamorous outward sheen of the conviviality of friends which could just as easily be posed by actors or models who have never met before.

I’ve written here before about how we sometimes end up knowing more about almost perfect strangers – our online contacts – than we do about the people we see every day. People tweet or text or e-mail a stream of consciousness account of their life. It’s Bloomsday today: a 2010 Ulysses might be tweeted, or blogged, or written as a series of text messages. Sometimes, however bad the signal, you can feel a stronger affinity to someone you know largely as an avatar, a signature, a series of words, even if you never see them face-to-face. Maybe they let you down less because the relationship is illusory – the smoke and mirrors of clever keypad semaphore. But then if they do, the shared text between you which you took for more than it was can be removed from life at a stroke: click to delete.

So maybe it’s not as bad as all that? Just terribly confusing. All I know is that, today, something in my own mind shifted in how I view a lot of people… a sort of epiphany, or tragic anagnorisis, a click to accept change. I’m less sure about what comes next, though I hope it’s not the inevitable tragic Greek conclusion of a stage piled high with bodies! I’m not living in a tragedy, though… if all the world really is a stage, this is certainly more like a problem play. A problem play in which the heroes and villains keep changing sides in some kind of endless playground game, the goodies and the baddies undulating and changing like the break and the undertow of waves.

Crashing forward. Dragging back. Cyclically repeating an eternal pattern, with its own rhythm of highs and lows. Land revealed again as the waters are drawn back, but with all the treachery of the soft sand where your feet sink beneath you as you try to keep going…

… and when you reach the end of the beach, you’re quite alone, stranded, and you realise that it’s just you and all those distances of sand and water and sky, and you feel all right about it in the end, because in a world so harshly indifferent that the people you know best are the strangers you would barely recognise in the street, and the people you see every day are out to stab you in the back, then maybe the moment of solitude, as the translucent summer darkness spreads itself over the empty beach, is the most comforting answer you can ever hope to hear.