The Lazy Genius Podcast - #361 - Two Things That Make Friendship Easier

Episode Date: April 15, 2024

No matter your level of extroversion or introversion, your age, your life stage, or any other factor, we all need friends. I tend to focus on more concrete things on the show, but I think that one of the reasons we struggle to find and maintain meaningful relationships is partly a logistical one. And yet, finding time to connect with people is just as important if not more important than finding time to pay your bills and cook your meals and tend to your job and your home and all the things. Let’s explore ways we can Lazy Genius friendship. Helpful Companion Links Pre-order my new book The PLAN or ask your library to consider carrying a copy once it releases in October. The Life Council by Laura Tremaine Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman How to Walk Into a Room by Emily P. Freeman Sign up for the Latest Lazy Listens email. Grab a copy of my book The Lazy Genius Kitchen or The Lazy Genius Way! (Affiliate links) Download a transcript of this episode. This podcast is hosted by Kendra Adachi and executive produced by Kendra Adachi, Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome aboard via rail. Please sit and enjoy. Please sit and stretch. Steep. Flip. Or that. And enjoy. Via rail, love the way. Hey there. You're listening to the lazy genius podcast. I am Kendra Adachi and I'm here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. Today is episode 361. The two missing people. pieces and conversations about friendship. Friendship is one of those topics that will never run dry. No matter your level of extroversion or introversion, your age, your life stage, or any other factor, we all need friends. We are wired for connection in some way. Now, you might have read that longitudinal study that came out of Harvard a while back that

showed how true this is. The researchers determined, with pretty much like zero doubt, that the most important quality to a good life is relationships, connected, meaningful relationships. This topic is as human and as necessary as it gets. Now, why am I talking about it? I do tend to focus on things that are, you know, a bit more concrete, I suppose, but I think that one of the reasons we struggle to find and maintain meaningful relationships is partly a logistical one.

It's tough to find time to align calendars to create rhythms of relationship in our busy lives. And yet, finding time to connect with people is just as important, if not more important, then finding time to pay bills and cook your meals and tend to your job and your home and all the things that we do tend to talk about here on the podcast. So today I want to explore two aspects that are often missing in conversations about friendship. The first is the levels of friendship and how our expectations often ignore those levels. And then the first thing, we'll set up the second thing. So we'll get to the second thing in a bit. But let's start with, what I see are the three levels of any friendship. Meeting, connecting, and deepening in that order.

Now, we all want deep friendships, right? That's that third and final level, deepening. In fact, I want you to imagine what it means to you to have a deep friendship with someone. Maybe you're imagining a relationship you currently have, or maybe you're thinking of when you wish you had. A deep friendship is very likely with someone who knows us, who sees us in all the good and the bad, who roots for us, who brings us food when we're in a crisis if they live close enough to do something like that, who will grab us something at the store, who we trust to hang out with our kids if we have kids, who we travel with, who we can talk to on the phone, as easy as breathing. A lot of you might have grown up reading or watching Anne of Green Gables,

and so you are quite familiar with the idea of a bosom friend. It is your go-to person, the person you do everything with, the person who knows you better than just about anyone. Now, is that a beautiful relationship to have? Of course it is. But in our loneliness or discontentment, no matter how extreme or for how long, we often forget that we cannot have a deep relationship of any kind without first meeting the person and then over time connecting with that person.

Every single deep friendship starts with a meeting. Sure, you might meet someone and you know right away, you know right away that you are going to get along with this person for a good long while. You know, you might have like a chemistry with them that enables you to jump over a couple of early rounds of friendship connection. You know, you're connecting on a level that would take a little longer with someone else. that's very, very normal. Chemistry and connection are so real.

I do not believe in love at first sight because love requires a lot more than eyeballs, but I do believe in chemistry at first sight, connection at first sight. People are just really dynamic. And there is a lot happening around us that we can't see. I cannot explain that eye contact with one stranger feels different than I contact with another. It's kind of weird, to be honest, but it does happen. And I think we've all experienced that. And it happens with friendships, like absolutely with friendships.

That said, you still have to meet first, you know, and then connect for a time, which enables you to grow deeper in relationship with that person. And yet we expect depth out of the gate. We don't always see that relationships we have now are in process. You know, right now you're like early in level two and the connection level with someone. You're not close to the depth at the end of the line, but you're on your way. And yet we forget. We forget about the process because we long for the end.

