#27 Is this friendship.jpeg
The first time I went to Seattle was in the summer of 2017. I had moved to the United States 2 months before and found a contract gig doing marketing for a start-up run by a first-generation Indian immigrant. He flew me out to Seattle for a week and showed me all the good sides of living in the US that were not a Walmart, Kroger, or Frozen Yogurt place in the suburb of Houston. One evening while walking down the streets of Bellevue, he tried to impart some social skills to me without much success. My only takeaway from the interaction was the pain in his eyes when he said, "Americans may act friendly but don't ever think they are your friends". I imagined he came to this conclusion because he was slighted by some girl who said "Howdy y'all" with a charming smile and Texas twang.
A year passed, and I stopped working on that gig but was constantly surprised to find that the company still existed. I started becoming the guy who goes to the same coffee shop and orders the same overpriced espresso drink. I fooled myself into believing that the coffee was good but had to eventually admit that it was actually the cute barista who said "hey" with a charming smile and Texas twang. I somehow gathered the courage to ask her out. She was kind enough to give me her number, build up some expectations, and then later text, "hey I think you are cool but Im seeing someone". After that, I stopped drinking so much espresso because Americans may act friendly but don't ever think they are your friends.
I became invested in different approaches to relationships and friendships. You do this when you don't have any friends, and you are sitting on your couch theorizing about what it must be like to have friends. I remembered a guy I worked with back in India who was really into the Adam Grant book Give and Take. The basic idea of the book is that in organizations, people tend to:
take from others (takers),
trade their time and information evenly with others (matchers),
or contribute without expecting anything in return (givers).
Givers usually lose, and takers are exploitative, so you must strive to be a matcher. Give and take equally. The guy in India organized his whole life around this. If you ask him for an intro to someone, he would immediately ask you for something in return - no favors to be cashed in the future, no debt. He would always tell me, "if you ask someone for something, then you should probably offer something in return."
When I moved to America, I tried doing this in a few business/career interactions because Americans may act friendly, but they are never your friends. Hence everything must be transactional. The only problem is that I didn't have much to offer.
"Hey, I'd like 30 minutes of your time to talk about the opportunity you have. In return how about I give you some free advice on something I've no direct experience in?"
I should have been sent to LinkedIn jail for all cold reach out I did back then.
This give and taking was not working out for me.
On the other end, I've had relationships with people who occasionally like to ask, "what have you done for me lately?" These types of relationships are characterized by give-and-take style scorekeeping combined with early onset of dementia about anything you might have actually done for that person. In the past few years, I've seen these types of people obsessed with a 21st-century phenomenon called Community. They are always seeking this magical thing called Community but never really arriving at it. A Community is a group of people, usually on the internet, sometimes in a compound with big walls and wearing the same clothes coincidentally, who keep asking each other, "what have you done for me lately?". They don't ask that directly. That would be naive like my Give and Take guy. Instead, they do it through a web of complex status games and gossip.
I've found that communities are great for people who thrive off a recursive loop of drama. Unfortunately, I found out pretty quickly that Im not a community person. I'm still friends with them cause they have great story material always. That's me taking from them. I'm a taker.
So am I still sitting on my couch theorizing about friendship?
Kind of, while trying to find a word to describe the good relationships I've had.
The most fruitful and intellectually stimulating interaction I've had in the last 5 years is with a group of people whom I barely know outside the one-hour calls I have with them every Friday at Yak Collective. The oldest friend I've in the US is a guy from high school I see once a year but we pick up right where we left off. There are several people who's narratives intersect with mine briefly. It could last a couple of months or several half-baked ideas exchanged in text. I'm neither deeply entangled with them nor keeping score using the give-and-take formula. I don't know what to call these relationships, but they have an atemporal and boundless quality that I enjoy.