August 17, 2025
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❤️ TFD
Few things make me feel more like a boomer these days than reading the comments of my own TikToks. The major theme of that account has always been hosting and creating community -- more so now with my upcoming book on the subject, Having People Over -- and I'm consistently shocked by the response that some of my content elicits. For example, yesterday, one of the first comments on a video about hostess gifts I really appreciated (most ranging in price from free to 20-30 bucks), was about how this was why the person prefers hotels -- because staying in a friend's home is so daunting. That's right: the idea of spending hundreds of dollars a night on accommodations is less daunting than buying a squeak toy for a friend's dog.
This is just one video and one comment, of course. But click on essentially any video I've made about these subjects, on everything from dinner party tips to musings about maintaining friendships across different life choices, and you will find similar responses. There is no limit to what these commenters can't do, don't like, feel better without. If I write about ways to make hosting easier, people will remind me how much they hate hosting. If I suggest checking in on friends after big life moments, they will tell me how hard it is to text people. If I assert that making friends as an adult should be as intentional as dating (if you want them), I will be reminded that friendship is rarely if ever worth the effort. And each time, I am reminded of that iconic tweet about Halloween being hard for adults with ADHD: omg you people can't do anything.
Maybe I just am a boomer in this regard, but I have to say I view these endless comments with a mix of confusion and contempt. Aside from the bean soup of it all -- the constant need to center yourself in every conversation, even ones that clearly do not apply to you -- there is also the endless, public repetition of your own limiting beliefs. If you genuinely feel it is impossible for you to text people back, to host or be hosted, to maintain adult friendships or even just show up to a birthday dinner when you don't feel like it, fine! That's absolutely allowed, and I assure you that the Community Police will not be showing up to your door to arrest you for your crimes against friendship. But good lord, what is this bottomless need to announce your limitations, to defiantly assert your intrinsic inability to be part of the village?
I'm not here to debate the disastrous impacts of our increasing atomization. We can see that people are becoming lonelier than ever, more distant and anxious and neurotic as a result. We know that the negative health effects (both mental and physical) of isolation are on par with smoking 15 cigarettes a day. And while much of this is a result of people being overworked and underpaid -- of simply not having the time for a social life -- not everything can be blamed on lack of bandwidth. We are also in a consumer economy predicated on destroying connection at every turn, replacing friends and family and neighbors with another app-based service or product we don't need. You can insist that you feel better with no close connections, that you prefer a totally atomized life where you rely on no one and no one relies on you -- but that would make you a statistical aberration on par with the rarest diseases. People are designed to need community, no matter how much capitalism wants to convince us otherwise.
Even still, whether it's about proclaiming your inability to make friends (and your total disregard for keeping them), or insisting that everyday tasks of adulthood are beyond your ability, my question remains: why? Obviously there is the very real fight for disability rights and benefits, something that we have covered at TFD, and I don't want to downplay its importance. However, when we're talking about optional things -- the ability to call a friend back, or have family over for dinner -- what is the benefit of declaring it beyond our reach, loudly and to strangers? What is the reason for barging into comment sections where people are trading tips about hosting to say you hate the concept? This is the behavior I simply can't understand.
Perhaps it's just my personality type, but I find much more liberation (and joy) in focusing on the things that I can do, both naturally and with great effort. Finding workarounds that allow me to accomplish things that used to be out of reach, or identifying the relationships that reciprocate as much as they demand, have been some of the great joys of adulthood. Yes, I could loudly declare that as someone who was once diagnosed with real-deal anxiety, this or that thing is really, really hard for me. I could also fixate on how I used to deal (or, rather, not deal) with money, how it felt like it was totally beyond my capacity to understand or improve. But I choose to focus on how much I've changed my relationship to both of those things by finding tools that worked for me, communicating clearly, and doing things that felt scary or unnatural at first.
The ugly truth is, especially as it pertains to social anxiety, ADHD, and other (very real) limitations, social media becomes a bit of a self-perpetuating cycle. Not only are these apps quite literally designed to destroy our attention spans and make us deeply insecure, they also convince us that the only connections that really matter are the ones on our screens. We get lost in a world of comment sections and influencers, of passively watching others' lives, of spending hours a day arguing with strangers about what we can't do rather than proving to ourselves what we can. We shout our most limiting beliefs into the void, have them affirmed by people we'll never meaningfully interact with, then move onto another piece of content that makes us feel inadequate.
My advice to anyone who constantly finds themselves feeling attacked by content that has nothing to do with them, who perceives the different life choices of others as an indictment of their own, is to stop using social media for a while. I mean this genuinely, and with empathy, because it means the system is working exactly as it was designed to. We must understand that the profit model of social media depends on exploiting these preexisting conditions, and by filling our time with half-real community interactions that temporarily make us feel more productive, more connected, or more satisfied than we actually are. Great things can come from these platforms, no doubt, but if you are constantly finding yourself feeling worse after using them -- or, again, fighting with strangers about why something doesn't apply to you -- that should be a massive red flag.
In the end, we may not be able to do everything as easily as some people seem to, but life is generally pretty hard for everyone. We're all figuring it out as we go. But the one thing that is sure to never help, to never make the uphill battle of adulthood even a fraction easier, is to lead with what we cannot do. We are capable of more than we think, and if something truly isn't for us, we can pass it by without giving it a second thought. But don't let the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world win through effectively monetizing your preemptive sense of defeat: fight back, and not in the comment section.
— C
