They’re not your friends

I want to talk about what I’ve been going through for a while now.

It’s only been the last couple of weeks that I’ve realized what it is exactly and it’s that I don’t have any real friends.

It’s not my objective for anyone to feel sorry for me but I know a lot of people especially those in this online ecosystem feel the same way, and I think the realizations I have come to can be useful.

I know I’ve done a lot of the damage to myself but when you have something you’re working towards it feels like everything else is secondary, almost like creating a separate reality.

Where one side of you is extremely happy that you’re making progress in whatever you’re doing, and the other side (which is everything that’s not that) gets abandoned.

Even thinking back to high school and university I never had that one person I would call my best friend or a group of people I looked forward to catching up with, I’ve always been that person who is invited to make up numbers and it’s not like that worried me too much, I still got to hang out with people.

I now understand that is the lowest form of friendship, that no one should be striving for, but even now I don’t have that. And for the last few years that never worried me, I think because I’m an only child I am used to not being around people all the time and would even say I enjoy it but after a while, it starts wearing you down in some way that I can’t describe.

For context, four years ago I moved an hour and a half away from my hometown, which isn’t far. But in these four years, I’ve had many of my ‘friends’ promise to come and check out where I live, and hang out for a few days but a total of two people have followed through.

And when you see people put in such little effort you start to realise maybe you only call people friends because you see them a couple of days a week routinely and the moment you break the routine, that’s it.

Then I think why has this happened? Why have I never found the group of people I gravitate towards, why have I never been to a party that I don’t want to leave after 5 minutes, whereas other people live for them and I think it’s because the people I’ve surrounded myself with, aren’t my people.

And until you move away from your hometown or pursue what you want regardless of what your ‘friends’ think you will never realize that. And since I have moved away, that’s exactly what happened, everything I thought I had ever wanted in terms of work, lifestyle, even down to how I want to raise a family is now the complete opposite.

The same goes for my friends, I thought I wanted people to hang out with and share a few laughs with but I want people who are looking to improve their lives because that improves yours too, and why else would you want to hang out with people who aren’t adding anything to your life.

And when I zoomed out, I realized it’s an impossibility to think that out of the 8 billion people on this earth, the few people from your hometown that you choose to spend your time with are the best people for you.

And had I not moved away from my hometown or had a lack of good friends, I wouldn’t be where I am now.

Then I came across this comment on a video…

‘The Lonely Chapter’ – “There is a period in everyone’s journey, where they have become so different by starting new things that they no longer fit in with their old friends, but they haven’t yet developed enough to find and fit in with their new ones. You have to go through that lonely chapter in the middle to move from where you were to where you want to be.”

Reading that made everything come full circle, and I started to realize that what I am experiencing isn’t uncommon, and I feel as though I am slowly coming out of the development phase because cool things are starting to happen.

Like selling this hat I made for abandoned dogs, if you want to pick one up the link is in the description, all the profits from each hat goes to feeding abandoned dogs.

A bit of a shameless plug.

But looking beyond projects, friendships are starting to form online, and for the first time, I can talk about my interests, and my future and have people being able to resonate with me.

So suddenly I am coming through this ‘lonely chapter’ better off than I have ever been in my life.

And it’s kind of funny, instead of feeling like I am missing out when I see people hang out with their friends each weekend, I think it’s the most debilitating thing in their lives.

And I truly think this the golden age for creating relationships that otherwise would have never been possible without the internet.

You can talk about exactly what you want and attract people from all walks of life that get you, without even having to leave your house, and people refuse to take advantage of it because of what their ‘friends’ might think.

Which is a sad way to live.

That’s all from me today, a bit of a different post.

Talk soon.

Ryan.