I think this phenomenon is part of the reason it's difficult to form friendships as adults. The shared context that the article mentions requires a lot of time around your circle of people, just "hanging out". It's tough to make that time as an adult with a career, family, etc.
This may be why college friendships can be so strong – often a lot of time is spent living and working around friends by default, without needing to schedule it.
If this is the case then why wouldn’t workplaces create lots of strong friendships? There is a lot of shared context.
I’m not sure I buy author’s brushing this away as being because coworkers are trained to replace you.
There is lots of competition in school and college also.
Suing? They can get you terminated, or hinder your advancement. Anything that can be construed as reflecting badly on you or the company can be used against you.
In the edge case, your failed-friend coworker would sue the corporation.
This would cost corporation money.
The corporation doesn’t care about you having friends, but does care about losing money. As such structures the workplace to minimize the sorts of free expression that creates “shared context” but also creates room for error - discussions of politics, religion, your health, ethnicity, age, etc. - topics that in the best case build trust and curiosity and lead to friendship.
My comment isn’t a commentary on people - who are mostly loving, reasonable, and forgiving. It’s a commentary on incentives and the structures those incentives lead to.
is this a thinly veiled complaint about being hit with sexual harassment complaints? The simple trick to solve this problem is not to sexually harass your friends either
Why did you make two logical leaps just to arrive at an accusation?
From the HN Guidelines: " Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. "
Having backed out of including a reply with my downvote—which I seldom do, but couldn’t find a productive response in me despite some effort—I’m curious what your charitable interpretation is. I went through all of mine, and none of them reflected well on the commenter.
Bizarre but illustrative that I have to defend myself against a nebulous “uncharitable interpretation.”
Are you free (according to corporate policy) to ask your coworkers about religion, health, romance, politics, ethnicity, etc.?
I’m comfortable discussing all of the above with my friends, yet each is to some extent restricted in the professional context, either by default or with seniority.
Not the previous commenter, but yes? I have literally never worked in a place where talking about that has been forbidden. I mean, talking about it offensively is obviously not on the table, but I've discussed literally every single one of those with colleagues before.
Is this a cultural thing? I'm from the UK, and I'm working now in Germany. Perhaps things are different in the US?
No? It’s lived experience, having seen a culture other than American, I can assure you that how most folks communicate at work is guarded, and very controlled. The folks that speak freely don’t get ahead.
Your comment is a great example actually - imagine being presumed a sexual harasser because of your attitude towards tort law! I wouldn’t want my coworkers to take such leaps. Much easier to avoid the question of loneliness in America.
You say this, but this is also my lived experience. I have worked with and interacted with many who bemoaned the rise of ""PC culture"" and complained they couldn't ""make jokes anymore"" when in reality they were just getting in trouble for harassing their coworkers.
The workplace is more like a relay race than a basketball team. Everyone may share the same project, but they all have different parts to it, and are unlikely to share the same or a sufficiently similar understanding of it.
It does. A lot of younger knowledge workers (not at all restricted to STEM) make good friends in their first job because of shared context. Eventually increased responsibility through experience means you necessarily open yourself up less and spend more time mentoring, guiding, or otherwise leading.
In my experience, workplaces HAVE created lots of strong friendships in my life.
Though, it's interesting, it varies tremendously by workplace culture and the work you're doing. In my jobs doing manual labor or jobs involving a lot of boring hanging out (as a cashier / supervisor / lifeguard) I made lots of friendships. In jobs where it's been primarily knowledge work, I had a lot of good acquaintances, but rarely did that turn into more. I think that being able to talk makes a big difference. It's worth noting though that when I was a lifeguard, I was a long lived employee surrounded by short term employees. The culture was in flux. There are times when I fit in and we became good friends (which remain to this day) and there are times when I didn't fit in or like the people and didn't make any friends. The manual labor jobs produced more lasting friendships than the lifeguarding for whatever reason. Something about actually suffering with others and working toward common aims and being able to talk about stuff produced the best friendships. (I also think that the nature of the work filtered out some of the lower quality people too, and that played a role.)
I doubt “coworkers trying to replace you” has much of an impact.
The bigger issue with some workplaces is that they’re not really close-quarters, because they’re very impersonal. Sure you might be all in the same room a lot, but you’re largely discussing business stuff or working independently. Even corporate “parties” and retreats can be surprisingly professional and unnatural. It’s almost like you don’t really “interact” with the person, you interact with their business facade.
If you’re not just talking business with your coworkers, you’re actually talking about life and hanging out and not having a fake professional personality, then you do form friendships. I say this from experience.
Though talking about non-professional things and not putting on a facade also makes you vulnerable, so those companies where everyone is competing against each other happen to be the ones where everyone is impersonal.
Workplaces do create lots of strong friendships. In the past, they were also one of the biggest sources of romantic relationships. Though that has changed, people are still friends through work.
The reason friendships between adults are hard is because adults are reluctant to make themselves vulnerable, but opening yourself to others and making yourself vulnerable is exactly what you need to start building a shared history of living (shared context).
It has to be something like this because I add to my list of close friends fairly often - so I have lots of people to lean on (as I discovered when I found myself debilitated by an accident recently).
I'm mid thirties and the last close friend who was willing to help me shower when I couldn't is someone I got to know 3 months ago.
YMMV. I found that least in SV - people are so guarded that they’re rarely ever going to be vulnerable even with anyone new they meet.
Maybe it’s the crowds I keep meeting but everyone is uncomfortable with even talking about what they want from life - let alone what they struggle with.
I think many people here don’t ever open up except with their therapist and parents.
Yeah it's this, just shared time, specifically time hanging out shooting the shit.
For instance of all of my coworkers I am paradoxically the closest to are the ones from out of town. I think this is because when they visited they had no other obligations so we ended up shooting the shit a lot. Where co-workers who lived here were always busy with family/life obligations.
When working 'busy season' in accounting 50+ hours per week for 4 months, there's not time for friends, and barely time for family. I won't work for that toxic culture again.
A hack that takes advantage of this is to look for activities/events where you spend a lot of sustained time with others.
So instead of a meetup once a month, go to a week-long retreat or an all weekend hackathon.
Or if there’s someone you’d like to get closer to as a friend, instead of just inviting them to hang out once in awhile, invite them to go on a trip somewhere.
Once you reach the tipping point of enough shared time/context by fast-forwarding in this way, it’s easier to then settle into a more ordinary rhythm where you see people periodically but still feel they are real friends.
If you're into music, festivals are fantastic for this. I was just at such a festival, in an MDMA-fueled reminiscence of just how lucky my friends and I are to have found each other. Through years of simply showing up, gifting my art, and being open to new people, I now have a tight party crew which has supported each other through some of the darkest shit I have ever experienced in my life. Deaths, overdoses, bad trips, poverty, angry neighbors/property owners, whatever... these guys have my back and I have theirs.
I may be a thirty-something loner and introvert, but these guys are my bass music battle buddies. Highly recommended.
That's awesome. How long did it take/how many festivals before you started to feel they were real friends you can count on in day-to-day life rather than just being 'festival friends'?
The relationships are generally cultivated over time. I have been active in the local dance music underground for all of my adult life, but in this case familiarity was established after showing up at a couple of desert events and hanging out. Later on, I was invited to a house party with some of the same folks where I was accepted into the "family". During all this I would show up at events with my camera, take really good photos, and then give them away, and that got me noticed and made me the unofficial-official photographer of the group. This was several years ago, and the story has advanced considerably since then.
edit- To answer your question directly, it took a few years to really feel that these guys were more than just party friends. I think the catalyst here was us, as a group, navigating through shared tragedy. The 'family' was already formed when I joined, and it definitely took a while to feel like I was someone more than just a guy in the periphery. Gifting is big in my scene, and if you want to speed up the process that is probably the best way to start -- art, food, whatever you can provide that other people might want or need.
edit2- It just occurred to me that gifting is a great lifehack in general for ingratiating yourself into a new group. The key is that it has to be something they genuinely want. For example, I went to visit a friend of mine in Chile and filled up about half of my luggage with candy, alcohol, and some other things that I knew my friend would appreciate. She was so happy and told all her friends, and in an instant I had a whole group of people to hang out with -- who very specifically told me that they appreciated the gifts -- while I was visiting.
> A hack that takes advantage of this is to look for activities/events where you spend a lot of sustained time with others.
