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Screen to screen – the spaces in-between
Conversations with my closest friend.
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Foreword
Sam has been my closest friend since the moment we met. More than a decade ago now. If you had been there, watching those two teenage students meet in the canteen of Esher College, you surely would not have put us together. My mum even said as much after having Sam round for dinner. He had gone to a school where they taught Latin, my school taught stabbing. We acted different, dressed different. I was loud, he was quiet, I was irreverent and he was considered. But we were just social chameleons, teenagers learning how best to camouflage ourselves. I had fashioned a front and Sam had built a shell. What brought us together however, was that we saw through each other’s attempts. We were both, what I would call, existential souls; worried about the world, the universe, our place within it, politics, the climate, space-time and the meaningless of existence – and we also loved to play video games. In fact once, knowing my mum was out at work, we skived off college and headed back to my flat, with the sole intention of playing Fifa all day long. Only when we arrived, I realised the house-keys were in my bedroom. Rather than concede defeat and head back to college; we borrowed the extra-long ladder of some very friendly, all-be-it curious builders, propped it precariously against my mum’s first floor flat and climbed in through the upper window. Utterly stupid, mildly dangerous and breaking and entering to any onlookers but still one of my fondest memories.
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It reminds of the Francis Bacon quote Sam had on his bedroom wall in those days; “Friends are thieves of time”. Over the years Sam and I would try our best to bring those words to life. So much so that I could happily sit here for the rest of the morning and type out anecdote after embarrassment, believe me, I would love to and not even for you the reader, just for my own nostalgia. I have a great story involving Sam’s 18th birthday, a Persian taxi driver, one sacred rug and an ungodly amount of vomit but I have told that story so many times, that word of mouth alone means it will probably find you. The story I need to tell is still being lived and I have no idea how else to tell it, other than to give you the pieces of the story itself. So after you have finished reading this foreword you will find, verbatim, a record of texts, messengers and emails between myself and Sam over a period of a few critical years. I have to admit, it is ironic that you will see our friendship through the prism of modern technology and social media, given that Sam and I both dislike social media immensely and its tools of apparent connection. But our friendship would evolve into a place where we could only contact each other using such tools, where the distance between the two points of contact allowed for contact at all. It is a way of interaction that we have all become tied to, simply by the accident of our birth into this accelerating age of technology.
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You see our generation has been thrust into a world never more connected and inter-connected with a hundred different apps to keep us in contact, yet simultaneously genuine human connection remains a growing illusion. Year on year, all around me, I encounter people exhibiting the sings of social isolation and the mental health issues therein. This is not merely my anecdotal opinion, there are scores of journals, studies and articles on the pernicious nature of social media and the new social dynamics of us smartphone-sapiens. In short, we have come to expect more from technology than each other. We have arrived at a place where the duty of friendship is optional and the bond made of rope seems to have withered to a tether. So this story is not academic or statistical, it is personal and from my viewpoint, that of a young man. Because I believe our modern age of screen to screen friendship can redefine the age old stereotypes we press upon men, yet equally it can entrench them. It remains true that men do not talk, I mean truly talk. The modern man might oil his beard, squat low in a supermarket aisle looking for the best blackhead cleanser and still enjoy bantering away over a pint of beer – but talk about his emotions? Discuss his mental state? Admit to overwork or exhaustion? Show vulnerability? Ask for help? To do that would imply ‘weakness’ better to suck it up and ‘be a man’. From 50’s mad-men execs to millennial safe-space latte drinkers, these sentiments have existed long before the veil of the screen, before the ease of reading an uncomfortable text and choosing simply to act as if you had not seen it. Yet perhaps the privacy, distance and dissociation inherent in our technological connection, could be the tool to redefining the narrative, much like a confession booth of old, a medium in which the unsaid can be said – I will elaborate more on this later, it would take me some time to realise.
This inability to open up on issues of mental health extends beyond men of course, it is a taboo each generation has struggled to bring into the light. I particularly know this as I have observed my own mother battle with depression and acute anxiety all her life, whilst attempting to wrestle with my own anxiety too. Yet even from this first-hand position, I was utterly unable to communicate on the deeper emotional level with my best friend for more than a decade. Too often we ask, “Are you good?” and hear in return, “yea, fine”. Like two friends in a boat, coasting along a serene surface, it could be worthwhile to jump overboard, into the deep with abandon, but who knows what lies down there, unrevealed. Better not to rock the boat.
Friend are thieves of time.
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I have always loved this quote, always thought it has a simple elegance and beauty to it, in the way that only truth can. But the more I think of it the truer it becomes. Yes it conjures the nostalgia of that ‘partners in crime’, Thelma-Louise-like relationship Sam and I enjoyed in our youth, yet in another sense I feel it warns us, to not rob each other of the finer virtues of friendship. Brutal honesty, vulnerability, unguarded communication. If I and Sam had better understood this all those years ago maybe we could have overcome the expectant weight our masculinity placed upon us. But we didn’t and so things would go quite wrong before they got any better.