I'm in my late twenties. I've never had many friends, but I can count the number of times I've done something social in the past year on one hand. I spent my birthday and all the holidays by myself, and will be spending the upcoming ones along as well.
Most of my human "contact" comes in the form of things like GitHub/slack/etc, or discussion forums related to programming.
I've had extremely few close friends in my life, and always been single. I've tried to date, but making connections with other humans is oh so incredibly difficult.
I think I'm rather likeable, I get along fairly well with most people I meet. I'm friendly, agreeable, and try my best to positive. But that's analogous to me being a good sport: that's great and all, but when it comes time to choose who bats on your team, you want someone good at sports.
You want friends who are fun, make you laugh, who are good matches.
You get good at sports with a lot of practice.
You get good at being a companion, someone other's enjoy being around by...
I had a very close friend once, about 6 years ago. It's embarrassing just how motivating desires to return to those feelings of acceptance and support are. I'm very intrinsically motivated, but 5 year plans of spartan existence to try and make something of my interests, to become someone respectable, someone another would want to forgive for their flaws and awful dorkishness, is something that keeps me going.
I know in reality that this would only make me less interesting, more distant. But if I am to make something of my life before I die and am forgotten, I need dedication.
For the longest time I thought I was a loner and an introvert... until I found the right people. I'm still enjoying me time more than average, but at least I know I don't have to "train" to socialize - I just have to find people I click with. And yes, it can take the longest time to get there, and it can happen in the unlikeliest of places.
I’ve found it helpful to divide being shy and being an introvert into two different buckets though they share some similarities.
The introvert classification helps me know how I best recharge my batteries: alone time where I can process my thoughts.
Shyness seems to be more tied to fear of how other people will reach to something I do or say, making it feel like it is better to just not interact.
Shyness / fear feels like something I can work on; I was a waiter for a while and that really helped me in this regard. Introvert feels more like something to be in tune with regarding how to recharge when you feel depleted.
The least likely of places is in my apartment during a pandemic, but I'll move to a larger city after it ends where there will be more opportunities in general, and with others with similar interests in particular.
It’s important to find a tribe of likeminded people, it makes us a lot more acceptable of ourselves and socializing with them is no effort whatsoever. Ultimately we all need to fit in, no matter how small the group is
> I'm friendly, agreeable, and try my best to positive. But that's analogous to me being a good sport: that's great and all, but when it comes time to choose who bats on your team, you want someone good at sports.
That bit threw me for a loop a bit since "a good sport" isn't someone who is good at sports, it's rather someone, well, friendly, agreeable and positive.
I think it’s a rather clever word play, and he’s indicating that people prefer competence over friendliness. Which in social situations often isn’t actually true. Most people don’t like being around insufferable people even if they’re brilliant (take Nassim Taleb as an example.
However people can’t just ignore someone like Taleb, even if they’d really like to, because he’s been so RIGHT about so many things, which exposes the flaws in their thinking.
Being friendly, polite, and positive are easy. If you're kind and not demanding, people won't mind you and will probably find you fairly likeable.
But that's not enough for people to actually want to spend time with you; you have to bring more to the table, e.g. insightful cultural commentary, to make people laugh, or some sort of common ground.
Navigating conversations to find common ground is much easier said than done. Doubly so for telling engaging and relatable stories to convey a sense of shared experience.
So I don't mean a preference for professional competence, but a preference for "social competence", acknowledging of course that it's also highly dependent on the culture.
To get more personal, I've been called "boring", "transparent", "predictable", "two dimensional". I think I'm probably more engaging than a script programmed to regurgitate platitudes, but some of my critics have suggested not by much!
> "... I'm rather likeable, I get along fairly well with most people I meet. I'm friendly, agreeable, and try my best to positive."
What would happen if you tried the opposite? I've been trying that lately. Not the opposite exactly, but I've been trying to not mask my real thoughts / feelings. This is often difficult because I've been so trained to be conscientious.
But, with this new scheme, I feel that I turn off about 10% of people, 89% don't get me, and 1% end up really liking me. Those few people who I connect with make me feel really good.
It's that old aphorism - be yourself. I find it hard to do as well - it seems like a common issue with my generation (Millennials). I know it impacts my ability to make real connections, because I can come across overly fake. I'm afraid my real personality is quite callous though.
> But if I am to make something of my life before I die and am forgotten, I need dedication.
You'll be thanked online. That'll maybe fire up the dopamine. So, you'll do it again.
You might be missing out on oxytocin, though.
If you can't get outside and walk and just wave at people or say hi, then you might start with a short Yoga video before you start work. Each thing you do, you only need to do it once, there's no commitment, and no one's forcing you to do it.
The Beatles used transcendental meditation, which involves just saying some mantra word aloud or in your head and you sit normally in a comfortable chair for 20 minutes in the morning and evening. You could just do that once also, if you want.
