Our friendships are failing, and I believe I know what is causing it: catch-up culture. If you’ve ever found yourself reminiscing about the days when your friends lived down the road, and you didn’t need to schedule yourself into each other’s diaries three months in advance, you aren’t the only one. It’s a term that I use within my book Bad Friend to describe the never-ending hamster wheel of dinner dates where you repeat the same stories you did the night before, filling in the gap of time since your last dinner date, only to repeat it all over again until you reach the end of your friend list — at which point, it’s been months and you have to start at the top of your friend list all over again.

I believe catch-up culture is also contributing to the loneliness epidemic that we all keep hearing about. The problem is, whilst you have ticked the box of seeing your friends, you aren’t experiencing the companionship of living your life with someone, the same way you would have in school or university.

During that phase of life, it was expected to see each other at least five days a week. The classes you were going to had a mutual topic of conversation, and therefore, your experiences overlapped much more so than they do in adulthood. As we get older, though, our lives diverge, and our friendships tend to get deprioritised. Physical proximity increases, and whilst these catch-ups might seem like a ‘good enough’ substitute, we have to ask the question whether it’s actually improving our happiness or fulfilling us in any way?

Just because we’ve ticked the box of seeing our friend, doesn’t mean we have actually invested in the friendship. In our romantic lives, dates are expected, and when we don’t put time and energy into spending that quality time, it is understandable that the relationship will then deteriorate. So, why aren’t we doing the same for our friendships?

Partially, it’s due to patriarchy; we tend to prioritise marriage and motherhood. The other part is due to capitalism; we’re all so overworked and burned out that the idea of coming up with an interesting plan with a friend just sounds like effort. As I say in Bad Friend“Adult friendship is hard because we are all tired.” We underestimate how much the pandemic has affected our friendships, too. I believe this is where ‘catch-up culture’ originated. We adapted to survive by relying on technology for catch-ups. Social media became the easiest avenue where we delude ourselves into thinking we know everything that is going on in our friends’ lives, and therefore think that a ‘catch-up’ will suffice.

Then the pandemic has led to a breakdown in the work/home boundary, with three times as many people now working from home, which means our careers take up more evenings than they used to, a time which used to be reserved for our social lives. Ultimately, 60% of people have not returned to pre-pandemic activities, with 35% saying that socialising is less important to them — and it makes me question whether the forced isolation has stuck more than we think. As a life coach, I am noticing an increase in people struggling with overstimulation when in large rooms or crowds and even with an excess of noise and light, and that could be an adaptation to the increase in alone time that we all experienced during lockdown and following that, less time in an office where we are more accustomed to social interaction.