Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow-ripening fruit.
– Aristotle
When it comes to the challenges of having friends as an adult, it seems like technologists often focus on the problem of meeting people or of having someone to do an activity with. The annals of apps that went nowhere are littered with solutions to these problems, and every year, someone tries a new version, sometimes even with funding.
But the real problem isn’t meeting people, nor is it having your friends know where you or what your plans are so you can do things with them. Those are necessary but insufficient conditions for having friends.
The problem is that friendship requires time and effort. Dr. Jeff Hall found it takes between 40-60 hours to move from an acquaintance to a casual friendship, from 80-100 hours to call someone a friend, and over 200 hours of being together to achieve being considered a ‘best friend.’
There are a number of systemic and cultural trends working against us when it comes to putting in that time and effort. We move more, work remotely, have gig work or other odd schedules, have kids and no family nearby to take the load off parents, and of course we have lots of things designed to entertain us or hold our attention when we’re alone.
What’s more, it’s just getting more unusual (and maybe weirder) to find people behaving in more casual time-and-effort ways, like stopping by someone’s house on the way somewhere else, or phoning people up without arranging the call in advance, or spontaneously making a plan to do something. This would be mostly unthinkable with people you don’t know well among most people I’ve talked to.
I’ve tried out a number of these matching-people programs, and in my experience, even when I have a totally fun and interesting conversation with someone, I probably won’t talk to them again for months, if ever.
There’s a social… taboo is too strong, but maybe anti-norm? against the idea that two individuals could meet for totally non-romantic reasons and then hang out daily with no motive other than to build a friendship. Being ‘busy’ is a marker of status, seeming like you have unlimited free time or even enough to fit a new friend in might make you look lame or needy. And generally, it does take time with someone to even tell if you want to go in the direction of time alone with them for any prolonged time period.
All of these factors make me believe that communities are the only reliable way to allow people to spend regular time with one another and become friends outside of a work or religious context (which are arguably forms of community). When you hang out in a community, you’re not implying other people must reciprocate whatever amount of time you can spend there, nor is there necessarily an expectation that you will be there at any given time, unless you specifically take on a commitment to do so (and in that case, it’s generally a service to the group, not one that implies you are lonely).
Being lonely has the odd side effect of making us more antisocial and suspicious, which means exposing our loneliness feels incredibly vulnerable. A community gives us a reason to be with people, getting to know and care about others without needing to give away that we feel isolated or alone.
There are a lot of ways communities or collectives or groups work, but I think anyone who is contributing to a community (where people care about each other) is working to alleviate a huge problem with enormous health costs and negative cultural impacts. All while mattering and co-creating meaning with other people. It’s one of the best ways we can be rewarded, be of service, without requiring a clear transaction (though some communities do have fees or admission, a good community still runs without the sense that you’re paying for someone to care about you).