THE ONES WHO DARED
THE ONES WHO DARED PODCAST Elevating stories of courage. You can listen to some of the most interesting stories of courage, powerful life lessons, and aha moments. Featuring interviews with leaders, pioneers and people who have done hard things. I hope these stories help pave the path for you to live out your courageous life.
THE ONES WHO DARED
The Art of Friendship: How to Build a Life of Deep, Lasting Friendships in a Digital World of Loneliness | Justin Whitmel Earley
Friendships can change lives, and in a world that often feels disconnected, their importance cannot be overstated. This episode features Justin Whitmore Early, a business lawyer and author, discussing the epidemic of loneliness and the importance of meaningful friendships in today's fast-paced world. His book "Made for People" emphasizes the transformative power of deep relationships characterized by vulnerability and commitment.
Key points include:
- The concept of covenant friendships, which go beyond casual acquaintances.
- The significance of spiritual disciplines for mental and emotional well-being.
- The essential role of vulnerability in forming authentic relationships.
- Practical strategies for nurturing friendships: "showing up, speaking up, and sticking around."
- The challenges of forming connections in the digital age, addressed through the Hang Ten Movement.
- Encouragement to engage in transformative conversations and prioritize in-person interactions.
The episode serves as a reminder to prioritize friendships, highlighting that genuine connections require time, vulnerability, and dedication, offering listeners tools to cultivate lasting bonds.
Links to Justin:
JustinWhitmelEarley.com
https://www.instagram.com/justinwhitmelearley/
-Links-
https://www.svetkapopov.com/
https://www.instagram.com/svetka_popov/
I don't get pushed back on the idea that we need friendship or that we're in an epidemic of loneliness or that vulnerability and commitment is important. What I get is practical pushback on saying that sounds beautiful. I just I don't have time for that, justin, or how do you have time for that? And so this is actually where the rubber meets the road. Humans are incredibly prone to relationship when they are in an environment that is conducive to it, but we happen to live in a strange time that we think is normal. It's normal to us, but it's very strange in human history where we find ourselves quote unquote too busy for the most human thing that there is, and that is friendship. That is odd and we've got to wake up to that being odd to see the importance of this point. But once we wake up to that idea and say, oh my gosh, you know, all of human history did not live like this. This is us. Who says we are too busy to eat, you know, like that's odd. Okay.
Speaker 2:Hey friends, welcome to the Ones who Dared podcast, where stories of courage are elevated. I'm your host, becca, and every other week you'll hear interviews from inspiring people. My hope is that you will leave encouraged. I'm so glad you're here, justin Whitmull-Earley. Welcome to the Once we Dare podcast. It's such an honor to have you here today.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Rebecca. I'm happy and thrilled to be here.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, justin is a lawyer, author and speaker from Richmond Virginia and he's written over five books. His book Made for People is the one that we're going to dive into, and the subtitle is why we Drift Into into loneliness and how to fight for a life of friendship. And I just want to give a backstory of how we, this interview, even came about. So I had your friend, heath Wilson, on the podcast, and, and, and a listener of mine heard the podcast and he recommended your book, this book, here. I didn't know this.
Speaker 1:Okay, this is a good background for me too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So she read this book, loved the book, somehow found people that knew me and knew my address and shipped the book to my house because after she read it, she loved it. And so I started reading this book and she's like this book is really good. She deemed me and Instagram is like hey, you should read this book, you should get this guy on your podcast and all this stuff Right. So who is this person? I have to think.
Speaker 1:Lauren, lauren, I'm going to find her.
Speaker 2:Yes. So here's the interesting part. So she sent me the thing, I read it and I was like, okay, and then your friend Heath said, hey, if you, you know, if you need anything, let me know. And I was like, well, your friend, let's get him on the podcast. So, ironically, this morning at five, 30 in the morning, lauren and I did a workout. So Lauren and I are now friends like in-person friends. That's amazing.
Speaker 1:Like this morning literally this morning, literally this morning, literally this morning, literally this morning 5.30 AM, we did a workout.
Speaker 2:She actually set up all my stuff because I'm usually like just a few minutes. I'm either right on time or like a minute late and she's like I'm here 5.10 AM. She texted me. I got her stuff set up, ready to work out in her class and so there you go. That's what your book did. Ised it. It's got me Lauren as a friend, so thank you.
Speaker 1:I mean, the dream of this book is to catalyze friendships, and if y'all are working out at 5, 10 am, then you're fast on your way to a true friendship there, because that's some intense stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm actually curious on how you went from being a business lawyer to diving into topics like habit formation for families and friendship, like what got you to I don't want to say pivot, because I know you're still practicing law, correct?
Speaker 1:I am, yeah, a full-time business lawyer, but it is understandably confusing to people that I have these books on habits and spiritual disciplines, parenting, friendship, and yet I write contracts all day.
Speaker 2:Friendship and yet I write contracts all day, which I love. I think it's such a needed subject because we are known as the loneliest generation. And so I love this subject and this is like just connections and people and relationship. I think it's the air that we need to live as humanity.
Speaker 1:Yes, so I'll give you the brief story because to me it makes sense. We'll see if to you and your listeners it makes sense. But I used to be a missionary in China, actually before I was ever a business lawyer, and it was in my late 20s that I decided to go to law school and become a business lawyer and during that time I didn't realize it, but I was beginning to assimilate to all the habits and practices of, you know, top law school student like driving, ambitious young lawyer. It was the water that I swam in and frankly it's not that different than the water that most modern Americans swim in. It's the idea of being constantly connected to technology, being as busy as possible and seeing that as a badge of honor. It was a lot of ignoring my body, minimizing sleep, eating or exercise in favor of work and productivity and really busyness, work and productivity and really busyness. And that whole time I still had sort of a missionary-ish worldview of thinking that I was doing what I was doing for really good reasons and it never occurred to me that you can be doing what you're doing for really good reasons but with all the bad and dangerous habits, and that in the end one of those would probably went out and I collapsed in my first year of lawyering in a totally unexpected but severe anxiety, insomnia, mental health breakdown. That was an enormous wake up call to me, one because it was so bad. It was really a very difficult and, honestly, quite dangerous time of my life.
