Episode 178 with Justin Whitmel Earley
Fight Against the Current of Loneliness
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SHOW TRANSCRIPT:
178 JUSTIN EARLEY TWO
Justin Whitmel Earley I'm totally.
Ginny Yurich All right. Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. My name is Ginny Yurich and the founder of 1000 Hours Outside and could not be more thrilled to have Justin more early. Back with us today. We spoke earlier this year about his books, Habits of the Household and the Common Rule. Super popular episode. It went up the week of Father's Day and we got so much feedback about it. So what a gift to have you back. Justin, welcome.
Justin Whitmel Earley Thank you so much. Ginny. I feel lucky to be on two times in such a short span.
Ginny Yurich His response is so great and I have taken so many things from your books we just have been doing. Just last night we did the blessing of the feed and the legs and and these liturgies that you talk about and you come to the world with practical ideas for today's parents and for today's humans living in a technological cesspool. So your newest book that's coming out is called and it will be out by the time this goes, is called Made for People Why we Drift into Loneliness and How to Fight for a life of friendship In all of your books, they're basically this mirror of what you're actually doing. Like this is what you're doing. You are fighting for a life of friendship. So can you tell us where the idea for this one came from?
Justin Whitmel Earley I absolutely can't. I feel like the last two books I wrote and that we talked about last time came out of crisis like a mental health crisis and realizing I needed to get my habits on track, a parenting crisis and realizing that my kids needed rhythms. I I'm really happy to say that this book has come out of more blessing than crisis in my own life. I feel like friends have made the difference of whether I am persevering through hard things, persevering through mental health struggles, persevering through parenting and family struggles. And so I write from a lot of gratitude and thankfulness for these friends, and I talk about some of them in the book. Most of them I leave Anonymous, but I think friends make or break lives, and the part that actually is crisis is I'm looking at the world, I'm looking a lot of other parents, particularly in this time of, you know, raising young children and thinking you have got to prioritize close relationships because nobody is going to do that for you, particularly in the realm of, you know, you're out of college, nobody's funneling you into dorm life. You're in the peak of career demands and demands. And if you don't fight against the current of loneliness in America, then you will drift into isolation and all the negative mental health and physical health outcomes that come with that. So I'm looking at a crisis and saying, my goodness, we need friends to do everything well, particularly parenting.
Ginny Yurich Wow. Is that insightful when you talk about funneling out of college? Because it's really interesting to think about that you could have had in your life 20, 25 years where relationships just happened because of the circumstance that you're in. You're in a school, you're surrounded by other kids that are exactly your same age. You go into college, same things. You've got two decades of a life that looks like that, and then all of a sudden there's no structure for that. There's no scaffolding for that out. You spit into the world and maybe you're an entrepreneur. Maybe you're working at a business where you don't really connect with your coworkers. Maybe everyone's different ages. We've got a friend who just started. He works each back and he's doing an apprenticeship and he's the youngest person in his company. I don't know, by 15 years. So all of a sudden it's not just right there and maybe we have no skills to even figure that out. Wow, that's really thought provoking. So then you talk a lot about this concept of the current, and I loved that part of their book. It kind of comes in and out throughout it, where the current is making us busier. Wealthier people who used to have friends be busier, wealthier people who used to have friends. You talk about the power of a current. Why are current so powerful?
Justin Whitmel Earley I'm really glad you focus on this. So this this occurred to me one day at the beach with my four boys. This was about two years ago. I realized the boys do so well outside as as, you know, be a good preacher of this message. So we're we're at the beach having a great day. Three of my boys are loving playing in the sand or doing other things. And my third son, Colter. So my three out of four sons, my third son Colter, just loved sitting and bobbing in the water. So we just put him in his lifejacket and hear Bob in the water. Then I look up from the sandcastle and realize I Colter's like almost half a mile down the beach, like running Dragon back, you know, Luckily my wife got these matching neon green sweatshirts, so it's easy to spot with that. So you go back to playing look up cultures half a mile down the beach again and it's like, I'm not going to blow anybody's mind here. But it turns out this kept happening because currents exist and currents are the things that move you down the shoreline of life unless you fight back against them. And what I hope will blow you a little bit is that you're a lot more like Colter than you think We are all a lot by culture than we think Cultures have currents and they move us in a direction when we don't do anything else. And really the whole theme of this book is that the American current makes you busier. Maybe wealthier people who used to have friends. And the dominant fact of living where you are right now in the Western world is that you will become lonely unless you fight tooth and nail against that. You've got to swim in the opposite direction. This book is about how to fight for it. It's about the arts and practices that you have to put in your life in order to not become the lonely person that you're destined to become.
Ginny Yurich Mm hmm. I love that you say currents derive their power from being invisible. Yes, And that's a point.
Justin Whitmel Earley This is a huge and hopefully the metaphor helps, but this is not my idea. So if you look June 20, 23, just two months ago for the recording this podcast, the surgeon general issued an enormous warning on lung. And it's actually I have it on my desk. It's this whole packet about the epidemic of loneliness in America, and it documents in very helpful and empirical terms what happens to our bodies when we do not have close relationship with other people. And the important thing to note about this is, one, this is not soft. This is hard data that shows this is what's happening to America, which is why the surgeon general is like, hey, besides obesity and smoking, which are two really big deals in public health, loneliness is rivaling, if not exceeding them and why we die and why we die young. So it's like, pay attention. But you also this is also obviously a problem of the interior life that works its way out. So it's not people are like, Oh, I'm not a lonely person, You know, I have people in my life. Well, the loneliness that's talked about in these health studies is actually a loneliness of the soul more than the body. You can be around other people, but not known by any of them. And that's where you start to fall apart. So this book is all about how to disclose your interior life to the people around you. Encourage them to do the same, and by doing so, do what are the most human things there is? Be a friend and it saves lives.
