What's New?

 

Sometimes, I’m a train wreck socially. The question that trips me up most consistently is: “What’s new?”

I never quite know how to respond to it.

I mean this kind of tongue-in-cheek, but it can be quite debilitating. 

Over the last couple years, and since graduating college, I’ve found myself sometimes avoiding catching up with people because I dread informing them of everything I’ve been up to since we last spoke.

Mainly because it never feels like it’s been enough. 

To be clear, I don’t mean this as a pity party. I’m doing fine and I’m in a good place.

But it’s that feeling that can really nag at me.

While this feeling could partially be attributed to the pandemic (see what the NYT refers to as "Languishing"), if I'm honest, it started before that. 

If anything, during the first couple months of the pandemic—at least socially—it was kind of comforting to know that everyone else was in the same boat: none of us were doing anything. It was okay to have nothing new going on.

When I first moved to NYC in late 2018 to start my post-college consulting job, I had a pretty quick-and-easy response when some asked me what was new. I would say that I had just started a new project and was going to xyz city on the weekdays. 

First, it was Dallas, then it was Princeton, then Edison, and then it just stopped. Not because of the pandemic but because I kept getting extended on the same project for over a year and had nothing new to say about it.

And pretty soon, I felt like I had nothing new to say, period.

I’m being dramatic, but I’m trying to give voice to that feeling of self-doubt in my head (and maybe in yours too) that keeps us from opening up to other people.

I had a few people reach out to me after my first post and share that they were proud of me for being so open. I wanted to extend that sentiment here because I think you can find real strength in being vulnerable.

I think back to this speech I attended at Penn State as part of a program for students interested in careers in investment banking. Most of the sessions were led by visiting alumni and were not very memorable. 

But there was this one speaker, Ryan, who used almost his entire alotted time to speak about the setbacks he experienced in life, including being rejected twice by a selective club on campus. Seeing the way Ryan connected with his audience by being vulnerable was a powerful lesson in humilty.

Which brings me to why I wrote this post today. This post is for anyone who finds themself retreating socially when they feel like they’re not setting the world on fire. 

I’ve been there too. I get it. But maybe by letting others in to how we feel, we'll form some deeper connections.¹

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1 If you enjoyed this post, I’d recommend a blog post I like from WaitButWhy called The Great Perils of Social Interaction.^↩