If you want a friend, sometimes having a pet can help. If they distract you and you're not getting things done, maybe you need some of that, unless your job is to ensure our planet isn't destroyed, in which case you could maybe keep them in a different area.
And if someone talks to you, maybe hold the button to turn the phone off and shut the lid on laptop and listen to them.
If none of that makes sense, then you might explore whether you have overfocused ADD or have an anxiety or autism spectrum-related condition. Very successful and productive people have had both, but Tesla still had friends and relationships, even if some were with birds.
Worst case, if you're thoroughly stuck in some belief that you must make something of yourself to the point of sacrificing all others, the red pill which you probably shouldn't take but it might be applicable is Hume: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4705/4705-h/4705-h.htm
> I know in reality that this would only make me less interesting, more distant. But if I am to make something of my life before I die and am forgotten, I need dedication.
Can you define what you meant by "make something of ny life”?
If you should want to spend a birthday not-alone, throw a party. And if you don't have any bffs, it's totally fine to invite people you kinda sorta know.
kinda obvious, but also kinda insightful. if you're an introvert and you're just waiting around for people to invite you to things, the people most like you are waiting for you to make an invitation.
Personally, I'm most content and productive when alone. Even having my overly friendly cat around (love em to death), can throw me off and drain my mental/physical energy.
I rarely open up to others outside of our group/online/irl, but with that said, I love my tight knit group of friends as if they're brothers and sisters, and I don't know where or who I'd be today without them. We've all openly shared and continue to share that sentiment to this day. Speaking for myself, growing together in our late teens/early 20s till now (early 30s) has been one of the best experiences in life and one of the most important factors to my personal development/growth. Not only have we been supportive of one another through thick and thin, but we've also helped one another to acknowledge and be critical of our individual faults, perspectives, project concepts/execution, but always backing with constructive feedback that has only helped each other flourish.
Over the years some have gotten married, moved into some big/high visibility positions, received public recognition for their work, left the city (nyc) to find peace of mind, have financial independence, have relative stability in career, have faced chaos in career, struggled with addictions, went to rehab, had near death experiences, faced incredible family tensions, dealt with loss of loved ones, the whole gamut. But we've all always been there for one another through all of it, unconditionally and without judgement. Whenever we meet up (or nowadays connect via online game or video chat) between everyone's hectic schedules, it's as if no time has passed since we last hungout/spoke, and without hesitation the ball busting commences.
I'm an introvert who, pre-March stayed inside all weekend, and post-March for a week or so at a time recharging, and am not what one would call a "people person" (not a misanthrope, just more comfortable outside of social/noisy settings, otherwise I need headphones and ambient/Warp Records music to focus). And about half of us in our group are introverts, but when we hit each other up and time permits, we're there.
It's hard to find these kinds of friends, and before meeting any of them, I felt more or less alone in the world in thoughts, interests, etc, and figured I'd just live in my own company with all the feelings and limitations that come with that. But I was wrong to think of or to be fine with that. It's corny/cliche to say, but friends like them can't be sought out, forced, or "networked", they come naturally and unexpectedly in chance moments, at the right time, in the right setting. And when you find them, you'll know and will see that they're invaluable and inimitable in so many positive ways, and that together, through giving/sharing each other's thoughts/sentiments/perspectives/concepts/kindness/humor/honesty/love/etc, everyone has something to give and to gain just in the name of doing so.
during a very long hike across the Alps I stumbled into a group of very upset farmers who desperately were looking for 3 cows that got separated from their herd during a severe storm and lightening. Since I had f-all to do other than walk for several hundred more miles, I offered to lend them an extra pair of eyes to speed up the search. It turned out that 2 of them were dead, one killed by lightening under a tree, the other fell off the ridge. We never found the 3rd cow during all the time that I was there (4 days in total). They told me that it's normal for herd animals that when they break lose from the herd for too long that they become very hard to integrate back. Once you separate them for a few days and they learn to survive by themselves, even you catch them they're becoming very likely candidates to bolt on you in the future.
weeks later the farmer texted me to say thanks once more and to update me: The 3rd cow has turned up (weeks later). And since the animal was back it already tried to do a runner on him a couple of times.
Maybe this sounds silly but I think humans are very much alike. Once people are happy by themselves and able to live without the need for friends (either due to circumstance or free will) it becomes difficult to integrate them back. I value friends and those I know from 30 years ago. But making new friends? It's not for want, but it's impossible to get close to anyone the older you get.
- consider men especially. very few of my male friends are actually able to create new friendships as they age. women are more skilled and open to maintain relationships. if you think this is hyperbole think about your own or other people's dad's in their 50ies or older and imagine them going out by themselves to actively bring new people into the group/family for the purpose of becoming friends. (friendships don't work that way, they rely on common struggle that is needed to build trust. the older we get the less our chances of going through a common struggle (like puberty). See also army training programs where people are thrown into hard situations just for the sake of bonding etc.
