Disposable Friendships in a Mobile World
30th October 2016
When the Jewish German psychologist Kurt Lewin fled Nazi rule and moved to the United States in 1933, he, like many immigrants, found his new home a little puzzling. Especially when it came to friendships.
“Compared with Germans, Americans seem to make quicker progress toward friendly relations early in the acquaintance process and with many more persons,” he wrote in his 1936 paper “Some Social-Psychological Differences Between the United States and Germany.” “Yet this development often stops at a certain point and the quickly acquired friends will, after years of relatively close relations, say good bye as easily as after a few weeks of acquaintance.”
Lewin thought that this idea of friends as fast fashion—easily acquired, emotionlessly discarded when worn out—might be spurred by the United States’s high level of residential mobility. American society was mobile in his day and has only gotten more mobile since. People can move from sea to shining sea, dropping things as they go.
For really disposable friendships, see the previous post about dissolving corpses.