I was talking to someone at work about making friends as adults. And we concluded that it’s really hard.
Hellos? Is anyone there?
In your 20’s you’re constantly out and meeting people but then your friends start getting married, move away, have kids and you see them less and less.
And then in your 30’s you’re stuck in this weird place where you have friends, they’re not just readily accessible to you, and it takes effort to coordinate schedules. And realistically the place you spend the most time is at work, so it’s best you find a friend there, but that doesn’t always happen.
This new girl was telling me that she was growing apart from those she thought were friends–some still wanted to party and others just got weird. I get that. She said she just wanted to do things and go to museums or places not just drink anymore. I also get that. I told her that if I didn’t have a kid I would go to a museum with her.
And that’s the thing, it takes a lot of effort to schedule a time to see people and then you have to be selective with your time. You can’t do EVERYTHING like you did in your 20’s. I’m already scheduled 3 weeks out and if I have plans 3 out of 4 weekends in a month I’m not filling that last one. I need a cushion for breathing.
So we were talking about where you DO actually meet new people if not at work in your 30’s and it’s hard.
If you’re into sports you can sign up for a team sport but it’s always awkward to find a team to join when it’s probable that everyone else knows each other and made their own team.
You don’t really want to meet someone at a bar in your 30’s because you know, Baby Reindeer.
A cautionary tale about tea
Classes like dance, fitness or art? Perhaps. But I feel like those for adults are far and few between and fitness classes are a strange vibe–yes you like the same thing but everyone just books it to the next thing, they don’t wait around looking to make friends.
I came across this article a few months ago and thought that it was an interesting concept: hosting a dinner party for strangers.
I would be interested in attending one but honestly I don’t have time to host a dinner party for my own friends so I doubt I will.
I have always had dreams about hosting an elaborate old school dinner party where everyone gets dressed up with all the feels of Clue The Movie. One day, when I don’t live in a tiny apartment, maybe I will.
The dream
It’s an interesting set up for someone who just moved to an area and is trying to make friends. Imagine if we could have these gatherings in every neighborhood, it would be a great way to foster a community which we have definitely lost in the last couple of decades.
Here are some sites I found around dinner parties for strangers if you’re interested:
The dinner party project
Dinner with Friends NYC
& The Table
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My brain is still on holiday mode; slow moving this week. But we actually had a really fun weekend and it didn’t seem to fly by us as it normally does.
Went to the zoo on Friday.
Bronx Zoo Monorail is the best for seeing animals up close
Went to Astoria Park in Queens on Saturday which was really fun and there was a splash pad so my son was in heaven.
Happy place
Sunday was Big Bounce America–bounce house heaven. We sweated A LOT. But it was really fun and no one broke anything. We did find an abandoned pair of shoes in the obstacle course, random socks and band aids all over the place but overall really fun and more enjoyable than I expected.
Monday was a rainy chill day which was fine by me. A calm, quiet laundry day.
It’s nice now that my kid is older he’s a little less scheduled so we can stay out longer. He is in the ‘I don’t need a nap but if I don’t close my eyes for 20 minutes I’m a demon’ phase but that’s going to pass soon and then he’ll just be a kid awake all day.
All day for me to entertain. I’m already tired thinking about it.
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I’ve always been interested in health and medicine since I was in my late teens. I’ve read a lot of books about diet, health and fitness and every day I’m learning more and more. I find it so fascinating. And even more fascinating that after all this time we STILL don’t know everything about the human body. It’s wild.
I think most people are not in tune with their bodies. We wait until it totally shuts down or is screaming at us until we finally go to the doctor. How many people have we heard that waited too long and then it was too late?
I never want to be that person.
And that is why I can spot something the second my body feels off. And I stop and take a listen. Sometimes it tells me to go to sleep, sometimes it tells me I need to move more, or eat less shit. Sometimes it tells me that I need to stress about the small things less (usually by knocking me out with some sort of daycare illness so I can finally lay down).
For some reason we are conditioned to just power through and that is NOT the right approach. I have no idea who started that rumor but we need to cut it out.
Here are some books I’ve read in the last few years that have really helped me. Hopefully they can help you too or at least make you a little more in tuned with your body and mind. These are definitely for people who are just starting out, I’ll leave the more intense books for a later post.
The world is so loud and there are so many things to do all the time, I get it. But no one will care about you if YOU don’t care about you.
Here are some books I’ve really loved:
The Blue Zones Secrets For Living Longer by Dan Buettner
Pain Free by Pete Egoscue
Food: What the heck should I eat? By Mark Hyman
Go Green Get Lean by Kate Geagan
My first intro in 2009 to carbon footprints and why/how what we eat affects our environment. We are talking about food and environment now more than ever which I’m very happy about, but it’s been a long time coming. And she made it very easy to understand. This book is why I removed sugar from my coffee and never went back. It’s great for someone just starting who needs to clean up their eating and I think it’s very helpful to know WHY you should and how it impacts the environment around you.
