flâneur

Give your friends a chance to abandon you - by Kasra

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Last week I helped my best friend pack his truck to move to a new city. I’m excited for him, and yet I shudder to think about the time and energy it’ll take to build that same level of closeness with newer friends. It’s not that I have trouble meeting new people; it’s that very few people have the open space to go through the effort of building a new long-lasting friendship from scratch. I’ve been struck by Esther Perel’s observation that “modern loneliness masks itself as hyper connectivity. And so people have easily 1000 virtual friends, but no one they can ask to feed their cat.”1 What do you do when the one friend you would ask to feed your cat has left? I made this meme recently about connection: There seems to be a tendency among some circles, myself included, to think deeply about connection in order to find shortcuts to it. You have events popping up where people plunge immediately into deep personal stories, or do strange-looking meditative exercises like staring into each oth

Last week I helped my best friend pack his truck to move to a new city. I’m excited for him, and yet I shudder to think about the time and energy it’ll take to build that same level of closeness with newer friends. It’s not that I have trouble meeting new people; it’s that very few people have the open space to go through the effort of building a new long-lasting friendship from scratch. I’ve been struck by Esther Perel’s observation that “modern loneliness masks itself as hyper connectivity. And so people have easily 1000 virtual friends, but no one they can ask to feed their cat.”1 What do…

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