Ginny Yurich That's incredible. That study was huge that you held up. Yes.
Justin Whitmel Earley It's interesting. Go download it for free. Epidemic of loneliness and isolation in America.
Ginny Yurich Unbelievable. So one of the things that you talk about and I think this is a really key point as you talk about time. And so if we look at our lives as like when we're growing up, that the majority of our time, our society builds people around us. And like you say, maybe you're not known, but you are around a lot of options, of friendships and there's time for it. And then all of a sudden you become an adult and you've talked about this in your books. You're off, you're being a missionary, and then you come back and you're starting a law practice and you have a child, your first child, and you're newly married, and we have a hard time finding the time for it. You say the fight for friendship starts with fighting for time. Then you had a really interesting study there about how we're really off in the way that we view the amount of time that we have. Yes. So can we talk about that study?
Justin Whitmel Earley Yes, It's a really interesting things. I love that you brought that up. If you just like quickly, Google online, like time spent with friends, people study, you'll see there's this neat data that has come out where you see peaks at the beginning and then again in later life. But you see a real dip in the middle because as you imagine, particularly as a young working parent, you're time available for other people is waning. Like you have so many obligations right now. But even in that time, so even in that documented waning point, there's just fascinating studies that show that we are actually very bad judges of how we use our time. So we think and anybody listening into this podcast is probably a resonate with us. We think that we are so busy and that we have no time. And a woman, I forget her name, wrote an article in the New York Times a couple of years ago called The Busy Person's Lives. It's actually almost eight years old now, I think, and she actually tracked her time for almost a year, which is wild and weird. I actually do it, and I've done it for years, so I'm eccentric. But if you do this, you will find what she found, and that is that she actually had remarkable amounts of times for things that over the course of the year were not actually very valuable. For example, I think she documented some 300 hours spent like reading gossip magazines, you know, and that would be like, you know, we feel like we have no time. Well, your stats on your phone would actually suggest to you that you got a lot of time to browse social media, sometimes 2 hours a day. And, you know, I say this gently because we're all bad at this, but I say it to wake up your brain to the reality that you do have time. You have as much as everybody else. You have 24 hours a day. And the most the really the question is just what do you do with your time? But I want to make people feel guilty. I actually want to encourage them because the remarkable thing about friendship is that it has a wildly disproportionate impact to the time you put into it. Okay. Anything else is really important in my life. I've got to do constantly like I get to sleep, hopefully at least 7 hours a day. I have to work and parent. Unfortunately, way more than that. I have to consider, you know, friendship. Just one hour a week will completely change everything else about your life. And that's like you can find any everybody can find that time. I don't care who you are. You have that time. And when you choose to devote one hour a week and this is my suggestion as a rhythm to vulnerable embodied relationship in the same room where you're telling the truth about your life and hearing somebody in conversation, you will be a completely different person. And that's great news. You have the time.
Ginny Yurich It is great news. And we use the statistics were unreal. One of the things that there are people that work a lot, so 75 hours a week, well, they were off by 25 hours.
Justin Whitmel Earley And you hear somebody say, I'm working 80 hour workweeks, just, you know.
Ginny Yurich Oh, actually, it's probably only 55.
Justin Whitmel Earley That's not that untypical. You know, we work a.
Ginny Yurich Yeah. We're overestimating how much time we spend being productive and underestimating how much time we waste. So, you know, I think when I started keeping track of how much time we spent outside, it's been a decade. Same as you just And I mean, people were like, that's really strange, but it has the power to change your life, to pay attention to the ways that you use your time. At the very least, it's causing you to be reflective and to think about it now. Well, in this section about how we use our time, there was also the concept of that we're mentally compromised. Sometimes when a lot of times I would imagine actually when it's time to make the choice to be an embodied friend or to actually go do something with someone else. So how can we handle that, like exhaustion? And I just want to scroll through my phone. I find myself, I have no energy and I'm making my decision really at a very bad time right now.
