18/ Baby Alienation

Hello world and welcome to the eighteenth edition of this rather ghetto newsletter.

The following story may come as a sharky rant for some, but I know my intentions are honest, so go figure. It perfectly goes along with this asphalt melting heatwave. Not.

Ok, let’s do this.

I’ve never had a best friend.

I lie. I had a few episodic best friends. One in early childhood, the other one in elementary school, and the third one during my teen years and early twenties. But it was never a single person, so I always kinda envied people who had their best friends throughout their whole life.

Having the best friend for me means having someone who is always there for you no matter what.

I’m a very difficult person. I’m one of those people who’ll either give you as much as they can or nothing at all, and I’m expecting the same in return. Since it’s always a two-way street, it’s challenging to make relationships like this to always work for both sides. Many people I meet are in the biz of transactions and manipulation (one-way streets), being there only when they need something from you. That’s easy.

Growing up, I was an awkward loner, so making friends never came naturally. But that’s exactly the reason I started valuing and respecting social contracts I’ve made over time.

If Pokemons taught me anything, that’s friendship:

It sounds strange when I see it written, but I think I invested a lot of attention, dedication, time, and energy into these social contracts. Since they weren’t organic from the beginning, I figured giving it an extra push is a way to go.

At one point I was very satisfied with finally having a tiny circle of supportive and trustworthy people around me. My socially contracted non-episodic friends — not besties nor “transactioners”. If some of them were in my top 5 I was probably somewhere at the bottom of their top 15, but I was totally cool with that. Sometimes I wished it’s been different but, it is what it is.

Little by little my circle started to shed away.

I thought it’s only a flux and we’ll be back together in no time. Every relationship has its ups and downs after all. But the trend continued and similar symptoms started to appear. Less and less internet communication, less and less IRL communication, less and less calls. The gap was too wide by now. Radio silence. My friends were no longer my friends. Some would say this is only natural and what’s going on is “life happening”. It’s not life, it’s alienation.

This particular alienation didn’t happen overnight. It was building up over time silently and then all at once, happening in three major waves.

Wave #1: Social Media Alienation
“Far from the eyes, far from the heart” goes the saying.

This one is a slow burner flicked probably 10-12 years ago while I was still on the colleague. I was the only one in my class without a Facebook account, and one of my friends felt kinda sorry for me and didn’t want me to feel excluded so she created one for me. I never used it because I found it uncool and I still think that way. In order to make that account, she also created the Gmail address I still own and use — thanks, Bojana!

But she foresaw my future and I experienced this soft exclusion ever since.

“Oh, we forgot to invite you to the party…”
“Oh, I didn’t know it’s your birthday…”
“Oh, you didn’t know they got married?!?”

“…because you are not on Facebook!”

Guess what motherfuckers, there are these things called phone numbers, SMSs, and calendars and they could be found everywhere.

It was Facebook back then, and Instagram, Viber, Whatsapp nowadays.

“I don’t know where/how to find you” is the most common excuse I hear. People are usually ashamed of this form of alienation when it comes to these awkward IRL situations so I don’t judge them anymore. I usually just fire back with the question: “Do you know how to use Google?”

Wave #2: Coupling Alienation
Most of my friends, the ones that survived Wave #1 at least, got into serious romantic relationships during their mid/late twenties.

And they all (including me) disappeared from the radar during the “pink phase”, and they all returned after a month or two when they were ready to “show off” their new shiny partner. The standard routine, nothing unexpected.

The unexpected part comes afterward. Their social life gets so exponentially richer out of sudden, so they barely have any time to meet or talk.

Again, a bunch of really unnecessary excuses, but they now usually fall into one of these two buckets:

1/ Blaming on the newly adopted lifestyle
This means the world of couples and adulting. This is where you do everything exclusively with other couples. “We can’t do this weekend man, we need to go to her 57th cousin friend engagement party”, “We wanted to invite you but since there were only couples we thought you would get bored pretty quickly and we didn’t have anyone who’s solo to set you up with”.

Or a friend showing up with his girlfriend whenever I wanted to talk with him in private. Because why not.

2/ Blaming on the partner
“My wife’s not letting me X”, “I really wanted to come but you know how he is sometimes…”, I guess we all heard these ones before. Nothing new. It’s such a shame people are not accepting the fact they changed and owning it, but blaming it on their poor partner.

The phantom menace is that this form of alienation is growing stronger and stronger as the relationships flourish and reach new heights.

Wave #3: Baby Alienation
The queen. The total armageddon. The inevitable end. The final countdown for the already eroded few.

