Transcription
When I was a kid, three sitcoms taught me everything I needed to know about adult relationships. Not those kinds of adult relationships, those kinds of adult relationships.
Everybody Loves Raymond taught me about the modern dysfunctional family. The King of Queens taught me about the modern dysfunctional relationship. And Friends, well, you could probably guess. Friends followed the hijinks of Phoebe, Joey, Chandler, Monica, Ross, and Rachel—six twenty-somethings in New York City who, despite the theme song's proclamations of their brokenness and singleness, always seem to be in relationships and able to afford two fairly spacious apartments in the heart of Manhattan.
Friends won over the hearts of millions by drowning us in the sappy power of friendship. The friends in Friends were the epitome of the gang, the spunky friend group for whom quirky adventures and memorable stories seemed to be lurking around every corner. In 22 minutes, life sucks, but it sucks a little less with friends.
And it's not just the lying-ass theme song that says this. There's lots of official data about how friendship has numerous health benefits, and loneliness is as bad for you as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. There are volumes of proven data, numbers, figures, and even fossil records. Yet, friendship seems to be on the decline.
Go online for two seconds, and you'll see lots of YouTube videos and think pieces about the so-called friendship recession. People spend less time with their friends. People have fewer close friends. A lot more people are feeling lonely. Once again, volumes of proven data. The vibe is getting so bad that the Surgeon General is getting involved.
This guy could have said anything. He could have said, "Y'all need to stop eating McDonald's" or "Go get a prostate exam." But no, he said, "Y'all losers need to get friends 'cause it's literally killing y'all."
Even putting all this nerd stuff aside, I see it in my own life. I punched myself in the chest for no reason. I think in a perfect world, I'd see my friends a few times a month or even a few times a week. But if I'm lucky, I get to see my friends a few times a year, and there are some friends I haven't seen in a few years.
It's not really anyone's fault that we're all busy or live far away from each other. It's just kind of how it is. As an adult, you've got family relationships, kids, cooking, cleaning, errands, taxes, smoking just enough weed to keep the cycle going, and work.
For those of y'all out there who are still children or live in a commune, let me break down work for y'all. Basically, as an adult, food isn't free anymore, so you actually have to go find a boss to become an indentured servant to, so you can, you know, not die. And it turns out being an indentured servant and not dying actually takes up a lot of time.
Most adult schedules revolve around work—going to work, preparing for work, recovering from work, or doing one of the five trillion things that need to be done before you go back to work. It's kind of obvious, but if through some kind of economics black magic we all didn't have to work anymore, except for five hours of farming a week, we'd probably spend some of that free time playing video games, jerking off, and hanging out with friends.
The five-hour workweek is an extreme example, but the point is, the time we spend working is time we're definitely not spending with our friends. Unless you have a quirky office situation going on, but come on, don't fool me. I know you don't. And don't pull that "we're all family here" crap on me.
I feel like our culture's prioritization of work is a big reason why people have fewer friends. You don't have to work 100-hour weeks or be a Japanese salaryman to be obsessed with work. Work, to most of us, is like water to fish. It's such an omnipresent part of our lives that we don't notice what a big impact it has on us—from what our day-to-day schedule looks like, where we choose to live, and how much energy we have left over for the five billion other things that need to be done to be even a halfway functioning human being, including eventually having a boys' night.
I'm not saying there isn't work that needs to be done in the world, but I am saying we're working too much in a way that hurts most of us and really only benefits the people at the top. Speaking of things we do that actively take away time we could be spending with friends, but we don't notice because of the hypnotic spell it puts us under—screens.
People act like it's fine for everyone to spend all this time watching TV and TikTok because, "Oh, I just do it in my downtime or when I'm taking a dump." I don't know, bro. If you're taking a dump for 20 hours a week, you should probably get that checked out. Just like work, if all the screens in the world disappeared overnight, I'm sure some of us would make more IRL friends.
To be clear, I'm not saying we should be Amish. I love my screen. If you try to take away my screen, I will go into anaphylactic shock. Anaphylactic—oh boy, this is a tough one—anaphylactic. I will go into anaphylactic shock.
