The Science of Making Friends | Hacker News Reader

The Science of Making Friends

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411 pointsfrostmatthew222 comments

WRT the decline with age, I've always felt like a lot of it is 'ego based', for lack of better terms.

I've found that as time goes on, people are far more concerned with doing things by the book, projecting an image, etc. rather than just 'being', enjoying life in the moment, doing things just because.

I've certainly been guilty of this to some extent because it seems impossible to avoid.

Personal anecdote: At age 16 it was fun to hang around at a bus stop or street corner or whatever and just chat bollocks. Move forward a bit and in college we'd hang out in someone's dorm room or flat or equivalent.

Now everyone is off at work, spaced out all over the place. You might be able to get one or two people to do something, but it'll probably mean some sort of sanitized commercial experience (go and get pizza at a restaurant, pay to commute there, pay to commute back, etc).

And it's all because we've sort of decided that working all the time is more important than being social.

I think that's sad. I often wonder if it's how we end up with such warped political environments. No-one just relaxes, any more, it's all 40 hour weeks and 'scheduling appointments' months into the future.

You grow up, and what were 20 kids, become a banker, a lawyer, a janitor, a policeman, a nurse, a dropout, a homeless guy, and so on. And it just doesn't work, because of all these rules we've made up, status games, location, whatever. Why can't we just go to the park again?

And no, this isn't just about childhood friends moving away. It's the same story up and down the scale, in my experience. Everyone is busy, everyone is pushing.

The community takes a back seat to economic needs, it seems. Something like that. I'm not sure. I know we still got stuff done back then, I have a bit of paper with a hologram on it that proves it. But it wasn't all consuming, somehow.

Christ, in some ways, this thread makes me want to just like, teleport some people from HN into the local park with some beers.

I think we'd have a great time. No vi vs emacs, mind.

> eleport some people from HN into the local park with some beers.

Park runs are fun (for various values of fun) and probably a good way to meet people.

I'd love to have an HN irl meetup sometime.

WE COULD SHOUT AT AND DOWNVOTE EACHOTHER DOWN IN PERSON.

Only if you have enough karma!

Is dang available to move tables when discussions go off topic?

It's definitely doable. Anyone in SF wants to meet in the golden gate park today around 3pm?

Edit: Since this got a few upvotes but not many replies, feel free to come at 37°46'08.4"N 122°29'08.8"W (https://goo.gl/maps/Vvyctgz4CAQ2). Will have a Linkedin tshirt/backpack.

I would -- one of my residences is in SF -- but I'm actually in Palm Springs at the moment.

Success breeds spatial flexibility.

Proximity breeds close relationships.

Not in SF, but this is awesome. Hope it's fun!

Same here I can't. I live in France but as soon as I am back in SF I will!

Did anyone come?

I'm in ;)

(Even though I probably would spend the time figuring out how the fuck you teleported us across the world.)

We basically used to do this when I lived in San Diego -- a monthly Hacker News meetup organized by email list. It'd start with a ~2 hours at a local non-alcoholic establishment, and then at a set time, whoever wanted would transition to a pub across the street. No agenda or presentation, just a meetup of interesting & like-minded folk. Good times!

Anyone around "Silicon Beach" come down to Original Muscle Beach in Santa Monica, we'll be down there swinging on the rings and monkey bars all day. Come make friends.

Sounds fun! I'll have to join next time.

I know most here aren't a fan of the site, but Reddit does this and the meetups are a blast. They're usually geographic or interest-oriented, but there are some bigger ones that inspire travel. You do get the negative you'd expect, but that's the Web in general. Don't go just to get laid (you won't), treat people with respect and it's great. I suspect there would be different problems with this audience, but all manageable.

They get pretty fun beyond a critical mass but that usually takes logistics, sponsors, and so on, and you're basically organizing a conference. I think Imgur had sponsors for the last big one and fed everybody the whole time. There's a spectrum. Small and intimate can be good, big and organized and logistical can be good. Sets the tone.

Get one or two of the heavyweight names here to talk, toss out some Goat Hill, and you'd draw a crowd.

I think reddit bashers just haven't spent enough time on Reddit. I only read Reddit as a lurker but I have been time and again just delighted at the fractal of subreddits. No matter your curiosity, kink or quirk, there's a small community there for it.

That’s because we’re all possessed with the idea of changing the world. We focus so much on the big picture that we lose track of what’s important in life. We also think that once you get past forties and haven’t done anything important you’re doomed for the rest of your life.

We can’t go back to the park again because we take life (and ourselves) too fucking seriously.

That's giving people too much credit.

99% of the people here aren't heads down in their study for months trying to complete a masterpiece. People are simply asocial and lazy.

Hey some people just want to watch youtube in their underwear and read hacker news. Not everyone is wired to be Mark Zuckerberg, although if they were the world would be totally hilarious.

I've observed the same but interpret it differently.

Life gets more differentiated as you get older. You learn what makes you happy and what doesn't, you experience different situations and react to them, and you make decisions about who you're going to be and what you're going to do. And all of that becomes part of your identity. It's part of your accumulated self-knowledge.

And part of that is perceiving differences in how you see the world vs. how other people see the world.

A banker, a janitor, a nurse, an engineer, and a dropout can all still be friends if they have something in common, and confine their friendship to that thing. I still occasionally get together with my high-school friends, when I happen to be back home, and we've become bankers, janitors, nurses, engineers, and dropouts. But 15 years after graduation, the high school we went to is an increasingly small part of our identities. And it feels constraining to hang out all the time, like you're denying all the other parts of yourself that you've discovered since. It's great to get together for a weekend and reminisce about old times, but it's not something I'd want to do every weekend.

The economic aspects are second-order effects. Yes, this tends to stratify people into economic tiers. But the reason for that is that it's hard to do anything for a significant portion of your life without it becoming part of your identity, and it's hard for a skillset to pay off without doing it for a significant portion of your life. And different skillsets are compensated wildly differently, based on supply & demand.

That only explains half of the picture, though.

The photograph in the linked article explains it quite well to me - regardless of how 'real' it is, there's a picture of a shiny gathering with the dresses and the shiny clothes and the fancy food, and so on.

And there's nothing wrong with that. I love me some good dress-up and the food there looks super yum. But the simple gatherings seem to have disappeared. Outside of family, do people visit just for the sake of visiting anymore?

I think it was the unified purpose, the school catchment area, maybe. That proximity. Everyone is everywhere now. My park is not your park, my pub is not your pub, etc.

I find it tiresome that it becomes hard to just have friends over. Have to negotiate a time, clean the house, get food, and if you're going to a friend's house you're expected to "bring something", etc. Sigh.

Back in college, the rule in the dorms was if your door was open, you were welcoming anyone who wanted to drop in and hang out.

40 years later, I still miss that.

The recapturing of some of this is one of the best things about my job, not because my job is anything really special in that regard, but because I'd spent so much time contracting (alone in a room by myself) or in grad school (same.)

Having an office, and a culture where people would 'drop by' sometimes, either for real work reasons, tenuous work reasons, or purely social, has been a godsend.

Now I'm thinking about how to consciously engineer this given our environmental constraints...

I miss this as well! Stanford still has this and calls it the open door policy

I really hope something like Campus Housing works out. They had a great idea but didnt execute. With the right group of people I'd be super down to live in something like a dorm again.

The 'cleaning the house' especially. At some point adulthood seems to inculcate this notion of formality to visits. It's been universally to my social detriment.

My wife and I use it as an excuse to clean up. We try to keep an active social life, as-is, so the place is generally clean-ish. But during especially busy weeks (or minor sickness, or random bouts of laziness and existential despair), the place can really fall apart.

So one of us will look around in disgust, invite someone over for dinner or drinks or something, and then politely pop in on the other, like "hey honey... I just invited [so-an-so], and they'll be here in an hour".

Suddenly, within 20-30 minutes, the place is spotless.

Hah... this is awful but so true. We go through the exact same thing. We just had overnight houseguests, the place hasn't been this spotless in years. I even had the carpets steamed!

Haha. My wife makes me cancel the invitation.

Do a weekly (or monthly) dinner. They key is consistency (OK an informality: byob, bring something you like, open invite instead of rsvps, etc).

This is spot on.

Jews do this - they have Shabbat every week, and festivals and other things where people live in a community and have to interact.

Christians also have traditional Church attendance and so do Muslims and many other faiths I'm sure. The point is, traditional life revolved around a community. Today, everyone is very individualistic in the USA. They move out and have their own place, not just the men but the women too. The grandparents live alone and then are shipped off to nursing homes while the kids are shipped off to daycares. But it wasn't always like this. In our modern society we are disconnected like never before.

So, the answer to that is very much "yes", but you have to make trade-offs in your life that show you value it. In order to have impromptu visits that fill up the empty spaces in your life, you first need to have empty spaces in your life. That is largely incompatible with filling every moment of your life with work or career advancement.

That group of my high-school friends who are now largely janitors, retail clerks, and dropouts? They get together pretty much every weekend, usually with spur-of-the-moment plans made on Thursday night or Friday morning. My wife often just invites a friend over for Saturday brunch; occasionally I'll wake up and they're chatting downstairs. I remember one time when I was still at Google, I'd gone over to a friend's to play Starcraft, but his roommate was trying out different cellos and he had played the cello in high school, so we ended up with an impromptu cello trio in the living room. Another friend dropped by unannounced, we got the fireplace going, and when the third roommate arrived home, he was like "This is like a scene out of the 19th century."

The thing is, this is largely incompatible with spending long hours at work or doing things in your off hours (applying for jobs, going back to school, learning new programming languages) for career advancement. I haven't had a moment like that (other than ones my wife initiates) since leaving Google for a startup - I suspect my friends (or some subset of them) still do, but I'm often too busy to be worth inviting.

