At their best, such friendships can encourage a kind of public-spiritedness, a way of investing in a shared outer world, instead of seeing one’s own private psychodramas as the center of social gravity.
If male friendship thrives on shared interests, then opportunities to engage in those activities need to exist. Various trends in American life over the past generation, however, have limited those opportunities. Churches, clubs, civic institutions, and public spaces are in decline. Jobs that take the form of staring, alone, at computers rather than engaging collectively in physical labor are on the rise. Hobbies are getting more and more expensive, and screens are colonizing the time once taken up by IRL activities.