Are friends just a form of casual entertainment?

Someone reaching out isn’t burdensome for me; I feel it’s only emotionally draining if someone calls back to back really quickly after a conversation or keeps me on the phone for over thirty minutes around meal times and I’m trying to exit the conversation.

What does feel risky for me is taking a chance to reach out to someone after a long time and they cut the connection entirely then and there. The relationship was likely severed a while ago but that confirms it in that moment. Much more often though it’s because that friend is from a specific time in my life and things _have_ changed for them or for me and we haven’t really had a chance to sort out changed dynamics of the friendship. Missing/not reaching out during/after important things can sour some friendships too.

You need better friends. True friends help you out and support you. They give you someone to talk to about things that plague you, and someone to share successes with. Get a group of friends together and you get community- which is something that is sorely missing in this world.

There's a certain mindset needed to build community, but I'm not sure how to describe it

Have you done it? Let's make a Lemmy on it. I'm explicitly thinking of doing this as a project at an open mic night.

One of the grand, society wide problems (at least in the English speaking world, my experience with other parts is limited) is the way in which people, in an effort to avoid hitting people's feelings, and to keep things simple for children, have stretched the word 'friend' to gloss over important distinctions between different relationships.

In order to avoid hurting people's feelings, they point at a coworker who they share memes with over the company slack channels and say 'friend' even though they never speak outside of those memes, they don't know anything about each other, and they wouldn't trust them with anything more meaningful than a meme.

In order to avoid having to explain the difference between different kinds of relationship (which they quite possibly don't know themselves) to kids, adults point at the kid their kid shares a classroom with and loves like a brother, and the kid who puts their kid through mild physical torture on a nearly daily basis, and calls them both 'friend.' How is the kid supposed to acknowledge the difference they have no words for outside of making hand waving gestures How are they supposed to teach their own kids the difference if they don't learn it?

English has the words friend, buddy, coworker, pal, comrade, ally, mate, classmate, bunkmate, playmate, acquaintance, companion, partner, associate, chum, bro, and more, but because people are too lazy, ignorant, or socially anxious, they all end up as 'friend.'