If you read this post, and wanted to put any of it into practice, I’d love to hear how it went! Whether you tried things and it failed, tried things and it worked, or never got round to trying anything at all. It’s hard to reflect on a self-help post without data on how much it helped!
Personal reflections: I overall think this is pretty solid advice, and am very happy I wrote this post! I wrote this a year and a half ago, about an experiment I ran 4 years ago, and given all that, this holds up pretty well. I’ve refined my approach a fair bit, but think this is covered well by the various caveats within the post.
Over the past year I’ve been way busier and have been travelling a lot, which means I’ve been neglecting to put much time into my various friendships. And I really value the time I invested heavily in the past to building good foundations and relationships, and still having a bunch of people I like and value when I see them. Though emotionally, I still feel a fair amount of guilt at not keeping in touch and connecting as much as I want to.
Reception: I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by the reception to this! I did not expect it to be in my top 2 most popular blog posts ever. I got a lot of sweet comments here and over DMs, and it recently got to number 1 on Hacker News. My best analysis of this is that I’m an extremely logical and systematising person, and this kind of mindset speaks to a lot of people. And taking a complex social/emotional topic and trying to break it down logically is something that people appreciate, and which tends to be well received and popular within a certain audience.
Usefulness of the advice: This is probably the most important question, and pretty hard to tell, given my limited data. Especially since I mostly hear from people who are excited on first reading, and far more rarely hear long-term follow up. On priors, I’m sure most people don’t actually do much follow-through, which is the core problem of ~all self-help-ish posts. But also, even if it did work for some people, most people don’t follow-up!
I tried to be pretty concrete and actionable in my advice, which I feel good about. My guess is broadly that this helped some people try taking action, and helped them feel more agency over their friendships. And that most of the value comes from getting people to actually be intentional and do something differently, and starting some kind of positive feedback loop, more so than the exact advice matters. But all of this is conjecture—I don’t have good data!
It wouldn’t massively surprise me if the concrete advice doesn’t work well for everyone. I’m a fairly extraverted, eloquent person (even if I have a bunch of social anxieties), and often present well (context depending), which helps a lot. And this advice was much easier to apply in uni, surrounded by a pool of interesting people in a concentrated area. And there was a decent pool of rationalist-ish people who vibed with my systematising mindset and approach. But I’m also not sure what advice would generalise better—it’s a hard problem!
Self-Review
If you read this post, and wanted to put any of it into practice, I’d love to hear how it went! Whether you tried things and it failed, tried things and it worked, or never got round to trying anything at all. It’s hard to reflect on a self-help post without data on how much it helped!
Personal reflections: I overall think this is pretty solid advice, and am very happy I wrote this post! I wrote this a year and a half ago, about an experiment I ran 4 years ago, and given all that, this holds up pretty well. I’ve refined my approach a fair bit, but think this is covered well by the various caveats within the post.
Over the past year I’ve been way busier and have been travelling a lot, which means I’ve been neglecting to put much time into my various friendships. And I really value the time I invested heavily in the past to building good foundations and relationships, and still having a bunch of people I like and value when I see them. Though emotionally, I still feel a fair amount of guilt at not keeping in touch and connecting as much as I want to.
Reception: I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by the reception to this! I did not expect it to be in my top 2 most popular blog posts ever. I got a lot of sweet comments here and over DMs, and it recently got to number 1 on Hacker News. My best analysis of this is that I’m an extremely logical and systematising person, and this kind of mindset speaks to a lot of people. And taking a complex social/emotional topic and trying to break it down logically is something that people appreciate, and which tends to be well received and popular within a certain audience.
Usefulness of the advice: This is probably the most important question, and pretty hard to tell, given my limited data. Especially since I mostly hear from people who are excited on first reading, and far more rarely hear long-term follow up. On priors, I’m sure most people don’t actually do much follow-through, which is the core problem of ~all self-help-ish posts. But also, even if it did work for some people, most people don’t follow-up!
I tried to be pretty concrete and actionable in my advice, which I feel good about. My guess is broadly that this helped some people try taking action, and helped them feel more agency over their friendships. And that most of the value comes from getting people to actually be intentional and do something differently, and starting some kind of positive feedback loop, more so than the exact advice matters. But all of this is conjecture—I don’t have good data!
It wouldn’t massively surprise me if the concrete advice doesn’t work well for everyone. I’m a fairly extraverted, eloquent person (even if I have a bunch of social anxieties), and often present well (context depending), which helps a lot. And this advice was much easier to apply in uni, surrounded by a pool of interesting people in a concentrated area. And there was a decent pool of rationalist-ish people who vibed with my systematising mindset and approach. But I’m also not sure what advice would generalise better—it’s a hard problem!