I think that the number of comments here suggesting a technological solution - an app, societal change, whatever - is pretty amusing. Technology is not going to matter. What does matter is making a decision that friendships and relationships are important to you, and seeking out other people who have also made that decision. And accepting the trade-offs that go with that. There are plenty of people who do live like that, but they are largely not the folks on Hacker News.

I think you're absolutely spot on with this. I'm going through a period of change in my personal life at the moment, and I'm definitely going to keep this in mind, so thank you.

One thing I would take issue with is conflating an app with societal change, though. The latter is much much harder. I think that in developed countries we have lost our way a bit.

Work-life balance, to me, would mean that I work hard, and play hard, but that fundamentally work would fit around life. At the moment, life fits around work, for me, and for everyone I know, including those that are really quite well off. And I don't think we are individually choosing this state. Some higher power is, Moloch, I guess.

Oh, I think we absolutely are individually choosing this state. It's just that we're responding to incentives that are basically emergent behavior resulting from the choices of everyone else.

You always have the choice to ignore incentives; that's why they are incentives and not compulsion. But ignoring an incentive means that you accept not getting the benefits that are offered by that incentive. A lot of people forget that they can do this. You don't have to optimize your life to pick up every little goody that comes your way; you always have the option to say "Yes, that's nice, but I care about other stuff more."

There's a very steep reward curve, though. It's not like, a 10% incentive. It's hundreds of percentage points.

Very rough numbers here:

Generic person might be able to earn $50K working 40 hour weeks in their most optimal career (one that uses their skills).

Same person might also be able to earn $25K working 20 hour weeks doing a similar thing.

They could also earn minimum wage with a rota that isn't really under their control much.

But the real 'work-life balance' option, the one in which the tables are turned and someone decides to 'schedule' work for 8pm on a Saturday or whatever because it's free in the diary?

As far as I can tell this just sort of doesn't exist. I mean you could do piecemeal bits and bobs for neighbours, maybe. But a sustainable source of money sufficient to eat and heat, pay for a roof?

An example would be a 24 hour supermarket. The employees could bid to fill slots and the rate they'd charge to cover periods. But it's not set up that way because the capital owners hold all the cards and it'd be less optimal for them. What you get instead, is 'come to work 6pm thursday or you are fired, kthx'.

I agree. There is always a choice, although the shift may be difficult or unsettling, and some people will feel freer to make a change than others. I think one huge component of this is location.

A little while back, I moved with my family from the city to the countryside (the foothills of central Portugal), where there is a growing community of migrants from western cities, living around and alongside the local villagers, who are mostly small-scale subsistence farmers. People call us the Neo Rurals.

Land and living costs are way less than where we came from, which means I can afford to work three days a week, rather than the 5 out of 7 days I was working before. I am fortunate to be able to work remotely (I'm a freelance JavaScript programmer) and to have come from an existing network (the wonderful Brighton, UK). Somehow projects arrive when I just need them (get in touch if you're looking for someone). But people here to do all sorts of work, and often grow food and generate their electricity to lower the base costs.

The door is open. Neighbours' children come by because they want to play. Many people home-educate / unschool. And we do pretty well as a community amusing ourselves, learning from and helping each other.

Uprooting is difficult, but I have never looked back. And it does come with some "hardships", but most of those are really joys.

Doesn't basic income take care of that? The idea being that once companies have to compete with the entire world (as opposed to a few other companies) for your time and attention, flexible hours (and many other changes to the relationship between employees and companies) will become the default.

I hope so.

I try to live in that way, and I try to encourage those around me to live in that way (refusing imbalanced employment conditions). I think if enough people did, we could start to help each other, rather than relying on capital and private property so much.

Basic income is one sort of stepping stone towards that. Ultimately I think the ideal is people actually having real choices, not the huge bias we have towards salaried employment at the moment.

If life were an MMO, then salaried employment would be the cookie cutter build, hourly work would be the odd hybrid, and otherwise you've decided to not bother with your talent tree, and you're just gimping yourself. Can we tweak the rules of the game a bit, or are they just emergent?

We totally can change the rules. We made them up. Most modern modern value systems are rooted in the scarcity mindset - the idea that there isn't enough (of whatever) to go around. The people that created those systems weren't bad, their ideas are just outdated. Now that technology has changed the calculus, and there IS enough to go around, it's just a matter of overcoming the momentum of the old value systems. You're right, basic income is a bridge measure. It demonstrates abundance for the skeptics, and shows us what pretty much full autonomy for every member of a society could look like. I'm not sure what comes after that, but if you've read Manna, the Australia Project as described at the end seems to have a lot of desirable qualities. It's a short read, and well worth reading (and has been on HN a few times, I think). Obviously we're not quite there, but it's not hard to envision if enough smart people were free to work on the various elements of that future, unrestricted by manufactured pressure to pursue more immediately-profitable endeavors.

> What does matter is making a decision that friendships and relationships are important to you, and seeking out other people who have also made that decision.

That is a necessary but not sufficient condition.

I have plenty of time to make friends, but wouldn't be able to make any. Especially as you get older, it gets nearly impossible to approach people. At this point I'm down to a single nearby friend.

If I may make a suggestion, try exploring social hobbies and friends will come. I did meetups for a while and met some cool programmers. After a while, I didn't want to talk software as much in my free time, but one guy invited me out to go swing dancing.

I now work online remotely in Asia and visit different cities to swing dance. Within 2 two weeks trips, I made some good freshman friends in Shanghai and Hong Kong. We still talk online from time to time about the next time we'll meet up.

I am also looking to temper my expectations, as the article suggests. I tried out a couple other styles of dancing and met freshman friends in those scenes. I remember wanting to fit in so much with each new group, and I still feel it with swing dancing friends sometimes. Over time, opportunities to deepen friendships arise. There's a lot that's out of my control.

> If I may make a suggestion, try exploring social hobbies and friends will come. I did meetups for a while and met some cool programmers.

I've tried going to meetups, but it doesn't seem like anyone is interested in being social. Everyone seems to be looking to network or advance professionally somehow.

I never get the vibe that anyone would want to hang out with me. Maybe I'm just not friendly.

Yes, I've met many people who "just want to network." Based on past evidence, less than five percent of the people I met from meetups became longer lasting friends. (Those are probably great odds when compared to my friendship rates in school and college).

I remember going home from some meetups feeling the night was a bust. In retrospect, I would have been less disappointed if I thought of it like dating or job hunting. My goal isn't a 100% match rate. My goal is to find matches that leave me happy.

Maybe I'm doing it wrong then. I'm not aiming for a 100% match rate—I'd be happy with a 1% match rate.

For an entire year, I probably went to a meetup every other week. In that whole time I didn't make a single new friend.

Maybe they just weren't the right ones for you. I also tried many different meet ups before finding the one that stuck with me for over years.

There's no shame in trying that meet up out for a year. I think that's the crux of "don't expect too much too soon." Sounds like it's time to try out another tech meet up, another hobby meet up, or anything else that has potential.

Maybe you should choose meetups for those of your hobbies that are not directly related to your career.

I mean, it is likely that if you are a programmer you'll end up talking about work in a programming or startup meetup.

It will be much harder if it's about boardgames or ultimate frisbee.

> I think it was the unified purpose, the school catchment area, maybe. That proximity.

My high school was super-stratified. The cliques were out of control.

As an adult, I have much more control over my surroundings and have found a place that fits me (it took some time - I've lived in two countries and 7 different cities). At 46, I'm much more comfortable with who I am and liking what I like than when I was 16. Teenagers often try so desperately to fit in that it ends up taking a long time to discover who they really are. BTW, I love how the movie American Beauty addresses this.

These days I have the resources to do what I want to do. That includes eating out with friends, going to baseball games, or just to the park to play with my kids and dog. I think the only time I get the sense of stifling that you describe is when I go to a formal event but that too is an experience I want.

> if they have something in common, and confine their friendship to that thing

What we all have in common is the human condition which is much, much bigger than hobbies, career paths, or political beliefs. We get sick, lose people, fall in love, have children, get better, meet people, and eventually die. Our surface area for meaningful, fulfilling interactions is enormous, but our culture is set up in a such a way that it's easy to forget.

The "human condition" is so common to everybody to make it meaningless as a criterion for hanging out.

Heck, it doesn't even stop people sharing it from killing each other in wars...

The problem is that even with co-workers at the same bank, or one's "society for foo" it's extremely difficult and rare to hangout after a certain age.

There are so many (work and self-imposed) obligations and "obligations" and BS, that it's even difficult to have quality/fun time with one's spouse.

And this certainly cannot be explained away with "the spouse is a tiny part of your current experience/identity".

So I think this answer doesn't cover the actual issue.

And it's not just workload either. Someone else writes below:

>In order to have impromptu visits that fill up the empty spaces in your life, you first need to have empty spaces in your life. That is largely incompatible with filling every moment of your life with work or career advancement.

But the lack of "impromptu visits" is also apparent in people who don't fill every moment of their life with work or career advancement. The killing of community/communal spaces, the advent of 100 TV channels and 8 billion internet/"social" options etc, also kill a lot of such time.

Thank you for this comment. I think it's really hard to pin down.

I don't agree that it's about people 'drifting apart', or 'finding different interests'.

In some sense those are being taken as tautologies, when I don't think they are. Why can't people with different interests hang out?

There's loads to talk about. Our interests are a tiny microscopic portion of the human experience.

In the UK people go out and get stone drunk and then anything becomes a fun topic of discussion. We call it disinhibition. But why are we 'inhibited' to begin with?

This is why I call it 'ego'. I don't think I'm using the term accurately. It's just this idea of pleasing one's self, efficiently, rather than trying to be part of some whole, or just swimming, letting life happen.

Younger we share some excitement, some common libido for things that brings us somewhere for the sake of it (games, places, shops, experience). As we age, we crystallize and what we shared isn't anymore and the need for enjoyment reverts to a smaller, stricter, more selfish need. No more experiment and discovery, more sustaining what our ego thinks is good and what works. With time feeling running faster we have less tolerance for subpar times.

