Good Friends Vs. Trash Friends

Which one are you, son?

I was starting to get sick on Friday evening into Saturday morning, and as a result, I couldn’t sleep. I saw an article in a TED newsletter about friendships changing in adulthood, which is a huge topic for me that I write about semi-consistently, so I clicked into it and it has this video from a former Indiana Pacers DJ:

Now, the video is pretty good, and she gets the requisite laughs and pops for a TED Talk. In reality it seems like it could be re-titled “Observations From Early Motherhood,” because that’s mostly what it is. I Googled this woman and she has a program/class now called HEART about how to have better conversations. It’s literally amazing to me that everyone who got a TED Talk goes and designs some course. I love learning too, but does the world need more classes and courses designed around acronyms? I’m not sold.

If you read some of my stuff, I talk about friendship a lot. The past few years haven’t been great on that front for me — I got divorced, which is a major way of losing friends. I lost a friendship with the best man in my first wedding, and another good friend of mine from back in those days too. Unless I text out, I regularly have no texts coming in save for 1–2 people. So it can feel very depressing, no doubt, spawning this article on male depression (a-ha!) and a general look at the expectations of friendship.

After I watched this video, I started with some self-awareness: am I a trash friend? In many ways, yes. Here’s where I came to on that side: