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The Friendship Graph
The above is a “friendship graph” from Tim Urban’s Copycat (heh, I tagged his copycat), who is the guy behind “Wait But Why.” I believe I once engaged in amorous activity with a woman who ran adjacent to him at a marathon in the Pacific Northwest. Ah, the simple connections of life.
I got this from Sahil Bloom, who is a big-time hustler content guy. So while his newsletters are usually good, you need to take them with a grain of salt, because he’s usually coming from a place of “I wake up at 4am and meditate with my Athletic Greens,” and while that’s noble, it’s also not most of humanity. I also can’t figure out how he makes money aside from owning some recruiting firms. Godspeed.
Anyway, if you look at this chart, it’s about enjoyment of a friendship and the health of a friendship and the four places those concepts can intersect. This is a noble way to define friendship, but it is by no means complete — nor do I think any simple graph could contextualize all the different ways we experience friendship as adults.
The problem with this graph specifically is that it doesn’t really account for life stage, which is the single-biggest driver of adult friendships (at least in America). A lot of people around 23–24 would probably (not all) prefer an enjoyable friendship, even if it’s not healthy, i.e…