I think it's because mobility is easy in the downward direction -- if the banker and the lawyer chose to become the janitor and the homeless guy, they could do that easily.

However, the banker and the lawyer realize that they have more life choices available if they are nearer to top of the hierarchy, and this directly leads to more obligations -- to maintain their positions, they must fulfill more responsibilities.

More choice leads to more reproductive success.

Q.E.D.

FWIW, my life isn't like this at all. I'm 34 and my friends and I are all professionals.

It was gorgeous in Seattle this week. Monday night I went to a BBQ with 7 of my closest friends. We spent hours on the rooftop deck of their apt building relaxing and shooting the shit. The rest of the deck was shockingly empty for such a nice day.

Tuesday night I went to a different BBQ hosted by other super close friends in their backyard. We spent hours relaxing and eating and having fun with their 4 year old.

Wed I messaged a friend I didn't know that well and we got drinks after work. 3/3 beautiful evenings spent outside with friends! I was happy about this.

I don't mean to judge or brag, just share my experience. I'm finding meaningful connection into my 30s, which I'm thankful for because it's really important to me.

>> I don't mean to judge or brag

It's not necessary to qualify comments like this. :)

Sounds like we all need to move to Seattle. Maybe not too many of us though. :P

I find myself thinking that there's an economic side to all of this. It might just be that my small hometown was less competitive. London feels like it has some sort of illness by comparison. A place to work, not a place to live.

Interesting! I have met some amazingly awesome people in London who I would totally hang out with if I lived there. But they are musicians, not doctors/lawyers/engineers. When I think about it more, most of my good friends come from my musical circles, not my engineering/technical ones. If I didn't have those musical circles, I wonder if I would be nearly as social.

> It's not necessary to qualify comments like this. :)

Thanks for being gracious. :) It bent somebody out of shape though -- the comment got downvoted. Doesn't bother me, but I can see how it could rub someone the wrong way.

> When I think about it more, most of my good friends come from my musical circles, not my engineering/technical ones

Weird, I've had similar luck. My best friends in high school were all music buddies, and I felt closer to them than any of my friends (both technical or otherwise) I've made since then. Makes me want to move somewhere with a better music scene!

Yup, I made more friends in one year as a music major than the following four as a computer science major :)

> I'm finding meaningful connection into my 30s, which I'm thankful for because it's really important to me.

How? I'm genuinely interested. I have basically no idea how people make friends outside of forced closeness, something which is regretfully lacking in the adult world.

My experience is not like that at all. On the contrary, people I know became less and less concerned with keeping an extended social circle and retreated to family.

This retreat in many cases has a lot to do with the refusal to put up with other's annoying behaviour. Family is no peace oasis either, but it's more difficult to defect from it :)

I return to my hometown for holidays and see this effect every year. There are still big groups of acquitances, but they're more homogeneus than what they used to be. I believe there's a big pressure when you're young to have a lot of friends and to fit in. When older we become grumpier and less tolerant of neighbour's faults.

I would not be surprised if most friendships resulted from pressure to fit in. It's healthy to let those types of people go.

> You might be able to get one or two people to do something, but it'll probably mean some sort of sanitized commercial experience

Well perhaps people would hang around at a bus stop or street corner and just chat bollocks but it's occupied by 16-year olds.. ;)

I've been thinking about this lately and my thoughts resonate with yours. My situation has amplified since moving to London a little over a year ago, where I had no friends or family. I've been wanting to go back to a simpler style of friendships like when we were younger.

At the same time I've also missed sports. My solution was to get back into skateboarding. I haven't skated in ten years but you'd be surprised by your muscle memory. I got all the gear and headed to the nearest skatepark and was quickly approached by the local skaters. I met a lot of great people and skated with them all evening. Haven't had so much fun in a while. Can't wait to go back.

That may be true, but I've found that I grew up making mostly the wrong friends, each of whom was more irritating, status obsessed, narcissitic, etc as life went on. Only like 2 people made it through the filter, and I'm making healthier friends these days, but I say the ease of disconnection in modern society is a blessing, not a curse. Shitty people get left alone? Fine with me lol.

What is the point of all that career advancement if you can't spend time with a social circle you care about?

It's a bit like that cartoon... humans sacrifice their health to make $$ and spend $$ to get it all back... humans wish they'd be older and then wish they'd be younger... etc.

I have some anecdotal perspective to offer in regards to where we tend to hang out when we’re young (reasons vary for us aged folk). One of the big reasons we end up at parks, or bus stops, or 7-11 parking lots, or wherever as teenagers is because we generally don't have the financial or social independence to go anywhere else to enjoy ourselves without the "burden" of adults.

At 16, there aren't many places to go with other people your age to just hang out and socialize. You're too young for a bar. Restaurants are expensive. Malls are lame. Maybe a diner, but that's only 4-5 of you at a time, and you'll probably need to order something. And this can be a burden for a diner owner for taking up tables for the cost of 4 cups of coffee an hour.

Your parents can go to bars and restaurants and each others houses and socialize. But as a teenager, going to someone's house generally requires the permission of other adults, and so on, which isn’t something you can plan around independently. And in our teenage years, we're generally trying to figure out what this life thing is without the parental supervision. It's difficult to explore independence with our parents within earshot.

I saw a lot of this first-hand, even beyond my immediate peers, as a DJ throughout my teenage years. When my peers were looking to hang out, they came to me for options. If I couldn't provide directly, I would generally know who could. It was usually someone's house / apartment whose parents worked 16-20 hours per day (like my mother). My own friends and I would try to rent places out to throw gatherings, and we never had trouble finding people to fill the room.

This was all about socializing and having a place to go. We needed these places to go without the pressures of our home lives and adults therein. And when we couldn't find a place, we resorted to waterfronts, parks, street corners, etc. Wherever we could find to just be ourselves with our peers.

In college, for the first time for many, we have our own places: our dorms. Add to that more responsibility (for most), and a lack of income (for most), and what better place to hang out with your peers than hopping from dorm-to-dorm? Why go to a park or hang around at a bus stop when you can go one floor down to another dorm? You’re no longer required to go out into the cold to socialize with your peers.

In adulthood, there are plenty of places to go, though most of them cost money. So in early adulthood, we enjoy our freedom to go anywhere and just "be". So it's bars, and restaurants, and wherever. We spend what little we make enjoying the newfound freedom to go anywhere. Sure, we _can_ go to the park, be we don't _have_ to go to the park. We can afford to go somewhere else and enjoy each-other's company, much unlike the previous decade.

This is an attitude I see from many of my friends and I fundamentally disagree because I think so many of those 'other places' are stifling and non-inclusive.

A restaurant is a place where speaking more loudly than a certain amount will earn you ire from others. You're surrounded by other groups that aren't your group. There's a prescribed format. It's a ritual, you know? There's a sandbox out there, and the format is 'let's go and do X, for X hours, and that's it'.

I hate restaurants, and cinemas, and cafes, and stuff. Just give me a roof and we'll make the fun. But the roof doesn't exist, because as a society, we decided that capitalism and the building of private castles is how it's going to work. Railing against that as an individual is terribly hard.

The problem with it, is that if we decide as a society that these paid, gated experiences are how we're going to socialise, then everyone who doesn't work hard enough is excluded. That's how we get things like socio-economic groups. If you socialise in restaurants, then your friend circle reduces to the people who can afford to socialise in restaurants.

If it's non-deliberate, then it's sad. If it is deliberate, then it's the 'ego thing' that I tried to speak of in the first post - it's about us not realising that we are humanity, we don't need to battle each other and assert dominance, we can just be, you know? Individual, yes, but one, too.

We need public spaces and gatherings because otherwise the ultimate endgame is that people retreat into ever-smaller niche groups until we just sit on our own.

I don't know where you are or where you're from, but this reads to me like you'd really enjoy New York City. Not everyone likes big cities, of course, and not all big cities will match my explanation. But bare with me for a moment.

I spent the majority of my twenties and some of my thirties in NYC, and it does match up very well with what you're saying. It definitely matches the habits I was alluding to as well.

I've spent many a night on different roof-tops around the city. Most people have tiny apartments, so we tended not to visit one another, except for the occasional golden jewel of apartment - rooftop access. During the summer, there's almost always someone throwing a rooftop party, and we visited often (or had our own).

Likewise, the parks are everywhere. They're immense, amazing, well-maintained, and well-visited by people from all walks. I've spent day-after-day in Union Square, Prospect Park, Central Park, whatever that park is along the entire West-Side-Highway, and Battery Park (amazing sunsets). Sometimes just to people-watch and sometimes to meet up with friends as we figure out our next adventure, but always an inviting place to be.

There was also a trend in NYC - as I was leaving a few years ago - to start replacing major streets with pedestrian parks [1] (including Broadway in times square!), which I was 100% all for. Most locals I've known have been huge fans of getting cars out of Manhattan and making the streets more pedestrian-friendly, whether it be through tolls or just plain closing off major thoroughfares.

And honestly, after living in 4 major cities around the US, there is nothing like going for a long walk around NYC. I'm in Chicago now, and walking more than 1.5 miles can get a bit tedious. I still do it in the warmer months, but it's still very much a driving city. In NYC, 1.5 miles is always interesting. You'll pass through three or more distinct and lively neighborhoods along the way. There are so many people out, so many buskers and people enjoying cafes and parks, that you _want_ to walk everywhere. There are plenty a night, while I was single and dieting, that I'd walk all the way home after a night out - through Lower Manhattan, over the Williamsburg bridge, and about another mile to Bushwick. Loved it every time.

At any rate, my post wasn't in disagreement. It was merely an anecdotal description of _why_ we end up in commercial establishments in our younger adult lives. Overall I agree with you, and what I'm explaining above is that I've seen some form of what you seem to see as an ideal in action, and I'm an enormous fan of it.

1: http://www.pps.org/reference/broadway-boulevard-transforming...