Justin Whitmel Earley And this is like enter the saving power of a schedule. Right. So for anything important in your life, I think about, you know, your finances. You know, hopefully you sort of you track you have a schedule like, you know, once a month we look on to your mantra, whatever else you use. And like Jenny, obviously, like you and all your listeners are, you know, you're so good at this. The idea is like, if you're going to spend 1000 hours outside of you, you've got to sort of track that. You got to look at, you know, all efforts to keep track actually wildly change us. And this is the idea of a schedule. And now anybody thinks about schedule and friendship is kind of like, well, you know, there's a lot more to relationships than a schedule. Absolutely. But when you have a rhythm and I can set up, rhythms are better than rules, right? Rhythms of friendship will change you from being a person who is drowning in the perceived busyness of your time to somebody who's actually doing what you ought to do maybe once a week and getting with a friend. So, for example, with my two, my very closest friends, Steven, Matt, we have a rhythm of every other Tuesday. We sit on each other porches and talk about our life. And this is like nothing incredibly complicated, right? It's just every other Tuesday. It's the not literally. Last night I was doing it with Steven. And what we do is, you know, sit on the porch and we talk about our lives and laugh and have a drink and, you know, talk about our kids struggles in our marriage shows and, you know, and then slowly something happens to this rhythm. Like over the course of months, you become a person without secrets because people know you. And this is where I just want to make the amazing connection between a light effort of a rhythm of friendship. Like, Hey, why don't we catch up every week for coffee? Why don't we do a once a month, one night with the, you know, a couple of friends? Why don't we do whatever this your rhythm is? It can be a lot of things if you hold to it. Even with a lot of exceptions, you slowly become a person who is wait for it known, who is not hiding in the shadows of life. We need to become people without secrets, because these are the things that you know, according to the loneliness studies and just according to common sense, life will eat you alive from the inside out when you're living it alone, when you have all these things that mental health struggles, you know, failure is fear. The inner voice in your head that talks to you all the time and says you're not doing it well, you're never going to survive. You're a failure. It's amazing how good friends are at saying, Hey, that's not true about you. I see somebody different here. And when you live in that rhythm of that schedule, which at first can sound rote and boring, you suddenly become a person without secrets and a schedule becomes a life raft to the good life called friendship.
Ginny Yurich Yes. And I think, well, Dr. Mike Rucker wrote about it in the fun habit that because of screens, like because of the way that we live and because our time is so divided, that like, our spontaneity basically has to happen within a schedule. Otherwise you're not going to have people is they want spontaneity, but there's no framework for it.
Justin Whitmel Earley That's so true. And we're going if you pause for a second and think about this, we're actually very good at this. Look at children. They crave rhythms and schedules like they need it to figure out what they're going to do. But you'll see them you like take them to the park at that hour and then suddenly they're also spontaneous and then they're, you know, active play and they're taking risks. And and we're the same way. We need a schedule to keep us to the right chunks of life. But we're very good at being spontaneous in those chunks. And so schedule spontaneity. It might sound weird or sound boring, but it works.
Ginny Yurich You do it. It happens within that framework because. Any regular Tuesday night. You're too busy. Yes, but if you schedule it, then it's going to happen. It's like what you talk about. Well, actually, there's a really, really cool sentence schedule defends from two sentences, Schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. Yeah, that's powerful words right there.
Justin Whitmel Earley I got to give credit for that to any delay. She has this wonderful passage in her book, A Writing Life, where she talks about the life of a writer and she says, Our days become our lives. You know what? What we do in our moments become our aggregate legacy. And then it makes her think about this wonderful power of a schedule like it's a net for catching days when you really want to do anything, like write a book, be a great parent, be a good spouse, or be a friend. The first thing you should do is set up a little schedule for that and a little bit. It's not a rule.
Ginny Yurich Do you have cool rhythms? You actually, I love the book, has all sorts of ideas, and my favorite one was the second Tuesday of every month get together. But it's great mean you really if people are looking for specific ideas the Shanghai Feast Society we do have all sorts of things in here and ways to do it regularly and to know that spontaneity can come through the schedule. Well, what about the hard edges, Justin? And I think, you know, when you're a kid and you're in a classroom, let's say, and I mean, I had this we have conflicts with your friends at school, but every single day you still show up and then you kind of have to work it out because you're in this environment where you have to work it out. But you say most friendships last only until the first conflict. So how do we deal with the hurts of friendship?
Justin Whitmel Earley Yeah, so I define a friend in this book as somebody who knows you fully and loves you anyway. And we kind of just talked about that first part. The friend is somebody who, over the course of life gets to know the real you. You disclose your interior life to them. But this second part is so important, and I phrased it that way Important loves you anyway, because there's always two ingredients to friendship, a flawed person and another flawed person. And if a lot of people are going to hurt each other, you cannot do friendship without doing forgiveness. And if you don't learn how to forgive, then you won't learn ever how to do a friendship because friends will hurt you. And lots of times worse than other people hurt you because you like them so much, you know, so their jabs or their bad moves or the things that they say or their flaws, just like in marriage or family sometimes can be very difficult. And so I devoted a whole chapter, and it actually, I think, became my favorite chapter in the book to forgiveness and talking about how to persevere through hard things with friends. And really it's the art of forgiveness. It's the art of saying you're not perfect and you don't have to be. And I will forgive your flaws and stick around anyway. And we crave that from other people. You know, like when we cut people off on the interstate, we're always like, you know, oops, sorry. And we kind of hope they'll be like, they don't worry about it when somebody else cuts off software, like how could they possibly be that kind of person? You know, we owe it to forgiveness. And I want us to learn to extend it to others, because if we're going to have relationships that lasts longer than disposable cups, we have to learn figure.
Ginny Yurich I like to the statement we should. These are really good statements for adult friendships and also for child friendships too. But I think because we grow up in this environment where we're surrounded by people, maybe we're not learning these skills and maybe we don't really know what to expect or what it's going to be like. And so you say we should be we should expect to be hurt by our friends.
Justin Whitmel Earley Yeah.
Ginny Yurich I mean, you're signing up for it. That's a thing, I think. But I think that's actually a very powerful statement that it shouldn't surprise you.
