November 03, 2012 | Read Online
One of the most depressing things in life is not being able have all your friends from various phases of your life meet and spend time with each other.
I have my first friends–from growing up and high school. I have my university friends. And I have friends from my various work phases and random encounters. In each case I met some truly special people, and I’d like nothing more than for them to meet each other.
To give just a few examples: I have two friends that are kind of secretly obsessed with men’s style. One I know from college and lives out east, the other I met through work and is down south. They’ll probably never meet. Why? Because they have lives and it’s hard to travel. It’s hard to just go hang out with friends when there are jobs and kids and wives involved.
I also have tons of friends who love politics and writing and discussing movies. My dearest friends. Friends for life. But they don’t know each other. And they never will. Because they live thousands of miles from each other.
Some people imagine their dream life as not having to work or being free to fish or golf all day. Not me. My dream life is being able to hang out with all my best friends, at the golf course, in a coffee shop, or during a car ride to some random adventure. We’re just together, telling stories with the particular spin that each guy brings.
But I cannot have that. I can never have it. It’s not available to us because it requires not just significant financial freedom but also a “you only live once” attitude in each friend. And most simply won’t up and leave for a week to spend time with cool people when there is life to be tended to.
So what we have is little phases of life where we experience these cool people, and then they’re gone. Sure, we have the occasional phone call, and we have Facebook. But I don’t want to see your kids grow up; I want to hang, man. And I want you to meet all these other cool people I know…who I know you’ll totally love as well.
Mark me down as in protest. I protest this. I reject it. It’s not humane. And if there’s any purpose at all for money it is precisely that of destroying this invisible and depressing barrier between friends in adulthood.
Join me in naming this foe. Join me in rejecting it. Make money. Convince your friends that, like the Buddha said, “they don’t have time”, and put something on the calendar. See to it that these people meet each other. Take ownership.
I refuse to let go of the various friends I’ve met over the years, and I don’t want them to miss out on each other either.
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