This is a good one. I really like camping, so being out in the backcountry for a week or ly helps you understand if you really get along with someone. Planning a trip, dividing up who brings what etc let’s you see how the other person approaches things.
Backpacking was how I spent a lot of time with who turned into my wife and cofounder. It’s fun but can also be slightly stressful at times and you see many aspects of a person. 15 years into our relationship and I felt like we’ve known each other very deeply since the beginning.
I think stressful situations are good for building relationships. Even if the stress is conflict with each other, of you break the relationship it will frequently be stronger after. I think psychology refers to this as Rupture and Repair.
Neither of the two examples are sustained time events.
Retreats are rather group focused (and even if it’s just two people — it can’t be regular and long enough; especially in the beginning) and a hackathon is, well, a hackathon. One has logistics challenge and another has logistics as well as intimacy challenge (or maybe we are talking about different kind of hackathons).
I’d rather suggest activities which are regular and repeated. That’s how I have made friends after college ended and I started working. Sports has worked for me in this regard.
Running long has a fascinating effect of getting people to talk about things that they normally wouldn't, in my experience.
I have a close friend that I've known since we started graduate school 20 years ago. For 4 months we trained for a marathon together, and the majority of my understanding of his deeper thoughts comes from those hours in that short period of time. In fact, I'll claim that anyone I go on regular long runs with will be someone I end up having a far deeper relationship with overall.
For the on-athletic amongst us, regularly volunteering can help you to meet more people and find friends, but as with all "work friends" bridging the gap between "work buddy" and "friend" can be difficult. I imagine it's easier if you can get a gig helping out with something you're both passionate about since it can help give common ground quickly.
Pokémon Go was good for this before the pandemic. I had a Wednesday evening raiding group. Before then, I had a Friday night all-night gym takeover caravan.
> It's tough to make that time as an adult with a career, family, etc.
It's more difficult than college, where everyone is thrown together into close quarters.
However, it's not impossible. It's just different and requires different techniques. If you sit back and wait for the contexts to come to you, it's going to be a slow journey. If you go out of your way to create those contexts, it's actually not that difficult to find and make new friends.
Hosting events, BBQs, get togethers, and any other social event is an easy way to start it off. This gets massively easier when you have kids, IMO, because you can now also host play dates, invite other families along to activities, meet other parents through daycare or school, and so on. It won't happen if you're staying at home or waiting for people to come to you, of course, but it's not that hard to get out and meet new people and friends-of-friends once you start getting out there and making an effort.
Even work can be an easy pivot to new connections if you make an effort. In-person makes this especially easy: Get into the habit of inviting people out to lunch with you once a week and ask if they can think of anyone else to invite along. The bigger the company, the easier it is to be exposed to a lot of new people this way. Again, it won't happen if you're not making an effort, but the amount of effort required is much smaller than it may seem.
I became closer friends, and even friends at all, with folks I knew from college years after graduating. As noted in this discussion, we had a lot of shared context that became more meaningful as we grew up.
I think you're right, you need proximity and significant time together to create and maintain friendships. Which is very hard to organize with adults.
Another way to look at it is the shift in priorities. When I was young, all I cared about is friends. I found it more important than school or my parents. I maximized my time with friends.
As adult "friend", you're way down the list of priorities, after the job, family, personal health, chores, recovery time...and then there's you, the friend. It's not malice, adults simply have too much shit to manage.
Some might be so busy that the last thing they need is a new friend.
Need? They need friends, they don’t have time for any.
I went to ICMI (International Conference on Men’s Issues) 2018 and the thing I was most surprised of is, a men help group is often just having a beer together. Fathers have been so busy with raising babies, maintaining the house and performing at career, that when it breaks down, they just need a beer, even with unknown people.
My take was a bit more literal, the situation were one already has "enough" friends and is not in search of making new ones. Not to say that one is not open to meeting new people if it happens by chance, instead to say to not being open to turning that into the commitment of a new friendship.
I'm saying this mostly for people that lack friends and are looking to make new ones. It's good to understand the sobering reality that some may dodge the chance of a deep new friendship developing. Not because they don't like you, simply because they can't take on the commitment.
The priority thing is an interesting one. When I was a kid I was just frequently bored and so were the other kids, so we'd hang out. I'm never bored anymore. I might be depressed and not want to do anything, but that's different from bored. With all the entertainment and things to do at all times, I wonder if current children will have the same experience as we did.
Wouldn't it be great if you could just call a buddy and then walk over and hang out? I miss that so much!
Last year I visited Bonn in Germany where I still have some family and friends. It was an unplanned, emergency trip. Within an hour of arriving at my hotel a friend texted me and let me know that he and his partner were randomly at a restaurant nearby. I just walked over and had dinner with them. I want that all the time! Most people hardly have time, for some reason we don't feel comfortable pinging people on short notice and even if it were to work, it would most likely require getting in a car.
I wonder if part of the problem is also a higher perceived barrier of how close one already has to be with someone to just hang out. As kids, we'd just hang out with pretty much anyone available. As adults we rarely make it to that level, because we don't hang out because we aren't close enough yet. So it hardly ever happens.
This was at least 25 years ago and it's very odd that I remember such insignificant detail. I was watching an American TV show where a person opened his front door to find his friend at the doorstep. He then proceeded to ask:
"what are you doing here?"
I remember thinking: Americans are so rude. What do you mean, what are you doing here? He's your friend. He's obviously there to see you. What kind of hostile way is that to greet somebody so close to you?
Now I'm exactly the same, although I'd not say that phrase out loud. I cringe when somebody ruins my plans with an unannounced visit. I'm not proud of it. I think the main cause is that we allow ourselves to be overloaded, leaving no room for "nothing" time or spontaneous time. Whilst that is exactly the time in which life happens.
So create the room. Society tells you that life is about juggling 10 balls in the air but this is nothing but an illusion. Just drop a few balls and decide they're unimportant.
Then the next day, you spontaneously come up with the idea to take a ride with the bicycle. When somebody asks, where are you going, and when will you be back, you give the only correct answers: I don't know and I don't know.
Perhaps you'll drop by the forest, take a stroll through it, and see a fox. The thing about life is that had you put in your calendar "in two weeks, go to forest to find fox", you would find zero foxes. The fox happened.
Or perhaps you'll take a ride downtown and spontaneously go to this dodgy coffee place, purely triggered by seeing it. A place you would have absolutely never attended had you done an internet search filtered by reviews. You go in, and who knows what will happen. Maybe it's a treasure, maybe you meet new cool people.
Or maybe nothing memorable happens at all and you cycle back home. You still had exercise, fresh air, were able to clear your thoughts...that's quality time and the "worst" outcome, in any case better than "Netflix".
I regret not going to college in the city I ultimately knew I'd end up living in. It was a ton of wasted social capital. I did end up saving money though (college city was cheaper), but it probably wasn't worth the savings. I still do keep in touch with a few people, but it's "annual Zoom call" catchup level of socializing: not enough to fill the day-to-day.
IRL I find it exceedingly easy to form connections with others (in my 30s), it doesn't take much time at all. I tend to be in situations where meeting new people happens (coworking spaces, cafes, big cities, going to other cities and staying in places with shared spaces etc).
However, 99% of the time I feel disinclined to solidify those connections and create the dependencies the article calls "shared context", because I actively do not find I have much in common with these people. Often I resist accumulating that "shared context" and actively evade and ghost them, other times I don't but later I wish I did. The reason is that by now I have a pretty well-formed worldview, and I know most others have one as well, and I am correspondingly sensitive to finer differences between them. And with meeting people in various IRL communities, the likelihood you are compatible in this way is hovering around zero.
***
Generally, I strongly disagree with the article, find it meandering and struggle with the unorthodox meaning it's trying to force onto the phrase "shared context". In fact, in the very next paragraph it gives a stark but much more suitable term for what it wants to say: a web of dependencies.
Friendships may form via such a web, but good friendships usually don't. It's a legacy way of sorts, and in our age worth actively avoiding.
An example of friendships formed via these webs is often childhood classmates. The only reason you may end up being friends is geographical proximity. There may well be nothing in common between you otherwise. If you let such friendships solidify, they will weigh you down or you will have to endure the psychological pain of ripping yourself out of that web of dependencies.
