(after writing this post I realized it is somewhat of a followup to The Intern Effect.)
It's been a long time since I started blogging. I'm no longer a green 20-year-old. Life has happened and is continuing to happen, but rather than levelling up all of my skills, some of them have begun to atrophy from lack of use. One such skill is that of being social. My life at this point is so comfortable that I can usually get away with only talking to the people I need to, eg. the colleagues in my team and my significant other and on occasion an old friend or two. Over the course of last week I've had the opportunity to engage in social interaction with a much larger group of people, who are all unknown yet amazingly interesting to talk to. It was an event that I won't soon forget. Let's call it the "going on a trip with people you think can be your friends but you don't know them that well yet and then you end up being pleasantly surprised by everyone" kind of feeling. It's the AK feeling all over again! How fitting that the company I would go to after AK ended up being part of something called AKQA. Life gets better if you just keep adding letters.
But hey, this blog wouldn't be this blog if I couldn't find something to bitch about, so here goes. There's one thing in my current life that I am not very happy with, and the effect of which kind of got hammered home during last week's events: I don't have any super best friends. I mean, I've got close friends, and I've got one or two people who may take offence at my saying this, but I don't really have any one or multiple people that I know I can and will be able to hang out with at any time now or in the future, and that's entirely my own fault. Life has happened, and all my old friends (and myself!) now have their own situation that takes precedence over 'hanging out with friends'. I don't blame them of course; none of us live near each other any more so it's not like we can see each other every week. As a result everyone spends more time with their significant other which leads to babies, which leads to even less time spent with close friends. That's life. But that's also choices.
That's where I left it at in 2009 in The Intern Effect. What I feel I am lacking is something that, at the time, I attributed to Japan being Japan and interns being knowingly temporary, but it was really much simpler: I was younger. Greener. I still seek the same thing, but I am seeking it at a level further than I even thought about back then. Close personal connections. Connections that are hampered by those pesky little personal lives that everyone has. A perfect example of this: one of my friends changed cities recently and I promised to visit him, yet I still haven't done so, even after I had read a blogpost from him complaining about the exact same feeling of friend disconnection. We're all seeking a more fulfilling form of friendship, yet we're all somehow not doing the things we need to to get it.
I dare not answer yet what could be the reason for this, or how to 'solve' it. Perhaps that'll just automatically make sense when I'm older. But I think I'm old enough to see the problem clearly now, and to have some ideas of where to look for a solution.
Learning a new skill is easy in that you can quickly get up to a reasonable level, and then need an extra-ordinate amount of time after that to become an expert. It's no different with friendships. True friendships require a lot of time and commitment, with no guarantee of payoff. Just like when learning chess or playing a game or training your body, you might plateau and be unable to get any better. I think that's a little bit what is happening to me: I've built up the social skills and experience needed to easily make friends and quickly get up to a quite-satisfying level of friendship, but then I plateau. I need to improve (or recover) my social skills as well as just spend more time with people in general. I haven't made it easy for myself by moving away from a lot of people who I could be closer to, but that's something I can fix. Not easily, though. Getting better at something takes time, and I need to finally make a proper decision on what (or who) to spend that time on. Like I said in 2009, I want to make the world a better place. I am becoming more aware of my own personal limitations within that context. Perhaps many people taking many small steps is as effective as one person taking a giant leap. Just don't jump off a cliff.