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Notes -
Yeah, I think your whole first section makes sense when you include the whole "devaluation of relationships" aspect.
THAT'S the part that makes it so easy to be flaky. If you truly value the relationship with your friends, you make an effort to be at the event as planned, because even if its easy to cancel last minute, you know that this will eventually lose you status points (you'd lose more in the older days where people would be stuck waiting for you and get pissed) and people will stop inviting you at all, eventually leaving you out of everything.
This is bad if its hard to find new friends OR there aren't many things to do by yourself. But guess what? You can make friends online! You can pay an Onlyfans girl to talk to you while you sit at home! You can watch a streamer and PRETEND he's your friend!
If you REALLY fuck up and gain a bad reputation throughout your town, its relatively easy to move to a new town and make new friends quickly.
I have to imagine that 'ghosting' dates was simply NOT a common practice before dating apps, for similar reasons. You really needed to keep your appointments because the pool of potential dates was relatively small and so if you offended too many you might be locked out of dating altogether. Instead, of course, you ghost one match because you can always go back to swiping with zero penalty.
So now it is easier to be flakey without wrecking your social status, AND its easier to move on if you do wreck the status.
And that flips over to your arguments that phones are now status symbols. Which man, I hadn't thought deeply on that and there's something to unpack there.
For me, I place an insanely high value on maintaining relationships, so I have inbuilt incentive to honor my commitments once made, and I thus hate hate hate feeling like my personal relationships have been devalued. But the world is how it is. I just put in the effort to maintain the friendships I really care about.
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