Mini Blog Post 25: Friendships should feel like playing on the same team
Introduction
Friendships are an incredibly valuable part of my life and my happiness. A few of the most salient things they bring me:
Comfort & emotional support
Knowledge and insights
Advice, and seeing my blind spots
Other people’s skills
Happiness
People to collaborate with
Accordingly, creating and nurturing friendships is a big priority for me, and something I put a lot of thoughts into. Friendships are a major mutually beneficial trade, and a general rule I live by is to find all the positive sum games I can, and optimise them as much as possible. And one thing I find very frustrating is that a lot of my default settings - my social instincts and general social norms around friendship - are highly counterproductive, and do not add to our happiness. So, it’s a complete no-brainer to me that I should put significant effort into trying to change these, and create better relationships and norms. To strive to make life better for me, and for the people I care about. My goal in this post is to outline my underlying model and beliefs, and how I’ve put these into practice
I have a few principles for friendships:
The goal is to increase future and long-term value - the past and short-term are useful only in terms of how they affect the long-term
The goal is to satisfy both of our preferences as much as possible - we are playing on the same team
If it feels like a zero-sum game, it’s not a friendship worthy of the name
It should feel safe and comfortable, and built on a foundation of mutual trust
Relatedly - it should always feel like you’re both going into disagreements in good faith.
Friendships should make both of our lives better
A corollary - a friendship should not feel like work. This is a guideline, not a rule - most friendships will require work and effort on occasion when things go wrong, to bring them back on track. But this should not be the default.
To implement these, I’ve found a few key skills:
Understanding each other - getting to the point where their mind makes sense
And realising that this is not the default
Conflict resolution - being able to work through tension and understand each other. Becoming able to apologise, and to receive apologies. And building on conflict to reduce the chances of future conflict
Helping each other, in ways the other person values
Good communication - both ways
Setting explicit norms - general rules and guidelines for how to act, and finding ones you’re both happy with
General failure modes I observe in myself and others:
Being too assertive - not taking into account their preferences
Not being empathetic, and realising that their mind and preferences are not the same as your’s
Being a doormat - not being able to assert your preferences and always deferring to their’s
For me this often comes from a place of aversion to imposing myself or bothering them - this is not satisfying both of our preferences well.
Not being willing to change yourself
Accordingly, for every point I raise, I’ll try to frame it as what you can do to help them do better, and how you can act on the receiving end
My views on friendship are pretty heterodox and weird, and involve removing a bunch of Chesterton’s Fences. The parts likely to be most controversial are that I strongly favour explicit communication, vulnerability and honesty, and generally come from a pretty high-trust environment. But I’ve found that this has added a lot to my happiness, and I’ve found myself friends who share these views. So I hope that outlining these views can be useful to you!
And a general note - I mostly think of friendships in a 1-on-1 framing, and this article is written accordingly. Group dynamics are hard, and these thoughts don’t obviously extend there.
Health Warning:
The things that make me happy are obviously not necessarily what will make you happy
It’s easy to have an incorrect view of what will make you happy, especially when doing unconventional things - be cautious, experiment, and be open to the possibility that you’re wrong
A friendship needs to work for both people - even if you agree with the principles here, check that your friends do too!
No friendship is perfect, and your preferences will never perfectly align. But in my experience, they can align pretty damn well!
It’s really easy to read an article on good friendship, and leave concluding that your friends suck. At least 50% of the time, this is not true - a good friendship is collaborative, and involves both people working together. So to develop worthy friendships, you will need to put effort in, and sometimes try to change yourself
Because there’s such a systematic bias here, I try to first ask what I can do better, before asking what they can do better - this is much easier to change, and goes some way to correcting the bias. Though obviously no crude heuristic will be perfectly accurate, and sometimes they really are in the wrong
The Law of Equal but Opposite Advice applies in spades here - this is very complex and depends on you and the friend. If some advice seems off or dangerous to you, it probably is, and please ignore it.
