#213: Reaching no-plan nirvana
The new plan is no plans
I write to you today on four hours of sleep, after attending the “reopening” of Planet Hollywood in midtown last night, a haunting event hosted by Alec and Hilaria Baldwin, followed by an 11pm poetry reading in a Russian bathhouse that went an hour over time, launching me deeper into the night than expected. Before the opening, I acted in a scene down by the water for my friend’s short film, which they’d nailed down only two days prior, telling me what to wear an hour before I left the house. We wrapped early, so I called my friend Laura and asked if I could change at her apartment before we headed to Midtown—the Planet Hollywood party was her idea, she’d given me half a day’s notice. She said come over, then played me four songs she recorded on a whim with her boyfriend while I poked through her tchotchkes. I hadn’t been to her “new” apartment yet—we’d talked about my coming over for years, but couldn’t manage it until I gave her five minutes’ warning. Lately, I’ve been learning that this—a hodge podge of last-minute suggestions in place of calendar-style planning—is one of the better ways to make things happen.
I used to be a planner. There was a years-long period in my late twenties to early thirties when I received a push notification on my phone every Monday that instructed me to “Make weekend plans!”—a message from a former self who was tired of forgetting to do that and finding herself lonely and bored come Saturday. Over that period I came to see my social life as a project I had to construct with great intention. I tried my best to see everyone I cared about on a reasonable cadence. I took preliminary pains to avoid flaking, carefully considering my potential workload and energy levels before committing to anything, never stacking too many engagements in a row that might cause me to bail. There were times I wanted to, obviously, but I rarely would. I was too loyal to the plan, my plans—without which I might lose my friends, my life, and never leave the house again.
When I had a kid, this value system unraveled comically fast. Not only was I too overwhelmed to put the work into artisanally crafting a social life, but my baby made most social plans difficult to execute. At first she was erupting in need at random intervals, like a broken alarm clock. Then came the treadmill of toddler colds and random nighttime wake-ups that left me exhausted and the fussy moods that changed ordinary days into strategic operations. Amid this chaos, my own needs could change on a dime—dying for a nap in the morning, starving for social interaction by 1pm (a broken alarm clock myself). Suddenly no amount of foresight or planning could keep it all in balance. I had to keep it loose. I became my own worst nightmare: I learned to see every plan as tentative.
Meanwhile, another approach to socializing took hold: Spontaneous texts telling friends I was heading to the park if they wanted to join; playdate requests with two-hour warnings; last-minute suggestions to get dinner the next night or breakfast the next morning. The day I had yesterday—the film shoot and the Planet Hollywood party and the bathhouse—is, to be fair, wildly unrepresentative of my life these days, but had I tried to plan all that ahead of time, it never would have happened. The ideas seemed to appear out of nowhere, and suddenly there we all were, Hilaria in a green dress, asking about the English word for “onion.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised to discover how well last-minute plans work for seeing my friends. After all, I spent most of my childhood operating this way—knocking on my neighbors’ doors to play, asking for sleepovers after soccer games, wandering down my college dorm hallway on a Friday night to see what might be happening later. It was only in my postgrad, full-time working life that I learned to be methodical and principled about my social calendar. Up to that point, it had always come together more organically, the natural result of living near and among friends and family, less of an individual than a part of a system that functioned with or without me.
The adult social life, as I understood it, was a much more individualistic endeavor. First of all, there were no hallways connecting any of our homes, or common bars or coffee shops to loiter in after work a la friend groups on network TV. Maybe we didn’t even have “friend groups” any more. Last-minute invites seemed rude; everyone was too busy for that kind of thing, or too anxious. And yet my response to this shift in circumstances—to optimize my social life through what I guess you could call “friend appointments”—presented its own problems. Planning ahead meant I didn’t always know what I’d feel up for later (cue the dread); it meant getting flaked on by people who didn’t know what they’d feel up to later. At times it meant a total lack of social interaction when I wasn’t able to do the administrative work of planning it all out. These are the hazards of the carefully managed social life. Friendship maintenance as another form of productivity, or even work.
