Throughout my life of exposure to US media, and from stories I get from friends and family from the US, I always see or hear people say they have no friends. Is that actually common?
That sort of thing is kind of incomprehensible in the Philippines because we have such an emphasis on community, whereas in the US I understand it’s an emphasis on independence. But here, it’s considered a depressing and unusual thing to not have friends. This also makes me wonder if we might just have a looser definition or standard for it here.
Edit: I might’ve misworded myself, but I didn’t mean to say that no one has friends in the US. Only that every now and then, someone will say that they have no friends.
Comments
I have a hard time understanding what media you are consuming that leads to this conclusion. The norm here is to have friends.
Maybe there’s a different standard of friendship in your country
No. That is not normal.
Nor do I have any idea how you could reach such a conclusion…. people having friends is pretty much universal in our media.
Where do people get this stuff.
Its only normal on Reddit. Thats why most folks are on here
I also feel that there is a disproportionate amount of people who are on Reddit or who reply to posts on Instagram and say that they don’t have friends. I’m sure that it happens everywhere in the world, but it is not the norm.
People have 10 friends and hang out with them 3 times a year
Independence doesn’t mean isolated.
But also not everyone needs 20 million friends.
Hardly exclusive to the US. In much of Europe, people make their friends very early on in grade school and its pretty hard to break through that barrier later on in life.