Dos Cabezas, Jean-Michel Basquiat to Andy Warhol
Quick Summary: In this Substack I talk about friendship and how it’s changed in my twenties. I discuss the difference between deep and close friends, the joy of the non-Update and the dangers of Friend-Optimisation. I finish off with a quick look at Elizabeth Days ‘Friendaholic’.
I saw a friend yesterday. She is not a close friend, but she is a deep one.
‘Closeness’ is measured in proximity. It’s in dinners, or coffees, or conversations shared. Close friends are marked out in the currency of time spent. I see this friend once or twice a year, and though it is lovely, and I appreciate her immensely, we are not close friends. I’m not the person she would ask to see a new gig in town, or pop over for dinner on a randomly free Wednesday - and she is not mine. That’s not the way our friendship works.
But we are deep friends. I feel like ‘depth’ in a friendship is measured in modality - in what you might do. I know that we are deep friends because some of those possible worlds have come to pass. It was her I called at a very low point, who calmed me down and made things feel okay again. Each of us will (and have) dropped everything to listen to the other. I hope that this potential doesn’t have to be tested again, but I know, in this deep friendship, that it is there. And even though she is not a close friend, she is a deep friend - and a very, very valuable friend at that.
For much of my early twenties I’ve taken closeness as my friend metric, and the number of close friends my Friendship KPI. Dunbar’s number is a measure of how many social connections we can sustain. It’s roughly the number in your average tribe - 150. I took Dunbars number as a challenge. Going through 7 schools, various hockey teams, and a very social time at uni/ 6th form means I met many wonderful people and I wanted to gobble them all up because they felt too brilliant to let go. So I hacked at my time to beat this, to have All. The. Friends. I wanted far more than my fair share of close friends - because I was lucky enough to meet far more than my allotted share of brilliant people.
So moving into adult life was hard because your capacity for closeness decreases. You have less time. People work or travel. They’re far away. They have partners and there’s less of the big gatherings that punctuate student life. You simply cannot have as many close friends. And this felt horrible at first. I felt like I was losing people left, right and centre. On the metric of close friends, my graph was tanking. Frankly, it freaked me out.
But I’ve realised that I’d been focusing on the wrong thing. Thankfully, in your twenties, your capacity for deep friendship remains. Depth is measured in maybes, modalities, things-you-would-do. And this is pretty limitless. I only have two kidneys but there are at least 20 people I would donate a kidney to. And in the unfortunate event someone is 3rd in the queue, it’s still the case that I would have donated a kidney - if only I could. Closeness is bounded by time, in a way that depth simply isn’t. I can only go for dinner with one of these 20 people at a time. But they all simultaneously have a claim to my kidney.
One of the good things from this gap year is that I’ve learnt how to trust in my deep friends. I’ve had to. I’m simply not in the country so I can’t be a pop-by-for-a-takeaway kind of friend. But a couple of days ago I saw Z, back from the States, who I adore. I hadn’t seen him for 3 years, but he remains as effervescent, interesting and simply wonderful as ever. We planned a Boston visit next time I’m stateside, spent 7 hours schlepping round London together, and it was effortless. We’re not close - we can’t be - but we are deep friends. I know that I would do an awful lot for him and him for me.
This move to deep friendship is scary. It’s less tangible. I don’t have the coffees, the dinners, those coins of time to attest to my value as a friend. I can’t see it. It’s something I have to trust in, but it’s also a trust I’m finding proved right. I think my friends do know that I would do anything for them, even if I can’t (and won’t) social whirlwind like I used to. And this is one of the things that I’m loving about friendship in my twenties, this move from closeness to depth.
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A second thing I’m adoring - the All Good update. I keep seeing friends and asking what’s going on, and people seem generally to be happy. We’ve moved away from manufactured chaos, or feeling the need for drama, or hyper stress. Those who are doing those things tend to be choosing them and are happy with that as their lot. So I’ve had so many updates from friends which consist of ‘really good thanks’, and I think this is symptomatic of the freedom to frame lives in accordance with their own designs. It’s really lovely. Hooray for the All Good Update.
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So this next bit is going to sound a little psychotic - but when I was trying to hold onto as many people as possible, I developed rules. My day was spreadsheeted on a Google Sheet, blocked into 6 cells, two apiece for morning, afternoon and evening. My time was a thing to be optimised, relentlessly. I did not like wasted time. I felt time was transient and my reaction to this transiency was to wring it out, to squeeze all the drips of life and living I could muster from this wet rag, this time.
So, as part of this Uber-Spreadsheet-Mindset I developed rules for optimising friendship. Like how out of 100 people, there’s normally 2 you’ll want to hold onto forever. Or how you can transition friends from regular contact (like people from training or classes) into people you keep up with, if you see them enough in the first 2 months after the scheduled activity stops. I tried to double up wherever I could, and had a horror of being alone, badgering my friends to do laundry with me, or run to the shops. I loved all of these people and I wanted to keep them close, close, close so they couldn’t go away. So I solved my time in my spreadsheet to try and keep as many as possible.
