All We're Doing is Catching Up

When you realize you've talked for an hour but don't actually feel closer

You’ve finally had a catch up with one of your good friends (after playing phone tag for the past three weeks). You got the whole download on her life. Job update, how her husband’s doing, their new house, the situation with their mom. And you’ve done the same. After 45 minutes, one of you interrupts with “Sorry we’re about to sit down for dinner! So good chatting, love you!” And by the end, you’ve covered everything, and somehow it also felt like nothing.

You know the feeling.

And this doesn’t just happen with friends who live in other cities. It’s the multiple weddings a year, vacations, family in town, and weekend work trips, where next thing you know you’re making plans to see someone six weeks out. So then you see them, catch up on the last month, and do it all over again.

At some point, we stopped being in each other’s lives and started reporting on them. There's a difference between telling someone about a hard week and having them actually there during a hard week. This catch-up, somehow, has started to become the default mode of adult friendship.

And I don’t want it. So how’d we get here?

Geography scattered us. Jobs moved us. Busyness continued to eat at the margins. And social media made us feel like we're in touch with our friends' lives, when really we're just watching them from afar, and feeling less inclined to actually check in because we think we already know. (When we don't… we know the highlight reel.)

But honestly? It also just happens. This is what life looks like in your late twenties and thirties. Nobody planned to let the randomness of daily life stop being shared. It's just that the structures that used to hold it (dorm floors, same office, same neighborhood) fell away. The friendships are still real, but the way in which we interact is different.

We’re there for the big moments. The engagement, the wedding, the new baby, the heart break, the job loss. We show up. What we’re missing are the unremarkable ones. The day when nothing happened. The spontaneous walk. The random work gossip you don't even remember by the following week. You can’t catch someone up on the feeling of a regular Tuesday. And what we’re really missing is the witnesses to our ordinary life.

You can have great friends and still not feel known on a daily level. There can be people who would do anything for you and not many who just... show up.

So how do we actually change it?

If your people are far away: Send the random voice memo instead of letting texts pile up. Call while you’re doing something mundane like walking the dog or folding laundry vs. scheduling a phone call in two weeks. Text the picture of your Tuesday night dinner. Be a witness to the ordinary, even from a distance.

If your people are in the same city: Stop waiting for the dinner in a month. Text “I’m going on a walk at 10, want to come?” and see what happens. Do something instead of just going out to eat. A coffee that’s only an hour. The impromptu stop-by when you’re in the neighborhood. What can be a low-stakes, unplanned version of your friendship.

We're not getting our college dorm hall back. But we can stop treating the catch-up like it's enough. A little more ordinary. A little more showing up for nothing in particular. That's actually all it takes.