Maintaining Relationships

I saw some research recently that said that about 25% of millennials had precisely zero close friends. I stopped scrolling and stared at that for a second. Could that really be true? Even when I was a dickhead in college and nobody liked me, I still had a small group of very close friends. I am trying to imagine what it must be like, and I can’t. I have had close friends since I was five years old.

Funny thing about friends—they change over the years. I don’t keep in close contact with one of the groomsmen at my wedding. I don’t talk to him at all. I’m not bummed about it, I went one direction, he went another, no hard feelings. I see him at reunions every five years and it’s like old times. I had high school buddies and college buddies and grad school buddies and Lehman buddies and all the friends I’ve made over the years of my newsletter, plus people in Myrtle Beach and Coastal Carolina and elsewhere. And I’ll tell you one of the secrets to my success: I work very, very hard at maintaining relationships.

One of my favorite things to do is to go on a long drive, to Charlotte or Atlanta, and go through the contacts on my phone and call them, one by one. People I haven’t talked to in years. I called one guy last year, after not talking to him for about five years, and he said, “Do I owe you money?” And we had a good laugh about that, and then caught up on everything that had happened in the intervening time period. It was awesome. I’m sure you’ve had this feeling before, where you’re going through old text messages and you see someone’s name, and you’re like, I should really see how that guy is doing…and you don’t. Because there is an invisible force field preventing you from pushing the button to call him. Some weirdness, some awkwardness that prevents you from doing it.

You have to push through the awkwardness. I caught wind recently that one of my old Lehman colleagues ran into some serious health problems. He had Type 1 diabetes and had some complications related to that, and ended up having six hours of surgery. I had thought about calling him a few months ago, and then I didn’t. And I felt like shit for not calling him. Same situation—there was some awkwardness that kept me from pushing the button on the phone. And he almost died. And then I really would have felt like shit. Every time you hang up the phone with someone might be the last time you ever hear from them. Ever think about that? Here is my challenge to you: after you get done reading this essay, go in your phone and call, not text someone you haven’t talked to you in years. You will be glad you did it, and so will they.

Just from a purely practical standpoint, friends can be very helpful. One of my favorite scenes from Ocean’s Eleven is the “I know a guy” scene, and I am very fond of saying that I know a guy. I know guys in finance, I know guys in academia, I know guys in politics, I know guys in media, I know lawyers, I know doctors, I know dentists, I know mechanics, I know contractors, and I even know actors. If I have a problem or a question about something, it’s pretty rare than I don’t have anyone to call. And if anyone wants financial help from me, I give it freely and without reservation. But the thing about knowing a guy is that you have to keep in touch with the guy, because if you’re calling someone out of the blue looking for a favor, it can be a bit unseemly. Which gets back to my original point about maintaining relationships.

Sometimes I’ll be going through the phone and I’ll come across the name of someone I’m just not friends with anymore. The relationship has ended. Sometimes I go through my phone and I come across someone who is dead. I keep these names in my phone as a reminder. I also keep voicemails of dead people, and people I’m no longer friends with.

When I was at a gifted and talented summer camp, in 1990, I had an RA named Bill. Bill was 19 years old and was a sophomore at Penn State. The dude was a wild man—he used to give us beer and take us in his room for a giant mosh pit in the middle of the night while blasting Ministry. I lost track of Bill after that. I searched for him online for years, but he had disappeared off the Internet.

In 2019, I get a LinkedIn message from Bill—with a different last name. He had changed his name—that was the explanation. We talked on the phone a couple of times, and it was huge amounts of fun catching up. I told him I’d see him if I ever came to Seattle. As it turns out, I had a trip planned to Seattle about a year later, so I texted him to see if he wanted to get together. No answer. I went to LinkedIn, and he had unfriended me on LinkedIn.

In these situations, you wonder what the hell it was you said or did that was so offensive. My best guess is that he read some of my op-eds or went to my Twitter feed and figured out that I was a member of the vast right-wing conspiracy. In fact, I think that is a pretty good guess. I found Bill’s blog online, and it was very liberal, and he did live in Seattle, after all, so political differences seemed to be the issue. Which brings me to my next point, which is that ending a friendship over politics is incredibly fucking stupid. You only do that if you believe that people you disagree with politically are bad people. Keep in mind that this was all while Trump was President, so tensions were high, though I have never been a Trump supporter.

The whole thing bums me out. But I will never know the reasons for that unanswered text. You never know the reasons for an unanswered text, so you always assume the worst: the other person hates you. I think this is a common experience we all have. Text messaging sucks dead donkey dick. There is no context. There are a million reasons why someone might not answer a text, none of which have to do with the person hating you. Any time someone doesn’t answer a text or return a call, I always assume I am on the outs. I think we all do. And then later, I eventually find out that it had nothing to do with me. It never has anything to do with me. So I can’t get inside Bill’s head. He was kind of an unstable guy. I mean, changing your name is pretty weird. So it could be anything. It’s probably not me, but that’s where your head goes.

I think that maintaining relationships is a habit of highly effective people. But people come and go in your life. The friends you have today are probably not going to be the friends you have ten years from now. You’ll have a whole different set of friends. And that’s okay. I don’t make a habit of cutting people out of my life. In fact, I think I have done it only a handful of times. It’s not a good practice—your world gets pretty small after a while. And I want my world to be big. I want to have lots of friends. Quick story: I had a publicist for the launch of Street Freak. He was a very cool dude, but holy fuck, that was one nightmare of a publicity tour. My book (about Lehman) was launched on the same day that Occupy Wall Street started. Terrible timing. So most of the interviews were very hostile. The whole thing was a complete disaster. Anyway, 9 years go by, and I bump into him at a party, and we hit it off immediately. We’ve been in touch ever since, and I even did a podcast with him recently. Amazing stuff.

So when I hear that millennials don’t have any friends, that must be a very lonely existence. Hey, you can always call me.

Go fuck yourself,

Jared

Music recommendation: This is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.

Twenty-plus years ago I used to listen to Autechre. Autechre made IDM: Intelligent Dance Music, which was mostly random noise. It sounds like a spoon in a garbage disposal. Here’s a video of a washing machine blowing up to the tune of Gantz Graf by Autechre. I am still laughing about this. And keep in mind, I used to listen to this stuff.

P.S. We’re Gonna Get Those Bastards will always be free. Please forward to whoever you like.