The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 361 - Making Friends

Transcript:

Jen: Hello, Peter Shepherd.

Pete: Hello, Jennifer Leigh Waldman.

Jen: Whoa, throwing the middle name in there. That's very familiar, Pete, and that feels appropriate because today I wanted to talk to you about making friends as an adult.

Pete: Oh my god, you mean the hardest thing an adult could possibly do?

Jen: Right?

Pete: This feels way too close to home. Alright, this is The Long and The Short Of It.

Jen: Yeah, Pete. For some context here, in the last three months, in a bunch of different contexts in which I was working with artists, whether it was one-on-one, in workshops, online, in-person, I found myself answering questions of all varieties the same way, which is, "It sounds like you need more friends."

Pete: Oh my god.

Jen: And that made me wonder, "Why am I having to tell so many people that they need more friends?" Oh, maybe what is at the root of that is this gentle truth: It's hard to make friends when you're a grownup.

Pete: Oh my god. I mean, I don't even know if that's debatable. I think that's so real. I feel that in my bones. I've had this conversation about the difficulty of making friends as an adult with so many people. In fact, one of my good friends, Josh, is, I believe, making a documentary about this phenomenon at the moment.

Jen: Wow, that is wild.

Pete: Because it's universal, I think is what we discovered. I met him as an adult, and we often laugh about the fact that how we became friends. It was so random and not intentional. And that, as you get older, it becomes harder to be intentional and even randomly make friends. So yeah, I mean, I kind of feel called out by this episode already.

Jen: Well, I decided that I would turn this question of, "Why is it so hard to make friends," and, "How do you make friends as an adult," into a workshop that I ran yesterday.

Pete: Oh my god. This is the most Jen Waldman thing ever. I love it.

Jen: And it got me thinking a lot about myself and my own life, and like, "Do I really put myself in the path of opportunity or serendipity to meet new friends?" It also got me wondering, "When was the last time I made a friend, who was like a ride-or-die kind of friend?" And I'm like, "Oh, it's probably Pete."

Pete: Hmm, yeah. That's nice.

Jen: Yeah. Right? Aw, we're friends. Remember when we didn't know if we were friends or not?

Pete: I do. Oh my god, I really do.

Jen: The early days of the podcast, we were like, "Are we colleagues? Are we friends?”

Pete: "Are we colleagues?" Yeah, that's so funny.

Jen: Which is maybe a good segue into this first aha moment that came up during the workshop yesterday, which is that it takes time and effort and repeated interactions in order to move someone from a stranger, to an acquaintance, to a friend, to a bestie.

Pete: Time and effort, yeah.

Jen: Yeah. Because we are all scheduled (some of us over-scheduled), that it feels hard or it feels like other things have to take priority. So that was one reason that came up, for like, "Oh, one of the reasons it's hard is you actually have to make time for it."

Pete: Yeah, which feels hard. Because I feel like when you're younger, you don't. Or maybe when you're younger, the time and the effort is kind of baked into what you're doing as a younger person. Like if I go right back to, I mean, I watch my son, who's two, interact with people at a playground, kids at a playground. And it's like, you almost become friends instantly with these other people, because the time and effort of what they're doing...I mean, everything they do is about play, and about looking, and exploring, and finding other people, and interacting with things and people. And it's almost like the time and effort in their day is so baked into connection and learning from other people. And that, as we get older, we take that for granted. We start spending time and effort on other things. And so, you don't necessarily sit down and go, "I've stopped putting time and effort into making friends. And now, I'm going to do something about that."

Jen: Yes. And when you sort of like turn the tables and look at like, "What am I thinking about other people that is prohibiting me from making friends," at least where I'm sitting, I'm like, "Oh, I assume people already have friends."

Pete: Hmm, yeah. Okay, so this speaks to a word that I wrote down, that I feel like is one of the most important parts that goes missing as we get older. And that is that making friends requires vulnerability.

Jen: That's right.

Pete: And a willingness to put oneself out there. To even suggest something like, "Hey, we should get a coffee," with someone requires a level of vulnerability. Which I feel like, as adults, we get a lot worse at modeling.

Jen: Mmm. Yep.

Pete: I mean, times have changed. And I'm going to make myself sound old, but when I was a kid, I'd literally just ride over to my friend's house unannounced and be like, "Hey, do you want to play?"

Jen: That's right.

Pete: That's a vulnerable...can you imagine just rocking up to someone's house now and being like, "I'd like to hang out with you." They'd be like, "What are you doing? And why are you at my house unannounced?" There's so much vulnerability, I think, in trying to instigate a friendship.