I don't think screens are some evil demon technology that is solely responsible for the decline in friendship. People have always been very resourceful when it comes to avoiding eye contact. In fact, screens aren't all bad. They can inspire conversation, allow you to keep in contact with friends who live far away, and even introduce you to new people.
But sometimes, I feel like we use our screen interactions as a crutch for the real-life thing. Something I've noticed personally is I mostly communicate with my friends online. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I much prefer texting and FaceTiming to trying to write five letters a month to all my friends. God, please no.
But still, sometimes it feels easier for me to ride this wave of online communication than actually take the effort to meet up with people in person. And speaking of in person, sometimes it even feels like our physical spaces are designed to keep us from making friends. Cities, with all their concrete, go from home to work and work to home and home to work and work to home and home to work and work to home.
And don't loiter anywhere. They discourage everyone from being anywhere except home and work so that they're easier to control, so we can extract more money from them and a greater profit margin without paying for stupid things like upkeep of public spaces. Not only is all of this physically alienating, but it also instills a mentality of alienation in us.
Gallup did a study where they found that people in cities actually feel the most lonely, and people in rural areas feel the least lonely. This intuitively doesn't make any sense because the whole point of a city is that there are more people there than in the sticks. That's why everyone from Pennsylvania moves to New York City when they turn 22—because in theory, it's supposed to be a great place for a young, hip, stylish cosmopolitan to meet new people.
So why do people in cities feel even more lonely? I would guess—and this is just my guess here, I'm just spewing crap—but I would guess it's because it's not about the number of friendships but the depths of those friendships. People in rural communities probably grow up in the same place, live there their whole lives, know most of the people there, and so they probably feel a deeper connection to each other than a bunch of random transplants in a city.
In a city, there are lots of people you don't know, which is really scary. That's why there are five trillion true crime podcasts out there. Every single bad thing that happens in the city gets blasted directly to your screen. It's not good news out there. Humans are fearful of the worst in each other, and this fear leads us to build a world where we defend ourselves from every single terrible possibility at some cost to the general public trust.
I mean, we put up literal walls and fences around each other. I like walking around in my underwear just as much as the next person, but isn't it a little silly that we're this defensive over little patches of dirt? I don't know. I could be talking out of my ass. I still lock my doors at night, but I don't know. I was in my backyard the other day, and I kind of realized that if we all knocked down our fences, we could actually have a pretty dope self-contained park within the block, which would probably lead to more socialization than the current situation.
But of course, that would never happen because we don't trust each other, and we need to put up our little signs that say "keep out." I feel like there is something going on in the current world, and I have no way to describe this except "unfriendliness has penetrated the vibe."
And if you want proof, look no further than "Man vs. Bear." If you've been touching too much grass lately, you might not know that some people on TikTok are asking, "If you were alone in the forest, would you rather come across a man or a bear?"
Listen, I read The Lovely Bones, and I watched that clip of Leonardo DiCaprio getting mauled by a bear, and I would take the bear too. At least the bear would make it relatively quick. But if you take a step back for a second and look at this logically, what I just said makes absolutely no sense.
Let me tell you something about bears: they can weigh up to 1,300 pounds and run up to 40 miles an hour. That means just getting tackled by one of these things is like getting hit by a small car. And before they use their teeth and claws to rip your skin off, the average American man is one cheeseburger away from being obese, and his go-to attack is the biological equivalent of swinging a rock in a sock.
There's really not a reason we should be this afraid of members of our own species, but we are. And I get why. It's 'cause a lot of bad stuff is happening in the world on both the big levels and the small levels. To be honest, when I see this stuff, my instant reaction is, "I'm going in the forest to be with the animals. I don't want to interact with any of y'all other human beings anymore."
But I feel like that's not the healthiest mindset to have. I'm not trying to downplay stranger danger or the genuine safety concerns women have and the constant state of terror that comes with that. If I had a child, I would teach them to have a healthy skepticism about strangers 'cause some of y'all really are crazy out there.
But still, I don't know. I feel like it's sad that our society is so alienating it creates the very monsters we're so afraid of while keeping the rest of us in a perpetual state of suspicion. If you walk up to someone on the street and try to talk to them, I say you have about as good a chance of being pepper-sprayed as actually developing a genuine, long-lasting friendship from that interaction.
