This actually used to happen when I was younger. I miss having friends and being able to just hang out in our free time. I miss having some usable amount of free time. Adult life sucks and sometimes I just feel like I want to jump of the Balcony and end it all since I’ll never get the good times back and I’ll never have anymore in the future.
Sorry you’re feeling like this mate, hope you catch a break soon. Wish I could go back to my late twenties too sometimes.
Sucks to think about, especially since relative to the past we are in the most prosperous times, but people used to be happier in generations prior because they had cheap third places to go to, had a purpose and community.
And now our lives are surrounded by substitute and vicarious experiences that will never afford us true fulfillment. And like a drug, it saps us of the motivation to actually change any of it.
I know it is popular to shit on Friends these years, but I think that it captures the growing up part of life pretty well as the show is basically about capturing a snapshot in time of a group of friends when they were the closest before adult life tore them apart. Because that is how the show ends. They all grow up, have adult responsibilities, different priorities and they all leave the apartment complex to start new lives away from one another.
In my 20s I had a group of friends for awhile and we would hang out in each other’s apartments all the time, sometimes we would sleep over at each other’s places and have breakfast together before heading to school. We would go on picnics and excursions together. All pile into the old, rusty car that one of us owned and drive somewhere.
We had a pub we liked to visit semi-regularly and we were pretty 50/50 men and women.
When we got our degrees, most of us packed up and left. We are now in our 30s and some have had kids in the meantime while most of us have grown apart. Some of us still keep in contact and hang out when our schedules permits it, but it isn’t like it was when we were in our 20s.
To me, Friends is an idealized version of the friends group stuff in your 20s. To me it isn’t as unrealistic as it’s being made out to be nowadays, but it is idealized.
I treasure the few years I got to have good friends and classmates that I loved to hang out with and treat as family. No matter how much time passes, whenever we get to meet up again, it is almost like no time has passed at all, and that is such a great feeling, even if we only get to see each other like once a year.
Reading that first paragraph makes me physically sick to my stomach. The impermanence of everything is killing me. There is no point. I cannot find a point of my own. It’s legitimately driving me insane.
It’s not how human beings are supposed to live. We’re supposed to have that close-knit friend community our entire lives. People had this up until only 100-200 years ago or so. People in little farming villages were able to have a stable friend group for their entire lives and have time to interact with them. Kids didn’t serve as a substantial barrier, as the friend group helped raise the children. This is how children are supposed to be raised. It’s supposed to take a village.
It’s only our hyper capitalist economy that atomizes us and forces us to scatter to the winds, endlessly chasing job after job in far flung cities, never able to settle down and form real community anywhere.
The way we live is deeply unnatural and fundamentally at odds with human nature. It’s no wonder we’re all mentally ill.
I think the impermanence of life is one of the most difficult things to accept, but once you do, there is some beauty to it too.
I think it is or at least should be one of the biggest motivators to try and live in the now. I have been the most happy, when I try to live in the now and appreciate what I have right now. It takes a bit of practice but it is doable and it a great antidote to anxiety and depressive thoughts in my experience. You cannot live in the now all the time, but aiming toward it, is a good way to spend the limited time you have in this life.
Big hugs to you.
I used to live in a condo with some friends, and there were others in our friend group that would randomly show up throughout the day. The doors were always unlocked, so friends would just walk in. Sometimes it would be early in the morning and would hang out while I made myself breakfast. Sometimes it was late at night after they partied and needed a place to crash.
Seems similar to what you mentioned, I relate. Like you said, Friends was idealized, but not unrealistic.
The expectation that you could get an apartment that size in central NYC without being a billionaire is also a lie
I quite like the way How I Met Your Mother handles this - the size of the apartments is the narrator misremembering. There’s an episode where the characters have been viewing a house in
New JerseyLong Island - they return to the apartment and it’s portrayed as the size it realistically would be.Can you tell which episode it is? I’ve tried watching some but couldn’t find it.
It’s in the intro to S07E11. Took me a while to track it down!
I think they explained it, the reason they could afford it was because Monica’s grandmother lived there, and they’ve been paying 1950s rent because of rent control or something. Something similar for phoebe as well. Anyway show never explains how joey/chandler/Ross can afford those big houses.
