‘When we finally met, it felt like home’: Why Gen Z’s closest friends are on Discord, Snapchat …

When Shruti Jain finally met her best friend of nine years in person last year, something unexpected happened. There was no awkwardness, no sense of meeting a stranger whose face she had only seen through screens. “It didn’t feel new or awkward at all,” says the 24-year-old PR professional in a conversation with indianexpress.com. “It felt like home. That’s when I truly realised that real friendships don’t care about distance.” Their friendship had begun in the most random way imaginable: through a comment under a writer they both followed online. Yet over nearly a decade, this digital connection had become one of the most constant relationships in Jain’s life, weathering the transition from school to college to work. For her, and for millions of others in Gen Z, the distinction between online and offline friendships has become meaningless. “Friendships are just friendships,” she says. “Once two people truly know each other, the distinction between online and offline fades.” This isn’t an isolated story. Across Gen Z, the generation that came of age with smartphones in hand and social media as their native language, digital friendships are being redefined from casual internet acquaintances into some of the most emotionally significant relationships of
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