Friendship: What Is Friendship For?

Why do adult friendships disappear?

Work. Kids. Moving. Ambition. Fatigue. Different values. Different seasons. Sometimes nothing happens at all—we simply stop seeing each other.

But perhaps the more interesting question is:

Why do some friendships survive?

And should they?

I've been thinking about friendship not as something to optimise or maintain, but as part of a much bigger question: what makes a good life?

When I was younger, living in San Francisco, friendship seemed to happen everywhere. Now, with a young daughter and a different season of life, sometimes the thing I want most is an hour alone.

Different season. Different need.

Every morning in my local town, a group of people in their sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties meet at the ocean to swim. Then they have coffee. They talk. They go home. Tomorrow, they do it again.

Perhaps friendship isn't just about finding the right people.

Perhaps it's also about building a life in which friendship has somewhere to live.

So this week I'm thinking about what friendship is actually for, whether we are meant to carry every friendship through every season, and what our relationships reveal about the lives we're choosing to build.

Who is here while we're living it?

This week's podcast

This Field Note is the beginning of the thought, not the conclusion.

On this week's Sutterfaction, I'll go deeper into friendship, solitude, ambition, seasons, community, mortality and the question of what relationships have to do with a life well lived.

Episode 40 — Friendship: What Is Friendship For?