It turns out that inconvenience can serve some greater social good, such as enabling the building of greater social bonds (or social capital), an important ingredient for the proper functioning of societies and democracies.
This is the point made recently by Roland Fryer, a professor of economics at Harvard University, who was reflecting about waiting for a ferry crossing from Chappaquiddick to Edgartown, Massachusetts.
He wrote in a column for The Wall Street Journal last week that spending time around that ferry had made him wonder if modern life had undersold inconvenience. “We treat waiting as wasted time. Often it is. But sometimes waiting does something useful: it forces people into some place, with nothing to do, long enough for conversation to begin.”
Fryer says some inconveniences aren’t merely costs. They are “the hidden scaffolding of social life” — what he terms the “friction theory of friendship”.
“Proximity matters most when it recurs. Idle time matters most when nobody is trying to impress anyone. Shared irritation helps, but with diminishing returns. A delayed ferry creates conversation; a broken ferry creates rage.”
He adds that this is why work, school, church, children, sports and waiting rooms often lead to friendships. Friendship is produced by “enough friction to make conversation natural”.
But for decades modern life has been about reducing that friction. We even hire people to queue for us at home affairs.
I have experienced the benefits of recurring proximity. One of my deepest friendships began on a train journey from the south coast to the Durban CBD in the early 1980s. We were a small group whose work circumstances forced us to ride the 7am train to Durban and the 5pm back south, Monday to Friday. We shared stories, laughed a lot, teased each other, and in the process, Alan Mkhize (now deceased) and I developed what would become an enduring friendship.
The impact of modern life on social capital has been examined before. US political scientist Robert Putnam examined the phenomenon in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone. He described social capital as the “features of social organisation such as networks, norms and social trust that facilitate co-ordination and co-operation for mutual benefit”.
Putnam noted that traditional forms of social engagement — such as political participation, trade union membership, and parent-teacher associations — had been replaced by “vibrant new organisations”. However, these new organisations weren’t driving social connectedness because people’s membership of these organisations involved paying membership dues and occasionally reading a newsletter.
Putnam was writing before the social media revolution, a technology that has “connected” people, but not in the traditional sense of social connection.
Even then, there was already evidence that advances in technology were “individualising” the use of leisure “and thus disrupting many opportunities for social-capital formation”. It’s worsened since. Today, cinema has declined markedly, as more people watch movies at home.
But even television has become less of a family-watching experience, with each family member often peeling off to watch movies and other programmes on their handheld device. This has loosened family bonds even further. And families, according to Putnam, are “the most fundamental form of social capital”.
No wonder, then, that social trust is in decline. Instead of helping increase social connectedness, technology and other socioeconomic factors are narrowing our sense of self — with the “I” drowning the “we”. As Fryer argues, a dose of inconvenience in our lives might just be the tonic.
• Sikhakhane, a former spokesperson for the finance minister, National Treasury and Reserve Bank, is the editor of The Conversation Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.
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