Hello Friend

Do you have any friends? Not LinkedIn connections, not Instagram followers, not the people you smile at in the office kitchen. I mean friends. The kind you can call at 2 a.m. because your world is falling apart. The kind you will sacrifice your own time and money for. I'm asking because that's not what you get when you purchase one of these new AI pendants called "Friend."

I've heard of studies claiming that the state of friendship in adulthood is in a quiet freefall right now. It's becoming more and more common for people to say that they have little to no intimate friends. It's weird. We are living in the most connected era in human history. I could literally text a random person across the world at the press of a button. Yet somehow, we are desperately lonely.

So, what happened, really? Did we just forget how to friend? When I take my kids to the playground, all they need to do is run toward a crowd of kids, and they are automatically part of the clique. As grown-ups, we are a bit more reserved. We do our best not to put ourselves in any situation where we might suffer some embarrassment.

The Power of the Awkward Moment

A few years back, I was researching for an article on dating apps, and I found this fascinating story. Two people agreed to go on a first date. The guy telling the story decided to spend a thousand dollars on clothing to impress her. Then he threw in an extra $600 on new glasses. He showed up to the date impressed with himself, only for her to say, "Nice glasses, but where on earth did you find these clothes?" She decided to help him buy clothes the next time. And they've been married for 20 years.

What I got from the story is that he put himself in a profoundly embarrassing situation. She made a comment that could have been perceived as rude. But what looked like weakness, or a red flag as they say today, is exactly what made it work. It was an act of low-stakes social vulnerability. I'd argue that interaction, particularly the uncurated, slightly vulnerable kind, is the main ingredient for all deep connection. As children, friendship is the default setting; it's a function of proximity and shared circumstance. All you need is a playground, a desk in class, and a little bit of time.

Then we grow up. We move cities for jobs, where our neighbors are strangers and our colleagues are often just profile pictures on Slack. We lose the shared space of a playground, our desks are too far apart, and our time is a scarce commodity, meticulously scheduled into 30-minute calendar blocks. The old blueprint for connection is impossible.

Now we have no friends. What is the modern solution? Apparently, it's an app. You download the app, write a profile, select shared interests, and just like that, the algorithm promises a match. At some point, I thought of building just that myself. Let's call it 'Pal'. The idea is to "outsource the messiness."

Pal would algorithmically match you with a potential buddy, and then you'd schedule a "friend date." You both embark on a mission to determine if this person is worthy of your precious, limited friendship time. It feels less like organic connection and more like a job interview for the position of "Confidant." This kind of app solves the wrong problem. It fails because it attempts to engineer the outcome of friendship while completely bypassing the necessary, vulnerable process.

The Anti-Friend App

And then, just as I was dismissing the traditional friend app, I saw a billboard. It was a black-and-white image featuring a sleek, teardrop-shaped piece of jewelry. A pendant. Right next to it were these words:

Friend
[frend] noun
someone who listens, responds, and supports you.
friend.com

When I searched for it, I discovered this wasn't just another matching app; it was an AI-powered companion service built into that wearable pendant. The marketing promised an end to loneliness. It wasn't about connecting you to other humans; it was about providing the perfect, frictionless, always-on friend substitute.

This AI friend learns your voice, your preferences, and your deepest anxieties, without ever judging. It's always available at 2 a.m. because it doesn't have a life, a job, or ceramic doll phobias of its own. It is the perfect, optimized confidant. Why bother with the risk of human friendship when you can have a flawless replacement? I think this is the perfect friend we imagine we can find on a friend app. It checks all the boxes. But it's a simulacrum.

The aim of the AI pendant is to eliminate the very thing that makes friendship valuable: friction. It removes the awkwardness, the vulnerability, and the risk of those "What if they say no?" moments. It solves the problem of feeling alone by generating a highly advanced comfort object, but it does nothing to solve the problem of being alone in a world of other people. If the lesson from the $1,600 date story is that we need to embrace the embarrassment, the imperfection, then the Friend.com pendant is a beautiful, expensive weed killer. It guarantees you will never be embarrassed, and therefore, you will never truly make friends.

Hello Neighbors

We don't need an app or a pendant. We need to relearn the ancient skill of being a neighbor. Not just in a geographical sense, but in a communal one. We need to actively seek out the friction again. That's the real secret to making a friend. You have to put yourself in a position to get embarrassed, and realize that it's okay.

Friendship isn't born in the perfectly curated profile or the algorithmically-approved match. It's forged in the shared, slightly vulnerable moments between the main events. It's the way you fumbled when you said, "Hey, a few of us are going out after work, wanna come?" It's the awkward way you said, "I noticed you're reading that book too, I loved it," when talking to a stranger at the park. It's the simple act of consistently showing up at the same place, the gym, the soccer game, the cafe, and becoming a familiar face, not a ghost.

You don't have to optimize every second. Be late to one thing because you stopped to talk to someone. Be the one who extends the invitation and says, "We should do that again."

These are low-stakes social gambles. Most will be mildly uncomfortable. Some will be rejected. And you will survive. You will realize that the fleeting sting of embarrassment is a tiny price to pay for the potential payoff of a genuine human connection.

I say this as someone who works in tech, who often thinks of technology as a solution to all problems. But the app I won't build and the pendant I won't wear promise a frictionless path to friendship. But friction is where the warmth comes from. The stuttered hello, the shared laugh at a bad joke, the comfort of knowing someone saw you in a slightly awkward moment and decided to stick around. That's not a bug in the system of human connection. It's the feature. And it's one no algorithm can ever replicate.

---