Substrate

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I think one of the best (and rarest) feelings in the world is knowing you’re doing something that feels right. I really really respect people who are good at listening to their gut instincts, who are in tune with what feels right and chart their actions accordingly. ​ True resonance between the right people has its own language. It’s incredibly effortless, a warm glow of energy they give you. Some people you can’t help but love. You can’t resist being a moth drawn to a flame. Something in you just knows: these are my people, this is my person. ​ “If you get close to what you love, who you are is revealed to you, and it expands” – Ethan Hawke ​ A lot of my friends are ‘free’ in ways that I am not and therefore they inspire me to grow and change.

I’ve begun to instead deeply worry about the power of inertia in our lives. Put simply, I think people are not nearly as intentional as they should be with their lives and how they make decisions. The decisions people make in the short-term and understanding long-term implications, and everything in between increasingly just happen. And we let them. I think the ages of 28-32 really is when inertia starts to take hold strongest. You no longer think you are totally flying blind in life, you are increasingly a little more tired than normal, and the path of least resistance can seem nice after having life beat you down to varying degrees. How much can I or should I attempt to impact or change those close to me and their lives?

My friends didn't wait for me to ask. They showed up. They took over. They didn't ask. ​ When they all swept out of there four hours later, my place was a home. Not only was everything put away — but now it had a memory attached to it, a group memory, friends, laughing, dirty jokes, hard work. These are the kinds of friends I have. Be that kind of friend to others.

I found my best friend in pieces: the sense of humor from the disco producer, the philosophical banter from the Twitter friend, the emotional support from the diamond maker. I found that all of the qualities I wanted in a best friend didn’t have to come from a single person.

To travel the world visiting everywhere only once can hardly bring understanding. You must return several times before a place opens up to you. ​ The thing that familiarity affords is not having to awkwardly reach out to people, but simply existing alongside them enough until it no longer becomes weird to interact. ​ To dwell poetically is to live as if even a simple apartment was your home forever. Once you are able to cast off the feeling that wherever you are living is somehow temporary, wherever you are living will begin to feel like home. To do this requires a kind of love.

As predicted, compared to those who believed they were interacting with a human operator, participants who believed they were interacting with a computer reported lower fear of self-disclosure, lower impression management, displayed their sadness more intensely, and were rated by observers as more willing to disclose.

Insane wealth doesn’t insulate children from the harshness of the world around them. Just because you’re rich doesn’t mean your life is going to be good, or even easy. The key to making any relationship last is making an effort. What does making an effort look like? Remembering things about people, reaching out to them regularly, letting them know you care. I’ve become a big fan of phone calls.

listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. Think how the friends that really listen to us are the ones we move toward, and we want to sit in their radius as though it did us good, like ultraviolet rays. This is the reason: When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life. You know how if a person laughs at your jokes you become funnier and funnier, and if he does not, every tiny little joke in you weakens up and dies. Well, that is the principle of it. It makes people happy and free when they are listened to. And if you are a listener, it is the secret of having a good time in society (because everybody around you becomes lively and interesting), of comforting people, of doing them good. Who are the people, for example, to whom you go for advice? Not to the hard, practical ones who can tell you exactly what to do, but to the listeners; that is, the kindest, least censorious, least bossy people that you know. It is because by pouring out your problem to them, you then know what to do about it yourself. When we listen to people there is an alternating current, and this recharges us so that we never get tired of each other. We are constantly being recreated. Now there are brilliant people who cannot listen much. They have no ingoing wires on their apparatus. They are entertaining, but exhausting, too. I think it is because these lecturers, these brilliant performers, by not giving us a chance to talk, do not let us express our thoughts and expand; and it is this little creative fountain inside us that begins to spring and cast up new thoughts, and unexpected laughter and wisdom. That is why, when someone has listened to you, you go home rested and lighthearted.

And social media is playing a role, allowing them to distantly observe people they once truly felt connected to, which opens up the gap between their wishes for those friendships and the more anemic reality ​ our lives are not as easily separated into pots that can be placed on separate burners. Extinguishing friendship has consequences for every other aspect of life. ​ As anyone who’s taken time out of the workforce to be a full-time caregiver knows, it’s not always easy to switch a burner back on after it’s been extinguished for a long time. ​ We’re more interested in resilience. You can’t stay truly connected without some level of misunderstanding or conflict, so the real Big Friendship goal is just to stay in it. Instead of pretending we won’t be challenged, we want the ability to bounce back and heal our inevitable wounds. ​ “Friendships don’t have the hallmarks,” Langan says. “They don’t have the milestones.” So it’s up to the people in the friendship to create them. ​ Langan says that another key to staying attached is to find verbal and nonverbal ways to tell each other you plan to be there in the future. ​ Usually the only way through it is to acknowledge it’s happening. And yes, it’s hard. ​ No one human can meet your every single emotional need.

Truly take a moment to think about it: How do you want to occupy space online? What are your goals? It’s nice when people treat their social media accounts as extensions of themselves, rather than as ads for themselves. The internet should not be a space to spam innocent bystanders with Soundcloud links and promotional blurbs. Instead, it should be a space to really exist inside of, and a place where you can forge connections that organically grow into mutual interest in—and support for—each other. Online friends are just different than your IRL friends. So, do not drop your friends or completely abandon your “old life” when you get a few hundred or thousand followers online.

But just know, their work and sacrifice is the thing that got you six. And maybe immediately go over to dap them up.

