No new friends

Only transactional events please

Hello all subscribers. One note I wanted to make was that I imported a bunch of people from my email list on racketracer.com over here. That website is very much now dead to me. If it weren’t for the fact that it holds domain authority and has some backlinks pointing to my startup - I would have gladly stopped paying the exorbant hosting fees to Bluehost by now. I’m moving all blog posts over to Substack for the time being while it’s easy.

Around the beginning of each new year, I always have a feeling that this is the year I finally stop making new friends.

This started my senior year in college. I distinctly remembering even tracking some metrics since Facebook had some feature where I could look at the number of new friends I made each year (haha). And maybe it was the nostalgia of graduating, but since college was the last year of school, I thought that meant it was the end of social circles and easy friendships.

This hypothesis has naturally proven to be incorrect in the six years since then. But I’m noticing a shift in the nature of new friendships made each subsequent year. Nowadays almost all new friendships seem transactional at first. And then slowly, the business gets mixed with pleasure, and the friendships last if we both get along.

I see transactional relationships as a growing trend. As we mature I think we get a little more time sensitive and protective. We care more about our own personal mental and physical health and tend to place a value on our existing relationships accordingly. But we still care about having social contact and so we naturally gravitate to being friendly with the people in our social circles.

I see this in my own life. Nowadays my life revolves around running a startup, my girlfriend, a few side hobbies, traveling, and catching up with close friends. Last year during the pandemic, I made a couple of new great friends all online and through the initial lenses of relating to my startup Interview Query and data science. It just turns out that after meeting these people for longer, they were still people I wanted to hang out with, chat about life, and extend to more conversation. And it was awesome that we shared a multitude of interests in which some of them revolved around a focus that I put in for 8 hours a day.

I keep on thinking of what Kobe mentioned at one point about having friends. Not for any real reason other than the fact that he was so focused on winning. He had people that he admired, and people he spent time with, but they were all there to help him with winning. Such an extreme mindset - but here’s the quote from the old article.

So how much are you willing to give up? Have you given up the possibility of having friends? Do you have any friends?
I have “like minds.” You know, I’ve been fortunate to play in Los Angeles, where there are a lot of people like me. Actors. Musicians. Businessmen. Obsessives. People who feel like God put them on earth to do whatever it is that they do. Now, do we have time to build great relationships? Do we have time to build great friendships? No. Do we have time to socialize and to hangout aimlessly? No. Do we want to do that? No. We want to work. I enjoy working.

So is this a choice? Are you actively choosing not to have friends?
Well, yes and no. I have friends. But being a “great friend” is something I will never be. I can be a good friend. But not a great friend. A great friend will call you every day and remember your birthday. I’ll get so wrapped up in my shit, I’ll never remember that stuff. And the people who are my friends understand this, and they’re usually the same way. You gravitate toward people who are like you. But the kind of relationships you see in movies—that’s impossible for me. I have good relationships with players around the league. LeBron and I will text every now and then. KG and I will text every now and then. But in terms of having one of those great, bonding friendships—that’s something I will probably never have. And it’s not some smug thing. It’s a weakness. It’s a weakness.

It will be interesting to see how new friendships develop from here onward. Maybe there will be a day where I’ll just not care about forging new friendships. But I don’t think that will be the case.