Which I don't even blame anyone for, based on the number of weirdos that are out there. I will also be pepper-spraying a hoe if they try to talk to me on the street. Yeah, I don't really know what I'm trying to say here because obviously, I don't mess with strangers, and I'm not trying to promote some fantasy that the world used to be this super welcoming, open place where you could make friends with anyone you bumped into on the street.
Okay, here's a story that might explain what I'm trying to say. I was in this small town once, and this middle-aged couple just passed me on the street, and they said hello. In my mind, I was like, "What the heck?" 'Cause I was conditioned to think that these people—I cannot interact with them because there is a microscopic chance that these people are trying to lure me into some horror movie crap, and I do not mess with that.
I feel like that mentality, times a million, is why people in cities feel so lonely. Because honestly, there's nothing wrong with saying hello to someone on the street. That should probably happen more, right?
You can kind of see a proxy for this increasing unfriendliness in the world of dating, or the whole concept of a "meet cute," aka meeting your partner organically, is a literal movie fantasy at this point. You meet your partner at work or on Hinge. Those are the two options.
And meet cutes for friendships are basically extinct too. I read this blog that had this good line about how most bars in New York City advertise around the fantasy of community when in reality, they're made up of insular groups of friends, which in my experience is very true.
I went up to a group of people in a bar once and said hi, and they acted like I did not exist. I very charismatically stood there saying nothing for about five seconds, which felt like five years, and I actually thought I was going to die.
The logical part of my brain knows that's just one experience and not some judgment on who I am as a person. If I want to make friends, I got to keep getting on the horse. But some other part of my brain says, "Do not touch that stove again."
People just don't really like talking face to face anymore, I guess. People don't talk to their therapist face to face. People don't talk to their delivery driver face to face, and people definitely don't talk to strangers face to face.
I get it. People are mean, and no one wants to get soup-naied, but it's gotten so bad that people are inventing paid libraries where being nice is encouraged because people at the regular library are too mean to talk about what they're reading.
At the library, dude, this isn't the club. There's no reason you got to be this mean at the library. If you're both at the library, that means y'all already got something in common. Y'all are both nerds.
Hot people are showing up to trivia night. Hot people! You ever seen an episode of Jeopardy? People who go to trivia night are supposed to look like this. But now, if you want to have friends besides your mom and your cat, you better start learning the capitals of the world.
Paying for friendship is a whole trope in dystopian media, but it's honestly not even that far away from our reality. It just happens indirectly. Friendship is big business, and the more difficulty we as a society have making friends, the more they can privatize it and suck even more money from us.
Paying for Netflix and gas wasn't enough. Now they literally want us to pay for friends. Well, screw that! I feel like it is my birthright, as a manifestation of the indomitable human spirit, to make friends for free.
Okay, so I've done a lot of bitching and moaning in this video, so let's talk about what you and I are actually going to do after this video is over to change the situation. Because let's be honest, most of the stuff I talked about, we got to wait for the Illuminati to free us peons from this crap.
But there are some things we can do to increase the friendship in our lives. Okay, so I'm going to talk about two things: making new friends and hanging out with your current friends more.
Let's start with the first one. In terms of making new friends, I would divide everyone in the world into three categories: friends of friends, strangers in an environment where they are semi-open to talking, and total strangers. Of these three types of people, I would say you should probably try to stick to the first two.
You could try to make friends with total strangers. It's not illegal or anything. You might have some luck with it, but your chances are honestly probably much lower. And honestly, you know when I'm walking to the grocery store, I'm not necessarily looking to chit-chat with strangers. So maybe just give everyone their alone time.
This is going to be super obvious, but to make friends, you have to be in a space where it's possible for you to make friends. Friendship, like most things in real life, requires effort. Life is not some sick rom-com written by some middle-aged writer in her condo with a beginning, middle, and end designed to entertain you.
If you want to make friends, they are unfortunately not going to magically walk through your door. You got to do something about it. Luckily, that something doesn't have to be something big. It can be as simple as organizing a hangout with your current group of friends or going to a random concert or going to your favorite museum.
And sure, maybe your chances of making a new friend at the museum are one percent, but the chance of you making a new friend in your bedroom is zero. We're not going to count internet friends for this because y'all don't meet up in person.
