Is anyone else losing friends in droves?

Don’t buy into the notion that speech and beliefs are an attack on your “safety.” That’s just a tactic to elevate a certain class of political beliefs above the usual debate. It’s a poisonous notion.

Of course, ideas that lead to policy matter in the aggregate. But I don’t think it’s productive to “lose friends” because their policy preferences, if adopted, through some long and attenuated causal chain might be contrary to your personal interests. Over the last year, I’ve become deeply concerned about the ideas espoused by many of my friends. I’m an immigrant to this country and for the most part love it for what it is. I think many of the notions my Facebook friends subscribe to will in the long term change the country for the worse, and lead to a worse future for my children. Indeed, it wouldn’t be historically unprecedented for these ideas, if taken too far, to lead to real suffering and physical harm to many people. But I know these people and I’m convinced they hold all of their beliefs in good faith. I’m not going to hold it against them that I think that the policies they support may be wrong or even harmful in the long run.

Things have definitely changed. Twenty years ago, I had friends with a wide variety of opinions, and it generally seemed possible to disagree without it being a problem.

These days, generally only the people to my "right" seem like this. It's rare to be able to talk long with someone to my "left" without them becoming offended. That seems particularly unusual, as I've been pretty far to the left my entire life.

It's tempting to look at the 2016 election as the cause, but I started really noticing this about a year before that.

Sounds like you are caught up in some horrific FB dopamine loop[1]. You really don't need to engage with people on the internet; it's totally optional, and not particularly "social." You especially don't need to engage with people on that toxic shit-hole which is designed to make you unhappy. You can either remove the app from your ipotato, or quit. I occasionally hear about shenanigans on FB from my actual friends. None of it makes any sense.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/phone-addiction-formula/

Keep mouth closed, ears open. Repeat serenity prayer:

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, The courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to know the difference.

Regarding the wisdom, I generally start with a null hypothesis that anything I can physically do with my body (which includes words produced by my mouth or my fingertips) is in the latter category, and everything else is in the former until I have overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

But anyways, I can relate a little. My sister has never been an activist type, never said anything about racial justice, until a week ago when she started posting BLM content on Facebook with a demand that anyone who disagrees should go ahead and unfriend her now. It was a shockingly abrupt change.

My interpretation of the above is that you have friends who support dismantling or at least re-building the police as an institution, and that you see this as a threat to your safety and you're getting into conflict over the matter. With that assumption, I would say:

a) Take a step back and ask yourself how much your safety is really being threatened by others' opinions on these matters. Also, as an exercise, consider the degree of un-safety that millions have been experiencing for many years which resulted in the current conflict. Even if you don't agree with your friends' conclusions, I'd bet you can at least sympathize with the root of the issue.

b) Relationships are maintained through tolerance. I maintain a good relationship with my parents despite having a polar-opposite political viewpoint, by putting what I know of them as people ahead of the words of their professed, abstract ideology. The two are not the same thing. Leaving some wiggle-room there is key to reducing conflict, which is key to maintaining lasting relationships. You have to be able to agree to disagree sometimes.

Treat online discussions as online, even among friends. You're never going to win anybody over, get over yourself. In real-life, you might be able to at least make a persuasive argument based on facts and supporting evidence, or even just charm. Online dialogue is just not suited to true understanding and hearing eachother out, but rather the opposite. Just observe the wild conspiracy theories that in normal discourse would never otherwise be allowed such prominence, if not for social media platforms and covert ad campaigns.

In the UK we often use the derrogative term "snowflake" to describe people who are usually left leaning & perpetually offended. Judging by Twitter, there are a new generation of snowflakes who are even more offended and angry, they melt away at the first sniff of conflicting opinion.

Whilst I dislike the term, I think life is too short to spend time with people who take themselves and their opinions too seriously. I want spend more time laughing and less time debating.

