I was on one of our Supercycle-adjacent philosophy calls with a friend recently, and we got to talking about friendships: what to expect of them, when to cut your losses, hopes.
I brought up a common error that I see often: as in many areas of life, people often average out their friendships.
Into their 30s, people tend to see a new stranger-turned-acquaintance at the coffee shop and a really good friend from 10 years ago potentially as often as each other. Sometimes they even see the acquaintance, the “shallow friend” more than the deep friend — though not always so.
In this way it can become easy to not want to impose on the deep friend. “Oh I haven’t texted him in four months, I really shouldn’t be asking him this favor.” Or it can be easy to do small impositions on your new friend, “I’ll ask him if he wants to come to the game tonight.”
In these ways your friendships end up averaged. Your acquaintances get more intimacy points than perhaps they’d earned yet, while your good friends get fewer than they’d already earned because you do not want to cash in on those points lest you disrupt the friendship.
In actuality, your really good friend is likely to be a way better friend than you even dreamed you deserve in friends. They are probably filled with capacity to do way more favors for you than you would ever need or ever even ask for, with more imagination and thoughtfulness about your well-being than you have capacity to hold in your mind. They also probably have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours thinking about you and modeling what may make you happy.
By contrast, your very recent acquaintance may not even remember those four conversations about your niche genre of movie that made you believe that you guys had an awesome vibe and 100 movie nights yet to come.
Given this large actual variance, why do so many people end up with an averaged view of friendship?
The way this averaged view ends up happening is how these friendships intersect with hope and imagination.
With new acquaintances, there is no existing loyalty but potentially nice future payoffs). Depending on how jaded you are with people, you may have a lot of hope that this will develop into something. Actually if you are completely jaded and finally feel something like a vibe or a spark, you may have a lot of hope more prematurely than other people.
With your really good friends, you already did a lot together and so potentially you have less imagination for new things to do that don’t disrupt or ruin the existing dynamic, and thus you have less hope around new potentialities because you are spending less time in an imagination space around positive brand new experiences.
And thus, new acquaintances have a distortion coefficient towards higher intimacy, and really good friends have a distortion coefficient towards lower intimacy.
This kind of distortion is the kind of we see when we take an average of anything. The distribution collapses.
What’s the solution?
This is where my marvelous, mischievous, marbles come in.
My friend started talking about playfulness, fun, mischief. As he was talking about his longing for these things, he started to radiate a wonderful energy. As he was trying to find his own long-lost mischief, his search for it in himself became it. That is, the search for mischief became mischief itself.
This may make sense when you think of Fred and George in Harry Potter — they were always looking for mischief even when they were not literally doing it in that moment. And in this way, they were mischievous!
(I prefer the British pronunciation of mischievous — it is a lot more fun already! They add a sneaky little extra “i”)
He became very beautiful in the moment. Very beautiful, very striking.
I stopped to tell him so, because why keep it to myself?
We continued to talk about many things, and at one point I told him that I don’t think the moment of beauty was an accident. I think that there is actually real beauty — and not only beauty, but real moral valor in mischievousness.
You see, in mischievousness there is an antidote to the average.
Not in terms of “when you fuck around and find out you learn new things that are unique or eccentric and not average” — though that too of course.
I mean something actually literally technical here.
When you are mischievous, you are throwing little marbles at the universe. You are allowing yourself to be an open sensor to data that the marbles ping back at you.
Imagine yourself in your bed, on your laptop, all the walls of your room around you. When you throw a marble 1 foot forward, it maybe doesn’t make a sound, or makes a soft thwomp when it lands on your bed. When you throw it harder, it might hit the wall to your side, and you hear a clink. When you throw it all the way across from you, you hear a big CLINK.
Mischievousness is how you become like a bat, sending out signals, seeing what sounds come back from the world around you.
When you get signals back in this fashion, it becomes extremely hard to “average” them (what would an average of the 3-dimensional landscape around you even mean?). Instead, you have to build models around what your world looks like.
It becomes very hard to just discard anomalous data, because it would be anomalous data on what axis even? Did you send marbles in the opposite direction? You have to actually contend with both what you predicted, and what you failed to predict. You have to contend with reality.
I believe that mischievousness, far from making you a dishonest trickster, actually would make you more honest by allowing you to see honestly the world around you.
And I consider personal development in this direction to be very virtuous, and not just fun!
Of course, what counts as “pushing yourself” in this way will vary between people. Some people may already consider themselves pranksters, but are not paying much attention to the signals they send back. They are throwing their marbles but are not paying attention to the sounds they make.
Other people are throwing marbles, but only in one direction, and so the resonances from the world they receive back are one-sided, or self-validating.
Some people are rather shy, and are not sending out many marbles. Perhaps they want to be polite, or perhaps they are simply shy, or perhaps they have no idea how far you can actually throw some of these back. Or perhaps they have heard ugly noises back before, and are scared to hear those exact noises again.
In each of these instances, whether you throw a lot and don’t listen, or are shy…just throwing some (more than one — do not give up from throwing one, hearing a strange ping, and drop the experiment entirely), in a direction you are curious about. You can go very soft and listen intently, or if you are bad a listening, throw a little more moderately and make sure you are hearing a clear sound. As long as you are both tossing and listening to the same marble, you are doing it right.
In all of these instances, the world is more forgiving to your soft pressures and even hard marble throws than you may expect it to be. After all, it is the whole entire goddamn world. It has seen a lot and has known a lot, and your attempts to see it will hurt it less than you think.
Will it hurt you, on the other hand…
That’s for you to decide. ;) :p