flâneur

Enter the friendaverse - by Shaiyan Khan - Synchronicities

shaiyan.substack.com · 1,055 words · saved by 1 readers

I love my friends, but as I gear up for a more permanent — visa pending — move to New York, I’ve been thinking a lot about the abstract idea of friendship. How we build it, how we lose it, and how we so delicately flirt it out from the clutches of an acquaintance. It’s strange to me that friendships are treated so differently from the other pillars of a healthy adult life: underwhelming financial situations are met with job hunts, underwhelming fitness levels are met with exercise, but underwhelming friends are just met over and over again. Nonchalance. There are structural problems here, of course: cities aren’t equipped to build community, communities are essential to finding friends, and so in the absence of novel friendship it’s understandably difficult to escape the gravity of old circles. That’s a lot to unpack. So instead of taking the meta approach of discussing friendships as some amorphous concept, I’ve been specifically thinking through friend groups. In my mind, an interest

I love my friends, but as I gear up for a more permanent — visa pending — move to New York, I’ve been thinking a lot about the abstract idea of friendship. How we build it, how we lose it, and how we so delicately flirt it out from the clutches of an acquaintance. It’s strange to me that friendships are treated so differently from the other pillars of a healthy adult life: underwhelming financial situations are met with job hunts, underwhelming fitness levels are met with exercise, but underwhelming friends are just met over and over again. Nonchalance. There are structural problems here, of…

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