I think the bigger lie is you can live in New York City and almost never interact with a person of color, but ok.
This actually used to happen when I was younger. I miss having friends and being able to just hang out in our free time. I miss having some usable amount of free time. Adult life sucks and sometimes I just feel like I want to jump of the Balcony and end it all since I’ll never get the good times back and I’ll never have anymore in the future.
Sorry you’re feeling like this mate, hope you catch a break soon. Wish I could go back to my late twenties too sometimes.
Sucks to think about, especially since relative to the past we are in the most prosperous times, but people used to be happier in generations prior because they had cheap third places to go to, had a purpose and community.
And now our lives are surrounded by substitute and vicarious experiences that will never afford us true fulfillment. And like a drug, it saps us of the motivation to actually change any of it.
Convenience at an all time high, wealth inequality at astronomical levels.
Times are different, complaints are valid
Fight for the future you want everyone to have
Interesting. I have friends eating breakfeast at my place before work one or two times a week.
You may hate on me now.
what time do you get up, and what time do you all head for work?
We get up at 6 and we head to work between 7 and 9.
So depending on the day and person its just a quick coffee. But on other days we have time for bread and croissants.
I hate the damn french with their stupid labor laws that let’s you have somewhat of a life.
Oh, we hate the french too! So we made even more even more laborate labor laws to outdo them!
🥐 = french
What they don’t mention here is that these guys get up at 6:00 AM, have lunch at 7 and leave at 8
I know it is popular to shit on Friends these years, but I think that it captures the growing up part of life pretty well as the show is basically about capturing a snapshot in time of a group of friends when they were the closest before adult life tore them apart. Because that is how the show ends. They all grow up, have adult responsibilities, different priorities and they all leave the apartment complex to start new lives away from one another.
In my 20s I had a group of friends for awhile and we would hang out in each other’s apartments all the time, sometimes we would sleep over at each other’s places and have breakfast together before heading to school. We would go on picnics and excursions together. All pile into the old, rusty car that one of us owned and drive somewhere.
We had a pub we liked to visit semi-regularly and we were pretty 50/50 men and women.
When we got our degrees, most of us packed up and left. We are now in our 30s and some have had kids in the meantime while most of us have grown apart. Some of us still keep in contact and hang out when our schedules permits it, but it isn’t like it was when we were in our 20s.
To me, Friends is an idealized version of the friends group stuff in your 20s. To me it isn’t as unrealistic as it’s being made out to be nowadays, but it is idealized.
I treasure the few years I got to have good friends and classmates that I loved to hang out with and treat as family. No matter how much time passes, whenever we get to meet up again, it is almost like no time has passed at all, and that is such a great feeling, even if we only get to see each other like once a year.
I used to live in a condo with some friends, and there were others in our friend group that would randomly show up throughout the day. The doors were always unlocked, so friends would just walk in. Sometimes it would be early in the morning and would hang out while I made myself breakfast. Sometimes it was late at night after they partied and needed a place to crash.
Seems similar to what you mentioned, I relate. Like you said, Friends was idealized, but not unrealistic.
Yeah, I think those memories are to be cherished. Your apartment setup back then genuinely sounds like a setup for a wholesome sitcom xD
It’s stuff like that, that makes me have very few regret from my 20s because I full on just wanted to make friends and throw myself into a bunch of scenarios with them while I had the chance and was still young.
When I hit 30, I was like “I’m ready to move forward”.
Still miss it sometimes. That closeness and the goofy shit we got up to sometimes. Also just the hanging out on those lazy evenings. Good times ❤️
Reading that first paragraph makes me physically sick to my stomach. The impermanence of everything is killing me. There is no point. I cannot find a point of my own. It’s legitimately driving me insane.
It’s not how human beings are supposed to live. We’re supposed to have that close-knit friend community our entire lives. People had this up until only 100-200 years ago or so. People in little farming villages were able to have a stable friend group for their entire lives and have time to interact with them. Kids didn’t serve as a substantial barrier, as the friend group helped raise the children. This is how children are supposed to be raised. It’s supposed to take a village.
It’s only our hyper capitalist economy that atomizes us and forces us to scatter to the winds, endlessly chasing job after job in far flung cities, never able to settle down and form real community anywhere.
The way we live is deeply unnatural and fundamentally at odds with human nature. It’s no wonder we’re all mentally ill.
I think the impermanence of life is one of the most difficult things to accept, but once you do, there is some beauty to it too.
I think it is or at least should be one of the biggest motivators to try and live in the now. I have been the most happy, when I try to live in the now and appreciate what I have right now. It takes a bit of practice but it is doable and it a great antidote to anxiety and depressive thoughts in my experience. You cannot live in the now all the time, but aiming toward it, is a good way to spend the limited time you have in this life.
