All My Friends
A GMT NYE Feast
Happy New Year! (I think I can still say that.) Let’s talk about loneliness, friends and big girl beds.
“I defeated death while mourning my biggest loss,” Arja Huestis writes in her essay, Diamond Mind: Feeling and Refracting Multitudes, “and yet unexpectedly went from feeling like a dull shadow floating through daily motions to rebuilding myself brighter and stronger.”
Arja and her husband, Guillermo, two good friends from our days in DC, lost Amalia weeks before her birth. Which means we never saw her, “Full head of curly black hair, a perfect button nose, and very long eyelashes.” And we never experienced what an amazing woman Amalia surely would have been. Take a minute to give the piece a read and appreciate what you have. Because, while Anisa will never have the pleasure of calling Amalia a friend, I hope Baby Girl carries the spirit of Amalia.
Speaking of…
All My Friends
We didn’t go anywhere over the holidays. But we were busy.
Anisa’s second birthday was a rolling party of friends and family. Christmas was a day long meal at my sister’s. And, New Year’s Eve was pure chaos. Even though it didn’t start out that way.
Our plan was to ring in the New Year with a few families Toya met through her mom’s group. Folks would come over after nap time, around 3:30 PM, toddlers would toddle, parents would party like the sleep deprived, all wrapped up and out the door before bedtime four hours later.
Call it a GMT NYE.
Anisa went down for her nap, I cranked away in the kitchen, Toya pulled together beverages for the evening. Baby Girl woke up to a tidy, quiet, house, and she knew something was afoot.
Soon enough, families started to arrive and the volume increased. As I dashed from the stove to the barbeque, I saw four two-year-old’s running over, under and in-between their respective parents, having a grand old time.
Leading the pack was Baby Girl. Running with her hands up high, beaming, she yelled to me, “All my friends are heeeeeere!” She could not have been happier.
Settle down. I know what you are thinking. But, since Baby Daddy would like to retire at some point in his life, we are not having another kid. Yet, Anisa’s pure joy got me to thinking about friendships and loneliness.
According to a 2023 report issued by Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, "Loneliness is a subjective internal state. It’s the distressing experience that results from perceived isolation or unmet need between an individual’s preferred and actual experience.” Meanwhile, social connection, a fundamental human need, is dropping. We are spending 20 hours less per month engaging with friends than we did roughly twenty years ago. For young people, ages 15-24, time spent in-person with friends has reduced by nearly 70% over almost two decades, from roughly 150 minutes per day in 2003 to 40 minutes per day in 2020.
In his 2000 book, Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam found that two technological changes of the 1970’s, the automobile and the television, put us on this trajectory. These days, the smartphone — a television in our hands that takes us anywhere we desire — has only made things worse: kids aged 8-18 spend an average of 7.5 hours a day on screens.
“The individual preference for solitude, scaled up across society and exercised repeatedly over time, is rewiring America’s civic and psychic identity, “Derek Thompson writes in The Atlantic. “And the consequences are far-reaching—for our happiness, our communities, our politics, and even our understanding of reality.”
With the explosion of AI in our lives, our bot-friends will offer the perception of social connection. Or, as Yuval Noah Harari put it in the opening pages of Nexus, “People might come to build relationships, join movements, hold jobs and experience emotional ups and downs in environments made of bits rather than atoms.” We all know this is happening to us. But, we don’t really think about the repercussions.
Counterintuitively, our loneliness, our sense of solitude, intensifies the individual connections we develop through the echo chambers of our choosing. What relationships we have spin up increasingly strident opinions of others, polarize our politics, create a desire for extreme control. Our demand for answers is immediately satisfied; we have no ability to sit with the unknown.
Without social connections that stretch beyond echo chambers, there is no common good, there is no opportunity to truly understand someone else’s pain or happiness.
In the worst case scenario, our future is season two of Squid Game that Rebecca Sun describes as, “All about the toll of tribalism: how the push to pit ourselves against one another in a winner-take-all political battle leads to destruction and despair for all.”1
So, what does this mean for a Anisa? Much less for her father, a classic introvert-extrovert who draws energy from people, but also likes to be left alone? (The name of this thing is Cranky Dad, after all.)
Which brings me back to something I keep writing about: fear. How do we live life less afraid? Even if that means we need to get through the fearful times we are living through? It is a brutal cycle we are in. And I am not sure us adults are up to the challenge.
See, the other thing that happened after the New Year is that Anisa started sleeping in her big bed. We were more afraid of this change than she was. We worried she would fall off the bed or wake up in the middle of the night scared or just wonder why her sleeping world suddenly got so big.
But every night, we set aside the throw pillows,2 Anisa clambers into the far corner of the bed, curls up with her stuffy of choice for the evening, puts her head down and turns to the door as I walk out, “Night-night, Daddy. Love you.”
Nothing to be afraid of.
What I’m Cooking
The aforementioned GMT NYE feast got out of hand:
Satay Chicken Skewers
Ginger and Chili Grilled Shrimp
Grilled Beef Skewers
Rice Vermicelli with Fish Curry
Braised Chicken in Coconut Galangal Sauce
Thai Style Sweet and Spicy Shrimp
Thai Style Spare Ribs
Miso Glazed Vegetables
Spicy Cucumbers with Mint, Scallions and Peanuts
Various sauces
Sources included Bangkok: Recipes and Stories from the Heart of Thailand, NYT Cooking and other sites.3 So much fun even if Toya now has final sign-off on all menus so I never overdo it like this again.
Can we talk about the impressive heads of hair on South Korean men? It was Bollywood level impressive.
I believe a bed should not have more pillows than the number of heads sleeping on said bed. It is an argument I have yet to win.
Pro-tip: Don’t skimp on the fish sauce.