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Comment by AussieWog93 | Hacker News Reader

>As people enter middle age, they tend to have more demands on their time, many of them more pressing than friendship. After all, it’s easier to put off catching up with a friend than it is to skip your kid’s play or an important business trip.

The sad part is that it doesn't have to be this way. The notion that friendship is something you make time for (to the detriment of your other pursuits) seems to be very modern, very Western and an absolutely terrible idea.

Just anecdotally, the friendships where people rely on one another for assistance - helping one another achieve their goals rather than hindering them - seem to get stronger and stronger whereas the "let's catch up" friends seem to wither over time.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, doing simple things like giving a friend a lift when their car breaks down, providing them with meals when they're unable to cook for themselves or helping them move house actually cause you to value the relationship more.

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Definitely on this. I enjoy just hanging out and having a beer, but also painting a room, building a porch, doing a little demolition, taking our kids camping together. Time doesn't have to be a zero sum game. (And it’s the same with a lot of stuff— you don’t have to stop parenting to cook or clean or garden, do that stuff with the kids!)

Another aspect I think is how much you plan things in advance, and how willing the people in your circle are to do stuff last minute. One of my groups is some neighborhood dads and every week or so they're like "hey, tonight or tomorrow?" and then it's a hang for whoever can make it, with no expectations or hurt feelings because it wasn’t possible to find a weeks-away date that magically worked for everyone’s calendars only to have half of them cancel at the last minute anyway. You need people receptive to this for it to work, but it has that fluidity of college dorm socializing once it gets going.

"I enjoy just hanging out and having a beer, but also painting a room, building a porch, doing a little demolition"

Perhaps that's the differece: specialization. More contractors and take-out meals mean less working with friends.

Friends are good for unspecialized labor, but when you get into skilled labor it falls apart. The one plumber friend will get swamped with requests, and the quantum physicist may not find an opportunity to reciprocate.

> Friends are good for unspecialized labor, but when you get into skilled labor it falls apart.

I wonder if this alone holds a lot of explanatory power for why people in many increasingly developed countries tend to have increasingly fewer close friends in their personal lives. Labor gets increasingly skilled and specialized (and requiring facilities, supplies, and support staff owned by large companies) leaving fewer opportunities to directly help people who live next door. And skilled/specialized labor pays more, so people have the money to just hire out any help they need.

Thus fewer friendships form around a natural need for help from neighbors and the ability to meet such needs -- because both have decreased significantly. And along with less needing/helping, human connection and trust also suffer significantly.

In the past, local community groups, especially churches and social clubs, helped significantly with fostering human connection; but those also are suffering significantly.

But painting a room or mudding drywall or hacking down a wall? These are not really that specialized, are they? Or like, they're skills that can taught at the basic level with a few minutes of instruction and oversight.

The fact that more labor has been specialized makes it harder to maintain a critical mass of unspecialized, informal labor.

If someone helps you paint, it might be months or years before you have an opportunity to really reciprocate.

And simple things have been specialized quite a bit. To do a good job painting (by modern standards) you need to prep the wall surface. It might be cracked or uneven or have bad (or out-of-style) texturing. Then you need to texture and paint, which is going to work out better with the right equipment.

Meal preparation is largely done today before the kitchen. Trimming and slicing vegetables, washing and filtering grains, cleaning and butchering animals, grinding herbs and spices, sauce and broth making, fermenting, etc., are all done already by specialists and machines. A modern dinner party at your home is closer to meeting at a restaurant for a purely social occasion than it is to traditional meal preparation.

I agree. Basic home ownership skills like plumbing, wiring, and painting aren’t “specialized. I’ve bonded with friends and neighbors over such things.

Ah, home ownership. For so many people these days, all of those "work on the house" bonding activities they saw their parents doing are unavailable because they don't own a home and don't expect to.

