Forces that fuel friendship
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
This tends to push people into clusters where they all share the same ideological viewpoints, which is a depressing situation. My idea of a great party has always been one where a group of people from widely different backgrounds are put together in a big room and 'forced' to interact with each other, but these days I'm afraid that would lead to a bloodbath of some sort.
To quote from Frank Herbert, on the subject of limiting your relationships to those who share all your identitarian tick-marks, "I can think of nothing more poisonous than to rot in the stink of your own reflections."
As far as "close deep meaningful relationships that you can rely on through thick and thin, a friend who will always come to your aid in times of trouble, and to whom you will always offer support" ... that sounds more like a military alliance between independent city-states in ancient Greece than your average human friendship. Don't expect too much, in other words.
Here's a related (novel?) concept: don't try to leverage friendships for personal economic gain, for access to a job, for growing your multi-level marketing business, etc. That's called 'networking', not 'friendship'. I suppose it has its place, humans being human, but don't confuse the two.
Aristotle identifies three types of friendships.
1. Friendships of utility, the types you exploit for gain
2. Friendships of pleasure, the types you exploit to play basketball
3. Friendships of the good, true friendships
I still clearly remember the feelings I had on the day when I realized many who spoke of ‘friends’ likely not had a single one.
Did I lose friends? I don’t know. I still enjoy being around them, working together, economically gaining together.
That I think would be the ultimate and clearest differentiator.
Of course such a situation is very rare so usually we can only rely on more ambiguous signals.
More prosaically, would they sacrifice a small part of their business interests in exchange for some great benefit to you if you give them a promise to do the same in the future? And vice-versa?
If so, then it would seem most likely they would be more than just business partners.
Has it occurred to you that actual humans' ideal types/levels of friendship might differ from your own? Most people want a mix, with a few very strong friendships (of the author's type) and many more weaker ones (of yours). Many are missing one or the other. Some want something different entirely. If the author's ideas about friendship don't resonate with you, consider just moving on. Deriding it as something that's very much not true friendship by anyone's definition seems like exactly the same kind of condescending clannishness you complain about (and "identitarian" is - intentionally? - a marker of which clan BTW).
I suspect it comes down to fear and insecurity. When we distrust the other, being afraid that their gain is our loss and their agenda may hurt our (psychological, financial, etc.) security, we start acting erratically. Fear manifests itself as anger and contempt. We are not relaxed and watch every word they say for signs of pushing their agenda. We are torn between considering it beneath ourselves to spend effort arguing with them, and being unable to stay silent. We don’t know when are they themselves and when they represent their group.
You can truly enjoy friendship (and indeed love) if you are secure on some fundamental level, and I suspect it is a hard precondition.
I don’t know where I’m going with this. Maybe we should look into being more secure and relaxed? Pay heaps more attention to mental health, our own and our society’s? Learn to play non-zero-sum infinite games? Release some part of us from having to fight for survival if we are lucky to enjoy highest ever standards of living?
> Here's a related (novel?) concept: don't try to leverage friendships for personal economic gain, for access to a job, for growing your multi-level marketing business, etc.
A little personal story - Many years back I was living with roommates and didn't have car. It would be easy way to ask for ride since office really couple of miles from home and really on the way of other guys commute. But I kinda made a point to just walk to work and consciously avoid asking for ride. Looking back I feel it really led to much better relationship than it would be if I had taken convenient route.
I have a few different friend groups and I'm conscious of different cultural mores, though. The group where this is common has a certain low-social-distance norm.
In any case, I have lots of close friends and I usually see people lament a lack of any, so I think it's better to do what I do rather than what others do. But cultural differences are cultural differences.
It doesn't sound like your average friendship in modern atomized societies. But it seems that it was the bedrock for many societies throughout history, including close knit societies today. I've heard it argued fairly persuasively that this is why military insurgencies tend to be stronger in societies where kinship groups are fairly strong (and there's a strong possibility atomized societies wouldn't be able to follow suite).
But on the other hand, do whatever you can to give your friends economic gains, access to jobs, and to grow their MLM. Do things for them without hesitation that involve little effort, loss, or risk for you, and consider about doing things for them that involve some effort, loss or risk to you.
Authoritarian structures like capitalism and religion have a goal of atomizing us all, forcing people to use them as an intermediary. Please don't think that friendship is about entertainment and work is about effort. Friendship is about mutual aid, and work is about helping the boss in order to help yourself.
Two friends get more accomplished than two people.
Capitalism and the rich are squeezing more and more money and safety from culture, and exploits traditional values of generosity and kindness in more and granular ways, and rewards sociopathic and narcissistic behavior patterns in a nasty feedback cycle. The internet enables all of that faster at a far greater granularity and now with AI-assisted attacks.
Combine that with the fact that environmental dangers are now starting to appear more tangibly on the horizon, and people's beliefs and values and disagreements represent more perceptible danger/evil to someone.
The internet, aside from isolated successes (mostly for very isolated people), should have brought us together. You could argue facebook WAS doing that in its earlier years, but now that monetization is necessary, propaganda and dividing and conquering of the rabble to serve the elite is what pays.
We live in the greatest amount of leisure and technology ever, and yet almost everyone thinks the future will be worse. For the current 18-30 demographic, they already are living the prospect of their third economic downturn, this time replaying the 1970s stagflation, and watching the current power elite ostrich plant their heads over global warming and a host of global environmental problems.
