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- #105: The best ships
#105: The best ships
Shem Opolot
January 24, 2025
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Who am I? I’m Shem Opolot, a health professional turned content creator, passionate about helping people be their best selves in life and work.
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Happy Friday 🎉 Adulting activities that bring me joy Part 1: You know those little balls of fabric that form on your sweaters or the crotches of your pants? I bought a fabric shaver that removes them, and watching it work makes me so happy.
Thank you to all those who filled out the annual survey. If you haven’t yet, here’s your last chance to earn bragging rights later when your desired feature is implemented.
Also, what music are you listening to? Share some bangers with me, please.
LIFE.
The best ships.
I grew up in Bugolobi Flats.
32 staggered rows of brown stone buildings. Demarcated only in a social contract. Gateless. Fenceless. Some blocks more porous than others, prefabricated—by the Israelis in the 1970s as they mulled a promised land in East Africa—and then stacked on each other four high to create 32 apartments per block.
Each household averaged about 3.5 kids, and my favorite time was twilight. The sun packed its overnight bag and tucked it over the horizon. We played more fiercely than ever, as though the last rays of light would smuggle our fun into the overnight bag.
Several clusters of kids played their own games: some played football with a ball made of straw, some biked around, leaving trails in the dirt that served as receipts of their parents’ money well-spent; some played kwepena (dodgeball) and piled stones to reward themselves for their agility; some foot-raced about for bragging rights; some used sticks to trace their dreams in the dirt; some dug holes in the dirt and filled them with marbles. Different occupations, but all of us connected by the same joy and closeness and the awareness of the sun’s position in the sky.
You couldn’t be caught out.
It was so easy to make and sustain friendships then. We did everything together. In that gateless, fenceless community, everyone was your neighbor. We played together, went to church together, went to school together, and rode our bikes to the fringes of the flat earth together. We even hit puberty and somehow decided biking and playing football barefoot wasn’t cool together.
But it’s so hard for adults to make and sustain new friendships.
For friendship to thrive, you need three things: proximity, timing, and energy. And childhood is the perfect petri dish for the friendship experiment. 70% of my groomsmen were guys I rode bicycles with, played football with, went to school with, wrote love letters to girls with, and got rejected by those same girls with. We were physically close, obeyed the same clock, and channeled the energies toward the same things.
But when you graduate from university, around 21, something changes. Mel Robbins calls it “The Great Scattering.” Trivial goals of finishing stages in a video game or holding a girl’s hand are replaced by professional pursuits. The corporate ladder replaces the ladder on a playground slide. You go from playing “thieves and police” to literally contemplating robbing a bank to make ends meet.
Some people get great jobs, some people get good jobs, some people get bad jobs, and some get no jobs.
And effectively, capitalism cuts the social cohesion you spent 20 years building.
Suddenly, you’re too ashamed to hang out with so-and-so because they spend too much, drink too much, or complain too much.
Suddenly, you go from rehashing episodes of Power Rangers in a huddle to binge-watching a guilty pleasure and telling no one about it.
Suddenly, your friends don’t invite you for things because you got married or had a child.
Suddenly, you want new friends, and they’re hard to come by.
But the ship of friendship never changed course. You did. And you must change the way you think about friendship to course correct.
The ingredients remain the same—closeness, timing, and energy—but you must add intentionality, flexibility, and grace. If you want some friendships to work, you must put that event on your calendar and call even when you don’t feel like it. You must be willing to play the ping-pong of scheduling to pinpoint a playdate.
And you must accept that people will come and go out of your life, and that’s okay.
Your friendships, at any given point, are a reflection of where you are at that point. Even when you don’t want to be at that point.
This post was inspired by this video.
THINGS.
A quote.
Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, of the “Spartacus” and “Roman Holiday” fame, wrote a letter to his 17-year-old daughter in 1957 and, among other things, shared this beautiful tidbit about parenthood:
A picture.
Another banger from the Joburg trip. Was my choice to carry my wife’s purse a product of chivalry or fashion? Two things can be true at the same time.
WORK.
The apps I pay for.
I’ll do everything in my power not to pay for an app. But I really needed these ones:
Readwise: I keep everything I read in one place, and any highlights I make randomly show up on my phone home screen widget every day. This is how I share quotes with you and how I remember a lot of what I read.
MyMind: Everything I find on the internet, I dump into MyMind. Gifs, pdfs, images, tweets, videos, memes, quotes, everything. And because of its natural language processing, I don’t need to organize anything. I just search for any word that appears in the quote or pdf, for example.
A screenshot of MyMind. It has EVERYTHING.
Fantastical: It’s hard to justify paying for a calendar app when there are plenty of adequate free options out there. But that’s it—all the options out there are adequate. Fantastical is, well, FANTASTIC!
Dashlane: I stopped using one password for everything, adding an asterisk or hash to that same password whenever security-conscious websites demanded I respect myself. Dashlane makes logging into websites on all my devices fast and secure, plus it comes with a “free” VPN!
FUN.
The Friday Fix playlist
Shem’s picks
✅ This app makes it easy to workout based on the muscles you want to work out and the equipment you have
✅ A list of places to visit is always a good way to spend your time.
✅ A statistical breakdown of the best movie sequels.
✅ What food expiry dates really mean.
✅ Bookmark this for when you want to celebrate a win this year.
Have a great weekend,
— Shem
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