Ryan Amor

The Question: A university friend seems interested only in sharing news of her professional achievements in our group chat. Am I wrong to resent this, and to expect something more meaningful from friendships that have lasted decades?

I’m in a group chat with friends from university and there’s one friend who loves sending messages about her work, and nothing else, and I’m like I don’t care. I’m not interested. You talk about your work when you’re in a social situation with strangers, and not with people you share a history with. She works in academia which extends to some sort of UN/regional stuff that all looks terribly important on paper and stuff, but looking at the news, are people’s lives really changing?? Do conferences, symposiums and summits really put food on people’s tables, save children from diseases and hunger or resolve conflicts and war?? Or is it all just pencil pushing, press releases and per diems??

Well, I don’t want to find out by interacting with the stuff she posts and risk being roped in discussions I neither have the interest nor the energy to participate it. But I feel bad because I have no choice but to ignore it, and this shouldn’t be the case! We’re at a stage in our lives where distance and personal commitments make physical reunions harder to come by, even if we could all afford it, and yet we balk at just being open in a chat group.

When we were all younger, these were the people I thought I was going to be in touch with for the rest of my life, that even if there would be the usual twists and turns, we would essentially be unchanged and transparent to each other. Thankfully for the most part, this has remained true, but somehow I want more.

I want to be able to at any given time, say this or that, and not be judged, or worse, ignored. That someone would get what I’m saying and be able to reply in kind. But this hasn’t happened. The chat group is as empty as a community centre waiting for the next event, or in this case, another post by my friend about micro-loans or sustainable development goals in Myanmar.

From the Ethicist:

There is something rather poignant about your description of the group chat as an empty community centre waiting for its next event. After all, a community centre is not empty because nobody belongs to it. It is empty because nobody has found a compelling reason to gather.

Your friend, at least, is showing up.

You are not especially interested in what she brings to these gatherings, and perhaps understandably so. Accounts of conferences, symposiums and international development initiatives can seem rather like the minutes of meetings to which one was never invited. The language of institutional accomplishment has a peculiar ability to make even worthy endeavours sound hopelessly self-congratulatory.

But I would be careful about dismissing the work itself. International development is an imperfect enterprise, and there are certainly conferences whose most measurable achievements are airline miles and hotel invoices. Yet the distance between a policy discussion and a child receiving a vaccination does not necessarily mean that nothing of consequence happens along the way. Institutions, for all their bureaucracy, can accomplish things that individuals cannot.

More importantly, however, the value of your friend’s work is not really the question here.

I suspect that what bothers you is less what she shares than what she doesn’t. You are being offered glimpses of her professional identity when what you long for is the person you knew before any of you had professional identities worth advertising.

You want the unguarded intimacy of your university years: conversations without agendas, observations without explanations, the easy irreverence of people who knew one another before they learned to present themselves to the world.

And there is a particular sadness in discovering that the people who once knew us most intimately can, over time, become little more than an audience for our respective lives.

Still, there is a complication.

You say you wish to speak freely without being judged or, worse, ignored. Yet you have already judged your friend’s contributions as uninteresting and chosen to ignore them. This is not hypocrisy so much as a reminder that the kind of friendship you desire requires something of everyone, including you.

Your friend may believe that sharing her professional life is an act of openness. Perhaps her work genuinely occupies so much of her emotional and intellectual world that these announcements are her way of saying, This is what matters to me now. What you interpret as self-promotion may be an invitation to know her as she has become.

You are, of course, under no obligation to accept every invitation. Friendship does not require an enthusiastic response to every conference communiqué.

But neither does a shared history entitle us to perpetual access to the versions of people we once loved.

This, I think, is the central difficulty of lifelong friendship. We cherish continuity while living through change. We hope our friends will remain recognisable to us, even as we expect them to accommodate the people we ourselves have become.

The intimacy you remember from university was not sustained simply by a willingness to speak freely. It was supported by proximity, shared experiences, endless unstructured time and the rather wonderful luxury of having comparatively little to do. You could be spontaneous because you were, in a sense, perpetually available to one another.

A group chat cannot effortlessly reproduce those conditions. It is a technological means of keeping in touch, not a guarantee of emotional closeness.

But you needn’t resign yourself to a digital noticeboard, either.

You could be the person who introduces something different. Not another article, announcement or worthy cause, but a memory, an irreverent observation, a small confession, a question that only these particular people would understand. You might discover that others have been waiting for precisely such an opening.

And if nobody responds? That will hurt, certainly. But it will also tell you something useful about the friendships as they exist today, rather than as you remember them.

There is no ethical requirement that you take an interest in your friend’s professional activities. Nor is there anything reprehensible about wishing that friendships offered something richer than periodic bulletins of personal accomplishment.

What you cannot reasonably expect is for everyone else to create the atmosphere of openness you desire while you remain reluctant to risk contributing to it.

Perhaps the greatest disappointment of growing older is not that our friends change, but that the effortless intimacy we once enjoyed now requires deliberate effort.

You are mourning something real. But before concluding that it has disappeared, you might try asking the others to come back into the room.

After all, the community centre is still there. And somebody has to turn on the lights.