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Comment by dkarl | Hacker News Reader

"Having a life" is how people explain why they don't do anything fun with their friends except eat and have drinks. "Want to ...?" "Well, yeah, that sounds great, but unlike you I have a frickin' life."

For most of my friends these days, "a life" is a wife and kids, but for some of them, it's just a house, or pets, or even a job.

Strangely, "a life" never stops them from having dinner with you or meeting for beers after work. It just stops them from doing anything that requires energy or planning. It's got to the point where I'm trying to figure out how to make new friends at an age where it doesn't happen by accident. But you find a guy whose Facebook page says "I love backpacking" and then you find out he hasn't done it once since he got married. I'm going out with women I'm not into just so I have somebody to do something with. I'd be too scared to get seriously involved with them, though, because then they would have a "life."

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> Strangely, "a life" never stops them from having dinner with you or meeting for beers after work. It just stops them from doing anything that requires energy or planning.

Excellent insight. I was trying to articulate what having-a-life really means. So in this sense, having-a-life means that your duties are supposed to be active, but your entertainments are passive.

If your entertainments are active, perhaps the implication is that you must be a loser in the other areas -- not accruing enough status, money, friends, etc., since you have energy left over. And that isn't completely untrue; sacrifices are necessary for any project. (Although, for me, it has always been the stuff that I did for no good reason which brought me the best jobs and the strongest relationships).

But if someone has no dreams apart from passive entertainments... I don't know how they even get through the day.

I think that nails it. There is an urge to demonstrate your success in everything you do, and some activities just aren't good mediums for showcasing how awesome you are.

I'm awesome at reading interesting threads and then adding my $0.02

"Having a life" is how people explain why they don't do anything fun with their friends except eat and have drinks.

It's funny, I always think the opposite. Whenever I'm working hard at my job during the week and then just eating and drinking with friends on the weekends, I feel like don't "have a life." I do these things most often for lack of other opportunities, and then I start to feel don't have anything more interesting to do than eat and drink and talk. At these junctures, I start thinking more about potential activities, projects and travel opportunities in order to get my "life" going again.

> It's got to the point where I'm trying to figure out how to make new friends at an age where it doesn't happen by accident.

Clubs (not the music type), Meetup.com, user groups.

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