Total lie

I know it is popular to shit on Friends these years, but I think that it captures the growing up part of life pretty well as the show is basically about capturing a snapshot in time of a group of friends when they were the closest before adult life tore them apart. Because that is how the show ends. They all grow up, have adult responsibilities, different priorities and they all leave the apartment complex to start new lives away from one another.

In my 20s I had a group of friends for awhile and we would hang out in each other's apartments all the time, sometimes we would sleep over at each other's places and have breakfast together before heading to school. We would go on picnics and excursions together. All pile into the old, rusty car that one of us owned and drive somewhere.

We had a pub we liked to visit semi-regularly and we were pretty 50/50 men and women.

When we got our degrees, most of us packed up and left. We are now in our 30s and some have had kids in the meantime while most of us have grown apart. Some of us still keep in contact and hang out when our schedules permits it, but it isn't like it was when we were in our 20s.

To me, Friends is an idealized version of the friends group stuff in your 20s. To me it isn't as unrealistic as it's being made out to be nowadays, but it is idealized.

I treasure the few years I got to have good friends and classmates that I loved to hang out with and treat as family. No matter how much time passes, whenever we get to meet up again, it is almost like no time has passed at all, and that is such a great feeling, even if we only get to see each other like once a year.

I used to live in a condo with some friends, and there were others in our friend group that would randomly show up throughout the day. The doors were always unlocked, so friends would just walk in. Sometimes it would be early in the morning and would hang out while I made myself breakfast. Sometimes it was late at night after they partied and needed a place to crash.
Seems similar to what you mentioned, I relate. Like you said, Friends was idealized, but not unrealistic.
- Yeah, I think those memories are to be cherished. Your apartment setup back then genuinely sounds like a setup for a wholesome sitcom xD
  It's stuff like that, that makes me have very few regret from my 20s because I full on just wanted to make friends and throw myself into a bunch of scenarios with them while I had the chance and was still young.
  When I hit 30, I was like "I'm ready to move forward".
  Still miss it sometimes. That closeness and the goofy shit we got up to sometimes. Also just the hanging out on those lazy evenings. Good times ❤️
Reading that first paragraph makes me physically sick to my stomach. The impermanence of everything is killing me. There is no point. I cannot find a point of my own. It's legitimately driving me insane.
- It's not how human beings are supposed to live. We're supposed to have that close-knit friend community our entire lives. People had this up until only 100-200 years ago or so. People in little farming villages were able to have a stable friend group for their entire lives and have time to interact with them. Kids didn't serve as a substantial barrier, as the friend group helped raise the children. This is how children are supposed to be raised. It's supposed to take a village.
  It's only our hyper capitalist economy that atomizes us and forces us to scatter to the winds, endlessly chasing job after job in far flung cities, never able to settle down and form real community anywhere.
  The way we live is deeply unnatural and fundamentally at odds with human nature. It's no wonder we're all mentally ill.
- I think the impermanence of life is one of the most difficult things to accept, but once you do, there is some beauty to it too.
  I think it is or at least should be one of the biggest motivators to try and live in the now. I have been the most happy, when I try to live in the now and appreciate what I have right now. It takes a bit of practice but it is doable and it a great antidote to anxiety and depressive thoughts in my experience. You cannot live in the now all the time, but aiming toward it, is a good way to spend the limited time you have in this life.
  Big hugs to you.
- Life has permanence in the long term not the long long long term. We're fighting to make lives for our children and fighting the rules to make sure that other people's children can live, survive, and prosper.
I mean, you can still live like that if you want to, for your whole life if you want to. Move into or start a housing co-op. Even kids don't get in the way of this. We're supposed to raise kids in a village. That's how children are meant to be raised.
- Nah, I'm good. My comment wasn't meant to be this sad woe is me rant. It was a critique of the meme since I did have friendships like that in my youth and just like in Friends, my friendgroup(s) split up when that period of our lives ended and we went on to start our adult lives.
  It is a completely normal part of life. I don't see it as a terrible thing.