The internet really now just functions to inform someone of how fucked up the world is and the nigh impossibility to change it proactively via politics. We will place all our faith in hopes in that which got us into this mess: technology.
Following the framework of the article, either "attention" was missing, or something is missing from the article. In French we have an expression, "atomes crochus", which would be equivalent to "chemistry" in English. Without that, friendship isn't really possible for me, I'll always get "stuck" only at a certain level with those people. There's no mention of chemistry at all in this article. I get that it's a bit unfair, you can't decide to have good chemistry with someone, but at least for me that's how things are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acali
It was a social experiment involving putting a bunch of people on a raft and crossing the Atlantic. The idea was to create an environment that promotes sex and violence, instead, everyone became best friends forever, except for the experimenter who was on board, everyone hated him.
It can be anything, as long as you are genuinely interested in it. You don't have to be "passionate" (no one goes from zero-to-passion instantly).
Drawing. Cooking. Tennis. Yoga. Video editing.
Chances are you can meet someone in the class that you vibe with and the routine of working together to make the best of the lesson is a good way to make a friend.
If you get along well, try to convert to a friendship outside of the classroom by inviting them to get a smoothie afterward.
1. Do you trust them?
2. Do you care about them?
Ideally it should reciprocated. The hard part is getting there, usually it comes naturally as you spend more time with the other person out of your own volition. Just because you are meeting someone everyday at work does not mean they will become your friends, do you trust them? do you care about them?
Once you friends you don't need to meet often as long the trust and care is still there. You can become friends in short time as well if you decide to put the trust early into the other person and they reciprocate. Point is, there is no formula or plan to follow.
When I say friend I mean a true friend, not colleagues or acquaintances. Were these meanings mixed into "friend" word before Facebook as well?
The other one was "Are you committed to excellence?" which he sometimes described as "Do you have high standards and do you strive to live up to them?"
I always liked his ending statement whenever he talked about this:
"Think of someone you respect. Now think of those questions. Odds are the answer to all three is 'yes'. Now think of someone you are having problems with and, again, think of the three questions. I would bet the answer to at least one of them is 'no'".
No successful NCAA coach is a moral paragon. John Calipari used to be held as the bad boy, but actually he was the most honest of the bunch.
Trust is always a gamble, at extreme you are putting your life on the line and you never know if the other person will decide to betray you next time regardless of what they did in the past.
Caring about someone is even harder as it is not a conscious choice we are making, it is feeling. You can't just decide from today I care about this person so they are my friend.
My point was, how do you know someone is your friend not how to make one. There is no method to make friends, at best some tips or guidelines.
I loved talking to strangers in a slow-operating 20-story elevator. Surprisingly, they are good and friendly listeners. You don’t want to spend five minutes with someone you rejected, do you? My current home doesn’t have an elevator, but I hope the next one will.
Someone can self-identify as a gender (among other things), alter their appearance to present as such, and a kind and empathetic society will (should) then regard them as such.
That's 2 quite different uses.
Like your username. We call you by it because it is the name you chose and present to us
And if I had a distinguishing feature, that would be used to identify me too.
If I wear a big hat then I will be identified as a big-hat-wearer. When asked to distinguish me in a crowd they will say, "that guy with the big hat". Telling everybody that I actually identify as a small-hat-wearer will make zero functional difference.
That's how distinguishing features work.
If you can't handle me at my worst you don't deserve me at my best is a cliche way of saying the opposite.
And people at parties are similar to friends.
For what that's worth.
I recently went to cross cultural a meetup where friendship was the topic of discussion. One thing I realized is that people struggle to agree on a definition of friendship. There's an especially noticeable divide between individualist and collectivist cultures.
My own definition of a friend is "someone with whom I have shared, positive experiences". But I do find that there's a difference between fast-friends, and long lasting, deep friendships. The six things mentioned in this article are definitely good things to consider if you want to develop long lasting friendships, but they're also not fixed formulas.
While this is not a peer-reviewed work, I would bet that her dataset and experience amounts to an easily publishable qualitative sociology/psychology paper.
> That was more than three years ago. Since then, I have done 100 interviews.
Up to readers to decide if my point still stands. I think it does.
This article is one in a series. See perhaps "The Friendship Researchers Who Are Also Friends":
> This week she talks with two friends who also happen to study friendship. They met at a conference back when very few relationship scholars were focusing on the topic, and became both friends and professional collaborators. They talk about what they’ve learned from their research and how they’ve applied those lessons in their own friendship.
* https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/04/how-frien...
The series has been going on for a number of years:
I don't think its much of a stretch to view friendship as a concrete social problem. Especially good friendships in our professional spheres which are vital to career fulfillment and health imo.
Anyway there was (sadly) nothing realistically actionable in this article for anyone seeking something even vaguely science or stat based.
Actionable to achieve what? It makes clear that there is no fixed procedure for making friends, but there certainly are a lot of suggestions.
I suspect the many linked stories have a wealth of information and examples, but they will all be anecdotes where none of them could be forced to happen if we tried.
Isn't research like this deemed totally bunk and unrepeatable. Is it really better than a thoughtful 'listicle'.
- Attention
- Accumulaton
- Intention
- Ritual
- Imagination
- Grace
You're welcome.
This is tongue-in-cheek. :)
Being able to follow cultural norms of the local group is just about the least remarkable thing about any given group of humans. HN is not special.
I've met a few people on github that could become real-world friends if circumstances ever bring us to the same place or we clicked in some additional ways. But yeah, that's not really happening in a pull request ;-)