At the beginning of the 2020s we were taken on an unplanned and involuntary journey into the future. I’ve been taking notes. Let’s get equipped.
The opening two years of the Soaring Twenties started with chaos, plague, disillusionment and loneliness. Those of us graced with survival have been given a precious gift. These years acted as a rapid prototyping experience, where we were all forced to undergo evolving conditions and experiments with possible future lifestyles. A critical lesson we have learned is that many, many people all over the world categorically refuse to live isolated and alone. The vision saturated our public consciousness: a happy, cozy home whose walls become our world, adorned with cottage-core clutter, food and introversion activities same-day shipped to our doorstep. But it turns out that a restful weekend isn’t the same as a wholesome lifestyle. What was missing?
Friendship. It’s such an overlooked pursuit today that I often catch myself and others reinventing it under other names and ways. This is always an excellent clue to the powers that drive human life, the created laws and patterns that cannot be successfully denied. Human beings weren’t made to exist in isolated bedroom islands just because it is physically possible to do so. And now that we realize the absence we are beginning to seek it out again. The explosion of online communities proves our insatiable need for connection, and that’s a good thing. But tools don’t replace human needs, they just augment our search for the real thing. We need some friends.
So here you are. You’ve looked around and realized that you’re pretty alone. And therefore, lonely, Whether you realize it or not. Can we fix it overnight with a 5-step formula of no-effort tricks? Like anything worthy or good, no. Am I going to explain the various hacks you can use to extract maximum efficient friendship benefit from your relationships? I can’t do that because that would be sad and perverse. But we can get started, and do good things for their own sake. Let’s do that instead.
I. Find your Establishment(s)
We can whine about the loss of neighborhood joints and Third Places or whatever the big city newspaper told us to fret about, or we can do something. Go out and case your town like a long-con artist. Where are you going to start appearing, predictably and regularly, so that you can get to know the denizens? I’m sure you can think of examples that fit your interests and personality, so I won’t insult your intelligence. I look for factors like seating areas, easy access to food, and spaces where leisure time is whiled. You need to be somewhere that isn’t your home, where the faces become people and those people know when you’re going to turn up. You will need a few of these places later, as your acquaintances begin to strengthen into genuine friendships. Friends need places to meet, unmetered and unplanned time to lose themselves in excited conversation or just sit and think and enjoy the company. In other generations these places were within our own homes, but we must begin where we are. Your places probably won’t be aesthetically pristine or exactly how you like them, but that simply means they’re real. If we lack deep friendship, we should start building friendships in the easiest way we can, adapting ourselves somewhat to best parts of our culture and age, immersing ourselves back into real life. So we’ve lost local place and we’ve been cut off from gathering for two years. Alright, then let’s start small, starting right now.
II. Be Humble
So now you have the setting for friendships to grow. But the real thing is going to require you to exercise some atrophied personal muscles, virtues neglected by two years and more of isolation and self-centeredness. Because friendship flourishes in humility, and is choked by pride. In order to build real connections to people, the kind that last lifetimes and result in knowing more than just someone’s birthday and media preferences, you must really believe that you, as a person, are incomplete without them. Contrary to the vision of the homebound future, you aren’t enough. Not enough to understand yourself, your art, your family or complex intellectual concepts. You need other minds and lives to be joined to yours. Once you realize that humans were literally designed to function in deep community, you no longer need to attempt the inhuman task of turning yourself into a one-being library of knowledge and skills. It is only through relationship that we are free to be ourselves, and able to lay down burdens fit specially for others’ shoulders. Good friends can critique you, challenge you, and force you to grow. They are strong where you are weak, wise where you are foolish. Confronting your own weakness and humanity, seeing yourself surpassed by your friends, is a vulnerable experience. But it’s your choice to shrink from the moment or to embrace it joyfully, realizing your new strength in fellowship.
III. Default Aggressive
The right attitude sitting at a table in the right place isn’t going to be enough, my friend. The one who enters the room alone needs to accept the responsibility to be the first to reach out. You are going to have to take the initiative, dare the first risk, and put yourself forward. Is this fair? Perhaps not. Modern people go on policing every space with neurotic glee, enforcing rules mandating omnifriendship by default. These rules are more fit for a preschool classroom than the world of mature civilization, and yet these same people complain about weak connections and fake friends. It takes courage to make the awkward self-introduction, to suggest the reading group or standing date and hope that others respond. The awkward silence is always tempting because the disappointment is at least certain. But at the other side of risk lies relationship, in all human interactions. We are approaching the fight for friendship faced with certain difficulties, unique handicaps from our society. Well, then to cultivate truly deep friendships we must use all the tools we have, analog and digital, new and old. We can’t simply bemoan the loss of the old paths and ways. New frontiers are waiting to be discovered, if only we can take the first step past discouragement.
Like all of the skills and tools we will be examining in our Field Notes, friendship is about to become one of the best kept secrets of a generation. The ability of a strong group of friends to see the potential in one another, to band together and produce work beyond the potential of any individual. Like a series of jewels in a ring, each friend in a good group sets off the others, making them better able to stand out for their own unique qualities, exposing the best in them even to themselves. Life with others frees us to enjoy true diversity, not the mandatory spreadsheet checkbox kind but the real and astonishing difference and similarity across any handful plucked from the sea of humanity and isolated in a convivial petri dish. Let’s be honest, it’s going to take us a whole lifetime to find Our People, know them well and enjoy their company, and make some things that we really believe in. We could waste a lot of time spiraling into depression at the State of Things or yelling at all the people who definitely aren’t our friends. I’d rather be at the café, physical whenever possible and virtual when not, laughing and scheming something special. Live most with those you know best.
Oh and by the way? All three of those steps make for a perfect way to choose a church to attend, if that’s a thing you’re not doing right now. All I’ll say is I’ve been blessed with true and vibrant friendships throughout my life, and most of those friends have come from the congregation. Deep and lifelong friendships are far from even a central reason to attend a church, but even the fringe benefits of the Way and the Truth are still a joyful life.
I’ll see you in the Future.
Alone among unsympathetic companions, I hold certain views and standards timidly, half ashamed to avow them and half doubtful if they can after all be right. Put me back among my Friends and in half an hour - in ten minutes - these same views and standards become once more indisputable. The opinion of this little circle, while I am in it, outweighs that of a thousand outsiders: as Friendship strengthens, it will do this even when my Friends are far away. For we all wish to be judged by our peers, by the men ‘after our own heart.’ Only they really know our mind and only they judge it by standards we fully acknowledge. Theirs is the praise we really covet and the blame we really dread.
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art...It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.
~ C.S. Lewis, selections from The Four Loves
A lovely Valentine's Day post. In 2018, I started a Jordan Peterson Reading Group through Meetup. We met once a month at different public libraries in the area to discuss 12 Rules. Only 5 or 6 people would show up, but three regulars always came. We disbanded the Meetup group during Covid, but now the four of us get together every two weeks at someone's house to watch his lectures on the Bible and talk about them. Starting your own Meetup group is a good way to find friends (although I too have many friends from church). Other popular groups in my town are "Random Acts of Fun," "Dinner and a Movie," "Madison Hiking Enthusiasts," "Java Walks," and "Classic Literature." "Random Acts of Fun" show up at events around town, chat to other people at the event, and easily recruit new members because they are a fun group.
Fantastic. Love it. You’re further and further solidifying your own space and your own style.