The expectation that you could get an apartment that size in central NYC without being a billionaire is also a lie

I think they explained it, the reason they could afford it was because Monica's grandmother lived there, and they've been paying 1950s rent because of rent control or something. Something similar for phoebe as well. Anyway show never explains how joey/chandler/Ross can afford those big houses.
- Hi, Chandler and joey'flat is not that big, it was actually the joke between characters often and Chandler had a good job anyway. Ross was good with money and his parents favourite so I think he got more money from them.
- Also worth remembering that except for Phoebe. All the characters on the show grew up upper class. Like top 5% upper class.
  Also Phoebe lived with her grandmother in a small apartment until her grandmother died and she got roomamates.
- Did any of us watch any of it?
  Friends fucking sucked.
I quite like the way How I Met Your Mother handles this - the size of the apartments is the narrator misremembering. There's an episode where the characters have been viewing a house in ~~New Jersey~~ Long Island - they return to the apartment and it's portrayed as the size it realistically would be.
- Can you tell which episode it is? I've tried watching some but couldn't find it.
- That would just be a dig on their intelligence. You can't see the massive problem of not being able to afford housing? How can I relate to this character?
Some of that is due to the realities of filming in a stage made to look like an apartment as you need the space for the camera crew to fit. This everyone lives in massive places.
- Never thought about this, that a really good input, thanks
- That's completely not the reason. How other shows manage to show small apartments and poor people houses?
  Showing regular people living in big apartment is more appealing to the public. Shows from the 70s or before were more realistic. Mary Tyler Moore was living in a small apartment and sleeping in the sofa despite having a regular job. In All in the family, they were financially struggling especially because of the 70s inflation. Lucy and her husband were living in a small apartment.
  Things did change in the 80s and we started seeing families living in big houses with cars. Even Roseanne who normally depicted a working class family was living in a big house and could afford many things.
It actually addresses this. Chandler was in a high paying job and lived below his means. And Monica’s (much larger, much nicer) apartment was rent controlled; The apartment complex still had her grandmother on the lease from the 1960’s, so Monica was essentially only paying a small increase in 1960’s rent.
That rent control was the topic of one episode, where Joey yells at the maintenance guy. In response, the maintenance guy threatens to tell the landlord about Monica’s grandmother being dead, meaning Monica would need to start paying full price for the apartment. Monica can’t afford the rent, so Joey has to do a favor for the maintenance guy and get back into his good graces.

This actually used to happen when I was younger. I miss having friends and being able to just hang out in our free time. I miss having some usable amount of free time. Adult life sucks and sometimes I just feel like I want to jump of the Balcony and end it all since I'll never get the good times back and I'll never have anymore in the future.

Sucks to think about, especially since relative to the past we are in the most prosperous times, but people used to be happier in generations prior because they had cheap third places to go to, had a purpose and community.
And now our lives are surrounded by substitute and vicarious experiences that will never afford us true fulfillment. And like a drug, it saps us of the motivation to actually change any of it.
- Convenience at an all time high, wealth inequality at astronomical levels.
  Times are different, complaints are valid
Sorry you’re feeling like this mate, hope you catch a break soon. Wish I could go back to my late twenties too sometimes.
Fight for the future you want everyone to have

To be fair they lived 5ft away, it may as well have been one big apartment. And one of them was a chef.

Still. Who does that.
- Older gens I'd say. My mother had afriend who always came in without knockin and just...vibed. Like they suddenly materialised in kitchen and talked while eating or materialised near table and drank coffee.
  My partner's mother had someone like that too.
  Meanwhile I am having a meltdown if someone tries the door before knocking (they are always locked anyway)
- Before the internet was widespread, it was extremely common for people to actually hang out in person. The show is set in an era where the internet was something you went out of your way to connect to, not something that was already integrated into every single device you used.
  Especially since they all lived so close together, it’s 100% believable that they’d hang out together regularly. People also forget that the show takes place over multiple years, and we only see 20’ish episodes per year. Assuming each episode takes place across two’ish days, they’re still only seeing each other two or three times per week. If I lived across the hallway from my best friends, I’d probably hang out with them a few times per week too.
  This is especially true from Chandler and Joey’s perspectives, where Monica’s kitchen is only like eight steps away from their own kitchen. Why bother cooking yourself breakfast, when there’s a professional chef willing to do it for you, and all you have to do is open two extra doors?
- Not breakfast, but I used to eat dinner with my neighbors allllll the time. They even used my fridge to keep extra food in when preparing for parties and stuff.
- People with close friends, i guess.
  My friends definitely don't want me around. lol
Lol plot twist, it was 4 overtly large apartments right next to each other.
Ross doesn't live in the same building. Later on he moves into the building across the road from them though. Phoebe lives elsewhere as well.

King of the Hill showing a group of childhood friends living next to each other, having time almost every day to just hang out near their homes and drink, went from just being a quaint little detail from when I watched it when I was younger to being an almost dreamlike aspiration as I move further into adulthood.

There's a certain amount of discourse in KotH fandom around exactly how all four childhood friends came to buy houses on The Alley behind Rainey Street. Apparently the canon is hazy and inconsistent, though I can't remember the details.

So no one told you life was gonna be this way.

Chandler being able to afford paying for rent AND providing for Joey is also incredibly unrealistic.