When you start thinking about friendships, it’s possible to fall into the failure mode of thinking a lot of friendships are toxic, and trying to cut people out of your life. This is sometimes true, and it’s important to be able to cut your losses when necessary. But this is should be a weapon of last resort, and it’s almost always worth putting in a lot of effort first.
Understanding & Communicating
90% of friendship problems come from not understanding the other person’s point of view, or from them not understanding your’s. From the inside, it feels like everyone else’s mind works the same as your’s - this is the default state of the world. And you constantly need to put in effort to overcome it! Understanding their mind and emotions, and communicating your own is a hard skill, but an extremely important one to develop
A warning: Good communication is hard and genuine emotional labour. It’s important, but often really hard in a moment of heightened emotion. It’s often sensible to give up on good communication at that time, but to remember to revisit the topic later! A really common failure mode is to realise a conversation will be a bit awkward, and to avoid ever having it - this is incredibly common and incredibly unhelpful. I have never had an awkward conversation I’ve later regretted, beyond realising I needed to improve my communication skills.
The underlying point: You cannot satisfy both of your preferences, if you don’t both know what those are. It’s easy to conceive of friendship as a zero-sum game, but this is very rarely true - you just need to be more creative. If you understand each other well, there’s normally a dynamic that can make you both really happy - and if there isn’t, this probably isn’t a friendship that will work for you both.
A conceptual clarification I find useful here - your preferences are not an obligation on them. Keep a clear verbal distinction between communicating preferences and making a request. The goal is to satisfy both of your preferences, and this means they shouldn’t always respect what you want. This is important, because it majorly reduces the friction to good communication - giving them information should be frictionless, while making a request shouldn’t be.
Vulnerability
A key part of friendship for me is having an environment where we both feel comfortable being vulnerable and open. This is an underlying point that makes all communication easier, and is key for really understanding each other.
A few tips:
Be judgement free - the key one
This is one point where I find my default social settings suck. Reflexes like “that’s weird” is a dumb cached thought, that has never helped me, and only hindered me.
Be deliberate - Don’t judge as a reflex, judge only if it helps you achieve your goals. And for me, the few times when judgement is helpful, I can achieve those ends without needing the constraints of judgement
Remember - the purpose of a friendship is to optimise the long-term future friendship. This means that hearing about past actions, or beliefs is only important in that it affects future actions. The transfer of information should be something that can happen freely
Note that this is about actions, not words. It’s not about saying you won’t judge, it’s about them being deeply convinced that you won’t judge them. Be good at listening, being empathetic, and clearly demonstrate this. Genuinely be judgement free, rather than judging but trying to hide it
Be willing to take the first step - sharing things about yourself makes it much more comfortable for them to share things
Be receptive, not pushy. Create a space where they can be vulnerable
Listen - make listening a priority, and something worth putting time towards
Be genuinely interested
Note - be interested, not seem interested. Sincerity is much harder to fake than you think, trying is always counter-productive
Clearly signal that this is what you want, and that they are not being a burden
Never say “irrational” - if they have a preference that they can’t justify, this is important and worth sharing! Even if it’s personally insulting to you. The preference exists, and affects their happiness, and that is what you care about
Remember, emotions are Bayesian evidence - don’t throw away what you don’t understand, if it can help you to form true beliefs
I generally find it really valuable to decouple conveying information, and obligations, requests and actions. If you try to do both at once, you’ll do both badly. And I consider this a key component of good communication
Understanding them
The key point here is that, by default, humans suck at understanding that other people’s minds differ from their’s - the typical mind fallacy. And it doesn’t feel like a bias from the inside, because biases never do. Which is why this is hard. The default state of the world is that you don’t understand other people.
Thus this is something you need to put constant and active effort into. I outline my general process for this here - the ultimate goal is that their mind should make sense, and if it doesn’t, you need to put more effort in.
