[HN Gopher] Books on Making and Maintaining Friendships
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Books on Making and Maintaining Friendships
Author : sundarurfriend
Score : 69 points
Date : 2025-03-23 18:50 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scotthyoung.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scotthyoung.com)
| wewewedxfgdf wrote:
| Intentionally making friends is a concept unfamiliar to me. I
| have a small collection of good friends, all made long in the
| past and deliberately maintained. Friendships are forged in
| shared experience and more easily when young - that's just my
| personal experience I know its different for others. And they
| cannot be primarily virtual or they wilt. I feel like if there
| was any sense of an intentional attempt to make friends I would
| push back and away. Of course your experience is different
| because friendships come in many forms.
| klipt wrote:
| > Friendships are forged in shared experience and more easily
| when young
|
| That's great but what if you move to study or for a job.
|
| When you're the new person in town you have to make new friends
| or be socially isolated forever.
| wewewedxfgdf wrote:
| I deliberately stayed in my home town to keep my friendships
| - in many ways I would have been far better off leaving - I
| have often speculated about living somewhere else for a
| better financial and career life but fewer friendships.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| Your experience is the "standard" story about friendships
| portrayed in the media, and it's great when it works out that
| way, I'm glad it did for you.
|
| It's hard to know how standard that actually is though, how
| much of the population gets to experience it that way. A lot of
| people grow up in situations where they feel ostracized or just
| don't find anyone they connect to in their peer groups, and so
| don't get to forge friendships at that stage.
|
| And then there's many that go through a traumatic experience or
| big upheaval in their life in a way that makes it practically
| impossible to maintain the connections they did forge. It's
| true that sometimes it's those traumatic experiences or
| difficulties that deepen the friendship, but there's also many
| cases where those are so big and impactful that they alter
| one's identity and relationships (including friendships)
| forever.
|
| It's quite mature of you to be open to the fact that the
| experience is different for others, that's not often the case
| when one gets the "default" good experience of something. Many
| others who get that experience tend to dismiss conscious
| attempts to make or maintain friendships (like in the post) as
| not genuine, but friendship is also a skill that some people
| pick up unconsciously, and others need conscious attempts to
| learn and practice.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > And they cannot be primarily virtual or they wilt.
|
| See that's the problem with childhood friends, people move.
| Eventually it's impossible to keep in touch beyond online with
| more than one or two, sometimes not even that. Yearly meetups
| don't really do anything except make you realize that you have
| less and less in common each time until one day nobody feels
| like organizing anything anymore.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It's nice but not all friendships can be maintained or forged.
| I was a military family so I moved around a lot. And this was
| pre-social media, so I lost all my elementary school friends
| when I moved. So, no "childhood friends" to lean on".
|
| And it happens naturally as well when you go to college and
| likely graduate. Lot of my middle/high school connections
| spread out doing the same as me, finding their next step in
| their career. I'd be surprised if most people knew more than
| 1-2 people at their first job. So you gotta either work hard on
| old relationships from afar or find new ones.
|
| It's especially important if you are trying to find a mate. I'm
| not sure I heard of many deep romantic relationships that were
| started virtually with no physical contact for months.
|
| >perience and more easily when young - that's just my personal
| experience I know its different for others. And they cannot be
| primarily virtual or they wilt.
|
| There's that too. We're social creatures and a screen can't
| satisfy everyone. Men in particular are also just horrible at
| updates. I don't know how you can communicate for 20 minutes
| with someone you haven't talked to in a year and casually
| mention "oh yea, I'm married now and am expecting a kid in 3
| months". Really shows how isolated you can feel with someone
| you thought you knew inside out.
|
| >I feel like if there was any sense of an intentional attempt
| to make friends I would push back and away. Of course your
| experience is different because friendships come in many forms.
|
| Well that's the difficult part of modern friend forming. It's a
| two way street and we're in days where even your second place
| might be virtual. There's no school or parents to make people
| mesh together. You need not only to create events but the
| recipient needs energy to participate. You can do everything
| right but some people will simply not want to meet you halfway.