>I've found that as time goes on, people are far more concerned with (...) projecting an image, etc

Compared to teenagers?

>The community takes a back seat to economic needs, it seems. Something like that. I'm not sure.

This is actually a phenomenon which, according to Karl Polayni's Aristotle Discovers the Economy, roughly began in Greece shortly after the inventions of the alphabet and coinage which helped lay the framework for a more global economic system.

Traditionally tribal or "uncivilized" economies produced goods and services primarily for the local consumption of the clan, community, or family.

But soon after, production for consumption shifted to production for exchange as such societies became less "tribal" and more "civilized" via increasing literacy and "the market system".

With this phenomenon began the shift from the tribal values of family and community over the individual to civilized societies' value of the individual over the community.

Aristotle warned that this dynamic would destroy the autonomy and connectedness of the family and community and create a dangerous dependence on foreign goods.

I feel it's like that too. We live to work and forget anything outside it. Maybe a bit off topic, but I like this piece from a cartoon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fy9TsGOswVA.

> "People with higher I.Q.s were less content when they spent more time with friends. Psychologists theorize that these folks keep themselves intellectually stimulated without a lot of social interaction, and often have a long-term goal they are pursuing."

Therein lies the rub. Having friends makes you happier, as long as your friends are intellectually stimulating.

I've been trying desperately for years to make some intellectually stimulating friendships, and it's quite difficult.

In part, I think, because I am a generalist, and most smart people are specialists. As a result, I don't run in the same circles as they do.

When I do make a friend who is smart, chances are they will end up moving across country for a new job, or will disappear into their research, and I'm back at square one.

Are there any other generalists who have trouble making friends with other smart people, because they all seem to be specialists?

Do you have any advice for generalists in need of smart friends?

To start with, Put contact info in your hacker news profile. Then when you say interesting things, folks who are a bit more shy can contact you directly. Also reach out to those who interest you. Who knows, some of these brilliant generalists might have time to chat.

having contacts online isn't really the same thing as a "friend", right?

Friendships don't materialize out of thin air, you have to start somewhere. If you would like to become friends with people on HN, posting contact info in your profile sounds like a good place to start.

There's no reason a single email can't turn into a solid long term friendship if things click. Some of my closest friends live across the country from me after meeting online.

I met half a dozen very good IRL friends first through online discussion (though not on HN).

The thing about talking to people online is that you can use the medium to agree to meet up in person as well.

I found that going to talks and events to meet people can be extremely effective. I love living near a university, for example, to go to public colloquia and talks — you meet the most interesting people there, who often share the same interests as you. Going to a Papers We Love talk [0] can be a great opportunity as well.

Of course, this is really only available to people who live in a large metropolis, particularily if you live in the Bay Area (if you're interested in science and technology in particular).

[0] http://paperswelove.org

Such a simple thing, yet it hadn't occurred to me. Thanks for mentioning it.

I have definitely experienced this, but till now hadn't had the words to describe it. Thank you stranger!

Don't limit yourself to "intellectually stimulating". Lots of people have something to teach us about life if we open ourselves to them and go beyond "specialist, PhD etc.".

I agree with this. Everyone has something unique to offer, and not everyone enjoys philosophizing over "deep" conversation topics. (Although I will admit it can get annoying at times when someone spends ten minutes listing all the coupons they clipped from this week's Kroger advertisement...)

>and not everyone enjoys philosophizing over "deep" conversation topics.

Then what are you agreeing with? The GP is specifically looking for people that do. If he/she didn't want intelligent conversations, he/she wouldn't have complained about not being able to find intelligent friends.

I can't stand either of those kind of topics, fwiw. Intelligent conversation doesn't necessarily involve having opinionated debates about arm chair hypotheticals.

Exactly, my favourite types of conversation are usually about some specific thing that is not necessarily "deep" at all, be it a programming language feature or the troubled life of some historical character, or the reasons behind the prevalence of some observed phenomenon (like the colour spectrums of movie posters, say). When discussing something fairly simple with an intelligent generalist, it's usually really stimulating not because they have some deeper perspective, but because you get carried away and stumble upon new ideas and crazy thoughts that you would never have come across on your own. Discussing philosophy proper is usually quite boring and not stimulating at all - that's what you have books for imo.

The thing is... I have to find something interesting about folks and the activities going on to even be motivated to keep up interaction. I need something to be curious about. I can learn a lot about life by reading and random conversations with random folks. This is one of the greatest things about being an immigrant in language courses, and one of the reasons I'll do another solo trip to Amsterdam - people open up in coffee shops (though I understand that is partially because I'm female).

That all said, poplular culture often remains strange and unusual to me, along with the things people do with their time and the things people seem to like to talk about. I once googled who the Kardashians were because it came up in small talk and folks wouldn't believe that I quit watching television (outside of the random show). I watch conspiracy theories for fun while working on artwork, which is also incredibly boring for a great deal of folks to talk about. I don't have the formal education to keep up with some topics - for example, I read HN mostly because I think it is important to know some stuff about these sorts of topics and because I have great hope in technology, but not because I'm personally involved (and I learn quite a bit, thank you every random one of you).

I really wish it were as simple as you say, but forming anything long-lasting with some of this stuff has proven to be a futile thing. I'll take the random friends I wind up getting and be happy with that.

The journal article cited for this indicates not that smart people are happier with smart friends, but that "More intelligent individuals actually experienced higher life satisfaction with lower frequency of contact with friends." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26847844

A lot of the meta-articles seem to be hypothesizing that intelligence could be an evolutionary adaptation for dealing with novel circumstances, and intelligent people are therefore driven to attack these challenges -- thus making them unhappy when they are distracted.

This meshes with my experience -- while I certainly enjoy my highly intelligent friends, I have not developed time-consuming relationships with them, because we are often focused on our own particular highly specific challenges.

The two ideas are not mutually exclusive. If stimulating friends make you happy, and the average friend is less than stimulating, then spending more time with your friends may make you unhappier.

I would love to hang out with people who are directly mentally stimulating but even people who are less stimulating could be good friends if the activities are productive. (Contributing to physical and mental health, confidence, sustainable self-induced highs, etc.)

> More intelligent individuals actually experienced higher life satisfaction with lower frequency of contact with friends

Does the article imply causation or just correlation? If the latter, I would assume the causation is the opposite - happier people need other people less, because they're happier even by themselves.

this. if a person cannot be happy on their own, with only their body and mind present, then I believe they are not really truly happy. quite a few people I know claim happiness, very few actually are.

I don't mean flashes of happiness caused which happen in everyone's life, but stable, balanced feel that gets cannot be easily disrupted and rather quickly returns back.

Always looking for interesting intelligent people, check my profile out and see if you think I might be interesting

Sounds like you might be interesting :)

Thanks. I actually added contact info in there this time. Whoops.

You have inspired me to fill in more profile information.

Don't forget contact info, which I just realized I neglected to insert in my own lol

You could also add your location, for people interested in meeting you in real life.

Good point. Added.

> I've been trying desperately for years to make some intellectually stimulating friendships, and it's quite difficult.

It used to be easy, until Google killed the social aspect of Google Reader.

I will forever remain bitter about this.

NewsBlur doesn't have as large of a community as Reader did, but it has similar social features and I find that comments are generally high-quality. I recommend checking it out if you haven't found a good replacement for Reader yet.

(Suggested as someone who was similarly disappointed at the death of Reader. I tried a couple of alternatives but eventually settled on NewsBlur.)

I use NewBlur but never tried the social features. How does this community work for you?

I pretty much just use it as an RSS reader, but that's how I used Reader back in the day. Sometimes I do read the comments left by users though. I've experimented with using the "Blurblog" for sharing, but I generally prefer using G+ for social.

NewsBlur is good, as are its community members, and I'm happy to be a paying customer. However, the difference in community size is certainly notable. Similarly, only three of my friends making the jump, out of two dozen. We practically never have discussions about anything again.

I think I'm their main source of social shares now, tbh.

Join Google.

IPA vs. Lager

> Do you have any advice for generalists in need of smart friends?

I'm a generalist in need of smart friends too :(. That said, I've had some success with helping to create (and now running) a local hackerspace - most people who hang out at such places are usually pretty smart, so you have one half of your criterion met. So maybe check out if there's a hackerspace in your town, and go see what kind of people come to it?

Also, a big reason why I'm hanging out on HN is because I get the chance to read (and sometimes even engage with) smart people with broad areas of expertise :).

I could have written this comment above. One of the problems lies in the fact that "smart" means different things to different people. Firstly, it usually seems to take on the meaning of hard-science smart and, with that, one often finds specialists. I live in a city where every other person I meet literaly has a PhD (or two) but what am I going to talk about with them regarding particle physics or string theory?

If I were to call myself smart, I'd say I'm humanities smart, ie a generalist, ie utterly and insatiably curious. How many others in life have I met like me? Maybe one. That's it, and he's a DN so I don't get to see him much.

We also have to factor in lifestyle. I'm a VA and thus I've moved many times in my life so this doesn't help with the situation. For the last decade, I've accepted way less pay and less hours so that I can have the free time necessary to learn all the things I want to learn - long-term goals, if you will. As a trade-off (and I gladly do it), I live abroad because that's when quality of life goes way up and cost of living goes way down (most of the non-native English speaking world already lives this way, IMO).

In the end, I'm curious enough to take up my own free time, but since I'm also not a shut-in, I seek out ways to socialize with interesting people. The kicker is that most of them are travelers/expats, so they move too.

Recently I met a guy who is both nice and available (even though he moved away the other day), so we'd hang out quite a lot. He didn't have to share my interests or be a generalist or anything. He just had to be agreeable and available, and this surprised me a bit, though I'm not sure why. Not be an a-hole and say "I'm free, let's do something" can be a powerful motivator.

I know people keep trying (unsuccessfully) to make startups that help you "find friends", but it would be nice if one of these actually took off.

