Hello, my newsletter familia,
It feels good to hit these keys and share with you once again. It’s been more than two years since I wrote a little Uddiscovery piece every month pieces. This long hiatus was spurred by the passing of my beloved Dadi in early 2020 after she lived an abundant 95 years of life. At the time, I wrestled with a behemoth of an essay, trying to cohere my thoughts around loss, grief, love, and life into a message that I could communicate. That essay draft turned out to be one of the longest personal pieces I had written, replete with anecdotes, philosophical musings, poetry, and references, and yet I could not figure out what I wanted to say, leading me to frustration and abandoning the project.
Funny enough, after taking all this time away from that piece and contending with living this wild life that has been 2020-2022, my thoughts around these themes of loss, love, and life are actually much simpler than I would have ever thought:
Loss is an inevitable, and even essential, part of life. It happens to us all the time. Trying to resist that truth and prevent its emergence is only a waste of energy. Instead, the loving and life-affirming action is to appreciate what you have in your present experience while it is there. And, then, to help yourself accept when it is gone.
Haha, even as I write this, I’m struck by the depth of the sentiments expressed here. Writing, which at its core I believe favors logical thinking, cannot fully convey the awareness that is living life with the acceptance of loss. I believe that awareness comes best with practicing attention and mindfulness. Recently, I have been reading Karma by Sadhguru. In it, he shares a Sadhana to help remind us that life is more than just what we identify with.
In hindsight, there was another core reason why I did not complete and post the essay regarding my Dadi’s death: I did not have clarity around the purpose of this newsletter. Was Uddiscovery going to be writing that I would try to monetize? Or was this just a semi-public journal? Who was I writing this for? And, why? These questions added another layer of resistance to the already-difficult processing of my grandmother’s passing. Without being clear on Uddiscovery’s value and purpose in my life, I wavered in my commitment to continue writing. This recent hiatus, however, gave me the space to truly miss Uddiscovery and understand why I loved doing this. For me, Uddiscovery served as an amazing way to spark real conversations around significant life experiences, big ideas, and perplexing questions with my very geographically distributed friend group and their extended network! When writing these posts, many of you all would reach out and share yourselves with me, and I felt many relationships, even those far away, strengthen with each post. Moving forward, I’m centering this as the reason why I keep writing and sharing in Uddiscovery.
But, as I return to Uddiscovery, I bring to it a bigger, more audacious goal, for this newsletter to serve as a bastion of connection, not just for me, but for my whole friend group and community. Today, I’m sharing a new project that aims to spur real conversations amongst a friend group. Welcome RealFriends Channels!
Modern-Day ‘Friends’
I once had a conversation with a friend who asked, “What would the show Friends look like for today?” A few new shows have propped up, trying to depict the modern-day friend circle, like How I Met Your Father and Twentysomethings.
I do love these shows’ depictions of newly-minted friends that are either living together or living near each other. However, in a world where we fly much more casually than in the 90s, can make friends purely off the Internet, and often live/work in cities that are not our home or college towns, I think many modern-day friend groups look more like this:
Since the 1950s, sociologists have considered three conditions crucial for making close friends: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other. Taking it one step further, I argue that these are the conditions that sustain close friendship. I make this distinction because I have learned that there is a difference between having friends and experiencing friendship. Friendship, like any relationship, is not something that one simply has or acquires, it is an experience that is cultivated time and time again.
Obviously, when your friends are geographically distributed, it can be challenging to satisfy these “crucial conditions”. Yet, interestingly enough, many of us had to contend with this challenge in full force when the pandemic lockdowns hit, and suddenly everyone’s friendships became dispersed. It’s been amazing to see the various solutions folks came up with to build and experience their friendships throughout these COVID years, such as scheduling video calls, playing video games, organizing co-living retreats, and digital nomading together. The efficacy of these solutions varies from person to person, but one thing is clear to many of my peers: social media, the previously predominant form of social connection for geographically dispersed friends, has become wholly insufficient for providing any real semblance of experiencing friendship with one another.
RealFriends Channel!
Upon reflection, I think my newsletter, paired with texting and calling, simulated the close friendship conditions pretty well. The relative randomness of each post’s timing and material sparked some serendipity. For instance, a friend could have been mulling about a similar thing when my email would come to them and they would see, “Oh, Shadman is thinking about that too!” This process helps to naturally surface a friend to mind while also giving you something to talk about with them, which I believe makes them feel proximate to you. Proximity and unplanned interactions are important to friendship because these conditions make friendships feel authentic and in the flow of your life. Keep things serendipitous! That’s the difference between a connection that feels forced and laborious versus fun and natural.
Finally, by lowering my own guard and sharing myself through these posts, others feel comfortable to lower their own and share something personal about themselves. So, when we do hop on the phone, we can dive right into an unplanned, open-hearted conversation. This is how my newsletter helped me stay connected with friends whom I may not be talking to or seeing all of the time and why I loved writing and sending these posts out. And, in the past two years, I’ve seen more of my friends launch their own newsletters with a similar intention and effect.
Uddiscovery served as a dedicated space where I could share my deeper thoughts and personal life events with my friends. But, what if I wanted to share a sketch, a poem, or a half-baked idea? And, what if I wanted to check on various different friends’ dedicated spaces, similar to what popular social media platforms provide?
Introducing RealFriends Channels!
RealFriends is an experiment that we are prototyping in Slack to see whether we can bundle the personal sharing of the newsletter format with the community feel of a communications platform like Slack. My co-creators and I are pursuing this fusion for two core reasons:
Not everyone opts to share their thoughts and life experiences via writing essays. Heck, I’ve been really enjoying sketching and singing recently! Slack allows you to upload anything - PDFs, audio files, images, whatever you want to share with your channel.
Slack can allow you to build a community around yourself. Just like how people will text you their thoughts on something you share. If they do so in your RealFriend channel, your other friends will also see what your friend thinks about something, making it likelier that two of your friends may then comment on each other’s comments and connect. The great thing about Slack too is you don’t need someone’s phone number to reach out to them. You can DM and call someone all in Slack. A perfect way for friends to meet friends!
The second point, the opportunity to build community, drew me most to this idea. Last year, I asked Esther Perel (still can’t believe I can say that) how she maintained lifelong friendships over the course of her life. The most impactful activity? Introducing friends to friends. Connecting your friends helps your friends learn more about your life and it also creates a friend group for your pals. Friends of friends likely have a high disposition towards being friends with you, too. Seeing how many new, tremendous connections took off after the CCC really reaffirmed this for me.
So, how do you get on RealFriends?
Let me know if you are interested and I’ll send you an invite to my channel. Uddiscovery will continue on, but as I mentioned, I will share shorter thoughts and ideas in the Slack channel that I wouldn’t otherwise do over email.
Get familiar with Slack! I would be happy to help you learn how to navigate the tool. Try commenting on any of the posts and starting a thread. If you want to connect with someone in the channel, click on their profile, select “message”, and introduce yourself!
If you want to make your own channel, navigate to the channel panel, and title it with your name. In the description, write what you will most likely be sharing with your friends in your channel. Click on the “Person” icon in your channel and add the friends you would like to share with to your channel.
Finally! Start sharing your reflections, artwork, whatever you would like to send over to your friends so that they may get a window into what you are up to!
See you there! In the name of a more connected world,
Shadman