Getting a baby is probably the best thing someone could wish for. And I’m really happy for all of the new parents among my friends and I love all those little potatoes, the fruits of their love.

But by now I learned that whenever I hear the keyword “expecting”, I know I’m losing my friends for good.

It’s a very strange feeling. Like, you can’t wait to see the baby but then you know you won’t be around to see it grow. You’ll never be there to babysit or to help out with whatever you can. That’s what the friends are for after all.

This final wave comes in four shades:
1/ Blaming it on the pregnancy
2/ Blaming it on the newborn and figuring out the parental role
3/ Blaming it on exclusively hanging out with other people with kids
4/ Blaming it on the toddlers

I would be a total jerk if I said there were no attempts. Kids’ birthdays are strategically utilized portals for seeing alienated friends. But the runaway here is 2 or 3 years long. After that, it’s only a ciao ragazzo. No more invitation for you Mr. Childless Boy.

So in the best case scenario, I’ll see my friends once or twice per year. Six hours tops. There are no other big occasions since parents don’t celebrate their birthdays anymore and they don’t show up on your parties because, well, they are not kids’ birthdays.

The other symptom of babylienation is not being taken seriously. Oftentimes I would be treated as if I was a child, teenager at best. All my life challenging questions and worries are banalized with the phrase “That’s all nothing, you’ll see when the marriage and kids come”. Secretly I think they just got alienated from their past lives and they don’t want anyone reminding them about it.

“You’ll reunite with them when you get your own kids. The kids will get you back together.” — are words of my optimistic mother. I think she just wants to comfort me but OK. Even if this was true, more time will pass, the gap will get wider, the ice will get thicker. Where I stand now, I don’t see how something like a baby would be able to break the spell. And even if so was true, are those the honest reasons for getting back together or just a piece from the social courtesy handbook? It’s the same as, let’s say, having a baby to save the marriage. It’s no wonder why so many people alienate themselves from themselves and turn into babies after that. It’s the wrong reason and let’s just all stop using: “If you get a baby, then ____ will happen”. Most of the issue existed before the babies as well, so babies shouldn’t be used as solutions for the sake of solutions

What I’m reading from my mother’s words is “You’ll be alienated as well, just wait”. But if this is the only way things will work, that means both my friends and I will be alienated from the true reasons for our friendship. We’ll be alienated together.

Honorable mention: COVID Alienation
The fourth horseman of this apocalypse is a reality shattering situation we live in. It’s no longer a question “if” COVID is going to change our lives, but ”how” and ”how much”.

When the lockdown started I was isolated alone, and none of my coupled/family isolated friends thought of asking how I’m doing. Zero. Then I took a chance and messaged them instead. I mean I get it: panic, confusion, taking care of kids/parents, being stuck with all of them together, figuring out remote work, etc. They were just preoccupied I guess.

This early signal plus physical distancing we need to follow plus the whole veil of uncertainty will just result in more pseudo reasoning for the lack of physical gatherings and interactions — aka blaming it on the COVID.

We are still about to see how will this pan out.

Different Angles
In preparation for this piece, I lowkey questioned two of my female friends on their perception of this phenomenon. Both of them are familiar with the baby alienation with mutually different angles, both different than mine as well, which is super interesting.

The first one doesn’t want to have kids. She says that whenever she senses the alienation on her friends — she just lets them go. She simply doesn’t want to deal with this shit. If they dealienate — fine, she’ll take them back.

The second one just became a mom. She is undoing her alienation by not wanting to lose her identity as a professional and a friend. She noticed that her friends started avoiding her, which just gave her more reason to double down on balancing her and the family life with social occasions.

“Life is all about you and not at all about you
Now, that's two opposing thoughts and yet both of them are true”

Life of my friends is all about me and not at all about me.
Life of my friends is all about their babies and not at all about their babies.
My life is all about my friends and not at all about my friends.

I totally get it.
But I don’t get it at all.

Do you get it?
Or you don't get it at all?

✦

Recent Musings of Life

Giving a leg up to the ones in need
I’m currently running a pro bono campaign of helping people with either tweaking their CVs or some other career question. Recommend to a friend if it would be beneficial to them.

Count Zero

When I was in Stockholm for the first time, it took me two days to figure out how my plastic work. Thankfully I found a hole-in-wall dumpling place that was accepting cash. It wasn’t illegal but 99% of stores were cashless. Gibson predicted my funny situation, Bitcoin, Chinese Social Credit System with a single passage in 1986.

The Mind, Explained
This short show explains the basics of the human mind in a really cute manner.

✦

That’s it for issue #18. Spread love, not germs.

Love,
—A

S02E06 — JUN2020

Baby Alienation

Recent Musings of Life