As for many things, there's a nice Knausgaard quote about this:
> That’s what distance does; when the time between conversations gets longer, intimacy diminishes, the little things connected to one’s daily life lose their place, it seems odd to talk about a shirt you just bought or to mention you’re thinking of leaving the dishes until morning when you haven’t spoken to a person for two weeks or a month, that absence would seem instead to call for more important topics, and once they begin to determine the conversation there’s no turning back, because then it’s two diplomats exchanging information about their respective realms in a conversation that needs to be started up from scratch, in a sense, every time, which gradually becomes tedious, and eventually it’s easier not to bother phoning at all, in which case it’s even harder the next time, and then suddenly it’s been half a year of silence.
I'm a guy and I like phone calls to friends, but I let them wander organically with little pressure. Of course, my friends and I have lives where it's not a big deal to set aside an hour or two for meandering conversation, and not everybody does. But wandering conversation is such a high-utility activity for me that I'm happy to do so. At any rate, it beats watching Netflix or whatever by a mile -- I remain confused by how many people say they have no time for friends but also consume a bunch of solo entertainment. I guess if your free time comes in unpredictably scheduled half hour blocks it might simultaneously be hard to plan hangouts and easy to watch TV, but I don't think most people have that kind of life, outside of maybe certain sets of parents of young children?
The quote is very interesting but I'd add something. Most of our dreads started after teenagehood, when social bonding was of high importance. Yet it often becomes a diplomatic effort, often void of real emotion. Real is too strong, but it's not vibrant nor fun most of the time. It's smalltalk. And we keep at it because as an adult it's deemed very important, even though, younger, relationships didn't center around mild chat, it was about having fun, cracking jokes, sharing a childish venture, getting something happy about the interaction.
ps: ah well, universe is poking fun at me, a very old friend just sent me a text after many months :)
Off topic, but seeing as you seem to have read some: where should one start with Knausgaard? I've been hearing more and more about him, and want to get a taste, but don't know where to start.
To maintain relationships as an adult you need regularly scheduled recurring events. Whether its a cookout every other Sunday, a Friday happy hour, Thursday night online gaming, or anything really.
But it must be a recurring event that does not need to be planned each time, but not going is still considered something you are cancelling.
This was common knowledge until we had a generation will cell phones which greatly reduced the amount of informal regularly scheduled events. In large part because coordination is not nearly as difficult so there is less push to just set something up that occurs once every two weeks as opposed to jus doing it last minute via group chat.
Or weekly/frequent religious community gatherings.
People who aren't familiar with that might not appreciate the community aspect.
For example, for some flavor of American Catholics, much of a normal Sunday can be blown (as far as the kids are concerned) by dressing up in Sunday best clothes, attending the big folk music mass, the chatter as people spill out of the church and maybe also talk with the priest out back after the procession out, followed by hours of "coffee and donuts" socializing in the parish's school cafeteria or meeting hall.
I'm not that kind of religious, but that's one way to find and maintain friendships, as well as sense of community and mutual support.
To maintain relationships as an adult you need regularly scheduled recurring events. Whether its a cookout every other Sunday, a Friday happy hour, Thursday night online gaming, or anything really.
That is obviously true, but I had never thought of it that way. This is one of the most insightful HN comments I've read in a long, long time. Thank you.
I run a face-to-face pen-and-paper RPG one night every other week for a group of friends. Some of them I've actually met through this campaign. We've been going for many years and when people ask how me make it work, my number one suggestion is the same as yours: pick a day of the week and stick to it.
Pick a cadence that is fast enough so that you don't forget what you did last time, but is also slow enough so that you have time for other things in your life and have time to look forward to it. It can be every week if that works for everyone, or every other week, or once a month. For us it's every other week.
One feature of having a fixed day is that it's possible for everyone to schedule other stuff around the activity. But the best part is that you don't have to spend a week coordinating peoples' schedules, having to decide if the player that "prefers" Monday gets to decide over the player who "prefers" Tuesday, and so on. At the start of every other week, it's already there in the calendar.
Also, since everyone in the group has jobs and kids now, people will miss sessions now and then. I've decided to play anyway, as long as we're at least two players plus the game master. If we were to wait for everyone to be available, we would always cancel, because someone is almost always away. We just pretend their characters are busy and decide at the start of next session what they did, or they float along as spectres with the group without interacting. If they hold quest items, we just give them to another character for a session, and so on. We make it easy to drop in and out.