We long for the depth that we imagine. We can also assume that every single friendship is moving toward that depth. And I think that's an unrealistic expectation. If the levels of friendship are real, if meeting, connecting, and deepening are the process that happens in every single friendship, even though we often expect to just hit deep right away. If those levels are real, we often assume that those levels work on every single friendship, and they just don't. Not every single friend you have is going to be a bosom friend.

Not every single friendship you have is going to be deep. Laura Tremaine described this so beautifully in her book, The Life Council. In that book, she lays out 10 types of friendship. and offers so much necessary and beautiful permission to not put every single relationship under like the besties lens. Not every friend you have is a bestie. Some friends are what Laura calls daily duty friends. They're the moms you see at school pickup.

They're the folks you say hi to at the gym because you go at the same time that they do. They're the coworkers who go to the same meetings as you. Like maybe for all those folks you have met. and you are connected with them within a certain context, but you might not want or need those relationships to go any deeper. You know, they are what they are. And they serve a beautiful purpose as they are. If we expect that every relationship is going to be deep and full of vacations and vulnerability, not only are we setting ourselves up for disappointment, we're also missing the goodness and value of those relationships as they are.

we're missing being content with them. You know, we're content that we probably won't go out for drinks with that gym friend. But we don't have to for that friendship to count for what it is. You know, saying hi at the gym, sometimes walking next to each other's treadmills or whatever. Like maybe you know her kid's name or something like that. Like those things can be enough, more than enough even. And maybe that friendship might surprise you by becoming more connected and even deepening for some reason. but you don't have to keep anticipating that.

Just let it be what it is and enjoy what you have. Not every friendship has to be a bosom buddy friendship. So one missing piece in many conversations about friendship, except for the ones that Laura Tremaine is having, is that there are levels to any relationship. You have to meet first. Then you connect. Then you deepen. You don't get deep right away.

Sometimes it takes years. And not only that, not only that, not at. every relationship has to be deep in the way that you imagine. Different friendships have different purposes. And while they all follow that path of meet, connect, and deepen, the particularities of those three steps, they'll look different depending on the context and the purpose of the friendship. So that is the first missing piece.

It's one that most of you have probably thought about. But this next one is a little more surprising. Things are feeling a little less human these days, aren't they? But isn't the whole point of progress to make things more human? That's why, at TD, when we design a product, whether it's an app for making trading easier or monitoring your account for fraud, we ask one simple question. How does this help people?

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Aw, isn't something we need to travel for. It's something waiting for us in everyday life, whether in a city street or a moment with a work of art. I'm Dr. Keltner, host of the Science of Happiness podcast. join me for Cities of Aw, a special series on how our public spaces can spark awe, wonder, and enhance the quality of public life. You can find us wherever you listen to your podcasts. Before we get into the second missing piece in conversations about friendship, I want us to do a little exercise to help us get there. The problems around friendship often feel pretty big.

So one of the points of this exercise we're about to do is to take how you feel about your current friendship situation. and make it smaller. So when you think about your friendships, you might think in broad strokes. You know, you might say like, well, I do have friends, but I don't have a lot of them. Or I don't have a lot of deep friendships. Or I'm really lonely in this new place and I miss my friends. Those are all real statements, possibly true for you today right now as you're listening. But if you are hoping to move forward in developing friendships on whatever level, that is kind of a big problem to solve those things I just said. And what do we know about big problems?

They're really hard to solve. It is so much easier to solve smaller problems. So let's make your friendship situation, whatever challenge you have smaller as we set the stage for the second missing piece. Okay, I want you to do this in your head or on a piece of paper or whatever, but let's do like a little friendship audit. Write down who you would say your deep friends are. Who is the closest to that imagined idea of a deep friendship?

Who do you call with good news and bad? Who do you feel like you can be your truest self-form? with, who are your deepest friends? That's one column. The next column is who are your contextually deep friends? Borrowing Laura's fabulous model of the Life Council, who are people that you trust and you feel deeply connected to, but only in a certain context? Maybe there's a work friend who is your first call when something with work is happening, but not if your kids get really sick or if you need bananas at the store, you know? Some friendships are deep in a particular context, but not universally.

And that's normal. So who are your universally deep friendships? And then who are your contextually deep friendships? I'm going to give you a slightly strange, but like hopefully relevant, personal example. One person who I would say I have a contextually deep friendship with is Nora McAnerney. Nora is a podcaster and author. She is hilarious and poignant and smart and all kinds of things.

A lot of you are already familiar with her. She is fantastic. We connected on Instagram as one does. And over the last couple of years, we have connected more and more. We've had more points of connection. Today, I would say that we have a contextually deep friendship. I trust her. I have called her a couple of times with work problems.

