Flaking, friendship, and the erosion of the social contract
A message arrives that all of us recognise. ‘Sorry, can’t make it tonight, I’m shattered.’
It lands casually. No explanation required, expected, or given. We send one ourselves a week later. The plans dissolve into the familiar promise to ‘catch-up soon’, the evening quietly slips back to our own routines, alone.
Somewhere, somehow, flaking stopped being a failure of friendship, and became a part of the contract.
We’re told Gen Z is living through a loneliness epidemic. Rising rates of anxiety, depression, and time spent alone reflect a generation cut off from meaningful connection, irrevocably stunted by smartphones and formative years in lockdown. There is truth in that story. But it’s also incomplete.
What often looks like loneliness is something much subtler. Not simply a deficit of friends or opportunities to socialise, but a growing tolerance for opting out of them.
Plans are made lightly and cancelled easily, excused with the familiar unquestionable statements of, ‘I’m too busy’, ‘too tired’, ‘just need a night in’. The excuses are often perfectly reasonable, but they reveal a shift in how we think about friendship itself; and with it, our attempts at connection are deferred indefinitely.
If there is an epidemic here, it’s not one of being alone, but choosing to be.
The clearest expression of this shift is flaking. Not the occasional, unavoidable cancellation, but the casual abandonment of plans that now passes as a socially acceptable norm. BBC Scotland asked Glasgow University students a simple question: Is it fine to flake on your friends? The overwhelming answer was yes. Not defensively or with any sense of guilt, but casually, as though the question carried no moral weight.
This is what distinguishes flaking from ordinary unreliability. Most of us have felt the disappointment of cancelled plans, and equally the unease of cancelling them ourselves. But how easily we now do this, with a simple faceless text message. Removing the anxiety and visceral consequences of the confrontation allows us to detach from the weight of our words as they fall onto our friend’s screen.
Am I saying that people don’t go out or see their friends anymore? Of course not. Maybe there’s less, but it’s not gone. The heart of it sits in our obsession with boundaries, self-care, and mindfulness. While all helpful in our self-growth eras, where do they lead us?
A friend lent me an anecdote. Her friend drove her 6 hours round-trip without hesitation to see her passing grandad. No grand thank-you was required, with promises to make it up to her. No sheepish, nerve-riddled asking. Just: Here’s my problem, can you help? Another story comes to mind. A friend in the midst of a chaotic few weeks of uni, burnt out emotionally and by work, but still travelled across the country to be there for a friend going through an equally tough time. The response wasn’t guilt, obligation, or a sense of debt. Just: I’m glad you’re here.
What struck me is how others responded to these stories. Why would they do that? You shouldn’t have done that — you were so busy. I’d never do that. Listening to these reactions, I question if selflessness itself is becoming radical? Is it not right to put a friend’s needs above your own, with no payoff beyond their comfort?
Our focus on protecting the self risks crowding out these friendships of unconditional depth. The kind I’ve seen my parents live and grow with over the decades. Decades without social media or the ability to mark a digital presence — maintained instead by memory and a sustained commitment to care.
These examples are deliberately intense. But the same logic appears in ordinary life.
Where the fixed early wake-up time or carefully guarded night-time routines cut off the possibility of spontaneity or open-ended time together, even the mild inconvenience of a later night, a rushed dinner, a slightly tired tomorrow, begins to feel like unreasonable requests. In their place emerges the ‘catch-up’. The managed version of a friendship. We book in an hour, exchange updates, reassure one another of continued goodwill, and move on. It looks like maintenance, but it rarely deepens anything; it’s an obligation met. When these catch-ups are so weightless, it only heightens the ease of flaking. Nobody goes in expecting a deep moment of friendship, just a reminder of their physical form.
Without shared time or a sense of growing alongside one another, a catch-up becomes a kind of relational PR: proof that the relationship still exists, even if the substance that once sustained it slips away.
When we can register someone’s presence in our lives by sending them a reel, liking their story, replying to a message once a week, it creates a feeling of connection without its substance. We are reminded of one another constantly, but rarely required to show up, to give something of ourselves. Up until very recently in human history, you could not do one without the other.
The worry is not that technology has erased friendship, but that it has made friendship optional in practice. Relationships can now persist in a symbolic form, kept alive by the PR heart monitor, taking up space in the ward, as the more demanding, rewarding, real relationships fade.
Friendships that are not maintained by technology, that rely on presence, effort, and the inconvenience of real time, are still possible. But they are becoming rarer. Not because we no longer value them, but because the world no longer insists upon them.
Our culture is reducing its members to their online character. In the early days of social media, parasocial relationships were reserved for celebrities and YouTubers – a world away from Zoella and Thatcher Joe. Now, we’re approaching a quieter inflection point, where this logic is being applied to our real-life friends, our romantic interests, even our sense of self.
When I think of a friend I haven’t ’caught up’ with in weeks, do I think of their laugh or their bitmoji? When I think of a girl I have a crush on, do I picture how I saw her in a bar or her Hinge profile that one time we matched? When these lines are blurred, we chip away at a distinctly human capacity for connection. A capacity central to our human condition, to our fundamental needs as fragile, vulnerable people; can we really live fulfilling lives when our best friends’ primary show of love is a story like?
If this continues, opting out becomes the default posture of our generation. The social commitments which form and sustain a community become optional, negotiable, and “let’s catch up soon’ replaces ever having to show up. Slowly, the social contract of friendship erodes — not through conflict, but indifference. We remain adjacent, but not intertwined. Present, but not committed. With this, real embodied connection risks becoming a novelty on either side of the parasocial divide, affecting us all, flaker or not.
May it be an exaggeration to say the prevalence of flaking is a cultural commentary on the death of the social contract? It may be, but I’d argue it’ll be a post-mortem.
