How Friendships End: "I haven't heard from him in a few years…"

[Music]
you know it's like no i'm like i'm 34 and [Music] that is the thing that sucks about getting older said uh the older you get the more people you lose and i haven't talked to moses in a couple years but one of the first messages that we sent back and forth to each other was like oh you're learning japanese i'm learning japanese too and then over the years it would be like well how just know that we we would go back and forth on occasion not that often i mean we weren't super good friends but we knew of each other we would talk to each other on occasion but i don't know i just i still remember that stupid [ __ ] hat you gotta remember guys that our time here is short and we gotta stop making excuses we gotta we gotta do what what we gotta do for the short time that we have it i don't have many regrets in life but i do regret that we've known each other for so long and i hadn't reached out in a while a lot of people live with this kind of tension in their lives and it becomes obvious in the moments following after the death of a loved one or when you receive the shocking unexpected news that somebody you knew on youtube has died some old colleague or some old friend but a lot of people live with this tension all the time and they don't think about what the alternative would be what the opposite way of living would be what that would really entail in terms of your personal commitment right what would it mean to not have and to never have this regret in life that you didn't stay in touch with people right to never be in this position of looking back and saying wow i wish i'd made the effort i wish i'd built on that friendship more i wish i hadn't maybe lost touch with that person after i made the effort to to really be friends that person okay and if you think it through if you think it through taking that alternate path or taking that kind of commitment to its opposite extreme entails a very different sort of tragedy although it certainly would mean that you'd never have this kind of regret in your life think seriously about why people don't stay in touch with one another i would say the number one reason nobody wants to face up to nobody wants to talk about is shame most people are not proud of what they've done with their lives they're not proud of what they're doing right now and when they become most keenly aware of their sense of shame is when they speak to friends acquaintances and family members people who remember what their commitments were what their promises were what their aspirations were maybe just six months ago but maybe five years ago right i am someone who's lived my life with a very high level of commitment not just to friends not even just to acquaintances but to people i consider colleagues and i say that because sometimes your colleagues are neither your friends nor acquaintances they may be people you don't like but who you value because of some kind of cooperative or collaborative connection and i'm willing to make a very very high level of effort to stay in touch with for years and for decades people i just consider my colleagues why do my colleagues stop talking to me i've seen dramatic examples of this okay it's because they're cheating on their wives it's because they broke up with their wife and they're with a new chick or they they split up with their wife because they were sleeping with their secretary and they were living together for a while and then they broke up with her and now they're in this other situation and they don't want to talk to somebody who knew them before who was friends with them when they were together with their wife right this is an easy example okay it's easy because it's all out in the open you can't really conceal it right they can't conceal it what they can do is avoid dealing with the consequences by avoiding you by avoiding talking to anyone who knew them before when they were in that marriage or when they when they were telling everybody they knew that although they broke up their marriage they did it because they were so in love with their secretary and this relation with the secretary was gonna last forever right then they really feel like a fool because that didn't work out that only lasted a couple months then they and some people are conscious that they're doing this and most are not okay i knew people who were buddhist scholars and gave up on buddhist scholarship i knew people who were doing humanitarian work in southeast asia and gave up on humanitarian work i knew people who were trying to be political intellectuals of different kinds and they gave up on those aspirations those ambitions that vision of themselves and of who they aspired to be right i'll be honest i think the shame that comes from that is much deeper and much more difficult to deal with than cheating on your wife or falling in love with your secretary because a hundred percent of it is on you if you're if your marriage falls apart there were at least two people involved depending on what kind of marriage maybe there were three or four or five people involved but there were at least two people it's not a hundred percent any one person's fault the reason why marriage didn't work out there's going to be some blame to go around right when you made connections when you gather people around you whether those were bonds you know bonds of friendship or was more like someone who was a colleague or more like someone who was you know just an acquaintance over the internet knowing them staying in touch with them when your sense of ambition and purpose has shifted or your sense of ambition and purpose has crumbled okay it's a reminder of what it was you aspired to do before what kind of person you aspired to be and then just just type just answering an email from them just talking them on skype just staying in touch by facebook message it's the most painful the most shameful thing in the world because it makes you stop and reflect on what it is you're really doing with your life right now it's easy to say oh i wish i'd stayed and touched them i wish i'd still shared my life with him i wish it would really examine why you don't why you don't stay in touch with the same people from one phase or one period of your life to the next and stop and reflect on the other side because it takes two to tango there's somebody else there what are their reasons for letting that gulf of silence open up most people find it very difficult to reconcile the grandiosity of their past ambitions with the mediocrity of their achievements the compromises they've made and most of the time it's not something as dramatic and palpable as leaving your wife because you fell in love with your secretary for a lot of people it's just alcohol marijuana video games a job that pays the bills that doesn't exhaust you doesn't take up 24 hours a day right but that can become a pretext for giving up on all of your own ambitions you never write that novel you said you wanted to write you never do that research you never you know you never record that album as a musician you know what if you give up making youtube videos whatever it is right a lot of people sell out and they can't point to anything they bought they can't point to anything they really got in return they lose that sense of motivation and purpose that may be for many of you in the audience why you're not in touch with people you knew in the past and seen or unseen that may be a reason why many of them are not in touch with you my sling is editorial explicit material briefcase show live and stereo flow fill me