I wanted her input on. She has done the same to me. We did connect very quickly and easily. There was chemistry. So we jumped over some of those kind of awkward early stage relationship of hurdles, but we both feel like ourselves with the other, and we experience a depth because of that. But am I going to call Nora if my kid breaks his leg? No. Am I going to call Nora if I get really sick? Like not for a while and only if it's really, really bad. But will I call Nora if something

super cool happens with a book? Probably. And would she do the same for me? I think so. Would either of us hold it against the other if we didn't? Not at all. Because there is a very specific context to the depth of our friendship. You have those people too. And those relationships matter. Just because someone doesn't know everything about you does not mean that their relationship isn't significant. It really and truly is. And we need to normalize that more. Okay. So back to the little exercise. Who are your deepest friends? Who are your, you know, contextually deep friends? Next, who do you feel connected to? Maybe you're not super deep yet, but you know, other's names, at least a few things about each other. You've had some points of connection.

You would say that you are friends, you know, and not just like acquaintances. You look forward to seeing this person. Who is that person? Who are those people? Now here's where we're going to get into this second missing piece. Okay. Usually when we are connected with someone, we are connected to them through a particular place or group, your neighborhood or apartment building or your dorm, work, church, clubs, civic groups, professional groups, school, whether it's your school or your kids. Maybe you're connected because of your history. You know, you share a history, whether it like an old job or church or college or summer camp or your kids, whatever.

When I went through my own friends and I named who is on the level of connecting, but like not really deep yet or ever, it was all context-based. It was all about the place mostly. whether a place I'm in now or a place I wasn't before. Now, why does this matter? Okay, if we go to the first level of friendship, which is meeting, right? Meeting, connecting, deepening. It makes sense that we meet people in particular places. We meet people in the neighborhood, at work, at church, in a group we we would belong to, at our school or our kids' school. We meet people in places. Sometimes we meet people on the internet. But usually that is also through the context of a technological place, like an online

community or like a shared mutual friend in the person that you follow. Okay. So if all of that is true, if we meet people in our places and we continue to connect with those people in our places, places matter, right? This is where the second piece finally comes in. I wrote about this in my next book, The Plan, out October 8th, that I will mention it here because it matters deeply to this conversation we're having. I read Oliver Berkman's book, 4,000 weeks, time management for mortals, and I loved it so much. It's basically a philosophical survey of how time management has messed us up because we forget that we're going to die. We forget our own finitude, and the productivity industry encourages that forgetfulness because it wants us to think we can.

can control more than we actually can. More control means more needed resources, which means more money. The book is great. But in it, he writes about relationships and connection and the part that they play in our time management. And I'm just going to read this to you because when I read it a couple years ago, it blew my mind. It is the second missing piece in conversations about friendship. That is why I included it in my own book because Oliver illuminated something vital to this conversation that no one really talks about. Now, this is a long quote, but it's worth reading. So here is what he says. Again, this is from his book, 4,000 weeks. The question is, what kind of freedom do we really want when it comes to time? On the one hand, there is the culturally celebrated goal

of individual time sovereignty, the freedom to set your own schedule, to make your own choices, to be free from other people's intrusions into your precious 4,000 weeks. On the other hand, there's the profound sense of meaning that comes from being willing to fall in with the rhythms of the rest of the world, to be free to engage in all the worthwhile collaborative endeavors that require at least some sacrifice of your soul control over what you do and when. Strategies for achieving this first kind of freedom are the sort of thing that fills books of productivity advice, ideal morning routines, strict personal schedules, and tactics for limiting how long you spend answering email each day, plus homilies on the importance of learning to say no,

all of them functioning as bulwarks against the risk that other people might exert too much influence over how your time gets used. And undoubtedly, these have a role to play. We do need to set firm boundaries so that bullying bosses, exploitative employment arrangements, narcissistic spouses, or a guilty tendency toward people pleasing, don't end up dictating the course of the day. And yet the trouble with this kind of individualist freedom is that a society enthrall to it, as ours is, ends up desynchronizing itself. We live less and less of our lives in the same temporal grooves as one another. The unbridled reign of this individualist ethos, fueled by the demands of the market economy,

has overwhelmed our traditional ways of organizing time, meaning that the hours in which we rest, work, and socialize are becoming ever more uncoordinated. It's harder than ever to find time for a leisurely family dinner, a spontaneous visit to friends, or any collective project, nurturing a community garden, playing in an amateur rock band, that takes place in a setting other than the workplace. For the least privileged, the dominance of this kind of freedom translates into no freedom at all. It means unpredictable gig economy jobs and on-demand scheduling, in which the big box retailer you work for might call you into work at any moment.