I've always been one that straddles this line. I enjoy the company of others, but only a few at a time. More than 2-3 people and it's more stressful than fun, and I either avoid it or check out and sit in a corner.
Articles like these do not understand people like me. They make the common mistake of assuming that everyone is the same as them, deep down inside. They are not. Some people are extroverts, and some are introverts, and most are somewhere in-between.
First, a slight technical aside - I'm impressed that you had the opportunity to divert on that trip. Some of my most cherished travel moments have been when, under no particular time constraints or schedule, I've been able to just do something interesting & random. At the risk of sounding churlish, I'm also impressed you were able to walk several hundred more miles in 4 days through a highly mountainous region that's ~500 x ~200 miles in size. (Of course, they'd have been using metric there - 800 x 200 km.) I imagine the area's mostly commons, as far as nomadic farmers are concerned, but they do sound like highly energetic cattle - hopefully they were dairy rather than meat breeds.
Second, evolutionarily speaking I believe humans have adapted to groups (herds) of ~30, but we're all on various spectrums, including the need for social interaction. It's a nice idea that there's a tipping point that any of us could reach where solitude is exclusively sought, but my (anecdotal) experience is that there's plenty of people who, no matter how much time they may be forced to spend with their own thoughts, have no interest in embracing a primarily solo arrangement.
I'm trying to guess your age - you mention people you knew from 30 years ago - so presumably you're 35+, but then you mention 'your own or other people's dads in their 50s' which implies a (conventional) upper limit of ~39. In which case I'm 10-15 years older than you, and can attest to a) a decreasing interest, or perhaps just available energy, in developing new friendships, but also b) an utter delight, absent the 'common struggle' that you think is a prerequisite, when I get to really & properly know someone over the space of many months, and despite subconscious protestations, am led to the ineluctable conclusion I have a new friend.
> I'm also impressed you were able to walk several hundred more miles in 4 days through
to clarify: I stopped my hike to help the farmers and I left them after 4 days. I didn't walk several hundred miles in 4 days. 4 days was just the time of my stop ;)
the journey / hike was planned to last for 2 months. there is a lot of distance you can cover if you plan to walk 20-30/km a day. altitude, weather etc doesn't make it any easier. I wrote about it here in case you're interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22256055
> hopefully they were dairy rather than meat breeds.
dairy cattle, this is the setting I'm describing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpine_transhumance ... you have usually some hut in the middle of nowhere often above the tree line with a "Halter" (keeper) looking after lifestock. Their job is to count the animals every day and make sure they haven't left the territory. The number of animals depends on how many farmers they have who give them the animals during the summer. These places usually also offer a shelter to hikers and mountaineers and are very common in the Alps. For me it was a great way to spend a few days to rest my legs and look after body hygiene (normally slept in the woods or any shelter I could build or find)
Hehe - my scythe blade is from Styria, though I've never been there. (I had it shipped from Cornwall back to Australia many years ago.)
That walk sounds tremendous, though well beyond my capabilities. Longest I've done is the Overland Track in Tasmania, Australia - and that was over 8 days (it can be done in 3).
Were the cattle tagged or branded? It sounds like there's a huge non-fenced / unbounded area to try to track these beasts.
cattle are tagged and I had lots of ideas about smart-agriculture and way to make the farmers (the "halters") job easier. mentioning these technologies to the people up there is not a good idea. it's not about making things easier for them or being "more productive", "carving out more time for other things", ... the chore is the point. it's part of this way of living. and once I spent some time with them I also agreed with them.
if you bought the scythe it in Styria it would probably be a "Schroeckenfux"[1] ... nice gear!! It's also the best way to tend after the grass. You can also reach everywhere :)
Styria was probably the best part in all the hiking. It has the densest and oldest forest in Austria and it is a little tiny bit more out of the way for tourism to reach it except Vienna. I spent nearly a 3 weeks there and did some extra tours criss-cross around the region because of how beautiful is there.
Sadly never been to Tasmania. I did the backpacking thing back in the early 90ies, where coming from Indonesia I visited Perth, bought a car and then drove around the continent for a year. Best time of my life and only fond memories of Australians and how they welcoming they were. It was mind blowing to see such a culture difference for a stiff European and be warmly greeted even in the supermarket with "have a great day".
Best memory of Australia (many good ones) was when I had a boat drop us off at one of the uninhabited Whitsunday islands just with enough water (and not enough food) and we camped near the beach. Monitor lizards eating our food (so after day 3 we hunted and ate them because fish wouldn't bite). We also tried to eat the lime color ants which we heard the Aboriginals would eat. (you won't get full from them) Totally nuts lol.
