We're Knot Friends
<i>> Thinking of this makes me realize me how little I’ve experienced communal activities since then. It has the same feeling of a family sitting together making Christmas cookies, or a group of artists sitting together sketching. People complain about the difficulty of making friends in your thirties, and I wonder how much of that is simply because we don’t afford ourselves the time for such communal activities. We aren’t regularly around groups of people with the sort of free time that precipitates these moments of idle bonding.</i><p>I've been thinking about this for the past couple of years, especially since the pandemic. I was locked down with my wife and two kids the entire, but we spent less time than you'd expect just <i>being</i> together.<p>We were either:<p>1. Doing explicit demarcated activity together like eating dinner, watching a movie, or playing a multi-player videogame. These are nice, but require coordination and don't provide much opportunity for idle chat (except for dinner).<p>2. Doing our own completely mentally-emcompassing things, usually involving separate screens. These also don't lend themselves to idle conversation. We may be spatially colocated, but we are all effectively worlds away.<p>Ever-present electronic devices connected to the Internet with an infinite feed of new media to consume has essentially destroyed all middle ground between those two poles.<p>It's horrible and horribly unhealthy. People need time to just idle next to each othere with our minds free to wander and free to peridically bounce off each other.