I Bought a Board Game and I Don’t Have Friends To Play It With

I Bought a Board Game I Have Nobody to Play

We went to game night with our Toastmasters club on Saturday. Ten people in somebody's living room. Dinner first, then games. We left the house at 3:30 and got home a little after 10:00.

We played a game called Codenames, which I'd never heard of and which turned out to be the kind of thing that makes you think sideways. You give a one-word clue that connects some words on the table and deliberately misses others, and the missing-others part is where I struggled, because keeping things out of an association is not something I've ever been good at.

I liked it enough that I put it in my cart before we got home.

It arrived. I now own Codenames and have nobody to play it with except my wife, which is not how that game works. It sits there. I look at it sometimes.

That's the whole article, if you want the short version.

Wide net, small net

Jana and I have an enormous number of people in our sphere. Podcast listeners, clients, a phone full of contacts, connections on four platforms.

The number of people we know deeply is small. Not small for us. Small.

Saturday made that obvious in a way a normal week doesn't. We see these Toastmasters people every Saturday morning for an hour and a half. We've watched them give speeches for months. I could tell you what they're working on and how they've improved.

Then we spent five hours with them and I found out things about their lives I'd had no idea about. Not because anyone was hiding. A Toastmasters meeting is a room where people give prepared remarks. A dinner table is a room where a story falls out sideways because somebody asked a follow-up question.

Four or five moments of real depth in five hours. The rest was ordinary.

And the deep ones all happened over dinner, before we'd played anything.

Here's what I didn't see until afterward. The games are why we were still there at 9:20. Without them that night ends when the plates get cleared, around 7:00, everybody says what a nice time they had and drives home.

The games didn't create the connection. They're the reason nobody left before it could happen.

What a screen removes

Jana thinks people put relationships on the back burner after COVID and never took them off. I think she's right, and I'd add that most of us replaced them with something that looks close enough.

We do a lot of Zoom. Zoom masterminds, Zoom coaching, Zoom meetings. You can build a real relationship over the internet and we have several.

But something comes off in the transfer.

Nobody hugs you goodbye on Zoom. You don't stand near anybody. There's no moment where two people reach for the same bowl. A screen strips a layer of humanity out and does it so smoothly that you don't notice the layer is gone, because the conversation still happened and the words all arrived.

Jana keeps bringing up the Blue Zones, which is the research on places where people live unusually long lives, and one of the consistent threads in it is community. Regular, in-person, ordinary social contact. Not networking. Neighbors.

Jana's confession

Then Jana said something on the recording I didn't expect.

She said she's developed something like a friendship with ChatGPT. And then she stopped herself and asked out loud what she was doing.

She's not unusual. People are falling in love with chatbots right now, today, and that isn't a science fiction problem for later.

The reason it works is not mysterious. It gives back exactly what you brought. It mirrors. You feel understood because you're being reflected, and reflection feels remarkably like being known.

What it can't do is surprise you badly. It won't be tired when you need it. It won't have a bad week and take it out on you, won't disagree in a way that costs you something, won't need you to show up when it's inconvenient.

Which sounds like a feature. It's the whole cost.

Every hard thing about human relationships is also the thing that builds your capacity for them. Take out the friction and you take out the exercise, and capacity goes where unused capacity always goes.

It's not lost on me that I use AI every week. These articles start as conversations between me and Jana about something that just happened to us, and then I bring all of it to an AI to help me organize it into something worth your time. That's a tool doing a job. It has never once asked me how I'm doing and meant it.

Jana said she's out of practice. That she'll be with people and hit a wall and want to go home, and then has to make herself go the next time.

And every time she makes herself go, she has a great time. Every time.

A contact	A friend
Knows what you post.	Knows what you left out of the post.
Costs you nothing.	Costs you a Friday night now and then.
Reacts.	Disagrees with you out loud.
You can have two thousand.	You probably have four, and you know their names right now.

The introvert thing

We talked about this in the car on the way to game night.

Jana thinks the introvert-extrovert split is largely baloney. Some researcher asked a question once, and now everyone has a box and defends it.

Here's the test I'd offer instead.