Speaker 1:As I reconciled to put life back together, I realized that indeed, my head was going one, reconciled to put life back together, I realized that indeed, my head was going one direction and my habits were going the other, and my heart was following the habits as in who I was, what it felt like to live inside of me and what I actually believed was much more a product of my habit than my head. And that was news to me. That was like a wake-up call in my early thirts that the ordinary patterns by which I lived my day-to-day life were not just incredibly important to my emotional and mental health, they were incredibly important to my spiritual health as well, and that was a launch moment for me. I didn't know it at the time, but I started writing about this and talking about this and, as it turns out, I was not the only one who felt like their normal day-to-day routine was a total wreck and had been made so by the currents of the modern world and smartphones and et cetera, and so that launched me into writing.
Speaker 1:My first book was about spiritual disciplines and how to approach the life of habit as a spiritual exercise. My second book was the same sort of theory but applied to parenting. I'm the father of four still young boys Right now. They're between six and 12 years old and, to wrap up this story, I got through writing about spiritual disciplines and habits and habits as applied to parenting, and what I saw next as the most important thing in my life and the most logical thing to write about was that next concentric circle of well, now, what does it look like to live with that healthy view of habits in community?
Speaker 1:I mean assuming you're thinking about your own life, you're thinking about the life of your household, that the next and really intrinsic thing that I think building a good life in our modern moment is paying attention to deep, deep relationships, which I call covenant friendships, and that has been. I will die on that hill. I think covenant friendships and the life of friendship is probably our most fundamental and important habit to our spiritual well-being and our emotional and mental health, but it's also. Here's the thing. It's also the first thing to go. As we get into the quote, unquote busy life of being a parent or a worker or whatever we do, friendships are usually the first things we sacrifice, but they are really the first thing we need, and this book is devoted to trying to recover that. In an age of loneliness, how would we recover the art and habit of friendship?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's so good. I'd love for you to break down for the listeners the difference of, or your definition of, a covenant friendship versus regular friendship, or just for people to know what that really means.
Speaker 1:This is really important, because I would say that the coin of friendship has been devalued in our modern era, and that's actually a quote from a guy named Namas who wrote a book on friendship. It's sitting behind me if you're watching the video. But we hear the word friendship in our modern moment and it does not connote something vital to life or necessary to life. It connotes a luxury. So we might think as low as Facebook friends. You know, friendship has been, friend has been made a verb in our modern moment. Or we might think as high as you know those people who we love. But even if we think of those people who we love around us, we are still, in our modern consciousness, far, far short of how most of humanity has thought about friendship.
Speaker 1:And really, through up until the last century, you will read writers who say things like friendship is the highest virtue, it is the most important love in your life, it is the thing that makes all the other things work.
Speaker 1:And we hear the word friendship and we think of it as a luxury, not as, not a necessity, and so one of the things that I'm trying to do is point backwards and say it's us, not them, who are weird.
Speaker 1:We are the ones who have lost the art of building that thing that is so essential to the flourishing of the rest of life and it's called friendship. And so I call it covenant friendship, because I'm trying to kind of redefine and repour meaning into the word and say because I'm trying to kind of redefine and repour meaning into the word and say, if we look and my writing is based on the life of Jesus and the way that he demonstrates friendship to us, because I think that's the archetype of friendship and as we look at his life, there's two things that he does he becomes vulnerable and he becomes committed. And I can talk more about what those things look like. But my essential definition of friendship is to say, when we combine vulnerability over time with commitment, we get something that we were made for and that thing is called friendship and it is vital to everything else in life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's so good and vulnerability is something that is really hard for, I think, especially this generation, like you said way prior, people would even write letters that if you read them they look like love letters to a lover.
Speaker 2:You would think they're love letters, right, those sort of ways. People kind of get mixed messages and it's just like you're, you're, you're, strange, you know. So I think that, um, like you said, friendships evolved and it's so different now. But I wonder how, um, with vulnerability and the way that you write about it, um, what are some ways that we can really be real without, without being like weird, and what are some benefits of being vulnerable with your friends?
Speaker 1:There are so many benefits of vulnerability. I was just listening to, actually, a neuroscience podcast last night about how important vulnerability is for our brain even but just to back it up. So there's a famous passage in John 15 where Jesus says that I haven't called you servants, I've called you friends, because everything the Father has made known to me I've made known to you, and I take this as my cue again, looking at Jesus's model of friendship as the archetype, that one of the things that we do in true friendship is we disclose all, so everything that is in us we turn inside out, and our friends are thus the ones who know who we really are. You know and here's the thing this is always going to you can't talk about vulnerability without bleeding into commitment. I'm going to stay mostly on vulnerability here, but they're the kinds of people who know all about us and yet stick around anyway, right, and that's what we love about them, whether it's they know our bad jokes or what we look like without our makeup on or in our failures, or you know the more serious stuff of knowing our secrets, our background. You know the traumas and difficulties, addictions that we all have, right, our friends are the people who know those things and stick around anyway.
Speaker 1:Now, that is much easier said than done, because what happens in our head is very different than what happens in life. We look at our flaws, our mistakes, our traumas, our secrets, our addictions, and we think these are the things that are going to prevent me from being loved, being liked and really from having relationship, like if people know this about me, they're going to leave me. This is what we think, and so we are scared to turn ourselves inside out. And this is, I think, our core problem that we get it wrong. We don't realize that one. I think our core problem that we get it wrong, we don't realize that one. What looks like fear to us, that we can't share? This looks like incredible courage to the other person. When they hear us sharing who we really are, telling our secrets, they see it as an incredible act of bravery, and thus we think they're going to keep us from relationship. But people are actually drawn to normal human beings who have flaws, just like them even deep ones, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so it's actually those deepest flaws that make us the most lovable and the most real. And I always say you can't. I believe that we are created to be fully known and fully loved at the same time. We are created to be fully known and fully loved at the same time. This is what, physiologically, when we talk about brain science, spiritually, emotionally, all these things, I think are one, and we are at our happiest and our best when we are fully known and fully loved. And the important part of vulnerability is that if you are not fully known, you can't be fully loved. So when we withhold ourselves, we cut ourselves off from the one thing that we want and need the most, and that is love. So all friendship begins with vulnerability.