I currently live in an area where I find it somewhat difficult to make new friends, and I'm not entirely sure why that's the case. Generally speaking, the people where I live are more interested in football/beer than technology/startups, but I actually don't think that is the reason for my difficulty — I am good friends with some football fanatics, and there are some technically-minded people who I can't stand. (And I certainly don't mean to imply that there's anything wrong with football and beer — I merely point out that these are not interests of mine!)

Honestly, I can't quite figure out what causes me to mesh well with some people and not others. I get along great with my girlfriend and my sister, and I can talk to them for hours even though neither is interested in science or technology.

And I don't think it's morals/values either — I'm friends with people whose political views are completely opposed to my own.

If someone can figure out what actually causes people to "click" with one another, then I think a startup for making friends might actually be successful.

I think/hope my start up, Krewe (https://www.gokrewe.com), has found the right formula. I believe the key elements are access and comfort. Krewe places people into a group with five of their peers, making it comfortable to hang out at first. You don't have to single anyone out, it works kind of how things worked in your youth. And everyone lives within a half mile radius, so it's really convenient to meet up often.

As you say, having lots of stuff in common isn't usually the defining factor in what makes people "click." I think most people can get along with pretty much anyone, so long as they spend enough time together. When you're in school, that's built in since you have to show up to class everyday. Krewe makes it possible to hang out with your group everyday since everyone's within walking distance and can get together for a quick beer or whatever.

Cool idea. Just signed up!

Good idea. I signed up for fun. No one else in my group yet though. Too bad the network effect is so hard to overcome.

Yep. It's still very new.

I thought this was a cool idea, and so I just signed up, but I was so alarmed by the process that I made an HN account to address this here.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but you drop people into randomly assigned groups of people who live within a certain distance without giving the user a chance to screen that group for people they already may know and need to avoid?

This is such an obvious potential problem that it didn't occur to me that your service wouldn't account for it. In my case it's at least not a dangerous situation, although I'm betting the other person in my new group is really not going to be pleased to get this particular notification email. But I imagine overlap will be a problem, particularly when your userbase is still small.

I have to ask--are there any women working at your company? Anyone over 25?

This may seem like a nuisance question to you, but for many women I know (and for myself), the inability to screen potential groups is an immediate dealbreaker. It's a safety issue at it's most extreme, but it's also just common sense. For many women this is an absolute dealbreaker in a way men might not understand.

Thank you for very much for your feedback. I really appreciate it.

Yes, Krewe does drop you into a group as soon as you sign up and you don't get to see who's in it. Keep in mind that we never give ANYONE your location or email address. You also have the choice to leave the group right away and join a new group and you have the ability to vote people out of a group.

But I strongly believe the platform simply won't work if people are able to pick and choose who they want to be in a group with. It's not hard to imagine that men will only want to be in a group with attractive women. If people can choose, then they'll only choose "the best."

I believe that the issues you raised apply to essentially anything in life. Every time you go to the grocery story, you run the risk of bumping into someone you don't like. If you go on Tinder, you can come across your ex. If you join a recreational kickball league, you could be put on a team with your arch nemesis. Krewe doesn't make you interact with anyone, it just give you the opportunity to do so. You should always meet up with new people in a safe, public space.

With that said, I will be making some small changes that I hope will help address your concerns.

I'm struggling to figure out OP's context (not sure why they're not just saying it) but one thing I can come up with is restraining orders.

It doesn't seem too outrageous to me that the use case of 'have been in a neighbourhood for a while and already have enemies' is just outside of the scope of the program, though. It has far more utility for people who have just moved to a new town and have no contacts at all.

I witnessed an incident of domestic violence involving the other person in my group. I don't want to go into more detail than that for reasons that should be obvious.

I disagree with your limited use case. IME there are many stages of life where you might need to refresh or replenish your friend group. Aside from moving to a new place, people complain about the difficulty of making friends after college, when their friends get married or have kids, if they're stuck in a job without peers, after a divorce, etc etc etc.

"Picking and choosing" is not remotely the same thing as "screening," and that you conflate the two indicates that you either didn't read my comment in good faith or you missed the point by an almost insurmountable margin.

I'd urge you to listen to the needs of your users. You managed to dismiss this out of hand in a way that implies you haven't thought much about women at all. Obviously you don't have to, and you wouldn't be alone there. But this is quite literally a case of a woman giving you feedback about something that many (if not most, by another large margin) women consider vitally important. (The response amongst my group of friends have so far ranged from "unbelievable" to "Jesus Christ.") Do what you want with that information, but don't dismiss it as "wrong" or irrelevant because you believe it applies to all areas of life. You don't have to care about female users, but know that it's obviously a choice.

ETA: in response to the comments below:

1. No one suggested that risk should be completely eliminated, or indeed that this was possible. You're responding to a straw man argument. Which...also doesn't seem in good faith.

2. If you don't understand that someone may screen a group for potential danger without applying further filters ("picking and choosing"), I'm...not sure what else to say except that you obviously have never found yourself in such a position. It seems trivially obvious to me that a user who has already self selected as someone who is looking for a service to match them up with new people would be perfectly capable of deciding to continue in a group after they'd screened it for potential dangers, since that's what they signed up for. People are capable of moderation. In this case, I don't want to be in a group with someone I've seen in a violent situation, and I would rather they hadn't gotten that automatic notification email, either.

This is really very basic stuff.

Please trust that I did read your comment carefully, agree with the issues you raised, and am working to resolve them.

I sent you an email, with an apology, and my plan to fix the problem. I want all my users to feel completely comfortable and safe using the platform, and will respond swiftly to any issues raised. I believe there are certain unfortunate risks that people, and women especially, must deal with in this day in age. I will do whatever possible to minimize those risks on Krewe, but I don't know if they can be completely elimated.

Edit: Response to stonecraftwolf's edit:

I don't know what else to tell you. I've apologized. I've said that I agree with you and your point is valid. I've said that I understand the danger you're referring to and why people would want to avoid being in a group with certain people. I've said that I'm working on a fix. If there's something more I can do, then I'll do it because I want this to work for you and for anyone.

I think part of the problem here is the fallacy that if you can't eliminate a problem entirely then it's not your responsibility at all. This seems to be a common approach for some tech companies that deal with social interactions, and it's obviously convenient to simply wash your hands of something, but it's an abdication of responsibility. it's also just not how life works. No risk can be completely eliminated; it doesn't mean we don't take whatever steps are available to us to mitigate those risks anyway. People wear seat belts, they buy insurance, they use all sorts of tools to help them mitigate risk. If you make the decision not to provide your users with the tools they need to mitigate risk on your platform (or wherever), you are very much making a decision about what experiences and what users you value. In our current culture, that often means it's a hostile place for women. Again, that's a choice, but obviously it has consequences.

Baron, I've read your responses again, and I do think you are sincerely trying. But I also think you have massively missed the point. I don't think you are unique in this respect; in fact, I think you have a lot of company, and that's...kind of the problem. I appreciate whatever efforts you can make, and I really hope that you can try to seek out feedback from as many kinds of users as possible.

I think we may have cross-posted our replies/edits. Honestly, I think the best you can do is approach it with an open mind, which you seem to be doing now. A big part of my irritation was the dismissiveness that I think originates in the common fallacy that I described in my other reply. But it's also...I mean. People--women, especially--have been talking about these sorts of problems with social networks for as long as they've existed. I think if you want your app to be useful for everyone, you have to consider the experiences of...everyone. The only way I've found to do that in my own work is by talking to as many kinds of people as possible, and asking them specific questions where appropriate. I've tried to provide you with some of those answers already, but I would encourage you to keep asking questions.

Can you give an example of an organization that does this screening process properly, as a role model?

My church, grocery store, and local bars, to give a few examples, don't give me an advance lists of attendees to scren before I show up somewhere. If I see someone I can't be near, one of us has to leave. Thankfully, this collision happens only occasional

You've done an admirable job responding to drive-by badgering with open-minded interest, patience, and kindness. Kudos to you.

I think he's got a good point. In what circumstance is 'screening' or 'Picking and choosing' in the context of his app not the same thing? What you propose would completely destroy his app for the reasons he already mentioned in his post. Have you not read his comment in good faith?

The issue that stonecraftwolf is raising regarding the platform is not at all unreasonable. I think there is a change that I could make that would allow users to leave a group with people they know they don't want to be in with before those people are notified that they've joined. So I'm going to be making that change and I think it will make Krewe better.

I find that a reasonable response, but people also join groups after you. So who gets to see who first? Why does only the new person joining get to screen the existing people and not vice-versa? Or if both happen, how?

People have highly evolved mechanisms to decide who they want to be friends with. I doubt that any kind of software as simplistic as dropping people into random groups will work. Yes, people will make a choice if you allow them to, and remember, their primary choice is wether or not to use Krewe.

I know that not everyone is going to will be able to get along with who they're placed with initially. But I think that's fine for a couple reasons:

1) I didn't like some of my best friends at first, but the more I spent time with them, the more we influenced each other and the more we were able to get along. I'm sure that's the case with a lot of people, and that situation will happen with Krewe.

2) A group of friends is a situation where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Even if you don't like any particular person very much, you can still really enjoy being with the group. You get to help build a culture and a communal identity.

3) Krewe doesn't end when you're matched with your group. You eventually get to expand your and make dozens of friends in your neighborhood. So even if you don't like they people you're with at all, and if you stick with it, you'll get to meet people you will like.

4) People get to have multiple friends. One of the great thing about Krewe is that hanging out with your group takes almost no effort. As long as you don't totally detest them, you should find it enjoyable to go out and do stuff with them.

I don't think anyone can design some sort of algorithm that will match you to someone who will inevitably be your best friend. You have to actually meet someone and get to know them before you can determine if you want to hang out with them.

I had an idea which was related to this. My idea wasn't to make new friends, but rather to figure out how you can be relevant to people you already know and grow that into deeper, better friendships. Honestly, I don't know how I can help my friends sometimes and feel they don't know what I'm struggling with, working on, etc.