1. If a BLM post is all it took to "lose a friend," I'd reconsider your definition.

2. Not everything is about you. Your friends explicitly were not thinking about you when they picked a side.

3. You won't be convinced, but someone else may benefit from a tool I've used to get past this. Would you hold the same beliefs if you were born black in an inner city? Would you want the status quo in terms of police strategies? To be scared for your life at every traffic stop? It's easy to defend a stance from a position of privilege (directly opposed to "my safety".)

You can do the same for your friends with different political beliefs - most stances are based on someone's life experiences or environment. There's likely a reason they believe something, and it has nothing to do with you. If you grew up in their situation, or friends, or life experiences, do you think you'd still hold your same beliefs? Most of the time the answer for me is no, and therefore the beliefs have nothing to do with the person's character.

I've got some friends with whom I disagree politically and we even regularly debate. In fact for one friend, our friendship has been maintained over the long term by regularly meeting for dinner and drinks, and often we end up having massive arguments about all kinds of topics.

Our secret is that we don't let it reduce our respect for one another, at the end of the evening we're always shaking hands and agreeing to meet again next week. It may also help that when we became friends we worked together, so we forged a bond of mutual respect through our work.

I have another friend who is a real SJW snowflake type (he got hired by Google, perhaps that explains it, he wasn't like that before). With him I don't tend to debate politics much because he gets genuinely upset. But we've also always come back and been friends again afterwards, and I've noticed he's sometimes gone off and researched whatever I was saying for himself and has questions. So obviously parts of it sunk in.

I think Facebook can be difficult because your default mental state is that all those people are "friends" even if maybe you haven't seen them for a while, or if your friendships have very different depths. The term friend is very black and white. Most people only have a tiny number of really deep friendships, often only one or two at most, I mean of the sort built on real long term knowledge of each other and which can survive genuine disagreement over divisive issues. You say "a fair number of my friends" which sounds like many of them probably aren't deep friends. They're probably more like friendships that were once deep, or who were party buddies, or who were former colleagues that you got along with etc. For them you'd probably be surprised to discover that if you started hanging out with them regularly for some reason, they'd get over it and you'd be OK.

> "defend their values"

I've been trying to listen to others more in tough times like these.

I'm struggling to articulate my _perceptions_ of events from my neighbors and friends of color in NYC. I'm struggling to understand my opinion as just _one perspective_ my family member in CA, who is in law enforcement, has put on me.

I'm not worried about losing friends, nor family member's love, because I've been struggling to hear what they're saying and pushing them past what is generally comfortable conversation, but not to the point of flipping their lid (Oh, that doesn't move you? How about this! kinda stuff), or repeating my stand on hypocrisies (once is enough).

Let me put it this way. Can you maintain 5k friends with one-on-one personal interactions? No. Impossible. By the time you get to the end of that list, someone will have been married and had two kids. How about 1k friends? 500? 50? Are we talking about fluffy posts about kittens on Twitter? or highly divisive topics? Can you have meaningful and thoughtful interactions with 5 people which leave you both aggravated, exhausted, and heart broken? I can say at this point you won't be worrying about the party you're missing with 50 friends, but thankful for the friends you do have.

Not an FB user but yes, in the last couple of months. Or was it more discovering what "friend" really means. Either way, I'm actually happier now.

I think this is a cultural thing. I have different view with my brother on pretty much everything but we still manage to find time to take vacation together. It makes pretty interesting evening after a slow, windless day. If people are interested he is really far left, i'm not (or i'm much, much further depending of your point of view).

I mostly don't care about my friends points of view. The only question you should ask them is : why do you think that, and the only question you should ask yourself is the same one. Unless you're really, really well informed, your point of won't be that interesting anyway. Interesting enough to post it on reddit or HN at most :)

If the conversation becomes to much for people feelings, take a tangent, talk about interesting philosophical point. Bias analysis is great too (check your own bias loudly to encourage people to do the same, it works). Do not hesitate to point that an argument is poor, especially if it comfort your views.

FWIW - I periodically remind myself that everyone I know is deeply flawed and is wrong to various extents on most topics. That includes myself.

