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- #140. To long life.
#140. To long life.
Shem Opolot
September 26, 2025
Hi! Welcome to The Friday Fix! You’re reading this because you probably stumbled upon this post somewhere on the internet instead of where it should be—in your inbox. But no worries; we can fix that.
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 🎉 If you’re reading this, you weren’t raptured.
But I was ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
My superior organization skills allowed me to create and schedule enough posts to last until the end of the year, when the antichrist will break out the guillotine. Be safe down there. The streets really are paved with gold up here, and you’d be surprised if you saw some of the people who have made the cut.
Also, before I vanished, I discovered an RnB musician called Divine Lightbody. Listen to her song “Roses.”
Also, this tweet made me laugh:
YOU are not having a good time so we must ALL be raptured?
— le’Giza (@Givenkazeni)
1:08 PM • Sep 22, 2025
LIFE.
To long life 🥂.
I can’t speak for women, but I know men experience this a lot.
As a romantic relationship between a man and a woman progresses, the woman occasionally asks odd questions as she draws circles on the man’s chest with her index finger. These questions, for the man, border on nonsensical, but they always come. Over time, they even become endearing. A rite of passage. A mile marker for all the love progress being made.
“Would you still like me if I were a potato?”
“Would you still like me if my breath smelled bad like all the time?
“What if my face looked like this?” (as they squeeze their face into a pretzel and stick their tongue out, or “smile” with just the teeth on their lower jaw showing). Sometimes these questions are less nonsensical but scarier:
“What are we?”
“Why do you like me?”
During a job interview a while back, the interviewer asked me, “Why do you like this job?” Without skipping a beat, I answered untruthfully, threading a needle with the flimsiest thread and connecting my experience and my purpose to a job that could be obsolete in a year. The truth was—as you know—I needed money.
People say we have war to thank for peace, and they might be right. But I’d say lies keep the earth orbiting around the sun at just the right distance and tilt.
Anyway.
After the interview, I joked with my wife about how that question made me feel like a young man who was scared to commit but found himself stuck on a rumpled bed with a woman demanding the impossible of an immature man: clarity.
In the earlier days of my relationship with my wife, whenever people asked me why I liked her, I’d say it was, among other things, because she didn’t need me. She was independent. She had her own hobbies, her own friends, her own life. She had no desire to tag along for my gatherings with my friends, and I felt no inclination to invite her, except to let her know she had a standing invitation.
A standing invitation she has never honored, which is, all the same, good for everyone involved.
You see, it’s good for you and your relationships to have your own life, separate from others. Your own hobbies. Your own relationships.
***
Harvard University published the results of the longest-running study of human wellness, which followed the same group of people for about 80 years. Now (lean in closer), studies like these are flawed for many reasons. For example, there are countless variables to account for when trying to prove that someone, let alone hundreds of people, turned out the way they did for any single reason.
But there’s also something to be said for asking the same question of hundreds of people from different backgrounds and getting the same answer.
The study claimed that the greatest predictor for longevity (long life) was the health of one’s relationships. Particularly, relationships outside one’s immediate family.
And I’m inclined to agree. You already know how I feel about community.
You know how busy you get. You settle into a routine. You go to work, you head home. You’re tired. You eat, you shower, and you watch a TV show until it’s way past your bedtime. You sleep. You wake up, and you do it again.
So much time passes when you’re in this drone state.
You must intentionally schedule regular, easy, frictionless friend time.
Why ‘easy and frictionless’?
Because I love that my parents’ generation used to just regularly have people over for tea. It was a low-maintenance but high-impact ritual. Nowadays, hosting friends seems to require themes and theater. Dressed tables and food so garnished you only want to take pictures of it. Okay, that’s not true; all plates of food hate to see me coming.
And don’t get me wrong, the theater isn’t bad.
But limiting friend time to bars, lounges, or special events alienates people in quiet ways they don’t mention. The cost of buying a gift or paying for a meal can be prohibitive, so they skip the gathering(s) altogether.
Breathing life into your relationships, much like starting any project, begins with reducing friction. You have to suffocate the excuses by making it easy to spend time with your people.
So, invite your friends over for tea and sit on the balcony or on the floor. If anything, because your life literally depends on it.
THINGS.
A tweet.
I think the worst thing you can do in life is buy into the idea that talent is supreme. Or dwell on the nobility of intention. Because it is a cutthroat jungle out here, and success is weighed against utility. You are not a singer, until you have sang. Not a runner, till you run.
— Okong' Okuna (@XivTroy)
9:22 PM • Sep 22, 2025
A picture.
Summer is almost over, so I’ll take every opportunity to wear sleeveless tops. Attending the H Street Festival this past weekend was a reminder that I’ve been in D.C. for at least a year. This city has grown on me, and I’ll definitely miss it and the lovely people I’ve met when I have to leave it.
WORK.
Are you asking the right questions
You can ask AI whatever you want, but if you want to get as close to your desired output in the shortest time possible (and save the planet), you need the right prompt.
A good prompt should have:
Task: What do you want to do?
Context: Give just enough background to avoid endless possibilities
Example: If you can, give it an example of what you want your output to look like
Persona: Who do you want the AI to be? If you’re a job seeker, you may want the AI to be a hiring manager with 20 years of experience
Format: Do you want the output in a table format? Bullet points? Paragraphs?
Tone: Casual? Formal?
💡 Bonus: I usually ask these two statements at the end of the prompt:
i) Please ask any clarifying questions until you’re 100% sure you can complete this task effectively.
ii) Ensure the output meets the standard for a top 0.1% expert in this industry.
FUN.
The Friday Fix playlist
Shem’s picks
> How friendships last and others don’t
> Why we have allergies
> This site helps you read summaries of the T&Cs you scroll past
> See how any two people can be connected
> A history of everything on earth in the form of cubes
Have a great weekend,
— Shem
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