This is why you literally got to touch grass, 'cause grass is outside, and if you're outside, there is a possibility you will meet another human being. Of course, just going outside is not going to immediately grant you new friends.
Step two is actually talking to someone. And let's just admit it, talking to a total stranger is really awkward. Even putting aside all the serial killer fears, it's hard to just go up to someone you don't know and try to convince them you're a normal person worthy of having a conversation with.
Personally, I feel like the older I get, the less I know how to have a normal human conversation. So right here, I'm going to recommend we all be a little stupider and act like four-year-olds when it comes to making friends.
Have you ever seen a four-year-old give a crap? No, because these kids do not know how to even give a crap yet, and that raw power allows them to make friends extremely easily because they do not care at all about how they are perceived.
Four-year-olds will go up to anyone and anything and start blabbering nonsense out of their mouths. And if they don't like the vibe, they will just move on with their lives. A four-year-old will legit walk up to you, talk about balloons for 30 seconds, and then dip.
So yeah, it's awkward to talk to people, but also, it's not that serious. You probably have more in common with the other person than you think. You both eat food. You both probably listen to music. If you're in some space for something, you probably both like that thing.
Just be friendly, be casual, be chill, be cool, be respectful. Approach respectfully, and we should be all good. By the way, I really do not want to overstate my credentials here. I do not know a perfect method for making friends. I don't really have any evidence that any of this stuff I'm saying actually works in real life.
If I did, I wouldn't be making this video. I would be hanging out with my friends and making a video called "Have Y'all Tried Not Being Losers?" Just consider this a jumping-off point.
The last thing I'll say is I feel like trying to force yourself to make friends is a lot like trying to force yourself to get into a relationship. It does not work like that. I'm not saying you can't put effort into making friends, but friendship is a two-way street.
And like all forms of external validation, you ultimately can't force anyone to be your friend. I feel like making friends is like that whole quote about happiness being a butterfly. You can't chase it, and you got to do other stuff, and then happiness will find you.
Making friends is the same way. I feel your friends are not some perfect Pokémon team you're trying to create with the perfect mix of personalities and genders, and you can't even control that stuff anyway.
I think the best any of us can do is just be outside doing the things we love, and hopefully, the right people will be in the right mood to have a conversation. Making friends is a process, and you're not necessarily going to have your friend group for the next 10 years of your life set by the end of episode one.
For all you know, your future best friend could be living in Siberia right now. Unless you live in Siberia, then imagine your future best friend living in Miami or something.
Alright, now I'm going to talk about how you can hang out with your current friends more, which is honestly way easier and simpler than meeting new people. Just invite your friends to come hang out. You guys could be inside or outside. It could be chill or hype. Just get the gang together and hang out.
If you want an intermediate-level tip, something that might help is setting aside a day of the week or month where y'all get together and do some ritual thing. Maybe not a real ritual, but it could be a real ritual if it's going to support your friendship.
But the most important thing is just to have that first hangout. So just text your friends, go hang out. In the end, despite all my complaining in this video, I honestly feel pretty okay about my social life, and I do have friends I greatly value and cherish.
Maybe I don't see them as much as I would in a perfect world, but I am very grateful for the times we do get to hang out in person and even the times we send our little funny texts to each other.
I keep going back to the question of why we as human beings want friends. Yes, there are some very obvious health benefits, but I think for most of us, we aren't trying to have friends because we want to be some eternal Dorian Gray sucking the life out of our friendships.
I think it's because friendship is true understanding, and maybe that tiny hint of possibility of understanding and communicating something real with another living human being is all we have in this great big unknowable terrible world.
I think in a perfect world, we'd all work less, use our screens more, our spaces would be better designed, and we would prioritize making time to spend with friends more. There would be no creeps or serial killers, so everyone at the bar would be nice.
But for now, this is the world we live in. So go sign up for that wine and archery class, or ask the person at the concert what their favorite song is, or get the guys together—gender neutral—to eat a bowl of chips.
That's all we have in this world. Stay safe, stay sane. I love you so much and appreciate you if you watched the end of this video. Thank you for being here. I'll catch you next time. Peace.