Friends Forever
I am a (wo)man and I am relentless(ly thinking about Industry)
I began 2026 by going on a date with a man in finance.
Now, it feels like an omen. Not a preview of anything romantic to come. Instead, foreshadowing for what would become my latest and greatest TV obsession: Industry.
I have never been interested in finance. In fact, I actively tried to separate myself from it while going to a high school that primed people for a career in that world. I feel as though my brain has refused to retain information about hedge funds, investing, and equity. It has rejected knowledge about how trading works more adamantly than the rules of football.
“My investments?” I looked at my coffee date as though he had three heads. He had brought two books on hedge funds in his gym bag to the date. His favorite movie was Margin Call. There’s nothing wrong with any of that, but I couldn’t exactly relate. When he asked me about my investments, I answered with the first thing that popped into my head: “I guess I’m wearing my investments?” I’ve never put money into the stock market, but if I was ever in trouble, I know exactly what bag I’d sell.
Lord, maybe I’ve Carrie Bradshawed too close to the sun.
When I first began Industry, I felt like an idiot for being unable to understand half of what the characters were talking about. I could tell they were making bad decisions, but I didn’t understand why X was short Y or and why they needed Z to be an anchor for __ block trade… I can’t even explain to you the things I don’t understand. The further I got into the seasons, the less it mattered. Rishi became one of my favorite characters to watch, and to this day I still don’t completely understand how his job works.
But as you may have guessed, Industry is much more than the industry it portrays. I love the entire series, but near the end of my binge, there was a scene that stopped my world. After suffering through the mountains of cocaine,1 sexual depravity, and abuse that Industry offers, I found a reprieve. A scene I felt intimately understood by. The kind with a line of dialogue I’ll be referencing for years to come. The kind that helps me make sense of my own life.
***Spoilers for Season 4 Episode 7 of Industry ahead!***
In the penultimate episode of season four, “Points of Emphasis,” the show’s leading ladies meet for a drink. Harper’s just pulled off a masterful financial move—a move that’s made a casualty of Yasmin’s marriage and career. Despite their vastly different positions, the two have chosen to celebrate and wallow together. Yasmin tells Harper, “You used to make me feel very alone. Now, you’re the only person in the world I don’t feel alone around.” It’s the first time we’ve seen camaraderie from this pair of frenemies since their unsparing fight in season three.
Industry is a show full of cruelty, bankrupt morality, and pain, which makes the rare displays of tenderness incredibly striking. Yasmin is great at making people fall in love her and manipulating that love for her advantage. Harper is great at being the smartest person in the room and stabbing anyone in the back to get ahead. The entire series, the women function as parallel figures, their lives spooling out in opposite directions. Their souls teeter on the edge of a cliff, with each indulgence in their worst instincts bringing them closer to a cataclysmic fallout.
Season four often saw characters reaching the end of their rope. It’s Industry at its darkest, which made it powerful to see Yasmin and Harper come back together as friends. Two halves, who together could temporarily become whole.
“I’m so jealous of you,” Yasmin says first. Harper’s intelligence, talent, and intensity have pained Yasmin since they met. Harper insists “I would do anything to live a day in your body,” and we know it’s equally true. Yasmin’s looks, whiteness, and inherited status are things Harper have longed for but can never achieve.
I had a similar (albeit less intense) conversation with a dear friend about this feeling on Sunday. On the C train, she told me, “You’re doing what I would want to be doing,” and then I explained all the reasons she was wrong. She can cook like an adult and hosts a consistent writer’s group. “You actually learned how to play Dungeons and Dragons instead of just talking about it,” I told her. She made the argument that I have passion and a clear direction. I insisted I actually have no idea what I’m doing with my life. Quickly, we agreed to give up the exercise, as neither of us would ever be satisfied by it.
I think juvenile jealousy of friends can be a natural by-product of your best friends’ life moving at a different pace than your own. Often, when you make a best friend it’s because your lives are aligned. You’re in school together. At work together. Single together. You find them in that ocean of people, go through some substantial life event, and exit it realizing they mean more than a set of circumstances. There is so much love between you it transcends whatever brought you together in the first place. They become an inseparable part of you, even as life goes on, relationships get more serious, jobs change, people move cities, and forces of nature pull you different directions.
“I really resented you for being a breathing example of how I was less.”
“I choose to love you for being a breathing example of how I can be more.”
Harper and Yasmin utter these phrases as Enya’s “Only Time” plays in the background. It’s the familiar sight of two girls working out their issues over cocktails. Finding that fleeting moment of clarity in the presence of someone who loves you and understands you, as only an old friend can.
