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Comment by obscurette | Hacker News Reader

Yes, managing relationships needs time, but there is another problem I see nowadays. When I was young (I'm in my sixties), it was normal to have friends who could be very different from you. They might have had qualities you didn't like at all, but you could still be very good friends. If I look my students (highschool and college level) now, they are extremely intolerant for differences compared to what I remember from my youth. One "I don't like it" problem is enough to dump any relationship. Why? I guess it's because of a lack of practice – you don't really need to interact with so many different people nowadays and interacting with people who are very different from you is just plain terrifying for many.

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It may be terrifying, but it's also terribly important. If the friendship can't survive differences, you're going to silently censor any points of differences (real or imagined) and soon you're just pretending to be the people you think the other expects you to be. No depth of connection, no growth.

You want someone to be friends with you, as you actually are. And that means you need to be friends with them, as they actually are, even if you worship different brands or vote for different movies.

>Why? I guess it's because of a lack of practice – you don't really need to interact with so many different people nowadays and interacting with people who are very different from you is just plain terrifying for many.

It’s not any more or less terrifying than in previous times, but as you wrote “you don’t really need to interact with so many different people”.

I would shorten that to “you don’t need so many people anymore”. Another factor is you can easily find more agree-able people (or bots) to spend time with, such as on this website rather than a neighbor.

I’m curious if you think viewpoints have also gotten more extreme in this period. It feels like the gap in political ideologies has widened a lot since I was younger.

The gaps in views are certainly widening in societies in general, but my point wasn't exactly that. It was more about differences which always existed. When I was young I was often dumped into large family gatherings which lasted days (birthdays of (grand)grandparents, funerals, weddings etc). I had to practice handling cousins etc who might had very different family backgrounds than me since very early age. We had to find things we had in common and accept our differences. We learned that differences are manageable. It's not common nowadays. Many people don't have relationships with relatives at all and kids don't meet another kids with different background until school. And even then distance is kept often because of overprotective parenting.

I agree with where you're coming from. I think its the continuing rise of individualism to a degree; sports team mentality politics/the internet/phones/social media have likely accelerated it but feels to me we'd been moving that way even prior to that. There's probably something there, too, about how more wealth gives people an out to not have to engage with broader society in a way where lower wealth or less unequal distribution of wealth doesn't.

Margaret Thatcher got quite a lot of stick for her quote about how there is no society and its just individual people that look out for themselves first and foremost before anything. But I'd say there's more truth to that than I'd want to believe. What stops that from being true to my mind is people being very intentional about creating a society by engaging with others.

I'm always interested in people's stories about adult friendships or loneliness crisis etc. and what I tend to see is that when people start being intentional about engaging, it usually ends up with them finding new friends. It's just easy to sleepwalk, with everything going on, into not engaging. Newish parents are very apt example of this

In my twenties my friend group had a gay jewish law student and an actual nazi, and everything in between. We all had the same sense of humour and didnt take ourselves seriously. The two guys specified would have deep and long conversations (not debates, not arguments) intonthe early hours while the rest of us fell asleep or left due to next day obligations. The only controversy I recall was when I said Conan the Barbarian is better than Lord of the Rings.

> The only controversy I recall was when I said Conan the Barbarian is better than Lord of the Rings.

facts

I see this exact thing right now to me and some (former?) friends, we’re all in our early to mid-40s. And, yes, it does involve politics, and more generally how one sees the world, but I personally find it quite baffling nonetheless. It’s like people really do feel the need to continue living in their intellectual bubble-balls, no dialectics involved, no contradiction, and hence no real (intellectual and not only) move forward.

I can’t and don’t see an easy solution for it, to be honest.

Depends? Are those more narrow one’s better and people have a better idea of what ideal looks like?

I’m kind of horrified at people saying they had/have to work at their best friendships as with my best friends, everything is seamless.

There are no misunderstandings. We never have to forgive each other. We never even need to clarify things for each other much, as we are that well aligned.

Granted it may not be possible, but ideally go find a better match in a friend.

The axes are independent. You can have seamless friendships with people who are very different from you, and contentious relationships with folks who are just like you (but doing it wrong!)

There's nothing wrong with having to work at friendship. For years I had a friend that I looked up to (and, as it turned out looked up to me). We were both constantly striving to justify the other's faith and respect. It was a lot of work but incredibly valuable for both of us.

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