(something like a Part 2 of EP5)

It didn't hit me back in 2020 when Covid struck around the globe, and we were locked inside our homes. The whole thing felt like a carousel ride at the moment: how fun it is to chat by Zoom with your friends, right? Or like, wow, so much content is now available for free. And suddenly, my friends and I were as far away as we ever had. Until we finally were separated by many miles across the ocean with zero expectations of meeting any time soon. And the only people who stayed were speaking not with me but to the audience of millions online.

My whole life, I have been an introvert. There is a particularly dense phase in each introvert's life when you suddenly realize (often mistakenly) an intellectual superiority and feel like people around you are morons. So it stroke me in high school when alcohol and light drugs flooded our company en masse. By then, I had enjoyed the time with Oxxxymiron and Hunter S. Thompson more than with my close friends since first grade. Pretty much every introvert I knew since that period overcame the "everybody sucks" phase relatively fast – as soon as they realized how fun alcohol could be. I include myself in this list, too: after a few months apart, we spend days at school and nights in some questionable apartments in a small, predominantly male company. The very same company that we later took the leap of faith, leaving our parents' houses and moving together to another city from a small town.

Through the university years and the early start of my work life, I never paid that much attention to keeping in touch – everybody was always around. We shared apartments, got drunk, and partied together many months in a row. We were single (almost all of us), lighthearted, open to adventures, and not pressured by life obstacles. Visiting Europe and flying to a music festival was as simple as getting together on any given weekend and hanging around by the sea-cost. Friendship was easy. It felt at the time like it would always be that way. But then, separation slowly started gaining traction. At first, constant spouses materialized. Then, the university suddenly was over, and real life began. Work-life balance turned from a Buzzfeed headline to an actual challenge. And then Covid struck. It's easy to be all "Zoom had defeated us" kind of guy. But the conversations became rare, the emotions empty, and all the talk was about job offers, new restaurants, and how far will we travel as soon as this ended.

So fast forward a few years, and the war finally drew us entirely apart. I cried meeting most of my friends during the past months, for it felt like the last time. Still an introvert, I've never been able to figure out how to make new friends as an adult. Where should you go? Is there a Tinder-like app for it? Where to study or hang out? The internet became the central place for socialization. Almost all the time, it's a one-way street. In such a profound ocean of knowledge (and bullshit, too), there're intellectual titans you constantly fall in and out of love with. For the past year, I have had the most profound conversations in my head and on paper with people ranging between Andrew Huberman and David Sinclair to guys from Bankless and their guests. There's a high chance I will never see all these people in real – precisely like there's also a chance that my goodbyes with high school friends were the last ones. But I refuse to believe in either.

Still, I feel such gratitude toward the people I “meet” online. Yes, it's almost always a "meeting," a sudden one. Like passing by and hearing a great conversation that you can't do anything but join. Even as a passive viewer, you still feel like a part of something big, a part of an idea maze. And someday you'll share it with your friends.