what do you even do for work?

I was talking to my friends yesterday who I haven’t seen for years and a topic came up, “what do you even do for work?” It was funny at first, but the more we spoke, the more it hit me. We actually don’t know much about what each of us do. We just know he’s doing his thing, doing well for himself, and that’s it.

It made me think about how surface level some friendships can become over time. Not in a bad way, just in that  “we grew up, life took us in different directions” kind of way. Everyone’s chasing something, stability, success, peace, but we rarely stop to explain what that actually looks like for us. We just assume our friends know, when really, they don’t.

And it’s strange, because we’ll talk about memories, relationships, and random life updates, but not the things that actually fill most of our days. The routines, the projects, the goals. The parts that make up who we’ve grown into.

You see the results, the trips, the new car, the stress, the tired eyes, but not the process. Not the story behind it. And that’s where connections quietly fade without anyone noticing.

Sometimes it’s not even about needing to know everything. It’s just about curiosity. About knowing who your friends have become, what drives them now, what keeps them going. Because if you don’t ask, you’ll keep clapping without even really knowing what they’ve been through to earn it.

That one simple question, “what do you even do for work?” made me realise how easy it is to know someone for years, yet barely know their world anymore.