In brief:
Try to actively form a model of what’s going on in their head. This will be flawed, and in a constant process of iteration and improvement
Notice every time the model is wrong, and you feel confused, and ensure this feels important
When you notice confusion, ask! Be curious, be inquisitive. Make it clear that you want to understand them and how they think, so you can be a better friend
This is often better done after the fact if strong emotions are involved, but it’s important to do! The moments of strong emotion often contain the most important information
This can feel a bit awkward, but is key to ensuring a good long-term future friendship
Be active. Respect their boundaries and privacy, but be genuinely interested, rather than just assuming they’ll tell you everything relevant - most people will not do this by default, and won’t realise that you need help to understand them
Note: It’s easy to frame understanding their preferences as understanding how to not annoy them. This is a terrible framing! It’s often much more valuable to use this understanding to make your friendship awesome - create as many interactions as possible where you both have a great time. One of the great benefits of these strategies is that having confidence I’m making somebody I care about happy, makes me happy.
Being Understood
The flip side - friendship is a team effort, and you need to ensure they understand you. Because the default state of the world is that they won’t. Actively communicate about your preferences - though be clear that you’re giving information, not making requests. Be clear about the magnitude of your preferences - which things really bother you, and which things aren’t a big deal. If you feel wronged, don’t let that fester inside of you, say something! (There’s a skill to this, which I outline in the next section)
Note: Conveying information, not requests is much easier said than done. It needs to be something you believe, and which they believe you believe - not just words that you mouth
It’s possible to take this too far - it’s key to couple this with understanding their preferences, especially with regards to how much you assert yourself. It can feel constraining to understand someone else’s preferences when they conflict with your’s. But I’m emphasising all this because I easily fall into the failure mode of systematically under-asserting myself - always being flexible, always deferring to their preferences, always being forgiving. I think this comes from a place
A general rule of thumb - if the friendship is fragile enough that sharing my preferences can shatter it, it wasn’t a friendship worth having in the first place - my preferences affect my happiness, which is half the point of the friendship! Similarly, it’s OK to assert preferences and ask for favours! Ensure this is balanced, but notice when you never do it - often doing a favour can be fun for both parties.
And as with listening to their “irrational” emotions, you should express your’s! If a preference is important to your happiness, a good friend will take it seriously, even if it’s not something you can justify. Even if it’s something really dumb, like hating when they wear the colour blue, it’s probably worth expressing! Only if you both have a complete picture of the other, can you find the dynamic that works best for you.
Conflict Resolution
Framework
An inevitable part of friendship, and life generally, is that there will be conflict. And this is often one of the times when things go most wrong. A lot of our default programming comes from the ancestral environment, with strong themes of dominance, revenge, and pride. And it’s pretty obvious that these are not going to lead to good outcomes, and are not emotions that are helpful to good faith disagreements. And these emotions are hard to resist, especially if the other person isn’t resisting them. But I think this is absolutely worth it, and an important skill to develop.
My general model of conflicts: Always remember that the goal is to improve the future of your friendship. Pride, revenge, etc, all have absolutely no place in this, the past is the past. The past matters, but only in that it gives information about how the future will go. A conflict is a learning experience, for you to both learn from, and understand how to avoid it in future. A repeated conflict is a sign that at least one of you is bad at implementing the lessons, and that is the problem to focus on. And the strong emotions are attached to conflict are useful for making it feel important, and getting you to pay attention. But never lose sight of the goal - improving your future friendship.
As a result, conflicts should always feel like you two working on the same team to resolve the conflict - Player vs Environment, not Player vs Player. If it ever feels like Player vs Player, something has gone wrong - because both of you want to improve your future friendship. Concepts like blame, fault, etc are meaningless, because they introduce tension without working towards your goal.