After holding hands, crying, and bearing her soul at the bar, Yasmin asks Harper if she wants to go out and “do all the things that Lorde sings about.” Harper reminds her that Lorde sings about being seventeen, which only makes Yasmin want to go out more. Then, the two lean in closer and say:
Yasmin: “Will you promise me something? Will you look after me tonight?”
Harper: “When the fuck are you going to look after me?”
Harper half jokes when she says it, but it’s a valid question since Harper’s done all of the looking after in the history of their friendship.2
Yasmin’s reply: “Tonight”
Cue the Daft Punk needle drop and my tears as I watched Yasmin and Harper dance at the club. They’re joyful, hugging each other and completely caught up in the moment. They share a kiss and it all feels romantic in the most platonic way possible.
Sometimes I think life can be measured in those perfect fleeting moments with those you love. When the rest of the world—anxieties, responsibilities, and insecurities—fall away. So many times, I’ve tried to go out and force one of those nights, but it’s not the sort of thing you can plan.
I was lucky enough to have that kind of experience this Saturday. I’d been to a lovely film screening and was catching up with friends I hadn’t seen in too long. I was sipping a Stella at a packed bar, buzzed but not drunk and the conversation was flowing. Then unexpectedly, two dear friends came waltzing in the door of the bar to our table. They’d seen on Find My Friends that I was in the neighborhood. Our groups combined in the most lovely, serendipitous way.
When I held one friend’s hands across the sticky pub table and told her how much I loved her, I was unable to capture the full scope of how I felt. Here we were perfectly aligned. Nothing else mattered. The bonds that tied us were unshakable. I felt complete because in spite of busy schedules and everything else going on in our lives, we’d found our way back to each other.
Industry’s magnificent sequence ends with the camera moving through the throngs of people outside the club. At first, we see a group of teenage girls sitting on the floor in a cluster. They’re probably recapping their night out, deciding where to go next, and taking how good they have it for granted.3 But we don’t stay with them. Instead, we pan right to where Harper and Yasmin have parked themselves on the floor for a drunk cigarette. Veridis Quo is still bumping from the dance floor.
God, maybe it’s the fact that I’m ten years out from the age Lorde sings about or the phenomenal facial expressions Myha’la and Marisa Abela cycle through in this moment, but I felt this scene in my bones. When you’re eighteen silly nights out are a dime a dozen. You’re living with your best friends or spending every waking moment with them. You take for granted the infinite future you’ll have together, only to find a few years later that it’s a struggle to see your friends every six weeks.
Even before seeing episode eight, you know this harmony between Harper and Yasmin can’t last. There are massive forces and decisions looming, destined to drive Yasmin and Harper apart.4 Even if there weren’t, there’s no way to stop yourself from evolving in a different direction from a friend. To stay in the state of perfect alignment you had when you met at seventeen.5 Life keeps going, you become part of an older demographic at the club, and it gets harder to dance the world away.
But it’s still possible. It’s still possible to stumble upon those exquisite nights. Every once in a while you get lucky.
“You have no idea how good I feel right now,” Harper says taking a euphoric drag from her cigarette.
Yasmin leans against Harper’s shoulder, drunk and the most at peace her character is likely to ever be. She replies with, “We’re here forever, even when we can’t be.”
Friends, always know I love you and I am there with you in our perfect moments. I am on the dance floor with you at the Heated Rival Rave. I am sitting on the hallway floor while you cook us dinner. I am listening to your debrief over breakfast in Porto. We are in the cab back to your old neighborhood after Drunk Shakespeare. We are on the back porch of our college house staying up late talking. We are deciding whether to get in the water at that beach by Northwestern. We are on the corner of 3rd Ave and 91st Street repeating the same gossip for an hour because we don’t feel like going home.
We’re there forever, holding hands across the table, even when we can’t be.
I’ll never let go.
Recommendations for This Era:
Industry!!!
“Eyes Without a Face” by Billy Idol (featured in Season 4 of Industry!)
Audiobooks
“It’s My House” by Diana Ross
Watching short films so you don’t embarrass yourself while filling out your Oscars ballot
The Veronicas Discography
Fun themed napkins
Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton
Letting go of shame about being a lazy cook
“Closing Time” by Leonard Cohen
But seriously, is this how people live?!?!?! I had such intense second hand anxiety watching people do that much cocaine.
She’s literally covered up murder for her!
As they should.
Such as the completion of Yasmin’s tragic heel turn into a Ghislaine Maxwell figure.
Or at 11 or 18 or 21 or 25. You get the point.