I Don’t Want Friends or Family
You can have them cluttering up your life!
Family! That’s the most important thing! Family!
Friends! Where would I be without my friends?
Relationships! That’s what makes life worthwhile. Forget about material things. Even forget about experiences. It is the friends you have and the friends you share those experiences with that count!
Humbug! I don’t agree with any of those statements. Oh, I’m not saying you should be like me. If friends and family are important to you, great! Normal, in fact. I admit that I seem to be an outlier here. (I wonder how many of us there are?)
Let’s get into it.
I’m old, 67 years old. I do need a couple of friends, and I’ll get into why later. But that’s all. I’ve pretty much dropped all the rest.
Friends were important to me when I was younger. Yes, I was normal in this regard earlier in my life.
Younger people need friends for many reasons. Friends provide validation. They provide a baseline of behavior and personality against which I could measure and develop my own.
I wanted to explore and experience life, and I wanted to do it with friends.
Friends introduced me to new people, ideas, and activities.
In high school I played in the marching band and in a (very bad) rock band, with friends.
I needed friends to help me move and to give me rides to the airport.
Sometimes I needed friends to live with and share the rent and other expenses.
I usually had a handful of close friends and a larger handful of not-so-close friends. I also experienced periods when I needed friends but did not have them.
My saddest no-friends annecdote: When a doc-in-the-box sent me for my first colonoscopy, at 45 years old, I could not think of a person in the world to ask for a ride. So I went alone, thinking I would take a taxi home.
But of course the hospital told me I could not take a taxi home because it had to be someone who would watch over me, since I would be coming out of anaesthesia.
We pondered what to do, and a nurse said, “You know, I once had a patient who did a colonoscopy without anaesthesia.”
So that’s what I did.
It wasn’t so bad.
But having no friends was. Boo hoo for me, back then. 😢
Family was important when I was a kid, of course. But they rapidly grew less important as I matured as an adult.
We were never a close family. My dad moved the nuclear family from New Jersey to Southern California when I was five. I never knew my extended family at all. Later in life, he once confessed to me that a big part of the reason we moved was simply to get away from them!
So family not-closeness was modelled for me from very early on. (It was quite hard on my mother, who was a very sociable woman whom everyone loved.)
Following the pattern set by my dad, my three siblings and I flew the coop as soon as we could, to Arizona, Oregon, Indiana, and me to Silicon Valley. We pretty much lost touch except through mother as a relay station. Only I remained childless, and I’ve met only one of my four nephews and never met my niece. I can name two or three of them. I know I have some great-nieces and/or nephews but I couldn’t say how many.
How did I get so damaged? (Assuming not wanting friends and family is damaged.)
Besides the not-close family thing, when I went away to college I lost touch with my high-school friends. For a while I tried exchanging letters with my closest friends. (This was a time before email.) But it soon became clear that I was “out of sight, out of mind.” I could tell—at least it felt to me—that no one really cared about me.
So we drifted away and I became a real loner.
As an adult, I’ve never been good at making friends.
I really made only one friend in college, someone I was on the fencing team with. That friendship did not survive college.
Mostly I made friends with people I worked with. I felt pretty lonely when I wasn’t in a significant-other type relationship, which encompassed about half of my adult life.
I think the need for friends is much different for older people. At least is is for me.
I know who I am and I have self-confidence, so I don’t need friends to compare with and to support my identity.
I’m not really looking for new experiences anymore, so I don’t need friends for that and I don’t need rides to the airport.
I have so much stuff that when I move, I use a moving company.
Most critically, I think, I’ve left so many friends and relationships behind, that I’m not anxious to start new ones. Because I expect them to be ephemeral.
I’ve given up on Best Friends Forever. Now I have friends of convenience. And if you don’t live nearby, you are not very convenient.
I do have a significant other, and that is important to me.
I’ve spent plenty of time without a significant other. I can do alone.
But I want a partner now. When I don’t have one, after a while I start feeling lonely, unworthy, and unloved. (So much for my self-confidence, huh?)
It is important to me to have love in my life. And more than just the love of my cat, who I love very much!
I also like the sense of worth I get from building a life together with my love. I value what I can do to make Mish’a life better. I also like that I have someone to give me rides to the doctor and to take care of me when I’m sick. And it is my pleasure and privilege to return the favor when what goes around comes around.
I have a few other friends I’ve stayed in touch with. Mostly we just talk on the phone, and that rarely. But it is the same as when I very occassionally talk on the phone with my siblings:
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“What’s new with you?”
“Nothing. Just the same old same old.”
“Me too.”
That’s why old people talk so much about their aches and pains and health problems: Not because we like to complain. It’s because we have nothing else to talk about!
I also have a convenient friend that I go for exercise walks with in the redwoods where we both live, almost every day. But I think we’ll only stay friends as long as we live close to each other.
HOWEVER … here’s where I admit that I do have friend-substitutes. I hang out with them like I used to hang out with friends IRL when I was younger.
First of all, I have my friends here on Medium. We discuss the weighty issues of the day, and have fun, and hang out whenever I want to, for just as long as I want to. You guys are much smarter and more interesting than any IRL friends I might have these days.
My other friend-substitutes live in podcasts.
Currently my gang is Stephanie and The Mooks on the Stephanie Miller radio show, which I listen to as a podcast. It is a goofy morning show that is lefty liberal talk and call-in with a generous helping of fart jokes.
Hanging out with these friends is very low stress because they do all the work and I never have to say a thing. Plus they reinforce my liberal political beliefs. They are my “echo chamber.”
My best friend used to be Rachel Maddow, but she partially ghosted me, dropping her show back from five nights a week to only Mondays. However, she just dropped in for a visit with her new, limited series podcast Ultra. And I’m always invited to Rachel’s election night parties with our friends Joy, Nicolle, Chris, Lawrence, and the always amazing Steve “Khakis” Kornacki.
A while back I used to hang with the Pod Save America guys but I got bored with them and dropped them. They were not in the least bit offended.
Even further back, Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzoles were my besties. But they became too intense for me so I had to move on. They’re still there doing their thing after all these years, and I can visit with them whenever I like. (And I still donate to Democracy Now!)
I speak of this lightly, but I really do believe that these people—this media—fulfils needs I have for friendship and intellectual stimulation that I would probably look to IRL friends for, if I did not have them in my phone’s podcast app.
In conclusion, that’s why I don’t have (very many) close friends or family. I don’t need them and I don’t want them cluttering up my life.
I’ve always been an introvert (who can put on a great extrovert facade), so this state of affairs is fine with me.
COVID was a blessing for us introverts because we could isolate without being hassled for it. At least, that has been true for me. COVID hardly affected my life at all.
And I’ll probably live this way for the rest of my days.
I am a rock, I am an island
And a rock feels no pain
And an island never cries
—Paul Simon, 1965
— Lannie Rose, November 2022
preferred pronouns: she/her/hers