Its labor needs calculated algorithmically from hour to hour based on sales volume, making it all but impossible to plan child care or essential visits to the doctor, let alone a night out with friends. But even for those of us who genuinely do have much more personal control over when we work than previous generations ever did, the result is that work seeps through life like water, filling every cranny with more to-dos. The reason it's so hard for my wife and me to find an hour in the week for a serious conversation or for me and my three closest friends to meet for a beer isn't usually that we don't have the time

in the strict sense of that phrase, though that's what we may tell ourselves. It's that we do have the time, but that there's almost no likelihood of it being the same portion of time for everyone involved. Free to pursue our own entirely personal schedules, yet still yoked to our jobs, we have constructed lives that cannot be made to mesh. That's the end of the quote. And hopefully you understand why I read the entire thing. We have constructed lives that cannot be made to mesh.

Y'all, is that not the most mind-blowing thing and also so deeply obvious? This is the second thing that is missing when we talk about friendships. We work so hard to create more time for ourselves, and maybe we are occasionally successful at it. But if that time is not aligned with the time of our people or with the places where we would meet those people? What good is the free time? What good is all this work we're doing to manage our time and our lives? Very little. That's why the places and the context within which you meet people and connect with them, they matter so much. We need to meet people in order to connect with them

and to develop deeper friendships. But if your life does not offer space for you to engage in places and contexts, whether those places are already created without you or created by you, your friendships are going to struggle to take off. You're going to struggle just to even meet people because of this idea of time autonomy. But if you're in a certain group at a certain place, living in a certain area, and your contexts match up, you are more likely to meet people there because their free time is likely aligned with yours. Even something as simple as your neighbor, have like the same trash schedule and mail delivery time as you. So you might connect outside when you're bringing in your trash cans or getting your mail,

like if you live in the suburbs. Your coworkers are at work at the same time as you are so you can meet and connect there. The other adults at school pickup are on the same timeline that you are. They're getting their kids and likely off to do homework and snacks. So like maybe why not do them together today? If you go to a club or a group meeting, you're aligned with people who have prioritized the same time to enjoy this particular thing that you have. Do you see it? Places, groups, tangible, contextual environments are one of the most helpful ways, not only to meet people and connect with them,

perhaps with the eventual result of deepening your friendships with them, but those contextual environments have already done the work of aligning the time, your time with other people's time. You don't have to ask all of your friends and acquaintances from your church to figure out when you're all going to get together this week. It's already Sunday at 10. That's when church happens. You don't have to ask all these people in your community when they're available to run or do yoga or go to the gym. The class time is already set. This is when the yoga class is. Our places matter. They help us align our time with other people without a lot of effort, honestly, or at least with less effort than if we were to start from scratch.

Now, let's talk about starting from scratch for just a second. It is hard to do, but that's why some of the most successful versions of relational connection in friendship happen because a plan is made and then not messed with again. You get drinks with these friends on the third Thursday of every month. You call your sister every Tuesday at lunchtime. You go for a walk with a friend every Saturday morning. Things are rhythmic and reliable, much like a church service or a workout class. Now, like Oliver Bergman said in that quote I just read, that kind of scheduling luxury isn't available to everyone.

If you have a job with varied hours from week to week, deciding once is rarely an option for you, or at least it's more challenging. But if you're looking to start from scratch in connecting with people, consider the place and the context and then decide when you will connect. You have to align your time consistently and rhythmically because the way our lives generally work is independent of everyone else's. Our time autonomy, it's pretty great until it prevents us from enjoying our time in the first place because our time is not aligned with anyone else's. So what does this mean practically? I think it means a couple of things.

First, I hope that you are encouraged by the acknowledgement of the levels of friendship and that you might be in the meeting and connecting phase with a lot of your friendships and have just a few deep ones, if it may be just one. Hang tight. All of them take time. Think of one person you feel reasonably connected with or maybe just someone you just met and consider one thing that you can do to connect with them this week. one thing with one person.

