Amalgamations 03: April 2023

The Friendship Funnel + 6(!) more things

[Intro]

April was a crazy month where I was on the road basically every weekend. This month’s edition is a few days late for that reason.

This month’s main piece is a bit different from the past few. Instead of reflecting on things I’ve been reading, I share a reflection (and a bit of a playbook) on something I’ve been doing for the past few years.

As always, the reader-favorite “Other Things” section is at the end. In exchange for my lateness this month, there is one more than usual.

[What I’m thinking about]

The Friendship Funnel

I aim to be very intentional in my friendship building. So intentional, that I’ve coined what I call the “friendship funnel” as a structured way of ensuring that I am attempting to both meet new people and build deeper connections with those people over time.

Friendship building is a tricky thing, one that we seem to have weird feelings about. In particular, saying that you are intentional about building friendships can feel inauthentic in some way. As a result, as committed as I am to this concept, it is something I discuss with my own friends relatively infrequently. I’m trying to get more comfortable with it; publishing a long form piece about it on the internet is a pretty good forcing function.

Why do we shy away so strongly from being intentional about making friends? Part of this I believe is social conditioning. From growing up, we have an ingrained belief about how friendships form: naturally, slowly over time, without much effort. That is because most of us spend the vast majority of our childhoods in the perfect laboratory for friendship forming: schools. You get a pre-selected group of people that share all the primary drivers that makes someone likely to be your friend: you’re the same age, you likely live nearby to each other, you may have similar intellectual or socioeconomic backgrounds, and you have a ton of shared experiences to bond over. And then, you get assigned seats next to each other for months on end. In this environment, you can be shy for months, lean over only to ask about a hard math problem, and eventually you’ll find at least a few friendships.

Adult life offers much less of this opportunity. After college, you really only have this type of environment in one location: the office. It’s no surprise that so many friendships (and romantic relationships for that matter) form in the office as a result. But with the rise of remote work post-COVID, for many of us (including me) that environment of opportunity is becoming less and less relevant. As a result, most of us are stuck in a catch-22: we’ve internalized that the only way friendships should form is to have them organically arise from natural contact over months or even years but have few to no environments where this will happen, leaving us with fewer friends, especially new friends, than we would like. 

To counteract this, the “friendship funnel” I’ve created for myself has allowed me to think about friendship building in a more structured way and ensure that I am taking meaningful steps in my objective of building more, deeper connections to people in my life. Though I don’t think any of the steps are particularly revolutionary, naming them explicitly and in an order has been helpful to me:

1. Put yourself in a position to meet people: Opportunity dwarfs every other aspect of relationship building. Think about the types of group environments that you feel comfortable in and where you think you may find like-minded people and seek those out internationally. For me in San Francisco, some of these places have been:

   1. House parties and dinner parties thrown by existing friends

   2. Social clubs/third spaces like Groundfloor and The Commons

   3. Pickup sports leagues like Volo

   4. Events I’ve organized myself where people bring friends I don’t yet know

   5. Group weekend trips

   Not everyone naturally feels comfortable in all of these environments. You can actually make that fact a feature: seek out the places that you do feel comfortable and you’re more likely to meet people who are like you (and so with which you’re more likely to vibe). Remember, it’s much more likely that you are the rule than that you are the exception. Most people are likely hoping to get out of the activities that they do the same things that you are.

2. Get people’s contact information: If you talk to someone for even a few minutes and think there is a chance that they could be your friend, make sure you have a way of getting in touch with them again. People, including myself originally, have an aversion to doing this, possibly because of the association with “getting someone’s number” in a romantic context. I’ve recently found that for someone I’ve met only briefly, exchanging something like an Instagram or Twitter is actually preferable to a phone number: not only do you now have a way of contacting them, you have a bridge to get more exposure to each other’s lives, which can help you both get a better sense for who they are as a person and build a bit more of a connection before you decide to hang out in person. Try replying to a story or tweet that catches your eye. That said, while some amount of virtual friendship building can be helpful, I would avoid letting your friendships exist solely virtually for too long. At least for me, I’ve found spending time together in person to be the most surefire way to progress to a deeper level of friendship.

