“I want to be your friend…”

The headline for this article has been rattling around my head all week, even if I didn’t know what it meant or where it came from. It made me feel like Richard Dreyfuss scraping away at mashed potato in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, except, instead of an alien landing, it seemed to predict my usual pre-Christmas meltdown.

You see the pictures, watch the ads, and begin to gorge on the movies and TV specials all promoting the same idealisation of life: people with people, doing the warm, cosy things that people used to do in the “good old days” to the sound of Morecambe and Wise/Only Fools and Horses/[Insert iconic Christmas comedy of your childhood here]. Nostalgia is a powerful but heavily-refined drug, as well as a non-too-profound reminder that life doesn’t always play out like that. It makes you wake in the night screaming: “Where is my lovable grandfather in his reindeer jumper experiencing VR for the first time? Damn you, John Lewis! Damn you!!!”

Yet my thinking about friendship had perhaps been reinforced by real acts of friendship. All week I’ve been getting supportive messages by email or through social media, warning me about the inevitable rejection that my sister will get for her PIP application. Although she’s extremely ill and we badly need the support, initial rejection is apparently “standard practice to see if you’ll break”. These messages didn’t just come from people who had been through the same awful process but from seasoned veterans who had worked inside the benefits system. It established a vivid contrast in my mind between people taking time out of their day to reach out to me, and a government system that makes the process of getting help and support so painful and difficult that the sick and debilitated give up. 

I’ve heard the phrase used so often it has become a cliché: “a process designed to fail.” It’s akin to the old practice of dunking “witches” in deep water. If they floated, they were made of wood and therefore a witch who could be burned. If they drowned, they were human. Some parts of government have barely moved on from this, except they now boast holistic offices-are-a-kind-of-woodland-too Jobcentre+ vibes. If the system to get help ultimately kills you, then at least it proved that you were ill and needed the help, otherwise, you can’t have been that ill…

And this is where so much of our political philosophy currently sits. This is where the current Conservative party appears to live, or, rather, these are the hills on which the current Conservatives are choosing to die. Forget about the nuance, the legalities, the questions of sovereignty, and think about it on the crudest level where this plays out before the public: is there mileage in a policy that in a broad, unsophisticated way suggests they’re abandoning “human rights”? It reminds me of Toby Young’s muddleheaded, misguided, but, on some deeply uncomfortable level, pragmatically correct arguments at the beginning of COVID-19 in which he tried to make a virtue of the seemingly cruel logic of emergency planning. It’s also the old logic of car manufacturers who know the likelihood of a design fault causing an accident, the cost to the victims of those accidents, against the cost of a recall.

Yet I wasn’t going to write my “I want to be your friend” article because lately I’ve been autobiographizing too much in these columns. I don’t know how much I would be stretching people’s patience, or whether there was any value in explaining what it’s like living at the grueling coalface of government rhetoric.

I was instead going to write about Biden/Trump even though there’s absolutely no movement in that story. Pundits and polls (usually via America’s conservative press) say Trump is leading. I still don’t see it. Democrats have hammered the Republicans in every meaningful vote that has come along. Abortion remains the hottest issue and that’s before we even get to the question as to whether America would consciously vote to become a dictatorship (I don’t think it will). The real election hasn’t even started, and Trump has not won a single vote since 2016 when he got into the White House thanks to the Electoral College… 

Yet even this story has a bearing on what I’m talking about.

People are not polls. Crude questions like “Do you approve of the job that Joe Biden is doing?” do not allow them to articulate the complexity of human thought. People can answer that question in a million different ways critical of the president and yet still vote for him next year. 

But still, I wasn’t going to write my “I want to be your friend” article because… Well, it’s too sentimental and I don’t like the sentimental, even at Christmas… or particularly at Christmas. Plus, the interview wasn’t as bad as predicted (though the decision comes down to the DWP where non-medical professionals review the case). The doctor conducting it was sympathetic, friendly, and knowledgeable. It was a reminder that good people can even be found inside bad systems, though the process still made my sister extremely unwell and, no sooner had one stress point eased, than we discovered that our uncle had died over a month ago and nobody had bothered to tell us.

So, yes. I do want to be your friend…

Because I’ve had such a spectacularly bad year, I’ve found myself seeking out places where people congregate. It’s why I don’t believe any of the hyperbole around AI. I have this lurking suspicion that brighter people than me haven’t figured this bit out yet. Perhaps a year of acute grief mixed with a few existential crises makes you realise that nothing replaces human contact. If you can pause from being excited by the noise-cancelling, wifi-enabled, lithium rechargeable, solar-powered, ecowobbly, bright lights and look around you, you will see people in the fringes, staring out of coffee shops, alone or in groups, and the look is the same. 

At times, I feel like I’ve donned the sunglasses in John Carpenter’s sci-fi classic, They Live. So many people seem lost and afraid, their desperate need for human contact both private and acute. Social media has become a refuge for so many. Twitter (screw you, Musk) can be hard, and I know I don’t exactly raise the bar given how I contribute to the gloom. You see so many people appealing for help, reassurance, or simply to connect with others, but it’s also impossible to reach out. Not enough hands, not enough time, not enough words.

As bad as the year has been, I know I’ve tried to do good things. Or that’s what I’ve written in my note to Santa. The more life pushes me to be cynical, depressed, and antisocial, the more I want to be optimistic and connected to the world. Why? Because people make the bad times bearable. It’s a lesson that Sports Illustrated might have learned this past week after it was revealed that they’d tried to hide AI content behind artificial profiles of non-existent journalists. It caused an outcry, and a backlash, and hopefully teaches many publishers a sobering lesson about the place of human beings in the creative industries. People do matter, though I look up from writing this to see Boris Johnson throwing anonymous civil servants under the bus.

I can’t help but feel that’s the singular failing of this government. They’ve forgotten it’s about people and it’s not all about them.

This year, Britain does feel a little more broken than usual, perhaps because we have a government dead in the water. We all wait for somebody – the Tory back benches, perhaps – to pull the plug on this poisonous parliament. Whatever the next government looks like, at least it will be new and have a direction. Let’s also hope that next year is better (though I’ve long since abandoned prophesying such things). Here, in the moment, perhaps all we can do is say that on some level, we’re in this whole existence business together. Find me on Twitter. Send me a message. I’ll send you a Christmas card. And, yes, let’s be friends.

@DavidWaywell

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