I really like your hiking story. Ultimately, I think it’s a matter of investment. There’s a high cost to building relationships, and there are lots of other things to do with your time. And when you’ve found contentment in solitude, the investment costs required for new friendships begin to look unfavorable.
thanks. yes I think so - for me it's just another form of investment. instead of investing in being around people, invest in being content with yourself. it's hard work but the reward is all yours. and just because anxiety or depression looms every once in a while doesn't mean the "project" or strategy was a failure. just means there is more work to do.
fwiw I still love being around people but instead of spending 9/10 hours among people I now spend 9/10 hours alone. that is I still have a job and can't always shield myself. but it works better for me than by chasing potential friends, or worse chasing a potential romantic partner (if I have a partner I will need friends even less, at least this is how I see other men my age, ... getting rid of all their male friends is what many men do once they start building a nest ...).
The difference is also that I cherish every chance to socialize a lot more now because it's not a given. When hiking I didn't see anyone for several days - so even the odd hiker I met seemed like a gift. In a way it also changed me from saying "hell is other people", to "I love company and being around people".
doesn't mean that I never feel lonely, the difference today is how I respond to that feeling I guess.
> friendships don't work that way, they rely on common struggle that is needed to build trust. the older we get the less our chances of going through a common struggle (like puberty)
I think this is true for "friends for life" that you make in school/university/army, but definitely it's possible to make new friends at 50. Granted, it won't be the same "will drive all night to bail you out" type of close friendship and more of a "joking around while at the BBQ".
In my opinion you are missing the point of parent's comment. It's possible to live by yourself without anyone. The question is the quality of that life. I've seen many, many, many people struggling with their daily problems to the point of suffering anxiety, depression and many other mental disorders and feel a lot of relief just by talking to someone else.
I agree with your point of being difficult to make friends the older you get but I for one, love to learn about others backgrounds and stories. If that lead to a new friendship I very much welcome it.
I wonder if there is a market for people to go to like a private bootcamp to make friends. There is definitely something to be said for bonds forged in adversity, and maybe people would voluntarily place themselves there to build new connections in their adult life. But, if you have the means to stop your regular life and do this, you can probably make friends in other ways.
Overthinking, philosophising, ruminating on topics like friendship is fuel for depression. It's not bad per se, but it's not solving any issues. Just think of the times you had fun with friends, that's what friendship is. All this deep, near metaphysical thought on friendship simply does nothing, just as thinking hard and deep about food does not make it taste better.
Love, food, friendship, music, you can talk, think, write about it, but it does very little for the actual experience of them. If anything, it makes you less able to experience them because you're too busy anaylysing it.
> but it does very little for the actual experience of them
I _so_ disagree. For music as an example, I do believe that people that are really into music get much more out of it than people who aren't. They probably don't enjoy "easy-to-listen-to" music as much, but they enjoy some other music much more deeply. Same for food, same for all art, and _maybe why not_ same for love and friendship
The issue with ruminating on social issues is that there is a very high risk that you go down the wrong path, and that it makes your life more difficult. As a society, our written down understanding of human behavior is still vastly inferior to the tacit understanding you get from lived experience.
Maybe if you are happy with your life and friendships, philosophizing a bit can make it even better. But if you are unhappy it can be a trap.
English really lacks when it comes to the vernacular of interpersonal relations. We give the same name "friend", to relationships varying from the person we buy beer from to people we help in our community to people we might be very intimate with.
Friendship though can fill many human needs. Casual friends like those in business or work allow us a shortcut for finding reliable service and goods.
Communities are built out of friendships that may not be particularly close but which allow us to do things we couldn't on our own. Moving house, caring for children, help in an emergency, planning a celebration or acquiring a hard to find item.
Perhaps a lot of HNers won't understand how important this is because of their financial situation. But these are services people often cannot pay for and only acquire through community. I grew up in such a community and had never heard of paid movers until I moved to the West Coast. In many a family emergency my siblings and I stayed with such friends.
Intimate friendships can be wonderfully fulfilling in a way you can only know if you've been in one. Though you must be very careful of who you invest them in. Something I really struggled with was finding that a lot of people are not good intimate friends and that's ok. You should just maintain those friendships at a distance.
The main thing I've found though is that if you are anxious and I am very prone to anxiety around unfamiliar people, you will not bond. To make friends, you must find a way to be comfortable around people. I think this is why families are often people's only major friend group. Because they have been forced into contact in situations where eventually their guard is down. Same as to why sports and games are so good for meeting friends. You get focused on the activity and lose some anxiety. Probably also why drugs and alcohol allow people to bond.
It's hard to experience true friendship without shared adversity. I'm not using the word "true" thoughtlessly, it's just that there seems to be a common theme among the varied descriptions of absolutely intense camaraderie between blood brothers, soldiers, and so on that leads me to believe that most of what we experience as friendship is a diluted version of those bonds. In an industrial information based economy with social media, where most threats are about soulless boredom or withstanding the daily grind, it's even harder to form such bonds in any genuine way.
