One of my good friends from my last company has been in town this week for work, so I met her for breakfast this morning after over a year of not seeing her. We talked a lot about work, the tech industry in general, layoffs and disguised PIPs (“performance improvement plans”), health insurance, politics, and family. I still remember when I met this friend over a Zoom call for the first time about seven years ago. I had been at the company for about six months; she had started a few months after me. But as soon as we started talking, I knew we clicked. It was like love at first conversation. I remember loving the sound of her boisterous laugh and loving how unrestrained it was. We were both loud, opinionated, laughed a lot, and loved food, cooking, and travel. She was like my West Coast equivalent on my team at the time. And since then, we’ve always confided in each other regarding all the work bullshit and hypocrisies around us. We no longer work at the same company, but we’ve stayed in touch. She’s one of a small handful of former colleagues from my last company who I still chat with and see. 

I was thinking a lot about friends I’ve made in my adulthood vs. friends I’ve made in childhood (K-12), and especially thinking about friends I’ve made in the last seven or so years of my life. The friends I’ve made in adulthood, as you’d predict, have values that more align to what I have. Relatively speaking, they are no-nonsense, ‘say what they think and mean’ people and don’t really tolerate much bullshit. They don’t say something to your face and say something different behind it. My good friends from childhood avoid confrontation like the plague; my adulthood friends confront stupid shit head on and stop it before it spirals out of control. They’re all striving to do something important with their lives and contribute to society. A lot of the friends I have kept from my childhood days are friends because of legacy; if I met them today, we’d unlikely “click” and become good friends. But I think all that is to say that different friends serve different purposes in your life. The friends you meet today and spend at most a couple hours a month with are less likely (due to time constraints) to reach the same comfort level of friends you’ve spent literally hundreds of hours with during your childhood; the context is just different. I’m lucky to have a happy and healthy selection of friends from both childhood and adulthood to keep me grounded.