Last month someone wrote into my advice column asking about how to build community when everyone was always flaking on her. I empathized as someone who’s felt aggrieved by flakes pretty regularly in my adult life, but realized in thinking through her question that it had been a while since I felt that way. It’s not that having a kid instantly clicked me into a community and fixed everything (I still make long-term plans and they still sometimes work and other times don’t!), but it’s imposed new limits at the same time as new needs, and forced me to find new ways of engaging with people around me. Longer conversations with our neighbors when they invite Sunny into their homes (turns out we do still have hallways connecting our homes), getting to know people at the park while killing time at the swings, forming group-chats with relative strangers because our kids are the same age, becoming a regular at our local spots because we have to get out of the house. Building friendships may take more planning, but building community can be instigated decently well on the fly.
This works outside the parenting world too. I mentioned this in my advice column, but one of my group chats that’s constantly trying to plan dinner, always moving the day further and further out to find a free one in common, saw each other twice recently, both times with less than 48 hours of warning. Last-minute plans are easy to say yes or no to, and they come with lower expectations. They also manage to conjure a feeling I’d thought was lost to youth—a sense of social abundance and opportunity, the comforting feeling of “what are we doing this weekend?” I still like planning special things ahead of time and think it’s important to do. It’s just not the only option and it doesn’t have to be the determining factor in my wellbeing, either.
There’s a catchphrase I’ve seen going around the internet lately: Everyone wants a village, no one wants to be a villager. I take this to mean that while many of us feel alienated, we often don’t take the necessary steps to live less alienated lives, or don’t know how to. If our days are ruled by work and we fear being a burden to the stressed-out people around us, fending for ourselves—or leaning on people we can pay to help us out—becomes the norm, and friendship gets squeezed into the margins. Our time, whether for work or for leisure, becomes a puzzle to solve.
Over-planning and then over-canceling is a natural result of this. It’s easy to blame individuals for being flakey—call them selfish or unreliable, for some it could be true. But I think it’s a systemic issue, too. When we’re forced to treat our social needs as discrete and separate from our other needs, booking dinners with friends like dentist appointments, weeks in advance, we lose touch with our natural throughway to community: to need and be needed. Difficult as parenthood has been so far, I’m grateful that it’s forced me to operate differently, reminding me over and over that I’m unable to manage it all myself. Being without plans used to feel like a sad ending to me, now it just feels like another beginning.
My favorite article I read last week was “A Lot of Oscar Dresses Looked a Little Too Perfect,” (free version here) by Rachel Tashjian for The Washington Press, a great write-up on the eerie feeling in Hollywood lately. Friday’s 15 things also included a hair tip, toddler art tools, a new beloved necklace, and more. The rec of the week was how to emotionally and practically manage the current political climate.
Last week’s podcast was an exploration of the trad wife discourse versus the divorcee discourse, and my attempt to thread the needle. So many great and thought-provoking comments, thank you!
Hope you have a nice Sunday,
Haley
I was recently inspired by the 'last-minute plans' advice in your advice column.
I had plans with a friend and I envisioned a cozy hangout, sitting on the floor of my sunroom, drinking wine and eating food on boards..I was missing a long-lost group of friends who used to gather like this regularly at my home.
My friend complained that she was struggling to form deeper friendships with people in our program. She had suggested a few of us go to an overrated restaurant. I pointed out to her that maybe the reason her connections with these other women felt surface-level and inauthentic was because they were always meeting up in more formal, public settings. You can't always go deep in a restaurant...and if nobody's crying, are we even hanging out?
So we tossed out LAST MINUTE texts to 4 other women that we had wanted to get to know better. All four of them showed up, even the one with two kids, and we sat on the floor in my sunroom and ate borek and drank really sweet Moscato rose someone brought and gossiped until late into the night. It felt nourishing to deepen these bonds. With everyone so busy, I know it wouldn't have happened with advance notice.
I hadn’t seen “everyone wants a village, no one wants to be a villager” before, but could not agree more. I feel like it’s turning friendships intro transactions where people are afraid of mild inconveniences and overly boundaried. Everyone wants the feeling of community but in an era of “self-care” and “protecting my peace” people are unwilling to put in the effort or endure the occasional discomfort that comes from reciprocity, conflict, or being needed. The resulting atomization is the opposite of life-affirming, and such an unfulfilling and disconnected way of being in the world.