Canonically Chandler is actually super rich from his mysterious nerd job and just lives frugally, and Monica's giant-ass apartment is rent controlled and inherited from her grandmother.
- He works in data analytics, his friends just don't care enough to learn what that means.
  He probably analyses consumer and advertising trends to guide investments and product launches.
- I don’t think Chandler is super rich, but he’s definitely comfortable. He doesn’t have the money to outright replace their furniture when it is all stolen, for instance. They end up using lawn chairs (and a canoe) as their living room furniture for a while. But yeah, he definitely lives below his means, because he always has money to pass off to Joey whenever he needs it.
- I might be remembering wrong, but I thought Chandler was an actuary, which is a position that is very well paid.
Chandler's job was just made to be some generic finance sector job, right? It's definitely possible even today, but he'd be working a lot more hours. You'd never see him on the show.
Ross being stable even as a PhD grad student seems a lot more unrealistic to me. He even loved on his own. But maybe it was family money.
- Ross wasn't a grad student though. he was a PhD researcher + professor. back in the 90s, that would've been a decent gig.
- Ross wasn’t a grad student; He had his doctorate. Initially he worked at a museum of natural history, then eventually got fired (for screaming at his boss) and went to work at the university as a professor. Either way, in the mid-90’s, he would have been comfortable.
- Chandler was more some bureaucratic data guy. The way they describe him is inputting numbers into speeadsheets at a megacorp. But he eventually becomes a manager.
Yep it's ludicrous

Capitalism is amazing. We can all just chill and have coffee and have amazing lives.

Now let us buy some American blue jeans and have hamburger sandwiches from McDonald's.
True if you narrow down the in-group enough and are part of it.
- As a temporarily embarrassed future billionaire, I understood that reference.
lol

What time do they start work? 11am?

That was part of a joke at the start of an episode. Everyone complained that their boss didn't like them and Joey (working at the Central Perk at that time iirc) pointed out "yeah I wonder why none of your bosses like you. Maybe it's because it's Wednesday 12 pm and you are hanging out at a cafe".
They wake up at 4.
- It's the street noise
- Moooorning's heeereee!

Interesting. I have friends eating breakfeast at my place before work one or two times a week.

You may hate on me now.

what time do you get up, and what time do you all head for work?
- We get up at 6 and we head to work between 7 and 9.
  So depending on the day and person its just a quick coffee. But on other days we have time for bread and croissants.

I think if they live across the hall then it happens. I have friends that live across the street and they come over for breakfast and we all get our kids ready together and off to school.

Anyone showing up at my apartment to hang out while I’m waking up and getting ready for work is going to get chopped in the throat, that’s my time for rage and hatred for existence.

Settle down there Neo :P

When I was a kid, the trope of the neighbor just coming over and having breakfast was real in my case. The neighbor was my best friend, and he was treated like family. Literally the only person who didn't live at my house that was allowed to just come in on their own. He was the Urkel to my Big Guy.

What they don't mention here is that these guys get up at 6:00 AM, have lunch at 7 and leave at 8

This and wall high lockers in high school

I had a locker in high school. It was against a wall. Admittedly, it was in a dedicated locker area/room and not in a major plot-device-friendly thoroughfare, but it existed all the same.
- Yeah, but all the lockers were stacked in rows with 2 short lockers instead of 1 tall one.
- We had lockers in high school but they were always in a large open area. Putting them against a wall in a corridor would be stupid as it would almost always lead to blockages.
  I also never knew anyone who had a huge locker large enough to be stuffed into, like always seems to happen on American TV.
I'm not sure what this means?
- Lots of lockers portrayed in media are the type that go from the floor all the way up the wall. I don’t know about other schools, but my lockers were all pretty small and there were several on top of each other.
My high school was like a community college campus where we had a set of books in the class+set at home and had to walk to all our classes to different buildings outside. It sucked in the winter time a lot.

That and having time to hang out at the coffee shop all the time. And also Monica who supposedly works in a high end restaurant having as much time as she does to socialize and whatnot. Still love the show tho.

Also in HIMYM how they have time to hang out at a bar every single night.