Meeting people in IRL communities is like that, it suffers from people being randomly put together. Accumulating "shared context" (again, web of dependencies) due to geographic proximity alone is the last thing you want to be doing. If you happened to meet someone due to chance IRL encounter, you have to vet them 10x more carefully before letting the web grow, because the chance the encounter is worthwhile is very low.
By contrast, shared context (the actual thing, not the meaning forced by the article) is easy to come by thanks to the Web, and there're plenty of people who have compatible worldviews yet are different enough to be interesting to engage with. All you need is try and get a feel for all the various ways of signaling. If you are sorta good at something like art or engineering (yes, this can be hard to know for sure), be a bit brave to go more public with it through social channels, etc. Establishing IRL acquaintance later with casual meetups is easy thanks to relaxing travel restrictions.
Hi! Author here. I'll admit I struggled to find a more precise word than "context". What I mean is that a friendship is not the 1:1 interaction you have with your friend, but that friend's omni-directional interaction with every other friend. Their location within a network is one way of putting it. In other words, their entanglements in your web of mutual commitments, shared history, and collective responsibility.
Maybe think of it like a shared challenge. You might be going through parenting together, or starting a business or some path through life that you have in common.
I think he's onto something. Then again, why aren't we still friends with everyone we spent a lot of time with when we were in elementary school? I fear a critical component is missing.
you can spend a decade living with someone without any shared struggles. relationships can have the same problem. they love each other, but they never had to actually rely on each other. if that weren't so there would not be any divorces.
True. But it's kind of sad if you think about it. Brothers and sisters will be there forever until death. Unlike friends or relationships which can be temporary.
From this year on, I am at least trying to get closer to my sister even if we have not been "friends" before.
I have a surprisingly decent relationship with most of y nuclear family with one exception, most of my brothers live hundreds of thousands of miles away from each other.
I’m almost certain at this point that in order to maintain a good relationship with my family distance is required. When my parents moved last, they ended up close to family that they were really close to and far away from family they had feuded with in the past. By the time I visited last year, they relationship with the family they were close to had severely degraded, and all the family they used to fight with were friendly.
I found this article strange, because the author seemed to be reversing cause and effect. Isn't "shared context" — trust, loyalty, love, belonging, safety — the result of friendship rather than the cause of friendship? How can you trust and be loyal to someone you just met?
"We can’t help but desperately compete in this unwinnable game of having the best collection of attributes to show off." I don't get it, because friends don't need each other to be the best person in the world at any given thing. Having things in common seems to be enough, no? Does anyone need to be "unique", a special snowflake in the world? In some sense friends are interchangeable, in that it's a total accident of circumstances which few of the billions of people on Earth you happen to hang out with. But I'm not clear on why "global uniqueness" is necessary for friendship. That seems to be an impossible standard, and it's not the basis of any friendship I've ever had.
"In my early attempts to make friends, I tried inviting people with shared interests to activities like sailing or grabbing brunch". I think the missing ingredient here is simply time. It's hard to become friends in just a few hours.
[Edit:]
"One way to create a shared context is through shared struggle. This is why many organizations implement ritualized hazing to initiate new members, but the important thing is not the hazing, it’s the sense that you are working together with your fellow humans to achieve a super-human goal."
The super-human goal of getting your butt paddled by a frat boy? No, hazing is just a perverse power play, nothing more. They do hazing because they can, and get a kick out of it.
>How can you trust and be loyal to someone you just met?
Duty. that's what the military often is like and my experiences with military friendships overlap a lot with the idea that long lasting friendships are build around context, although I think 'shared sense of purpose' describes it somewhat better.
Starting a business together or going through disease or really anything where people have real skin in the game and there's something at stake is where people can form deep, meaningful bonds quickly.
Are you close friends with everyone you served with, though? Isn't there someone in the military you didn't like? ;-)
AFAICT the formula for friendship is pretty simple: time + shared interests + personality/chemistry. The military is a good way to spend a lot of time together, and maybe a shared interest too.
I'm actually still close friends with a lot of them, and importantly that includes people I didn't really "like" intuitively but I relied on for a long time.
I don't think it's that simple really. Chemistry and personality are overrated. Sacrifice and obligation are what really binds people together and if we want to extend the discussion a bit, I think modern marriage which has shifted from being framed as something that's about duty and family towards shared interest and chemistry is an example of how frail this is as a basis for relationships as well.
The article author was basically asking "How can we make new friends?" and mentions sailing, brunch, and borrowing a neighbor's wifi. Whereas you're talking about... going to war. It just feels like you're discussing something quite a bit beyond the article.
I had some close friends among schoolmates, but I wouldn't characterize our relationship as "sacrifice and obligation". What does that even mean to a 12 year old? What does it mean to a college undergrad? I can understand what it means in the military, but that's a rather unique situation in life.
> The article author was basically asking "How can we make new friends?" and mentions sailing, brunch, and borrowing a neighbor's wifi. Whereas you're talking about... going to war. It just feels like you're discussing something quite a bit beyond the article.
He also says "one way to create a shared context is through shared struggle."
> I had some close friends among schoolmates, but I wouldn't characterize our relationship as "sacrifice and obligation". What does that even mean to a 12 year old?
I think it's pretty clear that there are multiple paths to lasting friendships, and some of those paths might not be available to twelve year olds.
Though even at twelve, I'd still expect a certain about of "sacrifice and obligation" from friends (e.g. if they got hurt, I'd be obligated to help them, and vice versa).
It's why joining a fraternity was one of the smartest decisions I made. We were a struggling chapter, too, which only added to the intensity of the bonding as well as the payoff when the chapter's future started to look bright again.
I just don’t find it plausible that only certain people are capable of love, trust, loyalty, etc. and we should be looking for those kinds of people. It seems more likely that this level of investment is costly and people already have these kinds of relationships.
The argument seems tautological. A good friend is someone who is loyal, trustworthy, etc., so look for these traits. But in reality, everyone has these traits, they just reserve them for a small number of high investment relationships. So the claim is that to make good friends, look for someone who wants to be your friend. Which isn’t that helpful at the end of the day.
Hi! Author here - thanks for the feedback. I added the following footnote to the article to clarify:
> I use the term "hazing" broadly to mean any way of excluding members from joining an organization. For example, a job interview is a form of "hazing".
In response to "How can you trust and be loyal to someone you just met?" I'll provide a personal example: I recently travelled to a different city, and asked a friend of mine for sightseeing recommendations because he used to live there. During the conversation, he mentioned that his ex-girlfriend still lives there, and offered to put me in touch with her. I then asked his ex-girlfriend (who I had only one prior interaction with!) to be my emergency contact while I was on my trip, which she agreed to, because of the shared trust they had established in their prior relationship, and their familiarity with me in our mutually overlapping social circles. This is what I mean that a person's entanglements are more important than their attributes.
> I use the term "hazing" broadly to mean any way of excluding members from joining an organization. For example, a job interview is a form of "hazing".
I agree that whiteboarding is ritualized hazing. ;-)
But otherwise, you can't just take a term that everyone understands in a certain way and then claim that it means something completely different. Job interviews aren't ritualized hazing, they're part of the hiring process.
[Insert reference to Wittgenstein's private language argument.]
Time is the missing factor. People aren't patient enough to build a relationship. I think it's 90% familiarity.
1. Bunch of strangers
2. bunch of strangers with afew people I recognize
3. started to be familiar with afew of the people who are there all the time
4. friendship blossoms
This happens naturally in school and in early adulthood. Later when you have children, spouses, jobs, and other interests it happens less. You an absolutely make it happen if your lonely, just be patient and don't be creepy.
Shared context is necessary but I think shared perspectives and values are what ultimately matter. I have shared context with a lot of people at work but I'm only good friends with one or two.
Very relatedly, my wife is my best friend, and I tend to become friends with people who are like her. (ugh, Wife Guy)
how close are you working with others? a small team that goes through developing and releasing a product will develop closer relationships than individuals who work by themselves just picking off items from the big task list
I think his point is true even in smaller teams and environments. Unless you’re forced to be together like in the military - I don’t see people relating to one another as soon as that context breaks apart. The shared moral fibers are important.
