How to Make Friends

It's easier than you think

The last friend you made was assigned to you.

A seating chart. A football team. A college roommate.

You’ve been coasting on assigned friendships all your life and school is fucking over.

Why do you think men join gangs?

Why do they pay to roll around on the ground choking each other in the name of Jiu-Jitsu?

Why do they all of a sudden love golf?

Why did the inmates in my dayroom seem more alive than the gray faced zombies who shuffled into work beside me?

WE ARE A NATION OF LONE WOLVES.

We live in the most connected age in human history, yet we never felt more lonely.

Humans are social by nature.

Strip a man of his people and he spins like an astronaut untethered in space, losing the idea of who he is with every orbit.

In jail we punished men by sending them to isolation/The Hole.

You have been isolating yourself so long it feels normal.

You even romanticize it. “I’m GRINDING.” The devil is laughing at you.

I built more in the seasons I had people around me. The isolation cave calls to writers and thinkers by instinct. You have to fight it.

Technology makes the cave easier every year. Stay in your room a decade if you want. Crack the door for the Uber bag. Become the termite kind of human!

This world wants to divide everyone. Walkable cities are gone. Sports teams dissipate after high school. College ends and the last thing unifying you to other men gets handed a diploma and walks off the stage. Work remains, sure. Look around the office and ask yourself:

Would I pick these people?

WARNING

There is comfort in sadness and being alone. You are safe from the big bad world you made it out to be in your mind. Safe from rejection and the awkward first conversations. Safe on your couch with your excuses. Fuck maybe you like hanging out with your excuses… They ask you for so little.

If you want to keep them, stop reading here. This essay eradicates your excuses for good, because once I hand you the tools, another night alone stops being bad luck and becomes a choice you are making.

Maybe you like being the sheep who wandered off, but Jesus went to get that lost sheep for a reason. You are better among your people.

Read on if the pain of aloneness outweighs the comfort.

Welcome back to the real world.

Free sheep, this is where I lose you. Keep wandering.

Wolves, come into the den. I am going to show you how to find your kind.

Six p.m. and my barber comes flying down the road on his electric skateboard. I am watching The Business legs kicked up, sipping espresso while the trade winds massage my back. He strolls into my villa and unrolls his tools onto the table like a surgeon.

I hand him a beer and crack one myself.

“Make me look expensive,” I tell him.

What happens over the next five hours is the art of male friendship, performed live.