That is, just as we’re becoming more alienated from one another, splintering into tribes and escaping to our screens and echo chambers, our livelihoods increasingly depend on being smooth and capable collaborators. Everyone is feeling weirder, and we’re all supposed to be fine with it.

Todd, Part I

Even seemingly normal, average people can struggle to make or keep friends. At first glance, Todd, a white man in his forties who works in tech, seems like he could perch atop any social pyramid if he so desired. (Todd is a pseudonym, for reasons that will become clear later.) I first met him several years ago at a conference in a hotel ballroom, and if there was anything remarkable about him, it’s that there was nothing remarkable about him. He looked like he sprang from an infomercial, dusted himself off, and could at any minute begin ShamWowing the banquet chairs.

Despite his everyman-ness—he’s married with children—he explained to me by phone later, he’s never had any close friends. As we talked, the similarities between Todd and myself became more and more evident. We both seem to lack the friendship gene. Small talk, for people like us, feels like tap dancing while frosting a cake.

As a kid, Todd attended a predominantly Christian elementary school where, like me, he didn’t quite fit in because he’s half Jewish. He was an only child, and he remembers trying to play board games against himself a lot, trying to beat the other four versions of himself. He would add extra rules to Monopoly, trying to stretch it to four or eight hours. He watched how his scholarly parents interacted with their friends, and he tried to spar intellectually like that with his own classmates. The only problem was that Todd and his friends were eight years old.

Having failed to get in with the popular crowd, Todd never developed the social skills that seem to come so easily to well-liked kids. Before long, what had been a small difference in social aptitude between him and his elementary school classmates yawned into an unbridgeable gap. In college, he did finally make a few friends, but they lost touch after graduation, leaving Todd, once again, alone.

He admitted that he put less effort into developing friendships than other people do. He’s not hard to get along with, but he had a tendency to speak to people like an anthropologist, not a friend. He’d ask, “What do you do? What are you interested in?” After building a full psychological profile of his interlocutor, he wouldn’t reveal even a morsel about himself.