There's an article or two about war veterans not able to adjust back to society. The plot twist is not that they were too traumatized to be normal citizen again.. but that the average modern life is a never ending fog of hypocrisy compared to the intense life-or-death honesty of relationships in wars. They said they ever felt doubt on the field, everything is simple.
Technically no. However the real question is not about the amount but about quality. This has been proved over and over in many psychology studies. A correct amount of friends can help one's psyche and productivity.
The real question is why is the guardian promoting this ridiculous mess of statements. WHat happened to the guardian? honestly they are beyond self parody now and they seem like a decafeinated vice if anything.
In the aftermath of the Assange and Snowden stories, it was found that 1) hard-hitting investigative journalism can alienate government officials on which newspapers depend for more ordinary scoops, and potentially bring hassles from law enforcement, and 2) the big money to be made today in the advertising-based market is "snackable content" and stoking the culture wars. Consequently, The Guardian has become less and less distinguishable from other online newspapers.
What always irks me is when someone on a forum comments that an article at The Guardian is intentionally furthering some crafty and intricate left-wing, working-class, Marxist, etc. mission. While The Guardian was founded as a socially-engaged newspaper for the working classes, the last decade-plus has seen an exodus of anyone attached to that 150-year-old tradition. Sincere political beliefs and idealism just don’t keep a newspaper going in our modern internet era.
>What always irks me is when someone on a forum comments that an article at The Guardian is intentionally furthering some crafty and intricate left-wing, working-class, Marxist, etc. mission. While The Guardian was founded as a socially-engaged newspaper for the working classes, the last decade-plus has seen an exodus of anyone attached to that 150-year-old tradition. Sincere political beliefs and idealism just don’t keep a newspaper going in our modern internet era.
I fully agree and I know that was the initial purpose of the guardin, as a right winger I did not have a problem with that as at least that marxism was honest. However as you say all this suuden change pf marxists for neolibs has been horrible. Particularly within the whole context of the corbyn persecution, we cna only wish that real leftists are able to regroup and form a real opposition newspapers as both the labour and tories seem to be getting away with destroying the uk.
> intricate left-wing, working-class, Marxist, etc. mission.
I think this is a mischaracterization. When conservatives complain about the Guardian's (and the BBC's) left-wing agenda, they don't mean the older socialist working-class left. They mean the modern elite leftism focused on identity politics, critical race theory, critical gender theory, and so on. That conflict is still playing out, as we saw with Suzanne Moore's recent defenestration. Interestingly, this older generation of leftists are being published by traditionally conservative publications like the Spectator and newish center-right publications like Unherd and The Critic Magazine.
I've never worked in journalism but how does
"You know something sceptical’s afoot when you find Larkin on your bedside table instead of Montaigne and La Rochefoucauld
" get past an editor?
I think I'm pretty smart but I've only thoroughly read half of the authors mentioned in the post which seems to intentionally render itself unintelligible to anyone who identifies as "working class"
Theres nothing better than getting done at the construction job site, having a few light beers, and arguing about arcane renaissance philosophers.
> "You know something sceptical’s afoot when you find Larkin on your bedside table instead of Montaigne and La Rochefoucauld " get past an editor?
> I think I'm pretty smart but I've only thoroughly read half of the authors mentioned in the post which seems to intentionally render itself unintelligible to anyone who identifies as "working class"
The sentence that you quoted isn't bad at all.
"Working class" doesn't mean "unlettered." And if you see a name that you don't know, you can always look it up. Just as people do when they see an ordinary word whose meaning they don't know.
Oddly enough, I have been reading the English poet Peter Reading recently, who did work as a laborer for two decades (and then survived for a few years afterward on the dole), and yet certainly had read at least Larkin and Montaigne during that time. And then of course there is the former Eastern Bloc where even many workers built up home libraries of some pretty deep authors, because there wasn’t much else to buy with one’s wages than books.
There was a time in the late 19th and 20th centuries when movements for worker emancipation went hand in hand with efforts to make those workers more erudite and give them access to the same reading that the bourgeoisie enjoyed. I regret that we seem to have lost this in the modern era.
It's an opinion piece by a novelist. Why are you so bothered by references to authors you're not familiar with? I just googled the ones I didn't know. And it's a bit patronising to presume that working class people don't read literature.
"The Guardian was founded as a socially-engaged newspaper for the working classes"
My point is that the pieces like this are inaccessible for the vast majority of people. Its meaning could easily be conveyed without so many obscure references. If this were in a literary magazine then fine, but this is the Guardian.
I agree, there are certainly modern conservatives who are objecting precisely to what The Guardian has become in the last decade. But one does commonly see comments left by people who completely missed these developments and think that The Guardian still represents the traditional Bolshie movements of 20th-century Britain.
