There’s a table in a rented house in Queenscliff — nothing fancy, just whatever furniture came with the place — with a hand-drawn map spread across it, dice scattered at the edges, and snacks slowly migrating toward the centre of the board.

Once a year, Steve, one of our friends, organises for us to make a trip down to Queenscliff to play tabletop RPGs for a weekend. More recently, we’ve started playing monthly or fortnightly at home too. Nothing glamorous about any of it. We’re not Glass Cannon Network or Critical Role — no cameras, no production values, no audience watching us roleplay with solemn gravity.

We’re just a bunch of friends. Laughing at the missed sword swing. Losing our minds when someone makes a completely unreasonable jump and somehow lands the killing blow on a copper golem with a natural twenty. Rolling dice and arguing about the rules and eating too much while the world outside keeps spinning without us.

I’ve been thinking about why it matters so much to me.

It’s not the game, really — or at least, the game isn’t the point. It’s what the game creates. A ritual. An excuse to sit in the same room for a weekend and actually be present with people I care about. A context where you ask “how are you going?” and actually mean it, and stay long enough to hear the real answer. The dragon we’re fighting is almost beside the point. What matters is being there for each other.

When you’re up at 2am resolving a critical data pipeline failure, your employer will not remember that next year. They might not remember it next month. The organisation absorbs it, thanks you if you’re lucky, and moves on to the next incident.

But fighting dragons with your friends — showing up for a weekend in Queenscliff year after year — those become stories. Stories that become memories. Memories that become the fabric of who you are to each other, and who they are to you.

Your friends will be there for you. Your work won’t.

And yet.

When was the last time someone you loved lost someone, and you climbed into bed next to them — not to fix it, not to say the right thing, just to be there in the dark with them? When something hard was happening in your own life, did you pick up the phone and call a friend? Or did the thought cross your mind — “they’re busy, they don’t have time to listen to me” — and you put the phone down and carried it alone?

Do you have a friend you’d call when you got the promotion — someone who’d hear the news and mean it when they say “that’s great”? Not quietly threatened by it. Not performing enthusiasm. Just genuinely proud of you, because your win is their win. That kind of friend is rarer than it should be.

Those moments. That’s what friendship actually is. Not the catch-up drinks you schedule six weeks out and cancel twice. The showing up in the hard moments. The willingness to burden someone with your struggle, and the willingness to carry theirs.

We don’t build trust by offering help. We build trust by asking for it. The act of calling someone when things are falling apart — not suffering quietly, not performing fine — is the thing that makes the friendship real on both sides. It’s not a burden. For the right person, it’s an honour.

This is something I’m still learning. I want to talk about what it actually means to be a good friend — because I think most of us, if we’re honest, have let that muscle go slack.



Are You Actually a Good Friend?


Most people, if you ask them directly, will say yes. Of course they’re a good friend. They’re there for the people they care about.

But ask yourself: do you call your friends on their birthday — actually call, sing happy birthday — or do you post on their Facebook because you saw the notification and everyone else was doing it? When a friend is going through something hard, do you show up? Not message. Show up. Do you say “I love you” to the people in your life that you love?

Most of us, if we’re being honest, have outsourced friendship to the low-effort channel. The emoji response. The “we should catch up soon!” comment thread that leads nowhere. We maintain the social graph without maintaining the relationships.

But when you’re in a dark place, who do you call? And more confronting — who would call you?

The answer to that second question is the real measure. Friendship isn’t what you feel for someone. It’s what you demonstrate over time. It’s the accumulated weight of showing up — for the birthday dinner that falls on a work night, for the hospital waiting room at 7am, for the phone call that starts “I just need to talk to someone” at an inconvenient hour.

Those moments don’t happen automatically. They have to be built. And they have to be built before you need them, not when you’re reaching for them in a crisis.

When our daughter Natasha was born, she wouldn’t latch on, and breastfeeding wasn’t working. Lena and I tried everything, exhausted and running on no sleep, seriously weighing up whether to just switch to formula. At some point we gave up trying to solve it ourselves and called our friends Tom and Rachel. We ended up talking for somewhere between four and six hours straight. We didn’t need advice, really — we needed to not be alone with it. And something about that phone call, about calming down, settled Natasha too. By the end of it she was feeding. I still think about that night. We’d been treating a human problem like a technical problem, trying to fix it in isolation, when all we’d actually needed was to pick up the phone.



What Women Already Know


Women are better at friendship than men. Not universally, not as a stereotype — but as a pattern that shows up consistently enough to be worth talking about honestly.

The research on women’s friendship patterns tells part of the story. Women’s friendships tend to orient toward direct emotional disclosure — what psychologists call face-to-face friendship. Personal sharing, vulnerability, actual conversation about what’s happening in your life. Men’s friendships tend to be shoulder-to-shoulder — bonding through shared activity, talking while doing something else together. Neither mode is better. But when the activity disappears — when the sport stops, when the shared project ends, when the workplace changes — shoulder-to-shoulder friendship has nothing to stand on. Face-to-face friendship survives the context change because the context was never the point.

What women understand, and what most men have to learn later and harder, is that the friendship is the thing. Not the activity. The person.

The good news is that the shoulder-to-shoulder model doesn’t have to disappear. The Queenscliff table is shoulder-to-shoulder. The hack is building ritual around it — making the activity a recurring container for the friendship, rather than the friendship being a side effect of the activity. When you have the ritual, the friendship survives when everything else changes.

