A short talk (transcript) by Simon Sinek arguing that friendship is a fundamental solution to modern problems—loneliness, depression, anxiety, stress, and suicide—and that adults are failing at making and maintaining friendships and failing to teach children how to form and repair friendships. The speaker urges reducing phone reliance during childhood play and practicing conflict resolution and repair skills.
What I'm obsessed right now is with friends, friendship. It's sort of my latest. The thing that I'm fascinated by and working on. If you look at most of the challenges that we're talking about these days, the epidemic of loneliness.
Rising rates of depression, anxiety, inability to cope with stress, in extreme cases, suicide. Friendship fixes all of those things. Friendship fixes all of those things. It. It's the ultimate biohack. And yet, if you ask people, are you a good friend? Most people say yes. And if you peel the onion just a little bit, you realize that we're all pretty. Actually pretty bad friends. Like, would you cancel on a friend for work or would you cancel on work for a friend? Oh, but my friends will understand, right? And you realize pretty quickly that we're not very good at communicating. Like, if you're having trouble in your marriage, right, if you have a fight, if there's a violation of trust, you try and talk it out, you work on it, you sit in the mud together, you get therapy, you try very hard to make the relationship survive. If you have a huge fight with a friend where there's a violation of trust, we just abandon friends. We don't do friend therapy to save a friendship. Why not? And the reason I talk about this is, as adults, we're struggling with friendship. How to make them, how to maintain them, how to look after them sometimes how to end them, how to. How to repair them. We're bad as adults. We're not teaching our kids how to make friends.
When your kids have play dates, they all have phones. Take all the phones away, put them in a bowl, call the parents and be like, well, the parents called you because you made the play date. But say, listen, we're planning on taking the phones away. If you need your kid, call me. And we know this. A lot of schools, a lot of schools want to get rid of phones. It's the parents who won't let them. Well, what if there's an emergency? Well, call the office. They know where your kid is. Old school, right? Like, the old systems work. And so one of the things that I'm very afraid of, even while we're struggling, is we are not teaching our kids how to relate to each other, how to have fights with each other, how to resolve things, how to repair, and how to make friends. Which means the epidemic that we're facing now of loneliness, stress, depression, and suicide gets worse. And our children will be the. The ones struggling even more than we are.
