The Foxhole Didn't Make us Friends

About this Video:

I once went through a major crisis with a general manager in my food service company. We were in the foxhole together every day, dealing with a salmonella outbreak, lawyers, and insurance fights. You’d think surviving something like that would create a lasting friendship. It didn’t.

That experience has left me wondering whether some of the friendships in my life are really just work relationships in disguise. I’ve spent almost my entire career as the boss, and I’m starting to think about what happens to those connections when work is no longer the thing holding them together.

In this video, I explore the difference between a friend and an acquaintance, why shared interests matter, and what I’ve learned about the everyday conversations that keep relationships alive. I don’t have a clean definition of friendship. But I do know that going through something intense together doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve built something deep.

Have you ever looked at a friendship you thought was solid and realized it might have been something else?

Transcript:

Years ago, my food service company had a salmonella outbreak. People got sick. Lawyers, insurance fights, months of it. I hired a general manager just to help me survive it. We were in that foxhole together every day. People say that forges a bond that lasts. I wanna tell you it did, but it didn’t. He and I had almost nothing else in common.

Once the crisis passed, there was nothing left to run a friendship on. We survived something together. We never actually shared anything. Here’s what’s actually bothering me. I’m afraid every friend I have might just be a colleague, and I never noticed. You know, I read about a woman’s father online. He’s retired, medicated, dissolving on the couch.

Nobody calls him anymore. I don’t think I’m afraid of ending up exactly like him. I’m afraid of the slow leak that got him there, the kind you don’t notice till the tank’s empty. I should tell you something about myself. I’ve been the boss almost my whole career, and the boss isn’t where friendships get made.

Nobody wants to hang out with the guy signing the checks. You know, I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t have either. So I went looking through comments, threads, strangers, dozens of them, saying the same thing independently. “I realized my work friends were just acquaintances,” over and over, in almost the same words.

Here’s what we’ve been missing, not whether you got a drink with someone after work, whether you shared an actual interest. Friends have several. Acquaintances usually have one, the job. Take the job away, and there’s nothing left to stand on. I wanna complicate that. Susanna’s my best friend, and we don’t share activities at all.

I don’t garden. I don’t build what she builds. She can’t ride a bike with me anymore. What we share is conversation, ideas, catching up over dinner almost every single night. So the shared interest doesn’t have to be a hobby. It just has to be something you both actually wanna talk about My daughter had a group of friends from a genuinely toxic job.

For years, they showed up to her kids’ birthday parties. You know, recently I’ve noticed fewer of them coming as the years passed. But here’s what

bothers me. I noticed that pattern for years and never once asked her about it from the inside. I collected the data, never asked the question. So I’m alone a lot, and mostly I’m fine with that.

I don’t think solitude is what actually scares me. What I don’t like is coffee alone in the morning or dinner alone at night. Almost every night, Suzanne and I eat together. That’s when we really catch up. That’s the part I miss. Maybe that’s the real test. I’d like to end with this, with a clean line between friend and acquaintance, but I don’t have one.

I know intensity isn’t the same as depth. The foxhole taught me that directly. But where the actual line sits, I honestly can’t draw it for you. So tell me, have you ever gone looking for a friendship you assumed was solid and found an acquaintance standing there instead? The comments are open. I’m genuinely collecting these.

And hey, this is Josh. You’re on the long, strange trip. I’m glad you’re here. And boy, I hope to see you back here next week!