{"id":131,"date":"2020-10-26T20:00:19","date_gmt":"2020-10-27T00:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/etiennefd.com\/dgm\/?p=131"},"modified":"2020-10-26T20:01:26","modified_gmt":"2020-10-27T00:01:26","slug":"leveling-up-the-skill-of-friendship-the-why","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/etiennefd.com\/dgm\/leveling-up-the-skill-of-friendship-the-why\/","title":{"rendered":"Leveling Up the Skill of Friendship: The Why"},"content":{"rendered":"

Says the popular adage:<\/p>\n

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.<\/p>\n

Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.<\/p>\n

Teach a man to make friends and now all his fisherman buddies give him freshly caught fish whenever he visits them down by the pier, plus<\/em> they water his plants when he’s out of town, plus<\/em> they help him pull through when he’s feeling down, plus<\/em> he’s also friends with the bakers so he gets fresh BREAD in addition to the fish.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, friends are great. Almost any relationship, including romantic or professional ones, is better when it involves friendship.<\/span><\/p>\n

But friendship isn\u2019t necessarily easy or natural. Everyone is somewhere between good and bad at it. <\/span><\/p>\n

Friendship is, in fact, a skill. Even if we rarely think of it as one.<\/span><\/p>\n

And <\/span>unless you\u2019re especially talented, or unless you\u2019ve deliberately practiced, there\u2019s a reasonable chance that you\u2019re not as good at friendship as you could. Yet there may not be a skill worth mastering more, as the (totally<\/em> authentic) proverb above illustrates.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is an introductory essay in what I expect to be a series of posts on friendship. Here, we’ll discuss the “why”: why friendship is a skill, and why it’s an important one. At the end, we’ll briefly lay some\u00a0groundwork for another essay about the “how.”<\/p>\n

But first, a personal anecdote.<\/p>\n

An auction of dreams<\/h3>\n

In the Quebec secondary school system, there used to be a class called “Personal and Social Development.” It was a hodgepodge of sex education, ethics, and other things neither I or my high school friends can remember.1<\/a><\/sup>though many of us remember that time the teacher brought a chocolate cake made with mayonnaise, which seemed like a mind blowing idea at the time.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the few things I do remember from that class was the “auction of dreams” we had once. The teacher would read out some ambitious life goals, like “to become the prime minister,” and we would bid points to buy them. The one dream I won was “to have a true friend.” I didn’t need to spend a great deal of points for it; my classmates seemed less interested. Perhaps because, to them, it felt more ordinary than the other dreams, or more easily attainable.<\/p>\n

But I knew that making new friends was, for me, a slow process. That deep, true friendship was rare. I wasn’t (and am not) disastrously bad at social skills, but I’ve always felt a bit below average, just enough to often be somewhat dissatisfied with my social life. I regularly wish I were part of some cohesive community of friends.<\/p>\n

In the narrative of my life, that auction of dreams has become a defining moment. A sign I knew I was slightly inadequate at something very important.<\/span><\/p>\n

Usually, though, I’m doing just fine. “Usually” as in “when there isn’t a horrible virus floating around and forcing us to cancel so many of the good things in the world.” The pandemic contact restrictions feel as if someone had detonated dynamite in the fragile social life that I had been slowly and painstakingly growing for years. It’s not that I’ve lost friends. But all the contexts \u2014 work, organized activities, parties \u2014 in which we effortlessly and serendipitously spend time with people are now gone. Social interaction has become more intentional. It takes more energy.<\/p>\n

So I’ve been sitting at home, wondering how to save what I could, and how to efficiently rebuild my social life. Then I happened upon the work of Visakan Veerasamy, better known as Visa<\/a>. If your Twitter is anything like mine, you’ll know who I’m talking about. He’s all over the place.<\/p>\n

Visa’s mission is “to build the greatest social graph of friendly, ambitious nerds that the world has ever seen.” As he writes in his book Friendly Ambitious Nerd<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Friendliness\u200b is about being a nourishing presence. It\u2019s about becoming somebody who people (including yourself!) love and enjoy. It\u2019s about creating supportive, encouraging spaces where people can feel comfortable sharing their honest feelings. Humans are a social species, we’re practically wired to desire kinship, to be part of something bigger than ourselves. So why not get good at it?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Yeah, why not? Why not see it as a skill, as something you can learn and master?<\/p>\n

You can be good or bad at basic human needs<\/h3>\n

I can think of a few reasons why friendship is rarely framed as a skill.2<\/a><\/sup>It’s more common to talk about “social skills,” but my view is that this is both more general and less important than just friendship.<\/span> One is that almost everyone picks it up to some extent in their youth, usually in school. Another is that socialization is a basic human need. So we learn the art of friendship the same way we learn the art of eating: as a necessity for survival.<\/p>\n

But even a basic need like eating involves several activities that we can be good or bad at: selecting foods to buy, meal planning, cooking, picking a restaurant, finding a balanced diet, and even just enjoying what you eat.3<\/a><\/sup>Some people apparently never enjoy their food, and eat for sustenance only. For an example, read the beginning of this<\/span> Slate Star Codex piece<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Similarly, the skill of friendship comprises a bunch of things we can be good or bad at:<\/p>\n