Talk is cheap, so people say (passionately) things with virtually no thought. Wait to see what people do and decide whether it's a _direct_ threat. If there's a 7 step chain of causation that's threatening, then you should relax and acknowledge you're probably wrong. The other part is you should make sure your actions directly align with your values.

Don't be this guy: https://xkcd.com/386/

So your friends fractured into anti maskers and pro maskers?

Or anti protesters / protesters?

I’m Confused so many decisive issues to deal with

> "my friends have publicly supported interests that seem directly opposed to my safety"

someone who is comfortable harming a friend is not being a friend. if you've told someone that they're harming you, and they won't change at the very least for the simple reason that _you're friends_...

maybe they used to be good friends and things changed, or maybe these weren't good friends to begin with. either way, now is a good time to make new friends.

best of luck. it's tough, especially during lockdown when it's harder to connect over shared interests in the real world, but it's very worthwhile.

in conclusion: real friends can have productive conflict that doesn't ignore the core respect and concern each person has for the other's wellbeing. you deserve real friends.

I preemptively removed the FB app for now. I don’t know if this is a fruitful strategy in the long run but I sleep better right now.

I tried to create a throwaway account using Tor to provide a sincere personal view of this topic, with valuable experience and which also needed strong anonymity as not to put specific people at risk, but the recatchpa rejects the Tor connection.

That this seemed necessary at all is itself sufficient to describe where we are.

Not really, I havent had any friends for years, but I've witnessed family go from relatively mild to full blown conspiracy-theorists within the past year, which is pretty alarming.

Are you sure these are friends, or just aquaintances? If you do consider them friends, why do you feel you must lose them due to their personal beliefs?

> During the Facebook debacle last week, a fair number of my friends have publicly supported interests that seem directly opposed to my safety.

Can you elaborate?

Stand by your principles and beliefs. If they were really your friends they would respect you for it. Maybe it’s time to find new friends.

> a fair number of my friends have publicly supported interests that seem directly opposed to my safety

I can't understand what you are hinting at here, or why it's related to FB. Maybe I'm out of the loop.

But in my experience, the majority of people don't religiously post on social media and have moderate views on most things. So extreme people on all sides are not representative of most people.

I've lost two friends in the past month or so... one very leftist, one very right leaning. I tend to be more libertarian, but pragmatic.

People tend to be tribalist in nature, you tend to lean into a group and that/those groups become your identity instead of striving to take things as an individual and respecting people as individuals.

We are all allowed to have our own opinions and perspective, and even discuss and debate their value vigorously. Where we tend to falter is when we lose respect for the people who are expressing opinions that we disagree with.

It's generally a combination of pedantry, anger, ignorance and disrespect for ourselves and others that leads to action in those baser instincts and reject "the other." In the end, we are worse off for it. It often feels like general discourse has been set back over a century in the past decade alone.

I try to concentrate on admirable personality traits in terms of those I would deem to support vs not about on level with policy opinions. Arrogance, corruption and hypocrisy are the big ones for me, short of that I'm willing to put up with just about everyone.

I think base assumptions and understandings are different for different people. However, we are now fully polarized on the topics.

Lockdowns: you fully support lockdowns or you want a hair cut or to murder my grandma. No room for any other interpretation or asking of questions.

Protests: you are literally a racist if you are not actively anti-racist. No room for other interpretations or asking of questions. Do not try to distract from the core message by talking about looting or rioting.

Politics: either you want to remove Trump from office or you are a racist or otherwise a terrible person. No room for other interpretation.

De-funding the police: you are a racist or a fascist and support police brutality or you want police removed from normal public interaction. Again, no room for a different interpretation or dialog.

I feel the problem is polarized politics and lack of room for dialog. Also, as a white male, my thoughts are not wanted nor valid. To the point that I feel I have to post with a throwaway since I've already have folks I thought were friends and have known me for years question if I am a racist because I don't support looting/rioting.

What FB debacle? I don't use FB, so I'd not know.

why is this thread flagged?