Speaker 2:I love what you just said. If you're not fully known, you can't be fully loved, and I think for some of us it's like well, if people know this and I'm opening up to a friend, right then, they can essentially use some of that, like if your relationship falls apart and people use it against you.
Speaker 2:now they know something about you that's like deep and you don't want somebody to know, or whatever it is, whether it's things you struggle with, like you said, addictions, or things from your past mistakes, any of those things in the category of things that maybe you're ashamed of or would not have you know be announcing to the world. And so I think there is that risk, but without risk you can't really have the reward of having those deep, meaningful connections.
Speaker 1:That is really well put, svetka, and it's a very important follow-up to what I just said. This is hard. This is also risky, In fact. Let's be honest, real friendship does have a real danger. I mean, if you are going to be honest about your life with some people and again, this is not all people okay. This is why we're trying to recover the meaning of friendship, not say that every Facebook friend is an actual covenant friend. No, we're saying the kind of friendship I'm talking about are the kinds of relationships you can probably count on a hand, if you're lucky, maybe two. It's the kind of friendship we should all have with at least one, two, three people.
Speaker 1:But the mark of relational unhealth is going around telling just anyone about just anything in your life, just anytime you feel like it. That is not what I'm talking about, to be clear. But it is the actual risk of vulnerability with people who you do trust. But that doesn't mean it's not a risk. In fact, the word vulnerability, in its Latin root, means to be capable of being wounded. And when we give our real selves to other people, capable of being wounded, and when we give our real selves to other people, we trust them to hold us in an and they're imperfect. You know they will hurt us, and we know this in marriage and any close romantic relationship. We know it in friendship, we know it in family the ones who know us the best have the capacity to hurt us the most, and that that is true, and that can be true at the same time, that these are also those important relationships, the safest ones and the best ones, and that that risk is worth it because we were made for it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure, and I just think about just looking back in my life and some of the closest friends I had and just some of the things that people felt comfortable enough to share.
Speaker 2:It's an honor to be able to hold some of those things sacred, like essentially making a really poor choice that I could derail their entire family and everything else, and so to honor that and to hold that space and be able to guide your friends and to saying, hey, I think I hear you and what you're going through, but if you go this path, essentially like this is this is what it's going to look like, and and but not judging them for not, like you said, knowing them and loving them anyways, you know, and so it's.
Speaker 2:I think that is the beauty of being vulnerable, is that when you share with people your struggles and things that even maybe the thoughts that you have that are just not, you know, may not be great, but when you have someone that you can be truly honest, where you have no secrets, like you mentioned in the book, that produces life of growth, and I think there's nothing else on earth that can get us to grow like relationships and those deep, deep relationships that we could tell, say anything to, and be real with, and not hold back, because if you can't be held accountable for, you know who you're trying to become and people to hold you in line with your values, your virtues, we're all essentially broken and we're all able to fall off that path that we're trying to align ourselves with.
Speaker 1:Absolutely agree. I think one of the most important things that I do and I write about this in the book is regularly it's right now. Our schedule's every other week is I get together with two of my closest friends. Their name are Matt and Steve, and they feature in this book heavily and we just talk, and that's not necessarily extraordinary until you look at it. Over the commitment of time and through those two friends, I've become a person without secrets, who is fully known, and that is so helpful for my work, for my marriage, for my fatherhood, for my life.
Speaker 1:Because what begins as vulnerability and becoming a person without secrets and this is the second chapter in the book the first chapter is vulnerability. The second chapter is honesty, because what begins as vulnerability ends with honesty, and what you have in covenant friendships is people that speak back to you right Like. The goal of being vulnerable is not simply to be known, though that's an important first half. It's then to be changed, to be called forward. And so friendship is this beautiful and, frankly, pretty humble idea that you need other people to become who you were meant to be, that you can't do it alone, like it's not in you. You actually need the outside input of close people to say I hear you, I hear your mistakes, you're loved anyway, but I won't let you sit here Like I want you to change. And they. And that honesty is actually incredibly unusual in our modern moment because we typically want people just to respect us and love us as we are.
Speaker 1:But real friendships do not leave you as you are. They don't, they just won't. They will say I love you too much and you're hurting yourself. I love you too much to leave you in this addiction. I love you too much to leave you in this addiction. Or I love you too much to let you think that this is your true identity. It's not Like you are actually this and they call us forward and that art is honesty. But you can't be honest with somebody unless they've been vulnerable first right. I mean it takes two to tango, as it were.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so so you talk about encouragement and then also correction. That's another chapter, and you're right. I think in our society it's like you want people to tell you all the good things and you want people to encourage you and make you feel good, right, but when you get to a place with friends that they're able to speak and say, hey, I see that what you're doing isn't right, or how are you really doing? You know, let's get real and for them to be able to correct you, and I think that's something that's so missing in our culture because we just, I think we're afraid of losing friends over being really honest and correcting someone, versus to just it's a lot easier, let's just say it that way A lot easier to just tell you all the good things that I see in you, versus to saying hey, I really think that you should.
Speaker 2:you know, take a look at this, or let's really talk about this, and there's some warning signs here or whatever that may be.
Speaker 1:You know, when I was an English major at the University of Virginia, we would do literary critiques of the things that we had written, and I remember learning something that has been so helpful for the rest of my life. So we would submit a poem or a short story that we've written and then we had to be silent as the literary circle discussed it. And for the first 10 minutes or so they were only allowed to say things that they loved about what we wrote. And then it was like for the second 10 minutes it was, they were only allowed to say questions that they had. And then the third was they were, you know, came to critiques, and what was amazing about this is the author had to be silent and just listen. They couldn't answer questions. But what was really neat is that when you had everybody voice, what was strong about the work like my fragile self I'll just speak for myself was kind of strengthened, so that I was ready and receptive to hear the questions and the critiques.
Speaker 1:And I think there's a lot of wisdom to this in our friendships. If you are the kind of person who only has a critique, then you will lose your ability to give the critique. But if you're the kind of the person who only ever has an encouragement, then you lose the strength of that encouragement. And it's only when we're willing to encourage truly, which is, you know, language is beautiful. When you break words apart, they mean so much more. It's literally to put courage in someone else, to call them to the brave act of being the good thing that they are, and so lots of times, encouragement might be like. You know, you are so helpful to people when you speak up.
