Don’t Order the Envelopes

“It was just so nice to be around people” is a phrase I hear a lot, and it’s really quite a ridiculous phrase. Who else are we supposed to be around?

Our tiny pocket computers have isolated us from the rest of society, and I think we’re only beginning to catch up to what that’s done to us. With so much of the world burning, we’re all looking for a friend at the end of the world—and that friend should be someone you can be bored with.

Not the friend who needs reservations at the most annoying new restaurant in West Hollywood. Not the friend who can’t go out without the promise of alcohol. Not the friend who cancels at the last minute and sends you a meme about how cancelling plans is actually self-care.

No. We’ve moved on from the hell of 2020 isolation. We’ve gotten therapy. A good skincare routine. We’ve read books. Seven of them.

I mean the friend you can go to the grocery store with on a Tuesday night and compare protein powder ingredients. The friend who will get slushies with you and swing on a playground after dark, laughing at the frivolity of it all.

For the last eight years, the person I was best at being bored with was my dog, Indie.

When she died, I realized I suddenly had no one to do nothing with.

If I wanted to see someone, there had to be a plan. A reservation. An activity. An end result. There was no one lying on the living-room floor with me screaming the lyrics to an old Elton John song. No one wandering from room to room while I got ready. No one simply existing alongside me.

There is a good kind of bored and a bad kind of bored, and somewhere along the way we decided they were the same thing.

They aren’t.

Boredom is the root of creativity. It’s also where intimacy lives.

And when there’s no one to be bored in the world with, you remember the importance of something as stupid as running errands.

Somewhere along the way, we started treating all the farting around as inefficiency. We eliminated the errand, the boredom, the stranger at the bookstore, the friend who comes along for absolutely no reason.

And then we wondered why we were lonely.

I have so many unusual encounters with people simply because I leave my house. Like the night I went to the bookstore instead of ordering from the ugly online conglomerate, and the cashier, after repeatedly failing to sell me a membership card, became so flustered she finally yelled, “WELL, YOU’RE REALLY BEAUTIFUL.”

That would never have happened if I’d stayed home and clicked a button.

Staying home and clicking buttons is, in fact, part of the problem.

We’ve built an incredibly convenient world and somehow made it harder to bump into one another.

So maybe the test of a friendship—or a relationship—isn’t whether you can have an incredible night together.

Maybe it’s whether you can have absolutely nothing to do together and still want to be there.

Because I don’t think most of us are missing entertainment.

We’re missing intimacy. Familiarity. Someone to run errands with.

Someone who stays not for the plot, but because there isn’t one.