Vexed: The future of friendships in the age of opinions

livemint.com:

I used to be friends with people who had a moral compass, but I lost many of them after they started reading my column. I still know a few, like a young journalist named Nidhi Suresh, even though she has been thinking of getting rid of some friends. It is the times.

She was in Ayodhya last week. The fervour of the new temple there has not consumed her, but she saw on social media some of her friends, with whom she may have shared broccoli and other liberal greens, posting their joy. It is a type of joy that inevitably has the quality of glee, and she has begun to wonder what it is that she loves about those friends, and whether she can still love them now that she knows there is something of the mainstream in them.

She wonders how to stay true to friends when you cannot argue with them about their deepest beliefs. Thus she enters a confusion of our times. People are losing friends they have loved for decades.

They are losing them over opinions. There was a time, not long ago, when very few people had any ideology. In fact, only elderly men had ideology, and there was a term for them.

It was not ‘uncles.’ It was ‘ideologues.’ Nobody uses that word anymore because now we know that to be an ideologue is in the nature of our whole species. And it appears no one can hide their ideology anymore. As a result, across the nation, especially in the educated middle-class, people have been losing friends.

Once we disliked people only for what they did to us; now people dislike those who are close to them for how they think. When I tell Nidhi this, she says, “Maybe you will now roll your eyes, but I think as a woman. We, or at least I, always need to know what the person I’m speaking to is thinking.