Blue Zones are all the rage now but Dan started this work about 15 years ago and now people are taking note. What he’s shared with us is amazing and you can definitely see commonalities between these communities that live so far away from each other. It’s about slowing down, finding community and purpose, and clean eating. And a little wine once in a while.
How many people are living with chronic pain and just think it’s a way of life? It shouldn’t be and I know this because I found this book as I was going to physical therapy and in a lot of pain. It was really fascinating to learn more about the body and how everything is connected. I tried to keep up with some of the protocols from this book but life eventually got in the way and I stopped. My pain did get better during that time so I do feel there is something to it. A great easy to understand intro into your body and how everything is connected.
He looks at every food group and tells us what we’ve gotten wrong, what is good for us, and what not so good. He gives a lot of incite into the food companies and the corruption behind things we’ve held true to for years before going, wait a minute…like that The American Heart Association (AHA) receives much of its funding from food and pharmaceutical industries. They said coconut oil had too much saturated fat but had never done a real study to show that–The study was partly funded by canola oil processors. Then years later we’re like, wait coconut oil is one of the best things for you! This book helps weed through all the overwhelming info out there.
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Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist who has written a few books now like Give and Take and Hidden Potential and this book, Think-Again.
In a nutshell, the book is about the value of rethinking in our life. He gives a lot of good examples and anecdotes about things and recognizable companies to make his ideas really tangible and easy to understand.
I love a good book that gives you a lot of aha moments or leads you to stop and think for a second as you’re reading.
As we go through life, we often have to rethink what we’ve known or, more likely, what we think we know. Or at least we should be in order to grow as humans.
How many people had a hard time when they told us Pluto is no longer a planet? I know I did.
Because it challenged what we thought our whole lives.
No wonder it’s so hard to get older people to change their minds about things–Could you imagine thinking you know something for 70 years to be told it’s wrong? That would open a pandora’s box of your mind—what else were you wrong about?! What else don’t you really know??
It’s easier to just ignore it and keep a closed mind.
He also has a lot of recent examples as this was written in 2021, so he references the 2016 election and the Pandemic which was very relevant to us. That period of time is a prime cautionary tale of what happens when you don’t THINK AGAIN and when you hold on so tight to what you think you believe–because it’s better to hold your convictions instead of admitting you were wrong.
One great example was the creator of Blackberry. He was so good and inventive for the time. The value of the company was over $70 billion and was the most used during that period. He failed at rethinking once Apple came onto the scene.
Even when he had employees telling him that he needed to add a reliable browser to keep up with Apple, he refused, which led to his demise. He was so fixated on keeping his baby as is, instead of changing with the times.
Did you know that even Jobs was resistant to turning the Ipod into a phone? When his team urged him to do it, he refused because he didn’t like phone companies and didn’t want to be one. But they worked together and convinced him that it would be a computer company that just added a phone.
People are more open to change when you include a vision of continuity. He was curious about what they presented and after 6 months he agreed to it. Four years after the launch, iPhone accounted for half of Apple’s revenue.
Can you imagine if they didn’t try to convince him at all, if he didn’t become curious and was just stuck in his ways, or they came at him with a different approach? The iPhone as it exists today, may never have been or would’ve been different. Or we maybe would’ve all still been using Blackberries.
One chapter was about teaching students to question knowledge. It’s about teaching kids to be fact checkers, scientists, to keep learning and keep an open mind. There’s a lot of examples of things done in classrooms which would be great for teachers to look into.
I wrote down these quotes because they are really thought provoking:
“When we lack the knowledge and skills to achieve excellence, we sometimes lack the knowledge and skills to judge excellence”
“No matter how much brain power you have, if you lack the motivation to change your mind, you’ll miss many occasions to think again.”
“It’s a sign of wisdom to avoid believing every thought that enters your mind. It’s a mark of emotional intelligence to avoid internalizing every feeling that enters your heart”
“When someone becomes hostile, if you respond by viewing the argument as a war, you can either attack or retreat. If instead you treat it as a dance, you have another option–you can sidestep.”
And some that really made me stop and think:
“Strong leaders engage their critics and make themselves stronger. Weak leaders silence their critics and make themselves weaker”
We’ve been seeing a lot of this in the last few years and it’s going to lead to our demise unless we start being objective and subjective about things. Putin is also a great example of a whole nation silenced because they don’t agree with him and support him; a petulant child having an adult tantrum with very serious consequences. He would be a psychotherapists dream.