I've known a number of writers, and as a class they are difficult to be friends with. If you can imagine most people being surrounded by a kind of spherical bubble, or maybe one with a few edges that represents their personal boundaries, a writer would have a kind of star shaped boundary, where in the crevasses they appear to have almost none, and at the tips they extend out further than normal and can be quite pointy. Fragile pricks even. I have no doubt people will ultimately say he was a good writer, a wit and wry observer, a fascinating person, even a fine husband or father, but I would wonder if anyone will say he was a good man, because friends are the only ones who can know that. I'd suspect that masculine friendship is something in particular that he's finding difficulty with, which is something there just aren't a lot of adequate words for, and what makes it such a complex and nuanced thing.
Personally, I can enjoy months of relative solitude, but I also have dozens of people in my life who recognize me as a friend. The reason I was able to make friends is because I made personal boundaries that make friendships both viable and durable. There is something to be attracted to, but still very much an "other," that lets you be you and doesn't want your stuff, and we're all different enough that there is no danger from mimicking each other ("mimetic violence"). As a writer, Ford's entire stock in trade is in transgressing personal boundaries, and that is what makes friendship a kind of received concept for many writers. It's why I don't read the Guardian, as it tends to trade in a kind of sympathy that seduces readers into moralizing their feelings of inferiority by standing up straw men to take down with neurotic criticism, and that dynamic rewards the very things that make friendships difficult. To me, it's like some kind of Imposter Syndrome Daily. However, if he would like to be friends, I'm sure we could work something out.
A friend is somebody you call when you're stuck in a ditch in the middle of nowhere, they say "Be right there!" and jump in their truck and head on out for an hour drive to get you.
You don't have somebody like that in your life? You have no friends yet. Just social acquaintances.
See, in Victorian England they knew about this and had names - passing acquaintance, nodding acquaintance, speaking acquaintance. Needed an introduction to get to the speaking. They weren't friends, just somebody you had been introduced to.
It's an interesting article but what seemed missing to me, as to the theory of why this would be, was any mention of money. That thing that correlates with IQ quite well. Instead, there's a whiff of heroism in their description of higher IQ individuals, which would be convenient for a couple of intellectuals:
> More intelligent individuals, who possess higher levels of general intelligence and thus greater ability to solve evolutionarily novel problems, may face less difficulty in comprehending and dealing with evolutionarily novel entities and situations
It seems they'd be amazed at how many "evolutionarily novel problems" can be solved simply by having more cash.
I'm just going to say one thing that has helped me a great deal in making and keeping friends. Be the person that makes the effort. You're going to feel in relationships that for every tit there should be a tat. There won't. Those who build communities around them and make friends are the ones to initiate, to reach out. People want to interact, they're excited to interact, but there's a lot of inertia in modern life. Pick up the phone and call people. During this lockdown, I've had people almost cry to be given a phone call, and people who have wanted to stay on the horn for hours, but would not have made that call themselves. Be the embarrassing one, who keeps making offers to hang out that get rejected 3-4 times, who calls three weeks in a row. I started out years ago as a total introvert, and, I have to say, these practices snowball. You build social skills, social capital, and an interest in and need for your fellow humanity by being the person.
one slight nitpick, sometimes (I've heard that a few times) you're the one that always initiate and nobody ever make things with you. It hurt those people a lot and after sometime they moved away.
Friends are close enough you can tell them the stuff that bothers you and distant enough that they can comment without being directly involved.
This brings so many advantages and one of my favourites is the sense of putting the world to rights. When you have good friends you can calibrate a justified sense of where you're going and what things ought to be without having to commit to learning it the hard way.
Frankly Ford should of had the conversation in the article with a friend, he would likely derive a more satsisfying answer to his premise.
He repeats his own woe too many times and goes on about his over-thinking about friendshop. Just go to a pub and socialize, why does it have to be a reminder of your childhood betrayals, or your crippling loneliness? Everybody has their own story, if you listen for two minutes people say incredibly interesting things.
This guy dumping his life story on page 1 makes a friendship a very short affair. Friends gradually reveal themselves to each other, for a bunch of reasons. But it makes the friendship last a long time and gives you time in the moment to reflect and enjoy the difference each shared story makes on your life.
Do people reject their own instinct for friendship??
To anyone else whom this article resonated, I recommend the journal of Henri-Frederic Amiel^1 and the Rhinoceros Sutta^2 for further explorations of a similar problem space and ethos.
The notion that you are supposed to have friends and socialise was so embedded in my mind by the environment it sent me to a crazy depression. I find that most people don't have anything interesting to say nor that they lead particularly exciting lives it made me really suffer. Thankfully there is internet where I have the most interesting people within a few clicks reach. It took a therapy for me to learn that you don't need to have friends nor socialise. It was liberating.