Marketing page: http://www.littlequest.me

I had to put the app on hold because my friend dropped out on the project. It was in beta for a bit. Never officially launched. Still I hope to re-write it from scratch later this year.

There used to be a place in the Bay Area called "a clean well lighted place for books" which was a book store (of course) but it was also a pretty decent place to hang out. Of course talking and reading were fun (sort of a library without the librarian shhing you all the time) but I always wanted to create "A clean well lighted place to hack." which was more tech oriented.

Of course you would need something to hack on and I figured a wall of various embedded systems connected together in various ways so that you would have write code on the outer ones to talk to the inner ones etc.

What we got though were maker spaces, which when they work have a pretty cool vibe but sometimes it's like hanging out with a bunch of ghosts or something. All going about their business, not joining in or starting conversations etc. That was why I thought an ice breaker type activity like the wall of systems would be an interesting idea. Sort of like putting a puzzle out on the table at a dinner party. A safe reason to be hanging out.

Some day I keep thinking I'll build something like that.

"A safe reason to be hanging out."

That really cuts to the heart of it -- I've always had a 'disability' where I am immensely social if I have an 'excuse' and just abysmal without one. Seeding the environment somehow would make all the difference for me; wonder to what degree it's generalizeable?

For example, I like hiking. But it's not enough of an excuse for me to be social.

> I always wanted to create "A clean well lighted place to hack." which was more tech oriented.

Isn't this exactly a hacker space? Well...besides the clean part.

Yes, but why would I want to go to a hacker space, I have plenty of toys at home.

The excuse to go to the bookstore was to see what new books had come in.

Since this is in the comment thread of The Science of Making Friends...to share your toys and make friends?

The bookstore provided extra reasons why someone might go there other than just to explicitly meet people. People do have different personality types [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraversion_and_introversion

There are two ways in which the bookstore differed from the current implementation of hacker spaces; ad-hoc local usage (book browsing), and commercial activity (book buying).

The hacker spaces I've been too have all shared a common "mode" which is "bring your stuff and we'll work in the same room." The allure being the social aspects and the interactions with other people interested in your space. But that has two problems, generally "moving" your space from where you work to the hacker space (for small embedded projects that is really hard), and for software projects they aren't necessarily "shared" any better in a social context other than IRC.

Hence the idea of the 'hack wall' which would be some common infrastructure that everyone would be able to see and work with (from a distance on their computers) and a common understanding of the opportunity and constraints. My thesis is that this is what the jigsaw puzzle does as a party, anyone can share in working on it, skilled or unskilled. At a conference I attended there was a similar sort of idea with "craft sticks" (aka popsicle sticks) and hot glue guns, but I think the need to be "artsy" was intimidating some people.

In my imagination the wall would be constructed somewhat like sections in a garden railroad might be, where each square would have some standard requirements, like power on the corners, 3.3v data busses, RS-423 connections, and maybe a serial port. And you could put squares together using something like 80/20 extrusions, then jumper across to the "standard" connectors, and each square would have a page in a local gitlab server which described its makeup. So to talk to an inner square you would have to create interfaces from the outer squares (which might all have a RasPi on them) to get to the inner squares.

I've only been to two hacker spaces, one in SF and one in HK. Both had hardware there to hack on, workshops for using various hardware tools, workshops on security, biohacking, etc. I preferred my own hardware, but I found the communal hardware and others projects fascinating.

I also wasn't too productive, but that's because I was busy meeting people and checking out their work.

I keep having the idea of setting up a community Linux server: you have to be in a certain geographic region to get a shell account. I think it'd be a fun way to meet people, in a classic hacker setting.

Having gotten "old" by some definitions, I've increasingly experienced the "friend problem". The article seemed to be addressing a "non-old" segment of the population, so I think it's appropriate to offer a few observations from a different perspective.

It's not just me of course, even my very friendly wife notices dwindling friendships despite putting a lot of energy into keeping them going. We often ask each other "why is that?", but so far neither of us has a clue.

The circle diminishes gradually, incrementally, the loss is one by one. Friends known for decades die, develop dementia, or move two thousand miles away to be near family.

Friends are people and don't always change for the better. It's puzzling and painful when long-standing friends grow "weird" and unfriendly. It happens, no way to explain it, no known illness or infirmity removes them, just another kind of loss to grasp.

Losses of such kinda are truly irreplaceable. Sure making new friends is wonderful and necessary but never quite the same. Thankfully a few stalwart friends are still around.

Experts all agree having more friends is better, thing is, starting new friendships is a constant and steep challenge in later life. We find opportunity is sparse, contemporaries hesitant to take up the offer, or distracted by a plethora of family, health, and economic demands. The experts aren't saying how to solve these issues.

If there is a key it must be the willingness to be persistent, not give up the effort to enrich the network of connectedness. Here and there people do respond, and a relationship slowly begins to form.

>* It's not just me of course, even my very friendly wife notices dwindling friendships despite putting a lot of energy into keeping them going. We often ask each other "why is that?", but so far neither of us has a clue. The circle diminishes gradually, incrementally, the loss is one by one. Friends known for decades die, develop dementia, or move two thousand miles away to be near family.*

Well, turns out you do have a very pragmatic clue!

    If there is a key it must be the willingness to be
    persistent, not give up the effort to enrich the
    network of connectedness. Here and there people do
    respond, and a relationship slowly begins to form.

I think that's 100% right. I've lived in NYC for almost 10 years and the sad reality is that people come/go frequently. I've found persistence to be the only consistent factor in building all the friendships over those years.

Yes you need to click with someone, but we determine that within 5 minutes of talking to a new person. A lot of people make the effort to build a new friendship, but get too discouraged from a lack of reciprocation. 5 no's in a row can definitely signal "not interested" (ha) but a lot of people are interested they just need more of a push.

It does come down to how badly you want to build that new friendship, but I think a lot of people are just not persistent enough at the beginning tbh.

For all the negative things folks have been saying on here about SF (expensive, etc.) there's a huge positive that overshadows all of it for me:

I've made more new friends in the last 3 years since I moved to SF than, I'd honestly say, my previous decade living in NYC. I'm 37 now and feel like I have more of a community than in college.

I think the key to finding real friends and friendships is to be in a place where you're going to be surrounded by the kind of people you WANT to be friends with. It doesn't involve over-thinking or forcing it: I'm a 30-something dude who loves tech and being outside. There are a LOT of people like that in SF. I figured that out within a week of visiting 3 years ago, so I moved here.

Say what you will about monoculture, but it sure made it easy and fun to find a community of people I liked (and vice versa).

Strange. I had the opposite experience.

I made more friends in NYC in 2 years than real friends in SF in 4. That's not to blame people, because hey, it takes two to tango and my behavior sabotaged my own success. But even though I am in tech, I still never felt comfortable in the monoculture of SF than while in NY.

Interesting data point - thanks for sharing.

Tell me more: how did you meet and make friends in NYC?

In SF - I find there's a more intimate social scene -- more dinner parties than bar nights, so easier to have meaningful interactions. Maybe I'm just seeing the product of my own growing up...

I haven't been invited to any dinner parties with strangers to become friends with. My existing friends invite me to dinner parties.

Wondering too, how did you make friends in NYC? I'm finding it difficult.

One of the best methods is recreational, organized sports. One good example is ZogSports. A lot of people sign up alone and I think the team sports and group interaction really help form the bonds early.

Slightly different point, but I took the less beaten road of moving to the Valley instead of SF, and made a lot of friends here compared to everywhere else I've been (grew up just north of NYC, have lived in Illinois and the DMV). There are a lot of good hard-working people here in the Bay Area who aren't necessarily obsessed with tech on their off-hours, or even working in tech (two good friends are a teacher and a Stanford post-doc for example).

Another thing that contributes to this is the massive influx of people moving to SF. There's so many people looking for friends that they're easy to find. I think this would be tougher in other cities without the same influx.

Yeah I think this is true. Also means that when the influx cools (inevitably) things will be tougher in SF :/

I'm more recently a believer that the best way to make friends as a guy is to be in an environment where you make loose connections but have long-term repeated interactions. In short, join a club. Work is mildly effective at this but because of other factors not as good as a club. Work-related meetup groups aren't as awesome for it either - it should be more like a side interest so it feels more like play. It doesn't even have to be a club that aligns with your true core passions, just something you enjoy enough and have a good chance of running into the same people semi-frequently. After a few months you've increased your odds of finding a new friend massively.

I worked on a boat in the middle of the ocean for many years. I've been grounded for the last few years and tried to make friends. The experiment has been a massive waste of time and energy. I did so much for so many people trying to be nice and helpful and got so little in return. From an economic point of view, I'm completely self reliant and don't need anything from anyone else. I invested so much in other people and I got nothing back.

There is one case where I watched some guy's dog for a weekend, took someone else's boat into the ocean to save him when his engine died, helped him move all this uncles' stuff after the uncle committed suicide, go drinking with him downtown even though I didn't want to go out, ect.. I moved into a new apartment and needed help putting up new blinds. He kept making excuses to not help me even though he is a contractor. From now on, I don't help other people. I work, make money, and if I need help, I'll pay a stranger. I'm fine with that.

I've grown convinced it is a myth that we need friends.

I have found that "giving" with the expectation of getting something in return is just wrong headed. Give because you want to give. Of course you have to be careful of the takers. Friend of mine for many years was moving, he called me and asked me to help. I said "Roy, you are worth 10 million bucks, go pay someone to help you!" and he did. There are endless supplies of good people in the world. But it takes effort, and sometimes you are rejected. Live with it and move on.

When I was really young I lived in a small town and things were tight financially for most people. I guess helping each other when someone needed something was a not some virtuous thing but rather a form of currency. Hey, can you help wire the electric to the shack in the back yard. Sure, can your daughter watch my boys tonight. And, it continues like this.

