Richard Ford: Do we really need friends? (2017)

I'm in my late twenties. I've never had many friends, but I can count the number of times I've done something social in the past year on one hand. I spent my birthday and all the holidays by myself, and will be spending the upcoming ones along as well.

Most of my human "contact" comes in the form of things like GitHub/slack/etc, or discussion forums related to programming.

I've had extremely few close friends in my life, and always been single. I've tried to date, but making connections with other humans is oh so incredibly difficult. I think I'm rather likeable, I get along fairly well with most people I meet. I'm friendly, agreeable, and try my best to positive. But that's analogous to me being a good sport: that's great and all, but when it comes time to choose who bats on your team, you want someone good at sports. You want friends who are fun, make you laugh, who are good matches. You get good at sports with a lot of practice. You get good at being a companion, someone other's enjoy being around by...

I had a very close friend once, about 6 years ago. It's embarrassing just how motivating desires to return to those feelings of acceptance and support are. I'm very intrinsically motivated, but 5 year plans of spartan existence to try and make something of my interests, to become someone respectable, someone another would want to forgive for their flaws and awful dorkishness, is something that keeps me going. I know in reality that this would only make me less interesting, more distant. But if I am to make something of my life before I die and am forgotten, I need dedication.

Personally, I'm most content and productive when alone. Even having my overly friendly cat around (love em to death), can throw me off and drain my mental/physical energy.

I rarely open up to others outside of our group/online/irl, but with that said, I love my tight knit group of friends as if they're brothers and sisters, and I don't know where or who I'd be today without them. We've all openly shared and continue to share that sentiment to this day. Speaking for myself, growing together in our late teens/early 20s till now (early 30s) has been one of the best experiences in life and one of the most important factors to my personal development/growth. Not only have we been supportive of one another through thick and thin, but we've also helped one another to acknowledge and be critical of our individual faults, perspectives, project concepts/execution, but always backing with constructive feedback that has only helped each other flourish.

Over the years some have gotten married, moved into some big/high visibility positions, received public recognition for their work, left the city (nyc) to find peace of mind, have financial independence, have relative stability in career, have faced chaos in career, struggled with addictions, went to rehab, had near death experiences, faced incredible family tensions, dealt with loss of loved ones, the whole gamut. But we've all always been there for one another through all of it, unconditionally and without judgement. Whenever we meet up (or nowadays connect via online game or video chat) between everyone's hectic schedules, it's as if no time has passed since we last hungout/spoke, and without hesitation the ball busting commences.

I'm an introvert who, pre-March stayed inside all weekend, and post-March for a week or so at a time recharging, and am not what one would call a "people person" (not a misanthrope, just more comfortable outside of social/noisy settings, otherwise I need headphones and ambient/Warp Records music to focus). And about half of us in our group are introverts, but when we hit each other up and time permits, we're there.

It's hard to find these kinds of friends, and before meeting any of them, I felt more or less alone in the world in thoughts, interests, etc, and figured I'd just live in my own company with all the feelings and limitations that come with that. But I was wrong to think of or to be fine with that. It's corny/cliche to say, but friends like them can't be sought out, forced, or "networked", they come naturally and unexpectedly in chance moments, at the right time, in the right setting. And when you find them, you'll know and will see that they're invaluable and inimitable in so many positive ways, and that together, through giving/sharing each other's thoughts/sentiments/perspectives/concepts/kindness/humor/honesty/love/etc, everyone has something to give and to gain just in the name of doing so.

during a very long hike across the Alps I stumbled into a group of very upset farmers who desperately were looking for 3 cows that got separated from their herd during a severe storm and lightening. Since I had f-all to do other than walk for several hundred more miles, I offered to lend them an extra pair of eyes to speed up the search. It turned out that 2 of them were dead, one killed by lightening under a tree, the other fell off the ridge. We never found the 3rd cow during all the time that I was there (4 days in total). They told me that it's normal for herd animals that when they break lose from the herd for too long that they become very hard to integrate back. Once you separate them for a few days and they learn to survive by themselves, even you catch them they're becoming very likely candidates to bolt on you in the future.

weeks later the farmer texted me to say thanks once more and to update me: The 3rd cow has turned up (weeks later). And since the animal was back it already tried to do a runner on him a couple of times.

Maybe this sounds silly but I think humans are very much alike. Once people are happy by themselves and able to live without the need for friends (either due to circumstance or free will) it becomes difficult to integrate them back. I value friends and those I know from 30 years ago. But making new friends? It's not for want, but it's impossible to get close to anyone the older you get.