Speaker 1:I want to give you the courage, my quiet friend who doesn't often speak up Be courageous, use your voice, because you are so helpful when you do, and if you listen to that carefully, that's a subtle critique too.
Speaker 1:You're not doing the thing that you're so good at. We need more of you, and that can also be true of your friend who's struggling with an addiction or an unhealthy habit or some sort of maybe toxic cycle where you say look, you are so wonderful. These are all the reasons your friends love you, and this thing is taking you away from every relationship of love that you have, and we love you too much to let you go there. And when you learn to pair encouragement with rebuke or critique, both of them can finally be heard, and I think that's you know, that's where we really do our service to our friends, when we see them as houses to be renovated, which means they're not meant to be torn down, but they do need a lot of work. So that is the right perspective for a human being, that they have a sacred dignity just by existing. But we all need work, we all need renovation and we need friends to do that.
Speaker 2:That is the right perspective for a human being, that they have a sacred dignity just by existing. But we all need work, we all need renovation and we need friends to do that. Yeah for sure, that's so good. Well, what would you say to someone who's listening to this podcast and is just like, okay, that's great, I'd love to have these deep relationships you're talking about? Where do I find these people? How do I start? Where do I find these people? How do I start? Most people have had friendships growing up, through school and different things like that. In different stages you gain friends differently. But how would one go about creating covenant relationships that you talk about, which are deep, which are meaningful and just on that level? That's a lot deeper than your surface friendships where you may go out to lunch every so often or get a cocktail or go to dinner and it's just like you know you're making pockets of connections here and there. But how do you facilitate and curate those really deep covenant friends?
Speaker 1:I think showing up, speaking up and sticking around is a good shorthand for moving from nothing to something here, because you're asking a question that's very important. A lot of people have it. It's sort of like this is a beautiful idea, but practically, what does this look like? Right? And so showing up is my first piece of practical advice. All of us have areas in our life where friends are available. The great problem in America is not that we are reclusive, we're not, and so none of us or most of us, the vast majority of people are not hiding away in apartments alone. It's just that we have our headphones on and our faces down and we pass by all these beautiful people that could otherwise be friends, and we have what Sherry Turkle calls aloneness together. So the first way to do this is let's start to show up at the place. It could be the gym, this could be a running club, this could be a church, this could be a work happy hour. Whatever be a church, this could be a work happy hour. Whatever the little rhythm is in your life, just pick one. Show up there as a discipline, because when we we have a modern problem of FOMO, like we just don't go, like we're always looking for a better opportunity and we don't repeatedly go to the same thing. So if you're thinking, gosh, this idea of friendship sounds beautiful, but I don't have any of this, well, the first thing that you do is just show up at that exercise class over and over, or show up at that recovery meeting over and over, or show up at that church group or running club, whatever it is. And the second thing is to speak up, because, you know, most of the ancients saw friendship as something that emerges from companionship, and usually we have no lack of companionship, that is, people that happen to be around us, whether they're oh, I always see that person in the subway car, or I always see that person at the group, but I never talked to them. Right, speaking up is the beginning of what we really just talked about, and that is being the person who's brave enough to be vulnerable and take a risk. And this might be a little risk, like saying, hey, we should get to know each other. You want to have coffee, which is a risk, you know. Or it might be the risk of like, in the third or fourth month of having coffee, saying, can I tell you something about my childhood that I actually don't tell many people, and that idea of speaking up is what begins the move from companionship to friendship, because you're actually disclosing yourself. And then the third one is sort of the obvious next step, but that's the idea of sticking around. But it's important. Important just to note here that because relationships are always made up of two ingredients, you know one flawed person and another flawed person.
Speaker 1:This will not be easy, because even the best friendships are going to hurt you. Even the most regular acquaintances and companionships are going to be annoying in some ways. And the art of friendship is the idea of sticking around anyway and not calling people. If it has the smallest problem, we're throwing it out, we're just picking up a new one. If we treat friendship like that, we will never have one. We just won't have one, because all friendship requires sticking around and forgiving. And if you want to get good at friendship and we all want to you have to get good at forgiveness. You've got to get used to it and you've got to be generous with it, because friends will hurt you. But that is precisely why they are so important, because we learn in them that forgiveness is actually the way of relationship and that without forgiveness, we won't be able to do relationship.
Speaker 2:Yeah, especially long-term friends, right, If you're in it for the long run, you're in it for the longevity of the relationship. There will be times that you will say something wrong, do something wrong or offend one another, maybe in intentional and unintentional ways, and you have to work through that reconcile and there's a whole chapter on forgiveness. So I really encourage you guys to pick up the book Made for People and really take a deep dive into that. The one chapter I do want to dig into is chapter seven on time, the art and the habit of scheduling. I think this is very underestimated and people that I know they're like well, how do you have friends? How comes it's like well, do you intentionally make it and do you put effort into the intention behind gathering and making it a habit? So I'd love for you to kind of take a deep dive into that one.
Speaker 1:This is a good one, because on the one hand, it sounds so boring. It's like wait. Of course you know this. And, by the way, I don't really want to schedule friendships. I want them to be spontaneous and just happen. But on the other hand, I don't get pushback on the idea that we need friendship, or that we're in an epidemic of loneliness, or that vulnerability and commitment is important. What I get is practical pushback on saying that sounds beautiful, I don't have time for that, justin, or how do you have time for that? And so this is actually where the rubber meets the road.
Speaker 1:Humans are incredibly prone to relationship when they are in an environment that is conducive to it. But we happen to live in a strange time that we think is normal. It's normal to us, but it's very strange in human history where we find ourselves quote unquote too busy for the most human thing that there is, and that is friendship. That is odd, and we've got to wake up to that being odd to see the importance of this point. But once we wake up to that idea and say oh my gosh, you know, all of human history did not live like this. This is us who says we are too busy to eat. You know like that's odd. Okay, then you say so. Maybe one of our most sacred duties is the simplest ones, and that is to schedule it. So you have 168 hours every week, if my math is right, and my suggestion is just to devote one of them to cultivating covenant friendship. So think of it as a weekly, not a daily, routine, and I think there's a lot of grace here, as in if you think of anything else that's so vital to your spiritual, emotional and physical flourishing, they're generally things that you have to do on the daily. I mean, just think of eating or sleeping. Right, we spend remarkable amounts of time doing that and we know that. You know that without that we would actually wither and die. Well, our emotional life and we actually now know our physical life we actually do wither and die without friendships.
