Deepening Friendships, Ethical Investing, Joys of Training, and Preserving your Why (For web)

My writing has been quite sparse since the start of the school year. But I finally got to this one.

Without further ado, here are some fall brain bits.

Deepening friendships

I have a tendency to maintain a relatively broad social network, lacking significant depth. My social horizon is wide, but I often feel a desire for more consistent, intimate, and meaningful relationships. This requires more than just interacting with a bunch of people. In fact, it partially requires limiting yourself to interacting with fewer select people, in a more quality fashion.

As of recently, I’ve decided to put more focus into deepening existing friendships. Here are some general factors I believe play a big part in doing so:

1. Spend more time with the people you like

• Find one activity or more you can do with these people every week

2. Be the leader

• Everybody is waiting for an invitation. Be the person to break the social stalemate. If you’re questioning or thinking you should, just do it. Everybody will be grateful

3. Choose an activity that’s conducive to connection. This means:

• Doing something you all enjoy. This will make you more likely to keep doing it in the future.
• Do hard things together. Whether it be self-improvement challenges, workouts, races, backcountry trips, etc. Overcoming adversity together is one of the most potent shortcuts to connection.
• This doesn’t have to be all the time, but sprinkle in activities/hang-outs where there’s opportunity for long unhurried conversation. This improves the odds of sharing more vulnerable and authentic parts of oneself; which lies at the heart of connection.

4. Ask for help, and offer help

• Much of the time we don’t want to burden others by asking them to partake in the chores and challenges of our lives. But counter-intuitively, this “burdening”, is a catalyst to forming strong bonds. It’s you being vulnerable enough to ask for a helpful hand, and as long as you’re willing to return the same generosity, you’re inviting this person into a very fruitful and functional friendship.
• Most of the friendships I see nowadays, between myself and others, are built strictly on convenience. We only do things with each other when we find the time. We don’t make the time. We don’t do things for them when it’s inconvenient, and we don’t ask them for things that are inconvenient in return. The best friendships consist of a healthy dose of inconvenience and burdening. Our hyper-productive & distraction-filled culture has stripped away this component of friendship, and we need to reclaim it.

We don’t build trust by offering help, we build trust by asking for it - Simon Sinek

This leads me to my final point:

5. We have to be willing to make the necessary sacrifice

• This entails breaking the “perfect schedule” and allowing people deeper into our lives. This means sacrificing some “productive time” to do “unproductive things”, which are actually deeply productive when done with the right people, because they bring us an incredible amount of fulfillment.

Ethical Investing

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what ethical investing looks like. Is it ethical to simply throw money into a fund, spread across a variety of different companies, just to build wealth? This is something I’m trying to figure out. It would partially depend on what you’re planning to do with the money you’re investing. In certain scenarios, which I’m very far from, upholding the value of ethical investing would mean sacrificing some short-term booms in wealth. Especially around the AI and military sectors.

Joys of Training

I trained up to my first half marathon distance this summer. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, but never fully committed myself to. I even ran a half-marathon race which was super fun. And unexpectedly, the most rewarding part of the process wasn’t running the goal distance, but instead the purpose and self-respect that accompanied consistently working towards that goal. Personally, I’ve found this to be particularly true for physical endeavours. Consistently engaging in physically hard things, paradoxically makes life so much easier.

I recently stopped running as often after achieving this goal. And following that, my life has felt a bit duller. It hasn’t felt like I’ve been building much towards anything. So I’ve realized that I should find another physical endeavour to train for. Here’s what I currently have in mind:

• My big goal is that I want to do the full Tamarack marathon in May. Which I won’t fully start training for until February.
• Until then, I have some smaller goals. I want to:
  • Complete my first 30-day yoga course with Breathe & Flow
  • Climb twice a week and reach the 5.12 grade territory
  • Get some long bike rides in (60+ km), before the end of the season
  • More consistently get good ~45-minute home workouts in (3-4 per week)

Preserving Your Why

I’ve recently had to continually remind myself of my ‘why’ across various pursuits—from my studies, to writing and endurance training. We all occasionally get looped into maladaptive incentives. Some examples of this in my own life have been:

• Grade chasing, especially in my first year of university.
• Writing because I know I might get some attention for it. Or to possibly make it a source of income in the future.
• Wanting to run or bike long distances so that I can keep up with the crazy people on my Strava feed.

None of these incentives have ever helped me find a true sense of purpose, or enjoyment, in these pursuits. When your incentives lack purpose or enjoyment, your commitments and progress tend to fizzle out.

I’m now trying to more clearly define my “why’s”, and to keep them at the forefront of my mind. I want my pursuits to be fuelled by incentives that align with my values. Incentives that can’t be altered by the presence or opinion of others. My more aligned “why’s” for the activities given above would be:

• Studying hard so I can properly explore my curiosities. While also doing so in a way where my competence will give me flexibility in the job market.
• Writing to see what I know. To learn and understand through writing. And to share my writing in a way that can inspire introspection in others.
• Run/bike in order to work the body and free the mind.

That wraps up my first newsletter for October. Hope this helped spark some nuggets of thought within your own life.

Stay curious,

Alex