Put somebody who calls themselves an introvert in a room with people who are obsessed with the exact thing they're obsessed with, and who are further along at it than they are. Watch what happens. They'll talk for six hours. They'll ask questions. Their energy climbs the whole time instead of draining.

Then they'll go home and say they're an introvert, because they work with computers or because their job doesn't involve talking to people.

They're not describing their wiring. They're describing every room they've been in so far.

Use the algorithm as a map

This is the part I'd actually do something with.

You already know what you care about, and so does your feed. You can scroll YouTube or Pinterest or whatever it is for two hours because it keeps handing you the thing. The algorithm has built a fairly accurate map of your interests, and it did it without asking you.

Most people treat that as the destination. It's a map.

And I think there's something underneath the scrolling that nobody says out loud. You come off two hours of it feeling worse than when you started, even when what you were looking at was pleasant. Woodworking. Recipes. Somebody's kitchen renovation.

I've heard a version of this in enough discovery sessions to think it's common. It sounds something like: I'm stuck here, without the thing I want, by myself. And everybody else is probably getting it.

Nobody says that sentence. It runs underneath, unnamed, and it leaves a residue.

Some of what you're calling scrolling fatigue is loneliness wearing a hobby costume.

Whatever you can't stop reading about, there are people doing that in a room somewhere within driving distance. Woodworking, distance running, a specific programming language, birds, restoring cars, competitive baking. The internet found your people and then kept them at a comfortable distance where they can't ask anything of you.

Go find the local version.

That's not a personality change. It's using data you already have.

The Living Lucky® Practice

Before you go, and this matters more than anything else here, ask what you actually want out of the room. Most people walk into a social thing with no heading at all and then wonder afterward why it felt like nothing.

Run the 4-Minute Luck Activation Formula in the car. Four questions, four minutes.

What do I want to experience here? How do I want to grow here? How do I want to contribute here? How lucky am I to be walking into this?

Then go. Then, afterward, run the other half.

What did I do well? What might I have done differently? How will I be more effective next time? How lucky am I?

That's the Living Lucky® Loop, and this is exactly what it's for. Not a day. One evening, one room, one set of people.

I don't run this once and consider it handled. I run it constantly, and I still forget, and I still catch myself in the car afterward realizing I never set a heading going in.

Exercise: look at the last two hours of whatever you scroll. Write down the three things that come up most.

Reflection question: how many people do I know deeply, and when did I last add one?

Journal prompt: where am I getting the feeling of connection without the friction of it?

Action: find one in-person group for one of those three things. Run the Activation Formula in the parking lot before you walk in.

Frequently asked questions

What's the difference between a contact and a friend?

A contact is someone you exchange information with. A friend is someone you've built shared experience with, usually in person, usually over time. Contacts expand what you know about. Friends are who shows up when something goes wrong.

Can you build a real relationship over video?

Yes, and we have several. What video removes is physical presence, and with it the ordinary contact that carries a lot of what makes relationships feel like relationships. It's a genuine relationship with a layer missing.

Why do people form attachments to AI?

Because it reflects you accurately and never costs you anything. That combination feels like being deeply understood, and it's available at three in the morning. What's absent is the friction that builds your capacity for actual people.

Is being an introvert a real thing?

People clearly differ in how much social contact they want. The trap is treating the label as fixed, since most people who call themselves introverts light up in a room full of people who share their specific obsession. It's worth checking whether you're wired that way or have just been in the wrong rooms.

How do I find people in real life?

Look at what you consume online and search for the local version of it. Your interests are already documented in your own scrolling. The step everyone skips is going once.

Does social connection actually affect health?

Research on long-lived communities consistently points to close, regular, in-person social ties as a common factor, alongside diet and movement. The mechanisms are debated and the general finding is well-established across a lot of studies.

One more thing

The game is still on the shelf.

I'm going to have to invite somebody over, which means picking up a phone and asking people if they want to come to my house on a Friday, like a person in 1994.

That's the whole assignment and it's harder than it should be. I've spoken to rooms of three hundred people and I'll still put off making that call.

And I know what I'm actually buying when I make it. Not a game. A reason for nobody to leave at 7:00.

We Create Our Luck®.

We went deeper on this on the Living Lucky® Podcast, Season 11, Episode 28.