| Isamu wrote:
| This may sound like I am joking but I think that engineering
| types tend to be literalists and could benefit from books with a
| more direct approach, like "How to be less of a jerk to everyone
| around you and why that matters" or maybe "It's not everyone
| else, you're the dick".
|
| I should add that I am thinking primarily about people who are
| inadvertently abrasive, as a result of clumsy interactions.
| dcraw wrote:
| My brother wrote an essay on how to work with "stupid" people
| (which starts with recognizing they're not stupid).
|
| https://jasoncrawford.org/how-to-work-with-stupid-people
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| That's a great read and very, very high EQ way of thinking
| about these situations.
|
| Last 3 bullets are solid. Roughly same advice I often give to
| junior devs.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I spent most of my career at a company with some of the top
| engineers and optical scientists in the world. I'm pretty
| used to being the dumbest guy in the room, and I'm smarter
| than the average bear.
|
| Problem-solving/designing IQ is great, but it ain't the be-
| all/end-all. A lot of folks with two-digit IQs are my heroes.
| hinkley wrote:
| I think I could die happy if the following aphorism were
| attributed to me:
|
| Never attribute to stupidity that which can be properly
| explained by apathy.
|
| We treat other very smart people as stupid when we just
| haven't given them any reason at all to make them give a fuck
| about our pet peeves, or daily pain. Everybody has days when
| they are just trying to make it to 5:00. Sell me on your
| idea. Scolding is a weapon of last resort, and some people
| reach for it very early.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| > Scolding is a weapon of last resort, and some people
| reach for it very early.
|
| This single fact is responsible for so much polarization
| and conflict in the world. It also makes one's point _less_
| convincing, and makes people less likely to choose your
| side.
|
| A lot of the times, especially online, the "scolding" is
| done not as an attempt to bring the other person over or
| make them see your side; rather, it's become a social
| signal to one's own in-group to say "see how committed I am
| to our side", and gain some cachet in the group that way.
| Even if it muddies the water for everyone and makes the
| world a little bit worse in the process.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Something I've come to realize is that there's a sort of
| irony in thinking people are stupid. It typically means you
| value a specific form of intelligence, and are too biased to
| recognize other forms when they occur in other people.
|
| My friend's mom hates computers and software, but is
| incredibly technically competent when it comes to weaving and
| looms. She has fixed so many old machines, learned to do such
| cool stuff with them, does amazing work with dying and
| processing, and so on. She would strike your average tech bro
| as pretty clueless and out to lunch (she's a little whacky
| and eccentric) but she's so technically inclined in a
| different way it's absurd.
|
| Obviously some people are intellectually disabled and can't
| do things like this, but stupid seems like a derogatory term
| in that context. And even then, I sincerely doubt you
| couldn't find useful insight and intelligence there too.
|
| I'd say that thinking other people are stupid is simply
| failing to recognize or appreciate the value other people
| bring.
|
| Having said that, I'm pretty stupid so I could be wrong
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| > Something I've come to realize is that there's a sort of
| irony in thinking people are stupid. It typically means you
| value a specific form of intelligence, and are too biased
| to recognize other forms when they occur in other people.
|
| There's a great book by Todd Rose titled _The End of
| Average_ ; great read.
|
| Premise is exactly that for centuries, we've measured
| "intelligence" in such a narrow scope focused on the
| foundations of industry (reading, writing, arithmetic)
| often at the expense of other forms of intelligence like
| spatial (e.g. sculptors, artists), emotional, and even
| dextile (I think I just made up a word?).
|
| I have more recently been thinking about what intelligence
| means in this era when AI is advancing so quickly in
| processing information in volumes far surpassing humans
| ever could. I think that in the future, we'll see a
| realignment on intelligence.
| jaredsohn wrote:
| Lots of useful information.
|
| I guess you need to practice what this suggests rather than
| just sharing it with someone, though. If you send someone a
| link of 'How to work with "stupid" people' they might think
| you're calling them stupid instead of trying to improve
| communication.
| brudgers wrote:
| I think it's Paul Graham's definition of a stupid person that
| goes something like: A stupid person is
| someone who creates difficulties that don't
| benefit anyone including themselves.
|
| Thinking about a large number of other people as lacking
| intelligence seems to be one of those things.
| lokimedes wrote:
| Look for books like "The Asperkid's (secret) book of social
| rules".
| stroz wrote:
| We built Soonly (https://soonly.com) for doing exactly this!
| Build meaningful friendships with simple text reminders.
|
| It's amazing how much value compounds from simply and
| consistently investing in your relationships over the course of
| your life.
| johnea wrote:
| People need a book on how to make a friend?
|
| Sorry, this is never going to work...