Jen: It's so true. And you would think in the population that I'm working with, which are artists who move from show to show, cast to cast, or having to meet new people all the time in the context of work, that this would just be easy for them. And it isn't. I mean, when I saw at the beginning of the workshop yesterday, the expressions on the faces when I was like, "When was the last time you made a really good friend? Or like, what is a friend? Do you need friends," you could sort of see this look of like, "Oh. Huh. Hmm...confronting myself." But I do have to say, Pete, by the end, this idea that we would open ourselves up to experiences where we might meet new people, the joy in the room, the joy of possibility was palpable.

Pete: Hmm. Nice. I have a perhaps very obvious question. I wonder what it was that made that the response that you felt like you needed to give people? Or put another way, what do friends give us that make this an important consideration?

Jen: Well, I think people that I work with are always very surprised by how much information, like inside information, I have about what's going on in our industry, the happenings, the movers and the shakers, what's going on with all of them. And I'm like, "I don't know any of this because I know it. I know this because my friends know it and we talk." And so, when I hear someone saying like, "I never know what's going on in my own business," or, "I only hear about things after they're over," or, "I could really use help in this area, and I have no idea who I could possibly reach out to and say, 'I need help'," I'm like, "It sounds like you need more friends."

Pete: Right, right, right.

Jen: Because there are just things that you're not going to be able to figure out on your own. And friends help friends. So, it's good like from a business perspective to have more friends. But like just from a quality of life and abundance of love and mutual respect for other people perspective, it's healthy to have friends.

Pete: Yeah, agreed. So, this feels personal. It feels relevant because...I'm not unique in this, and many people have gone through this. But my experience in the last few years has been moving from a city that I'd spent fifteen-ish years in with a bunch of friends and a bunch of networks and a bunch of communities, to a place where I literally knew not one person. And my wife and I moved. And then, we had our son. And so, two big life events happened to me at once. One was the move to a city where I didn't know anyone. And the second was becoming a dad. Which, you talk about time and effort required to make friends, reduces the amount of time and effort that you have to put into something like that, because you want to spend more time and effort being a dad. And almost three years after moving, I still don't think I've nailed this. I have definitely made some friends in Brisbane that I would happily text, bounce ideas off, catch up with. And yet, I still think I would be the person in your workshop that would be like, "Oh god, when is the last time I made a ride-or-die? When is the last time I put effort into that?" And so, I say all that because A., I feel this so deep in my bones. But B., one of the things I've been thinking about is how this is a need, to feel connected and have friends. That is, we think it's a want, like, "Oh, I want to have friends," or, "I want to have people that I can bounce stuff off of." But actually, I kind of think it's a need. I kind of think that we're a social species that have been through generations and generations, that have grown up in community and with friends. And that, we live in this particularly quirky, curious state at the moment where you can very easily get by and live a life without much interaction with other people, with friends, because things are so convenient now. And it's almost like we've forgotten the fact that connection and belonging and inclusion and friendship is actually a need, as opposed to just something that we want.

Jen: Yeah. We are social animals, as they say.

Pete: Yeah. Now, I still don't know exactly what to do with that. Other than, when I think about that, what I realize is I could spend more energy and maybe even a little more urgency on creating the conditions to make friends, in the same way that I spend a lot of time and energy on creating the conditions for me to be healthy and happy and go to the gym and do those things. So it's like, it's kind of...if you think about it as a need, in the same way that we need to sustain ourselves and move our bodies and put fuel into them, like what if you treated it with the same level of importance?

Jen: That's right. So Pete, one of the things that we're doing this month in my Career Collective is putting effort toward friend-making possibilities.

Pete: Okay. Oh my god, tell me more. I'm in. I'm in.

Jen: So like, this is the challenge for the month.

Pete: Is this like a bingo card?

Jen: Well, we're not doing bingo this month. The idea is to do five friend-making actions.

Pete: Oh my god, I'm so in.

Jen: And the boundary that we put on this is that it only counts if it is something that is happening synchronously. So it could be virtual, it could be in-person, but it must be in real time. So like, texting a friend and saying, "Hey, want to get tea sometime," doesn't count. Getting tea counts.

Pete: Nice. Alright. And is there a list of what these actions are, or do we get to determine?

Jen: Well, I had them come up with all the things they could possibly do. And I literally have a spreadsheet with like hundreds of things on it.

Pete: Amazing.

Jen: So one of the things I asked them was, "What is the easiest, least effortful thing you could do to complete one of these tasks?" And so, things like, "A fifteen-minute Zoom coffee date," or, "A walk in the park," or, "Invite someone to walk with me."

Pete: Yeah. "I'm already doing this thing. What if I just invited someone to do it with me?"

Jen: Right. "How do I like incorporate the things that I'm already doing?"

Pete: "I'm going to the gym. What if I went to the gym with a friend?" "I'm going to go and have a coffee in the morning. What if I invited someone to come with me?" Yeah, I love this.

