Tag: friends

Another smart blog to read (still!) is Norbert Hoeller’s blog

I wrote about my friend Norbert Hoeller and his blog back in 2023. I am happy to report he is still blogging two years later. While he doesn’t post as often as I do, whenever he does post, it’s very much worth a read. I am fortunate to lunch with him fairly often and whenever I do, I learn a lot from him. If you can’t sit down for a meal with him, the next best thing you can do is read his blog. For instance, you can read any of his posts and learn something: on travel / where my baggage, on travel / foreign currency, on hacks / air conditioner battery, on ticks and lyme disease, on hacks / monitoring refrigerator temperatures and on  paypal shopping notification.

Or you can just start at the beginning and go on from there.

I am always encouraging smart people I know to blog. I am always happy when they continue to do so.

Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t care about you and your friends

Mark Zuckerberg was roasted recently for saying the following:

“There’s the stat that I always think is crazy, the average American, I think, has fewer than three friends,” Zuckerberg told Patel. “And the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it’s like 15 friends or something, right?”

“The average person wants more connectivity, connection, than they have,” he concluded, hinting at the possibility that the discrepancy could be filled with virtual friends.

Some thoughts on that:

    • He’s wrong. The majority of Americans say they have four or more close friends, according to this Pew Study. And 2/3rds of Americans have three or more close friends. That just close friends. Obviously the list of total friends is much higher than 3 for most Americans.
    • Zuck just wants to find justification to start forcing AI into the social technologies that Meta owns so he can sell more ads. But he and Meta don’t seem to want to come out and say that. So he offers up these “virtual” friends as justification.
    • Meta’s products don’t foster real friendship and social connections.  Meta exploits people with technology that makes it easy and desirable to connect with others. Once you establish social connections there, they short circuit that by inserting ads into your communications. They also enable others (e.g., influencers) to insert their communications into your feed. In the end the technology you used to communicate with your friends becomes a firehose of others trying to get you to buy things.

You might push back and say: what do you expect? That’s the deal you made to use their “free” social media technology. There’s some truth to that. But there are degrees of exploitation, and Meta is the most extreme form of it and have been since Facebook first took off in the early 2010s. They aren’t just a parasite living off their host: they take over the host and eat it alive.

It’s instructive to compare Zuck’s proposition with what is being offered by the porn actress Sophie Dee, as outlined in this Washington Post piece. She too is offering up social connections, albeit of a different nature. In the end though, the game is the same: foster enough social interaction to push and promote the services she is selling.

There are ways to foster real friendship and enable communication with technology. That’s not what Mark Z or Sophie Dee are offering though. They are offering an illusion via AI to sell more things to you. Let’s be honest about all this. Let’s ignore this talk from Zuck about his virtual friends, for they are no friends at all.

Want to be healthier? You need to be more social


You have to socialize if you want to be healthier. That’s been tough during the pandemic. And it is tough for men in general. As VOX shows, men have fewer friends than ever.

Of course having friends is good, and if you can form new friendships, that’s great. But socializing with strangers is also healthy. This piece, talking to strangers, shows why.

Get out their and make small talk. Smile at people. Thank them for their help. You will be doing them a favour and yourself as well.

How Many Close Friends Do You Need in Adulthood is a good question


How Many Close Friends Do You Need in Adulthood asked The New York Times:

One 2016 study suggested people who have six or more friends have improved health throughout their lives, while a 2020 study by Suzanne Degges-White, professor and chair of the Counseling and Higher Education department at Northern Illinois University, found that middle-aged women who had three or more friends tended to have higher levels of overall life satisfaction.

Hmmm.

Before you dismiss it — I see you, fellow introverts! — go read it. Not everyone needs the same number of friends, nor does everyone need the same type of contacts. But like other parts of our lives, if we neglect our friendships, it has a adverse health on us.

We all need friends. And like exercise, we have to work at it as we get older. When we are younger, it’s much easier to find and make friends. For proof of that, check out this: Who We Spend Time with as We Get Older from FlowingData.

It’s been hard for anyone, young or old, to make and keep friends during these pandemic. Especially in places like Toronto, which suffered numerous lockdowns. But the weather is getting nicer, so get outside (literally) and work on your friendships.