Speaker 1:But one hour a week tends to be plenty, and so that can look like Matt and Steve and I do that every other week porch night that I told you about, and even every other week. That is vital. That could look like your Saturday morning running club, or it could be like the Wednesday happy hour at work. Whatever it is, I recommend people look to one sacred hour a week and hold that pattern like come what may, hold that pattern. I mean, in all practicality, most of us have more than that. We might have that happy hour and the running club and church or and that recovery group, and you know, as long as we're holding strong on one of those, we are doing something that is simple but also sacred and that is that showing up and then speaking up and sticking around Right. And so my strong encouragement to people is really to schedule it.
Speaker 1:And if you were to, if your one practical takeaway from this podcast was to go to that friend who you know you have a potential deep relationship with and say could we make it a habit that we have coffee every Saturday, because I love it when we talk and I feel like I grow when we talk and honestly I would just love more of you in my life.
Speaker 1:That is revolutionary. I mean it's absolutely revolutionary. Everybody else, by the way, is waiting to hear that from somebody, and when they hear the words of commitment spoken that actually I love you and I want to spend more time with you, friend, they are so on, even if they're like actually don't have an hour every Saturday, but we could do every month. Something is better than nothing, always and speaking up, it's just amazing how much our life changes when we use our words to speak, our desire for commitment to friends, and if that was your one takeaway, I guarantee you, your life and that person that you're talking to it's going to change. It's going to be one small but one incredibly important incremental step towards living a life of friendship, and that, in today's world, is revolutionary.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that, Justin. Well, you just may have. Who knows how many friendships may have developed out of that statement.
Speaker 2:So if you're a listener, tune into that because that is so important and so many studies have been done on like the number one reason people die and all these different things and it really comes down to loneliness has been the thing that's been the number one killer. It's. You know, there's even studies that say it's better for you to eat cake with a friend, like just really unhealthy cake, oh absolutely Than to eat broccoli by yourself.
Speaker 1:You know.
Speaker 2:So it's like it's that important for us as humans to flourish is to honor those friendships and to be intentional about it. Because if we're really honest, we probably spend just I don't know how many hours on our phones doing who knows what right Most of us do, and that's another bad habit or essentially I mean of our modern world. But if we take that one hour a week or every other week and it's a consistent thing, imagine the rewards that you can reap from having deep relationships that can help you navigate life. And I'm a true believer.
Speaker 2:I know personally in my life if I didn't have some of those real friendships and just some of the hard things that you go through in life, the ups and downs of life. I think if I didn't have that, I don't know that I'd be where I am today. If I didn't have real friends who I can call and talk to or meet in person and just really share what's going on in my life. That's really real raw, hard. And for them to be there and to be a friend, to hear me out, to pray with me, to help walk me through that, and I've also done the same thing in return for some of those friends, because that is life. So I just, if you're listening, I really encourage you to, like Justin said, take that step and just make it a habit, you know, ask for that next step, as awkward as it may seem like, hey, I really love spending time with you and can we do this more often? You know, and it is like you said, it is really honoring, so I love that.
Speaker 1:Yes, and I love your use of awkward there, because all my best relationships have started with some awkward and articulate fumbling of could we do this more? And those sort of awkward moments, like on the other side of awkwardness, is the life we long for in relationship, and so that you're awkward or that it feels like that is the norm, not the exception, and it is so worth pushing through that to finding what always comes of shared awkwardness and that is friendship. I mean, this is our friends, are the people we can be awkward around, and they still love us. So it's important to note that point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that. Well, since the release of your book and you having walked through with your friends, is there any additional information that you're like man? I wish I could add this as an appendix in the book or something to like just things you've gathered over the years regarding this topic.
Speaker 1:One I already said, and that was the phraseology of show up, speak up and stick around. I think the more I've talked about the book, the more people I've seen the people long for a practicality, because my 10 chapters are all the arts of friendship, when you know commitment, vulnerability, honesty, forgiveness, things that we've talked about. But I think that show up, speak up and stick around is a nice way to just look at the practicality of your life and say can I move towards that? I think the second thing that I would just emphasize more is the role that technology plays in steering us away from this. So there is a whole chapter on technology in the book, yeah, but I think it's become ever more important to kind of move that to the center of the discussion and say one of the reasons we're getting bad at being vulnerable to each other is because we're spending so much time online curating our image. And one of the reasons we're having difficulty with commitment is because our attention is so frayed with possible options on online relationships. And one of the reasons we are able to live with such an unprecedentedly low amount of relationship is because we think we have more than we do, because we're substituting online connections, for actual embodied relationship.
Speaker 1:And so the metaphor I give in the book for this is snacks versus meals, and I think this is helpful for people because in your physical life you know this right. You know that if you just eat snacks and don't eat meals, your life will actually be threatened. I mean you will not be able to survive. Your life will actually be threatened. I mean you will not be able to survive. You will certainly not be healthy if you just eat snacks and then ignore actually true, whole meals.
Speaker 1:Well, the same thing is happening to us relationally, but our death is much slower, so we don't notice it and it is all the more dangerous because of that. I mean, the illnesses, the cancers that we don't see are always the most fatal ones, right, because they get so far. And I think we live on the snacks of online relationships and we forget that we need the meals of embodied presence with other friends who know us fully and love us anyway, and we find ourselves not even hungry for that. We don't even know that we're withering away, because the snacks are the things that make you feel full, even though your body's going unnourished. That is incredibly dangerous and we need the triumph of embodied relationship over the kind of sad replacement of technological connections, and that's probably the most urgent thing about friendship in our modern moment.
Speaker 2:Which leads us into I'd love to touch on the Hang Ten Movement and for you to speak into that.
Speaker 1:What kind of made you create the Hang Ten Movement and tell us a little bit about it and how people can find it, what it is, all the things. The Hang Ten Movement is a project my wife and I just released about a month ago, and it is a set of 10 technology practices for communities. Now what we are trying to do here is to not only help parents apprentice their children into healthy use of technology, but we're trying to name and fix the fact that we can't do that alone. We have to do it communally, and here's how this is related to friendship and the other books that I've written. I think it'll become quickly apparent.
