I have always believed that the people you love should make your life bigger than it was before. Not necessarily by changing it dramatically, but by expanding its possibilities, introducing you to new ways of thinking, and giving you reasons to step outside yourself. My friendships over the years, have done exactly that.

Lately, I have been thinking about friendship in the context of the growing conversations around loneliness and the erosion of third spaces. We spend a great deal of time discussing how to rebuild community, yet we rarely examine the relationships that form its most immediate foundation. Friendship is often treated as a private matter, something that exists alongside our lives rather than something that actively shapes them. But if we are serious about building stronger communities, perhaps we need to begin by reconsidering how we approach friendship itself.

Part of the challenge lies in the fact that our generation is increasingly being encouraged to adopt an individualistic approach to relationships. We are taught the language of boundaries, self-preservation, emotional labour, and protecting our peace. These ideas are valuable and often necessary. And boundaries can be life-changing, particularly for the people pleasers and the eldest daughters in the room, who have spent years feeling responsible for everyone else's emotions. But somewhere along the way, boundaries have sometimes become barriers. The desire to protect ourselves can make us hesitant to take risks, even calculated ones.

Research consistently shows that Gen Z is more risk-averse than previous generations. While discussions around this often focus on careers, finances, or dating, I wonder if it also extends to friendship. Deep friendship requires vulnerability. It requires uncertainty. It requires reaching out first, showing up when it is inconvenient, and occasionally prioritising someone else's needs over your own comfort. None of these things come without risk.

As our lives become increasingly compartmentalised, friendships can also begin to feel transactional. We start approaching them according to availability and convenience. "I'll come if I have the energy." "I'll call when things settle down." "I'll make time when my schedule opens up." While these statements are understandable, they can gradually transform friendship into something conditional. The relationship exists only when it fits neatly into the margins of our lives. Yet the friendships that endure are rarely the convenient ones.

Recently, I read an essay on Substack about the importance of inconveniencing yourself for your friends, and the idea has stayed with me ever since. The argument was quite elementary to be honest, the best friendships will inconvenience you. They will require effort. They will occasionally disrupt your plans. They will ask you to make room for another person when doing so is not entirely comfortable. And this is not a flaw in friendship. It is the very thing that makes friendship meaningful.

Good relationships are sustained through these repeated acts of care.  They are the people who travelled across cities for difficult conversations, answered phone calls at unreasonable hours, showed up at hospitals, sat through heartbreaks, attended events they had no personal interest in, and listened to stories they had already heard several times before. I hope I have done the same for them.

The irony is that we live in a time of unprecedented connectivity. We can reach each other instantly from almost anywhere in the world. We exchange memes, react to stories, send reels, share posts and maintain an endless stream of digital contact. There is genuine intimacy in some of these interactions. Sending a friend a meme that immediately makes them laugh is, in its own way, an act of affection.

But digital connection can also create the illusion of closeness. It is much easier to spend an evening forwarding reels than it is to ask a friend how they are actually doing. It is easier to keep up with someone's highlights than it is to understand the reality of their life. Hyperconnectivity can sometimes allow us to feel socially fulfilled without requiring the deeper investment that genuine friendship demands.

What makes this shift particularly striking to me is that it is happening within South Asian societies that have historically understood life through a collectivist lens. We grow up hearing variations of the same lesson: it takes a village. We understand interdependence instinctively. Family systems, community celebrations and shared responsibilities have long been central to how we organise social life. Yet friendship has often occupied a strange position within this framework.

In many South Asian households, including mine, there is an implicit hierarchy of relationships. Friends are important, but family comes first. Family is treated as permanent and foundational, while friendships are often regarded as secondary, valuable but ultimately replaceable. I understand where this idea comes from. Family is frequently imagined as the stable centre around which the rest of life revolves. And I know I won't be the first, and certainly won't be the last, to say this, but as someone who comes from what many would consider an "unconventional" family structure, I disagree.

There have been countless moments when my friends have understood me more deeply than members of my family. They have accepted parts of me that others struggled to comprehend and have witnessed versions of me that existed outside family expectations and social roles. In many ways, they have helped me become the person I am. And none of this is an argument against family but rather, an argument for expanding our understanding of what care and intimacy can look like.

Especially for young people who move away from home and build lives elsewhere, friendships often become far more than casual social relationships. They become emergency contacts, festival companions when you cannot make it home, and witnesses to the messiest and most uncertain parts of our lives. Given the central role they play, it feels increasingly unfair that we often do not treat friendships with the long-term seriousness and commitment they deserve.

Perhaps one of the most valuable things we can do is borrow some of the principles we associate with family and apply them to friendship. Not the restrictive aspects, but the sense of responsibility. The assumption that people will show up. The understanding that relationships require maintenance. The belief that commitment does not disappear when circumstances become inconvenient. Because it can be very easy to get wrapped up in the hustle culture narrative we are fed time and time again, where you're meant to have a 5-9 before your 9-5 and productivity maxing is imperative and the boxes of what are productive and what isn't are so narrow and boxed in. Our lives have always been meant to be vast and long and not narrow and short. It has always been a marathon and not a sprint, and the only way we're going to make it through to the other side is if we nourish ourselves in every way.

So this Friendship Day, accompany your friend to their dentist's appointment, sit down and do your taxes together (as someone who filed hers for the first time this year, I'm fairly certain it would have been infinitely better with my best friend beside me), and invite them over while you finally install that stupid lamp that has been sitting in storage for the past two months. Make your friends intrinsic parts of your life. Let them into the mundane, unglamorous moments, not just the milestones and celebrations. Because friendship is one of the ways we build lives that are larger, richer, and more resilient than the ones we could ever create alone.

If you enjoyed this, here's more from Homegrown:

Cooking Up Belonging: Inside The 'Borrowed' Kitchens Of Young Indian Adults 

The Rise & Fall Of Every Version Of You: When The Internet Becomes A Prison Of Identity 

Growing Up On YouTube: How Indian Gen Zers Found Their Identity Amidst Digital Chaos