Crosscut · 23 min
Engineering Friendship
Tech startups want to sell friendship as a fast, frictionless product, but building real trust requires the slow, clumsy work of sharing ordinary moments in person.
Friendship is Built Over Time, Through Ordinary Moments – I Teach Lonely College Students to Notice Them × Can You Spend Your Way Out of Loneliness?
Published 2026-09-26
0:00 / 23:05 · Narrator Sulafat/Charon/Vindemiatrix
In this episode
The Conversation
Friendship is Built Over Time, Through Ordinary Moments – I Teach Lonely College Students to Notice Them
by Justin Vaughn, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Applied Civic Leadership, Coastal Carolina University
The connection
College students are sitting in a classroom, learning to endure the awkwardness of making a friend. In an essay published this week, a professor describes teaching young adults that relationships grow through a slow, clumsy accumulation of ordinary moments. There is no shortcut to trust. Yet a striking contrast emerges when pairing that reality with a Vox article published just a day later. It reports on the booming loneliness economy, where venture-backed startups try to sell human connection as a fast, frictionless product. Putting these two side by side reveals a sharp divide. One approach asks people to embrace the messy, unglamorous work of being human, while the tech industry tries to engineer a way around it.
Justin Vaughn leaves you with a very specific image: college students sitting in a silent room, staring at their phones, having to consciously practice the awkward steps of simply talking to each other. He shows that building trust is a slow, clumsy process of shared meals and campus walks that just can't be rushed. Allie Volpe, up next, looks at the exact same problem—isolated people desperate for connection—by following startups trying to sell a quick fix. What jumps out reading Volpe alongside Vaughn is the sheer contrast in how they treat the friction of making friends. Where Vaughn leans into the unglamorous work of saying hello, Volpe tracks an exploding industry trying to bypass that awkwardness entirely. She writes about three-thousand-dollar loneliness coaches and wearable AI pendants, all designed to offer community as a frictionless product. Put these two together, and the tension is hard to miss. The tech industry is desperately trying to put a price tag on human connection, while Vaughn’s classroom experiment suggests that the slow burn of building a relationship is exactly the part you can't buy.
What remains is the stubborn reality of a clumsy silence. There is no code to fast-forward through a misunderstood joke or a forgotten name. Trust demands hours of ordinary presence, and time refuses to be optimized. Startups will keep trying to sell a shortcut, promising to smooth out the rough edges of meeting someone new. But if that very awkwardness is the mortar holding a relationship together, what happens when it gets stripped away? Can a bond built without any friction ever hold enough weight to keep a person from feeling alone?