Mark exited his family group chat after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election and, shortly after, stopped speaking to his family entirely. He knew his mom and siblings were conservative and pro-life, and though they didn’t really talk politics, his suspicions about their votes were confirmed when he pressed them. They had made a choice, and now he would too.
Mark had taken to social media the day after the election to rant about half the country, but there was little he could do with anger at that scale. His family offered something more manageable: a localized target for a generalized grievance. He couldn’t control how millions of Americans voted, but he could control whether the few he knew who voted for Trump remained in his life.
For anyone seeking a controlled, frictionless existence, cutting people off offers a deceptively clean solution: eliminate the point of contact. His mother, recently widowed, is heartbroken by her son’s decision to go no contact. She tries to focus her attention on the rich relationships she still has. Mark’s siblings vacillate between annoyance and deep hurt, bewildered that something so distant from the ordinary life of their family — national politics — could enter their intimacy and overwhelm it.
The no-contact phenomenon is one manifestation of a deeper spiritual jaundice. We’re estranged from ourselves in a way that makes the risk and friction of other people difficult to bear. Politics gives that interior unease somewhere to go. It can be particularly potent as a repository for discontent because it supplies both a diagnosis and a culprit. Diffuse dissatisfaction is difficult to metabolize.
Ideology offers a simplistic answer for why you feel bad and who did it to you. And once the culprit is someone you know, you can do something about it.
Obvious forces are contributing to the rise of this phenomenon. Social media habituates us to curated “communities” while encouraging blocking, unfollowing, and muting voices that introduce friction into seamless scrolling. It also spawns what I call TikTok psychologists—endless short-form videos inviting you to examine your workplace, family, or childhood for hidden toxicity, narcissism, or trauma.
For a fee, courses promise to help you “break the cycle.” The appeal is seductive: excavate your past, locate the wound, identify its author, and your present unhappiness begins to make sense. Pundits and politics offer similar explanatory relief in the present tense, supplying villains and catastrophes with enough regularity to keep us perpetually activated. Past or present, the gaze remains trained outward. We go surprisingly far down rabbit holes to discover what someone else did to us or is doing to us while avoiding the much more frightening journey within ourselves.
The accelerants—social media, pundits, therapists—suppose something already combustible. Social media provides siloes, pundits supply villains, and therapists grant permission, but none fully explains why we’ve embraced the promise that amputating even our most primordial relationships can make us well. And we’ve been amputating them at a rapid pace. Recent polling shows 38% of Americans are estranged from a family member, with political and ideological disagreement accounting for a significant share of these ruptures.
While it can be entirely healthy to permanently distance oneself from an abusive or dangerous relative, the hundreds of estranged parents I’ve encountered nationwide testify to a different phenomenon: diminishing willingness—particularly among young people—to endure the risks and friction that durable relationships require.
Family life presents the highest stakes for this dilemma. It’s a long-term investment in other human beings with few variables or outcomes under our control. We choose spouses without knowing who they’ll become in 30 years. We have children knowing they’ll suffer, without understanding their beliefs, paths, or ultimate impact on us.
Beyond risk lies relentless friction: competing needs, irritating habits, misunderstandings, disappointments, heated political disagreements, and obligations that arrive at the most inconvenient times. The people closest to us are those with the greatest opportunity to disturb our peace. Friction is certain, but returns are uncertain. For anyone seeking a frictionless existence, cutting ties offers deceptively clean relief—yet its costs compound.
Avoidance makes us more brittle. The more accustomed we become to eliminating friction rather than navigating it, the less friction we can bear. It trains us in avoidance. What begins as relief from a difficult encounter becomes an increasing dependence on controlling conditions of contact.
Avoidance also keeps us stuck. Friction is contact with reality. Once contact ends, we lose one of the most powerful correctives to our grievances: the encounter with the actual person. In memory, the mother who wounded us remains frozen at the moment of injury; in person, she’s irritating and funny, selfish and generous, capable of failure and sudden vulnerability.
Finally, avoidance can become a means of avoiding ourselves. Rehearsing reasons for cutoffs may help stay away when estrangement is necessary—especially for those escaping abuse. But when relationships were merely difficult but not dangerous, that same rehearsal quietly dulls dissonance, making it easier to rehearse righteousness than to wrestle with a more complicated truth that might implicate ourselves.
A culture organized around minimizing risk and friction will eventually find family difficult to justify. Family is a long-term wager on goods we cannot secure in advance and daily encounters with people we can’t control. Before deciding to go no contact, consider you may be losing far more than you gain by cutting ties. Risk and friction are prerequisites of life and love.
Family is indeed a bad bet if we prize control and untroubled existence—but it might be our best bet if we seek something more human. Mark can eliminate the friction his family creates. He cannot make them cease to be his family. Nor can he know what might have happened had he stayed in contact long enough for all of them to become again something more than the worst thing he believed about them.
There is a terrible risk of remaining. But there is also a risk in leaving too: that by protecting ourselves from those who disturb our peace, we slowly become people incapable of loving or knowing anyone—and secure one terrible result: remaining a stranger to all and to ourselves.