Big hugs to you.
Life has permanence in the long term not the long long long term. We’re fighting to make lives for our children and fighting the rules to make sure that other people’s children can live, survive, and prosper.
I mean, you can still live like that if you want to, for your whole life if you want to. Move into or start a housing co-op. Even kids don’t get in the way of this. We’re supposed to raise kids in a village. That’s how children are meant to be raised.
Nah, I’m good. My comment wasn’t meant to be this sad woe is me rant. It was a critique of the meme since I did have friendships like that in my youth and just like in Friends, my friendgroup(s) split up when that period of our lives ended and we went on to start our adult lives.
It is a completely normal part of life. I don’t see it as a terrible thing.
I loved Friends, but yeah, the whole show was a big fat lie and I hate I dont live in that world
I think if they live across the hall then it happens. I have friends that live across the street and they come over for breakfast and we all get our kids ready together and off to school.
King of the Hill showing a group of childhood friends living next to each other, having time almost every day to just hang out near their homes and drink, went from just being a quaint little detail from when I watched it when I was younger to being an almost dreamlike aspiration as I move further into adulthood.
There’s a certain amount of discourse in KotH fandom around exactly how all four childhood friends came to buy houses on The Alley behind Rainey Street. Apparently the canon is hazy and inconsistent, though I can’t remember the details.
Anyone showing up at my apartment to hang out while I’m waking up and getting ready for work is going to get chopped in the throat, that’s my time for rage and hatred for existence.
Settle down there Neo :P
So no one told you life was gonna be this way.
👏 👏👏👏👏
One too many 👏
Thanks /s
Now I’ve got that fucking song stuck in my head!
🥹
this whole show is fake af
yes, because it’s fiction. Or did you think that the showrunners were claiming that this was actually a documentary about the actual lives of actual people?
What show is this?
Friends.
That’s supposed to be a new your city apartment lol
Lmao I love it. Everyone has a gigantic apartment or mansion no matter what their job is.
Do we ever see Phoebe’s apartment?
Ross and Monica’s parents were well-off and Monica’s apartment is actually her grandma’s rent controlled apartment I think?
Rachel’s dad is loaded but she wants to be independent so she… Stays with Monica
Chandler has a well-paid job and is likely paying more in rent than Joey for their place in the earlier seasons.
Really, Ross (and maybe Phoebe) are the ones who make no sense. Ross likely has child support payments and let’s be honest, not THAT great a career
I never understood how far away Ross was supposed to live from the others. Ostensibly it’s in a different building but he’s always round at their place so presumably he commuted to see them, unless it’s literally just around the corner. So where did he find time to do that?
I thought he was directly across the street. There are some storylines involving looking across into the other buildings’ windows.
That’s after he buys a new place, past the halfway point of the show.
When I was a kid, the trope of the neighbor just coming over and having breakfast was real in my case. The neighbor was my best friend, and he was treated like family. Literally the only person who didn’t live at my house that was allowed to just come in on their own. He was the Urkel to my Big Guy.
This and wall high lockers in high school
I had a locker in high school. It was against a wall. Admittedly, it was in a dedicated locker area/room and not in a major plot-device-friendly thoroughfare, but it existed all the same.
We had lockers in high school but they were always in a large open area. Putting them against a wall in a corridor would be stupid as it would almost always lead to blockages.
I also never knew anyone who had a huge locker large enough to be stuffed into, like always seems to happen on American TV.
Yeah, but all the lockers were stacked in rows with 2 short lockers instead of 1 tall one.
I’m not sure what this means?
Lots of lockers portrayed in media are the type that go from the floor all the way up the wall. I don’t know about other schools, but my lockers were all pretty small and there were several on top of each other.
cant push a dork in a half size locker, much less the 1/6 size lickers that are common these days.
Mine were floor to ceiling
I figured there were some like that.
Yeah but I grew up in NJ where my school was 400 students and that was pretty common because most towns are really small. So I imagine space wasn’t as big of an issue as other big schools face.
I’m pretty sure the average intake for my school was about 1,000 per year.
Some people had very small lockers but most of us had the half height ones. But there were definitely a few where you could barely fit books in unless you put them in at an angle.
My high school was like a community college campus where we had a set of books in the class+set at home and had to walk to all our classes to different buildings outside. It sucked in the winter time a lot.
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Chandler being able to afford paying for rent AND providing for Joey is also incredibly unrealistic.
Canonically Chandler is actually super rich from his mysterious nerd job and just lives frugally, and Monica’s giant-ass apartment is rent controlled and inherited from her grandmother.
