There’s a famous thought experiment by John Rawls called the ‚Veil of Ignorance’ where you imagine creating a society’s rules before knowing your own class, race, talents, etc.
If you didn’t know whether you’d be rich or poor, healthy or sick, privileged or marginalized what policies and principles would you come up with to make society as just as possible?
It genuinely feels like people don’t value friendship the same way they did 20 years ago.
Especially online, the dominant conversation around friendship seems to be about leaving people. Cutting people off. Protecting your peace. Outgrowing friends. Setting boundaries. Calling people toxic, unhealthy, or draining. And the weird part is how normalized it all is now. Ending friendships is not only accepted, it’s encouraged.
Whenever I hear people talk about friendship this way, I can’t help but wonder whether they’re actually good friends themselves. It rarely sounds like it.
What also stood out to me is how little discussion there is about maintaining, repairing, or strengthening friendships. There’s endless content about finding new people and leaving old ones behind, but barely anything about working through conflict with the people already in your life.
Any flaw, disagreement, disappointment, or emotional mismatch gets framed as a reason to end a friendship instead of work through it. Therapy speak gets used constantly to justify it and to frame the person doing the cutting off as the emotionally mature one, while the other person becomes someone no longer worth the effort. I notice this especially in female friendships.
Friendships aren’t perfect all the time. They require tolerance, loyalty, forgiveness, and resilience from both sides. People used to expect imperfections and rough phases instead of interpreting every uncomfortable feeling as proof the relationship is unhealthy.
Now it feels like friendships are treated as disposable the second they stop being convenient, validating, or perfectly aligned with someone’s personal or professional growth. I honestly think social media is making this mindset worse, and it’s bleeding into real life.
I’m selective about who I let into my inner circle, but once I call someone a friend, I’m there no matter what. Not just for the good times. I want to be there through depression, divorce, failure, grief, and whatever else life throws at them. That’s not always convenient, and sometimes it is emotionally draining, and time consuming but loyalty and being there for a friend means a lot to me. And I‘ve never been too busy to make space for a friend in need. So I think it’s much more about priorities.
And honestly, it’s great knowing a female friend has your back like that too.
What made me think about all of this even more is that I’ve experienced having my loyalty and support completely taken for granted, only to later be framed in the language I constantly see in online friendship discourse. And when I eventually saw the kind of content filling that person’s social media feeds, it was all there: protect your peace, outgrow people, don’t tolerate anything uncomfortable…
What never seemed to cross her mind was how much time, space and support she asked for and was given freely but me asking for reciprocation in much smaller ways was ‚absurd‘ to her.
I’m from Germany, and I wrote my bachelor’s thesis on urban farming and local food supply chains. At the time, the co-op was still in its funding stage, so it was really nice to see that it eventually opened its doors.
For those who know it or have already shopped there… I’ve been curious: how is it doing these days, and what’s the shopping experience like?
…we have an official international childfree day that celebrates us? It’s 1st of August and was created in 1973.
Anyways… I ordered myself a nice cake today for next Sunday to celebrate myself and the fact that I‘m free. I‘ve been doing this for years. I‘ll sleep in, then go pick up my cake, take my dog on nice long walk where I don’t encounter any children and do whatever I want all day long.
Did anyone else just know they didn’t want kids from a really young age?
I’m not talking about deciding in your 20s or after a bad experience but sort of always knowing.
I never liked dolls, never played “family,” or other nurturing roles and by the time I was around 15 I was already 100% certain I didn’t want children. That feeling has never changed.
In my mid-20s, I dated someone who wanted kids, and I knew I wouldn’t be the mother of these children. No internal conflict, no “maybe someday”.
Sometimes I feel like most people either change their minds or come to the decision later, so I’m curious:
Did you always know and can see a consistent pattern or did you get there over time?