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Comedian humorously nails the reality of modern adult friendships

"Would I turn up at their house unannounced?"

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

Getting together as adults can be…tricky.

When you're a kid, friendships just sort of happen. The kids in your neighborhood, school, place of worship, sports or other activities are the pool of kids you pull friends from, and friendship in childhood mostly revolves around sharing common interests and having fun playing together. As you move to the teen years, friendship becomes more about "hanging out" and bonding over emotional things, and then adulthood comes along and throws the whole concept of friendship all out of whack.

As you become entrenched in career and family and full-on-grown-up responsibilities, friendships can be harder to maintain, at least in the way we're used to. Time becomes a trickier commodity to manage, and what friendship looks like changes. That's not good or bad, it just…is.

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Comedian Jake Lambert hit the nail on the head with a bit about various realities of modern adult friendship, pointing to relatable friendship norms such as:

Not really knowing what your friend does for work:

"What's my best friend's job? Something to do with numbers…I once heard them use the phrase 'project manager.'"

"No, I don't know exactly what they do for work, but I do know about every single one of their colleagues, who they hate and who's sleeping with who."

What forms the basis of adult friendship:

"Are we friends because we like the same things? No, we're not children! We're friends because we hate the same things."

The reality of rarely getting together:

"Oh we hang out all the time. What is it now, September? Well the last time I saw them was…I wanna say June? But we talk every day. I mean, not on the phone, on WhatsApp. I mean, not on WhatsApp, but we send each other memes on Instagram. But we message properly as well. Like we'll message to say we need to catch up soon, and then we do catch up, within about two or three months."

Unannounced visits? No thanks. Unannounced phone calls? Also no.

"Would I turn up at their house unannounced? No, not unless I wanted to give them a panic attack and completely ruin their day. I mean, I wouldn't even call them without a text to warn them first. You know, that's real friendship."

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People totally related and added their own friendship realities to the mix in the comments:

"Say what you will but not talking to a person for months and picking up like you never stopped talking when you finally get together is a new level of friendship unlocked 🙌❤️🤣😂"

"Texting to warn them before calling is friendship!!!!!!!!!! It is!!!!!!💯"

"I wouldn’t even call them without a text to warn them first is my love language."

"Also, you have known each other for 10 years and have 3 photos together."

"The shame of how accurate this is 😂😂😂😂😂😂"

Adult friendships may be challenging to maintain fully, but they're still valuable and research shows that we may be missing out on some of their benefits. According to one analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s "American Time Use Survey" Americans are spending significantly less time with friends—and more time alone—than we did a decade ago. From 2014 to 2019, the time we spent with friends dropped by 37%. Then the pandemic hit, and we all know how that turned our social lives upside down. The most recent data, from 2021, showed even more of a drop in friend time, from a little over 4 hours a week in 2019 to a little less than 3 hours a week in 2021.

Spending time alone doesn't automatically mean feeling lonely—some people genuinely prefer to spend time by themselves—but humans are social creatures in general and research shows we are facing an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. A few reasons might be how increasingly online our lives have become, how anxious and exhausted many of us feel, and the connections that got disrupted during the pandemic. Whatever the reason, a whole lot of people are lonely these days.

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Nurturing friendships in-real-life could be a way to counter that. Focus on quality over quantity. You don't have to have a ton of close friends—focus on the ones you share similar values with and who bring out the best in you. Even if you don't have time to get together often, check in regularly with more than just a meme. Even a simple, "Hey, I'm thinking about you and wondering how you're doing," can go a long way. Scheduling get-togethers on a monthly basis (a first-Saturday-of-the-month set coffee date or something) can make it easier to see one another rather than always trying to coordinate schedules. Long-distance friendships can be trickier, but we do have loads of technology to communicate long-distance and don't underestimate those "We need to plan a get-together" messages. Acknowledging that you miss one another and want to see each other despite the difficulty of actually making it happen means something.

Friendships as adults may have some comical quirks, but they're still important to our well-being and life enrichment. Keep sending those memes and get together when you can. You'll rarely regret making the effort.

You can find more from Jake Lambert on his Instagram page here.

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Woman's epic conversation with her printer proves they are designed to drive us all mad

Stevie Martin/Twitter

Anyone who has owned an inkjet printer knows the invention is rife with complications and frustrations. We managed to put a man on the moon five decades ago, but we still can't create a printer that works like it's supposed to? Really, humanity?

All we want is to be able to push a button and print the thing. That's it. So simple. We've been carrying complex supercomputers around in our pockets for years. I can send a video to my friend on the other side of the planet in a matter of seconds. I can tell you right now exactly what the weather is like in a tiny town in the Arctic. Printing a damn form in the room I'm sitting in really shouldn't be this hard.

