I love my friends.
I can’t imagine my life without them. They’ve been there through life’s ebbs and flows, sharing tears and laughter and memories that will last a lifetime. We can do everything and nothing together. Every time I think of them I can’t help but smile – or cry, even – wondering how I got so lucky. With them, I can just be.
Recently, though, I’ve learned my kind of hyper-codependent friendships are increasingly rare and special. A recent column in The New York Times posits that distance can make the platonic heart grow fonder. Even amid our national loneliness crisis, research shows that a relationship's quality isn’t determined by the frequency of interactions. Intentionality is key.
Even so, my social media feeds have been brimming
with those bemoaning the state of my modern friendship. Some iteration of “everyone wants a village; no one wants to be a villager” gets passed around often.
It isn’t all our fault, though. As the world around us crumbles, so can our most intimate relationships. Friendships might be harder to maintain in 2026, but they’re worth the fight. They’re all we have left at this point. Friendship is radical.
Friendship comes at a price
The state of our economy isn’t conducive to friendship. Despite President Donald Trump waxing poetic about how good things are, most Americans feel their wallets shrinking due to inflation, corporate greed and international turmoil.
Generation Z (those born between 1997 and 2012) can’t afford a first date, let alone the routine costs of maintaining a friendship.
To remedy this, some have chosen to forgo friendship altogether, or be as low-effort (thus, low cost) as possible. Others take a more deleterious approach. A piece in The Cut exposed the very Gen Z phenomenon of Venmo “ghosting,” or “repayment avoidance,” where friends refuse to pay others back for shared costs, forcing an unlucky person to foot a bill they never planned to.
Out of 1,000 Gen Z consumers who have fronted money for a group expense, 76% said they weren’t fully repaid, while 55% said repayment issues created tension or negatively affected a relationship, and 47% said they’ve gone into debt to cover group expenses, according to a report by Zelle.
Dear fellow Gen Zers – and I’m going to hold your hand while I say this – your precarious financial situation is not an excuse to not pay someone you owe.
Doing so can and will fracture your relationship. No one wants to be friends with someone who has to be chased down for repayment or mysteriously never has the Uber app on their phone when it’s time to book a ride.
Social media often begets antisocial behavior
I see this type of selfishness exist even outside fiscal responsibilities. Our culture of loneliness has hardened us too often to be inconsiderate, mean and generally unsociable.
The loneliness epidemic is caused by an amalgam of systemic issues that force us into isolation. Friendship is another part of our lives that's actively being stripped from us. By exhibiting antisocial behaviors, we let those systems win.
Gen Z has unique friendship dynamics borne out of the digital age. Social media and technology have expanded our friendship possibilities outside of our immediate areas. We’re no longer bound to our schools and neighborhoods to make friends.
This allows us to find people we identify with more, and our familiarity with social media eliminates the initial emotional barriers we would’ve put up otherwise. But relegating all our intimate relationships to the digital realm can create a sense of object permanence that can only be avoided by making intentional steps to nurture these relationships.
Friendship isn’t always cheap and convenient. Sometimes you’ll have to scrape together $30 for brunch just to see someone you care about. Preserving a friendship in 2026 is constantly fighting back against the external forces that want to pull us apart from each other.
Platonic relationships are worth the battle. We owe it to ourselves and each other.
Kofi Mframa is an entertainment and culture columnist at USA TODAY.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Friendship is unaffordable. We have to pay the price anyway | Opinion