We need to not take things so personally–we need to separate our opinions from our identity. Too many people are taking things so personally like it’s a personal attack to their being instead of a disagreement of ideals or beliefs. I don’t know how we got like this in our country–you’re either a democrat or a republican, you’re either with me or against me. We are going to be our own demise and it’s very sad to see. Strong leaders address the duress they don’t add fuel to the fire nor do they ignore it. They are mature enough to have a conversation about it–a logical one. Not everyone needs to agree on everything and I don’t know where we went wrong and started thinking that way.
And finally:
“When we dedicate ourselves to a plan and it isn’t going as we hoped, our first instinct isn’t usually to rethink it. Instead, we tend to double down and sink more resources in the plan”
This one had me think about my life, my journey of figuring out what the hell I want to do with the years I have left. And it made me realize that we sometimes pressure ourselves to do things we think are what we are supposed to do, or steer our life in the way we think it should go. But sometimes when it feels like you’re just crashing into waves the whole time maybe, just maybe, life is telling you to let go and see where you end up. I’ve definitely been trying to do this in the last year.
I read another book after this that I really loved and aligned with this Designing-Your-Life, it’s about thinking like a designer for your life and building a life of joy. I’ll be reviewing it at some point, I’m in the middle of my 2nd read right now. Sometimes we get stuck thinking that our path has to be the one we originally thought and we’re so fixated on it that we miss the other opportunities that usually are better for us.
Overall, this book was excellent and I will go back to reread it as well. The theme I am seeing from what I’m learning is that open-mindedness and the ability to pivot and rethink ideas and beliefs are some of the strongest traits a successful person and leader could have in life.
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Had a great time in Denver for a few of days the end of March into April. We missed the Monday snowstorm and got there on Wednesday where the rest of the week was 58-65 degrees. It felt so amazing to be outside and moving every day. Then we came back to NYC to rain for a week. Both United flights were not Boeing’s thankfully and all parts stayed on the plane. I’m now doing the final touches on my Orlando and Jamaica trips. This month had a few days off from work which was nice to relax. And I had my very own totally alone wellness day which was very nice.
What I Ate:
Kyuramen (Bayside, Queens)- I wasn’t impressed. Had tables in a honeycomb shape which was cool so you had to climb up to your table. Got a crispy chicken sandwich that had rice as the bun. Chicken wasn’t white meat, it looked a bit undercooked but I was also wondering if it might have been pork instead and they mixed up the order. I didn’t say anything because I know I’m picky with meat so it might have been a Me thing. They had good purple sweet potato fries though.
The French Workshop (Bayside Queens)– this dessert made up for the lackluster dinner. I got a piece of dessert that tasted like a giant Ferrero Rocher hazelnut ball. SO GOOD.
I don’t even wanna know how many calories. My favorite part is this beautiful dessert on a nice silver platter on a paper plate with a plastic fork. This establishment said “Hard pass to washing dishes”
Wellness retreat Yo1: Breakfast lunch and Dinner. I didn’t have to make myself any of those meals; it was glorious. Vegan based. I had a chicken cutlet made of tofu. It was amazing. And I had just talked about how I can’t get behind tofu. This changed my mind. Soups, salad, juices and a chocolate mousse for dessert. I wish I could eat like that all the time. And have someone else make it.
Non chicken cutletNon steak steak
What I Read:
The Son and Heir: A Memoir by Alexander Munninghoff
Miss Independent by Nicole Lapin
What I Watched:
Chicken Nugget (Netflix)
Oppenheimer
Aquaman and The Lost Kingdom
Baby Reindeer (Netflix)
Griselda (Netflix)
Tracker (on CBS)
Toddler Corner:
Started soccer again and he picked out new soccer shoes. Bright orange. We’re making progress in wanting to wear sports gear.
Got a helmet and scooter so we’re scooting a lot outside when it’s nice. He’s in that phase of existential crisis of wanting to be a big independent boy but also not completely being ok with not being a baby anymore. It’s emotionally exhausting but we’re working through our feelings. All of us.
Picked him up early one day that I had off to take him to the Long Island Children’s Museum to see an Eric Carle exhibit and they were also showing Don’t Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus the Musical that day…two of his favorite authors so he was very excited and overwhelmed. It was a nice family outing. I will always take him out of school for experiences.
Favorite Pic Of The Month:
I found this just laying outside the parking lot of work one morning. Warning? A sign of a fun night? The mystery is still not solved.
What I’m Looking Forward To Next Month:
More sun and being outdoors. May is going to be a relatively calm month so I have no plans, just taking it one week at a time. Unlike the always busy June.
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Life With Purpose (And Other Things) 