I wish going outside again were possible, but what if most of the people you actually want to hang out with aren't in the same area?

And for those who are near, the cost of having a coffee or a drink is too much now on top of expenses that are already stretching,

The kids tend to hang out with the kids of their parents' friends, with the neighbours' kids. A bit later in life, when in school, we find friends among the classmates, who too aren't usually all that similar to us.

Maybe when we switched to a fully online adult world with its hyper-optimization of everything, we've put our potential friends in the same bucket with recommendation system-driven content like music and tv-shows. Dating too.

There are certain benefits in getting by with limited choice, when we learn to communicate with people who are not a 100% match.

And as for having a drink or a coffee- we can always just invite the friends over. Hanging out in each others' apartments is fun and cheap

go for a walk with your friends and a bottle of water

It's becoming rarer and rarer for people to have friends that are physically close to them unless they've stayed in the town they were born in.

Modern technology kind of broke friendship in the sense that not very long ago maintaining friendships over any distance was expensive. That is it costs long distance fees, gas, or letter writing. Because of those expenses it was very common to make friends locally pretty quickly.

But the internet broke that, especially modern social media. Wherever you moved your friends were a free website away, and long distance calling was gone. At first this seemed fine because sites connected you to your friends, but as the lock in happened it became a contest of getting you pissed off and showing you ads.

Going to take a long time to socially fix this problem. Especially as some large number of people are going to talk to AI instead.

Hi Friend, are you looking for a <insert product>bottled water</>? Here are the top 1000 brands of delicious bottled water! Water is very good for you! You are an ugly bag of mostly water! You do not have to enter your payment details, I remember them! Be assured that 1000 cases of 1000 brands of delicious bottled water are on their way to you now [Shipping charges may apply] at Peach Trees 2026, Sector 13, Mega-City One! Have an adequate day!!!

Eventually that's what's going to happen if things keep on going in this direction and it looks like there's nothing stopping it so yeah, we're moving in circles. Old things will become new again.

My household just bought The Brick to start taking control of our phones and online usage. We've been very online for 15+ years but are hoping to break the addiction cycle by simply blocking our devices from access. The timing feels right, mostly because sites like Instagram and Reddit are too braindead and spam+ad heavy these days. The executives and shareholders' desire for profits have already killed two of my biggest online pastimes.

I heard of The brick and sounds very effective. Not many people realize the're addicted to their devices and most tragic of all is that kids who grew always online have no baseline to return to. As the OP mentions, I too hope that when it'll all become a junk pile people will eventually return to offline mode.