Enter the friendaverse
I love my friends, but as I gear up for a more permanent — visa pending — move to New York, I’ve been thinking a lot about the abstract idea of friendship. How we build it, how we lose it, and how we so delicately flirt it out from the clutches of an acquaintance. It’s strange to me that friendships are treated so differently from the other pillars of a healthy adult life: underwhelming financial situations are met with job hunts, underwhelming fitness levels are met with exercise, but underwhelming friends are just met over and over again. Nonchalance. There are structural problems here, of course: cities aren’t equipped to build community, communities are essential to finding friends, and so in the absence of novel friendship it’s understandably difficult to escape the gravity of old circles.
That’s a lot to unpack. So instead of taking the meta approach of discussing friendships as some amorphous concept, I’ve been specifically thinking through friend groups. In my mind, an interesting friend group should be like a cinematic universe.
Cinematic universes have a shared oral history, where the constituents (and audience) generally agree on some sort of origin story. The moment that brought you all together, the delicate plot points that changed the course of your mutual story, the stories that get told with incrementally more exaggeration every year until they’re hardly recognizable from the truth. But you don’t care: you’re enjoying the warmth of your shared history.
Of course, that shared history is made all the more interesting by your shared language. Slang that is uniquely yours, the inside jokes you’ve been repeating for so long that you forget (and fight over!) who started them, and nicknames for outgroup characters who you’ve meticulously moulded into the Enemies of your cinematic universe.
Currency (whoever gets the most LMAOs when you’re talking shit in the group chat), relative social status (the rich one, the guy with game at the bar, the punching bag), villains (exes, tangential friend groups) — friend groups just become more fun when you look at them through this lens. But all of this is just table stakes universe building.
In whichever history of the (actual) universe that you subscribe to — the Big Bang, God, or something in between — some big thing happened, kicked off a chain reaction, and that momentum took everything from 0 to 1. Somewhere along the line, though, the momentum wore off. At some point, humans showed up on the scene and had to become active participants in building the universe they found themselves in by inventing fire, wheels, or electricity. They had to disturb the universe that had, so far, chugged along perfectly fine without them. I can’t shake the feeling that the universes of most mid-twenties friend groups are entering this phase. Especially after lockdowns.
Many of us had our Big Bang moment in University, where some happenstance brought us together, and we were able to ride out the momentum of that early universe forming moment. More like universe-ity, right lmao!!!! Momentum doesn’t last forever though, and I imagine that’s why the majority of friend groups become stale at some point. A stale friend group is heart wrenching. All that shared history, all that compounded trust, just left to rot like bread on a counter.
It doesn’t have to be this way. I expect if the constituents of a friend group instead became active participants in building the next stage of their cinematic universe, they’d be able to open up the opportunity for genuinely lifelong relationships. Once the initial universe-forming momentum wears off, it’s time to shift from doing things together to creating things together. Why does the cinematic universe of a friend group have to be insular? Why can’t we work together to manifest these quirks into the broader world? The world would be far more interesting if our culture came upstream from friend groups instead of downstream from “tastemakers”. It’s a damn shame that these things that are unique to a friend group — history, language, currency — aren’t often spread more broadly. And it’s already happening all around us! ConstitutionDAO was a meme in a group chat that went from, “wouldn’t it be funny if we bought the Constitution?”, to a $40M crowdfund and a bid at last week’s Sotheby’s auction. Reboot was a group of friends who were sick of the nonchalance in tech, and now it’s a publication and event series that’s reclaiming techno-optimism. YesTheory was a couple of buddies who challenged each other to take a risk every day for 30 days, and now it’s a worldwide community of discomfort seekers.
I deeply believe that life is most interesting when you’re able to go on a journey with your friends. Of course there’s nothing wrong with enjoying someone’s company for the sake of it. But I think there’s often an opportunity to strive for more. When I look at my own life through this universe-building lens, I see it everywhere. My parents have run a business together for >15 years, and the milestones they celebrate together keep them closer than ever. My brother and I grew up with wildly different interests, and starting a business together has been one of the best ways to mesh our differences. The way you combat this universe staleness of course doesn’t have to be a business: writing a cookbook together, or starting a group living house, or starting an event series, or, or, or.
I read somewhere recently that growing up is just an exercise in collecting anecdotal evidence for the clichés we’ve known since we were kids. We all grew up berated with the same stories about the importance of family, the importance of community, the importance of friends. But we’re in a uniquely lucky position in history where we’re all now looking at the same anecdotal evidence: quarantining away from your friends and family is fucking catastrophic. I’m sure things would be similarly catastrophic if I let my relationships go stale. Disturb your universe.
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