I disagree. I think there is a reasonable expectation that someone who is a contractor who consistently asks for large favors to help for a couple hour to put up blinds.

I don't need friends.What we see in movies and the media is a myth, once again, an unobtainable expectation.

So there is something called The Ben Franklin effect, [0] which basically says that people are more likely to befriend/like you if you ask them to do you a big favor rather than the other way around.

The psychological explanation is that people will smooth the cognitive dissonance between their indifference and/or antipathy to you and the fact that they have actually done a favor for you by revising their opinion of you.

Of course asking a favor from someone who is indifferent or slightly hostile toward you may only confirm their misgivings, and I've never tried such a strategy myself, but I have read that such favor-seeking often works.

In the Wikipedis link, Franklin is quoted from his autobiography as follows:

-------

"Having heard that [a rival legislator] had in his library a certain very scarce and curious book, I wrote a note to him, expressing my desire of perusing that book, and requesting he would do me the favour of lending it to me for a few days. He sent it immediately, and I return'd it in about a week with another note, expressing strongly my sense of the favour. When we next met in the House, he spoke to me (which he had never done before), and with great civility; and he ever after manifested a readiness to serve me on all occasions, so that we became great friends, and our friendship continued to his death.

-------

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Franklin_effect

EDIT: added prepositional phrase

I always wondered what this effect is called. It works amazingly well.

You need to be aware of the related effect which is helping someone when they can't return the favor is an very effective way to create an enemy. The cognitive dissonance created by a favor that can't be paid back is resolved by revising their opinion of you in the negative.

That's an excellent point. I had heard of the Ben Franklin effect, but not this. Yeah when I try to give my help to most people, they get resentful.

Am I special/broken in that if someone does a favor for me with the implication I don't pay them back, my opinion of them goes up? Perhaps I'm just not used to the phenomenon lol...

I agree that asking for help from someone you consistently help is reasonable.

You may quote me on this. "The expectation of reasonableness is an unreasonable expectation"

I dont "need" lots of things, but they do make life more enjoyable.

You are probably choosing the wrong people to be friends with. And yeah, doing things for people doesn't work in the same way that being the errant boy for the girl you liked in elementary or high school didn't work either.

Yeah pretty much this. Even though it seems OK from an "objective" standpoint to lend your aid when it seems obvious that you can do it and it is not too much cost to you, this doesn't really work in the making friends dept. Yes there are maybe 5% of people who will catch on to what you are doing and click but that is not good odds.

someone once said something along: any relationship will thrive to a degree to which value is derived by both sides

This helped me understand a few things. We all have childhood friends that once made sense but now if we met these people we wouldn't become friends. That's the exception to above rule, and i'm sure there are a few others, but generally that is a good way to understand why a friendship is working or ceases to be useful. It's something you can also use to acquire new friends or improve existing relationships. The value you offer may be as simple as being available (i.e. available to go out to meet possible romantic interests, available to pursue a new hobby together, available to blow off steam after work), actually listening and offering advice (advice part only works if the person looks up to you on a given subject and asks for it, unsolicited advice is the worst), being positive and seeking/seeing positivity in every situation/person (i've had friends that really helped me realize that people are in different stages of their life even when they seem obnoxious there's probably a good reason for it at the time so we shouldn't be quick to criticize and it's mostly a waste of time anyway). Most people don't actually think about this or put any effort into improving their value proposition but you'd be surprised how much difference that can make.

I would improve this to: any relationship will thrive to a degree to which perceived value is derived by both sides.

I think a lot of people are stuck on a treadmill of success and would have a better life if they stopped to smell the roses, or talk to someone that maybe doesn't necessarily have an obvious way of adding value to their life.

Whenever I thought long enough about value, I concluded that all value is perceived value, including any manner or definition of "intrinsic value".

I've certainly found myself in the difficult position of having moved to a place where I know nobody. I read "How to win friends and influence people", hoping I could learn how to make better friends with it. It's easy to go to meetups and make shallow connections with small talk, but getting people to talk to me is like pulling teeth, a lot of single sentence reponses and no attempt to further the conversation.

From the body language you describe it sounds like those people don't actually want to continue talking with you (for whatever reason). Carnegie is great. Follow up by reading a book or two about body language. While it's far from a hard science, it'll give you some more insight into what a person is thinking/feeling.

I think the Carnegie book isn’t that great, because it’s easy to misinterpret the rules. An often mentioned strategy is to be a good listener. This gets repeated ad nauseam, but is it actually true? I found that people become more open if you put a story on the table first. It’s like an investment. You open yourself a little bit and tell something about yourself, whereas a question about the other person asks them to trust you first.

This is true. The first step in any relationship is establishing goodwill or even just lack of malevolence (which if it's romantic and you're pursuing women is extremely important). Everything else comes after. People want to talk openly about themselves, but not unilaterally.

That's true. I read Carnegie's book as a teenager and for a long time tried to be the best listener, which I think I became. I asked thoughtful questions and rarely opened up myself. That's not the way things work. In my experience, one needs to have interesting stories before other people open up.

Me, too. Moving to a new city really sucks. You lose the "networking effect" of becoming friends with your friend's friends. Makes me miss college.

My wife is actually working on growing a company to solve the new-to-town-how-do-I-meet-people problem, which we had when we moved to Austin. She runs speed friending events and helps folks who hate small talk figure out what to ask in conversations to break through it. Right now she's actually hiring people in other cities and teaching them how to run the same sort of events.

What city are you in?

(Feel free to email me)

Do you do any sports? Tennis/golf clubs are great for meeting people. Gyms as well. You can't expect to have a new bff in 2 days, but you will meet people from all walks of life and maybe it will click with one or two.

As for the talking part, I think people need to be good listeners, but at start, people need to be great storytellers. If you have a story or two about you/something, that is funny and you can intrigue people, you can be sure folks will stick around...

'Regarding the recent crime wave, when I was a teenager and I went camping with some friends and we noticed we ran out of toilet paper while one of us was on the can... not having a lot of options, we had to resort to crime... we went around trailers..... etc'

Seems harmless enough, but its a story I tell a lot with a bit more details and pauses, takes about 5 minutes, makes people laugh (we were caught stealing the Toilet paper) and opens up folks.

If you have a few funny real stories to tell, you will always find engagement from folks much nicer than 'ohh so what do you do? any kids? etc' that most people end up doing

>A study published in February in the British Journal of Psychology looked at 15,000 respondents and found that people who had more social interactions with close friends reported being happier—unless they were highly intelligent. People with higher I.Q.s were less content when they spent more time with friends. Psychologists theorize that these folks keep themselves intellectually stimulated without a lot of social interaction, and often have a long-term goal they are pursuing.

Does anyone have a link to this so called study? Funny how in academia you are required to reference everything but when it comes to journalism anything goes.

---edit----

Please ignore my request, I had a temporary brain fart, a Google search helped me find it.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26847844

This TED talk https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_waldinger_what_makes_a_good... makes the same point and used data from an 75y study.

This is incredible, thanks very much for sharing this. I really needed this.

The "speculation" is the worst part of a science research. It gets the most air play but has but has the least basis in fact.

Perhaps more intelligent people (by IQ test) are more introverted -- more thinking less feeling/EQ, and so are less comfortable with the company of other people they don't know well. That certainly fits the bookworm/ computer nerd / uberhobbyist type of high IQ person.

One point missed by this article (but mentioned by another commenter) is that it's not enough to just want more friends. It's not even enough to meet another person who also wants friends. What keeps friends together is perceived mutual exchange of value - it sounds callous, but I challenge anyone to describe a friendship that lasted where either party believed they derived no value.

Our lizard brains aggressively pre-filter potential friends by estimating expected value add. One property that contributes to perceived value is scarcity, and this leads to a sort of counterintuitive result: it may be easier to make friends if you don't really want or need them (or at least you appear that way). If you are self-reliant, happy, and occupied most of the time, your time and attention are scarce (from the perspective of others). This signals value and makes others want to be your friend. Obviously, this doesn't mean you should be constantly unavailable. But it does mean that being constantly available to hang out, talk, do favors, etc. will probably make you less desirable as a friend.

"The only way to have a friend is to be one" - Ralph Waldo Emerson

I've always imagined relationships as a reciprocity index which sounds similar to what you are describing here.

What is friendship? Seriously. I'm curious to know how different the definition is across various people.

My personal definition: If I can call a person for no reason other then to tell them my cat just spilled my coffee and I'm annoyed I consider him/her a friend.

Maybe a strange one but I also consider people friends if I consider their insults directed to me funny.

I have the opposite problem to most people, of having too many friends. And the number is ever-growing. Wherever I go - job, hobby, school - I pick up more friends. It's wonderful in that I am never lonely and I feel very loved. It is difficult though too because I sometimes feel overwhelmed and that I am not able to be a good friend myself. I have so many invitations, emails, texts etc that I can't keep up. I adore the majority of my friends - but it is quite difficult to extricate myself from a few friendships I have that are draining.

I've been thinking recently about why I am this way...and I believe it is down to 1) listening carefully to what people have to say, 2) being happy and calm, it is just my nature, I am quiet but I am always looking for something to laugh about. I like to crack little jokes and I appreciate humor in every situation, 3) being un-judgmental and kind.

Anyway i'm not sure what my point really is, except that you CAN make friends as you get older! It is not all doom and gloom :)

I'm glad you wrote this. I feel similarly myself, although it sounds like the making of friends comes more naturally to you. I have a surplus of friends that I know could become much closer friends if I was able to dedicate more time to those relationships, but the truth is that I already have a lot of excellent close friends.

It's absolutely lovely but exhausting. I too feel overwhelmed by texts, invites and the like and am trying to figure out how to handle this without compromising myself too much (life is tough right now and I feel like I need an increasing amount of time on my own right now). Honesty about it is the approach I've been taking - I try to be the best friend I can to all of those closest to me, but bear in mind that I am also the most important friend I have.