I'm a player in another group that insists that everyone is present, and we have six-month gaps between sessions that are supposedly bi-weekly because there are always sick kids or deadlines at work for someone.
> But it must be a recurring event that does not need to be planned each time, but not going is still considered something you are cancelling.
The tough part about recurring events is that they're always lower priority than anything emergent, because they're going to happen again. A mildly uncooperative two year old or middling-priority work task likely won't prevent you from attending a one-time event, but an every-other-week happy hour? Yeah, sorry, can't make it this time...
The trick is finding a large enough interval such that missing an instance feels like a real loss.
I was playing a Moba with my brother almost every day, talking on voice while we played. I had to quit because the Moba was really sucking up all my drive and free time, but after quitting, I really missed talking with my brother. I started playing again for that reason, but had to quit again, because in the year and a half I was playing that game, I really got nothing done other than have lots of fun and piss off my wife. Of course I never call my brother on the phone otherwise, I have no reason to. I have a really hard time finding a middle ground, but the social aspect of gaming is definitely one of the strong positives for me.
Chatting can be difficult for men. As a man, we tend to not make points about chatting about our feelings or life. But, when our goal is video games / bowling / watching a football game / whatever else with downtime, well, the feelings or life conversations aren't our focus then. Loophole! (not to mention sometimes serious conversations can cause awkward silences. Everyone has the activity to turn back to.)
It can also be boring and annoying to talk about politics, the weather, or to gossip about people not present. Video games, like sports, offer a very detailed, completely trivial subject to talk about. Additionally, silence while watching or playing a game isn't dead (like silences at the holiday dinner table), it's a steady stream of new conversational material.
I made true friends through Ventrilo/TeamSpeak and different games (but mostly Counter-Strike). I’ve never made a phone call to a friend unless truly necessary but I’ve spent several hours talking through these.
Nowadays with Discord it’s just so much easier and fun for everyone. I’m happy that it was invented and just wish it was open-source but oh well.
>Like others his age, Gill says that his close friendships from high school and college have atrophied, not only because of the distance but because of their mutual aversion to talking on the phone.
I'll take the liberty to illustrate my own experience: my number of friendships and acquaintances has incredibly declined not because of any personal aversion to voicecalls, but to texting and social media.
I've noticed how, gradually, people I'm frequently around have grown more and more reluctant not only to pick up a phone call but also--and more importantly--to engage in face-to-face interaction, something I find absolutely essential to fulfill one's social needs to a deeply satisfying extent. Not having an online, public presence makes you irrelevant to a lot of people. In some countries, for example, not using WhatsApp is plain social suicide.
Not sure if it is something I picked up from my dad but I hardly chat to friends I have made over the years. As I have grown older I have gotten closer to my family including extended family. When I do meet with my friends we kick off as if we last saw each other yesterday yet sometimes it is a good 5,10 or even 15 years since we last met. The older I get the more memories I seem to have that include my family so I just focus on them. Not to say I don't talk to other people but I make way more effort and it seems much easier to talk to family. Maybe it is an African thing most of us are big on extended family. My uncle is a good 15 years older than me. Growing up he was an adult now we both adults so we can converse on the same level. Same with my dad.
Nah you just described me and my father to an extent. There are variables, but what you described really sounded familiar. And my dad’s side is Scottish.
My mom is more social and cognizant if social needs (Irish). Though less so now that they’re getting older/retired.
I’m not sure how well it mixes with the norms of Canadian society here. Often feels a touch off-centre but not entirely out of place.
So maybe more a trait of people who just tend toward family over other social connections, and less a heritage thing?
Kids change it too. It's hard not to make friends when you see the same parents a couple times a week at soccer or baseball or swimming, year-after-year. There's a lot of downtime and you around people that you have something in common with.
I’ve seen this with my kids and their school friends when they play online together. They chat and encourage each other, its really sweet and completely different to their off line rough and tumble play. I wake up on the weekends to quiet whispers of “sick play, dude.”
There’s a buddy of mine who I stay in touch with by playing Chess on a mobile app. We’ve had a game going at all times for probably 4 years now with a 3 day time limit on moves.
He’s a lot better than me. Overall record is something like 200-50, but it’s a simple way to keep in touch.
Other than that, all of my friends of college stay in touch because of college football. We all follow the team, get together at different away games and bowl games. Home games are actually tougher because most people come with a family routine for those.
I used to play WoW with a childhood friend on the other side of the country. Unlike MOBAs, I find that WoW is (or at least was during BC and WotLK) are mindless enough that you can actually hold a real conversation.