The people I talk to frequently outside of work after having left are people I share some deeper values with. Everyone else seems to not share the same values. (Not surprising either because many are not from a similar background or have gone through what my friends and I have experienced)
I think shared values is paramount to friendships developing outside the workplace/collaborative environment. I’ve worked with hundreds of people professionally and through volunteering - very few ever translated because both of these things I volunteer for and work for attract very specific types of people who I do not get along with. I just happen to do both of these things - and my type of values and personality are more spread evenly in society.
well of course there is a spectrum. not every team becomes a group of close-knit friends. it's just a bit more likely that friendships grow out of a team because there are more opportunities for a shared experience.
"True friendship comes mostly from shared struggle. Think sports teams, military, small teams at work, even childhood friends and the experience growing up.
It is hard to establish anything meaningful of a connection with casual interactions, and expecting to just "party/play hard" with people you don't really know is putting the cart before the horse. First you must work hard together.
I'd suggest joining a Crossfit gym or similar. I've had great success meeting people within the context of group workouts. It has regular class schedules, and provides a way to ease into social interactions at your own pace as you'll be around the same people regularly. Often this leads to opportunities to do things together outside of the classes.
Additionally, there are likely individuals with similar disinterest in the common activities you mentioned in you CS classes. Finding opportunities to work with someone on class assignments, studying or projects together would fall in the "shared struggle" category."
This has exactly been my observation and experience. There’s a poignant cartoon where two animals are on a long journey. One asks the other, “Is it about the journey or destination”. It gets a response “it’s about the company”. Bonds developed through shared struggles tend to be stronger. Even if that struggle is artificial one like going on a road bike trip with random strangers. Even parents bonding over is about their struggles of raising children.
Kick-about in the park -> simple activity, not many connections formed
Weekly football team -> training, trips, club events -> more connections formed
From my life the easiest connections are the ones where you're stuck together for a long time, eg education. You do pretty much everything together for years, you end up visiting each other's parents, you know each other's siblings, friends for life. In fact it's a reasonable test of how good friends you are with someone, whether you visited their house, know their family, know their friends, and know their CV.
Work is a little bit different. People are coming and going, there's a hierarchy as well, and also people are busy and have already got a friend group. That being said there's still the "always together" element so plenty of opportunity.
A more recent one is the "other parents in your kid's year". You end up hanging around your kid's friends parents a fair bit, and there's a fair chance they are similar to you. Which brings me to friend templates...
Meet a few people and like the article says, you will find many have similar attributes. Often you end up meeting people who have basically had parallel lives to yourself, in two ways:
- They literally have the same friends as you. I have this guy I went to school with briefly, who then turns up in all my friends' stories about what they got up to over the years, without me actually meeting him. Like a comedy show, he's just left when I arrive. I even had a random guy on an international flight tell me he was going to go see this guy, and I identified it because I knew so much about him. Anyway this is probably something that's happened to a fair few people, but they end up seeing the guy in real life and becoming friends.
- They have done the same things as you, unconnected. They went to your uni, or studied what you studied. They work in your line of work. When you were kids, you had the same interests. They're from your city. These kinds of people are great seeds for relationships, but there's lots of them, and not all of them are watered.
Congrats to the author, a good observation. I was just talking with one of my friends who recently became a father about how quickly new moms bond and form friendships due to the common context.
But similar interests can make the bond stronger and deeper I'd argue.
I had this realization somewhere around turning 30. I had been a touring musician in my teens and early twenties, and those were the friendships I had. I realized at one point that I had selected friends based on the kinds of music that they liked and whether I had partied with them, and that those were dumb criteria for friends.
I vowed from then on I would choose who to hang out with based on how kind, thoughtful, and trustworthy they were, and that I would stop having endless worthless conversations about bands and other products. I could just enjoy the stuff that I was into without making it into a identity. Never looked back.
> One way to create a shared context is through shared struggle.
Can't agree with this enough. Nearly all of my best friendships have been people I've met through a shared goal that required a ton of work (e.g. some intensive artistic training as a youth, early startup jobs, etc.)
I always realize how lucky I am to have had some of these intense "struggles" pretty early on in my life, as I've met people who didn't have that opportunity and I realize how my network of real friendships has greatly benefited from that.
I think the article is spot on about friendships forming from shared context.
However, shared activities are often the precursor to shared context - so joining a swim team or a bike team or any group activity is still a good idea.
Doing shared activities with some regularity is one way to build shared context and ultimately friendship.
I really can't understand the idea of friendship. Throughout my life, I never had the opportunity to foster a meaningful friendly relationship (one with trust, loyalty, support etc.) I found it to be apparent when people toss over the things I do.
I have a lot of acquaintances and friends but very few close friends. Other than that, I feel like most people only talk with me when they absolutely need something. Otherwise, I am always the last person to be called on anything.
> Becoming disentangled from your web of mutual commitments, shared history, and collective responsibility is to be rendered into a transaction, a slave.
When author compared that having this "disentangled" social web is like being enslaved to business, I couldn't relate it. Isn't it completely normal? I don't want to idolize friendship, but everything will end eventually. I have experienced this throughout multiple phases of my life. No one of the so called friends made effort to contact me once I disappeared from social media. Only my close friends remained because I put the effort to do so. When I stopped putting effort, even these relationship got eroded (One can't clap with a single hand). This was the moment I realized that there is no such thing as friendship which author described.
Life is what you give meaning to. It's nice that author is there to foster social meaning. For some reason the post felt like it's trying to create void that people without close friends are missing things from life. When I came in peace that I can't rely on any other person but myself, I found peace.
Life has multiple dimensions. No one has to live in one way. It's better to find our own ways and be happy with it.
PS: Just a minor opinion! Do not take it personally.
did your friendship actually end or did you just loose sight of each other?
how would you feel if that person contacted you now?
i have friends that i consider close, that i only talk to once a year or even much longet. and not so close friends that i talk to every day.
it is indeed the shared context, similar personal experiences and trust that connect us. the friendship doesn't stop just because we stop talking, it does stop however if something happens that breaks the trust between us and we have no opportunity to regain that trust by creating more shared context
oh, i totally get you. and i don't want to try to analyze your situation. (i am neither qualified, nor is it my place to do that) i am just making general comments how i would see the situation if it occurred to me.
the thing that i initially picked up on was when you said "When I stopped putting effort, even these relationship got eroded. This was the moment I realized that there is no such thing as friendship which author described." because i think it is possible to keep staying friends without putting in effort to keep in touch. the only effort that is needed is that if my friend contacts me, that i do not ignore them because that sends a confusing signal. but if we both stop communicating then we should be able to resume later. again, i am not saying that this should have happened to you. and it doesn't always happen to me like that either.
what i am trying to get at is, that just because you couldn't experience it yet, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
good friends are rare. but they do exist.
Well, I would just talk with them as if nothing happened
which is what i would do too.
However, the conversation always end up with most of them asking something from me.
but then what happens? do they keep asking for favors without giving you the feeling that you are still friends? that would be unfortunate. and i would not know how to deal with that either. if it happens rarely and they are not big favors i might not think much of it. maybe it is just part of their struggle to keep in touch. maybe follow up with asking them something in return. how they have been, i don't know. this is something i struggle with, because i am uncomfortable with small talk. to start a conversation i need to have a reason, or a topic to talk about.
but what ever it is, it doesn't mean the friendship is over, or that it can't be reactivated. frankly, if someone is upset because i didn't keep in touch, then that's their problem. if they think, for you to be worthy of their friendship requires effort on your part, then they probably weren't good friends to begin with.
but the same goes the other way around. if others asking for favors is a problem, i'd think about why that is so.
_do they keep asking for favors without giving you the feeling that you are still friends?_
Then they disappear until the next time. I do not mind helping others at all! I try to help people as much as I can.
_if they think, for you to be worthy of their friendship requires effort on your part, then they probably weren't good friends to begin with._
This might be the case with me atm. I simply can't afford to manage a perfectly feasible time because of personal reasons. However, I have friends who work around these limitations and still manage to catch up. There are some who do not consider this limitation.
You build expectations around relationships. It's hard when you define a rut. Try to reach out and suggest something to an old friend.
A trick for making friend is often to make a minor ask. It makes a person psychologically invested in you. In this case, the people are asking you and you are giving, but you don't ask. Try to ask them for some sort of help, even if you don't need it.
It's hard for me to ask people to do things or help me, but this it's often easier than setting aside a block of time convenient for both of you. Other people want to be helpful also.
