(2019-07-24) Krishnan How To Make Friends 2.0

Nikhil Krishnan: How To Make Friends 2.0. To make good friends (friendship), the general consensus amongst sociologists seems to be that we need three key components:

• Proximity: Repeated, unplanned interactions. A setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other
• Meeting: This is the function Twitter and writing plays in my life. By constantly broadcasting my interests/personality on the internet, you have a pretty decent sense of whether or not you wanna kick it with me. And that friendship actually builds up over time before actually meeting. Physical proximity becomes less necessary, relationships are built agnostic of geography. The repeat, unplanned interactions happen in the public forum consistently over time.
• Escalation

I’ve been dabbling more in STRUCTURED group events

Escape Rooms

I’ve so far hosted two P2P TED talks, each with about 7–8 prepared talks and 30–40 people

AirBnB trips

Maintenance

Systematic spontaneity is basically setting up processes to make sure you’re catching up with someone, but without it seeming robotic or inorganic. One thing I do, for example, is called text roulette. A couple times a week when I’m waiting for something, I’ll basically just scroll very fast through my messages and arbitrarily stop and pick a random person on that page to hit up and ask if they wanna catch up/do a call sometime.

Safe online spaces are key to getting friends to open up. This is usually a one-on-one space or small group space and totally private. One experiment I have going is with 7 other close friends that are spread across the world. Once a week, a different person in the group answers at least 5 questions from a question bank