See also:

- Lancet study on "the psychological impact of quarantine": https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

- consider men especially. very few of my male friends are actually able to create new friendships as they age. women are more skilled and open to maintain relationships. if you think this is hyperbole think about your own or other people's dad's in their 50ies or older and imagine them going out by themselves to actively bring new people into the group/family for the purpose of becoming friends. (friendships don't work that way, they rely on common struggle that is needed to build trust. the older we get the less our chances of going through a common struggle (like puberty). See also army training programs where people are thrown into hard situations just for the sake of bonding etc.

Overthinking, philosophising, ruminating on topics like friendship is fuel for depression. It's not bad per se, but it's not solving any issues. Just think of the times you had fun with friends, that's what friendship is. All this deep, near metaphysical thought on friendship simply does nothing, just as thinking hard and deep about food does not make it taste better.

Love, food, friendship, music, you can talk, think, write about it, but it does very little for the actual experience of them. If anything, it makes you less able to experience them because you're too busy anaylysing it.

English really lacks when it comes to the vernacular of interpersonal relations. We give the same name "friend", to relationships varying from the person we buy beer from to people we help in our community to people we might be very intimate with.

Friendship though can fill many human needs. Casual friends like those in business or work allow us a shortcut for finding reliable service and goods.

Communities are built out of friendships that may not be particularly close but which allow us to do things we couldn't on our own. Moving house, caring for children, help in an emergency, planning a celebration or acquiring a hard to find item.

Perhaps a lot of HNers won't understand how important this is because of their financial situation. But these are services people often cannot pay for and only acquire through community. I grew up in such a community and had never heard of paid movers until I moved to the West Coast. In many a family emergency my siblings and I stayed with such friends.

Intimate friendships can be wonderfully fulfilling in a way you can only know if you've been in one. Though you must be very careful of who you invest them in. Something I really struggled with was finding that a lot of people are not good intimate friends and that's ok. You should just maintain those friendships at a distance.

The main thing I've found though is that if you are anxious and I am very prone to anxiety around unfamiliar people, you will not bond. To make friends, you must find a way to be comfortable around people. I think this is why families are often people's only major friend group. Because they have been forced into contact in situations where eventually their guard is down. Same as to why sports and games are so good for meeting friends. You get focused on the activity and lose some anxiety. Probably also why drugs and alcohol allow people to bond.

It's hard to experience true friendship without shared adversity. I'm not using the word "true" thoughtlessly, it's just that there seems to be a common theme among the varied descriptions of absolutely intense camaraderie between blood brothers, soldiers, and so on that leads me to believe that most of what we experience as friendship is a diluted version of those bonds. In an industrial information based economy with social media, where most threats are about soulless boredom or withstanding the daily grind, it's even harder to form such bonds in any genuine way.

Technically no. However the real question is not about the amount but about quality. This has been proved over and over in many psychology studies. A correct amount of friends can help one's psyche and productivity. The real question is why is the guardian promoting this ridiculous mess of statements. WHat happened to the guardian? honestly they are beyond self parody now and they seem like a decafeinated vice if anything.

I've known a number of writers, and as a class they are difficult to be friends with. If you can imagine most people being surrounded by a kind of spherical bubble, or maybe one with a few edges that represents their personal boundaries, a writer would have a kind of star shaped boundary, where in the crevasses they appear to have almost none, and at the tips they extend out further than normal and can be quite pointy. Fragile pricks even. I have no doubt people will ultimately say he was a good writer, a wit and wry observer, a fascinating person, even a fine husband or father, but I would wonder if anyone will say he was a good man, because friends are the only ones who can know that. I'd suspect that masculine friendship is something in particular that he's finding difficulty with, which is something there just aren't a lot of adequate words for, and what makes it such a complex and nuanced thing.

Personally, I can enjoy months of relative solitude, but I also have dozens of people in my life who recognize me as a friend. The reason I was able to make friends is because I made personal boundaries that make friendships both viable and durable. There is something to be attracted to, but still very much an "other," that lets you be you and doesn't want your stuff, and we're all different enough that there is no danger from mimicking each other ("mimetic violence"). As a writer, Ford's entire stock in trade is in transgressing personal boundaries, and that is what makes friendship a kind of received concept for many writers. It's why I don't read the Guardian, as it tends to trade in a kind of sympathy that seduces readers into moralizing their feelings of inferiority by standing up straw men to take down with neurotic criticism, and that dynamic rewards the very things that make friendships difficult. To me, it's like some kind of Imposter Syndrome Daily. However, if he would like to be friends, I'm sure we could work something out.

A friend is somebody you call when you're stuck in a ditch in the middle of nowhere, they say "Be right there!" and jump in their truck and head on out for an hour drive to get you.

You don't have somebody like that in your life? You have no friends yet. Just social acquaintances.

See, in Victorian England they knew about this and had names - passing acquaintance, nodding acquaintance, speaking acquaintance. Needed an introduction to get to the speaking. They weren't friends, just somebody you had been introduced to.