The NYTimes has an article "Why it is hard to make friends over 30" that gets reposted almost every year [1]. There's a quote about friendship conditions:
"As external conditions change, it becomes tougher to meet the three conditions that sociologists since the 1950s have considered crucial to making close friends: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other, said Rebecca G. Adams, a professor of sociology and gerontology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. This is why so many people meet their lifelong friends in college, she added."
But it's worthwhile noting that these conditions are simply that: conditions. Their existence do not inexorably lead to friendships. They are necessary but insufficient conditions.
I've been in many situations where all 3 were present but I didn't feel a simpatico with the other person. I've taken weekend trips with people whom I never wanted to interact with again because I did not like what I saw on the trip (vulnerability can backfire -- if someone is vulnerable about how evil they are, I'm not likely to appreciate that). I don't really keep in touch with most college friends either.
On the other hand, there's something that does lead to fast and lasting friendships for me: it's that indescribable feeling when someone is on the same "wavelength". It's a collocation of a bunch of things: the way they view the world (even if they are of a different political stripe), a shared sense of humor, and something you admire about them.
Shared context definitely creates the conditions under which such people can be identified, but mere shared context itself cannot create resonant frequencies that are not there.
I'd assumed that those 3 factors were to give you chance to find someone on your wavelength, which IMO is pretty rare, and develop a friendship between you.
Yep, seen this a 1000 times, person gets a little too vulnerable, accidentally annoys people around them, gives them fuel for any fallouts that may happen between people. I’ve seen some pretty vicious stuff from people who otherwise aren’t that bad.
Probably the biggest thing that shocked me as an adult is how many people still act like teenagers.
> Probably the biggest thing that shocked me as an adult is how many people still act like teenagers.
This still continues to surprise me. I see many people into their 40s, 50s, and 60s acting no different than if they were in middle school or high school. If only they mimic’d the good parts instead of the bad parts…
Thanks for sharing this! I think your explanation really hits the nail. Reminds me of what Pope John Paul II said on a similar topic in a husband-and-wife context (book title: "Love and Responsibility"). He said that all relationship is build on "common ground" (i.e. school project, work project, etc) and this is one of the reasons why the Catholic church mandates a couple to have the willingness and openness to have children as a prerequisite to get married in the church. Children are one of the "common ground" that glue the relationship between the husband and the wife.
Plus I suspect the conversation rate of being raised catholic is much much higher than later in life without a religious background. Or in other words making new little catholic children is good for the church.
> The problem is that we’re not actually that unique as individuals. As much as we’d like to believe in our special nature, we’re pretty much mostly similar to other human beings.
I don't fully agree. Most of the population is indeed like that, but truly unique individuals do exist - I had the privilege of meeting a few.
> Any skill or attribute you claim makes you unique—”I’m really funny”, “I’m good at shining shoes”, “I’m an attentive lover”—you can always find someone else better than you on that dimension.
This reminds me of my friend who told me one time that he's seeing someone, so naturally I asked what she's like.
He answered with a set of skills/talents like "perfect pitch" etc., to which I replied "are you dating or are you hiring her?".
It's not the skills an attributes that make us unique and interesting, but what emerges from their combinations.
Case in point: my SO has pretty bad eyesight, but in exchange a heightened sense of smell - I've seen her detect gas being let out of a stove during a routine checkup two floors down. She is also a kind person and a great listener.
What emerges from these traits is (among other things) the ability to tell someone that they should visit a dentist without upsetting them - especially when they're yet not fully aware of their condition.
> truly unique individuals do exist - I had the privilege of meeting a few.
The law of large numbers suggests this is false. Unless someone has had an experience with exposure to every walk of life, which I don’t believe is possible given 8 billions.
Perhaps more accurately: “I have met tens of thousands of people, and have met singletons in that group.”
Sorry to be a buzz kill, but my pet peeve is people extrapolating their individual experiences for generalizable things.
> Sorry to be a buzz kill, but my pet peeve is people extrapolating their individual experiences for generalizable things.
No worries, because I think you're wrong and can prove it to you:
Say we have 50 different traits that people can have - just a binary yes or no. You meet a person who has 10 of them.
Such an individual has already a lower than 1/10e10 probability of having this exact set, and anyone with the same traits and one additional on top of it has 27.5% of that probability.
But that's a simplification, because surely there are more than 50 features/activities in the world and even if that's the limit, when you sort them by proficiency for a given individual, then suddenly order matters and you need just 6 of them to be "probably unique".
Of course there are plenty of people who are interested only in e.g. travelling, food and movies - popular culture calls these people "basic". But on the flipside there exist humans who have a large set of things that can be said about them.
My take is that we're not exploring even a noticeable franction of those combinations and each one of them generates unique, emergent properties.
This is muddled. Aristotle lays it out clearly in the Nichomachean Ethics. There are 3 basic divisions of friendship: those out of utility (i.e. quid pro quo or alliances toward a shared practical end), those out of pleasure (i.e. shared interest to a non practical end), and those out of virtue (i.e. a recognition of shared core moral value that defines your highest goals in life). He expounds upon the details of this at length, and I've found it to be pretty accurate.
Did a bit of sleuthing on YouTube, and it's actually surprisingly hard to find a credentialed professor lecturing specifically on this part of Book VIII in isolation from the rest of the work, but I did stumble on this summary, which to my recollection of the reading, is a little dry pretty decent:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucB_X6h_Mi4
I imagine you could read the chapter or two on friendship in the book in about that long, there's really not that much text. Aristotle's surviving works are only lecture notes, his actual writings all being lost.
Interesting! These three ideas roughly line up with a few of the stages in Ken Wilbur’s spiral dynamics: Shared pleasure describes the opportunist. Utility describes the achiever and virtue … well , that more closely describes Robert Kegan’s stage 4 (systematiser).
If we play the missing notes of that scale, we would infer you could also be friends with someone out of diplomat energy - they make you feel (socially) safe to be around and appreciated. Or they help you feel grounded in being the better aspects of your personality. I think both of these aspects come out in strong friendships and healthy romantic relationships.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 260 ms ] threadThis may be why college friendships can be so strong – often a lot of time is spent living and working around friends by default, without needing to schedule it.
This would cost corporation money.
The corporation doesn’t care about you having friends, but does care about losing money. As such structures the workplace to minimize the sorts of free expression that creates “shared context” but also creates room for error - discussions of politics, religion, your health, ethnicity, age, etc. - topics that in the best case build trust and curiosity and lead to friendship.
My comment isn’t a commentary on people - who are mostly loving, reasonable, and forgiving. It’s a commentary on incentives and the structures those incentives lead to.
From the HN Guidelines: " Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. "
Are you free (according to corporate policy) to ask your coworkers about religion, health, romance, politics, ethnicity, etc.?
I’m comfortable discussing all of the above with my friends, yet each is to some extent restricted in the professional context, either by default or with seniority.
Is this a cultural thing? I'm from the UK, and I'm working now in Germany. Perhaps things are different in the US?
Here is an example of how corporate risk aversion prevents authenticity.
Your comment is a great example actually - imagine being presumed a sexual harasser because of your attitude towards tort law! I wouldn’t want my coworkers to take such leaps. Much easier to avoid the question of loneliness in America.
Though, it's interesting, it varies tremendously by workplace culture and the work you're doing. In my jobs doing manual labor or jobs involving a lot of boring hanging out (as a cashier / supervisor / lifeguard) I made lots of friendships. In jobs where it's been primarily knowledge work, I had a lot of good acquaintances, but rarely did that turn into more. I think that being able to talk makes a big difference. It's worth noting though that when I was a lifeguard, I was a long lived employee surrounded by short term employees. The culture was in flux. There are times when I fit in and we became good friends (which remain to this day) and there are times when I didn't fit in or like the people and didn't make any friends. The manual labor jobs produced more lasting friendships than the lifeguarding for whatever reason. Something about actually suffering with others and working toward common aims and being able to talk about stuff produced the best friendships. (I also think that the nature of the work filtered out some of the lower quality people too, and that played a role.)
The bigger issue with some workplaces is that they’re not really close-quarters, because they’re very impersonal. Sure you might be all in the same room a lot, but you’re largely discussing business stuff or working independently. Even corporate “parties” and retreats can be surprisingly professional and unnatural. It’s almost like you don’t really “interact” with the person, you interact with their business facade.
If you’re not just talking business with your coworkers, you’re actually talking about life and hanging out and not having a fake professional personality, then you do form friendships. I say this from experience.