Speaker 1:One of the things I was interested in in writing my first book, the Common Rule out of my own mental health breakdown, was a healthy relationship to technology for the purpose of our mental health. And how we use technology in our modern world is generally the number one factor in your mental health generally, and so it's really important to pay attention to personally. But most of us don't. Most of us don't realize the reason we're depressed, the reason we're anxious, the reason we're lonely, has far more to do with how we're using technology than anything else. Number two parents begin to realize and I was thinking about this in writing. My second book of Habits of the Household is how we use technology around our kids is astoundingly important to their development. Usually, unfortunately, that's a negative factor that we are more absent than present. It's also incredibly important to what they see right. I mean our kids are always becoming us right, like the way I put it in the book is we become our habits and our children become us. So the habits of the household are part of, you know, probably the most important part of their formation as children, and technology is at the center of that of that. Because if you're a normal parent like me, you have a lot of regrets about how much you're swiping your phone or how you're using technology in the house and thinking I'm actually not training them well, and so those two things are important in and of themselves. So think about your own technology habits, think about your household's habits.
Speaker 1:But then what we're realizing and Jonathan Haidt is probably people are familiar with him, his books have gone so bonkers and popular, which is great, because he's been popularizing the research of technology as a collective action problem. It's really hard to change your phone habits when the world requires you to be on social media the way it does. It's really hard to change your family habits when everybody else every other eighth grader is getting you know iPhone, or even in sixth grade. So you feel pressure to have one. And what we're doing is we're looking up and realizing personal is important, but it's not enough. Household is important, but it's not enough. Community is important and if we do that then we will figure out all of these together.
Speaker 1:So long but important prologue to saying the Hang Ten Movement is a set of communal household and personal practices. So if you go on hangtenmovementcom you'll see four habits for communities, three habits for households and three habits for individuals. And my claim there is that we need to integrate these layers and say I actually practice good hygiene as a person and then actually, you know, require certain things of our household space. The screens aren't in every room and that we have no zones like dinner tables or bedrooms where we don't allow children to take their phones. And then we have communal ethics and the hang 10 nomenclature comes from the core practice of the hang 10 movement of saying we should wait until 10th grade to introduce smartphones and social media to children because we need to protect their childhood development and by doing that core practice together, by saying our neighborhood or our school, our PTA, our church, our youth group, whatever it is, we are committed to this together. That is one of the most loving and helpful things we will ever do to our children.
Speaker 1:I know they're going to think it's hard and I know they're going to be frustrated, but it's kind of like saying I'm not just going to give you a car when you're in sixth grade. That would hurt you and other people. Smart phones are equally as useful and equally as dangerous and we really need an ethic of how to use them. So the Hang Ten Movement is a set of practices to provide that sort of third party ethic of. We need to mature and this is one of the key ways to do it is to wait until 10th grade to introduce it, but it's also, lauren, and I call it an apprenticeship. The practices are supposed to take your child through childhood and into adulthood and say, by the time you leave my house, I want you to understand how to use it. It's not an idea of just withholding it. No, I'm going to slowly move you there and we need that idea of apprenticing them into it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's really good and I need that idea of apprenticing them into it. Yeah, that's really good, and I was just listening to Jonathan's interview regarding the Anxious Generation. That's his book, right?
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, that's he's written. I'm kind of astounded. He's written incredibly good books, like three or four in a row. They're all worth reading, and the coddling of the American mind lays a lot of the foundation for why we're having so many mental health problems in high school and college students, and the anxious generation really builds on that and isolates, in particular, how a smartphone based childhood is one of the most not just unhealthy, one of the most dangerous things that we can do to children. So if you want more empirical data, read his books. It's really helpful. If you want practicality, okay. Well, what do I do? Go to thehangtenmovementcom and just look at the practices and I think if communities started following these practices, we would see revolutionary change, and even in your small community, in your household, you would see it. So go check those out. They're simple, but they're really, really important for our children.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think you and him both make the same point, which is it's so much easier to develop habits and do things when you have other people doing them with you.
Speaker 1:Oh, absolutely.
Speaker 2:If you get a whole school to say, hey, we're not going to allow phones in our schools, then your kid is not going to feel like the only isolated kid who's not with a phone during school.
Speaker 2:So, whether they don't have a phone at all or they have a phone that's not a smartphone, whatever that is. And I think same thing with churches and communities and different things, which is what your Hang-ten movement offers is just some practical steps. And I think even he was saying even if you have one or two friends that are doing this with you, it's a lot easier to kind of go against the current than it's like oh man, I'm the only person that's not on this and, by the way, what a nice way to tie back these two conversations, because habits are an amazing thing.
Speaker 1:I believe they are at the foundation of what it means to build a good life. But all psychological research, all habit research, will show you this funny and beautiful thing, and that is that you cannot form them alone and beautiful thing, and that is that you cannot form them alone. All of our, all of our habit change that's that's important, especially when it comes to pulling back the addictions and problems that are so dangerous to us, and this might be alcohol addiction, this might be smartphone addictions, could be anything. We need friends to do it, like, literally, you.
Speaker 1:You, you are not able to change your patterns very much at all alone, but the extent to which you're able to change them in community is astounding. I mean, our ability to destroy ourselves is actually rivaled by our community's ability to hold us together and rebuild ourselves, and that's a beautiful fact. So when we think about our own lives or our children's lives with technology, the Hang 10 movement is directly related to this thing that we just spent half an hour talking about, and that is that we need friends. We can't change our children's relationship with technology alone. But we can do it together. And if we don't do it together then we will fall to the lowest common denominator and it's dangerous for us and them. But when we start to do it together, we start to do two very beautiful things change our children's future and build friends alongside with to do it. And that's such a wonderful thing for us and for them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think Jonathan also saying that this generation, like, if you ask them, do you realize like social media is destructive or do you wish TikTok didn't exist? And he said majority of them would say yes, I don't. And like we agree with it, but they don't have a way to like, like a way out. Essentially, there's no like. Okay, what's the other option? Everybody else is doing this, you know, and I think there was a I forget what country in Europe, but they started doing things where they borrow a church building, like a beautiful church building and it's a phone-free zone, and they have days where you know you can't enter with a phone or they have a basket, if you did bring one, and people come in there and they do all sorts of things. There's like the arts people are reading, they're painting, they're doing different things and it's.