One of the most powerful tools for learning from conflicts are norms - rough rules and guidelines for how to act towards each other. There are a lot of default social norms, but I find it much more useful to think of norms as a tool - something the two of you can discuss, and set norms you mutually agree upon. Having simple rules & guidelines to follow lowers the cognitive load, but can significantly shape your dynamic, so I find this valuable. Some norms I try to set in almost all of my friendships:
Don’t lie directly to each other
I am happy to receive honest feedback at any time, unless I explicitly request otherwise - this is my responsibility to set boundaries around, and I will do my best to not be defensive
I am always happy to hear your preferences, even if they don’t make sense
I am always happy to receive invitations and offers, and take responsibility for the cost of saying no
I’m always happy to receive compliments
If you think I’m making a mistake, please tell me!
I’m always happy to be asked a question, though I reserve the right to not answer
If I did something to annoy you, I would like you to tell me about, and I take responsibility for not feeling defensive
I’m happy to discuss whatever norms would make you happiest
The exact norms you’d prefer will of course be subjective, but I think this is a valuable thing to think about! I find these cut out a ton of unnecessary awkwardness and wasted motion. (Note: “I take responsibility for ___” isn’t something you should say casually - you’re pre-committing to not being annoyed with the other person)
Invest Effort
The first point - friendship is an iterative process of finding the best dynamic. Conflict will naturally come up in a long friendship, because your dynamic is not perfect at first. You need to develop the skill of resolving conflicts in a way that strengthens the friendship. Be empathetic, collaborative and compromise, while still asserting your preferences.
And this is a difficult process! So the first step is to realise that this will take genuine emotional effort from both sides, and there’s no good way round this. This is something you need to be prepared to do, if you want deep, robust friendships (though the emotional labour goes down a lot with practice!)
A warning: This should take effort, but this can go too far. If everything is effortful, the friendship will feel like work. It’s especially bad if you front-load all of the conflict resolution - you should invest effort in proportion to how much you both currently value the friendship! And be willing to lower your investment in the friendship, if you find yourself constantly using these skills.
Compromise
The fundamental point of a friendship is to satisfy both of your preferences as much as possible. This is unlikely to be perfectly possible, so you’ll need to compromise a bit. Thus - the fundamental goal of conflict resolution is to find a good compromise, because this is the ideal state of a friendship. This is important to keep in mind because it means you need to care about their happiness as well as your’s, and because it means a perfect solution is often impossible.
The exact question of how to trade off between your preferences is hard, and subjective. But if you understand each other, are discussing in good faith, and genuinely invested in the friendship, I find it’s normally possible to work something out.
And remember, you’re on the same team! This should not feel like a negotiation - you should be working together to find the best compromise. You can do things like negotiate and trade-off concessions, but only as a way of finding the best compromise - you aren’t trying to bully each other into anything. You both care about your mutual happiness! If it feels like a zero sum game, that is a very bad sign. There’s often a good way to satisfy most of both of your preferences, if you’re creative enough - beware being stuck in a bad local optima.
Seeking compromises is one of the times that friendships can feel like work. This is natural, but beware of it happening too much
Being wronged
So, at the start of a conflict, what should you do if you feel like the wronged party?
Firstly - remember that in most conflicts, both people feel wronged - humans are bad at thinking about this kind of question. Ask yourself whether you were actually at fault.
And, with that out of the way, remind yourself that “fault” is an utterly meaningless concept. The question is, why was there a conflict, and how could you and your friend act differently in future to avoid a repeat. Holding a grudge is meaningless - the past is the past and nothing can change that.
So, you want to be constructive. But how?
The first step is being willing to express your preferences - indicate that you feel wronged, and why you feel wronged. You’re giving feedback to somebody else, and receiving feedback well is hard. It’s easy to for them to become defensive, and this is natural - be empathetic and patient. Don’t frame it as blame, frame it as “I want to avoid a repeat, here’s what went wrong, here’s how things can be improved”. Always be forward looking, always be striving - the past holds nothing important here. I would say to forgive, but from this perspective forgiveness is meaningless - there’s nothing to forgive. A string of repeated failures is bad, not because of the past failures, but because it’s evidence of future failures. Your future happiness is all that matters, all else is wasted motion.