In Economics, optimisation-think is seen as value neutral. It’s working out how best to arrange the inputs to maximise the outputs - and it doesn’t change the inputs in question. But Sandel makes the observation that adding a price or putting something into an optimisation problem changes its nature. Putting a price on a hug makes it different to a normal hug. Budgeting your time in hours, ‘spending’ it on your friends changes the qualities of your time. Friendship-time becomes a variable in an optimisation problem and not an intrinsic good. In trying to solve the problem of ‘Max. Friend subject to Limited Time’, I failed to notice that my attempts to solve the problem were changing the nature of the inputs it was composed of - the time I was giving to my friends.
Back then, my rationale was that I love a lot of people and the cost of suboptimal time allocation was that people I love would slip away. The idea of losing someone through carelessness, misspent time, missed calls, missed contact felt unconscionable. Hence my obsessive optimisation was a labour of love to the ideal of friendship.
But this labour of love to the ideal of friendship tarnished the individual relationships of which friendship-to-me is composed. It is not as if there is a being called Friendship, looking down on the smoke from my sacrificial offerings and smiling approvingly. Instead, in the service of Friendship-in-General, I neglected Friendship-To-Individuals. My efforts expanded the scope of my friends, but limited the quality of my interaction. I met more, less. Each felt traded off with a faceless other.
And so that’s another reason to move to depth over closeness. Modalities, possibilities are infinite in a way that bounded, limited time simply isn't. Focusing on depth removes the possibility of slipping into that optimisation-think. And optimisation-think is really not a great way to treat your friends.
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By the way - I know this sounds psychopathic. I get that. So a little context: I didn’t really trust that I was likeable until I was 16. Likeable has a weak and a strong reading. The strong reading is ‘likeable’ as ‘someone who is liked over and above the average person’. The weak reading is simply ‘someone who has the capacity to be liked’. When I’m saying I found out I was likeable, that’s in the latter sense. I genuinely didn’t really believe I was someone who people could really, actually, wholly like until I was 16 and moved schools.
I vividly remember winning a vote at my new sixth form and having a very clear thought of ‘Oh my god, people like me. They actually like me’. And people did! Going from the light bullying of my first school to the total, encompassing warmth of my second was dizzying. I became addicted to the buzz of new friends, of all of these excellent people who wanted to give me their time of day. To be honest, I’m still regularly awed by how all these interesting, funny, kind people like me. It boggles me. And I take it as evidence when I’m in a wobble that I am okay - because I can’t be fooling this many splendid people.
So I related to a lot of Elizabeth Day’s ‘Friendaholic’. She describes herself as addicted to the process of making friends, an addiction that prompted her studied examination of what friendship is. She looks at different types of friends and provides new language and concepts around friendship, arguing it’s incredibly underserved relative to romantic relationships. Over the course of the book, she realises that brilliant people don’t have to be her friends. That it’s okay to think someone is wonderful, and still not have time for them in your life. There are many, many brilliant people in the world, and only so many hours in a day.
I also loved the idea of knowing your friends ‘friendship’ languages. For one of my friends it’s clear dedicated time - an evening that she knows is for the two of you, is reliable and inviolable. For another, it is birthdays. I love her dearly, so though I forget almost everyones birthdays, hers is in Day-Glo neon lights shining on the surface of my cerebellum. It’s such an important question: How does this person ‘speak’ friendship, and how can I make sure they’re feeling valued as a result?
Another idea I loved was the idea of planets. It turns out Dunbar’s number isn’t simply the raw 150 social connections, but a set of concentric circles. There are only so many close friends, so many dinner-party-friends, so many invite-to-my-wedding-friends you can have, all arranged in rings - like planets. And I liked this idea of planets, of how it lets you think of friendships waxing and waning, with the potential to come close again so long as they don’t escape the gravitational field entirely. It’s stopped things being so binary. Sometimes people are closer, sometimes further away and these things change as you get older. You just need to make sure those you have loved, and might love again, stay in orbit.
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One last recommendation. I did an exercise, a long time ago, when trying to work out what it is I value. I listed out my 20 closest friends (gratifyingly, 19 are still in my life), and beneath each, a word that sprung to mind when I thought of them. It showed me what I value (in my case, ‘Funny’, ‘Kind’, ‘Impetus’/ ‘Make-Stuff-Happenery’/ ‘Oomph or Gumption?’, ‘Drive’, ‘Steadiness’ and ‘Ease’). I’d really recommend. It’s pretty spot on - those are 6 of the traits that I value most - and it’s interesting because we do show what we value through who we choose to spend our time with.
Have a wonderful week everybody - much love xxx
, into what philosophers sometimes call “the space of reasons”. In other words, we treat it as a rational decision to be consciously deliberated over and optimised relative to private goals, rather than treating it as in the will of God or other people.
Spreadsheeting the good man Jesus and the scoundrel Christ PG 137