There’s a guy in my band at School of Rock – funny, good taste in music, takes the playing seriously without being precious about it. We get along well. After rehearsal we pack up our gear, say “good one tonight,” and go home. We’ve done this for months.

I know what he does for a living; we’ve talked about it in the green room on performance nights. But I don’t know much beyond that. I don’t know anything about his life outside the room where we play music together. And I’m pretty sure he’d say the same about me.

This is what making friends looks like at my age. You don’t make friends. You make context-mates. People you share one specific room with, in one specific mode, at one specific time. The room is the boundary, and nothing crosses it.

It’s not that I don’t like these people. I do. It’s that the container is sealed. After rehearsal, someone could suggest grabbing a drink. But it’s a Wednesday, and we all drove separately, and it’s already 10pm, and everybody has a morning. So we don’t. And next week we don’t again. And the not-doing accumulates into a settled norm that nobody decided on but everybody observes.

And even if someone did propose the drink, and we went, and it was great – then what? We’d need to do it again. But not on a Wednesday; it’s too late after rehearsal. So now we need a different night, without the rehearsal as an excuse to be in the same place. Someone has to propose a specific day and a specific bar. People have families and commitments; half the group can’t make it. The ones who can don’t know each other well enough to carry the evening without the full band’s energy. My house could be an option, but there’s a dog who’s not great with strangers and a living situation that’s never quite ready for guests – we’re too busy having our lives to make them welcoming for others. So we’re back to Wednesday, back to “good one tonight,” back to the parking lot. Each obstacle solved just surfaces the next one, a friction cascade that compounds until the activation energy exceeds what any sane person would spend on a relationship that doesn’t exist yet.

That’s the catch-22. You can’t get close enough to someone to justify the effort without first making the effort you can’t yet justify.

But that’s about new people. What haunts me is the old ones.

I have friends I’ve known for twenty years. People I have real history with. We’ve done genuinely stupid things together – ridden bespoke cardboard sleds down ski slopes, planned elaborate events for no reason, stayed out too late on weeknights in full knowledge of the consequences. There was a period of my life when friendship was an active verb. Something you did, regularly, with your body present in the same room as other bodies.

Last week, one of these friends sent me a TikTok of a guy falling off a ladder.

That’s the friendship now. That’s what it’s been reduced to. Not all at once; there was a long, slow erosion that I can almost trace in layers. We used to talk – in person, online, wherever. Even the friends I saw face-to-face eventually drifted onto social media feeds, where you weren’t really talking anymore but you could at least see each other’s lives scroll by. Then the algorithms took even that; you stopped seeing each other at all unless you sought it out. What’s left is the direct message, and the lowest-effort direct message is a forwarded video.

Each step lost bandwidth. Real-time conversation became passive observation became algorithmic silence became a meme in your inbox. The meme says “I’m still here.” It carries no actual information about either person’s life. It’s a keep-alive packet – the signal a machine sends when there’s no data to transmit but it doesn’t want the connection to time out.

I used to find the memes annoying. I’ve nearly disconnected from social media entirely now, and having to open Facebook to watch a 20-second fail video felt like an imposition. But lately it just makes me sad. Not at my friends; at the situation. These are people I love, and this is what we’ve been reduced to. Ghosts of friendships, going through the motions of connection without the substance of it.

I should be honest about my part in this.

I used to be, if not always the one planning the adventures, at least a catalyst for them. Something about being in the room made things happen. I was a reagent; I lowered the activation energy for everyone else’s fun. People would propose something half-baked and I’d be the one who said “yes, and” until it became real.

I withdrew from those rooms. Gradually, for reasons that all felt reasonable at the time. I got tired. The logistics got harder. My body stopped being willing to do what it used to do – an evening of drinking doesn’t metabolize the way it did at 28. The conversations that used to happen naturally just… stopped happening.

I don’t think it’s about proximity, though. Some of the best friendships I’ve ever had were with people I rarely saw in person – twenty years of remote work and open source collaboration taught me that high-fidelity connection doesn’t require a shared zip code. And the friends I did see in person drifted just as far. It’s not that I need to be in the same room as my friends. It’s that the kind of conversation that makes a friendship – the real-time, ambient, say-what-you’re-actually-thinking kind – isn’t happening anymore, in any medium. The rooms didn’t close. The conversations inside them did.

The comfortable thing to write would be: “I’m going to start initiating again. I’m going to be the one who proposes the dumb adventure.” And maybe I will, sometimes. But the whole point of everything I’ve just described is that the structural barriers are real. It’s not a willpower problem. It’s a life problem. The terrain changed.

There’s also a harder question I’ve had to sit with: maybe my friends are fine. Maybe the meme is the friendship they have capacity for, because the rest of their bandwidth is going to spouses, kids, careers, health, whatever. Maybe they’re not experiencing a deficit at all. Maybe the asymmetry is that I need something they don’t, and no amount of initiative on my part changes that math.

If that’s the case, I’m genuinely happy for them. That’s not sarcasm. If their lives are full enough that a forwarded TikTok is an honest representation of what they have left to give, then the problem isn’t with them. It’s with my expectations.

But I don’t actually know if that’s the case, because I haven’t asked. I haven’t responded to a meme with “hey, that’s funny – also, how are you actually doing?” I haven’t proposed the dumb thing. I’ve just received the keep-alive packets and felt sad about them without testing whether the connection on the other end is actually dormant or just dead.

So here’s what I know.

We can make room in our lives for the relationships we want to have, or we can be reduced to memes. Those are the options. Making room means accepting that it costs something – time, energy, the vulnerability of suggesting that a Wednesday night rehearsal buddy might want to get a beer on a Saturday. It means risking an empty room. It means proposing the cardboard sled race and being okay with the possibility that nobody shows up, or that the people who do are different from the ones you hoped for.

It also means learning to recognize an outstretched hand when you see one. Because nobody says “hey, this meme-relationship sucks, wanna get dinner this week?” That’s not how people work. The signal is subtler – it’s the friend who keeps sending you things, who keeps pinging, who hasn’t let the connection time out even though you’ve given them every reason to. The meme might not be laziness. It might be the only bid they know how to make. And if I’m not picking up on that, if I’m just cataloging it as another sad data point instead of treating it as an opening, then I’m part of the problem I’m describing.

I don’t know if I’m going to do all of that. I’d like to say I will. I’m learning, at least, that understanding a thing and acting on it are different muscles, and I’ve spent too long exercising only the first one.

What I do know is that the keep-alive packet isn’t enough. Not for me. And if you’re reading this and you’ve been sending me memes, I want you to know: I see the ping. I know what it means. It means you’re still there, and you want me to know it. That’s not nothing.

Let’s get together soon.