It’s January 1st. You woke up feeling great because you didn’t do a damn thing on NYE but watch football and eat Chinese food.
You fire up the TV. Put on that favorite sweater emblazoned with your last name’s first initial. Fill a glass of butterbeer. Finally, you kick-back on your couch to watch what can only be described as a Hogwarts Express one-way ticket to Nostalgiatown, USA via the Harry Potter Reunion on HBO Max. Life is good.
I won’t harp too much, but I texted family and friends during the show urging them to watch it. It was all-caps GOOD. But this is less about magic and more about the journey that the show reflected on and how it pairs with reality.
The reunion focused on the main cast and explored their reflections of that time. At one point, Daniel Radcliffe mentions as an aside that they all inhabit these shared experiences over a formative time in their life, and it caught my attention.
Shared experiences are what we all live for. It’s what forges the strongest relationships. It’s what gives us a vivid purpose and something to fall back on, knowing others can relate to our “identity.” Being able to live through and tackle the same challenges, leading to lessons and experiences with other people, is what makes life, “life.”
Looking around, you can find this everywhere.
War
I, obviously, have not experienced this firsthand. I have, however, just finished re-watching Peaky Blinders and the season four reunion episode with Tommy Shelby and his fellow tunnelers exemplifies this. There’s a knowledge and respect for each other’s character; a level of trust that would be absent in the case of anyone else. There are plenty of other examples to draw from, but man, I love that show.
School
I think this is why parents always reflect on those “this is the best time of your lives” feelings when their kids are running around middle and high school. It’s really the last time you’ll be completely surrounded by people who you have ~some~ sort of shared experiences with. That one 3rd grade teacher years ago. You sat by each other at lunch. The book fair. You know similar people and are living lives in a somewhat parallel fashion. Shared experiences even from a degree of separation create familiarity and a level of camaraderie for people. You’re all going through adolescence together.
Sports
This is the easiest one for me to relate to. Spending time in a sauna trying to drop the last few beads of sweat with your teammates who are suffering right along with you. Few get that one. Long weekend drives and early mornings to run, train, battle. Big tournaments. Nerves. Sacrifices. Shared experiences forging a bond that, honestly, you look to replicate through the rest of your life. Beyond fame and pay, I think this is the main reason why you see so many athletes struggle to hang ‘em up.
You go from celebrating the satisfaction that an arduous regiment of prepping for battle every week brings with a group of people who have been there every step of the way, to what? Company happy hours?
Neighborhood Kids
The homies. There is a precious, small amount of time in life where you’re truly unencumbered by responsibility and left to run around with minimal oversight. When you’re left to make your own fun, it’s the shared experiences of skating in the street for hours after school. RuneScape. Playing drunken H-O-R-S-E in your buddy’s driveway with the three beers you took from his dad’s fridge (sorry, Coach). Figuring out how to talk to the ladies. Or just late nights playing Xbox.
As a friend once said, “No amount of co-worker happy hours can replace one night of drunk-wrestling on Conner’s roof.”
Startups
Admittedly, similar to war above, this is a perspective that I don’t have firsthand. Taking cues from Silicon Valley and a few internships in my younger days, there is a sense of vulnerability in early-stage companies because you have an idea, a service, or a product that you believe is worthwhile. You pursue it with no real assurance that anything will come of it. You’re in the entrepreneurial foxholes together. Those who are right next to you scrapping away share these experiences with you in a way that anyone who isn’t in that tiny office just couldn’t understand.
As life goes on, these arenas offering an ability to gather shared experiences with a group of people become fewer and farther between. I for one have noticed that I miss them dearly and have looked for ways to find new ones. Rarely am I successful.
I think the lesson here is that you can’t recreate these experiences–but you can be grateful that you were lucky enough to have had them in the first place.
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