## The Friendship Equinox The [much maligned](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11288408/), [much discussed](https://www.krcu.org/2022-09-05/the-science-of-adult-friendship), [oft-reported](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/07/well/live/adult-friendships-number.html), [hardly contextualized](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9902704/) problem that rears its head on the internet every once in a while, rarely for the purpose of edification: Why do people feel more alone than ever? Surely it is our hyper polarized time. It must be that they just don't make 'em (people, that is) like they used to. I propose this question is answered by answering one of its factor questions: Why is it so hard to make friends as an adult? This factor question is a clothesline on which so many other answers hang. Perhaps no successive question is more loadbearing, further, than: And what do we do about? If friendships are a flower, then time together is the sunshine. Stick to the end for prescriptive advice. #### Adult Friendships Quality of life for the average American recedes from the shore. What the elite class calls inflation is corporate price gouging. Fascists strip copper wire out of our country's walls, soak the carpet in gasoline. The undeniability of our ecological fuckage only becomes more apparent as hurricanes and heatwaves hammer cities one at a time. It is easy to say that "capitalism" is the answer, and it is, yes, in much the same way that "high fructose corn syrup" is what's for breakfast no matter what cereal one pulls off the shelf. Call it a policy issue. Bundled with the symptoms above, there is systemic pressure levied against you, an adult, to keep you from making new friends. This is our first thread we shall braid. The reason your friendships are collateral for the failings of a capitalist system is that the health of your friendships is not the quickest path to ROI for our oligarchs. [That so many Americans lack intimate friendships](https://www.npr.org/2023/05/02/1173418268/loneliness-connection-mental-health-dementia-surgeon-general) is tied to real estate prices. In my own life, spending time with people got much harder when I was kicked out of downtown into the suburbs. Short on friendships? It is tied to diesel shortages, as gas prices rise the distance I will drive to see people decreases. A few friend plums short of a friend fruit pie? Tied to wage stagnation: with no free places to spend time, spending money to see one's friends gets more precarious. There is no issue more intersectional than having or not having friends. If you have not as many friends as you would like, I'm saying, it might not be your fault. Living in this country (and most other fully developed countries to lesser degrees) means you are a victim of some bullies who want you to make profit for them, no matter the personal expense it tolls on you. There is a solution, you'll be happy to learn. A radical, subversive, rebellious response. I advocate that you intentionally get nothing done in the company of other people. #### Wasted Time The second thread requires, reader, to answer a question for yourself: Why are you so busy? Alternatively, if one of your friends asks you "do you want to hang out today," how often are you to able to take that time together without significant heads up? Wasted time is the unobtanium of adulthood. There are doctors appointments, dentist appointments, physical therapy. Dinners to be made, meetings to attend, volunteering to do. Got to read for that book club! Plus, The fatigue of working under an exploitative system leaves a brain battered and lonesome. The end of the work day: where a reheated episode of a show you don't care about and leftovers from the strip mall Mexican are the only possible recourse. There is undeniable privilege in aiming to waste time, but it is a privilege only because it has not yet been claimed as an entitlement. Let's fix that. The impulse to do this, to waste time on purpose, is wrong, your mind will tell you. You must host guests, not dawdle alongside them. To be someone's friend as an adult, you must take a YMCA class together, join an adult-only softball league. I dissent. If you want to grow closer to someone, do nothing together, objective eschewed, and let your imagination fill in the gaps. Time wasting is embedded into childhood: we have time we must fill, how? Now the reverse problem is true: we have time we must reclaim, how? The answer is use your adult agency to recreate the best part of childhood: let loose for 30 minutes of recess. Do you remember it, nothing but a jungle gym and no responsibility? It is time to play together again. This intuits the next question: what play does recess for adults beget? It can be very simple, and I suggest the simplest possible expression. Pick a small hand-hobby: knitting, coloring, sewing, journaling. And you and the other person, do that together, in parallel. If you have the kind of space where it is possible to do this, and the weather, just go be outside together. A walk! We, dear reader, you and I, have invented the walk. Such geniuses we make. Observations will find themselves, if you commit to walking/crafting/lounging with no particular objective. Take it a step further, ask your friends if you can come to their house. To do what? Nothing! To have objectiveless, intentionless time and space in which you co-inhabit is very hard to do on accident. The ability to occupy a moment of intentionlessness without distraction is the path toward play, and play the path toward friendship, but both paths are riddled with scrolling. It is true now as always: that you are beholden to a phone means you are a victim. It is a policy, infrastructure, and action failure that, in order to lead a somewhat typical and well-adjusted lifestyle, you need a surveillance device which exists only to turn your life into ad revenue. As victims, it is true we are entitled to our feelings of defeat and vulnerability. Perhaps this system cannot be changed. But we are responsible not to let these feelings control our lives. My own experience and the experience of my friends tells me the most obvious answer is that the phones must go. One such friend (Kelsey Wort) eliminated media of all kinds, even just music, for weeks. The result was so much time, creative wattage, and sense of inner rest that she sung to herself, did collage art, and went to bed early. To live a hermit to all of pop culture both past and present is unsustainable as an adult who wants to find common ground with others, but in short burst it was remarkably therapeutic for Kelsey. In my own life, I have eliminated phone use in an effort to cull back hours for myself -- it is successful, and I am always under an hour-per-day of phone