The Blunder Years, Episode 3: “It’s easy to wake up in your 30s and think you have no friends”

This episode with Ryan Narus is only about 29 minutes in total, which I believe is the shortest of the three that I’ve done so far, but it’s still got a lot of interesting stuff in it for sub-half hour. To wit:

“Stop playing the victim”

This was good for me to have a discussion around, because I am often guilty of it. I’ve been divorced — which admittedly is largely my fault, as all relationships are two-way streets — and I’ve lost friends in that process, so it’s easy for me to say “Oh, woe is me.” I have pretty decent self-awareness around some things — here’s a decent post in that vein — but I also can easily fall into victimhood, as I think many of us do/can from time to time. I need to stop that, and this discussion was a good reminder of that.

Friends in your 30s

There are some true friendships that carry on for decades, no doubt, and most of us have a few of those. In reality, though, a lot of friendships fade in and out contextually based on where you live, where you work, where your kids go to school, whether you’re in a relationship or not, etc. For example, this past Saturday night I was at a wedding with one group I’m tangential to, right? A few of my other friends were at a bar four blocks away. In a different, parallel universe, I’d probably be at that bar, but because of my specific relationship at this specific time and people connected to that woman getting married on that day, that was my Saturday night.

All this said, it can be easy to wake up in your 30s and think “I have no friends” or “I am behind in life,” and I’m guilty of this virtually every day at some level. (This is something I am working on.) We talk a bit about that in this episode too. Here’s actually one develop-your-30s-friendships strategy we discuss, to wit.

Infants and fear

When you have a kid, are you now scared of everything? I don’t have kids, but I’ve actually written about this before. We also holler at this topic.

Where’s the audio?

That would be here:

Enjoy! Episode 4 will be sometime around October 2-3.