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| I've heard good things about "The Other Significant Others" by
| NPR's Rhaina Cohen (with the disclosure that the author is the
| partner of a friend of mine)
|
| https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250333025/theothersignifi...
| adminm wrote:
| For any "self help" book, people split into three groups and they
| take it as 1. Gospel, 2. Nonsense, 3. Somewhere in the middle.
|
| I think you have to be in the third group for the books to be
| useful. You have to be able to pick out the truths and the
| nonsense. But also I think the nonsense is sometimes helpful to
| point out the truths.
|
| Me and you could read the same book, find it useful but what we
| took from it was quite different because what we needed was quite
| different. Even though we fundamentally had the same problem.
| profstasiak wrote:
| I want to highlight this blog article which in my opinion gives
| more actionable advice than all of the books listed (I read 6/8
| of those) on the topic of having good social life
|
| https://www.neelnanda.io/blog/mini-blog-post-23-taking-socia...
|
| tldr; taking social initiative is like a cheat code.
|
| The easiest way to make friends is to start organizing. I started
| applying this approach to my social life and I created two new
| friends groups from scratch.
|
| 1. Me and my brother started organizing lasertag matches.
| Basically anyone is invited. We even post open invitation to all
| our friends. Right now we have 20 people in our group chat and we
| do lasertags + beers once a month.
|
| 2. I created a group of friends from highschool - like a reunion
| shit but once every month. When I reached out to people everyone
| was hyped. I had only one of these meetings atm but everyone was
| happy and said they want more. We will be having a second one
| soon.
|
| If I needed more friends that's what I would be focusing on.
| Organizing a cyclic get together of people. It's like a cheat
| code for having a lot of friends.
|
| Right now I am a bit of time constrained but I look forward to
| organizing something different in the future.
| sitkack wrote:
| Yeah, when I was younger, I had a kickball mailing list running
| on my mail server early 2000s. It only had kickball traffic,
| anytime someone wanted to play a game they would post, their
| phone number and time and location of a game and people would
| just show up.
|
| Would organize larger games with more notice. Anyone who
| watched us for more than 15 seconds would be forced to play. If
| they had fun, we made them sign up.
| nico wrote:
| When I first read "How to win friends ...", the advice in the
| book made sense, but I couldn't take advantage of almost any of
| it, except maybe for written communication
|
| My social anxiety was so high, I couldn't even get to the basic
| situations that are the base for all of Dale Carnegie's book
|
| However, another book (and mainly the exercises in that book),
| that helped me a lot, was The Charisma Myth, by Olivia Fox-Cabane
|
| It has some excellent material on how to reduce social anxiety
| and be able to have better interactions
|
| Highly recommend it. And if you are curious, but don't want to
| commit to a whole book, just find the intro somewhere online and
| follow the 3 tips in there
| nvahalik wrote:
| Our men's group has been reading "Side by Side" by Ed Welch.
| Great book.
| GlacierFox wrote:
| Tech does seem to be where I've met the most obliviously
| abrasive, socially inept people that would absolutely not gain a
| grain of insight from any book on this subject matter -
| purposefully.
| sitkack wrote:
| It is odd how quickly this dropped from 1 to 58 (3rd from the
| bottom on the second page) in just the time I came back from
| lunch.
| disambiguation wrote:
| Autism, low social and emotional intelligence, weak theory of
| mind, inability to read and anticipate the emotional states of
| others.
|
| I suspect this is a major, yet unspoken, cognitive difference
| that separates the pro social from the anti social.
|
| Further im pessimistic that any amount of self help lists and
| techniques can make up for what is natural to many, yet deficient
| in others.
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