Knocking on the Door

One of the things you don't realize you lose when you get older is how little effort it took to just be around people.

You never really had to try. Your friends were just there, and most of the time hanging out wasn't something anyone decided, it just happened. Eventually that goes away. Your friends remain, they may live in the same city, you still have your group chats, you'd still call them your close friends, but you stop just being around them constantly. I don't think most people notice it while it's going on.

It's one of the great things about being a kid. You'd walk down the street or bike to a friend's house and just knock on the door. “Is he home”, “Can he come out”. People didn’t check a calendar or ask what works, you just showed up and either they were around or they weren't. The actual activity you figured out once you were already hanging out.

College was the same thing but with more people. One of the best parts about college is just being on campus. People live so close. Someone knocks on your door, you meet for lunch after class, you run into people in the library, you walk down the hall and somebody's already doing something and you just join. It just makes being around people so much easier.

Then you graduate and start working and everything spreads out a little. You have more freedom than you've ever had but at the same time you have less, and it's a lot more difficult to spend your free time with who you want.

The commonly thought reason is time. Work takes it, you have more responsibility, blah blah, everyone knows that part. What I never really thought about, and I think it's very true, is proximity and ease. Even when you do have the time, there's so much friction to just seeing someone. You can be in a group chat with your best friends trying to plan a night where everybody can join and it's so difficult. Someone's traveling, someone's stuck at work. Especially when you're working a lot or get out of work late, there's a lot of friction to just grab dinner on a weekday with friends, and before that was such a common thing.

And when everything has to be planned, it kind of needs a reason too. Nobody makes a plan to sit on someone's couch and do nothing. You make a plan for dinner, or drinks, or a game. Which is fine. But most times the best shit happened spontaneously. Some afternoon, everyone's bored, friends are nearby, f it let's go do something. There is just less of that now, mostly because nobody's close enough anymore for "f it" to happen. I think that's what living near people does. It keeps you more childlike, maintaining the freedom of a kid. You don't need a reason to see someone, you just see them, which is kind of what freedom is about.

The best thing I've come up with is plan parts, leave parts open. Plan something, like let's get lunch, then don't plan anything after and see where it takes you. You're not going to randomly run into people the way you used to, and there's too much friction to just show up at someone's door, so you have to leave room to just do shit. I mean you don't need it, but if you have it, it just makes things more likely to happen.

And the friend group gets smaller, you condense your friend group down to the people you actually chose, which is good but a lot of the best friendships start with someone who just happened to live down the hall, and you don't get many of those anymore.

I don't really have an answer for this. I think it's kind of the unfortunate tradeoff. You get more freedom as you get older, and you lose the kind where you could just walk down the street and knock on someone's door.

-- Gabriel