I grew up with seemingly all my extended family working on their houses one way or another. I saw a lot of it. Plumbing, electrics, knocking down and building new walls, repairing floors, plastering, painting, wallpapering, carpeting, fitting windows, pouring concrete, mixing cement, gardening and remodelling the garden, erecting sheds, countless other things and that's just some basics that popped into my head.

Many of those involved a team of extended family and friends working together on a project.

As an adult I've rarely had the opportunity to do anything like that, and certainly never anywhere I lived myself, due to renting and most people I knew renting for most of it.

Even putting up a small shelf or painting a wall have been against the rules at most places. I don't own a drill because there's nothing at home to use it on. So I have neither the skills nor a friendship group that tends to develop with that sort of thing

It's not from lack of interest though. I miss it, having seen so much as a child that I've been unable to even dabble with as an adult.

It's one reason I rent a small office for work. Unlike homes, some commercial leases expect you to do things like put up wall furniture, paint as you likr, replace carpets and doors and so on. There are limits to that but not as limiting as homes in my experience.

I really do sympathize with people who can’t own a home, it’s terrible. My mortgage is 1300/month right between Baltimore and DC so it’s not like I’m out in the cut or anything. I’ve never experienced the “homes are too expensive to buy” situation, but maybe I’m just incredibly fortunate.

Post-2008 I think a big issue is down payments. Yes with 1% interest and 25 years you can turn a massive principal into reasonable payments, but how do you come up with 5% of it to get started?

It's hard to save tens of thousands of dollars unless you're lucky in your career or have a second earner dedicated just to that (and no school loans or other debt to service). Other than that you're waiting for a windfall or reliant on your parents re-mortgaging their place to give you your down payment.

I got lucky with my company's series A. But I know a lot of people whose parents helped them. And a bunch more whose parents can't— those people are still renting in their late thirties, waiting for a bus that may never come.

> I’ve never experienced the “homes are too expensive to buy” situation, but maybe I’m just incredibly fortunate.

You are.

I mean I could do that stuff but it’s not very enjoyable for me so I’d rather just pay someone else to do it (since I can afford it). I would guess many people feel the same.

Fair, and I can afford it too. But I also have the (modest) time available to do some things myself, and YouTube is a stupendous resource for basic stuff like how to plumb a sink or snake a drain or fix a water softener seal or wire a GFCI or any number of hundreds of other things you might want to know.

It's no judgment on those who feel differently, but I find value in picking up random skills and tools and really appreciate along the way the chance to break a sweat with friends and family over these types of situations.

And sometimes it really is a major savings— I spent ~$600 last year on materials and tool rentals that saved me what likely would have been a $10k plumbing visit (broken drain pipe under a concrete floor).

"The friendships where people rely on one another for assistance" and "'let's catch up' friends" would appear to be, according to Aristotle's analysis, friendships of utility and of pleasure, respectively. These are not bad, but there is a higher, more perfect, more durable form of friendship, the friendship of virtue [0], rooted in a common goal. Marriage is such a friendship, for example. It is not surprising, then, that friendships of pleasure or utility should more easily wane, while friendships of virtue are more lasting.

[0] https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2016/06/16819/

Glad to see someone say something good about marriage. Elite media is so negative about it these days. We are stuck in cliches about how historically it was just a strategic play for money and power and it never made sense as the core friendship around which your life revolves.

Maybe marriage is a nuisance if your life's ambition is to get an essay into The New Yorker, but if you have more pedestrian interests in family, it can be the best.

> Maybe marriage is a nuisance if your life's ambition is to get an essay into The New Yorker, but if you have more pedestrian interests in family, it can be the best.

A disproportionately large portion of journalists for national outlets live in Brooklyn New York, which explains their biased view of the world.

I just find it interesting how we believe we are so much more advanced than our ancestors and know so much more, but when it comes to living "The Good Life" they were still talking about the same problems we are struggling with in modern society.

Maybe overall we shouldn't be so quick to dismiss the wisdom of the ancients in favor of our modern obsession with data.

Natural and formal sciences + resulting from them technology is indeed more advanced.