It reminds me of this article I read sometime ago: "Why smart people are better off with fewer friends"(1)

The gist being "For more intelligent people, (social interactions with close friends and happiness) correlations were diminished or even reversed."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/18/why-s...

I'm just going to say one thing that has helped me a great deal in making and keeping friends. Be the person that makes the effort. You're going to feel in relationships that for every tit there should be a tat. There won't. Those who build communities around them and make friends are the ones to initiate, to reach out. People want to interact, they're excited to interact, but there's a lot of inertia in modern life. Pick up the phone and call people. During this lockdown, I've had people almost cry to be given a phone call, and people who have wanted to stay on the horn for hours, but would not have made that call themselves. Be the embarrassing one, who keeps making offers to hang out that get rejected 3-4 times, who calls three weeks in a row. I started out years ago as a total introvert, and, I have to say, these practices snowball. You build social skills, social capital, and an interest in and need for your fellow humanity by being the person.

Friends are close enough you can tell them the stuff that bothers you and distant enough that they can comment without being directly involved.

This brings so many advantages and one of my favourites is the sense of putting the world to rights. When you have good friends you can calibrate a justified sense of where you're going and what things ought to be without having to commit to learning it the hard way.

Frankly Ford should of had the conversation in the article with a friend, he would likely derive a more satsisfying answer to his premise.

He repeats his own woe too many times and goes on about his over-thinking about friendshop. Just go to a pub and socialize, why does it have to be a reminder of your childhood betrayals, or your crippling loneliness? Everybody has their own story, if you listen for two minutes people say incredibly interesting things.

This guy dumping his life story on page 1 makes a friendship a very short affair. Friends gradually reveal themselves to each other, for a bunch of reasons. But it makes the friendship last a long time and gives you time in the moment to reflect and enjoy the difference each shared story makes on your life.

Do people reject their own instinct for friendship??

Richard Ford's novels, The Sportswriter and Independence Day, are both excellent. Surprised something he wrote is on HN, but, here we are.

To anyone else whom this article resonated, I recommend the journal of Henri-Frederic Amiel^1 and the Rhinoceros Sutta^2 for further explorations of a similar problem space and ethos.

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1 - https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henri-Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric_Amiel

2- https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/KN/StNp/StNp1_3.html

The notion that you are supposed to have friends and socialise was so embedded in my mind by the environment it sent me to a crazy depression. I find that most people don't have anything interesting to say nor that they lead particularly exciting lives it made me really suffer. Thankfully there is internet where I have the most interesting people within a few clicks reach. It took a therapy for me to learn that you don't need to have friends nor socialise. It was liberating.

I feel like the opposite of this author. I am easily influenced by the people I surround myself with, professionally or otherwise, and friendships have had a huge influence on who I am, my hobbies, interests, etc. I wouldn't have learned to program had it not been for a friend in school. I suppose without them I could be breathing, but I suspect I'd have less knowledge.

> Maybe my experience of vitiated friendships has had to do with being an only child

Probably true. Having siblings teaches people how to enjoy their peers. There 's a social imperative to have friends, but in the end it's about our reward systems. Friends are to be enjoyed, if not, then it s OK not to have any

There’s no jury out on this. The research supports friendship as an important factor in our health and well-being. What’s interesting is how difficult friendship can be, and how this difficulty only seems to be increasing, judging by the decline in average people to which one could confide. To me, it’s a question underappreciated in a tech world dominated by young people who think more friends are the answer, when I think experience and evidence shows that depth is more important. But of course, harder to engineer.

Not in a survival sense but they do help immensely with passing the time.

Yeah I dont like when people imply I don't have friends or enough of them. I know I can have a discussion with anyone if I feel like it or if people come to me. I just answer "the world is my friend". My father is also like this.

I'm leaning on the introvert side but as an adult I've quickly adapted.

A therapist also told me friendships are a lot of work to maintain, and often a cause of pain. If romantic relationships are already a source of pain, I cannot let friendships do the same to me.

When we're all done with the "I am too smart for friends" bit, maybe we can acknowledge that loneliness is incredibly dangerous (supposedly as bad as smoking 15 cigarettes a day). https://www.hrsa.gov/enews/past-issues/2019/january-17/lonel...

A curious article. I'm not sure Ford even understands what friendship is. His only attempts to frame it are through quotes of contrarian literati, which leads nowhere, especially without insights into the state of their lives when they spoke. Without that, the references are largely purposeless and merely provocative.

Methinks Ford would have done better to define his personal notion of friendship by contrasting it to a model that most of us would recognize. Thereafter it would make more sense to observe that, like many other authors, his need for companionship may be twisted or absent. To explain this he could point to the origins of his state of mind — perhaps his profession, certainly his upbringing — the latter of which is the subject of his book, apparently.

