[With] the younger generation, …. Happiness is achieved by having not only a circle of friends but also the technology that enables constant communication with them. Text messages and mobile phone calls, emails and social networking websites, these are essential parts of this friendship culture. As well as holding friends together, this personal communications technology has created a symbiotic relationship with the mass media and with the rock music industry. The music and the mass media are an integral part of the friendship group. Not all young people buy into all of this culture, but most young people subscribe to some of it, either consciously or unconsciously.
The “keeping friends” culture as an expression of self-importance needs some explaining, as at first glance I seem to be demonizing a highly valuable part of life. In itself, keeping friends is clearly good. It is the surrounding narrative that makes the current youth version of it both distinctive and potentially destructive. Or rather, it’s the absence of any wider narrative that is the problem. The small group of close friends and immediate family now bears the whole weight of a young person’s existence; no other groups have any continuing role. The individual only has a duty to generate happiness among their friends and family; the wider picture of life is simply that if everybody did this locally, then all that local happiness would generate a global experience of happiness. This is the generation that wants for nothing and so sees no need for any larger vision of life. This world is meaningful just as it is and there is no need to imagine any deep or ultimate significance.
The “keeping friends” culture is about shared self-importance and it consciously excludes any wider importance offered by political, philosophical or religious visions. Indeed, such visions are often condemned today as the sources of unhappiness in the world, while keeping friends is considered the one reliable source of happiness. Part of the reason for this is that students are educated in our schools to deconstruct all philosophies and stories; they are brought up with a suspicion of everything that lays claim to be the big story about life. But in the end, the main reason that they do not believe in such wider visions is because life is fine just as it is. Why can’t everybody just be happy?
Abbot Christopher Jamison
Finding Happiness, p. 164-165