Though talking about non-professional things and not putting on a facade also makes you vulnerable, so those companies where everyone is competing against each other happen to be the ones where everyone is impersonal.
I'm mid thirties and the last close friend who was willing to help me shower when I couldn't is someone I got to know 3 months ago.
Maybe it’s the crowds I keep meeting but everyone is uncomfortable with even talking about what they want from life - let alone what they struggle with.
I think many people here don’t ever open up except with their therapist and parents.
For instance of all of my coworkers I am paradoxically the closest to are the ones from out of town. I think this is because when they visited they had no other obligations so we ended up shooting the shit a lot. Where co-workers who lived here were always busy with family/life obligations.
So instead of a meetup once a month, go to a week-long retreat or an all weekend hackathon.
Or if there’s someone you’d like to get closer to as a friend, instead of just inviting them to hang out once in awhile, invite them to go on a trip somewhere.
Once you reach the tipping point of enough shared time/context by fast-forwarding in this way, it’s easier to then settle into a more ordinary rhythm where you see people periodically but still feel they are real friends.
I may be a thirty-something loner and introvert, but these guys are my bass music battle buddies. Highly recommended.
edit- To answer your question directly, it took a few years to really feel that these guys were more than just party friends. I think the catalyst here was us, as a group, navigating through shared tragedy. The 'family' was already formed when I joined, and it definitely took a while to feel like I was someone more than just a guy in the periphery. Gifting is big in my scene, and if you want to speed up the process that is probably the best way to start -- art, food, whatever you can provide that other people might want or need.
edit2- It just occurred to me that gifting is a great lifehack in general for ingratiating yourself into a new group. The key is that it has to be something they genuinely want. For example, I went to visit a friend of mine in Chile and filled up about half of my luggage with candy, alcohol, and some other things that I knew my friend would appreciate. She was so happy and told all her friends, and in an instant I had a whole group of people to hang out with -- who very specifically told me that they appreciated the gifts -- while I was visiting.
This is a good one. I really like camping, so being out in the backcountry for a week or ly helps you understand if you really get along with someone. Planning a trip, dividing up who brings what etc let’s you see how the other person approaches things.
Retreats are rather group focused (and even if it’s just two people — it can’t be regular and long enough; especially in the beginning) and a hackathon is, well, a hackathon. One has logistics challenge and another has logistics as well as intimacy challenge (or maybe we are talking about different kind of hackathons).
I’d rather suggest activities which are regular and repeated. That’s how I have made friends after college ended and I started working. Sports has worked for me in this regard.
I have a close friend that I've known since we started graduate school 20 years ago. For 4 months we trained for a marathon together, and the majority of my understanding of his deeper thoughts comes from those hours in that short period of time. In fact, I'll claim that anyone I go on regular long runs with will be someone I end up having a far deeper relationship with overall.
For the on-athletic amongst us, regularly volunteering can help you to meet more people and find friends, but as with all "work friends" bridging the gap between "work buddy" and "friend" can be difficult. I imagine it's easier if you can get a gig helping out with something you're both passionate about since it can help give common ground quickly.
It's more difficult than college, where everyone is thrown together into close quarters.
However, it's not impossible. It's just different and requires different techniques. If you sit back and wait for the contexts to come to you, it's going to be a slow journey. If you go out of your way to create those contexts, it's actually not that difficult to find and make new friends.
Hosting events, BBQs, get togethers, and any other social event is an easy way to start it off. This gets massively easier when you have kids, IMO, because you can now also host play dates, invite other families along to activities, meet other parents through daycare or school, and so on. It won't happen if you're staying at home or waiting for people to come to you, of course, but it's not that hard to get out and meet new people and friends-of-friends once you start getting out there and making an effort.
Even work can be an easy pivot to new connections if you make an effort. In-person makes this especially easy: Get into the habit of inviting people out to lunch with you once a week and ask if they can think of anyone else to invite along. The bigger the company, the easier it is to be exposed to a lot of new people this way. Again, it won't happen if you're not making an effort, but the amount of effort required is much smaller than it may seem.
Another way to look at it is the shift in priorities. When I was young, all I cared about is friends. I found it more important than school or my parents. I maximized my time with friends.
As adult "friend", you're way down the list of priorities, after the job, family, personal health, chores, recovery time...and then there's you, the friend. It's not malice, adults simply have too much shit to manage.
Some might be so busy that the last thing they need is a new friend.
I went to ICMI (International Conference on Men’s Issues) 2018 and the thing I was most surprised of is, a men help group is often just having a beer together. Fathers have been so busy with raising babies, maintaining the house and performing at career, that when it breaks down, they just need a beer, even with unknown people.
My take was a bit more literal, the situation were one already has "enough" friends and is not in search of making new ones. Not to say that one is not open to meeting new people if it happens by chance, instead to say to not being open to turning that into the commitment of a new friendship.
I'm saying this mostly for people that lack friends and are looking to make new ones. It's good to understand the sobering reality that some may dodge the chance of a deep new friendship developing. Not because they don't like you, simply because they can't take on the commitment.
Last year I visited Bonn in Germany where I still have some family and friends. It was an unplanned, emergency trip. Within an hour of arriving at my hotel a friend texted me and let me know that he and his partner were randomly at a restaurant nearby. I just walked over and had dinner with them. I want that all the time! Most people hardly have time, for some reason we don't feel comfortable pinging people on short notice and even if it were to work, it would most likely require getting in a car.
I wonder if part of the problem is also a higher perceived barrier of how close one already has to be with someone to just hang out. As kids, we'd just hang out with pretty much anyone available. As adults we rarely make it to that level, because we don't hang out because we aren't close enough yet. So it hardly ever happens.
"what are you doing here?"
I remember thinking: Americans are so rude. What do you mean, what are you doing here? He's your friend. He's obviously there to see you. What kind of hostile way is that to greet somebody so close to you?
Now I'm exactly the same, although I'd not say that phrase out loud. I cringe when somebody ruins my plans with an unannounced visit. I'm not proud of it. I think the main cause is that we allow ourselves to be overloaded, leaving no room for "nothing" time or spontaneous time. Whilst that is exactly the time in which life happens.
So create the room. Society tells you that life is about juggling 10 balls in the air but this is nothing but an illusion. Just drop a few balls and decide they're unimportant.
Then the next day, you spontaneously come up with the idea to take a ride with the bicycle. When somebody asks, where are you going, and when will you be back, you give the only correct answers: I don't know and I don't know.
Perhaps you'll drop by the forest, take a stroll through it, and see a fox. The thing about life is that had you put in your calendar "in two weeks, go to forest to find fox", you would find zero foxes. The fox happened.
Or perhaps you'll take a ride downtown and spontaneously go to this dodgy coffee place, purely triggered by seeing it. A place you would have absolutely never attended had you done an internet search filtered by reviews. You go in, and who knows what will happen. Maybe it's a treasure, maybe you meet new cool people.
Or maybe nothing memorable happens at all and you cycle back home. You still had exercise, fresh air, were able to clear your thoughts...that's quality time and the "worst" outcome, in any case better than "Netflix".
However, 99% of the time I feel disinclined to solidify those connections and create the dependencies the article calls "shared context", because I actively do not find I have much in common with these people. Often I resist accumulating that "shared context" and actively evade and ghost them, other times I don't but later I wish I did. The reason is that by now I have a pretty well-formed worldview, and I know most others have one as well, and I am correspondingly sensitive to finer differences between them. And with meeting people in various IRL communities, the likelihood you are compatible in this way is hovering around zero.
***
Generally, I strongly disagree with the article, find it meandering and struggle with the unorthodox meaning it's trying to force onto the phrase "shared context". In fact, in the very next paragraph it gives a stark but much more suitable term for what it wants to say: a web of dependencies.
Friendships may form via such a web, but good friendships usually don't. It's a legacy way of sorts, and in our age worth actively avoiding.
An example of friendships formed via these webs is often childhood classmates. The only reason you may end up being friends is geographical proximity. There may well be nothing in common between you otherwise. If you let such friendships solidify, they will weigh you down or you will have to endure the psychological pain of ripping yourself out of that web of dependencies.