Speaker 2:There's socializing, and I believe there's actually a cafe in New York city that's starting to do that. I think I took a screenshot on my phone somewhere. It's in there somewhere.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I've heard of places like this, yeah.
Speaker 2:So I think there is a an uptick of like hey, we are actually really sick of this and we do see the negative effects of this, and how do we create that? So it's's, it's a matter of someone saying, hey, here's an opportunity. Or let's look at this from a different view.
Speaker 1:or like, hey, let's get together and not have our phones, and yes and yeah and that that one of the claims of the hang ten movement is that we can do this in normal spaces at normal times and create extraordinary community. So one of the one of the patterns that you'll see in the household practices is the practice of having no zones, and this is precisely this idea, but it's trying to build it into ordinary life rather than saying we need to go to some cafe or church.
Speaker 1:As beautiful as those ideas are, I love it, we just also need it in our ordinary patterns and I would honestly say, ordinary patterns, and I would honestly say not to to my own horn here, but just to encourage people that it's possible is that one of the things that we've done in our house is we have an RO box by the front door and I know that the the go RO Heath Wilson was the guy who introduced part of introducing us, along with Lauren, thank you. But when you go into our house you're going to be encouraged to put your phone in this box, right, and then you're going to see. You know, your normal experience in our house would be that there are places that we would think of as no zone, so the dinner table would be one of them, or the porch with friends would be another one of them. And so, just in regular rhythms of life, there's nothing wrong with going to the box and checking your text messages or looking something up or saying, but your normal interactions are going to be communal and analog. And then we're going to have dinner every night and nobody's going to have a phone in sight, and one of the things that we've seen, even with six to 12 year old boys four of them at the table is that they actually want to talk, they really do, and that we want to talk to them and that conversation is possible and these things unfold. And then when you apply this across places, another one of the hang-ten practices is that in teaching settings like schools or churches or classrooms, that's a no-zone. You don't have phones there.
Speaker 1:And when we start to put those sort of norms in our life which, by the way, can become very normal, very quick we find that suddenly and very rapidly we're recovering that communal life that we were made for, that life of friendship that we just talked about. And I think that's encouraging because our brains long for relationship. And I would say that there is a grace built into our brains. We call it neuroplasticity. That means we are not stuck with the world that we have, we are not stuck with the relationships we have. So many people, I think, say you know, the genie's out of the bottle, the ship has sailed. It's not true, it's not. We can change these patterns and we must. And the good news is that all our relational excitement, what we were made for, that idea of our brains, our bodies, our souls long for friendship. They will actually very quickly bounce back if we commit to certain rhythms of removing technology and putting our bodies around each other, and that's great news. It is possible, and we must start living like it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that point. It's one thing to have that once-in-a a while event where you have no screens, for example, versus incorporating that in your daily habits, your daily life, which is a lot more sustainable and a lot more rewarding. And I think some of those events could be a good prompting to be like, hey, this is something we can do differently, but essentially it's what you do on a day-to-day basis that really makes an impact on your life.
Speaker 1:It really is. And, just like on the friendship topic, it was like probably the most important thing anybody can do is just call that one friend, text them and say, hey, can we, you know, do this Saturday coffee or whatever it is here. Probably the most important thing you could do is just go to the hangtimemovementcom, read it up and then send it to another friend and say we should talk about these practices in our community. It's not that you have to do all of them, though I would recommend it. But if you were just to send it to them and say let's have a dinner and talk about this and talk about how to raise and apprentice our children into technology by far the most important thing you're going to do.
Speaker 1:In fact, the whole idea of the hang 10 movement was sparked because one mom in one of our kids' classes said we should get all the parents in this class together to talk about how we're going to handle technology. They're only in third grade now, but soon they're going to want iPhones. What should we do From that one conversation? So much has changed in our life and you should be the person, whoever's listening. I'm talking to you. You should be the person to spark that conversation you can change so much in your community and in your children's lives. Just go to the website and send it to a friend and have a conversation about it.
Speaker 2:That's so good, Justin. Well, thank you so much for your time. Is there anything else you'd like to relate to listener or anything I haven't asked you that you'd love to share?
Speaker 1:I mean, I'm a business lawyer and I'm sitting at my desk right now, but I'm going to be writing books for the rest of my life. So there's so much I had to tell you, but you should just go to my website and keep up. My next book is called the Body Teaches the Soul. It's coming out in about nine months and it's about how important our physical disciplines are to our spirituality and vice versa. So I could go all day, but just follow along. Read along. I love to talk to people, join my email list, follow me on Instagram. As much as I critique social media, I do put some stuff out on it. So I'm there.
Speaker 2:You got like millions of views per video.
Speaker 1:So once in a while when I talk about parenting and habits. Yes, if I talk about the dangers of technology, the weirdest things happen. I know. Yeah, the algorithm doesn't send it around. It's odd, I can't figure it out. But hey, we'll keep saying things that matter.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I usually wrap up my podcast by asking just a few questions. One of them is is a few questions.
Speaker 1:One of them is is what's the best advice that you've ever given? What's the best advice that I was ever given? One of the best pieces of advice that I've ever given. Actually, I actually read it on a gym wall and it seemed so trite at the time but it was. It was something like everything that you want in life is on the other side of suffering and pain, and I thought you know what a good phrase for a gym, because we're about to get hurt during this workout.
Speaker 1:But I started for years. That has followed me and I now think about this. You know, whether it's talking about friendship, talking about technology, talking about new habits in life, everything important in life is hard and most of the best things in life have a lot of hurt and pain and suffering in order to get to the virtue, the goodness and the beauty. And I think that has really changed my approach to life. I've stopped seeing life as oh it's. If something feels uncomfortable, then it must. I must be doing it wrong and really kind of flipped that and thought that probably means I'm doing something right. Actually, it probably means I'm working towards something worth working towards. So it's really helped me persevere both in faith in the gym, in relationships and really everything.
Speaker 2:I mean, we probably wouldn't have this book today had it not been for suffering. I'm sure there was days where it was not easy to write, oh my gosh.