I might be remembering wrong, but I thought Chandler was an actuary, which is a position that is very well paid.
He works in data analytics, his friends just don’t care enough to learn what that means.
He probably analyses consumer and advertising trends to guide investments and product launches.
i bet you can hear this
I thought he was a dentist with a hitman friend.
You will care about the W.E.N.U.S because I care about the W.E.N.U.S!
I don’t think Chandler is super rich, but he’s definitely comfortable. He doesn’t have the money to outright replace their furniture when it is all stolen, for instance. They end up using lawn chairs (and a canoe) as their living room furniture for a while. But yeah, he definitely lives below his means, because he always has money to pass off to Joey whenever he needs it.
Chandler’s job was just made to be some generic finance sector job, right? It’s definitely possible even today, but he’d be working a lot more hours. You’d never see him on the show.
Ross being stable even as a PhD grad student seems a lot more unrealistic to me. He even loved on his own. But maybe it was family money.
Ross wasn’t a grad student though. he was a PhD researcher + professor. back in the 90s, that would’ve been a decent gig.
I was under the impression Ross was still in a PhD program the first year, working at the museum seems like a gig for a PhD student. Worrying about the museum displays and stuff like that in season 1.
Nah, just your typical PhD paleontologist dinosaur nerd. The times they showed that side of Ross was probabaly some of the most realistic moments in the show.
nah there was a whole episode where people were banging next to where his dissertation was in the NYU library. he ends up banging a girl that was interested in his paper while policing the library next to his paper.
It wasn’t (and still isn’t) a decent gig as a young professor, especially not in a field where you can’t bring in much grant money. Making even decent money in academia requires decades of seniority, and the really big bucks requires popular fame (a la Stephen Jay Gould) or enormous research grants that your institution gets to take 30% or 40% of.
nah back in the 90s, it was a pretty good gig. not rich rich. Ross wasn’t rich rich either. but you made more money than your average Joe and society was way cheaper back then, even in new york. there were also way less phds, so there was higher demand and cost of education was way less. I dropped out of my program in the late 80s for a private sector job, but my friends that continued lived pretty decently.
Ross wasn’t a grad student; He had his doctorate. Initially he worked at a museum of natural history, then eventually got fired (for screaming at his boss) and went to work at the university as a professor. Either way, in the mid-90’s, he would have been comfortable.
I mean they mentioned he and Chandler graduated in 1991, so if Ross got a PhD in 3 years that is probably a record, lol. I was always under the impression he was in a PhD program the first season of Friends and that’s why he was working at the museum.
Chandler was more some bureaucratic data guy. The way they describe him is inputting numbers into speeadsheets at a megacorp. But he eventually becomes a manager.
When he tries to leave early on because he hates it so much they call him and offer a huge raise to get him to come back, so I think he’s more than just a random data entry guy that could easily be replaced.
Yep it’s ludicrous
Another total lie is almost every TV show character drinking bottled water now. You could legitimately give this the benefit of the doubt as purely a production issue, because it’s a simple way to avoid rigging a functional sink on the set with a working tap - I mean, the transporter on Star Trek was invented to avoid shooting lots of shuttle takeoffs and landings. But product placement is also such a big thing now, I’m dubious.
It was astounding to me to find out that plastic bottles have only existed for some 45~ years.
Plastic bottles became common more like 60 years ago. They were invented in the 1950s but were too expensive for a while. I remember as a kid in the 60s there was a commercial where somebody dropped a bottle of shampoo, which normally would have been glass, and was amazed that it didn’t break. This stuck in my mind all these years because of a standup comic named Norm Crosby. who told on a talk show about this scene actually happening to him at the grocery store. The lady in front of him dropped her shampoo, so he picked it up and re-enacted the commercial - “It didn’t break… It didn’t break!!!”. He was hoping for a laugh but she just glared at him and said, “Gimme da soap.” Anyway, that’s how I know plastic bottles were being popularized in the mid-60s.
My (soon to be ex-) wife buys large quantities of bottled water… One of many things about her I found irksome over the years, I went to the trouble of putting in an RO filter under the sink… and she was always so vocal about recycling… What’s better than recycling? Not buying tons of plastic in the first place…
I had a girlfriend that was utterly convinced that bottled water was healthier for you. Although when pushed she couldn’t provide a reason.
Some people do seem to buy into the idea that bottled water is all collected from some kind of secret magical spring of eternal youth. When really it all comes out of a tap in the factory.
in many places even in the us, the tap water is not drinkable. Even if it’s technically safe, it might smell bad or taste funky. If you grow up in an area with bad tap water, you might not trust any tap water even after moving to a different area. In context, insisting on bottled water for drinking makes sense.
Mmm… Microplastics
