i've been a bad friend

on social capitalism

Welcome to debrief! This newsletter is on pause and will be sent out semimonthly while I finish writing my book. But you’re in luck this fortnight—because I FINISHED MY SECOND DRAFT!!!! So I’m back with a new essay: on social capitalism.

Here it is!! All 189 pages and with a new title that definitely starts with the letter T! (We’re still working on the subtitle.)

We often focus on the financial aspects of the capitalistic drive for more—money in the bank is easily quantifiable, after all—but capitalism also operates in the social sense. Similar to capitalism’s imperative to make more money, there’s an analogous imperative to make more friends, cooler friends, kinder friends, whatever-er friends.

And even when your ideal life under capitalism includes your existing relationships, they’re somehow better versions of your existing relationships—your mom nags you less; your partner takes out the trash without being asked; your friend responds to all of your texts instead of only one in four. This is, in part, due to the smoothing powers of money on our experience of life’s frictions,¹ as well as our own delusions about what money can buy. These interactions also take place in “cooler” spaces and locales—larger homes, private social clubs, an Aman Resort.

In this way, financial capitalism and social capitalism are often intertwined—one does often beget the other, hence the lumped term socioeconomic status—but the social element of capitalism can be splintered almost completely from the financial nowadays. Look no further than the bevy of scammers with devoted fanbases or the recent tragedy of Hamptons royalty, Candice and Brandon Miller.

Deception isn’t a new phenomenon, but the modes and ease with which we can deceive others and even ourselves are. Digital mediums like websites and social media and Photoshop/generative AI allow us to project our simulacra of social capital without requiring the financial capital that would’ve been necessary to project the same in the analog world. Add to that the normalization of over-leveraging—Miller reportedly secured an $2 million mortgage on their Hamptons home (on top of an existing $6.1 million mortgage) from a company advertising cash loans closing in 24 hours (which should be illegal! JAIL!!)—and we’re in an ecosystem in which social capital is even more important than, and can exist independently of, financial capital.

Enter the social climbers, the yacht girls, the sugar babies.² Social capital isn’t a strictly feminine endeavor, but women were necessarily attuned to it as a mode of power—because they historically weren’t allowed to enter into contracts or open credit cards or otherwise engage in the formal economy of financial capital. Even as someone who’s always aspired to be financially independent, I worried about social capital, as well—financial capital, by itself, was never enough.

The problem with pursuing social capital—attending more exclusive parties, rubbing elbows with the fully socially capitalized—is that in doing so, you can find yourself in rooms with predominantly social climbers. People who will be curious about you, sure, but who don’t actually wish to remain friends with you—not unless you can help them in their ascent. Which only reinforces the capitalistic urge to have more friends, better-connected friends, -er friends. How many times have I been ignored by someone in a social setting and thought to myself, If only I were a bigger name/had 2 million followers/were friends with a celebrity? Countless.

For those with parents who overly emphasized the value of college, it’s easy to absorb the unstated corollary of such a message: your life right now isn’t real. Not in the way that college will be real. My parents often downplayed the people (and experiences) in my middle and high school years. They didn’t make a concerted effort to learn my friends’ names. (“The girl we carpooled with” is a common moniker.) They mostly asked which AP classes they were in, which colleges they were applying to.³

I resented their dismissiveness at the time, but I also internalized a lot of it—I prioritized making new friends at Yale, HLS, NYC, this supposed “real life,” over maintaining older friendships. There is some wisdom to such an approach—after all, it’s better to have friends in the physical world, that you can meet IRL—but it’s also possible to over-index on newer friendships. It’s not an explicit lessening of older friendships, but because time is finite, that’s the result. And even new friendships become old ones, or disappointing ones, or broken ones—setting off the hunt for new friends again. This time, it will be different; this time, they’ll be better.

Recently, I’ve been trying to sit with the inevitable hurts of friendship—really sitting with them—rather than channeling that energy into finding new social spaces, befriending new potential best friends. As much as I’d like to believe that there is some perfect new best friend out there, just waiting to be discovered, someone who is available every time I want to hang out or talk (but doesn’t demand my time when I’m unavailable), someone who prioritizes me exactly equal to how much I prioritize them (magically, without ever having to talk about it!)—that person does not exist. That person is a fiction. Real friendships—real people—do not operate that way, as if they could intuit all of my preferences and wants.

Capitalism’s allure is the promise that what you have now is not all that you could have. Capitalism offers the perfect, socially appropriate and societally reinforced, impetus to never be present in your own life, to constantly be working towards more—money and friends. I’ve been grappling with the financial aspects of disengaging from the rat race, but now I want to reckon with the social aspects, as well. What would it mean to engage more meaningfully with the friends I have rather than go on 50 first friend dates? What would it be like to plan consistent trips to visit old friends instead of attending parties in NYC every weekend in search of something which doesn’t exist?

What would it be like to get off the hamster wheel of social capitalism? ◆

Further reading:

• ROBERT PUTNAM KNOWS WHY YOU’RE LONELY, nyt magazine. Putnam, the author of the 2000 book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, is interviewed about why community in America is so hard to find today and why pursuing fun in your own life is a civic duty.

• THE SECRET BATTLE FOR THE FUTURE OF THE MURDOCH EMPIRE, nyt. Succession is real! Rupert Murdoch’s kids are fighting over the future of their father’s media empire. Murdoch is attempting to change his family’s irrevocable trust while some of his kids are arguing that the trust is, well, irrevocable. It really goes to show that more money, after a certain point, doesn’t smooth over all of life’s relational frictions.

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1. Before you come for me that this isn’t a peer-reviewed study, here’s a peer-reviewed study from the same author with the antecedents which likely laid the groundwork for this subsequent study.

2. Their converse, I would argue, are the public escorts, the OnlyFans creators, the FIRE crowd—who pursue financial capital even at the expense of social capital. (I don’t think this trade-off is fair, mind you, but I do think it exists.)

3. I don’t blame them now for their glossing over the specifics of my friends. I think they had a lot on their mind, were stressed by how expensive the colleges I wanted to attend were, and otherwise showed love in ways I couldn’t interpret—but back then, I could receive parental love in only the narrow channels I viewed as “American.”