Yeah. I also struggled with that. We are told from a young age that we need both friends and someone to have sex with. It makes you feel pretty inadequate to be missing one or both. But at some point in my life I realised I just don't care what others think. I do have someone to have sex with, and if I absolutely had to use a term I despise, "best friend", she would probably be it, but ultimately the only constant in my life is me. Everyone else is on their own path. Our paths may cross. They may even align at times. But our paths are our own.
I feel like the opposite of this author. I am easily influenced by the people I surround myself with, professionally or otherwise, and friendships have had a huge influence on who I am, my hobbies, interests, etc. I wouldn't have learned to program had it not been for a friend in school. I suppose without them I could be breathing, but I suspect I'd have less knowledge.
> Maybe my experience of vitiated friendships has had to do with being an only child
Probably true. Having siblings teaches people how to enjoy their peers. There 's a social imperative to have friends, but in the end it's about our reward systems. Friends are to be enjoyed, if not, then it s OK not to have any
I doubt there is a correlation. I have four siblings but no friends really. My closest siblings are the closest to friends that I have, I think. Other friends, alas, just haven't proved to be worthwhile in the long run.
Much like the author, though, I struggle with the definition of a "friend". I have people I am friendly with, but none with whom I share my deepest, darkest secrets or anything like that. I simply have no need or desire for such a person in my life. Others have shared such things with me, though. So maybe I am their friend? I don't know (or care).
Oh yes. I had a 'friend' in high school, an only child. We'd be doing some group activity and look around and "Hey! Where did Kirk go?"
Next day, I'd ask. "My TV show was starting". No goodbye, no excuses, just said it like it was a reasonable thing.
See, he valued 'friends' as long as they were more entertaining than a TV show. Then he'd simply choose a more entertaining option. Screw the friends; screw social norms; just go stimulate his senses with something else for a while. Totally self-interested in a sense.
There’s no jury out on this. The research supports friendship as an important factor in our health and well-being. What’s interesting is how difficult friendship can be, and how this difficulty only seems to be increasing, judging by the decline in average people to which one could confide. To me, it’s a question underappreciated in a tech world dominated by young people who think more friends are the answer, when I think experience and evidence shows that depth is more important. But of course, harder to engineer.
Depends on how you like to pass the time and whether other people necessarily have to be involved in that. I enjoy passing my time as much as possible with art (literature, film, music) and travel. As my social circle entered its 30s and 40s, my friends have mainly had children that leave them with little freedom for those things, and they are less willing to "pass the time" with me. While sharing those experiences with other people would be great and all, I still feel that these pastimes are wholly fulfilling if I enjoy them on my own. I feel fortunate to have this personality, it has really helped me get through lockdown.
Yeah I dont like when people imply I don't have friends or enough of them. I know I can have a discussion with anyone if I feel like it or if people come to me. I just answer "the world is my friend". My father is also like this.
I'm leaning on the introvert side but as an adult I've quickly adapted.
A therapist also told me friendships are a lot of work to maintain, and often a cause of pain. If romantic relationships are already a source of pain, I cannot let friendships do the same to me.
A curious article. I'm not sure Ford even understands what friendship is. His only attempts to frame it are through quotes of contrarian literati, which leads nowhere, especially without insights into the state of their lives when they spoke. Without that, the references are largely purposeless and merely provocative.
Methinks Ford would have done better to define his personal notion of friendship by contrasting it to a model that most of us would recognize. Thereafter it would make more sense to observe that, like many other authors, his need for companionship may be twisted or absent. To explain this he could point to the origins of his state of mind — perhaps his profession, certainly his upbringing — the latter of which is the subject of his book, apparently.
But as it stands, this article doesn't stand alone very well, and certainly doesn't propose friendship to be victim to the general perversity of life during Covid, which is the thesis I inferred from its title.
In my experience as a man, most of the men I’ve had around me tend to avoid talking about what is going on inside of them, not sharing and describing what they feel and how this relates to their unmet human needs.
"The reality is that men are hurting and that the whole culture responds to them by saying, 'Please do not tell us what you feel.' ... If we cannot heal what we cannot feel, by supporting patriarchal culture that socializes men to deny feelings, we doom them to live in states of emotional numbness. We construct a culture where male pain can have no voice, where male hurt cannot be named or healed."
— bell hooks
This quote resonates with me. I want to share a few more gifts and ideas that have come my way in the past few years.
Last year I learned about the work of Pia Mellody, who believes that that there is not just one type of abuse, ‘disempowering abuse’ - shaming someone and making that person see themselves as ‘less than’ others, but two types of abuse. The second type of abuse, which I think American culture suffers, is what Pia calls: ‘false empowerment’, making a person feel like they are somehow 'better than' others. This leads to people having what she calls other-esteem, in contrast to reality-based self-esteem - which someone on the internet described as: "other-esteem happens when we base our self-worth on external things".