And how about making it so we don't have to sell an organ to afford printer ink, please and thank you. Did you know that the cheapest printer ink costs twice as much per ounce as the world's most expensive champagne? And pricier inks cost upwards of seven times that? It's literally one of the most expensive liquids on the planet, and it's not like we're injecting it into people to save lives. It's freaking ink. And unless you're printing things constantly, that liquid gold tends to dry out before you can use it all anyway, making it functionally even more expensive.

Get it together, people. We shouldn't have to live like this.

You may wonder if printer woes are a distinctly American phenomenon, like some kind of annoying marker of late-stage capitalist dystopia. The pain almost feels purposeful at this point, doesn't it? Like printers are some sort of sociological experiment designed to test our mettle and weed out the winners from the whiners. Is it the printer, or is it me? Maybe I'm just an idiot.

Or maybe I'm an idealist who thinks putting ink on a page in my own home shouldn't cause me this much mental angst.

I know I'm not alone in these thoughts because pretty much everyone I've talked to about this topic has expressed the same sentiments. And judging by this hilarious viral video from the U.K., our friends across the pond deal with the same kinds of printer woes we do. The only difference is they hemorrhage money in pounds instead of dollars.

Check out this hilarious conversation between writer and comedian Stevie Martin and her printer and see if you can't relate:

In defense of multi-function printers, I will say that having the photocopy/scan option does come in handy. But do people fax things anymore? I feel like it's been 20 years since I faxed something, but maybe that's just me.

The "I can't print in black and white without blue ink" thing is legit. As are the connectivity and wifi issues. As is finding the model number for the printer. (Whyyyyyy is that so hard?)

But the best part is when the printer says it's out of paper, Martin says she's looking at the paper, and the printer says, "Well, I can't feel it."

Why are you like this, printers? Why?

I actually solved 95% of my printer woes after years of wasted frustration and money by doing two things:

1) I bought a basic, black-and-white only laser printer. It copies and prints and so far has been far less of a pain than every inkjet printer I've ever owned. Laser toner is massively less expensive than inkjet ink, and though laser printers themselves used to be a lot more expensive than inkjet, that's no longer the case.

2) I use a local print shop for printing things in color. I used to assume this was more expensive than printing at home, but as infrequently as I print things in color, and as frequently as my color cartridges would dry out, I figured out the cost of color printing at home was far higher than paying someone else to print things for me.

But for those who absolutely need an inkjet printer at home, for whatever reason, the struggle is real. You're not imagining it, you're not an idiot, and you're definitely not alone.

(You can find Stevie Martin on Twitter, and if you'd like to buy her a cup of coffee to thank her for the laugh, you can do that here.)

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She joked she was going to start stealing from drunk dudes to make a powerful point.

New Zealand comedian Alice Brine read a headline about a recent rape. Then she decided she'd had enough.

Photos via Alice Brine, used with permission.

"A young woman has taken a young man to court because he's raped her," she said in an email. "The justice system in NZ means that the a defence lawyer in this case is allowed to argue that 'even though the victim of the rape clearly said 'no'... she probably didn't actually mean it.'"

"It's totally ridiculous."

The expectation that rape is a violent crime committed only in dark alleys by hardened criminals doesn't account for the countless date rapes and assaults committed by acquaintances, both new and old. And, especially when alcohol is involved, it's not uncommon to see men walk away from such trials with very little punishment. Or none at all.

Brine took her frustrations to Facebook, where she unleashed a searing hot analogy about what exactly 'no' means. Check it out:

Here's the full text of Brine's post:

"I'm gunna start going home with random very drunk guys and stealing all of their shit. Everything they own. It won't be my fault though... they were drunk. They should have known better. I'll get away with it 90% of the time but then when one brave man takes me to court over it, I'll argue that I wasn't sure if he meant it when he said 'no don't steal my Audi.' I just wasn't sure if he meant it. I said 'Can I please steal your Gucci watch?' He said 'no' but I just wasn't sure if he meant it. He was drunk.He brought this on himself. You should have seen how he was dressed at the club, expensive shirts and shoes. What kind of message is he sending with that!? I thought he wanted me to come and steal all of his shit. He was asking for it. When he said 'no' to me taking everything he owned I just didn't know if he meant it. 'No' isn't objective enough, it could mean anything."

Brine's pitch-perfect post definitely struck a nerve. It's been shared over 68,000 times so far.

Brine says the response has been almost 100% positive. OK, so a few people don't get the joke, but for the most part, the reaction has most been along the lines of: "YES. THIS!" 

"Consent is not difficult to understand," she told Upworthy. "If you can get your head around not stealing a car parked outside your house, then you can get your head around not stealing a woman's body just because she's sitting on your bed."

This fundamental understanding of consent is sorely lacking in legal systems around the world right now. "This analogy is one where people can finally see ... just how ridiculous it is when the tables are turned," she said. 

An analogy that paints a clearer picture on consent, no matter how silly it might sound, is always worth sharing.

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