Everything else? Not so much; we are, after all, still just people.

Is a friendship of virtue a friendship? That seems to violate the idea that friendships are low-commitment and non-binding relationships.

I would define my wife as my wife and friend, because our status as friends could become shaky but she would still be my wife. Similarly a long time business partner could be someone I identify as a friend or not. Those are both relationships rooted in a common goal, but I think Aristotle's definition of friendship is a stretch here. I think the wisdom of "don't go into business with your friends" is more relevant in my life.

> That seems to violate the idea that friendships are low-commitment and non-binding relationships.

Why is friendship low-commitment and non-binding. In the Western world, this is an aberration. For most of Western history, friendship was often considered more permanent and requiring more commitment than even marriage. It was seen as a life-long arrangement, with duties between friends, etc. Slighting one's friend was the start of many bitter bitter disputes that lasted generations.

> Is a friendship of virtue a friendship?

Yes -- and it is plainly the highest form of friendship as it is the closest to dissolving the individual into a greater whole.

Sounds like something I would hear at a google all hands or something.

> the idea that friendships are low-commitment and non-binding relationships

Is that your idea of what a friendship is ? Friendship to me means far deeper than that.

Would you be ok with a friend getting mad at you for not texting them back fast enough? What about wanting to go to counseling with you to discuss why you have been arguing more recently?

Yes 100% the reason why I need and love my friends is because those relationships do not have the weight of expectation that other relationships do.

> seems to be very modern, very Western

I don't think this is true at all. I'm not from a Western culture originally, and my friends (who i love) across a whole slice of society (from bus drivers to tech executives) have sort of diverged. Some of them always make time no matter what. Others, despite being super helpful when they can, 100% put other priorities over friendship first. Pretty sure that's not just my case and not really limited to the West at all.

"That is always the way with stay-at-homes. If they like something in their own village they take it for a thing universal and eternal, though perhaps it was never heard of five miles away; if they dislike something, they say it is a local, backward, provincial convention, though, in fact, it may be the law of nations."

We went from one income households to two. A lot of dads discovered that mom was actually doing quite a lot of the work and the not-shitty ones started doing their share. Hard to meet up with the lads when you're consoling a sick kid.

In spite of that, women have had larger and stronger social networks than men for decades/centuries (if not all of human history). Now, if anything, the gap is narrowing and women are becoming lonely at a rapid rate.

Perhaps more evidence that catching up with the lads for a pint is less valuable than bringing over a casserole for a friend with a sick kid.

True, though there's a lot going on. Urban design used to force more chance interactions and we're more physically isolated now, among other things. Sit next to someone on the bus or walk alongside them to the well? Strike up a conversation (unless you're British in which case I guess you sit on the bus in silence). Drive alongside them on the way to the grocery store? Not much chance to say hi there.

Citation really needed for the centuries claim. Both friendships and family structures changed a lot more in time then people assume.

People that you invite over to your house seem naturally more intimate friends?

Hence American (?, not sure if it's not British, just assuming) has a nice word for it:

Homey. (With possible gender differentiation to homeboy and homegirl)

Is the gap narrowing because womens' social networks are weakening or because men are forming better peer groups?

You are right, showing up to help or at least to anything they invite you to (even a simple lunch) is very important to continuity.

One of the reasons I won't read these articles - I don't want the content to become an excuse/prescription for me losing touch with friends.

Also who made the writer an expert? (May not apply to the author of this particular article, but I am generally skeptical).

This is so spot on. I feel like I am such a shitty friend especially after having witnessed my friends go above and beyond for when we needed their help without even being asked for it.

My wife's family has a real knack for working out what each other need, basically asking each other how they're going and really keeping a finger on the pulse when listening to the responses.

It's an art form for sure, but working out who needs assistance and in what form makes it really easy to provide it.

No worries, you can always find time and opportunities

Oh totally. Coming across these friends in my life made me realize I had to really work on my empathy and selflessness!

