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I came to the realization a while back that I only have maybe…4 friends other than my wife. When I moved and left for college I was married already and most of

I came to the realization a while back that I only have maybe…4 friends other than my wife. When I moved and left for college I was married already and most of my friends were not. My wife and I weren’t big into the clubbing thing so old friends sort of fell away. We did both make some friends in college, some mutual and some exclusive. But there were social factors that made that difficult - mainly we were very, very poor and were often embarrassed to have people over or go out since we couldn’t afford to. A small handful of those friendships live on in my wife’s social media but I have no social media footprint. After college we both worked and that’s where I picked up the friends I have today. Two (now former) coworkers and a former boss. We have an ongoing text chat and we’re pretty open about real stuff. As luck would have it, both my former boss and I moved to the same state for new jobs and live fairly close. So the four of us (we and our wives) hang out on occasion. At my current job I’ve picked up one more friend with whom I talk regularly about non work things. But I’m unsure how long that friendship will last as we’re both seeking new jobs, she’s leaving in a week and I’ll (hopefully) be leaving shortly thereafter. Hopefully it’ll last, but who knows. My wife is better at making friends than I am. She’s joined several local groups around her interests and is slowly building a new social circle. But for me I tend to work from maybe 4am to 7pm and often during the weekend. So by the time I shut everything off at night I’m just so exhausted that I don’t have much more energy to do anything.

adventured 5y ago
> I came to the realization a while back that I only have maybe…4 friends other than my wife. This is overwhelmingly true about everyone, having a single digit count of close friends. People that pretend to have dozens of close friends, are liars, whether consciously or subconsciously (specifically they're maintaining a facade to draw social points from, narcissistically). It's not feasible to successfully maintain so many high level relationships, even if it's all a person does all day. A typical social butterfly might have a few dozen active social connections that they keep alive by occasionally touching base, which is very different from having that many good friends.
soared 5y ago
> 4am to 7pm and often during the weekend 15 hours days and more on the weekend sounds incredibly unhealthy. How do you eat, sleep, and socialize?
- theshadowknows 5y ago
  I don’t really socialize that often. And I sleep sporadically. I do eat well enough. I try to eat lots of vegetables and drink lots of water. Salads are my go to. The biggest reason I work so much is that the team I’m on is very small and I’m the “sr architect” which sounds considerably fancier than it is. In reality I’m the architect and the engineer and the prod support agent and the integration and business architect. Because my team is not considered essential we do not have budget to hire more FTEs but because our “internal clients” ARE considered essential we are basically at their mercy. And I see other teams in the company get descoped every month. So I’ve been trying to keep the workload handled so that my team doesn’t all get fired. But I can’t do it anymore which is why I’m trying to leave. Had 6 rounds of interviews with our biggest competitor over the past two weeks and I think they all went well. So hopefully in a couple of days I’ll be able to slap down my two weeks, burn my never used PTO, and hope for better days in a new org.

adventured 5y ago

> I came to the realization a while back that I only have maybe…4 friends other than my wife. This is overwhelmingly true about everyone, having a single digit count of close friends. People that pretend to have dozens of close friends, are liars, whether consciously or subconsciously (specifically they're maintaining a facade to draw social points from, narcissistically). It's not feasible to successfully maintain so many high level relationships, even if it's all a person does all day. A typical social butterfly might have a few dozen active social connections that they keep alive by occasionally touching base, which is very different from having that many good friends.

soared 5y ago

> 4am to 7pm and often during the weekend 15 hours days and more on the weekend sounds incredibly unhealthy. How do you eat, sleep, and socialize?

theshadowknows 5y ago
I don’t really socialize that often. And I sleep sporadically. I do eat well enough. I try to eat lots of vegetables and drink lots of water. Salads are my go to. The biggest reason I work so much is that the team I’m on is very small and I’m the “sr architect” which sounds considerably fancier than it is. In reality I’m the architect and the engineer and the prod support agent and the integration and business architect. Because my team is not considered essential we do not have budget to hire more FTEs but because our “internal clients” ARE considered essential we are basically at their mercy. And I see other teams in the company get descoped every month. So I’ve been trying to keep the workload handled so that my team doesn’t all get fired. But I can’t do it anymore which is why I’m trying to leave. Had 6 rounds of interviews with our biggest competitor over the past two weeks and I think they all went well. So hopefully in a couple of days I’ll be able to slap down my two weeks, burn my never used PTO, and hope for better days in a new org.