Here's something that would have baffled Aristotle: we now have friends we've never met, friends we actively dislike, and friends whose last names we don't know. The word has stretched so thin it barely means anything at all.

This isn't just linguistic drift. It's the aftershock of one of history's most successful ideas—equality—colliding with one of humanity's oldest institutions. When we decided everyone deserves equal treatment, friendship became philosophically awkward. How do you justify loving some people more than others in a world that increasingly insists you shouldn't?

For Aristotle, friendship wasn't a pleasant add-on to life—it was life's central achievement. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he devotes more space to friendship than to justice, courage, or any other virtue. A person with wealth, health, and power but no friends? Aristotle considered that existence barely worth living.

The ancients distinguished friendship sharply from family bonds (which you don't choose) and romantic love (which they viewed as a kind of beautiful madness). True friendship—what Aristotle called philia in its highest form—required rational selection. You examined someone's character, recognized their excellence, and chose to entwine your life with theirs. Cicero's De Amicitia went further: friendship was "nothing else than an accord in all things, human and divine, conjoined with mutual goodwill and affection."

This wasn't egalitarian. The whole point was discrimination—in the original sense of careful distinction. You were supposed to love your friends more than strangers. Your loyalty to them trumped abstract duties to humanity at large. A Roman who treated his sworn friend the same as any random citizen would have been considered not admirably fair, but morally confused.

Takeaway

The ancients didn't see partiality toward friends as a moral failing to overcome—they saw it as a moral achievement to cultivate.

Something shifted in Western thought between the Enlightenment and now. The idea that all humans possess equal moral worth—once radical, now common sense—created an unexpected problem for friendship. If everyone deserves equal consideration, how do you justify the radical inequality of caring desperately about one person while barely noticing another?

Immanuel Kant, that great champion of universal moral law, was deeply suspicious of friendship's partiality. He worried it corrupted our judgment, making us favor those we love over those who actually deserve our help. Utilitarian thinkers faced similar difficulties: if the goal is maximum happiness for maximum people, your intense focus on a few friends looks like a misallocation of emotional resources.

The political implications followed. Modern liberal thought emphasizes impartiality as the foundation of justice—blind scales, equal treatment under law, no special favors. Friendship operates on exactly the opposite principle: extreme partiality, maximum special treatment. This tension never got resolved; it just got buried. We kept having friends while quietly absorbing a moral framework that made friendship philosophically embarrassing.

Takeaway

Equality as a universal ideal didn't just challenge political hierarchies—it made the unavoidable selectivity of genuine friendship feel vaguely like a moral failing.

The word "friend" has been colonized. When Facebook launched in 2004, it needed a term for connections, and "friend" was sitting there, warm and trusted. Within a decade, people routinely had hundreds of "friends"—a number Aristotle would have considered not just impossible but definitionally absurd. True friendship required time, and humans simply don't have time for hundreds of intimate relationships.

This wasn't just corporate branding. It reflected a genuine cultural shift toward what sociologist Mark Granovetter calls "weak ties"—connections valuable for their breadth, not depth. We network now. We maintain contacts. We cultivate professional friendships, which would have struck earlier generations as an oxymoron roughly equivalent to "professional love" or "strategic sincerity."

The democratization of friendship—making it available to everyone, all the time, requiring nothing—has produced exactly what you'd expect. A 2021 American Perspectives Survey found that the number of Americans with no close friends quadrupled since 1990. We have more "friends" than any generation in history and report record loneliness. It turns out that when you remove the selectivity, the commitment, and the partiality from friendship, you're not left with better friendship. You're left with something else entirely.

Takeaway

Democratizing friendship didn't make it more available—it made it less recognizable. What remains is connection without the selective commitment that gave friendship its meaning.

The ancient view wasn't perfect—it often excluded women, non-citizens, and anyone deemed insufficiently virtuous. But it grasped something we've lost: that some forms of love require inequality to exist at all.

Perhaps the task isn't choosing between equality and friendship but recognizing their different domains. Universal dignity in public life; fierce partiality in private bonds. The challenge is remembering that loving everyone equally means loving no one in particular—and that's not love at all.