North American culture is highly individualistic. It is reasonable and expected to prioritize your own personal / professional needs first and have those of your friends be a distant second. Prioritizing life choices around your friends requires you to integrate your life with others in some way which is challenging and often results in conflict. North Americans are incapable of handling such interpersonal challenges as they are trained to be 'selfish' as a default.
The end result of this is we live an atomized existence that is comfortable but oddly "empty". I have experienced living in a different culture so I can at least put this way of living in context but anybody who grew up here can't & this odd feeling of something "missing" can never be satisfied or understood.
Mind you the western approach to living does have a lot of advantages. Not being bound by community strictures makes our societies a lot "freer" and more dynamic. But it wouldn't be intellectually honest to admit that this doesn't come with a cost. Mental health is getting affected and the problem is only going to get worse.
I think that the individualist framework is the correct one, and I tend to think that communitarian emphasis leads to all sorts of erosion of identity (among other issues). What I mean to say, in regards to friendship, is that within an individual's things that they'd like to emphasize/prioritize, friends so frequently play second fiddle to things like career. I don't actually think that this has to do with individualism, so much as individualism gives such an unconstrained vision of what constitutes a life that most people simply choose to optimize for things like a career.
Again, I'm highly individualistic, I think the individual is the correct atomic entity by which to reason about society and discuss objectives and solutions, and I still find friendships to be of utmost importance. Individualism doesn't mean "existing as an atomic entity independent of other entities," it means "treating individuals as entities with characteristics unique to themselves rather than existing primarily as members of collectives."
The end result of this is we live an atomized existence that is comfortable but oddly "empty". I have experienced living in a different culture so I can at least put this way of living in context but anybody who grew up here can't & this odd feeling of something "missing" can never be satisfied or understood.
Mind you the western approach to living does have a lot of advantages. Not being bound by community strictures makes our societies a lot "freer" and more dynamic. But it wouldn't be intellectually honest to admit that this doesn't come with a cost. Mental health is getting affected and the problem is only going to get worse.