I hate talking on phones more than ever because rectangular “candybar” smartphones aren’t a good fit for a face, and the audio quality is terrible. I have to keep saying “What did you say?”
Of course I prefer meeting in person, and ideally in a place that isn’t pumping in music. It’s the only way to hold an actual conversation.
Sound quality and audio codec compression of these services (Discord, Mumble, Teamspeak, Ventrilo) is generally quite good, they are designed to support rapid coordination of large groups in high intensity situations and e-sports tournaments. It was not uncommon to have 40+ people in a single voice channel for MMO raids 10 years ago, and things have only improved since then. However, your experience will be significantly affected by your choice of headset and microphone. I have spent a lot of time in voice channels and it's common to have long conversations among groups of friends or online acquaintances there.
For me, this is fantasy hockey. I don't even like to watch hockey anymore, but I enjoy the daily interaction with my friends who are no longer in the same city and busy with their own lives.
I met most of my closest friends in College and we graduated almost a decade ago and have ended up moving to different parts of the states but I keep in contact with most of them via a Discord server and play with some of them on a near daily basis.
It's really great since it feels like we are just hanging out in the dorm hall just shooting the shit.
That has been my experience. Friendships are best formed and maintained by working towards some mutual goal or at the very least regular interaction. In the absence of physical proximity games are pretty much the only recreational option.
And it really works. I can chat with my friends, talk during the game, but I'll never talk on the phone. Idk why, but it's nice to know that this is just not my way.
[+] [-] papeda|6 years ago|reply
> That’s what distance does; when the time between conversations gets longer, intimacy diminishes, the little things connected to one’s daily life lose their place, it seems odd to talk about a shirt you just bought or to mention you’re thinking of leaving the dishes until morning when you haven’t spoken to a person for two weeks or a month, that absence would seem instead to call for more important topics, and once they begin to determine the conversation there’s no turning back, because then it’s two diplomats exchanging information about their respective realms in a conversation that needs to be started up from scratch, in a sense, every time, which gradually becomes tedious, and eventually it’s easier not to bother phoning at all, in which case it’s even harder the next time, and then suddenly it’s been half a year of silence.
I'm a guy and I like phone calls to friends, but I let them wander organically with little pressure. Of course, my friends and I have lives where it's not a big deal to set aside an hour or two for meandering conversation, and not everybody does. But wandering conversation is such a high-utility activity for me that I'm happy to do so. At any rate, it beats watching Netflix or whatever by a mile -- I remain confused by how many people say they have no time for friends but also consume a bunch of solo entertainment. I guess if your free time comes in unpredictably scheduled half hour blocks it might simultaneously be hard to plan hangouts and easy to watch TV, but I don't think most people have that kind of life, outside of maybe certain sets of parents of young children?
[+] [-] agumonkey|6 years ago|reply
ps: ah well, universe is poking fun at me, a very old friend just sent me a text after many months :)
[+] [-] dorchadas|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] momokoko|6 years ago|reply
But it must be a recurring event that does not need to be planned each time, but not going is still considered something you are cancelling.
This was common knowledge until we had a generation will cell phones which greatly reduced the amount of informal regularly scheduled events. In large part because coordination is not nearly as difficult so there is less push to just set something up that occurs once every two weeks as opposed to jus doing it last minute via group chat.
[+] [-] neilv|6 years ago|reply
People who aren't familiar with that might not appreciate the community aspect.
For example, for some flavor of American Catholics, much of a normal Sunday can be blown (as far as the kids are concerned) by dressing up in Sunday best clothes, attending the big folk music mass, the chatter as people spill out of the church and maybe also talk with the priest out back after the procession out, followed by hours of "coffee and donuts" socializing in the parish's school cafeteria or meeting hall.
I'm not that kind of religious, but that's one way to find and maintain friendships, as well as sense of community and mutual support.
[+] [-] e40|6 years ago|reply
That is obviously true, but I had never thought of it that way. This is one of the most insightful HN comments I've read in a long, long time. Thank you.
[+] [-] scandinavegan|6 years ago|reply
Pick a cadence that is fast enough so that you don't forget what you did last time, but is also slow enough so that you have time for other things in your life and have time to look forward to it. It can be every week if that works for everyone, or every other week, or once a month. For us it's every other week.