>The sad part is that it doesn't have to be this way. The notion that friendship is something you make time for (to the detriment of your other pursuits) seems to be very modern, very Western and an absolutely terrible idea.

Why wouldn't it though? Ultimately speaking time is a finite resource for an individual. If one's pursuits or responsibilities do not align with the pursuits of your friend, then why wouldn't one need pick between expending one's time with said friend vs other callings?

I guess it makes more sense when you consider reciprocity.

Pouring your finite and valuable time into assisting a friend achieve their goals implies that they will, at least to some extent, help you with yours. It doesn't matter if they're aligned as long as you understand one another.

Whereas with the "let's catch up" friends, the implicit agreement is that by making you sacrifice for the relationship, you get the right to make them sacrifice.

I guess the latter is better than nothing, as it beats being alone, but an optimising brain leads one towards putting in minimum effort and letting the relationship decay to the point of just being alive.

I don’t think what you’re saying is necessarily wrong, but you’re simply not addressing the scarcity of time.

I have friends that I would do basically anything for, and they would do basically anything for me, and this has been proven many times over throughout our friendships. But being there when they need you (or vice versa) isn’t what constitutes most of the relationship, most of it just just normal friend activities. Additionally, the entirety of the time devoted to the relationship is time you cannot devote to something else, no matter how much benefit you derive from the friendship.

Time devoted to relationships with my friends has certainly dwindled a little for me over time. I’m still there for them if they need me, but I devote much less time to socialising with them, because there are simply too many other things in my life that take priority over that. Because again, not matter how positive and beneficial your friendships are, hanging out with your buddies simply isn’t going to take priority over the needs of your spouse/children/career very often.

I'm not sure I see the time spent with "let's catch up" friends as a sacrifice. I find it as a time to break out of my routine, get a fresh perspective on the things I'm doing, and offer the same to the friend I'm meeting. It's like a mini-vacation to go to dinner with someone I don't usually see.

The "always there to help" friends are valuable to me as well, but they're a larger part of my every day life, more like extended family, and so usually can't get me that "get out of my life and look back in" sort of interaction I can have with friends I have to break routine to go see.

I think the parent commenter actually answered your question why wouldn’t.

We like things to be "fair" and to have mutually beneficial relationships in our work life. On top of that we all struggle with being vulnerable so your idea of a friendship built on top of mutual reliance seems really difficult to pull off.

Far more likely is you needing to accept that you will be doing most of the maintenance work around any of your adult friendships, and they might not have any "benefit" outside of being one of the few balms to existential dread.

Realistically, when would that happen with a middle class lifestyle?

When ny car broke down, I call my roadside assistance to get it towed and took Uber home when my wife was working.

When I need to move, I call movers. Same with home repairs. If I couldn’t cook for myself and assuming I wasn’t married (I am) I order in. I’m not saying having friends isn’t important for emotional reasons. But now, unless I lost my job and have lost my financial means, i usually “need” friends for emotional support.

That being said, when my wife had surgery a few years ago, I really leaned on her (and my friends through association). My wife knew I would be an emotional wreck and they came for emotional support.

> Somewhat counter-intuitively, doing simple things like giving a friend a lift when their car breaks down, providing them with meals when they're unable to cook for themselves or helping them move house actually cause you to value the relationship more.

Why do you find this counterintuitive?

That must be why we find it hard to maintain friendships these days. We mostly just buy the goods and services we want, and the results are often more convenient and better quality. Mutual aid and dependence seems less necessary, even if it's maybe good for the spirit.

My close friends with kids include their kids when visiting friends. We all love their kids. And we get to spend them with our friends.

It doesn't have to be that way, but my goodness, look at the transactional-mentalities on display below. It's sad.

> "let's catch up" friends seem to wither over time

In my experience, at some point there is nothing to talk about anymore, i have some of those long term friends but it's getting to the point where they come by my house, catch up in 10 minutes and then spent the rest of time in the couch on the phone.

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