Justin Whitmel Earley It shouldn't surprise you. And we always seem to talk about the ends of the spectrum here, because there's a there is a level where a relationship can become unhealthy or you might need to move away. Talk about that in a second. But most of our problems are ones that we should expect. We should expect our friends to disappoint us. We should expect our friends to hurt us. We should expect our friends to not love us the way that we expected to be loved. The great thing about friendship is that by pushing past those difficulties and talking about them, you enter into new realms of relationships. The tragic thing is whether you're a teenager or a, you know, a 40 year old. When you have a conflict with a friend, you should see it as the gateway to a new relationship, not the barrier to a relationship. Because when we say, oh my gosh, this I can't believe this person said that, I'm going to leave. We think of these conflicts as like, I can't be friends with this person anymore. You know, people say that's like that. It would be it would be tragic, you know, But when you talk about it and you say, this hurt me and it hurt me because I actually like you and I like what you think. And, you know, these are hard conversations. You're kind of embarrassing. This is the idea of fully disclosing yourself like, I have emotions, but suddenly when you have that conversation, you push it to a whole new level of relationship and you realize that on the other side of conflict is. Everything you wanted in a relationship like understanding, forgiveness, tenderness. And yes, I'm talking about friendship, not marriage. I mean, it should like friendships are emotionally intimate and they should be no way. On the other side, there are places and I've had them in my life where somebody has really started to maybe struggle with mental health or an addiction. Mostly. I've seen this in addictions and I've realized that I'm not going to save this person. And there is a category of relationships. It's much less and it's much more serious where you have to realize that I can forgive this person for the way they've hurt me and the way they're hurting themselves. But it doesn't mean that I'm going to be the one to save them. And you might need to move away for the sake of your and their health. And that might be, you know, having an intervention that may be in suggesting counseling. But at the end of the day, everybody needs to understand that forgiveness is important, but you cannot save other people. They're just rejecting it and they're just continuing this pattern of hurt. It is okay to walk away from friendship. What's amazing is that actually, like you can lose a lot of friends in life and we do and still be a really healthy person. You know, it's not marriage. Not like driving a truck with ten spouses. We might have questioned the spouse, but if you had people in your life where like, oh, we used to be so close, but then I moved in. So they said, you know, you shouldn't feel guilty for that. Maybe you ought to write them a letter. But if you have a friend who fell to an addiction and you just couldn't reconcile, you know, that's human life. But by and large, Jenny, we need to move away from the disposable cup framework of friendships and move into forgiveness.
Ginny Yurich Yeah, and it's really scary. But to your point, you have to actually do it in order to see what's on the other side. And I would imagine, Well, you said most modern friendships last only until the first conflict. So I would imagine that many of us have not gone to the other side to see what that looks like. And we've had some ones where you try to go to the other side and you and you don't get there. Yeah. And so friendships are not marriages. You can lose a lot of them and still be healthy.
Justin Whitmel Earley Thomas Merton, who was a contemplated that lived around the 1956, he has this great quote about saying that flaws are exactly what make us human and that's why we need each other. And I just think it's such an important idea for friendship. It's you. We're not looking at this romanticized version of people who always get along and we're like, destined to understand each other. We're looking at a life like anything else that's like built on grit and pushing through things and persevering anyway, because relationships are all flawed like that. And when you see them as like, Oh, that's what it was meant to be. Yeah, that's what it's supposed to be. Then you move out of this paradigm of like the perfect friends are the ones who always understand me, always accept me the way you are, and I never have problems with. And we should be on a sitcom together. Like life is not like that. Good. You know, because when you persevere through flaws, that's actually interesting. And that's the life we're like.
Ginny Yurich Yeah, I mean, and and then you talk about when you're talking about the grit and pushing through, obviously, this is amazing modeling for our kids. And that's one of the things that you touch on in this book, too, is your kids are seeing it. Your kids are seeing that Tuesday night on the porch conversations. They're part of it. They're being seen and known by these other men in your life, these other families in your lives. So that's a great way to teach our kids grit and pushing through. Those are things you may not learn in the classroom. So amazing life skills for sure. I want to know about the cast. The book is dedicated to the cast.
Justin Whitmel Earley Yes, that's right, Sarah. I started high school in a terrible place. I was the kind of guy who tucked in his t shirts. I played the clarinet and I was not doing well in the social settings, to say the least. I just moved to a new high school because my dad was elected to state office. So I was like the politicians kid who was known like, Oh, that kid. But I didn't know anybody. And it was just a tough beginning of high school until I talk about this. At the very beginning of the book, I had this one day at the lockers where a friend and I named Steve asked each other if we wanted to be best friends. And the way we got there is we had just spent a weekend together like a church camp and bonded over skateboarding and hacky sack and drum set. So it's very, very 1990s. Like if you're picking up two things, you might be like, what's a hacky sack? But the point is we found a common interest that suddenly made us say, Oh, you too, like you're interested in this. Like we found each other, right? And we had this like what I call a Wes Anderson moment at the lockers where, you know, the Wes Anderson movie. The way we love it is because everybody says what they think all the time and we're locker room and we can't remember who said it. I think it was Steve, but he was just like, should we be best friends? And I was like, Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. As if it was a decision. I went with a bunch and that's it. I tell that story because most remarkable moments in life actually pass rather uneventfully at first, but everything in my life began to change. From that moment on, it was a pivot point where I lived in this world of anxious high school adolescent decisions. And that didn't stop after that moment at the locker with Steve. But the way that I faced that environment completely changed because now I face it alongside a friend. And ever since then I've had this feeling like. I was made for friendship. You need other people to walk through the world. And. And just a quick aside, just note that about your life. I mean, the anxiety, the depression, the difficulty that you think is baked into life is actually baked into loneliness, not life. When you walk through the same circumstances next to a friend, everything about this experience has completely changed. And what's neat is that friendship is like a fire. It catalyzes other fires, it grows. And, you know, I tell the more complicated stories in the book, but what happened is that Steve and I wrote this relationship and friendship began to grow to other friendships with other people, not without problems. We sometimes were exclusive and mean, and we learned to change our ways. And we by no means when I say the center, but we learned to live in a network of friends that, you know, we're not everybody's friends with everybody's. But it became by the end of this high school, this group we called the cast. And to this day.
