Broaden your friendship group: In the UK, it’s quite rare to have a truly diverse group of friends. In 2018, a YouGov study found that one-third of white Britons didn’t have any friends from an ethnic minority background, while other research has suggested that people, including children, tend to gravitate towards those who have the same class background.
I’ve always prided myself on having a diverse array of friends, but recently I too realised that my circle was overdue a shake-up. As the number of people I talk to continually shrinks – as most people’s friendship circles do as they age – I’ve recognised some repeated patterns. My friends in the UK are mostly middle class (although plenty of us had working-class upbringings), earning a decent wage, and a mixture of ethnicities, but few are first-generation immigrants. Many of our experiences are shared and enough are delightfully different – but we are all coddled by having grown up in one of the world’s richest countries.
I began a journalism research fellowship at the start of the year, which means I’ve recently made new friends from countries and regions including Japan, China, Kurdistan, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Argentina, Chile, Norway and Finland. How we relate to each other across the classroom is interesting. Often, it’s by finding points of difference – and laughing about them. For instance, did you know that the Finnish for “cheers” is the fun phrase “hölökyn kölökyn”?
As the sole Briton in the group, I am often the butt of the joke, but this is something I embrace – yes, it’s true that the British Museum has done a wonderful job of stealing and plundering items from around the world.
This past week, we have talked about more difficult topics: gender, race, immigration, and the climate crisis. We don’t agree on everything; we are, after all, an array of ages with various familial and religious backgrounds, but we have far more in common than I might have expected. As journalists, we have a united sense of wanting to live in a world where truth prevails over mistruth. We have shared food, family stories and experiences of trauma. Last Friday, we celebrated Lunar New Year and were each given a traditional bright-red envelope containing money – or, in our case, chocolate coins.
More spaces for connection like this should exist – certainly for the expansion of our understanding of global politics, but purely for the joy it brings, too.
