Should I pursue more transactional friendships?

Friendship is a net loss. What’s in it for me?

Me [left] and Chris hanging out in Greece back in 2010

The other day, one of my oldest friends, Chris texted me to get a coffee, and I thought, why? What’s the point? What am I getting out of this? At the time, I was flicking through a series of emails, half asleep on a caffeine and cream drip, second-screening Instagram rot and New York Post headlines. The market tanked on tariffs. Yawn. The Middle East is ablaze. Okay. The dollar is losing out to gold. And then what? I thought of not responding to Chris’s text. The internet brings out the nihilist in me. The more I suck it down the hungrier I get. The scroll is our private little cum-fest. A reliable me-machine. Every ding a potential jackpot on betting apps and market gains and porny hooah’s. 

How can coffee with a friend, especially a guy that isn’t a business associate or future investor, compare to that exhilarating waterfall of stimulation? With a non-transactional friend, there is a finite amount of JACKPOT!! CHA-CHING!! $TOTHEMOON juice that can be injected into my bloodstream. 

Chris is a guy I’ve known for almost two decades who, when we were wanna-be Rimbauds on an adolescent booze cruise through the Greek islands, instinctively ripped off his shirt to suture my bleeding leg after I crashed my motorbike. It was a nasty, gory mess. Road rash peeled the skin on my elbows and knees to the bone. A busted artery in my big toe spiraled blood into the air. My arms and feet were mangled and burned from friction with the ground. We were in the middle of nowhere, on a winding road overlooking the foothills of Paros. He flagged down a car, and a guy in aviators claiming to be an Athenian dentist pulled over while his much younger girlfriend (good for him) sat shotgun. He offered me a cigarette. Told me to wash myself off in the Mediterranean, ‘you’ll be fine,’ he said, flicking ash. I refused the ambulance at first, figuring it would be thousands of euros. I was injured, but still a miser. 

Chris nursed me back to health while I remained pinned to the bed, pussing through the sheets in our cheap shared room. This was 2010 so I couldn’t kill time day-trading $PONKE coin in my goon cave, motoring through Frankencontent while speed eating rolls of Oreo sleeves. Things were duller, slower. I chain-smoked cigarrios and abused Greek Tylenol, weathering my self-inflicted imprisonment with a pair of binoculars that allowed me to leer at the coeds on the beach. 

a rare glimpse into my goon cave (that I rarely leave)

At night, Chris cooked me dinner, cleaned my wounds and when I would bitch he would say, fuck it you’ll be fine and pour me a drink. He cleaned me up with a q-tip, and hiked to the other side of the island to find a clinic with a better doctor to examine what he thought was an infection. My foot was almost amputated. I had a cheap splint. It was getting dire. He spent a day negotiating with the airlines resistant to letting a mangled passenger fly. I’m not sure how I would have gotten home without him. But that was then and this is now. He wanted to get a coffee and I wanted to scramble my consciousness, bury myself in What Do you Do for A Living? videos while my baby screamed for a fresh diaper.

Living in New York City where every interaction has monetizable potential, even casual friendships can feel perilously self-interested. In an age of ever-shrinking attention spans, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that relationships must now be at least a little transactional to justify their existence. 

We’re told to have friends, that friendship staves off loneliness and increases life expectancy. But what kind are we looking for? Friends who have no interest in joint ventures? Non-billionaires? What’s the point of spending time with people who don’t want to use you as a foothold to lever up their social status? It’s almost suspicious when people just want to talk and listen and exchange ideas without any ulterior motive…

These days time slips away in furious fifteen-second text pecking binges and endless Reels flicked at us without any thought to the compounding cost. It’s possible to lose an entire month of the year to thirty-second AI-generated videos. And if we truly have less time, then maybe there aren’t enough hours in the day for friendships that function at a net loss. Friendships that, when measured in emotional output, logistical planning, schlepping, and bar tabs, don’t move the needle. These days, it feels better, perhaps, to spend the night at a brand activation full of small talk and LinkedIn potential than waste it at an old friend’s dive bar birthday party. 

If you’ve ever spent any time working in marketing, there’s really only two words that brands use to describe what they want: authentic and iconic. This is the gospel and every ad campaign on the internet must simultaneously be both. Authentic people, authentic clothes, vintage film cameras to create that soft, ageless aesthetic that feels real. Again and again in marketing meetings, we’re told: it has to feel like life. Authentic means real and iconic means transcendent. 

You know what’s real? A surprise hospital bill. You know what lasts? A debt cycle. 

The more time we spend cashing in our me-machine chips, hiding alone under the covers, soaking for hours in our crypto crank tombs, fingers twitching just enough to auto-order more Jergens and Toaster Strudels from Costco, the harder it gets to tell what’s real. It might sound like hyperbole, but it’s not. This is exactly where we’re headed if we continue to ignore those texts for pointless coffees with good friends. Those who complain about too many social invitations rarely stop to think about the alternative. Even the best of friends will eventually stop initiating, leaving us with nothing but a thinning toilet paper roll. Hold onto those friends who offer no ROI, because the holy things aren’t quantifiable. 

Since life is all about profiteering, friendship is a losing deal worth taking. It’s the old confidence game. Friendship is nothing if not loyalty+trust+time. Give them your L and T and in turn they give you theirs. Fight the urge to stay chained to the slop chair another night spooning Kozy Shack. Go buy two cigars, one for you and one for them. Don’t worry about invoicing, either. This isn’t a business. A friend is someone who has done nothing for you lately, knows your filth, doesn’t mind the way you smell and always seems to be saying, fuck it, let’s go get a drink. 

In the end I texted Chris back, but suggested we skip the cafe’ au lait and go straight to the hard stuff.