Maintain Your Friendships With a Boring Weekly Email Thread
Gave yourself a home haircut? Started drinking more water? Fixed the creaky garage door? No life update is too mundane.
Two of my childhood friends and I maintain an email thread that’s both active and aggressively boring. In one recent message, my buddy Josh told us about the progress he’s made on his deck; in response, I informed the group that my son Luc threw a Lego at my eye. Over the past several months, we’ve briefed each other on the family board games we played, the meals we’ve consumed, and the loads of laundry we’ve ignored.
These quick life updates couldn’t be more mundane, and yet I’ve come to value them. I’ve become a proponent of the boring weekly email update.
I first heard the idea of starting a boring email chain with friends or family on the podcast Happier with Gretchen Rubin. Rubin was talking about an observation made by her mother, which was that “when you’re in touch with a person all the time, you have a lot to say to each other, but when you see a person rarely, you have a hard time coming up with things to say.”
Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard summed up this social phenomenon in his memoir series My Struggle. In a somber passage, he writes about his fear…
