You Blew It!: An Awkward Look at the Many Ways in Which You've Already Ruined Your Life - Softcover

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Josh Gondelman is a comedian and writer who incubated in Boston before moving to New York. He is an Emmy-nominated writer for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, which is a television show. He has also written for Women's Health, The New Yorker, and The Cut, which are magazines. He has toured internationally performing standup, which is just heavily-rehearsed talking, really.
 
Joe Berkowitz is a writer living in Brooklyn. His work has been featured in The Awl, Salon, The Village Voice, Cosmopolitan, Vulture, RollingStone.com, GQ.com, and McSweeney's Internet Tendency, among others. He is currently a staff writer at Fast Company. He apologizes in advance and often.

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***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***

Copyright © 2015 Josh Gondelman & Joe Berkowitz

CHAPTER 1

Friends Like These

Every year after your twenty-second birthday, it becomes more difficult to make new friends. Nobody told you this as a child because you would’ve cried about it until given ice cream or a pony. As children, two people can form an intense bond over simply not being the kid who threw up on the monkey bars that time. Once we’re old enough to file our own taxes, though, we’ve become conditioned to assume everyone we meet has enough friends already. As hard as it is to make new friends in adulthood, though, it’s easier than ever to lose them.

Friendship dynamics evolve over time. In high school, half your friends hated each other and only stuck together because, well, what else were they gonna do—hang out at a cooler high school, where the principal spends most of his time with a small group of students at a nearby fifties-themed diner? Adults don’t have to do that. Our busy lives both explain and excuse losing touch. All it takes now is one perceived slight, and we never text that buddy from our urban kickball league ever again.

Of course, this disposability isn’t true of old friends. Anyone whose wedding you were in won’t kick you to the curb because you declined to “like” one of their Facebook status updates. (Although he or she probably will move to Scarsdale and breed, thus de-friending you by natural causes.) It’s the new people in your life you actually worry about. A blossoming adult friendship is a delicate soufflé under constant threat of collapsing under its own weight and turning into egg chum. But unlike the soufflé we destroyed back in home ec class, friends don’t give you credit just for showing up.

Making Plans and Breaking Plans

Even if much of friendship can now be literally phoned in, most of us still like to actually meet up from time to time and gaze at our phones together in person. Every year, though, it seems there are fewer hours in each day and more reasons not to leave the house. Spending time in the same room as your friends used to be an essential part of forging a community, and still is, but now you can get that feeling of togetherness from protesting a sitcom cancellation while doing five other things and not wearing pants. If people meet up less than they once did, it’s also because making plans has started to feel like a cold-war showdown of who will cancel first.

It’s pretty much expected that before any two people meet up they will first cancel back and forth five or six times, like two awful ships in the night piloted by people who have never driven ships before. One part of the problem is scheduling. If you pick a date too soon, your friend probably can’t make it; pick one too far out, and you come across like your own executive assistant trying to pencil someone in for a “deskside.” Choosing a time frame is crucial, though, because everybody knows that “Let’s meet up sometime” is code for “See you never.”

Getting together and doing stuff always sounds like something Future You would do. Future You is down for whatever. On the day of, though, Current You is more “down comforter,” and doesn’t want to go anywhere—which is often the optimal outcome. But bailing on friends too often puts you on that slippery slope toward becoming the Boy Who Cried RSVP. That’s why there’s a protocol for cancellation.

On the day you’re supposed to meet with a friend, it’s fairly standard to check in and confirm that neither of you has died nor had a conflicting appendectomy come up. Some people even offer an out during this check-in, a chance to reschedule if need be. Any mention of a rain check, though, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Unless you’re seriously pumped about after-work drinks, it seems almost rude to not reschedule when your friend offers. He or she probably just wanted to put this off until later but didn’t want to be the jerk who pulled the trigger. It’s like a vampire playing coy about needing to be invited in until you just give up and throw your neck-blood right onto his fangs.

After canceling and rescheduling enough times, it’s clear that this is all a charade and neither of you really wants to see the other. Actually meeting up at this point would be like listening to the decades-delayed Guns N’ Roses album Chinese Democracy— confusing and unnecessary. Neither of you will come right out and pronounce the plan over. Instead, you slowly starve it out, withdrawing from Gchats, avoiding all mention of this idea, until it withers and dies. When two weeks have gone by without mentioning your coffee date, you’ve both officially won at cancel-chess. Congratulations, you are free.

I Don’t Know Why You Say Good-bye, I Say Hello

If you’re anything like us, you’re not out of the woods—even if you do make time to see a friend. But assuming you’re seeing this acquaintance on purpose, you may want to actually, you know, talk to her. Don’t worry, though. There are plenty of ways to botch both the entry and dismount of conversation.

The Handshake

What was once a simple clenching of fingers for the purpose of making sure the other person wasn’t going to stab you with a sword is now a minefield of unregulated finger gymnastics.

First off, how much pressure do you apply during a handshake? You don’t want to go too hard with it. You would seem psychotic. Squeezing an acquaintance’s hand with a metric ton per square inch of pressure is like dunking over your seven-year-old nephew. You’ve just proved that you are a big strong person who has no restraint.

But you also don’t want to leave your hand completely limp, like your limbs are made of uncooked steak. It’s unnerving. Unless you are a surgeon or someone else who does delicate, creepy work with their fingers, grip firmly. Don’t be gross.

Even once you’ve gauged the appropriate pressure with which to clamp, there’s still the issue of handshake style. Do you pump once? Twice? Thrice? (Answer: One pump is standard, two is for politicians, and three is reserved for characters played by Chris Farley in early 1990s SNL sketches.)

Plus, over the last few years, the handshake-shift-grip-pull-in-for-a-hug-and-backslap has become increasingly popular. That move says: “I want to hug you, but I’m worried things are moving too fast. Oops. It happened.” Usually it’s men doing this. Women often feel less shame about showing physical affection to their friends, whether it’s hugging, cheek kisses, or making out while drunk and talking about it twice a year. On average, women are much less emotionally repressed.

The Fist Bump

A fist pound is a simple, no-frills greeting. Unfortunately, it has permeated the public consciousness to a point where everyone knows it, but nobody knows exactly when to do it. A fist bump sends one of several diverse messages. It could mean anything from . . .

“Thanks for coming to my fraternity mixer,” to . . .

“I am a germaphobe,” but also . . .

“I just saw a movie about cool inner-city teens in the eighties,” or . . .

“We’re both wearing rings that when touched together give us superpowers!”

Worst of all, there’s no way out of a fist bump if the...