I thought the show was like a weekend and holidays only view into their lives with a few work stuff sprinkled in, so I discounted all the regular work related loopholes.
- A lot of people don't actually realise just how much time passes between most episodes if you actually listen to context clues. Obviously there are some exceptions, but generally these shows are not supposed to be assumed to be real time in any sense. Some will have a thanksgiving episode and the next is Christmas or new years. People will mention they've been dating for months after a few episodes.
  Some vaguely line up with being the week they aired in real life being the week it's supposed to be in the show. But think about what that would mean. You're seeing an entire week of their lives condensed into a 20-30 minute segment of highlights. Many episodes span several days of their lives. That means you're seeing maybe 5-10 minutes of each day the episode involves.
In the 90s what else were people doing if they weren’t hanging out? If I had no kids it’s perfectly plausible I could meet at the bar every day after work. How is a coffee shop any different? Just for clarity plenty of people drink coffee at night.
- It's true. Try hanging out somewhere outside your house with no modern technology for two hours.
  First you'll realize how long time feels without a smartphone or instant entertainment.
  The second thing you'll realize is how hard it is to keep track of time without a wristwatch.
  People socialized more in person because there wasn't much else to do and it was the best way to do so.
- I was in grad school in the '90s and went out drinking six nights a week (Monday nights were for studying, as best I can recall). Like 5pm to 3am drinking plus a bunch of weed at somebody's house or apartment afterwards. These days I would literally commit murder to not have to do something like that even one night.
When I worked in NYC, we generally would meet for happy hour a few times a week after work. So not weird at all.

this whole show is fake af

yes, because it's fiction. Or did you think that the showrunners were claiming that this was actually a documentary about the actual lives of actual people?
What show is this?
- Friends.
  That's supposed to be a new your city apartment lol

Another total lie is almost every TV show character drinking bottled water now. You could legitimately give this the benefit of the doubt as purely a production issue, because it's a simple way to avoid rigging a functional sink on the set with a working tap - I mean, the transporter on Star Trek was invented to avoid shooting lots of shuttle takeoffs and landings. But product placement is also such a big thing now, I'm dubious.

My (soon to be ex-) wife buys large quantities of bottled water... One of many things about her I found irksome over the years, I went to the trouble of putting in an RO filter under the sink... and she was always so vocal about recycling... What's better than recycling? Not buying tons of plastic in the first place...
- I had a girlfriend that was utterly convinced that bottled water was healthier for you. Although when pushed she couldn't provide a reason.
  Some people do seem to buy into the idea that bottled water is all collected from some kind of secret magical spring of eternal youth. When really it all comes out of a tap in the factory.
It was astounding to me to find out that plastic bottles have only existed for some 45~ years.
- Plastic bottles became common more like 60 years ago. They were invented in the 1950s but were too expensive for a while. I remember as a kid in the 60s there was a commercial where somebody dropped a bottle of shampoo, which normally would have been glass, and was amazed that it didn't break. This stuck in my mind all these years because of a standup comic named Norm Crosby. who told on a talk show about this scene actually happening to him at the grocery store. The lady in front of him dropped her shampoo, so he picked it up and re-enacted the commercial - "It didn't break... It didn't break!!!". He was hoping for a laugh but she just glared at him and said, "Gimme da soap." Anyway, that's how I know plastic bottles were being popularized in the mid-60s.

I think the bigger lie is you can live in New York City and almost never interact with a person of color, but ok.

I think what most people find unrealistic is having more than 1 person you want to spend more than 30 minutes with. In the 90s, nothing about their lifestyle is super unrealistic for New York. The only thing is the money.

Sitcom characters spend ridonkulous amounts of money on stupid things nobody does irl. It's usually rationalized by saying the character is always broke, which makes sense until they blow $2500 to hire a mariachi band for somebody's birthday a week later.
- Being broke can be the impetus for zany hijinks that sitcoms center around. But actually being broke sucks and is not very funny, so they don't show you that part.
  Otoh, I know quite a few people who fit that exact description. They have jobs that pay them pretty well, but spend recklessly, so they are always "broke" despite having steady, well paid employment.
Also notable that Hollywood types often lead lives with very loose schedules and will randomly hang out in places.

I loved Friends, but yeah, the whole show was a big fat lie and I hate I dont live in that world

Never really looked and just realized how cluttered that apartment is.

there's nothing on the floor, that's peak organization
Also what exactly is this a picture of
- It is a slightly resized print of this piece.

Yes, but Leave it to Beaver was a faithful documentary of life in the fifties.

True. Many things got left to Beaver, some say too many things got left to Beaver. Much of McCarthyism and the Red scare can be blamed on little Theodore Cleaver.

Post like this are more cliched than the tv shows they try to make fun of. The meme needs to have an annoying kid brought in to save it, because it’s “jumped the shark”.

Where breakfast

Well this was a shitty show.

Cringe take, sorry bro
- You can say that it isn’t for you but you can’t say it’s a shitty show. It’s one of the most influential shows of the 90s. Cheers, All in the Family, MASH, and Seinfeld are probably the only ones that compare. (I’d like to put Malcolm in the Middle and Married with Children up there too but that’s probably giving them too much credit)

Also they don’t even lock their doors. Same shit with ”Big Bang Theory”. I know, knocking the door or ringing the bell and walking to open the door takes too much time.