I saw this firsthand when I was working in India. Some colleagues (Sarasa, Nidhi, Abhilash, Deepak) took me out to play badminton — I’d never played before, and I was genuinely terrible. But what struck me wasn’t the sport. It was that this group did it every week, without fail. They weren’t there to compete or keep score. They were there to be together, to unwind, to laugh at each other and at themselves. What I remember is leaving that court feeling like I’d glimpsed something. These people had built a ritual, and the ritual had built them.



What the Harvard Longevity Study Actually Found


Harvard physician Arlie Bock began following the lives of a few hundred Harvard sophomores. The study is now 85 years old, has followed over 1,300 people including the children of original participants, and is the longest-running study of adult development in history.

The fourth director of the study, psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, gave what became one of the ten most-watched TED talks ever. And the headline finding, distilled from nearly nine decades of data, is deceptively simple:

Good relationships lead to health and happiness. Not wealth. Not professional achievement. Not optimised nutrition or fitness metrics. Relationships.

Waldinger and his co-author Marc Schulz published the full findings in The Good Life in 2023. Two things from that research hit particularly hard.

First: relationship satisfaction at age 50 was a better predictor of physical health at 80 than cholesterol levels. That’s the kind of finding that should make every analytically-minded person stop and recalibrate. We spend enormous energy optimising for things we can measure while ignoring the metric that turns out to be most predictive of how we age and how long we live.

Second: when participants reached their 80s, their biggest regret was almost universally the same. Too much time at work. Not enough time with the people they loved. And their proudest achievements were almost entirely relational — being a good parent, a good friend, a good partner, a good mentor.

George Vaillant, who directed the study for over three decades, summarised it: “When the study began, nobody cared about empathy or attachment. But the key to healthy aging is relationships, relationships, relationships.”



What We Actually Traded


Reflecting on how high achievers use the word “sacrifice”. When we say we’ve sacrificed something for our career, we shouldn’t be afraid to put a name to who that sacrifice was. Because often it was the people in our lives that we call friends.

Put a name to it.

We’re not sacrificing some abstract concept. We’re sacrificing specific people. Former colleagues whose numbers we keep but never dial. School friends who live in the same city and see us once a year if they’re lucky. The people who would drop everything if we called — but who we don’t call, because we’re heads-down on the next deliverable.

So many of us have cancelled on friends because a meeting came up, telling ourselves they’ll understand. Yet the reverse almost never happens — we wouldn’t reschedule a meeting for a friend. We’ve quietly trained ourselves to treat friendship as the flexible commitment, the one that can move.

And the friendship debt is unlike technical debt — you can’t see it slowing you down, it doesn’t show up in velocity metrics or retrospectives. It just quietly accumulates until something breaks. The incident you pushed through alone. The difficult conversation at home that had nowhere to go because there were no friends to process it with. The creeping sense that despite being deeply capable and professionally respected, you’re not quite sure who you’d call.



Ubuntu: A Different Operating System


There’s a Zulu/Nguni philosophy called Ubuntu. The phrase “Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” translates roughly as “a person is a person through other people.” You’ll also hear it rendered as “I am because we are.”

Desmond Tutu described Ubuntu this way: “In our African worldview, we need other human beings for us to learn how to be human. For none of us comes fully formed into the world. The solitary human being is a contradiction in terms.”

He contrasted it explicitly with Descartes: “It is not ‘I think therefore I am.’ It says rather: ‘I am human because I belong. I participate. I share.’”

Most of the professional identity we build in data engineering runs on Descartes. I architect, therefore I am. I optimise the pipeline, therefore I am. I resolved the incident, therefore I am. We define ourselves by what we produce, alone, with headphones on, in a flow state that the rest of the world is just interrupting.

Ubuntu is a different operating system. One where your identity is constituted by your relationships — where the question “who are you?” is answered not by your job title or your GitHub commit history, but by who you show up for and who shows up for you.

The longest-running study of adult development in history arrived at the same conclusion Tutu was describing. Every major piece of research on social connection and mortality found it too. The architecture most of us are running on isn’t wrong in a subtle way. It’s wrong in the foundational way.

Mark Shuttleworth — South African entrepreneur — named the Ubuntu Linux operating system after this philosophy in 2004, explicitly to emphasise community, open-source contribution, and the idea that the work is better when people build it together. Engineers understood that intuitively, because it maps to how the best software actually gets built. It also maps, as it turns out, to how the best lives get built.



The Dragon Will Be There Next Year


There’s a table in a rented house in Queenscliff, with a hand-drawn map on it and dice scattered at the edges.

Every year, we make the trip. We gather around a table and roll dice and laugh at the missed sword swing and the impossible jump. The dragons change. The characters level up. The rules get argued over and amended and house-ruled into something nobody outside the group would recognise.

But the people are constant. And the ritual is the point.

It is more amazing to have an extraordinary experience with someone than by yourself. You can go somewhere alone and say “look what I did” — versus “do you remember that time we did that?”

The 2am pipeline failure you resolved will be forgotten. By you. By your employer. By the Jira ticket that gets closed and archived.

The dragon you fought with your friends — the copper golem that went down to a natural twenty on an impossible jump — that becomes a story. The story becomes a memory. The memory becomes part of who you are to each other and who they are to you.

That’s not sentimentality. That’s the mechanism by which good lives actually get built. Eighty-five years of longitudinal data says so.

Researcher Robin Dunbar found that building a close friendship takes roughly 200 hours of time together. Those hours don’t come from nowhere. They come from showing up, again and again, at the table. From protecting that time the same way you’d protect a critical production window. From understanding that the maintenance cost of friendship is the highest-ROI investment available to you as a human being.

Your work will absorb your best years and move on when it’s convenient. Your friends will still be at the table.

Put a name to what you’re protecting.

Then protect it.