Ginny Yurich Oh, these are your high school friends. They add to this book is dedicated to your high school friends. Wow. Is that cool?
Justin Whitmel Earley Not all of them, which is what I think is also cool as we we started calling ourselves this because it was just the regular people who would show up. But I think we quickly realized that could be exclusive. Like there's a cast of characters and we started to say, you know, we should think of it as a cast, like a way of friendship that we're molded into like a, you know, a cast of iron or a cast of metal and people through college, people just who live in Richmond of the same town of us, people who just came in and out, they started to sort of be added to this group. And it lives on now and both as a text chain and as a regular gathering here in Richmond where we get with friends and enjoy a gift of humanity called friendship. So I feel lucky to be taught this early. I feel lucky to have lots of awkward moments in my life where we named being best friends and named having a cast. But I think the takeaway I give to listeners is there's a real power to names. I'm not saying if the name your group of friends, but there's a real power to saying to somebody else, I want to push into this friendship to just naming what exists. Like, I really appreciate you. I love to do coffee once a month, something like that. There's a power to that. And Steve and I found it rather awkwardly and in high school, and you can find it rather awkwardly as a 30 year old or 40 year old or 50 year old. You can start any time.
Ginny Yurich In the text chain, includes the campfire, like if it gets too hot, then you just in the care of everything. Look, we're going to have to move this to empires then.
Justin Whitmel Earley If you read the book, there's a lot of fire imagery, and one of it that I on that part did is text chains have radically changed how we interact with people, not totally for the worse. They've helped us keep up a lot more in small increments, which is great. But I use the analogy of snacks and meals, like technological connections are a snack, in relationships are a meal, and we all know what happens to our body if we just eat snacks. Yeah, we atrophy. And you'll notice if you just carry on a lot of conversations on text change with friends, small things will start to bother you. Like arguments will crop up and it's easy to be sarcastic or not be helpful. And when we on our text changes as friends start to sense these moments like, Oh, we've reached the limit of health in relationship, here we send this campfire. Jeff, which signals this conversation. The next step is to meet over a fire and talk. Yeah, and we've had amazing times where, like, we've gotten really mad at each other and then we meet over a fire and lots of this. Like it started to happen in the pandemic, which is why the fire was important. So we can, like, meet outside and talk. And we quickly realized like all that we were mad about faded really quickly and we mostly agreed and understood each other's viewpoints. And the theme here is we need embodied friendships. Technological connections will not do it. I mean, I love text chains. I love some aspects of social media. I also love Oreos and chips, but I don't make a diet out of them. Right? So you can have these things in small places, but you need to make a meal out of embodied friendship.
Ginny Yurich It's good. Oh, you said it right off the bat that the cast is a text chain, but it's also get together well. And you also talked about this inclusive exclusive, which I do actually really tricky. And I think it's tricky too, because sometimes, like as a mom, if you are spending time with a group of people and all the kids get along, then sometimes you introduce a new family and it upsets the dynamic. And so there is that's a fine line. But I liked this idea that you had in the book about the Shanghai Feast Society. Was that the one where you use that as a way to help other people connect?
Justin Whitmel Earley Yeah, that was a really neat thing that when I was living in Shanghai as the early graduate after college, me and a couple other people because the expatriate community there is small and you need each other, right? You need to find other people like Americans or Westerners to help you stay sane in a foreign society. Anybody who lives overseas understands this. And we started this thing called the Shanghai Peace Society, where we would send out invitations to people who we thought should know each other and we would literally treat them to a dinner and usually happened in a group of probably at least six, maybe no more than 12, because a conversation. Can really only carry on at that capacity. And one of the big themes was a one conversation theme at dinner so that everybody was talking and helping to get to know each other. So really neat thing. And for me, it's a it's a model of inclusivity. If you're not running to your friendships, then you're not going to make friendships. You absolutely need some of those closed circle times where it's you like it's me and Matt and Steve on the porch and we're really catching up on our life where it's you and those moms at the playgroup because you really get each other. But if you don't balance that with times where you're inviting the world in, two things will happen. One, you'll become like a trapped eddy in a river that slowly starts to decay and decompose. And I know that's gross, but clicks close. Circles of friendship do get gross. Like it's it's not the way we were meant to live. We need, like, fresh water, So we need to run to those moments. But we also need to keep, like new water flowing in and doing things like whether it's the Shanghai Fish Society or having a playgroup every a month where you invite everybody who wants to come to, yes, you know, the worst thing in the world and everybody knows this is to be on the outside. It is just so damaging to our mental health and our sense of self. And it's really one of the most awful things you can do to anybody is exclude them and let them know it. And we've done that to people. And this stories in the book, you know, we excluded a guy who eventually became one of our best friends and we had to repent and say, sorry about that. But that story reminds me that we have an incredible capacity to hurt each other by being exclusive. But when we run to real friendships, we balance bringing people in and nurturing the ones we have, and that's the good life. Like it's just such a gift to invite them into the circle.
