I’ve never had a blog before, even though I had thoughts. Thoughts which were more often than not amorphous — indubitably due to the fact that I never once stopped to articulate them. I was (still am) a coward. Putting my writing out in public is difficult. What if the things that I write about are so uninteresting and at most, serve as mere proxies which others used to gauge what a insight-porn-ish nitwit I am.
Everything I can imagine saying or writing sounds cringey or content-free. Did you know there are different kinds of dashes: — - – (em dash, normal dash, en dash)? I did not.
I’m also terrible in the subtle art of nonstandard sentence construction. Instead of picking words that maximize meaning and value for the readers, I pick words that fit the metre and rhyme scheme.
Why now
The main trigger was when I got to read Ben’s sagely advice on blogging as an awesome avenue to gain even more awesome friendships.*
Points by Ben that made way too much sense when playing out to their logical conclusions:
- Around 25% of his friends, he either first met them through one of his blogs OR
- His friendships was significantly reinforced by commenting on each other’s posts
- Another 25% or more he met indirectly through one of these people (who are disproportionately likely to have friends that he like a lot)
This is important. Over the course of my life, I realized that I deeply value friendship.
Reciprocal Arrangements
In the hierarchy of relationships, friendships are at the bottom. Romantic partners, parents, children — all these come first. 1
The poignant point about friendships lies in its inherent voluntary nature. Since you can choose to enter, you can also choose to get out. There are no fail-safes in friendships, unlike in other kinds of relationships e.g., marriages, birth families, business partners.
Some time back, I was asked if I thought of Person X as a friend or acquaintance. I was puzzled because weren’t everyone friends? Isn’t someone a friend if this is a person 1) I’ve talked to before and 2) bear no negative sentiments towards? Hmm…
Our world is a high-dimensional one. Any number of factors could conceivably matter when it comes to the quality of a relationship between you and another party. The graph below presents a more mathetical sketch and decidedly stronger babble and prune filter (to me) when I’m stuck between pursuing or dropping this budding acquaintance-friendship.
Source: Wait But Why
So, on to the hunt for my sources of enjoyment, and thereby establishing which billions of variables in the universe are actually relevant to me when it comes to people I want to be friends with.
Everybody worships
Based on personal experience, a directly relevant variable i.e., which variables mediate the influence of everything else, boils down to the choice of what they think about. What they consciously decide has meaning and what doesn’t. It is usually a direct forerunner to an estimate of their internal mental patterns — emotions, engagement, thoughts/worries etc. Their curiosity, hilarity2 or exhilarating verbal facility.
If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing. 3
One thing I care about in friends is whether we’ll have interesting conversations. I become especially invigorated, whenever such interactions temporarily prove/disprove hypotheses I have.
Other things that matter to me in friendships:
- Taste4 and aesthetic sensibility
- Self-knowledge and reflective mindset
- Confidence and the ability to project self-assurance
- Empathy - the ability to read others and empathize with their point of view
- Conflict tolerance - a capacity to handle disagreement constructively
Intelligence, while an important attribute, is overrated.
The bottom line is basically somebody to talk to, someone to depend on and somebody to enjoy. Across the entire life course, these expectations remain the same, but the circumstances under which they’re accomplished change.
Relevant objections
”BORING PEOPLE FIND OTHERS BORING”
It’s true that sometimes, we might be over presumptuous in holding some kinds of inclinations as superior to others. Some people prefer to spend their free time checking social media and getting sad. Others prefer to read books 5. Who’s to decide which one is interesting/better?
But I disagree that there are no boring people. I don’t mean to be binary about this. You can be simultaneously boring and unboring. People are mercifully, individuals with loves and hates, ambitions and generosity, potential and idlesness all mixed up inside them.
And sometimes, I get stuck in a group conversation with people I don’t find interesting. The topics, meh. The people, meh. The vibe, meh. I’m meh sometimes too.
Maybe its age, but I’ve started giving more conscious thought to my conduct and what the sum of all my choices added up to be. Some say that rather than changing from the inside out, you bring the outside in.
Cities and Circuses
According to PG, different cities whispers different things to you. The kind of conversations you overhear tell you the kinds of people you are around.
Whether I like it or not, it’s hard not to be influenced by those around me. When I pay attention to what I do and say, I feel a state of internal division and weakness that sets me further away from a meta goal of mine: “to live in truth” — to act diligently towards some well-articulated, defined and temporary end. The feeling of alienation when no one around me cares about the same things as I do, is also bitter. And I wonder why my consumption of desserts has gone up…
A city speaks to you mostly by accident — in things you see through windows, in conversations you overhear. It’s not something you have to seek out, but something you can’t turn off. One of the occupational hazards of living in Cambridge is overhearing the conversations of people who use interrogative intonation in declarative sentences. But on average I’ll take Cambridge conversations over New York or Silicon Valley ones. 6
As Feynman once said, the first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. Anyway, this first blog post is in hope of laying down a trail for others to follow, if they want to.
I will be making my own criteria for failure and success timely and clear, at least for myself. Though, a side-goal would also be for others to understand what I am doing, so that you can evaluate together with me.
That said, any first-person text has a narrator of questionable credibility because humans tend to rationalise, justify and explain away some of our conduct and decisions. How reliable am I? Am I a believable three dimensional character that makes you want to keep reading what I expound on? I don’t dwell on these type of questions for too long. Else, I’ll go mad or become a post-modern philosopher.
Footnotes
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To have a sense of humour is to be strong: to keep one’s sense of humour is to shrug off misfortunes, and to lose one’s sense of humour is to be wounded by them. See Paul Graham: Taste ↩
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The odds of people with good taste having more developed characters is greater. ↩
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Performative reading at cafes is another matter altogether. ↩