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Chapter 1: How is catch-up culture affecting our friendships?
How is catch-up culture ruining our friendships? Thanks for asking. I don't know about you, but as I get further and further into my 30s, I find it increasingly difficult to keep in touch with friends. Even when it's someone living in the same city as me, I'll likely only see them two or three times a year at most, and those meetups tend to follow a similar pattern.
Catching up on life updates over a drink or dinner, making vague plans to see one another again in the coming weeks, and then not ending up seeing the person for another six months anyway. That pattern probably sounds familiar to a lot of you, and it's become known as catch-up culture.
Isn't that just what a normal friendship looks like when you get into adulthood?
It's certainly easy to default to that cycle, but some say that friendships should be about more than simply exchanging summaries of life developments. American author Michelle Ellman released a book called Bad Friend in 2025, in which she touched on the catch-up culture phenomenon while more broadly exploring how friendships tend to end.
Talking to Days Digital about catch-up culture in October 2025, she said, You go on these dinner dates where you catch up with friends, but you are not experiencing life together. You only really pick up the meal where you left off last time, which could be months, and it almost feels stunted.
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Chapter 2: What are the limitations of catch-up culture in adult friendships?
Your life is only ever since your last catch-up, and you aren't talking about the bigger things in life, like your future or the menial day-to-day. If you think about it, when was the last time you actually spent some real quality time or shared a new experience with your friends, like playing sports, going on a weekend away together or attending a concert?
If you're struggling to answer that question, maybe you've unknowingly become a victim of catch-up culture. What's problematic? Of course, keeping up with each other is the foundation of friendship, but it's only a way of maintaining it rather than truly living it.
The issue with catch-up culture is that we no longer create new real memories with our friends, we don't build shared experiences, and above all, we filter what we tell them to avoid showing vulnerability. We tend to only share the headlines of our lives, and even then, often only the positive ones.
We're scared by the idea of venturing into a deeper conversation, even though that's what true friendship is supposed to be about.
It can be hard to find time to fit friends in though, can't it?
Well, absolutely. The idea that our priorities shift as we get older is hardly new. We tend to prioritize romantic relationships and careers over friendships. It's not like uni, where fellow students play a central role and represent the main part of our social lives. Once we get into working age, friends will move away to pursue their own ambitions, As will we.
In this modern era, we're also productivity obsessed, as pointed out by Josiah Gogarty writing for GQ magazine in January 2025. He highlighted how busy our schedules tend to get, saying the commute is soundtracked by self-help audiobooks and our evenings are occupied by exercise classes. Sound familiar? Michelle Ellman has also gone on record talking about the impact of social media.
Constant connectivity creates the feeling that we know everything about our friends' lives without actually seeing them in person. We see their posts, comment on their stories and send them reels. It gives us the impression that we're still sharing things, but we're only really viewing their highlight reel.
Rebuilding strong connections with friends doesn't mean we have to stop dinner dates completely, but it's worth thinking about being creative and coming up with other kinds of shared moments, going on weekend trips, attending a pottery workshop or walking in the forest. After all, it's the combination of diverse experiences that makes a friendship what it is. There you have it.
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