how to be or not to be a friend
on building and maintaining friendships as an adult, and why we probably all suck at it
1. how many deep conversations are too many
it’s one of those things that i internalised only when i experienced the counter. we’ve all learnt how to make friends in adult life on the backs of having Deep Vulnerable Conversations, but nothing replaces shared experiences in the present. small talk isn’t terrible, if you’re building new memories alongside! loved this meme.
2. why the parasocial delusion may not mean doomsday
are we only seeing their stories or also seeing them? instagram is poison but boy does it make it convenient to delude oneself into feeling clued into a friend’s life because you keep up with all their stories and it’s obviously a reflection of their full authentic life (it isn’t).
buuuut. is the skepticism overdone?
one of my favorite takes on social media x friendship is what the future of ‘friendship capacity’ could look like. humans have always augmented capacities - coffee to be more awake, weights for greater strength, glasses for vision - and so, what if social media is the ‘supplement’ that will increase our cognitive ability to have more than the 150 stable connections (per the Dunbar’s Number1).
is high quality necessarily better than a diverse quantity of friends? have we as a culture changed the definition of ‘friend’ itself? isn’t the dream to find a bubble and echo chamber for oneself? a cracking read on modern friendships:
READ HERE: The myths and reality of modern friendship, BBC
3. texting is important, texting is connection, but texting is hard
as each week passes and i try to catch up on my whatsapp message backlog2, i go back to this classic from Rega Jha on “slow texting”, and it gives me a powerful reframe to not feel guilty (i still do). some of my friends don’t quite…agree (hi, if you’re reading this, i promise i’ll respond by the weekend!!!)
READ HERE: In defense of ssss-low texting, by Rega JhaI too have become a fan of ssss-looooo-www messaging. There’s a small handful of people I’m closest to on earth, with whom daily contact is as effortless as breathing. And then there’s everyone else I know — people I like plenty but would rather talk to slowly, who I’m always hoping will themselves take time to respond, even when I reach out.
For years, I felt guilty about this tendency to let messages sit in wait. I was accused of being “hard to get in touch with” (a criticism I’ve now accepted as fact).
The guilt stemmed from feeling like I was letting down a normal expectation — now that we have our phones in our hands all the time, as I truly do, shouldn’t we be capable of instantly responding to whatever shows up on them?
4. why it is all worth it :)
5. men and women “can’t be just friends”
bollywood has not helped3:
and neither has hollywood:
and no matter where you look, it’s really disheartening to find men at large either view women as sexual objects to be kept close or as objects of purity to be kept at bay. but i’m sure there are ‘good’ men too? this one’s a slightly terrifying but eventually hopeful read:
Men are capable of being friends with women. Millions of men are proving this to be true every day. But men historically have neither been required nor expected to respect women.
6. the bane of our discourse
okay go and text your friends now. until next time & new reads!
🌻
~ rufus
Dunbar's number is the idea that people can maintain stable social relationships with about 150 people
Someone also recently shared with me the viral concept of “waffle wednesdays” where you send a short vide- clip update to your friends every wednesday (…conflicted about more scheduling in life)
Pained me to criticise an SRK-KJo classic, but in the pursuit of intellectual objectivity…sigh
Outstanding collection.