Ginny Yurich MM I love the imagery of the water, the stagnant water. It's got to be flowing well, and the saying is make new friends, but keep the old right. That's the thing. I grew up hearing that one, and it's a truth. So really good ideas that Shanghai Society is a cool idea to try and bring together people who might connect and who might know each other and to be inclusive and to invite. And I like that idea, right? It doesn't have to be every single thing that you do. But to weave that in on a somewhat regular basis, back to the scheduling, back to the net that holds our days apart, the part you talked about with geography was really interesting. So often we look at our life like as it is now, and we don't have context for how people used to live, and so we don't really think about those things. So now when we meet someone, the first question we ask is What do you do for a living? And I, I don't like that question because I don't know why. I think because now I do do something and I don't really want to talk about it. I don't know. Even when I didn't do something, I liked that better. But you say it used to be, Who's your family?
Justin Whitmel Earley Yeah. Yeah. Or where you're from, you know? Yeah. And it's very important to realize that we live in about a century of time that is radically different from the rest of human history. In the rest of human history, the question you would have asked somebody is, you know, what people that you belong to like, what's your name, Who's your family? And that came with a lot of problems, too, you know, a lot of tribalism, a lot of like you're not on the inside of the outside. So I'm not necessarily saying we need to go back. I'm just saying that we should note that the new thing, the new identity marker in our world is what do you do? Okay. And that means that we're primarily thinking in terms of career and what sort of name we earn ourself. And I like love Jenny, like I love being a lawyer, I love writing books. I actually love talking about it. So.
Ginny Yurich Okay. Is that you? Do I.
Justin Whitmel Earley Like it? Maybe it's a flaw. I like talking about myself. But regardless of where you are on that spectrum, I think the important thing to note, sociologically speaking, is that we live in a world now. That's where identity markers are mostly around what you do in the world. And as important as work is, that's dangerous because you can start thinking like that and thinking, okay, the primary thing about my life is doing something that is important, which means let's get to the geography point. You tend to move for jobs. You tend to say the center of gravity for where I live is work and maybe friendships will happen there. But, you know, we'll see. And I would suggest that switching that to the old default, which is actually the center of gravity of where you should live, should be friendships, unless you have a really good reason to move for a job. This happened to me in law school. So I was thinking, hey, I need to find the best, most prestigious law firm. And I thought that meant like going to New York. I had offers in New York and D.C. and back in Shanghai where I used to live. And then I had my first two kids in law school, and I realized life was about to get really complicated as a busy young lawyer with two young children. And I realized that if I did not move to where my friends lived, I was not going to have any because I was going to be so consumed by work that to fight against that current would be really hard. And Lauren, I made that tough, but now stands as probably the best decision we ever made to say, actually, we're at to Richmond, where a lot of our friends and family live and find the best job we can find. And I did. I was fortunate enough to find a great lawyering job here, but reversing that default and saying, I'm going to be in close proximity to friends so that the current's a little bit easier to swim against, has changed everything about our lives and our children's lives because they grow up with these guys they call uncles and these cousins around them, and half the people they call uncles aren't actually uncles, they're just friends, you know. And that's a beautiful life, like making friends a family and making family and friends.
Ginny Yurich Yes, it is a support network for kids because we had that. We had people we called grandma that weren't really our grandma. And you just felt like, oh, there's extra people that care about me and I could turn to you and that loved me. What would you have done? So when you talk about going to Richmond, you said family. Were you talking about returning to some high school friends or returning to college friends? Like, I guess my question is, what would you have done because people are so transient. It's so hard. Justin, Like, I remember thinking when you graduate from high school. Like, it's like everyone has had the same life, albeit a couple, you know, maybe this kid played soccer and that kept a basketball, but you kind of have the same life as other people for 13 years in a row. And then the very next day, it's like an explosion. I mean, this person joined the military and that person is already working in that person's going to school. And this person got married already and now and has a kid. So I'm impressed that you were able to leave and come back and find it.
Justin Whitmel Earley Yeah, I know. I do want a name that I think we had a unique situation thanks to a couple of the friends whom I mentioned earlier, they had intentionally decided to move back to Richmond after college, and they sort of are creating a community of friendship there. So when we lived in China, when I went to law school in D.C., we would visit Richmond all the time. And for us it was sort of the obvious locus of friendship. I don't think most people have something that obvious, and I try to be really clear in the book. You do not need to move like you should not feel guilty right now if you're like, I need to get back to my hometown. Not necessarily. I just want you to think of your life more like a plant than not. You need to put down roots somewhere and it will mean people. They will mean like. So this could be moving a little closer to your church. Or it could be like, you know, moving a little closer to your school. It could just be deciding, hey, I'm going to try to cultivate the relationships that are around me instead of assuming that, you know, face times or, you know, texts with people who don't live near me are enough. And there's lots of different ways to do this. But I, I just want to signal to people that you're a body physical being, and that means you have physical limitations. And that's not bad news. That's something to lean into when you realize that you need a route here in this place with relationships around you who you can actually talk to face to face on a regular basis, then you'll be very healthy. That's a good life. But most of the current of America that we talked about would kind of convince you that you can technologically be omnipresent and omniscient and everywhere and and know you're a body. You're not a technological brain that can extend itself through the ether of the Internet. You need people around your body and geographies. One helpful way to think about that.