All this could happen and I wouldn’t necessarily barge through the apartment door and share that. It takes a nudge or a simple question from Nick for me to feel comfortable on a social level unleashing the 4 min story. “What's up,” “how’s it going,” “I had a weird day today, how ‘bout you?” is all that it takes. Just a simple prodding and boom, here comes the story. If he doesn't ask that because he’s busy coding, relaxing, or cooking, it won’t come up.

Look as long as you can at the friend you love, no matter whether that friend is moving away from you or coming back toward you.

A pause...and then I saw him pop up on my screen, eyes warm and crinkling, smiling widely. “Ahhhhh, there you are!” he beamed, clearly thrilled to see me. It made me happy. He was right: it didn’t feel like a proper reunion until we saw each others' faces. ​ My internet friendships look a lot like my IRL friendships, but they lack corporeality, are impossible for me to get my fingers around. When we hang out in person, our offline interactions look a lot like our online ones: talking, analyzing, processing, thinking out loud, asking questions, reflecting, words, words, words. Our brains are directly wired into one another. Our bodily expressions are confined to heart-eyes, wow, angery, cry, or whichever limited faces our messaging apps allow us to make. We blow blue bubbles at each other. We convey our emotions through slang and punctuation, express our love through memes. ​ Robin talks about making a messaging app for his family, with a grand total of four users, and the joy of building things just for yourself, much like a home cook as opposed to a professional chef.

and I’d tell them stories about Jane. I pictured her scooping them into her arms. “She’d have eaten you up like English muffins,” I told them. ​ They showed Jane the photograph—she couldn’t really see by that point, but Denise says she knew, she knew, she saw, she knew, she heard, she smiled—and then she died. She knew, she heard, she knew.

This has been so exciting for me because (reason). Thanks for letting me share. What’s important about that to you? Likes don’t count, you can’t respond to them. The triangle of friendship is consistency, vulnerability, and connection, with the latter being the base. I’m going to continue to mingle. It was lovely to meet you/y’all! “Hi, I’m [Jasdev]! Mind if I join you?” Suffixing clothing compliments by asking where they got it from. We all want to be both seen and supported—in love, friendships, and work.

That was a day I felt our friendship leveled-up, because I knew I could trust her to give me honest feedback on any subject. "Truth is Kindness" ​ all forms of lying --including while lies meant to spare feelings-- are associated with less satisfying relationships ​ I slide into dishonesty more often than I’d like. It’s easy and it’s comfortable.

“That is what is strange—that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone.”

and exercise and yoga and turning off devices and caffeine and pep talks—these can all help with our metaphorical recharge, but they’re not a perfect formula like a plug into a correctly-shaped hole. Sometimes are bodies and minds are stubborn mysteries. I have been thinking lately, as usual, our language about wellness is bending toward the language of machines. the one and only infallible, deep-in-the-bones, rejuvenating source of energy, has been the love of good people. the warmth of friends I haven’t seen in a year, and who have lit my face up with a grin so expansive that I find my cheeks sore at the end of the day.

Purl, directed by Kristen Lester and produced by Gillian Libbert-Duncan, features an earnest ball of yarn named Purl who gets a job in a fast-paced, high energy, bro-tastic start-up. Yarny hijinks ensue as she tries to fit in, but how far is she willing to go to get the acceptance she yearns for, and in the end, is it worth it? Get ready for more #SparkShorts coming to Disney+ later in 2019. Sign up for updates at http://disneyplus.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Pixar Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pixar/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Pixar Copyright: (C) Disney•Pixar

That gaze is a monolithic one: it’s the mass of readers I am potentially failing by writing something pretentious, boring and not worth their time. Everyone is watching! It had better be good! It's is the gaze that says: You can't write unless you're describing everything in the cellar. ​ And most of all, letters make me feel like I am reading things that were written to me and for me alone. And that's my favorite feeling in the world. ​ So maybe the privacy I’m talking about really is just trust, and the ability to write to someone you know will still love you despite your writing. ​ —I’m talking about a friend who loves you enough to edit your writing.

“They had to develop cultures of safety. That often means specific social safeguards. Those ‘ossified corporate structures’ that Silicon Valley hates so much because they ‘keep you from moving fast’? Yeah, a lot of them exist to keep top brass from doing hideously stupid things.”

BAD METAPHORS is an ongoing series that takes a critical look at the figures of speech that shuttle between technology and everyday life. In the gentle shrugging off of blame, “bandwidth” as metaphor becomes a useful distortion, since there is no regulatory body assigning us an emotional frequency spectrum. When we discuss feelings and relationships in terms of “bandwidth” we are treating them like megabits of information.

Of course, there are downsides to each model of relationship. People whose friendships primarily consist of sporadic deep dives probably feel a higher degree of loneliness day-to-day during dry spells in-between the deep dive nourishment. (If you’re in an intimate romantic relationship, this can be okay because you tend to share minutia/quick hits with your spouse so don’t need to lean on friends as much for this.) People whose friendships primarily consist of regular quick check-ins and texts and workday lunches probably feel some lack of depth with some of their so-called “close friends.” They realize that after years of “how was your day?” conversations and staying up to speed on the real time relationship drama or work battles that will someday be easily forgotten — they realize that they’ve never explored life’s deeper questions with their friend.

Before Linkedin, contact books, address books, or the personal CRM, David Rockefeller had 200,000 index cards.

“Your tribe has the context about you & your life — and can remind you, when you need it, of who you are, and who you can be.”