Meeting people in IRL communities is like that, it suffers from people being randomly put together. Accumulating "shared context" (again, web of dependencies) due to geographic proximity alone is the last thing you want to be doing. If you happened to meet someone due to chance IRL encounter, you have to vet them 10x more carefully before letting the web grow, because the chance the encounter is worthwhile is very low.
By contrast, shared context (the actual thing, not the meaning forced by the article) is easy to come by thanks to the Web, and there're plenty of people who have compatible worldviews yet are different enough to be interesting to engage with. All you need is try and get a feel for all the various ways of signaling. If you are sorta good at something like art or engineering (yes, this can be hard to know for sure), be a bit brave to go more public with it through social channels, etc. Establishing IRL acquaintance later with casual meetups is easy thanks to relaxing travel restrictions.
See https://www.businessinsider.com/things-that-help-people-make...
It seems to mean "your location within your network of people"?
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0265407518761225
I've tried to make other friendships work by maximising time spent with someone, and it basically never worked.
Highly frustrating if you're the systematising type.
From this year on, I am at least trying to get closer to my sister even if we have not been "friends" before.
I’m almost certain at this point that in order to maintain a good relationship with my family distance is required. When my parents moved last, they ended up close to family that they were really close to and far away from family they had feuded with in the past. By the time I visited last year, they relationship with the family they were close to had severely degraded, and all the family they used to fight with were friendly.
"We can’t help but desperately compete in this unwinnable game of having the best collection of attributes to show off." I don't get it, because friends don't need each other to be the best person in the world at any given thing. Having things in common seems to be enough, no? Does anyone need to be "unique", a special snowflake in the world? In some sense friends are interchangeable, in that it's a total accident of circumstances which few of the billions of people on Earth you happen to hang out with. But I'm not clear on why "global uniqueness" is necessary for friendship. That seems to be an impossible standard, and it's not the basis of any friendship I've ever had.
"In my early attempts to make friends, I tried inviting people with shared interests to activities like sailing or grabbing brunch". I think the missing ingredient here is simply time. It's hard to become friends in just a few hours.
[Edit:] "One way to create a shared context is through shared struggle. This is why many organizations implement ritualized hazing to initiate new members, but the important thing is not the hazing, it’s the sense that you are working together with your fellow humans to achieve a super-human goal."
The super-human goal of getting your butt paddled by a frat boy? No, hazing is just a perverse power play, nothing more. They do hazing because they can, and get a kick out of it.
Duty. that's what the military often is like and my experiences with military friendships overlap a lot with the idea that long lasting friendships are build around context, although I think 'shared sense of purpose' describes it somewhat better.
Starting a business together or going through disease or really anything where people have real skin in the game and there's something at stake is where people can form deep, meaningful bonds quickly.
AFAICT the formula for friendship is pretty simple: time + shared interests + personality/chemistry. The military is a good way to spend a lot of time together, and maybe a shared interest too.
I don't think it's that simple really. Chemistry and personality are overrated. Sacrifice and obligation are what really binds people together and if we want to extend the discussion a bit, I think modern marriage which has shifted from being framed as something that's about duty and family towards shared interest and chemistry is an example of how frail this is as a basis for relationships as well.
I had some close friends among schoolmates, but I wouldn't characterize our relationship as "sacrifice and obligation". What does that even mean to a 12 year old? What does it mean to a college undergrad? I can understand what it means in the military, but that's a rather unique situation in life.
He also says "one way to create a shared context is through shared struggle."
> I had some close friends among schoolmates, but I wouldn't characterize our relationship as "sacrifice and obligation". What does that even mean to a 12 year old?
I think it's pretty clear that there are multiple paths to lasting friendships, and some of those paths might not be available to twelve year olds.
Though even at twelve, I'd still expect a certain about of "sacrifice and obligation" from friends (e.g. if they got hurt, I'd be obligated to help them, and vice versa).
The argument seems tautological. A good friend is someone who is loyal, trustworthy, etc., so look for these traits. But in reality, everyone has these traits, they just reserve them for a small number of high investment relationships. So the claim is that to make good friends, look for someone who wants to be your friend. Which isn’t that helpful at the end of the day.
> I use the term "hazing" broadly to mean any way of excluding members from joining an organization. For example, a job interview is a form of "hazing".
In response to "How can you trust and be loyal to someone you just met?" I'll provide a personal example: I recently travelled to a different city, and asked a friend of mine for sightseeing recommendations because he used to live there. During the conversation, he mentioned that his ex-girlfriend still lives there, and offered to put me in touch with her. I then asked his ex-girlfriend (who I had only one prior interaction with!) to be my emergency contact while I was on my trip, which she agreed to, because of the shared trust they had established in their prior relationship, and their familiarity with me in our mutually overlapping social circles. This is what I mean that a person's entanglements are more important than their attributes.
I agree that whiteboarding is ritualized hazing. ;-)
But otherwise, you can't just take a term that everyone understands in a certain way and then claim that it means something completely different. Job interviews aren't ritualized hazing, they're part of the hiring process.
[Insert reference to Wittgenstein's private language argument.]
This happens naturally in school and in early adulthood. Later when you have children, spouses, jobs, and other interests it happens less. You an absolutely make it happen if your lonely, just be patient and don't be creepy.
Very relatedly, my wife is my best friend, and I tend to become friends with people who are like her. (ugh, Wife Guy)
The people I talk to frequently outside of work after having left are people I share some deeper values with. Everyone else seems to not share the same values. (Not surprising either because many are not from a similar background or have gone through what my friends and I have experienced)
I think shared values is paramount to friendships developing outside the workplace/collaborative environment. I’ve worked with hundreds of people professionally and through volunteering - very few ever translated because both of these things I volunteer for and work for attract very specific types of people who I do not get along with. I just happen to do both of these things - and my type of values and personality are more spread evenly in society.
"True friendship comes mostly from shared struggle. Think sports teams, military, small teams at work, even childhood friends and the experience growing up.
It is hard to establish anything meaningful of a connection with casual interactions, and expecting to just "party/play hard" with people you don't really know is putting the cart before the horse. First you must work hard together.
I'd suggest joining a Crossfit gym or similar. I've had great success meeting people within the context of group workouts. It has regular class schedules, and provides a way to ease into social interactions at your own pace as you'll be around the same people regularly. Often this leads to opportunities to do things together outside of the classes.
Additionally, there are likely individuals with similar disinterest in the common activities you mentioned in you CS classes. Finding opportunities to work with someone on class assignments, studying or projects together would fall in the "shared struggle" category."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28969047
Isn’t there a popular joke about these being cult-ish?
Kick-about in the park -> simple activity, not many connections formed
Weekly football team -> training, trips, club events -> more connections formed
From my life the easiest connections are the ones where you're stuck together for a long time, eg education. You do pretty much everything together for years, you end up visiting each other's parents, you know each other's siblings, friends for life. In fact it's a reasonable test of how good friends you are with someone, whether you visited their house, know their family, know their friends, and know their CV.
Work is a little bit different. People are coming and going, there's a hierarchy as well, and also people are busy and have already got a friend group. That being said there's still the "always together" element so plenty of opportunity.
A more recent one is the "other parents in your kid's year". You end up hanging around your kid's friends parents a fair bit, and there's a fair chance they are similar to you. Which brings me to friend templates...
Meet a few people and like the article says, you will find many have similar attributes. Often you end up meeting people who have basically had parallel lives to yourself, in two ways:
- They literally have the same friends as you. I have this guy I went to school with briefly, who then turns up in all my friends' stories about what they got up to over the years, without me actually meeting him. Like a comedy show, he's just left when I arrive. I even had a random guy on an international flight tell me he was going to go see this guy, and I identified it because I knew so much about him. Anyway this is probably something that's happened to a fair few people, but they end up seeing the guy in real life and becoming friends.
- They have done the same things as you, unconnected. They went to your uni, or studied what you studied. They work in your line of work. When you were kids, you had the same interests. They're from your city. These kinds of people are great seeds for relationships, but there's lots of them, and not all of them are watered.
But similar interests can make the bond stronger and deeper I'd argue.
I vowed from then on I would choose who to hang out with based on how kind, thoughtful, and trustworthy they were, and that I would stop having endless worthless conversations about bands and other products. I could just enjoy the stuff that I was into without making it into a identity. Never looked back.
Can't agree with this enough. Nearly all of my best friendships have been people I've met through a shared goal that required a ton of work (e.g. some intensive artistic training as a youth, early startup jobs, etc.)