On friendship, it’s importance and limits

 I have been thinking a lot about friendships over the pandemic. I have wondered how many friendships will dissolve due to the distance imposed on us by this disease. I have wondered how many will strengthen afterwards when we have a chance to reunite. This crazy time has distorted our lives in so many ways, and our friendships will be one of those things that gets distorted.

If I have you thinking about friendship now, here’s more food for thought:

  1. The People Who Prioritize a Friendship Over Romance – The Atlantic
  2. Why You Need a Network of Low-Stakes, Casual Friendships – The New York Times
  3. The Limits of Friendship | The New Yorker

The pandemic will be over. When that happens, make sure you value the people who were your friends during this difficult time. Best friends are best. But go out and make more friends, too.

(Photo by Kimson Doan on Unsplash)

Some basic thoughts on “Friends”: it’s roots and its relationship to screwball comedy


It’s the 25th anniversary of “Friends”, and a number of reviews I read talk about it looking backwards.This piece, though, does something better: it looks at where the series came up from.  Key quote to me was this:

Chandler, who is so indifferent about what he does that he is unable to pay his job even the small courtesy of hating it—Chandler, besuited and bedraggled, whose work in computer-something-or-other summons the amorphous anxieties of the coming digital age. … It is through Chandler, in the end, that Reality Bites finds its way into Friends’ otherwise chipper cosmology. His work is simply there, looming, draining, tautological. His laconic resentments of it invoke the precise strain of Gen Xed ennui the novelist Douglas Coupland had described earlier in the decade: the mistrust of institutions, the mistrust of professions, the mistrust of meaning itself.

You can see in the quote the tie to Douglas Coupland’s  book Generation X and the film Reality Bites. These are the roots of “Friends”. ‘Friends’ at 25: The Prescience of Chandler Bing’s Job – The Atlantic. That generation after the boomers needed a show, and many of them found it in “Friends”. Now people look back at it and many mock a show about six well dressed people living in an amazing apartment in NYC. But “Friends” then tried to make sense of becoming an adult, or “adulting”, to use a word that came along later. The fact that people have such fondness for it makes me think it resonated with them and it represents part of their lives.

I always liked “Friends”, but for a different reason. I am a fan of screwball comedy, and that series often went there. Seinfeld did absurdist comedy well, but I loved that this series did a comedic style I loved so much. Watch some episodes of “Friends” and then watch a classic screwball comedy like “Bringing Up Baby” or “His Girl Friday” and you will see the similarities.

All comedy series go pear shaped after a time, and the things that made it originally great fades. For a time “Friends” was one of the best comedies on TV, and it was great then because of the form of comedy it aspired to and because of the way it represented the time it was rooted in.

How to be a better conversationalist, starting with 100 questions


When you meet someone at an event or at a party, the inevitable questions come up: What do you do for a living? Where do you live? Whom do you know? These are safe questions, and they lead to tepid conversation most of the time. If such conversations had a colour, it would be beige.

For a list of colourful questions, try some of these (unless beige is your favorite colour)” 100 questions to spark conversation & connection. | Alexandra Franzen

Some of them would still be pretty safe at a work function, such as: What’s your most urgent priority for the rest of the year? Others could lead to some pretty funny stories, such as: What’s something you’ve tried, that you’ll never, ever try again? or What’s the strangest date you’ve ever been on? (These may result in the same story!) Some are fairly personal, such as: What’s one mistake you keep repeating (and repeating)? (You may want to have your own example in case you stump someone). Finally, the last question is one most people should have an answer for, and is likely one that will tell you lots about the person: What are you most grateful for, right now, in this moment?

A great list. Throw some of them in a list on your phone and use them at the next get togther you attend. Better conversations await.

Best way to host a dinner party? Like a Parisian

Paris food
The wise David Lebovitz has great tips on how to host a dinner party in the manner that  Parisians do. If that sounds daunting to you, it shouldn’t. It’s filled with such smart advice such as “Keep it Simple” and “Finish with chocolates”. If you have a dinner party hosting coming up, drop everything  and read and follow this: How to Entertain Like a Parisian Tips – David Lebovitz. . From the good people at Food52.com.

(Photo from here)