Comment by arthurofbabylon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arthurofbabylon | Hacker News Reader

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arthurofbabylon

Alternatively: make friends with everyone nearby.

I've been traveling full- or part-time for the last 10+ years, and I've adopted the strategy of rapidly developing friendships. The person who sells bread, the person I see on walk after walk, the person I'm meeting for the first or 4th time... I'm just open-minded and open-hearted, genuinely curious, generous with my time and attention... and it's awesome. With just a few interactions, I feel like I am with my people, that I am valued, that I am around people I appreciate.

Occasionally I'm met with suspicion (some people don't believe that I am seriously that curious/excited about XYZ that we are doing together), but overall most people seem to appreciate the ready camaraderie. Occasionally I get burned by forming too deep of a connection too quickly with someone who turns out to be untrustworthy, but time has proven that that is a worthwhile risk to take on.

I think of community as a pyramid – there are infrequent acquaintances at the base, and best friends and family at the top. All of it matters. My strategy is basically to respect the entire pyramid, showing up as fully as possible for everyone.

Forming friendships rapidly is not easy – it has taken me many years to learn to soften myself and open the mind, but I do keep getting better at it, for everyone's benefit. It greatly helps to share projects (in my case, mostly rock climbing).

Note that walking (to the grocery store, when bored, when the sun is setting) is a phenomenal way to feel connected with nearby people.

We must have very different definitions of the word "friend". I don't count someone I run into on a walk a friend, and I don't think this would fit the definition for the majority of people.

Sounds like you're being friendly with people, which is of course great, but I highly doubt any of these "friends" of yours would help you move.

The pyramid I described flows upward. Every close friend we have began as an acquaintance, and with time and repeated interactions they became progressively bigger influences, stronger supports, deeper connections.

Many adults stop forming friendships, because they (or their culture) insert mechanisms that maintain distance between acquaintances. I don't do that – my whole strategy is to not do that.

What is the threshold at which point someone becomes a friend? There's no clear line – it's defined by amorphous things like trust, vulnerability, shared enthusiasm. The way we conduct ourselves can make us more or less capable of experiencing trust/vulnerability/shared-enthusiasm/etc. While the person I run into for the third time is not yet a friend, I conduct myself knowing that we can probably get along quite well, if we're both present and open.

You might underestimate the power of curiosity and an open mind. Remember when you were 5 or 10 years old, how suddenly you connected with your best friends? It happened in a matter of days, or in some cases hours. It's not just a phase of life thing (although it is relevant), open-mindedness and curiosity have the same effect in adulthood.

(Finally, I guarantee a large portion of the people I interact with each day would help me move, if I were to ask. Many of them are literally catching me while I fall rock climbing, and vice-versa!)

Not at the start, these things take time. But every close friend starts as a casual friend, who starts as a stranger.

Agreed. If I read the article too literally, I'd rewrite the headline: "never crawl out of the pit you were born in." The set "your friends" must change over your life. And it's great if you can hold on to people, and even better if you can stay a 5 minute walk away, but that's an ideal and not a realistic goal.

Totally agree with this - almost everyone in my apartment with a dog goes to the same nearby dog park. It's really pleasant to see and talk to them everyday.

Can I ask where are you from and where are you living/traveling? What you describe seems to be just the standard way of living and interacting with people almost everywhere here in Italy. Well, it is more common in smaller communities and in the southern part of Italy. Of course it is a generalization so it isn't an absolute truth. My point is that even with this kind of interaction I find it very very hard to find friends even remotely comparable to the friends I have been growing up with. It feels like the word "friend" is misused if I use to describe people I have know for 30+ years and people I have met in the last couple years both.

serious question but aren’t newer connections that you make in this manner necessarily much more shallow than the ones you’ve started long ago, which does include friends/family from earlier phases in life? how could that possibly give you joy or even call it “friendship” at all if people only know you in a trivial sense? what you described sound more like acquaintances to me.

Yes, the tendency is for recent connections to be shallower than those formed long ago. But connections also open up at different paces. For some people it took a decade (and multiple phases of life) for us to become close friends, others it took just days.

Consider the pyramid of relationships – at the base are acquaintances, 90% of the people we see each day – at the top are our closest friends and family, those few people that we deeply trust. We can let the people in our lives move fluidly along the vertical axis, and if we are lucky more than just a handful will make it to the top.

I try to not know anyone "in a trivial sense" – the whole point is to be present enough to realize how cool people are.

There is a conundrum with the question you are asking. They don't know what it's like to have a friend that goes back, say 20 years. And you do. It's kind of like asking someone who has never ate roast duck, to tell you if roast duck tastes better than roast chicken. The information you seek isn't there.

What made you assume the GP has no friends that go back 20 years?

Do you think a person that makes new friends easily necessarily lets old ones go, instead of holding on to them?

You are absolutely right. I assumed, for some reason, he never spent a serious amount of time in a single place

Sounds amazing! Would love to hear about your stories and learnings should you ever choose to write about them :)

Out of curiosity, and unrelated to your question, but to your style of writing. Have you ever been diagnosed or tested for ADHD or ASD?

Same boat, to some extent.

My childhood was highly itinerant between frequent international moves and boarding school, and adult life has been much the same, and I rapidly learned as a kid:

A) how to form “friendships” fast

B) that “friendship” is usually convenient, transitional, temporary, and disposable

I have zero friends from school or university, and people I would count as friends who I have known more than a decade I can count on one hand - and that’s just fine, as I accept and understand that friends are people who you are geographically proximal to and are convenient to spend time with.

I am rarely geographically proximal to anyone for very long, and as it’s my choice to move on, I slink off to my next destination to never be heard from again, as there’s just no point in trying to maintain a friendship at long distance - the effort/reward ratio is all out of whack for both parties. What possível relevance does what I am doing on another continent have to your life? None. Is it likely to engender resentment and hostility if we keep in touch? Absolutely. It’s far preferable to just let the embers fade than to end up with an explosive decomposition down the line when your values and weltanschauung inevitably drift.

The few friendships that I have maintained over the years are with fellow travellers - people who, like me, understand that relationships are disposable, and are not worth operating at a distance - rather once every few years coincidence will see us in the same place, and we bring the friendship out of stasis for a weekend. As an added bonus, by not keeping in touch, we have plenty to catch up upon when we re-encounter one another. These people usually emerge from the strangest cracks in the pavement - a borrowed cigarette on an icebreaker, a hot air balloon disaster, as a mirage on the horizon whilst stood queasily in the oozing muck of the dried up Aral sea. Because they begin out of utter disconnection, they can be sustained.

Unlike you, it doesn’t foster a sense of connection - rather a sense of deep disconnection, as I realise that to the majority of people, who live sedentary lives and have had the same friends since they were in nappies, this way of thinking is alien - but again, that’s ok, as it’s now of my own volition to live the life I lead.

Hence “friendships” in my points - as I don’t really view this type of interaction as friendship, rather just that the world is better when you are friendly to strangers.

Friendship, in the fecund, smothering way that many seem to view it, is utterly alien to me, and is in my view nothing more than tribalism, as most people have “friendship groups”, within which they engage in cultural drift and mutual ego-massage, usually resulting in poor outcomes for all.

Honestly, I’m not sure it’s even a thing beyond a reified concept that we are taught to engage in from an early age.

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