FWIW, I'm exactly with you on your points 1, 2 (replace calm with excitable sometimes though!) and 3.

I'm not sure how relevant this is, but I'm one of the most open, positive and optimistic people I know and I just want everyone to enjoy life and being alive as much as I do. Perhaps people like that.

With the only exception that all those people are not friends per se. They are just people you know in person.

I tend to say: "People with many friends do not have friends". I'm sure it's not a fact, but more like a rule of thumb, based on my personal observation.

My wife has a talent of building connections and enlarging the network. She attracts people like a magnet and I was always fascinated about that. I once asked her: "You know all those people, but is there the one you could truly call a friend?". In a second, she realized what I was asking about and said: "No, I don't have friends..."

If you use Facebook as a proxy, you can actually see that you max out on friends when you are in late teens to 20's and then its downhill from there.

Stephen Wolfram (mathematica fame) did a deep dive into the numbers and there are quite a bit of interesting insight..

http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2013/04/data-science-of-the-f...

What goes unchallenged is the article's assumption that people with more friends are happier (I think?)

I have a much better social life now than I did when I was younger. Younger was lots of sort-of-friends, who I didn't really like, based on convenience/availability.

I have far fewer friends now, but I've known many of them 10+ years and like them much more than my childhood friends.

You likely know yourself a lot better now too, so the people you choose to build relationships with would reflect the qualities you value most.

People with more friends can seem to be more happy externally (perpetually busy, always invited to events, always texting etc.) but if those friendships are all shallow, then it can be lonely and mentally-taxing. But regardless of the number of friends, the key factor is the quality and resulting strength of those friendships.

I find it difficult to find friends who are reliable. Many who seem to like me when we hang out are almost impossible to make plans with. They often respond by saying they need to check their schedule. Perhaps it's just a polite no. When we do get together everything is great but it seems so shallow. I have a lot of friends like this.

Beyond the reliability issue I find it particularly hard to find highly intelligent friends. Most of my intellectual stimulation comes from my work but sometimes I find I want more. Many of the people I meet who are intelligent and in my field are socially inept. They can be intellectualy stimulating but deeper friendship is difficult.

Ditto. I've managed to meet one or two smart friends in each stage of my life. But they're kinda all over geographically so hard to be close with or see often.

What did you like about this article? The headline suggests it's going to explain something new and it just states the obvious. I see many articles fitting this pattern. Kind of the "5 ideas to lose weight" we saw a while back.

Made a bot that was used for dating. Nothing smart, just visiting pages of other persons randomly between 1/3 days and normally triggering alarms.

Girls thought I was shy.

I thought nothing, only that my model of human beings was right: people prefer 100 bouquet of one rose then 1 bouquet of 100 roses.

Since then, I stopped using bots even though it was successful and I prefered to learn from the bots : just be considerate, and even if you don't think of it consciously, because you may come back to where you were, you might influence positively people's opinion. Even cats and animals comes to me on a regular basis now (probably uncorrelated, but who knows?)

Being polite and considerate does not always mean being lowering your eyes when you see a bully :)

Since then, I make friends slower, but with more quality. and since my "turn over" in friendship is low, I kind of do not mind having enough time to share quality time with them.

I've seen 'Friends' and 'Couples' sitting at restaurants staring at their phones, the whole time they are together. It's already difficult with age to make friends, if you add the 'mobile' factor you can dwindle the probability to zero ...

A better article on how friendships change over time and in adulthood by the atlantic.

Key takeaways: (well, don't have time to write this out today, sorry)

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/how-friend...

or u can just Rent A Friend : http://www.afar.com/magazine/the-incredibly-true-story-of-re... -- proven to work in japan. perhaps it could be repurposed for the US market. (although i dont think it would play out very well )

I always thought it was fun when I was in a random group of people at a party and a couple of individuals were stoned... kinda rambling their ideas but really going far out there with the whats and ifs. It would be fun to have a service that paired you with an individual or group who wanted a 'guide' for their herb trips as they walked around the city / city parks / recreational outdoor areas.

-------------------

Like, people could pick 'flavour' of guides. E.g.:

[ x ] This Person A likes to talk and share his knowledge about bikes.

[ x ] This PersonB likes to talk about Kant/Heigel and some other western philosophy.

[ x ] This PersonC can do card tricks and has hilarious stories about his time overseas staying at 'X'. (ok now this is getting farfetched here, but hey people like doing stuff!) He also can wear a cape if you send a special request and bring a small jade plant.

--------------------

MIght not need to even be monetized or anything, I think it would just be fun to connect with other random groups of people and put on a 'facade' of the 'guide', which in turn might create real friendships. (When we meet new people we usually are putting on a neutral facade of some sort and really only show our deeper layers once the intimate connections have had time to be laid down).

Also , I think this meetup format is less akward because there is a preset goal in mind: E.g: THis person is going to be talking/showing/interacting around this theme/subject/activity. So this is similar to when people take courses in college (with preset goal of learning about course subject) and can form friendships more easily with people beside them/in discussion group (as the relationship has the prebuilt support already there to help it build around).

This is kinda fun to rant on so maybe i will continue later but yes.... Rent A Friend style idea seems to have potential it could be sooo much more.

could work on ideas of: Homogeneity of English Language. Would be fun to rent-a-friend but with goal of learning their native language. (E.G. hmm i am bored on a sunday afternoon, I know , I will practice my language with a rent-a-friend japanese speaker because I love the phonetics. (maybe the pairing will also speak japanese as 2nd language but that makes for another commonality base to talk around)

It's very beneficial in society to have lots of friends and know lots of people. Unfortunately the default mode of making friends is very extroverted and thus the usual advice is as well. Just chat up someone...that is not something that a decent chunk of the population is comfortable with.

I haven't read the science but I'm a bit skeptical about the claims. As an introvert I'm often uncomfortable in mid-size+ social gatherings and need to recharge afterwards (with a good book for example). The article claims health benefits form having friends and seems to imply that making more friends is the way to go. I very much prefer deepening existing friendships. Being around very good friends is sometimes exhausting as well. I'd be very interested if the claimed health benefits have been tested on groups that were split into intorverted/extroverted. I often feel like these "self help by making more friends" articles are very biased towards the extroverted mode of living.

Just wondering: can beginning a startup with new people be considered a good way to find new friends?

Wouldn't you usually know them already before cofounding a startup with them? It seems like a pretty big committment.

I agree that it sounds risky ti srarr a startup with people we dont know well enough to tell if our vision and interests align. That being said, I'd be willing to work on a not-for-profit side project or proof of concept.

I'd exercise caution about that, since eventually the startup will inevitably hit a rough patch and it'll be nice to have a social network other than the startup.

They are more like family members, with all the positive and negative associations that entails.

And then mixing business with family... can be a problem.

I began a startup over 20 years ago. Today, my two best friends are from that startup. Many others from that startup ended up being people that I greatly enjoy seeing and still get together with.

(I've added the following in an edit because I realize that my answer isn't very useful without additional information.)

My best friends actually didn't start the company with me, they happened to be some of the very first key people hired by the company--I didn't know them before that. In our startup, there were ups and downs and definitely challenges to overcome; in that kind of environment one really gets to know people's character and I was lucky enough to make friends with two really great guys. Additionally, I got to know many remarkable people this way.

Years after the company was sold and all of us had gone our own ways professionally, I was on a second date with the woman that I am now married to. We were headed to one of her friend's house for a party. While walking up to the front door I asked for the names of the people I would be meeting (to make it easier to remember their names). To my surprise and my wife's her friends were the wives of the CFO and the COO from the company before we sold it. Today we enjoy seeing them socially and even vacation with them from time to time. So it's not just my very best friends that came from the startup its actually many friends.

Some people from the company I'd like to see more, but understandably, there are also people that I usually avoid.

This article was deeply personal for me. I have moved around a lot during my 20-something years of life due to a lot of factors including, but not limited to: genocide, civil war, family house foreclosed, crossing the Atlantic, taking a new job in a city 1500 miles away from my "home" state. In all those times, I have made a lot of friends some whom I am still in touch with today and others, I have drifted apart from. As I get older, it is just get too tiring to recreate new friendships. I am quiet and picky and not the kind of personal who has tons of acquaintances. I have gained new insights from this article;be right back as I text an old friend to ask how he is doing...

Most people also will expect there to always be some level of talking in social interactioms and feel awkward around pauses and silence. I believe this is because internally most people have not built up a constructive environment and use external activities and talking as a distraction rather than truly growth-inducing times.

It feels awkward without the pauses though. If internally we need change - (WE do.) Change comes from within. - we need to make sure we aren't running on the same programming. Responding instantly and avooding pauses is not a new experience...

Yet another of these superficial articles that is equating quality and quantity. This obsession with "how many" because it is easily measured is the same thinking that leads people to pump up their Facebook friend count.

OKCupid used to make the same mistake in their blog entries analyzing their message traffic. An ad that gets more responses must be better, right? Well, no. Getting one response from the right person is better than twenty responses that you are completely uninterested in.

I (right not 30yo) consciously balance time spent "old friends" and "new acquaintances". While most the "acquaintances" never move into good friend, even a tiny fraction is worth it. (Also, it is wonderful for networking; being confined to one's circle of friends makes it harder to reach out.)

Sort of reminds me of that fake book from Numb3rs :P

Where exactly do I find the science here?

obligatory http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/bigbangtheory/images/f/f...

This is is more 'The science of losing friends' with unscientific advice on gaining them.

I would be interested in science of making them.

Or even a more analytical approach other than kinda obvious stuff.

Agreed, yet another article that promises to teach something, it's artificially long and the bottom line is stuff everybody knows...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation

I think the most important thing is to have a long-lasting, monogamous relationship. At that point you can decide on expanding your social circle if you feel like it.

Perhaps someone should create a "learnxinyminutes" for this.

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