One feature of having a fixed day is that it's possible for everyone to schedule other stuff around the activity. But the best part is that you don't have to spend a week coordinating peoples' schedules, having to decide if the player that "prefers" Monday gets to decide over the player who "prefers" Tuesday, and so on. At the start of every other week, it's already there in the calendar.
Also, since everyone in the group has jobs and kids now, people will miss sessions now and then. I've decided to play anyway, as long as we're at least two players plus the game master. If we were to wait for everyone to be available, we would always cancel, because someone is almost always away. We just pretend their characters are busy and decide at the start of next session what they did, or they float along as spectres with the group without interacting. If they hold quest items, we just give them to another character for a session, and so on. We make it easy to drop in and out.
I'm a player in another group that insists that everyone is present, and we have six-month gaps between sessions that are supposedly bi-weekly because there are always sick kids or deadlines at work for someone.
[+] [-] nlawalker|6 years ago|reply
The tough part about recurring events is that they're always lower priority than anything emergent, because they're going to happen again. A mildly uncooperative two year old or middling-priority work task likely won't prevent you from attending a one-time event, but an every-other-week happy hour? Yeah, sorry, can't make it this time...
The trick is finding a large enough interval such that missing an instance feels like a real loss.
[+] [-] Tade0|6 years ago|reply
Or somebody willing to go the extra mile and gather everyone regularly.
I have such a person in my circle of friends from college - he organizes get-togethers which include me even though I've been out of town since 2015.
Given the distance I usually vodkonference.
[+] [-] hnick|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsfyu404ed|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] JeffL|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cheez|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ducttape12|6 years ago|reply
Also, what do you mean you got nothing done? You bonded with your brother. That seems pretty valuable to me!
[+] [-] ducttape12|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pessimizer|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway50003|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] outime|6 years ago|reply
Nowadays with Discord it’s just so much easier and fun for everyone. I’m happy that it was invented and just wish it was open-source but oh well.
[+] [-] Funes-|6 years ago|reply
I'll take the liberty to illustrate my own experience: my number of friendships and acquaintances has incredibly declined not because of any personal aversion to voicecalls, but to texting and social media.
I've noticed how, gradually, people I'm frequently around have grown more and more reluctant not only to pick up a phone call but also--and more importantly--to engage in face-to-face interaction, something I find absolutely essential to fulfill one's social needs to a deeply satisfying extent. Not having an online, public presence makes you irrelevant to a lot of people. In some countries, for example, not using WhatsApp is plain social suicide.
[+] [-] mmsimanga|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 52-6F-62|6 years ago|reply
My mom is more social and cognizant if social needs (Irish). Though less so now that they’re getting older/retired.
I’m not sure how well it mixes with the norms of Canadian society here. Often feels a touch off-centre but not entirely out of place.
So maybe more a trait of people who just tend toward family over other social connections, and less a heritage thing?
[+] [-] gtirloni|6 years ago|reply
Friendship as an adult has been about shared interests, not being assigned to the same class or living nearby, so it makes sense.
[+] [-] criddell|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elvecinodeabajo|6 years ago|reply
Aversion to the phone calls doesn't appear when talking to other in VoIP chats when playing online games.
Cool thought.
[+] [-] HNLurker2|6 years ago|reply
Hits too close to home there.
[+] [-] monk_e_boy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brightball|6 years ago|reply
He’s a lot better than me. Overall record is something like 200-50, but it’s a simple way to keep in touch.
Other than that, all of my friends of college stay in touch because of college football. We all follow the team, get together at different away games and bowl games. Home games are actually tougher because most people come with a family routine for those.
[+] [-] klausjensen|6 years ago|reply
Hell, sometimes we talk for an hour and never even manage to start the game...
[+] [-] faitswulff|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DonHopkins|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randomvectors|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manfredo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ken|6 years ago|reply
I hate talking on phones more than ever because rectangular “candybar” smartphones aren’t a good fit for a face, and the audio quality is terrible. I have to keep saying “What did you say?”
Of course I prefer meeting in person, and ideally in a place that isn’t pumping in music. It’s the only way to hold an actual conversation.
[+] [-] keypusher|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bartwe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vwyxp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yay_cloud2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blegblarh|6 years ago|reply
I met most of my closest friends in College and we graduated almost a decade ago and have ended up moving to different parts of the states but I keep in contact with most of them via a Discord server and play with some of them on a near daily basis.
It's really great since it feels like we are just hanging out in the dorm hall just shooting the shit.
[+] [-] knolax|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RichardHeart|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krsrhe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DigitalTerminal|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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