do your friend homework, it might save you

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Responding to voice memos from your friends might just be the most important task of the day.

Whether it be second-dates that your friend has been on with out-of-league men or hankering through currents of consciousness as they tug and pull every which direction, it is always somehow the intimacy of mundanity that makes life worth living again.

But why is it that friend homework is always the first thing we put off, even when it’s the thing that brings us back to ourselves?

decentering work

I faked a dental surgery today to get out of having to speak in a meeting.

Droning my life away in a last-minute (it was scheduled 10 minutes before I could log on), needless (we talked about my fake dental surgery for half the meeting), lengthy (there was no agenda and we laughed about it) meeting made me spend a good chunk of the day sitting in a indomitable silence about what my life was.

In the middle of it, I was on my phone (as one is when your camera is off and there’s no real will to be attentive). I get a text.

It’s video of two grandmothers holding margheritas, sipping them by the beach.

“So us omg,” my friend said.

“Hopefully it is,” I replied.

Life is worth living again.

The revitalizing ability of friend homework is more than just about diversion. It decenters the very notion of traditional work. Where’s the hustle to hang? To send each other trinkets of our existence in hopes of feeling like it has meaning?

Friend homework subverts the very systems that make us believe that our isolation and individualism will save us. Our time and emotional labor towards relationships are worth it! It proclaims.

It is a reorientation and unwitting relinquishment of time towards community, deprioritized in a world that glorifies the grind. It asks us to value connection not as a break from real work, but as meaningful work in itself.

Sophie Rosa in her work, Radical Intimacy states,

“Radical intimacy insists that to remake the world we must pay attention to connection, care and community as sites of struggle.”

Intimate bonds—especially close friendships—aren’t just personal—they’re formative spaces for revolutionary change, offering resistance to capitalist logics by centering care.

In a neoliberal economy, time becomes an individual resource that we cloister to ourselves. We self-optimize for it and atomize the achievements we make in our own time.

But I would argue that sharing time, the communalization of our most prized resource, proffers the most effective resistance against exploitive economies that predicate on production. Friend homework builds spaces that share time. It creates rooms and houses that prioritize collective presence, shared vulnerability, and relational attunement over output. We are not alone again, and that is all that truly matters.

Maybe all we need to do is care.

building a language

The commonplace dictionary of a social media chat should be studied.

“So us”

“So true”

“LOL”

“Miss you :("

Something profound happens when friends cultivate an unspoken code—a private linguistic landscape that practices care without an emotional overhaul. Code-switching to a shared language circumvents the exhaustion of the day to day and is a quiet (but loud) form of resistance. The ability to convey depth through connection only comes from taking the time to build the colloquialisms of the tongue. Speaking it everyday, and practicing its truest form over and over will only make it second nature to you eventually.

For centuries, language has been a tool to fight oppression and divert systems of power that steal your essence unabashedly. A shovel to excavate space for yourself without having to undertake the labor of having to explain yourself, the language we build by replying to each other’s musings fights oppressive systems through its mere existence.

In an era of exhaustion and hyper-work, feeling understood is a commodity. Translating the intangibles of a friendship into the mundanity of sharing the everyday is nothing short of linguistics. It is a building a language that enables you to not say as much and be heard — something that is exceedingly necessary to remain fortified against an energy-draining environment.

So talk, girl. That’s literally the only way we’re gonna get through this.

so just respond to it now

Yea, now.

Whatever voice memos you have waiting in your messages and the pictures of your friends cat making bread.

Respond to them knowing that this isn’t just you responding to something so you’re friends. It’s you acknowledging that this is the language that keeps your friendship and you, alive.

If I could measure the years returned to me by the sound of my friend’s voice, they would more than repay the hours I spent responding to them with care.

To everyone that just got an onslaught of pictures about my day, I’m sorry. I’m waiting on your response ;)