Jen: Exactly. And then, we also brainstormed ideas of things that require more effort, more planning. And it's really interesting, some people were really excited about the low effort things and were not at all excited about the high effort things. And some people in the group were so excited about the high effort things and not that excited about the low effort things. So not everything for everyone, just the things that fit the specific person. But like, I had two people in the studio both say, "Well, hosting a game night could be really fun," so they decided to host it together. So they're now organizing, and their groups will overlap. And people who haven't met before will meet. There were all sorts of things like, "Join a book club," or, "Go to a museum and comment on a painting to someone standing next to you," or, "Talk to the person sitting next to you on the subway," or, "Participate in your local community group," or, "Go to a church." Like, there were just endless possibilities. So like, when you really think about it, the getting yourself there is not as hard as the opening yourself up to talking to someone new once you get there.

Pete: 100% agreed. I'm so obsessed with this. I'm not unique in this opinion, I've heard this expressed by very, very smart people that have far bigger platforms and audiences than I do, but I tend to agree with this notion that in the world that we live in that is rapidly becoming more artificial with AI and different technologies, I feel like there is like a macro desire and push and need to do things that are more human, to go against the idea of everything that is so automated, and so convenient, and so like, "I can do everything I need to do from my living room, and still function." But actually, what if I wanted to not do that? And do things that were more human, and more spontaneous, or more high friction, but have this amazing payoff that is like literally biologically hardwired into us? So, I am obsessed with this. The other thing I just wanted to add, you mentioned this idea of like...initially, I thought, "Oh yeah, those low effort ones feel great. Like, I could tick those off in my head and go, 'Yeah, I could do fifteen minutes here and fifteen minutes there. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, there's my five.'" But what I also know, personally, is there is a particular magic about, in my opinion, high effort, deep connection. Tracey and I have a number of friends we try and spend a weekend or more with each year. And so, there's this couple in particular, Derek and Nella, who, we go away for a week, once a year. We started this about four years ago. And we pick somewhere every year, and we go away together for a week. And they're amazing. But each time we do it, we often reflect on the fact that if we just caught up for an hour or two over coffee, we wouldn't get anywhere near the level of conversation that we end up in when we're walking to a cafe on day three, looking at some random house and we start talking about architecture, for example. And we're like, "You just would never end up in this conversation if you had this super easy to orchestrate fifteen-minute or one-hour or two-hour dinner or conversational Zoom meeting." And so, I like the idea of low friction, low effort. But I also feel like there's so much magic in the high friction, high effort, where you end up on some random conversational thread that you wouldn't have otherwise. Every time we catch up with these two, in particular, we leave just like so filled, as opposed to drained, which can happen with other people.

Jen: Yeah. Okay, two more things to share. One...just going into this idea of draining cups. One of the pieces that came up in the conversation was that you do spend resources when you are meeting new people. And since we are intentionally seeking to meet new people this month in the Career Collective, what boundaries can you put in place ahead of time? Like in terms of the resources, how much time are you willing to spend on this? And then, just be honest with yourself about how much time you have and are willing to spend. Are you willing to spend money on this? Like, are you willing to take someone out for coffee? If the answer is no, then just don't spend money on it, rather than, in the moment, feeling this drain happen. How much creativity are you willing to spend? How much physical exertion are you willing to spend on meeting new people? How much travel time? So like, we talked about the realities of it, just to make it easier to find the things to say yes to, rather than being like, "I don't know what to do, because I have no constraints." And then, the other thing, speaking of constraints, is that we are doing some speed-friending sessions this month. And we did a three-round session during the workshop, where I had everyone in a Zoom room, I threw them out into breakout rooms of two people, and they had two minutes each to answer the question, "What's inspiring you right now?" And then, they got sucked back into the main room. And then, immediately put in another room. And we did three rounds of this. And the faces, the smiles, that feeling of like, "Whoa, that was so fast and so fun," I could feel it coming through the screen. And I actually had someone say like, "I think I might have actually really just made a friend." And then, she came off of mute and was like, "Issa, will you be my friend?" It was so great.

Pete: Oh my god.

Jen: So I'm hosting several of those this month, based on speed-dating (if you've ever done that) or speed-networking (hate that word), which I've done before. And you just never know what's going to come out of it. And it's low commitment, two minutes per person, but it could be high impact on the other end.

Pete: I love it. I mean, and it takes a level of openness and vulnerability to say yes to such an event and a workshop. So, I love the fact that you're curating a group of people who have already got through that hoop.

Jen: Right.

Pete: Well, I've gone from feeling called out and a little despondent to kind of excited about the idea of quantifying friend-finding activities into a number, which was five. But also, to do so in a way that doesn't drain all the resources that you have available to you. That, there are constraints we can put on this activity, like any other activity, and a world where we can actually make it really fun. And so, here's to more friend finding.

Jen: And that is The Long and The Short Of It.