Ginny Yurich Right. And so this work from home can be a blessing and a curse. In fact, Josh has worked from home actually for most of our marriage. And it actually is trickier than you would think, Right. This is one of those things that everybody wishes that they have, but then you have no anchor. You can go anywhere. So my where should we go? It So it's one of those things that good and bad at the same time. And I like that idea of limitations. I also like this idea. Creating moments outside the ordinary is one of the best ways to care for the ordinary creative moments outside the ordinary is one of the best ways to care for the ordinary. And this goes back to that. It really doesn't take much, but it does take something. So what are some ways that we can weave in like the UN, ordinary into our friendships?
Justin Whitmel Earley Yeah, I think this will be obvious to people when I say it. It's like, Oh yeah, that. But the reason I like to talk about weaving in the UN ordinary is because most of friendship is kind of like the mundane life I just described. Find a rhythm where you're doing a playgroup or having coffee or sitting on the porch and know that you know habit, that beauty of setting up a schedule sustains most of life. And that's the good stuff. But as I say in the book, and I think maybe it was Emerson that first said something like this, you know, I don't remember 90% of the books I've read, but they've made me intellectually who I am. I don't remember 90% of the meals that I've eaten. And yet they they made me survive. Like, here is my body I'm living. And you don't remember 90% of the time you spend with friends, but it creates your soul, right? Yeah. Now there's that 10% reality of when you intentionally spend a memory making time. An hour of the ordinary time. Remarkable things happen. And I want to encourage people, even in their busy stage of life, of career and parenting, to say, like, go on a girl's weekend once a year like this. So one of the things that me and my friends do. As we encourage and our wives are happy to take us up on it. Them getting away to the mountains of Virginia for a weekend. They've done this at least three years in a row when we all have like young kids right now. So it's not easy. But we say we got the kids for a weekend. You guys go get like an Airbnb next to some brewery or something, and they just spend the weekend talking and eating and drinking together and doing that incredibly important work of making a memory where you can look out onto a mountain, having an important conversation and cry with somebody about something you haven't said that you need to say. And those are out of the ordinary times. We are away from your kids and you're away from your usual setting. And they're not the normal life for friendship, but this so important. And so even if these are just like once a year things, a summer vacation with friends, you know, we think about this regularly with family, like, let's have a getaway. I suggest doing this with your friends, a bunch of fathers. And I did it for Father's Day. We went to a house for two nights and our wives returned the favor of watching the kids for that weekend. And Jenny, I mean, it's hilarious. It's like all stereotypes aside, me and like ten other dads sat talking on the porch for almost 12 hours straight, taking turns, crying and sharing what was hard about being a father and like, being like, Yeah, I think this is very manly. Yeah, some people might not, but we're just sat next to a river and talked about what was hard and how we could be better dads. And I remember coming back being like, That is exactly what I needed for Father's Day. Wow. And these are the ordinary times that changed the rest of our friendship. And they don't have to be all the time, but make it so your spouse can do that sometime. Your work. You need to be away for a weekend to do that. Sometimes you need little times like this.
Ginny Yurich Yeah, I loved the what you said, the incredibly important work of making a memory. It is incredible. Alistair Humphreys, he's a National Geographic explorer. I talk about it a lot because he's been on our podcast a couple of times and he's just delightful where he says, You'll never have enough time, you'll never have enough money. Thank you for that's how you feel. Like I don't really have it. You have to just do it anyway. You have to make those decisions and ever regret that. It's a really good reminder to try and do the out of the ordinary things in order to care for your ordinary life. Josh Knight We've been challenged from Audrey Roloff. She's got that book, Love Letter Life, and they're trying to do 52 dates a year. And our kids were so clingy. We had a hard time when they were little, but now they're older. So we're trying to do that and it's tricky. Now I speak at conferences. We work gone basically all spring that we did an overnight, just one overnight to Amish country. We stayed in this silo. I mean, some day it was so fine. I mean, it was 24 hours. And so you forget that's what you said at the very beginning. You forget how powerful a small think two nights, one night, how powerful that can be. Wildly disproportionate. Yes, that's a great phrase.
Justin Whitmel Earley It's a good thing to tie these two things together, like both in your your romantic relationships of marriage and in your incredibly important relationships of friendship. Those little intentional efforts like a date night once a week, or if you can once a month that get away once a year. You do never feel like you have the time. You always feel too busy. You're always like wondering, Is this a good idea for the budget? Friends are worth being lavish for their worth saying Let's work to make this happen. Like in a marriage, when you take your spouse on a date and you're like or a getaway and you're like, Oh my gosh, we needed that so much, you'll find something similar. So I would say the more you understand that friendship is at the center of life, the more you get. You feel appropriate to be like, I'm going to lavish some time and money on this and the dividends are amazing. Like your investment will be paid back, You'll come back a better father, you'll come back about your mother, you'll come back a better spouse, you'll come back a better worker, because friendship will make or break your life. So we'll learn how to do it.