3. Spend time with loose connections in a group setting: Getting exceptionally tactical here, you can think of the first two steps as an attempt to identify a set of people you could become friends with. The next step is figuring out who actually will be. I find that oftentimes jumping from talking to someone in a group setting for just a couple of minutes to inviting them to spend time together one-on-one can be daunting, not to mention time-consuming. You may be better at this than I am. My approach is instead to find an event or group activity that I can invite them to that feels low pressure for both sides. This could be a party (large or small) that you host, a group activity like a hike you organize, perhaps a dinner you put together. This provides you an opportunity to reach out and reconnect after your initial encounter and provides a comparatively lower pressure way to spend a bit more time together and see if you continue to connect. 

4. Invest in one-on-one time with the people you’ve met that you vibe with: At this point in the funnel, you have identified some number of people that you continue to click with and that you could see becoming a close friend. Double down on these people: grab dinner, do an activity very purposefully together, whatever. Make it clear you want to be their friend. Either they will reciprocate (great!) or it will become clear quickly they are not as interested (still a good outcome!). Once you find someone as excited as you are, investing in a few distinct hangouts (both one-on-one and in small groups) helps provide the exit velocity to cement your friendship.

In April, the Surgeon General published a New York Times op-ed about the “loneliness epidemic” gripping our nation (and I’ll extend to: our world). To me, this only drives home further a point I made in step 1 of the funnel: it’s much more likely that you are the rule than that you are the exception. The desire you have for both more and deeper connections to those around you are almost certainly shared by basically everyone that you interact with. For me, that perspective has shaped my willingness to put myself out there intentionally more than I ever have. If that is something that you struggle with in one form or another, it may for you too. And if it does, hopefully this structured process can act as a tool in your toolkit for doing so.

[Misc]

Six Other Things

1. Readwise Reader is by far my favorite application I use right now and probably the best app I’ve found in the last few years. It’s the central collection point for this newsletter and has helped me read more and read better over the past few months. I was a big user of Pocket for many years prior to finding Readwise, but found myself doing much more saving than reading. Readwise has changed that pattern. I can’t rave enough.

2. At the end of this month, I’m moving for the first time in almost 5 years. I’ll also be living alone for the first time. When I decorated my current apartment, I planned on staying there for a year or maybe two and so did it cheap. Many years beyond that, I’m excited to decorate a place again. This post from a menswear blogger I’ve followed for over a decade has been particularly inspirational (it doesn’t hurt that he also happens to live in a San Francisco 1 bedroom).

   

3. Even after reading the article, the thesis of “The Gambler Who Beat Roulette” seems too impossible to be true: not only are the physics of at least some roulette wheels predictable enough that the fall of the ball can be determined in real time by tiny, wearable computers, but there may be people out there that can do this just with their minds. And yet by the end, you are left with the feeling, as the author is, that there is no other reasonable explanation.

4. I picked up Species by Michael Friedman at a tiny bookstore amongst the redwoods about 2 hours north of San Francisco and I am obsessed with it. I find myself reading a poem, getting to the end, and then immediately re-reading again and again, struck by the poem but with absolutely no idea what it is actually talking about. A few weeks in and I’m not sure I understand a single one. And yet I love it more and more.

   

5. I was the type of kid who set up SOCKS proxies on my laptop in high school to circumvent the site-filtering firewall because most VPN ports were blocked. I also used to work on Chrome OS, including on the video conferencing experience during COVID, when laptops went home and became school for kids for months and sometimes years. “Inside the Chaotic World of Kids Trying to Play Video Games on School Laptops” tells the story of the surprising semi-underworld of sites helping kids not pay attention in class. It’s a tale that is shockingly entrepreneurial and is both very far away from but, at the same time, not that dissimilar to my own attempts to waste my time with Adobe Flash games in school in my youth.

6. “No Good Alone” by Rayne Fisher-Quann resonated deeply with me at the beginning of the month and feels like a fitting end to this newsletter given its core topic. As someone who loves to learn about myself through my relationships with other people, Fisher-Quann’s push for externalized self-improvement rings true.

   The process of becoming yourself is not a corporate desk job, and it is not homework, and it is not an unticked box languishing on a to-do list. You do not have to treat your flaws like action items that must be systematically targeted and eliminated in order to receive a return on investment. You have no supervisor; you should not be punished when you fail. Your job is not to lock the doors and chisel at yourself like a marble statue in the darkness until you feel quantifiably worthy of the world outside. Your job, really, is to find people who love you for reasons you hardly understand, and to love them back, and to try as hard as you can to make it all easier for each other.