People are struggling to make friends and maintain friendships. Covid, digital tech, dwindling confidence, emotional burnout, remote work and less time spent socialising – the list of purported reasons for the friend undersupply is not hard to guess. 

Let’s not list the skills you need to make friends, but simply say they are learned. And it’s dangerous to be without them. With the world of work changing fast, you may be looking for a new role at some point. If your relationship-wrangling chops are hopelessly ring-rusty, where will that leave you?

Relationship building skills – like other skills – are learned, practised and repeated to build muscle. If you’re told you can communicate optimally with everyone remotely, be suspicious. The digital world offers many ingenious proxies for communication and relationship building, but they are not the same as building relationships in real life. GenAI can be incredibly impressive, but it is not your friend – or your therapist, as even Cosmopolitan tells us (below).

Tony Hallett and Daine Lindsay were reminded of the importance of in-person time when they recently ran a series of interviews in New York and Philadelphia. They also recorded this promo video for the Global Thought Leadership Institute’s conference – another great example of a face-to-face networking event where connections will be built. And our Southeast-based team get the benefit of in-person connection once a week at our coworking space, too (below.)

Elsewhere, the makers of the Solved podcast say that the topic of friendship had previously been a turnoff for listeners, but that’s seen a recent and marked reversal. It seems people are currently very much interested in how to make and keep friends.

In the modern world, sometimes these connections do start on the internet. With clients, with colleagues and even friends. If you’re not connected to us on LinkedIn or Instagram, go on – make the first move.

Until next time,

The CC team

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Word of the moment: Parasocial

The Cambridge Dictionary has named ‘parasocial’ its Word of the Year for 2025. What does it mean? According to cam.ac.uk, it’s “involving or relating to a connection that someone feels between themselves and a famous person they do not know, a character in a book, film, TV series, etc, or an artificial intelligence”.