Ginny Yurich Yeah, and I don't know. I mean, I don't know where this comes from, but I have found that it doesn't ever. It never, like, ends. You like you think, Well, here's an example. So this doctor, Michael Rucker, who wrote this book about fun, the fun habit, he said at one point in his life, he spent all the rest of his money to go on this adventure that he felt like he should go on, but then he's not destitute. So you end up I mean, it ends up being okay. I think sometimes it feels irresponsible or something like that, but somehow it always turned out to be that that was it's an investment. I don't think it's a waste either of the finances or the time.
Justin Whitmel Earley We should listen to the old people in our life, you know, And this they tell us what you think about on your deathbed and it's not more money. Yeah, it's more memories. It's more people, it's more relationships. It's more time with your kids. It's more of a time with your spouse. It's more time outside. It's more time with friends. Would do well to listen.
Ginny Yurich Yeah, for sure. But then with one thing here, I love that your books include questions and conversation starters. Your other books had it too, and I always appreciate that. So you have this list of questions. So I had a friend in college that we had a list of questions. I haven't done it since college. Where we would get together on a weekly basis and talk through the same list of questions. And I didn't think about it until picked your book up. And I loved that. So you have these questions and people could write their answers out ahead of time. And then you get together and you already have this framework of things that you can talk through. So is this something that you do on a regular basis, or is this just an idea for people, maybe something you've done in the past?
Justin Whitmel Earley It's something that I've done in the past, but it's a form that happens a lot in our friendships. And I'm glad you mention this because I tried. You know, friendships are an art, but I tried to give a lot of, like practical examples at the end of every chapter and charts and stuff that like, here are some ways that you can practice scheduling, practice, geography. And with this one, I think commonly in our friendship, we've had similar sets of questions that we'll ask each other. And the one list that you're referring to in particular was we were getting away with a group of friends and we wanted to make sure we didn't just shoot the breeze and like drink beer and talk about sports or something. We wanted to make sure we had some time where we really caught up. And so we sent out these seven or eight questions ahead of time, and people had to write out their answers and then their spouse had to answer one question. And then what was neat? You read someone else's answers like this is what someone else said. Oh, wow. So way of saying, here's what they think. And then it's sort of like we would ask them questions about what they said, which honestly, Ginny was partly just managing time because when you get like six or seven people and they're like, give us the update on your life. Sometimes we would just talk for an hour and that's good, but we've got six or seven friends. It's like, I don't know that we have all the time for that or that it's.
Ginny Yurich A way of managing it without kind of being a jerk.
Justin Whitmel Earley Yeah. And the thing you can do so many versions of this, that theme here, I just think is realizing that intentional conversation, intentional questions, tiny bit of intentional effort unlocks us inside and we're actually to be asked about our life. We actually look forward to talking to people about these things. And I give a reference in the book about a book of a thousand questions. I mean, when you hear a good question, ask her.
Ginny Yurich I bought it.
Justin Whitmel Earley You're good. You bought it. Yeah.
Ginny Yurich Yeah.
Justin Whitmel Earley When you're a good question, ask or you're fast on your way to becoming a good friend. So ask good questions and listen.
Ginny Yurich And there's a really good list right in the book. Let's end with one of the questions. So one of the questions is what's one book or podcast everyone needs to pay attention to besides made for people and the common rule and habits of the household.
Justin Whitmel Earley One podcast that everybody needs to pay attention to is that is the are a podcast. You had them on arrow is a they're a phone box that you put your phone in and it tracks its time off and gamify being off your phone. And not only do I love the idea of less time on our phone, more time in real relationships, those guys are they're also just curating a really good list of people to hear from. Yeah, they got a great line up, so they're kind of in that theme of presence and intentionality. So I'd say, Go arrow, go, go. Listen to them.
Ginny Yurich It's awesome. That's a great suggestion. They really have had some phenomenal guests on and their product is great. We're using it in our households. Too much excess, so. Justin Huge. Congrats on a new book made for people Why we Drift into Loneliness and How to Fight for a Life of Friendship. I know people will get a lot out of it and it will change. Like you left lifted up that huge study of what? Loneliness. And we didn't really talk about it. I think to a degree some people know. But you talk in the book about the effects of loneliness on both our personhood but also on our health. And so this is such an important book about being known, and I can't wait to share this with everyone. Thanks for being here.
Justin Whitmel Earley Thank you, Ginny. Every time every time we do this, it's so great. Appreciate you having me again. We just finished recording the audiobook two weeks ago, and I'm also excited for that because I think more and more readers are doing audiobooks. And I love the idea of like if you if you don't have time, especially as a parent, like to read the book, I will read it to you, you know.
Ginny Yurich Yes.
Justin Whitmel Earley Or the audiobook. Oh yeah.
Ginny Yurich Well, huge congrats, I'm sure. Keep in touch.
Justin Whitmel Earley Well, you're the best. I hope we do. Keep it the touch. I'm sure we will. Thanks for being a great reporter and enjoy this.
Ginny Yurich Thanks, Justin. Yeah.