I always realize how lucky I am to have had some of these intense "struggles" pretty early on in my life, as I've met people who didn't have that opportunity and I realize how my network of real friendships has greatly benefited from that.
However, shared activities are often the precursor to shared context - so joining a swim team or a bike team or any group activity is still a good idea.
Doing shared activities with some regularity is one way to build shared context and ultimately friendship.
I have a lot of acquaintances and friends but very few close friends. Other than that, I feel like most people only talk with me when they absolutely need something. Otherwise, I am always the last person to be called on anything.
> Becoming disentangled from your web of mutual commitments, shared history, and collective responsibility is to be rendered into a transaction, a slave.
When author compared that having this "disentangled" social web is like being enslaved to business, I couldn't relate it. Isn't it completely normal? I don't want to idolize friendship, but everything will end eventually. I have experienced this throughout multiple phases of my life. No one of the so called friends made effort to contact me once I disappeared from social media. Only my close friends remained because I put the effort to do so. When I stopped putting effort, even these relationship got eroded (One can't clap with a single hand). This was the moment I realized that there is no such thing as friendship which author described.
Life is what you give meaning to. It's nice that author is there to foster social meaning. For some reason the post felt like it's trying to create void that people without close friends are missing things from life. When I came in peace that I can't rely on any other person but myself, I found peace.
Life has multiple dimensions. No one has to live in one way. It's better to find our own ways and be happy with it.
PS: Just a minor opinion! Do not take it personally.
how would you feel if that person contacted you now?
i have friends that i consider close, that i only talk to once a year or even much longet. and not so close friends that i talk to every day.
it is indeed the shared context, similar personal experiences and trust that connect us. the friendship doesn't stop just because we stop talking, it does stop however if something happens that breaks the trust between us and we have no opportunity to regain that trust by creating more shared context
Well, I would just talk with them as if nothing happened However, the conversation always end up with most of them asking something from me.
I think you can get the idea on why I feel this way.
the thing that i initially picked up on was when you said "When I stopped putting effort, even these relationship got eroded. This was the moment I realized that there is no such thing as friendship which author described." because i think it is possible to keep staying friends without putting in effort to keep in touch. the only effort that is needed is that if my friend contacts me, that i do not ignore them because that sends a confusing signal. but if we both stop communicating then we should be able to resume later. again, i am not saying that this should have happened to you. and it doesn't always happen to me like that either.
what i am trying to get at is, that just because you couldn't experience it yet, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
good friends are rare. but they do exist.
Well, I would just talk with them as if nothing happened
which is what i would do too.
However, the conversation always end up with most of them asking something from me.
but then what happens? do they keep asking for favors without giving you the feeling that you are still friends? that would be unfortunate. and i would not know how to deal with that either. if it happens rarely and they are not big favors i might not think much of it. maybe it is just part of their struggle to keep in touch. maybe follow up with asking them something in return. how they have been, i don't know. this is something i struggle with, because i am uncomfortable with small talk. to start a conversation i need to have a reason, or a topic to talk about.
but what ever it is, it doesn't mean the friendship is over, or that it can't be reactivated. frankly, if someone is upset because i didn't keep in touch, then that's their problem. if they think, for you to be worthy of their friendship requires effort on your part, then they probably weren't good friends to begin with.
but the same goes the other way around. if others asking for favors is a problem, i'd think about why that is so.
Then they disappear until the next time. I do not mind helping others at all! I try to help people as much as I can.
_if they think, for you to be worthy of their friendship requires effort on your part, then they probably weren't good friends to begin with._
This might be the case with me atm. I simply can't afford to manage a perfectly feasible time because of personal reasons. However, I have friends who work around these limitations and still manage to catch up. There are some who do not consider this limitation.
A trick for making friend is often to make a minor ask. It makes a person psychologically invested in you. In this case, the people are asking you and you are giving, but you don't ask. Try to ask them for some sort of help, even if you don't need it. It's hard for me to ask people to do things or help me, but this it's often easier than setting aside a block of time convenient for both of you. Other people want to be helpful also.
i was actually thinking about that when reading the posts. are those friends asking for something in an attempt to reconnect?
"As external conditions change, it becomes tougher to meet the three conditions that sociologists since the 1950s have considered crucial to making close friends: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other, said Rebecca G. Adams, a professor of sociology and gerontology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. This is why so many people meet their lifelong friends in college, she added."
But it's worthwhile noting that these conditions are simply that: conditions. Their existence do not inexorably lead to friendships. They are necessary but insufficient conditions.
I've been in many situations where all 3 were present but I didn't feel a simpatico with the other person. I've taken weekend trips with people whom I never wanted to interact with again because I did not like what I saw on the trip (vulnerability can backfire -- if someone is vulnerable about how evil they are, I'm not likely to appreciate that). I don't really keep in touch with most college friends either.
On the other hand, there's something that does lead to fast and lasting friendships for me: it's that indescribable feeling when someone is on the same "wavelength". It's a collocation of a bunch of things: the way they view the world (even if they are of a different political stripe), a shared sense of humor, and something you admire about them.
Shared context definitely creates the conditions under which such people can be identified, but mere shared context itself cannot create resonant frequencies that are not there.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/fashion/the-challenge-of-...
Yep, seen this a 1000 times, person gets a little too vulnerable, accidentally annoys people around them, gives them fuel for any fallouts that may happen between people. I’ve seen some pretty vicious stuff from people who otherwise aren’t that bad.
Probably the biggest thing that shocked me as an adult is how many people still act like teenagers.
This still continues to surprise me. I see many people into their 40s, 50s, and 60s acting no different than if they were in middle school or high school. If only they mimic’d the good parts instead of the bad parts…
While I am impressed with his pop culture awareness, I am sad he had to note WAP meant Wireless Access Point
Of course now I am wondering what the other WAP is. Maybe I don't want to know...
Considering that the Fortran Assembly Program (FAP) is on the HN home page right now, it seems particularly relevant!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31553927
It's just a pop song with some swear words in the title
I don't fully agree. Most of the population is indeed like that, but truly unique individuals do exist - I had the privilege of meeting a few.
> Any skill or attribute you claim makes you unique—”I’m really funny”, “I’m good at shining shoes”, “I’m an attentive lover”—you can always find someone else better than you on that dimension.
This reminds me of my friend who told me one time that he's seeing someone, so naturally I asked what she's like.
He answered with a set of skills/talents like "perfect pitch" etc., to which I replied "are you dating or are you hiring her?".
It's not the skills an attributes that make us unique and interesting, but what emerges from their combinations.
Case in point: my SO has pretty bad eyesight, but in exchange a heightened sense of smell - I've seen her detect gas being let out of a stove during a routine checkup two floors down. She is also a kind person and a great listener.
What emerges from these traits is (among other things) the ability to tell someone that they should visit a dentist without upsetting them - especially when they're yet not fully aware of their condition.
The law of large numbers suggests this is false. Unless someone has had an experience with exposure to every walk of life, which I don’t believe is possible given 8 billions.
Perhaps more accurately: “I have met tens of thousands of people, and have met singletons in that group.”
Sorry to be a buzz kill, but my pet peeve is people extrapolating their individual experiences for generalizable things.
No worries, because I think you're wrong and can prove it to you:
Say we have 50 different traits that people can have - just a binary yes or no. You meet a person who has 10 of them.
Such an individual has already a lower than 1/10e10 probability of having this exact set, and anyone with the same traits and one additional on top of it has 27.5% of that probability.
But that's a simplification, because surely there are more than 50 features/activities in the world and even if that's the limit, when you sort them by proficiency for a given individual, then suddenly order matters and you need just 6 of them to be "probably unique".
Of course there are plenty of people who are interested only in e.g. travelling, food and movies - popular culture calls these people "basic". But on the flipside there exist humans who have a large set of things that can be said about them.
My take is that we're not exploring even a noticeable franction of those combinations and each one of them generates unique, emergent properties.
Does there exist a TL;DR of Aristotle's views on this? (e.g. a 10-60 minute version)
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.8.viii.html
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.9.ix.html
If we play the missing notes of that scale, we would infer you could also be friends with someone out of diplomat energy - they make you feel (socially) safe to be around and appreciated. Or they help you feel grounded in being the better aspects of your personality. I think both of these aspects come out in strong friendships and healthy romantic relationships.