The whorls of my recent conversations with friends have been, aptly, circling friendship. When going through scary, scarcity times, as we have been for a while, the traditional wisdom is to reach out to and rely upon each other. We do, we really try - and yet life gets in the way of living. Compared to the conditions of our teens and twenties, it's not a great mystery. We're adults now, we're living in different places and do our best to meet the universal demands of jobs, domesticity, health.

But who of us has actually changed in a significant sense to warrant this stress on the fabric of friendship? No one I know has moved further away. Sure, some of us have kids now but babies require intense attention for the first few years and then it just means more people to invite to your birthday party. When our heaving schedules do magically align, we rattle through the major categories - work, relationships, health, podcasts - in a catch up. Telling name. Points to our fear of missing out and that pervasive loss of each other which, for me, only reinforces the missing.

There was the minor matter of a pandemic along with a few unprecedented political and economic events falling in our lifetimes. A near total erosion of social infrastructure, which means we are pretty much facing the same problems. That's the extent of our ability to unify. We're not only losing free common places but free common time. No one seems to work the same hours, every gathering requires panning for that gold of overlapping dates. Unmoored and out of sync from the rhythm of each other's lives, time off is more likely spent alone or on admin than on the humble hang out.

We try to look after each other. We trade life hacks, cracking codes to get the correct medical attention. Meeting our basic needs has become as choreographed and tense as pulling off a heist. At least Danny Ocean got to hang out with ten of his friends in Las Vegas. We are falling through the gap between being able to affect reality while being acutely aware of everything we want to change. We reach out to each other for something to hold onto but the grip is slippery, twisting ourselves in knots just to be together for an hour. This pretzel logic makes us salty.

What is being revealed to us about our assumptions, needs, and desires around friendship as our obligations and failing infrastructure apply pressure? Forced into becoming hyper-individualistic economic units, increasingly atomised and lacking in resources, no wonder the language of HR departments during a round of redundancies has leaked into difficult conversations around friendship. Maybe we've become so used to receiving bad news in corporate tones we think that's the only way to do it. We could be grasping at formality as a poor substitute for assertiveness. We're trying in every sense of the word.

A dear friend sent our group chat of long-standing friendship this article by Pranav Jain, which articulated so much about the conditions we're trying to practice friendship within. One quote in particular stood out. "Friendship... has always depended on a certain irrational generosity." The phrasing knocked me out with its accuracy. Of course friendship is so hard in an age defined by austerity, where every interaction has to be run through the gamut of rational stinginess. It also made me think of something incredible done for me by a complete stranger.

My dad is the family archivist. It's a good excuse to spend more time in the British Library. He's diligently uploaded every ancestor and descendent he can verify to a genealogy site. I didn't think much of it until a few years ago, when he forwarded me an email he'd received from another site member, asking after my maternal uncle. He passed the inquiry onto me, the end of that particular line. She had something for me. My curiosity won out over my suspicion and I gave her my address. A small, very well wrapped package arrived not long after. I had absolutely no idea what was under each layer of paper and bubble wrap. I didn't for a good few minutes staring at the embossed and slightly faded cream and gold cover. Then I opened it.

It was a baby book. My uncle's baby book. Black and white photos of my grandparents beaming, holding their first child. Handwritten measurements and observations. I didn't cry until I found the lock of his hair. A delicate loop, blonde and soft, as if it had just been cut yesterday. We weren't close and he died in 2004 but I stroked it all the same. It was his and it was still here, with me. I sent her flowers. I didn't know what else to do. There was nothing proportionate to demonstrate what I felt but I poured what I could into an email. She was delighted. We had no idea how the baby book ended up in her house, a way away from where my grandparents raised their son and daughter. But that mystery faded away. We signed off with kisses.

Her reason was simple. Just putting something back in its right place. Funny that just can expands to mean both what is minor and what matters most. She went to that effort with no prospect of a personal reward. It taught me that generosity is whatever you give freely and plentifully, so that the nature of what you give defies quantification. I take issue with, "do as you would be done by". It strikes me as narcissistic, behaving towards others only as you expect to be treated, seeing the world solely through your perspective. Besides, if you don't like yourself very much, you're going to hurt a lot of people. Ah, I love the smell of recognising the actions you can perform outside of any reference to your own interest in the morning.

Though I find myself increasing obsessed with time, I am resisting the urge to say that this kind of thing doesn't happen anymore. These kinds of acts don't belong to the past. Instead, they usher us into that dimension of kindness that transcends time. These kinds of acts don't have to be limited between individuals, either. We need each other. We waste so much energy pretending that isn't true. What could be an instrument of irrational generosity, allowing and enabling these collective acts? What would that look and feel like?

Where we give to each other en masse not for no reason - but beyond reason?