usage, sometimes under thirty minutes. My partner has deleted tik tok and filled her life with dot art. Guided coloring books have given her a much greater feeling of enjoyment than any shortform video has in my time of knowing her, and I am excited for her to complete the book so we can put her art in a frame of collages, or maybe a scrapbook. Our home and lives will embody us more because we pointed our energy away from corporate espionage devices made to steal time, attention, money, memory, and our ability to love one another, from us. Yet, the act of wasted time is only steadying one's self against a symptom of capitalist, consumerist, mercantile, fascist, technofeudalist society. The deeper message metabolizes in different ways for different people: that you should feel guilty for wasting time with someone. That to waste time with someone is not advancing the friendship because you need additive experience to a friendship to enhance its ties. That you have no time to waste. Cover this idea like a lit candle and let the smoke run out. I contest: to waste time is rebellion against a system which defines itself against you. A system which has assigned you an objective to be as maximally efficient and productive as possible. I refuse conformity to such a system, and hope you might as well. Do something radical with your day today -- turn your phone off. Even for an hour, turn your phone off. Tomorrow, again, only for a bit, turn your phone off. See how wide the world can be without it. #### Ritual Time wasting coexists with a simple symbolic act. They cycle as an infinity in a positive feedback loop, where that symbolic act legitimizes the time wasted, and the time wasted permits your symbolic act. This symbolic act has been eradicated from the eternal-now of a digital society. Our third thread, after wasted time and adult friendships, is the symbolic act of ritual. Friendship creates meaning for ritual. Ritual codifies and enhances friendship. Ritual has been entirely misplaced in contemporary life: no culture in which I have ever participated has [elaborate feasts in ceremonial community building](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch), nor does one give [every seventh's seventh's year jubilee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_(biblical)), nor still is there an opportunity to [squash old beefs in a street free-for-all](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takanakuy). I believe a ritual of friendship assigns meaning beyond the arbitrary, and allows a space or action to take on a heightened sacrality. Further: it normalizes the act of having sacrality in one's life! This is a positive feedback loop for a deeper sense of meaning in interpersonal relationship. Ritual allows time-wasting to be guiltless, to be true pleasure. It is permissible to sit in the living room in parallel play because the ceremony of the friendship is confined to a place and time beyond the present moment. The same is said of walks in a park. Productivity (for productivity's sake) does not need exist in a friendship that has been ritualized. This arrives me at the prescriptive advice for implementing adult friendship ritual. Here is my take: think of someone who is your friend and for whom you know their birthday -- this is probably someone for whom making a ritual is in your combined interest because if you know someone's birthday automatically, you are likely to be pretty close. Then, [find the two (!) equidistant points between the days on which your birthdays fall](https://begoodtool.com/dateCalculator/en). These two dates are your friendship equinoxes, and your birthdays serve as the friendship solstice. For example, my birthday is Aug 19, and Tribe Member Kristyn Childres's birthday is Nov 9. On these days, the Friendship Solstices, the friendship is about the person whose birthday it is. This is the natural order of things. Our Friendship Equinoxes fall on March 31 and September 29, two days which make it so that we get to celebrate each other, with each other, equally, in a sense a mutual admiration and love that means the rest of our friendship can be about what friendships are best for: wasting a little bit of time with someone you love. But what does that look like? Create a ritual together in which you will both partake and celebrate on these equinoxes. Craft one filled with meaning for the two of you! If you live in the same town, you might do the same activity together, eat a special symbolic meal together (you decide the symbolism!), listen to a shared album together, read some poems (or anything else) to one another, and/or visit a precious place. If you are ready to take that next, life-long commitment step, gather the pals and let's have a friend wedding! Cake and silly vows and dressing however you'd like. Pictures abound! Invite everyone over! Deem a third friend the priest of your friend marriage and let them officiate. Why is it only marriages that are given a vow of affection, with a commandment to find a way to preserve your love for one another through the hard times? If your friends are far away, many of these activities can be simulated digitally, or you can take part in them independently in your friendship equinox and reconvene at the end of the day to tell one another of the ways in which you spent the day thinking of one another. Agree to do certain activities at a synchronized time, to, figuratively or literally, stare at the same moon. Let the same moon stare back. To make further example, Kristyn and I's friendship equinox ritual -- of which she has had no input yet since this essay is news to her as well -- might consist of any/all/none of the following three things which tie into our shared history: Kristyn and I might make this designated days of the year to get a haircut (once, in the trough of covid, where going anywhere was still forbidden, Kristyn, who lived very near me in grad school, cut my hair on my porch, my only haircut for months on either end; a formative memory). Kristyn and I might attend a reading somewhere in our respective cities (We were the co-hosts of my MFA's creative reading series). Kristyn and I might make a point to, on this day, gather a flood of primordial internet content to send to one another (we are both big fans of late 90s early 2000s internet culture). These are just three things I came up with as typing this essay, there are plenty of other options, including none of these three! What do you think, Kristyn who is reading this idea for the first time? And just like that (following her comments back to me), Kristyn and I have a date and ceremony for our ritual! It's easy as writing someone you know and asking them this question: how can we ritualize our friendship in a way that is meaningful to us? The rest is natural.