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Comment by rTX5CMRXIfFG | Hacker News Reader

serious question but aren’t newer connections that you make in this manner necessarily much more shallow than the ones you’ve started long ago, which does include friends/family from earlier phases in life? how could that possibly give you joy or even call it “friendship” at all if people only know you in a trivial sense? what you described sound more like acquaintances to me.

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Yes, the tendency is for recent connections to be shallower than those formed long ago. But connections also open up at different paces. For some people it took a decade (and multiple phases of life) for us to become close friends, others it took just days.

Consider the pyramid of relationships – at the base are acquaintances, 90% of the people we see each day – at the top are our closest friends and family, those few people that we deeply trust. We can let the people in our lives move fluidly along the vertical axis, and if we are lucky more than just a handful will make it to the top.

I try to not know anyone "in a trivial sense" – the whole point is to be present enough to realize how cool people are.

There is a conundrum with the question you are asking. They don't know what it's like to have a friend that goes back, say 20 years. And you do. It's kind of like asking someone who has never ate roast duck, to tell you if roast duck tastes better than roast chicken. The information you seek isn't there.

What made you assume the GP has no friends that go back 20 years?

Do you think a person that makes new friends easily necessarily lets old ones go, instead of holding on to them?

You are absolutely right. I assumed, for some reason, he never spent a serious amount of time in a single place

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