The Point Of Doing Pointless Things With Your Friends

by on in ESSAYS, INSPIRATION

My friend Nick and I meet every week, or every few weeks, at a different diner in Denver, lock our bicycles to a street sign, walk in and order breakfast, and we talk about things: business ideas, our changing city, the exact definition of a bro, other new restaurants that have better food than the one where we’re currently eating, and how the current diner rates on three categories: food, ambience, and service.

We are almost halfway through a list of a dozen diners in Denver, 0 percent of them hip, none of them popular weekend brunch spots, and usually never more than about 30 percent full while we’re eating breakfast there.

Nick and I met about eight years ago riding bicycles in central Denver, and you could probably say we don’t have a ton in common on the surface: He owns a brewery and I don’t drink. He loves metal and I love old hip hop. He dresses like someone who loves metal and I dress like someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. He has a strong beard and I can’t grow a beard to save my life. But we have committed to visiting all these diners, for no really good reason. It’s not the food, I said to Nick at the last one, the legendary Tom’s Diner on Colfax (Food: 7, Ambience: 9, Service: 9).

“What is the point, then?” Nick asked.

Friendship, as I have come to define it, is based on conversations. If we like each other, it’s because we can sustain a conversation for an hour or longer every time we get together, and when we part ways, we are both at least slightly richer in some way. Where the conversation happens isn’t really important—during a hike, on the drive to and from mountain biking, on adjacent barstools, over an expensive dinner or $3.50 breakfast burrito, over a cup of coffee—or, as Will put it in Good Will Hunting a long time ago: “Or maybe we could get together and just eat a bunch of caramels. When you think about it, it’s just as arbitrary as drinking coffee.”

I also believe that distinctive memories form the chapters of the story of a friendship, and those often start with “wouldn’t it be fun if we …” and hopefully are mentioned years later with “remember that time when we …” If you’re going to be there for each other during the bad times (which are hopefully few) and the Saturdays moving furniture into each other’s houses, you should make an effort to stack up some legitimately fun adventures to balance those out. No matter how contrived those adventures are.

Several years ago, I interviewed a bunch of people who identified as “highpointers”—mostly people who actively tried to summit the highest point in as many of the U.S. states as possible. Plenty of the high points are legitimate hiking or mountaineering challenges (such as Denali, Mt. Hood, and Mt. Rainier), and the high points of the flatter states are borderline comical (like Florida’s 340-foot Britton Hill, just off County Road 285). Overall, you’d have to admit it sounds like a pretty curious hobby.

But in interviewing the folks who had a dozen or more highpoints checked off their tick lists, I heard something that stuck with me. I have long lost my notes and forgot who said it, but they said something like, “It’s not about a list. It’s about the experiences. The list just gets you out there.”

In the years since that interview, I’ve found a lot of joy in doing contrived things with my friends, adventures we just make up for something to do as an excuse to hang out—a traverse of a series of peaks, a 20-plus-mile run between half a dozen restaurants, a line on a map that’s almost meaningless besides the fact it’s what we’re doing Saturday. Earlier this summer, Nick and I and two other friends met way out in Aurora at 3:45 a.m. to bicycle the entire 26-mile length of Colfax Avenue in the dark, after traffic from Saturday night partying had died down and before Sunday traffic had begun. A few weeks later, we pedaled the length of Broadway starting at 4 a.m. for no good reason. So we ran out of iconic streets to ride and started joking that the next bicycle event would have to be some sort of geometry thing, and Nick suggested The Rhombus Ride.

We haven’t done it yet, but we have started in on this list of very adequate diners. And the point isn’t that the food is great, or some quest to find The King of Denver’s Very Adequate Diners, or anything like that. When Nick asked me, I said, “I think the point is spending time with your friend.” Because when you think about it, it’s as arbitrary as drinking coffee, or climbing mountains, or golfing, really.

-Brendan

15 replies on “The Point Of Doing Pointless Things With Your Friends“

  • Sarah

    Thank you. This is really well written and contains some really quotable thoughts. I believe that life is an adventure, and the best parts are the memories of the things you’ve done and the people you did them with. 🙂

  • Jake

    No, especially the bit about golf- now I understand why people golf.

    Brendan, one of your best and my favorites.

    PS- Just crushed a garlic fish burrito. Even though it was a late lunch, if I plan things right, a hat trick is still possible. Next time you come to SF, I’ll let you in on the secret spot.

  • Patrick

    I moved back east to be close to my wife’s family. My friends here don’t really ski, don’t really climb, and couldn’t ride a mountain bike if their life depended on it. So instead we go to something called Science Cafe once a month. We drink beer, eat burgers, and listen to people talk about interesting stuff we can’t begin to understand. Still, it’s a good time and a good reason to get together. I guess that’s the point.

  • Josh

    I like to call this random yet significant time with friends ‘creating history’. Small bits of time over months to years or short burst of intense togetherness- it doesn’t really matter. Collecting experiences to create a history with some one else is really what we all are want, right?

  • LBG

    I’m a highpointer! It’s dorky but it combines my loves of hiking, climbing, roadtripping, exploring, and checking-shit-off-lists. I just bagged my 35th– NC’s Mt Mitchell, the highest point east of the Mississippi. I met up with friends I’ve known for decades, all of us coming in from different parts of the country. For two days we hiked up the rugged and stunning Black Mountain Crest trail, drank beers and told stories late into the night, and woke up to a misty sunrise over pure southern Appalachian perfection.

    You don’t need to do a multi-day hike over rocks and roots, though. You could drive to the top of Mitchell in about 20 minutes.

    It’s not about the list.

  • Kendall

    Thanks for the reminder. I’ve not done enough pointless stuff with friends lately and sadly needed to be reminded. Doing pointless things is often times more the point of it than those grand plans we seem to scheme up and rarely execute on.

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