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Comment by chesterarthur | Hacker News Reader

You have to share values with someone to be their friend?

To form a long-lasting friendship, you need at least some common ground to touch on.

That's the great thing about co-worker friends. I don't have tech friends from my "real" life, but I have a ton of random friends from old jobs I talk to and (in what seems like a different life, before COVID-19) get together with regularly. What started as joking about agile processes is now planning weird trips and brunches.

Shared interest and mutual respect is different than shared values

Some values are incompatible with mutual respect.

I need to share any subset o values.

Otherwise there's no space for dialogue. I believe this is the norm.

Are people using values to mean interests? I need to share some interests: sports, beer, model building, architecture etc...

Values though? I can't see that being the norm unless your shared interest is politics, religion, or social order/dynamics.

I don't. I literally mean values.

I have people with shared interests added as "friends" on facebook, but my actual friends are those with whom I have some common ground - even if it's something as abstract as the shared belief that nothing is ever "100% done" or that politics is just a game of appearances and one shouldn't get too invested emotionally in them.

> Are people using values to mean interests?

This was a mistake I made in my 20s. No, values are not interests. Values are things like "would this person stab me in the back, given opportunity?". That can happen in sport, job, anywhere.

From long-term perspective, just like you lose most work-friends when you change your work, you lose most of your hobby-friends when you change a hobby or simply not have enough time for the hobby anymore. Values seem to stay for much longer time.

aren’t you valuing tennis as a sport if you like to talk about it with colleagues? I’d say that interests and values go a long way together.

In the US at least, "values" has come to mean ethical positions, like those brands and politicians claim. For example, "treating all life as sacred" or "helping the neediest" or "maintaining our traditions." A person might say that politicians and brands "share my values."

Different from interests, hobbies, or shared experiences that provide the basis for most friendships.

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