Further, be specific. Be concrete, give examples, and give concrete suggestions for how things could be better. Make it as actionable as possible for the other person, and be open to having a conversation about which suggestions might be best - this is a team effort. And, even if you truly were wronged, it’s easy to be unreasonable! Be aware of this failure mode, and listen to the other person.
Often it’s good to give a bit of time before doing this - it’s hard to have a constructive conversation in the heat of the moment. And this is about the long-term future friendship, it’s not urgent!
Apologising
The flip side of this - what to do if you screw up. The socially conventional thing to do is to apologise, but what does it really mean to apologise? It’s easy to mistake an apology as just saying sorry - indicating that you didn’t have malicious intent, and wished the mistake hadn’t happened. But this is past thinking, not future thinking. A true apology centers on making sure the mistake doesn’t happen in the future. Because that’s what you do if you made a mistake and regret it.
Note - at this point it’s easy to fall into guilt, and feel really bad about what you did, and resolve to do better next time. No, no, no. This is Try Harder thinking. If you screwed up once, the default state of the world is that you will continue to screw up - you need to put in effort to change the default. Identify the mistake, identify the underlying state of mind that led to the mistake, and figure out how you can avoid that in the future.
Of course, you also need to help your friend to be better! But I find future framing is often useful there too. You want to understand what you did wrong, in detail, be able to explain the error to the other person, and to demonstrate the concrete actions you’re taking to avoid a repeat. Actions speak louder than words - I find this is far more effective at demonstrating remorse.
If you feel like you’ve resolved the underlying problem, but can’t point to concrete actions, this can often feel awkward - like you’re making excuses, rather than acknowledging fault. And this should feel awkward! This is strong evidence that you haven’t truly changed the default, and a sign that you need to be more creative.
Health warning: This is emotional and cognitive labour. It’s worth it for big mistakes, but it’s also OK to skip it for something minor, that you don’t really care about. In those cases, an apology to show you consider yourself at fault, and didn’t have bad intent, is often enough. So long as the other person also considers it minor!
Helping with problems
One of the most valuable parts of friendship is the things you can add to their life that they can’t get themselves, and vice versa - how you can help each other. The human brain is the most powerful general intelligence we’ve yet invented, and friends represent another one, with a different perspective, biases, and knowledge - that’s insanely useful! This is one of the most valuable things you can provide each other. So the natural question to ask is, how can you optimise this?
The first important thing to note is that help can take many different forms: giving solutions to problems, emotional support, advice, knowledge, comfort, companionship, honest feedback, pointing out blind spots, exploring problems better. These different kinds of help take different skills, and are appropriate in different situations! And it should mostly depend on what your friend wants.
One key point here is that it’s hard to tell what kind of help your friend wants! If they have a problem, sometimes they want to hear solutions, sometimes they want emotional support, sometimes they want to explore the problem more. So the first step should always be to figure out what kind of help they want.
Note that this is very different from the kind of help you think they need! This is a hard problem, because understanding what’s in their head is difficult. This is often hard to figure out, especially in the moment of high emotion - if you can ask directly, great! But often people aren’t comfortable with that. If you’re uncertain, be hesitant about the help you give, and be very aware of the possibility that you’re “helping” in counter-productive ways, and be open to changing tack. Distinguish between doing what you think counts as helping, and taking the actions that best achieve your friend’s goals. I think this is an excellent problem to approach with norm-setting - if this happens a lot, discuss in the abstract how to approach these kinds of scenarios, and ask how useful your help was in the past.
And be aware of this when you want help! People are pretty happy to help when you request it, but they don’t have access to your mind - you need to request the kind of help you want. I try to always begin a request for help with a request for exactly what kind of help.
