Good morning John, it's Esther day. A day in our community and ideally in the whole world where we celebrate
non-romantic love. When we call on people to tell the folks that they love that they love them.
Even if it is a little awkward like John, I love you. I appreciate you. To me you will always be a big deal
no matter what. And I want to work hard to have you always be a part of my life.
Is that what love is? I also asked on Twitter this week if people had
questions about family and friends because I wanted to use people's questions to kind of get at something
I've been thinking about a lot and it worked. Let's start out with a few easy ones. What's the weirdest thing
you've ever caught John doing? Like besides sponsoring a third tier English soccer team, nothing. That is the weirdest thing.
What's a cute Orin story? In the morning sometimes he looks at me and he says "Papa Da Nana", which is actually sentence
that means pick me up up up take me downstairs da and feed me a banana, "Papa Da Nana".
How do you know when it's the right-ish time to have a baby?
I actually made a whole video about this but I mostly want to answer this question because then this person's mom
replied to her and said ask your mom if she's ready to be a grandma. No, no bad mom! No!
How do you stay in touch with family when you're separated by a long distance? One of three ways, one you could just happen
to have all of the same free time and all of the same desires for communication.
That's not gonna happen. Two you could do what I did all throughout college and you let the person who wants to talk more
guilt you or nag you into calling them. Which creates resentment.
Or 3 you can schedule, it just schedule it. Have it on the calendar
so nobody is having their expectations upset. Relationships are work,
do the work! Speaking of which here's the actual question that I wanted to answer in this video.
Because I knew I was gonna get it a lot, and I've been thinking a lot about it.
How do you make friends as an adult?
I also see people answer this question incorrectly a lot. Those answers usually go something like you got to put yourself in places
where you will interact with other people.
Volunteer, take a class, go to a protest, bring your neighbors cookies,
if you got kids go to kid things. All that stuff's fine advice
I just don't think that it gets to the root of the problem.
I'm gonna go ahead and get pretty real here. When you're young,
you make friends easily because you find it very easy to value other people. Like the kid next door when you're growing up you
implicitly believe that they're a big deal and what they
think about you matters. And likewise
they feel the same way about you. And when two people each agree on the others intrinsic importance
they work together to maintain a relationship and respect and appreciation and that's friendship.
At least as far as I can tell, I'm sorry, I think about these things very rationally
but it's how it works up in here. But as we get older and we're exposed to more people who might not be worth being friends
with, we also start to value other things like romantic love or money or power or likes on Instagram.
I think, and this is just guessing, we're less likely to quickly value other people and less likely to be quickly valued by others.
I think when we ask why is it harder to make friends as an adult what we're really asking is why is it harder to
value and be valued by others. But I actually don't think that it is harder
I think that we just forgot how hard we used to work for it.
None of this answered the question.
But I feel like understanding the question better might help us each individually answer it better for ourselves.
You want to make friends as an adult,
You have to figure out how to really value other people and to get them to believe that it matters
how much you value them. Because look we're all in this messed-up
2018 together and sometimes you're gonna put energy in and in and in and never get any back. That can hit your confidence pretty hard
and then you stop trying. But you got to understand that there are so many non social and quasi social things taking up our cognitive resources
that it makes sense that people aren't giving back when you give. We kind of sometimes don't have the time and energy to devote to
valuing individuals in our lives and that's a little bit of a disaster.
Because that's what friendship is and that's what love is and while this video has a lot of guessing in it
that's something that I know. Love is not free
it takes a devotion of time and energy, it takes work and I wanted to say to all of my friends and family
thank you for helping make that labor joyful. John, I'll see you on Tuesday