That's where it all starts anyway. The levels help you see where you are and can give you encouragement that it doesn't all have to look the same with everyone or have all the same depth and it all have to happen at the same time. The other practical thing I want you to take from this is to look at your places. Where are you already? To bar the phrasing from Emily P. Freeman's latest book, How to Walk Into a Room, what rooms are you already in?

look around those rooms and notice how at least this part of your life is aligned with theirs. That is a gift because time alignment is hard to come by. So look at the places where you already have it. Look at the places where you already are, where you can either seek out people who are also already there or invite someone new to that place with you. Start thinking about how you can get to your place. more consistently, what place you might want to add in order to meet and connect with people,

and then prioritize that place. Prioritize that place for the potential friendships, but also because that place already offers time alignment. It already lines up your free time or your leisure time or connection time with the time of other people who are interested in doing the same thing. So look around your places. Look around and see if there's someone new to meet. See if there's someone you've already met, but you could do a little something to connect with them more, even if it's just saying hi and confirming their name and, you know, asking them if they like the book that you saw them reading the other day or whatever. This is how we start small, you guys. But it's also how we pursue meaningful, connected relationships.

We pay attention to these two things that we don't talk enough about. first we pay attention to the levels of friendship and we stop expecting that everyone is in the same place at the same time or will even get there at all. We notice that some relationships are deep or connected only in a certain context and we do not see that as a loss but as a gain. And second, we pay attention to how we can align our time with other people. We can know. We can notice when we are so stuck on our own autonomy and control that we are unknowingly preventing ourselves from connecting with others because we just don't want to be at the mercy of a place that tells us when we have to be there. Embrace that time if you can. See it as a gift since

you don't have to plan the thing yourself. See your places as the first level of friendship, as places to meet people because you have to meet people in order to connect with them. It's just too big to say that friendship is hard or you don't have any deep friends or you're having trouble meeting people. All of those are true, but they are not solvable. These two missing pieces can help make that problem smaller and therefore more solvable. And I hope that they help encourage you in a direction of, more meaningful, consistent friendships.

And those are the two missing pieces and conversations about friendships. Okay, before we go, let's celebrate the lazy genius of the week. This week, it is Leah Ross. And I find this particular message a beautiful match to today's episode topic. Because when we talk about friendships and when I got fiery about things, and this is one of them, it can come off possibly as if you need to be hanging out with people. all the time. And that is just not true. But rather than offer that disclaimer on its own, let's do it through Leah's message as our lazy genius of the week. Leah writes this.

Hi, Kendra. I have been a lazy genius. It's 2018. And just thank you. Thank you. Sorry. And just thank you for helping me put words on so many things that I want my home and family life to be and feel like. I want to share one thing that is freeing me up big time right now. Embracing the live in your season principle. I have four kids and most of them are extroverts, but my thirdborn, who is in four day a week preschool right now, is a major introvert and homebody. School is hard for him sometimes for that reason. So while I am very tempted to do the play dates and see the friends on the one day he's home in the morning, I have surrendered to that's just not what the season needs, because that's not what my child needs to be his best self.

This child needs a day a week at home in PJs, free to play Legos or lay around and look at a book, just whatever solitary activity feels right. My child is so, so much more regulated on the other days and does better in school drop off when his bucket is filled with an at-home day. Would I rather be doing all the fun things when he's home with me? Yes, but I see the season for what it is. I know it's a relatively short one. He'll go to elementary school soon. And so I'm embracing this season. Instead of playdates, I use our introverts day for meal prep, laundry, and whatever else I can do from home to set myself up for success the rest of the week. Thank you again for putting words to the things I needed to hear to get set free and love my kid

well. You're the best. I love this Leah. And I hope that all of you listening who might feel like you're in a season like this, whether it's a kid or yourself that you hear me say like sometimes we do need solitude. We need rest. Connection isn't just about others. It's also about you. You can connect to yourself and allow the same for those you live with by letting them be alone. So take that message from Leah as permission. We're not all or nothing here. Yes, we want deep friendships. We also want deep care for ourselves.

And sometimes that means an introverts day. So thank you for sharing this, Leah, and congratulations on being the lazy genius of the week. This episode is hosted by me, Kendra Adachi, and executive produced by Kendra Adachi, Jenna Fisher and Angela Kinsey. The Lazy Genius podcast is enthusiastically part of the Office Ladies Network. Special thanks to Leah Jarvis for weekly production. Thanks y'all for listening. And until next time, be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. I'm Kendra, and I'll see you next week.

Have you ever felt like you were living just a B or B plus life? It's so dangerous to live that. More dangerous than a B minus or a C plus life? Because when you're living a B or B plus life, you don't change it. You think it's good enough. Is it? I'm Susie Welch. I host a podcast called Becoming You.

People think, okay, an A plus life is not available to me, but there is a way. We are all in the process of becoming ourselves. Listen to Becoming You wherever you get your podcasts.