Psychologist Terrence Real has a great summary which I copied from his book ‘How Can I Get Through to You? Reconnecting Men and Women’:
“What Pia has called “disempowering abuse” is the one we can all readily identify. It is made up of transactions that shame a child, hurt him, physically or psychologically, make him feel unwanted, helpless, unworthy. What Pia has called “false empowerment,” by contrast, is comprised of transactions that pump up a child’s grandiosity, or at the least, that do not actively hold it in check. Pia’s genius was in understanding that falsely empowering a child is also a form of abuse.”
At the same time, I also believe our modern culture has a massive fear of grief and sadness.
“In this culture we display a compulsive avoidance of difficult matters and an obsession with distraction. Because we cannot acknowledge our grief, we’re forced to stay on the surface of life. Poet Kahlil Gibran said, “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” We experience little genuine joy in part because we avoid the depths. We are an ascension culture. We love rising, and we fear going down. Consequently we find ways to deny the reality of this rich but difficult territory, and we are thinned psychically. We live in what I call a “flat-line culture,” where the band is narrow in terms of what we let ourselves fully feel. We may cry at a wedding or when we watch a movie, but the full-throated expression of emotion is off-limits.”
I'm curious if anyone here has heard about Nonviolent Communication (NVC)? Marshall Rosenberg's voice is often a light in the dark for me, helping me become aware of what's going on inside me. He has 2 or 3 great audiobooks that he recorded himself. There are also some great facebook groups where people practise together. Here's a short intro video with Rosenberg where he presents some of his theories: https://www.youtube.com/embed/DgaeHeIL39Y
Lastly, reading socialist authors like Mark Fisher, Wendy Liu, Jakob Rigi, Vijay Prashad, and of course Marx and Engels, has helped me to see why bourgeois Global North culture (heavily influenced specifically by American cinema/Hollywood) has evolved into a culture that glorifies violence, turns young girls into sex objects, sends young working class men to their deaths to ‘defend' their country, and indoctrinates it's citizens with bizarre nationalistic views and a sense of cultural superiority.
>I’m all for human intimacy, but can’t I just like the world in general?
What an insufferable and tangled mess this article is. Sorry if this answer starts off as merely dismissive rambling, but seriously, that article is, from the start, fueled by hybris and lonely misconceptions (DUH).
Intimate, deep relationships between humans are something incredibly intricate. They drive reflection and joy, enable a less self-obsessed view of the world, and are just generally beneficial to the human experience in pretty much every sense that I can think of, be it (socio-)psychological, behavioral, gametheoretical, systemstheoretical, you just name it.
I for one find it a curious read. It reads like someone who’s inspecting himself though positing a seemingly abstract question. He’s doing something of an inventory of his qualities. This seems less about whether friendship makes sense as an absolute and more a way for the author to come to terms with something.
It could pop from hn suddenly. But I’d hope the seemingly genius people here may consider the opportunity to reevaluate their interpersonal ethos.
I disagree (on the worth of the article and its presence here); I think it's important to separate the subject and conclusion (which we might not like) from the thoughtfulness of its consideration, which seems perfectly abundant here.
Friends go away, die, disappoint you. Friendship isn't worth the maintenance and ending of it, for every minute it might make your life better (and doubtfully so) you will get two minutes of misery.
The only semi-reliable friends are family members, and even if they are loyal to a fault, they do have an expiry date.
Get used to being alone, the sooner you prepare the better.
Your sad comment reminds me of this stanza: "The sweeping up the heart, / And putting love away / We shall not want to use again / Until eternity." (Emily Dickinson)
Dickinson had a ton of family members die in rapid succession, so she probably wrote that in the fallout of deep trauma. Still, there's something to be said about shifting the "fulcrum" of happiness within yourself and being more emotionally self-sufficient, if you can. Ironically, that can also make you a better, less co-dependent friend/partner.
Most of my human "contact" comes in the form of things like GitHub/slack/etc, or discussion forums related to programming.
I've had extremely few close friends in my life, and always been single. I've tried to date, but making connections with other humans is oh so incredibly difficult. I think I'm rather likeable, I get along fairly well with most people I meet. I'm friendly, agreeable, and try my best to positive. But that's analogous to me being a good sport: that's great and all, but when it comes time to choose who bats on your team, you want someone good at sports. You want friends who are fun, make you laugh, who are good matches. You get good at sports with a lot of practice. You get good at being a companion, someone other's enjoy being around by...
I had a very close friend once, about 6 years ago. It's embarrassing just how motivating desires to return to those feelings of acceptance and support are. I'm very intrinsically motivated, but 5 year plans of spartan existence to try and make something of my interests, to become someone respectable, someone another would want to forgive for their flaws and awful dorkishness, is something that keeps me going. I know in reality that this would only make me less interesting, more distant. But if I am to make something of my life before I die and am forgotten, I need dedication.