But as it stands, this article doesn't stand alone very well, and certainly doesn't propose friendship to be victim to the general perversity of life during Covid, which is the thesis I inferred from its title.

In my experience as a man, most of the men I’ve had around me tend to avoid talking about what is going on inside of them, not sharing and describing what they feel and how this relates to their unmet human needs.

"The reality is that men are hurting and that the whole culture responds to them by saying, 'Please do not tell us what you feel.' ... If we cannot heal what we cannot feel, by supporting patriarchal culture that socializes men to deny feelings, we doom them to live in states of emotional numbness. We construct a culture where male pain can have no voice, where male hurt cannot be named or healed."

— bell hooks

This quote resonates with me. I want to share a few more gifts and ideas that have come my way in the past few years.

Last year I learned about the work of Pia Mellody, who believes that that there is not just one type of abuse, ‘disempowering abuse’ - shaming someone and making that person see themselves as ‘less than’ others, but two types of abuse. The second type of abuse, which I think American culture suffers, is what Pia calls: ‘false empowerment’, making a person feel like they are somehow 'better than' others. This leads to people having what she calls other-esteem, in contrast to reality-based self-esteem - which someone on the internet described as: "other-esteem happens when we base our self-worth on external things".

Psychologist Terrence Real has a great summary which I copied from his book ‘How Can I Get Through to You? Reconnecting Men and Women’:

“What Pia has called “disempowering abuse” is the one we can all readily identify. It is made up of transactions that shame a child, hurt him, physically or psychologically, make him feel unwanted, helpless, unworthy. What Pia has called “false empowerment,” by contrast, is comprised of transactions that pump up a child’s grandiosity, or at the least, that do not actively hold it in check. Pia’s genius was in understanding that falsely empowering a child is also a form of abuse.”

At the same time, I also believe our modern culture has a massive fear of grief and sadness.

“In this culture we display a compulsive avoidance of difficult matters and an obsession with distraction. Because we cannot acknowledge our grief, we’re forced to stay on the surface of life. Poet Kahlil Gibran said, “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” We experience little genuine joy in part because we avoid the depths. We are an ascension culture. We love rising, and we fear going down. Consequently we find ways to deny the reality of this rich but difficult territory, and we are thinned psychically. We live in what I call a “flat-line culture,” where the band is narrow in terms of what we let ourselves fully feel. We may cry at a wedding or when we watch a movie, but the full-throated expression of emotion is off-limits.”

— Francis Weller

I personally experienced a welcoming introduction to Weller's work in this podcast: https://charleseisenstein.org/podcasts/new-and-ancient-story...

It goes well with this video, inspired by him: https://www.youtube.com/embed/HSqLr8dA3wo

I'm curious if anyone here has heard about Nonviolent Communication (NVC)? Marshall Rosenberg's voice is often a light in the dark for me, helping me become aware of what's going on inside me. He has 2 or 3 great audiobooks that he recorded himself. There are also some great facebook groups where people practise together. Here's a short intro video with Rosenberg where he presents some of his theories: https://www.youtube.com/embed/DgaeHeIL39Y

I also admire very much Dr. Gabor Maté's work, and have found much relief in his work and his words (many of his talks are free on YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/embed/TIjvXtZRerY and https://www.youtube.com/embed/adYJm_A2CSM

Lastly, reading socialist authors like Mark Fisher, Wendy Liu, Jakob Rigi, Vijay Prashad, and of course Marx and Engels, has helped me to see why bourgeois Global North culture (heavily influenced specifically by American cinema/Hollywood) has evolved into a culture that glorifies violence, turns young girls into sex objects, sends young working class men to their deaths to ‘defend' their country, and indoctrinates it's citizens with bizarre nationalistic views and a sense of cultural superiority.

This video illustrate my last point (trigger warning: it's dark): https://www.youtube.com/embed/j800SVeiS5I

Richard Ford needs an intervention by Princess Celestia.

>I’m all for human intimacy, but can’t I just like the world in general?

What an insufferable and tangled mess this article is. Sorry if this answer starts off as merely dismissive rambling, but seriously, that article is, from the start, fueled by hybris and lonely misconceptions (DUH).

Intimate, deep relationships between humans are something incredibly intricate. They drive reflection and joy, enable a less self-obsessed view of the world, and are just generally beneficial to the human experience in pretty much every sense that I can think of, be it (socio-)psychological, behavioral, gametheoretical, systemstheoretical, you just name it.

How the hell is this on the top of hn?

Friends go away, die, disappoint you. Friendship isn't worth the maintenance and ending of it, for every minute it might make your life better (and doubtfully so) you will get two minutes of misery.

The only semi-reliable friends are family members, and even if they are loyal to a fault, they do have an expiry date.

Get used to being alone, the sooner you prepare the better.