Kris Verle, shares 7 important things you need to know about making adult friends.
One perk of being an online life coach who works with a lot of gay men is that I get to spend plenty of time on Instagram staring at people’s abs, pretending it’s for work.
One such six-pack recently provided me with the ultimate boner-killer by posting a picture of himself and his dead Tamagotchi with the caption, “My best friend is dead.”
His previous pictures didn’t suggest a particular talent for sarcasm, so his post raised two questions. Firstly, how did anyone with a body like his have the time to look after anything else but his own meal plan? And secondly, how the hell did he manage to keep that thing alive since the nineties?
Turns out that Tamagotchis are making a bit of a comeback. See, clever marketing people have figured out that millennials aren’t just the self-entitled brats you love to bitch about. Apparently, they can take care of other things than just their social media accounts. Plus, they’re old enough now to do nostalgia. Nostalgia for the days when they were six and you were 26 — in case you’re still clinging on to that ridiculous idea of being a Xennial.
After feeling a tad guilty for un-following said six-pack, I started to wonder whether I was the one who was missing a trick here. Maybe it was judgmental and ignorant to think somebody can’t be friends with a virtual chicken. And maybe I could even learn a thing or two about love and kindness from cleaning up some pixelated poop.
So, as the first in a series of articles on how to make friends as an adult, I’m investigating some of the external conditions necessary for making new friends, and whether it is indeed possible to become friends with a robot.
Here are the seven lessons I learned. You may not like them.
Lesson #1: We need to get along in order to belong.
We all depend on others for our survival. Throughout history, those with advanced social skills mostly had the upper hand compared to those who were fit but dim.
