The Uncertainty Paradox: Anna Goldfarb and Naomi Win Making Friends on Just Press Record

When I burned out, or, more specifically, when I gave up on churning myself in an effort to make a go at the music industry, I wanted to hide from all of my old friends. I couldn’t cope with the failure. I couldn’t cope with the flags I had planted and things I said I believed and - I felt ridiculous. So I cooped up. I hid out.

I threw myself off of what friendship expert Anna Goldfarb calls “the friendship cliff.” And I did it in my mid-20s. Learning that some unique experience of your life has an even pop-clinical type name for how common it is, is such a weird experience. But I knew it wasn’t just me, too.

I watched, or at least heard about, how a lot of my friends would go over their cliffs later, often around 30, which - why do I always have to be so early or so late to everything, argh - but instead of friends just drifting away, I put myself on an island with scarcely a ball named Wilson to talk shop with out of shame, guilt, and a pretty depressing amount of confidence.

But we’re not here for that story. I’m here because of that story. I’m here because when I started trying to climb out of that pit, I found out that friendship isolation rarely happens in a vacuum. Instead, it happens when we’re most uncertain about who we are and where we’re going.

As it turns out, there’s actual research backing up both the timing and the underlying psychology of why this happens to so many of us, proactively or passively.

Like I said before, Anna Goldfarb is a friendship expert. She literally wrote the book, “Modern Friendship: How to Nurture Our Most Valued Connections” - and I was unsurprised to find that most people don’t experience a gradual decline in friendships, they experience a cliff’s edge that they either jump off of or fall down. In all cases, it sucks.

The “normal” way this goes is - your friends stop being your primary relationships, and as spouses (or, ahem, let’s just call some of them “miscellaneous crazy people”) and jobs and kids and LIFE takes over, those new characters become the new primaries. And, they’re supposed to come first. It’s supposed to work more or less like this. It’s just math.

But there’s more going on inside of it too. According to Gerald Mollenhorst’s research, as adults we lose half of our friendships every seven years. This is not the seven year itch you’ve heard about. This is the painful reality that our friends churn. That’s part of adult life too.

If friendship isolation happens when we’re most uncertain about who we are and where we’re going, i.e. on our way over and beyond the edge of the cliff, what does that tell us about uncertainty itself? Uncertainty is the enemy, right?

That’s where I knew I needed a behavioral psychology friend to step in. Because I already knew uncertainty most definitely wasn’t the enemy. In fact, there’s a whole body of research based on good decision making under conditions of uncertainty. And that’s where I knew I should get Naomi Win together with Anna. The uncertainty question - because if friendship is Anna’s thing, uncertainty is Naomi’s.

This is what Just Press Record is made for.

Dr. Daniel Crosby came on the show before. He put me onto Naomi’s work on decision making under uncertainty. Plus, she’s got a music background and excellent taste in - ok, she likes metal and punk and stuff. So yeah. My people. When you see the art on Anna’s walls, it’ll all make sense to you too.

Naomi pointed out that “Uncertainty is the only condition where there’s both growth AND learning.”

I’ll pause with you on that one. The thing that makes us want to hide on an island with Wilson is actually the prerequisite (or the co-requisite, or something technical sounding) for growth. Jump off the cliff or slide down it, that uncertainty you’re feeling, is the making of how you’ll get back on top.

Post-music, I found myself working as a bank teller and hoping nobody would recognize me. It took me a while (and some changes/promotions), but I was slowly realizing the business lessons I’d learned from being in business - without ever getting any official business education - had real world financial services applications. I was learning, even if I had nobody to talk to about what I was quickly realizing. But - I was taking in new information and change was starting.

I was over the cliff, but I was learning a lot. From 25-35, I didn’t have very many friends, but man was I studying and learning and growing up enough to kick out of the shell I was in, in due time.

Naomi explained how every time we experience uncertainty, we’re literally taking in more information than we can process. Our pupils are dilating, our hearts are pumping faster, our brains are more alert. We’re physiologically designed to learn when we don’t know what comes next and that’s a feature, not a bug.

I can see how it applies to my own life. But Anna can see how it applies back to friendships and everybody else in a life who makes life worth living.

“The best thing I can do for my friend is remove uncertainty,” she told us. Which makes for a paradox. Uncertainty is required for growth, but certainty is required for connection.

All this time, I’ve thought about how the friendship cliffs, and yes, there are more than one, were all about losing people and parts of your identity. However, those cliffs are also about natural points in life where the world asks us to learn to navigate both sides of this equation. It’s life’s way of challenging us to learn to sit with the discomfort of not knowing, and figure out how to offer the gift of clarity to others.

Anna and Naomi had never met. In just over an hour, they went deep. They might even be friends now (plans were plotted after we pressed stop, as you won’t be surprised to know).

Part of my own learning experience, beyond the professional consulting and advising work I do in my day job, is I love meeting interesting people who are doing interesting things. I know how easy it is to lose friends and how hard it is to meet cool new people. So I have Just Press Record to both nurture my curiosity and introduce people like Anna to Naomi. I needed my prior uncertainties to grow into realizing how much I love doing this. Listening to them talk, all sorts of gears started clicking in my brain.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re bad at friendship, or if you’ve ever wondered why adult relationships feel so much more complicated than your elementary school friends, this conversation will give you both the research and the roadmap.

Watch/listen to the full episode of Just Press Record on Cultish Creative YouTube below (or find it wherever you get your podcasts):

ps. special shoutout and thank you to Nina Badzin and Daniel Crosby for this episode!