Advice for two important kinds of helping friends with problems:
Giving advice and proposing solutions
Giving advice is hard. You have a limited view into their situation and preferences, and fundamentally can’t understand how they think.
Thus, your goal is to act as additional processing power to help them make better decisions - aim to help them explore the problem, and understand it better
If you have solution ideas, be aware that there’s a good chance they’re bad! It’s still good to suggest them, but it’s really annoying to have somebody insistently offer bad advice, so be willing to back off
My main rule here is to use strategies that fail gracefully. I try to give advice by asking questions, eg “would something like [first idea of the solution] be helpful?” - if the answer is no, I can back off with no harm done. If the answer is yes, I can continue and this is far more convincing
A useful trick - simplify the solution as much as possible, and pose it as a hypothetical. Eg replace “set a daily alarm” with “what if a magic goblin appeared and started insistently poking you at 2pm every day?”
Another major source of value you can provide is helping them implement. I outline a range of strategies for overcoming procrastination yesterday, these are much easier to help somebody else do
Create a sense of urgency - ask “are you surprised if you never do this?”
Make the solution concrete, and break it down into next steps
Offer accountability - I like to offer to message them at a specific time and date to check in
Encourage them to take action now, and make it clear that it isn’t rude
Giving honest feedback and judgement
Another key value of a friend is to spot your blind spots - to notice the mistakes you’re making, the times you’re in the wrong but feeling defensive, the awesome wins you’re missing. This is incredibly valuable, because blind spots hold you back from achieving your goals, but are really hard to see from the inside.
This is a really complicated one, because it’s unpleasant to receive feedback. It’s easy to feel defensive. And it’s awful to get honest feedback when you just want emotional support. The goal should be to respect their autonomy, and only give honest feedback if they want it.
I find norm setting valuable here - I really value honest feedback! (Though reserve the right to ignore it - you can’t please everyone)
Giving honest feedback is hard, and emotional labour, but I think it’s worth it
Remember - to give good feedback, be as specific and actionable as possible! Give concrete examples of the past to illustrate your points, and give concrete suggestions for improvement.
The flip side of this - receiving feedback well is a skill. This is emotional labour your friends are going through on your behalf. If this is something you care about, then try to become the kind of person who welcomes it.
Notice the feeling of defensiveness, and work past it
This is importantly different from blindly agreeing with feedback! I try to assume the feedback is true, explore that world and see if it makes sense to me. If I can’t explain that world, I try to run the feedback by some other friends, or just discard it. Feedback is Bayesian evidence, but shouldn’t be trusted blindly
This is really hard to balance - by default I’m too defensive, so should listen to feedback more, but shouldn’t trust it blindly
Applying the skill of learning from conversation to understand where the feedback comes from, and the underlying model
And if it seems valuable, learn how to take action in the moment and convert this into taking the first step
I’ve highlighted these two because I think they’re the kinds of help I value most, and which I’m best at (emotional support is also extremely worth optimising, though I mostly suck at it). The general point is that the ability to help is a key part of a good friendship! I highly recommend that you identify the best ways you can help your friends, and the forms of help you most value, and figure out how you can optimise those. Because that’s what you do with things that matter.
Conclusion
In conclusion, friendships are an insanely valuable part of my life. And I’ve found that these mindsets go a long way to creating healthy, sustainable dynamics, that make both of us happier. And these are just my preferences, I know I’m pretty weird on this front.
So, the message I hope you take from this post is that you can shape the dynamic in a friendship, to fit both of your preferences. And that this is an incredibly important and valuable thing to do, and something worth working together on. Our default social settings create a ton of wasted motion and unhappiness, because they’re not designed to be optimal for our happiness. I hope my preferences can give some inspiration for a starting point, but I recommend you explore and think about what you want, and what they want. And remember - it should always feel like you’re playing on the same team.
Which friendship dynamics make you unhappy? How could you shape them to be better?
