The Quiet Desperation of Maintaining Adult Friendships

 I’ve always said (mostly to myself) that there are three key steps to leading a peaceful life:

1.       Define your relationships clearly

2.       Have rock bottom expectations so that your chances of being disappointed are slim (but not lost)

3.       Make Fuck-You money

Let’s touch base in reverse order for posterity’s sake.

Fuck-You money is a myth. You can make enough money to fuck around with on a month-on-month basis. It is as easy as selling your soul to corporate. Which isn’t nearly as bad as selling your soul to the Devil, but just as effective; sometimes even better depending on the market.

But you might not be able to make enough to show the proverbial and actual middle finger to the society and fuck off into the void. Not at your job, which makes you feel like a prince(ss) in the first week and a pauper in the last.

Making a lot of -like fuck-you grade- money is only possible if you shed your moral conscience and embrace the darkness. The evidence is in the Epstein Files. At that point you’re making money for the sake of making money. Might as well play golf. Or jerk off, which is infinitely more fun.

Ex-your-pectations. Like His Holeyness Shri Nithyananda would (probably) say, “Divorce (pronounced die-whores) yourself from your expectations. Because (becaas) your (youvar) ex-pec-ta-tions is the root cause of your suffering. Turn the root cause into a root square, so mathematically speaking, when you root square something, it always becomes extremely small and sometimes irrational. You can say irrationally small – it is not correct to say, but you can say, nobody is stopping you… or me. Because the me in me is talking to the me in you…

*jumping meditation resumes*

You get the point. It doesn’t matter if you don’t. It’s your mistake for having higher than rock bottom expectations from this blog. Which further drives my point.

The actual blog starts here.

I shouldn’t be the one to be talking about relationships but let me anyway. This is not just about romantic relationships. Most people my age are already married, so there’s no romance left in their lives anyway. And those that aren’t married, there’s no romance there as well. All romance in your life begins to fade when you hit 32, and it completely disappears by the time you’re 34. What’s left is a string of friendships precariously hanging by a thread. Even your spouse is a friend – a fouse, or a spend.

I see folks my age making new friends and I immediately assume it’s friends with benefits. All strings attached, all the time. It doesn’t have to be sexual, but there’s something transactional. Sometimes sexual also, idk.

Maintaining older friendships comes with a set of challenges of its own. Especially if you’ve lost touch and reconnected after a while. It’s like using that old 1100 phone in 2026. It feels familiar, but also feels awkward. There’s only so far nostalgia can propel your relationship.

Connecting people, not generations

Unless you’ve always been friends, then you still maintain that prepubescent toilet humor with each other. When the occasional talk about the stock market and taxation and national security suddenly make you feel like a poser and you go back to joking about slapping ballz or <insert female-specific homoerotic timepass activity here>.