Speaker 1:I mean, I know that you're Sveka, working on writing and for anybody who writes, I will say writing to me is the most difficult and most rewarding process ever. I feel like writing is getting into a cage match with my own soul and I just beat myself to death and somehow myself beats my other self to death. But at the end of it is this incredibly rewarding thing called a book that actually, as it turns out, they change people's lives. But they're so hard to write.
Speaker 2:They're so hard yeah, and I think in writing you find out so much about yourself and your habits and your hangups and all the things, and it's like wait a minute, what is what's going on here? These are some of the things that I need to change and I think it reveals a lot about who you are Well for anybody with a creative practice.
Speaker 1:It might be writing or it might be something else. Cecil Day-Lewis once said I write not in order to be understood, but in order to understand. And I think for most creatives and I would count myself among them, despite the whole business lawyer thing that I have I write first and foremost because it's the way I understand the world around me, myself and everything in between, and it so happens that some of it is worth publishing and some people will read it and take something from it, and maybe they'll come to understand something too. But if you're writing or if you're doing art, whatever your creative output is, know that it's probably the most important for you, and that's okay, even if the world never reads it or never sees it. You are transforming yourself by engaging in this, and that's the main reason that I find writing worth it, even though it's so hard.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I don't, I think, for my book. I was writing it because I wanted to understand the story. So, and as I was writing to understand it, you know came about that there were other people who also were interested in finding out what I found out. So that's kind of how that spiraled. You know what are some of your favorite books that you read, or some pivotal books in your life, because we never know, there may be a Lauren on the other end of this podcast who's going to get a book and it's going to change their life. So give us three books that are good.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. The Power of Habit was a book. That was the book that sparked my realization that habit was forming us way more than we thought. I would commend it to anybody. It's a fantastic summary of the psychological and sociological research on habit. But for me it really sparked the realization that even my spiritual and emotional life was far more formed by habit than I thought, and I would just strongly commend it to anybody.
Speaker 1:Cs Lewis's the Four Loves is an amazing treasure of a book on relationship and love and particularly there's an essay in it called Phileos, or the love between friends. That essay it's short, it still rings really true. I've got a few things that I quibble with. I like to try to get. I like to say I do disagree with CS Lewis on something so many people think that he's a saint, like infallible. But generally I have a few quibbles with that essay, but generally it is one of the most beautiful writings in the century on friendship. And so you know, if you like Made for People, if you like any of the ideas in here on friendship, I would read CS Lewis's essay Phileos.
Speaker 2:And what's the most bravest thing you've ever done since this is the Once we Dare podcast. You know we're encouraging people to have courage. What is that one brave thing.
Speaker 1:Oh man, I mean, on the one hand, I hopped a train in college and it was probably one of the bravest and stupidest things I've ever done, because I ended up in a different city, that I wasn't sure where I was and I basically, I almost, I honestly died on the train. It was a terrible idea. It's a story I tell friends and sometimes my children, but I always caveat do not do this, do not do this. So I checked the box in College of Train Hopping, push through a life of marriage, parenting and work, even when my body and mind was falling apart with anxiety. And this is the story of my first book. If you want to read more about it, it's in the Common Rule. But it was the meltdown that I alluded to.
Speaker 1:I subsequently realized that mental illness and very difficult bouts with it are far more the norm than the exception. Most people will have a period in their life, if not a long period, where they do not feel themselves and actually feel very dangerous to themselves and feel like the world is falling apart. And my encouragement to you, if you're feeling like that listener, is that you are more normal than you think and this is more winnable than you think. And I now look back at the years where I felt like I was drowning in the chaos of my own mind and see that, thankfully and mostly, this is due to my wife and close friends who pulled me along.
Speaker 1:The bravery and the courage just to keep living and loving the people around me each day, even though I felt totally lost, was a time that I now see that was one of the bravest things I've ever done Just to choose to love them and love myself, even when I didn't feel myself. That's very hard to do, but it's very courageous and it's a battle you can win. And I stand now on the other side of it, realizing that we don't have to be today like we were yesterday. You really can change your addictions. You can change your mental health. You're not destined to the world you're in now. But it takes friends, it takes actual commitments to habits, it takes changes in the way you use technology. But all of those are doable and maybe the most courageous thing your listeners will do or make some of those changes today. I would recommend it. It was definitely one of the most courageous things I think I've ever done.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that is really profound because so many people do struggle with anxiety, depression, different things and, like you said, there's actually some practical things that you can do. Some things are deeper. You may have to work through some trauma and different things. So, but for listeners to know that they're not alone and they are people that are going through similar things, when you have people around you who's got you, who are there for you, you're able to know that this isn't the end, all that there is hope on the other side of this period. So I really appreciate you being vulnerable and just sharing that because we're not alone. There's other people who are struggling.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Well, I think when we see life accurately, we realize and it's definitely true for me we are all very broken. I mean, we all have a lot of vulnerabilities. My life is messy. My friends know that I write about habits as a mess of a person because I need them, not because I'm so good at them. And I think start there, Don't be afraid of the breakdowns you're having. It's actually what makes you need other people and it's what makes friendships so important, so you can lead with that and it actually becomes the catalyst for relationship.
Speaker 2:Well, justin, thank you so much. I love this conversation. I think it's going to be really helpful for a lot of people, and we're expecting a lot of Lawrence to be on the other side to say hey, I listened to this podcast. I there's this book you got to get it and you know, I'm just going to ship it to you. I'll find out your address and I'll just ship you the book and let's be friends.
Speaker 1:I love it. Yeah, to that. To that Lauren out there who did it, you know my enduring thanks.
Speaker 2:Oh, she's going to love it. I'm sure she's going to hear this episode too. She was actually really excited to hear it. She's like I can't wait until you have this episode, so I'm sure she's going to feel honored.
Speaker 1:Well, that's great.
Speaker 2:So thank you, Justin.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for having me. This has been a delightful conversation.
Speaker 2:Thank you for listening to the Once we Dare podcast. It is an honor to share these encouraging stories with you. If you enjoy the show, I would love for you to tell your friends. Leave us a reviewer rating and subscribe to wherever you listen to podcasts, because this helps others discover the show. You can find me on my website, speckhopoffcom.