Warning: This “blogpost” is currently just a messy, meandering collection of thoughts and notes.

2023: My current best description of friendship is “shared understanding”.

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If I can only pick one thing from my memex to share with the world, I think it might be “Make friends”. It’s maybe the simplest two word directive that has the most influence on everything else. To make good friends you have to be kind, interesting, sensitive, ethical. If not for the nourishment of friendship I would probably be a selfish asshole. Making friends is the most valuable thing that I know how to do, and I think the most powerful thing I could do to teach other people how to do it. It’s a little odd to me that we live in a time where it’s never been easier to reach out to people, and yet it seems like people are lonelier and more disconnected than ever.

Start with yourself. The most important person you have to be friends with is yourself. (Much of self-improvement, personal development, introspection, etc can quite simply be reframed as the art of socialising with yourself. Listen to yourself, pay close attention to yourself, don’t interrupt yourself, be kind and supportive to yourself, be constructive in criticism.)

Attention might be the core ‘currency’. Possibly the most important thing in a friendship – including one with yourself, or your spouse, or your child – is attention. Deep, focused, undivided, non-judgemental attention. To really see + hear the other person, in a world where people constantly feel unseen & unheard. (Being attentive is how you notice things in people that they may not have noticed in themselves, and this can be an incredibly powerful way to connect with someone.)

So: the most important thing about the most important thing in life is attention, and in schools, in my opinion, we often screw up how we teach it. If you use threats and coercion to force kids to “pay” attention… …you set people up for dysfunctional relationships their whole life! (“PAY ATTENTION TO ME!”)

Good reply game. You make friends by correctly reading and responding to the implicit proposals in other people’s utterances. There is an art to replying and commenting, and probably like 60-70% of people I’ve seen on the internet fail at it. The important thing is not to speak your mind, but to “support” the OP. You can support them by disagreeing well & you can “mis-support” them by agreeing stupidly.

You want to give people sincere compliments. Sincere compliments make people more powerful.

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Two paths you can take on Twitter: nitpick (you don’t make any friends), or support (you make lots of friends)

Some people think quote-tweeting is bad, but you can actually quote-tweet with kindness and use it to introduce good people to each other.

here is a thread of 40+ friends I’ve met in person via Twitter

I flew halfway across the planet to meet twitter friends and it was one of the best experiences of my life.

I am here to build an army of kind friendly nerds who are good to each other.

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I believe that You can meet effectively anybody in the world if you have internet access and you’re willing to spend 10 years working on it.

This is basically the final form of advanced reply guy methodology. To meet any person, find out what they want, and make it. If the person has a gated network, find out what their gatekeepers want, and make it. People will trip over themselves to refer you if you’re legit.

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Optimize for referrals – rather than try to meet 100 new people blind, meet the 100 or so people you already know, identify the best 5-10 of them (whatever that means to you), and then develop yourself so those people refer you to their friends.

Thread of threads: A social graph is a human-web

• there is more intelligence outside of your head that inside your head, and having smart friends accelerates your intelligence development
• Friends make you more creative
• you can be friends with yourself
• you can be friends with art

List of examples of how to be friendly and nourishing

The more interesting question to ask, compared to “how do you compete with smarter people”, is “how do you win the love, trust, support & goodwill of smarter people, so that THEY are on YOUR side?” It’s interesting how rarely anybody seems to ask this. I think about this all the time.

Back to the Memex.