I’m typing these words directly onto Substack, which is rare, because I would often draft my newsletter in Obsidian first before cmd+c and cmd+v it here.
Doing the latter feels like editing. Doing the former feels like talking.
As if any of that matters :)
But hey, how are you holdin’ up? How’s life? Anything new?
I just had a quick reflection about my life up until this point.
People often complain: “I don’t have any clothes” when sifting through a ton of garments in their closet.
I would say the same thing about friends.
Friendships are weird. You spent one-third of the day hanging around them in your early adolescence, allowing them to look at your ugly puberty corners, letting them in on your dirty little secrets. They became your best friend. They were must-haves when you went to the school toilet. You felt like this life wouldn’t be interesting without them. Then you guys parted. One for each university, then each city, then each country, and later each continent.
I’ve had the pleasure of seeing my so-called secondary and high school best friends drifting away from my life to follow their passion/ambition. Oh, wait, me too.
I’ve had the pleasure of making good friends at companies I worked - the only caveat is I didn’t stay for more than 2.5 years at any of them.
Interestingly for me, or unfortunately - idk, each new company requires relocating to a new city, or country (when will it be “continent”?), demanding me to leave behind my just-warmed-up colleague-turned-friends.
While for me, the relationships I’ve made where I’ve been are meaningful and trustworthy and I’d kill for them to be more intimate and involved (not in a romantic way), I’m not sure it’s the same for them. While apart, our lives moved on, we didn’t stay in touch, they knew nothing about me and neither did I, except for the things I shared publicly on this newsletter and my Instagram Stories. Sometimes I wonder, by doing all of this public sharing thing, am I trying to tell those people about my life just so that I can maintain our connection, one that I’m not even sure they care to invest in?
Sometimes I wonder, do I still want to stay connected and involved in their life because of what we’ve experienced together in the past, or despite of?
And that sometimes frequency has turned to usually these days, when I’m back to a city I used to be in.
I want to make a call. Have a chat. Coffee. Talk. But I realized I’m far too not-close with them anymore to have a perfect excuse to reach out.
No names I could come up. Not because I didn’t know anyone, but because, maybe maybe, I’m scared they are not looking at things and wanting things the way I do. There’s also a lil flying purple demon on my left shoulder whispering to me that “You’re only meeting them out of boredom. You’re not trying to involve them in your life and neither will they.”
Then I realized another thing: the friendships I’ve made that I want to reach out and become “close like the old days” are all from, and at, work. That means: there wasn’t a real coffee talk before. That means: the friendship hasn’t been built outside of the context of work. I’ve never progressed further than company trips or self-organized trips. It’s just like the secondary school time, except I didn’t get to see people’s ugly corners and dirty little secrets and they didn’t get to see mine.
I call these contextual friendships because I feel they are built, and only exist, in certain contexts. Fun they were.
It’s funny because I’m more than willing to meet up with people whom I’ve only met once or twice socially, they knew me or I knew them (that’s calendared in the next few weeks, can you believe that). In fact, I am more proactive at that than at reconnecting with my contextual friends.
I have a hypothesis that many people rush to get married right after school because they cannot stand being alone, or maybe cannot stand seeing their used-to-be-best-friends having new close friends while they are left out of the game.
And I think I understand why there are so many office lovebird dramas. People see each other too often their mental model was time-traveled back to the secondary/high school days, and they think life wouldn’t be interesting without that guy/girl. Many people find it hard to share in detail with the other half what is happening in their work life - their fear, their concern, because “they wouldn’t understand anyway”. At the same time, there’s this other person on the same team who’s been through the exact shitty boss and the exact crappy promotion system and understand exactly how they feel. An invisible bond is created between Les Misérables. I often remind myself that people go to work to bring home the bacon, and what they present at work is what’s needed to get the bacon. Usually, that part is nice and well put together, but that’s not who the person truly is. I’ve never seen anyone arguing with their parents at work.
I’ve worked at places where people only come for the money. It’s a damn fine place. But I don’t like it. What good are people if not connected on a deeper level? Of course, some don’t find the need to, but how can they look at and smile at and laugh at each other probably more than their significant other without at least being somewhat connected?
Nick Carraway (The Great Gatsby) best described my feeling in such a place:
I was within and without
I wanna hang around people because I wanna hang around them, not because I don’t wanna hang around loneliness. I sometimes hate myself when the latter happens.
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Aite, nuff ranting for a Sunday night. Thank you for “listening” to me till here.
Take care, and have a great week ahead!
Tuấn Mon
Finally, someone putting these thoughts to words 💯