If you’re wealthy, in some elite intellectual class and social strata by virtue of your academic or professional credentials, the people with whom you end up forging these organic, valuable friendships end up being those who are more interesting, intellectually stimulating, etc. There’s a certain stochastic privilege afforded to those who can approach building friendships and relationships in this carefree, feel-good, fun-maximizing way and still end up with much more interesting, high value, intelligent friends. You get to have your cake and eat it too.
If you’re not well off, of a low status and removed from the power-centers of the world intellectual elite, you couldn’t get such high chances associating with people in a natural, carefree way. You’d have to be directed, focused and deliberately agentic towards cultivating a high-value social circle bearing all the accoutrements of being interesting enough to match your criteria.
You can make good friends anywhere, but you could still manage to make interesting friends the “right” way (according to this post) by just relocating to places where the type of person you’d prefer to associate with, with respect to their intellectual/personal merit, is more common, and let the friendships develop naturally.
Somehow this reminded me of an advice to women: “Do not marry for money; you will be unhappy. Instead, select your environment so that you only ever meet rich men… and then marry for love.”
If you’re wealthy, in some elite intellectual class and social strata by virtue of your academic or professional credentials, the people with whom you end up forging these organic, valuable friendships end up being those who are more interesting, intellectually stimulating, etc. There’s a certain stochastic privilege afforded to those who can approach building friendships and relationships in this carefree, feel-good, fun-maximizing way and still end up with much more interesting, high value, intelligent friends. You get to have your cake and eat it too.
If you’re not well off, of a low status and removed from the power-centers of the world intellectual elite, you couldn’t get such high chances associating with people in a natural, carefree way. You’d have to be directed, focused and deliberately agentic towards cultivating a high-value social circle bearing all the accoutrements of being interesting enough to match your criteria.
You can make good friends anywhere, but you could still manage to make interesting friends the “right” way (according to this post) by just relocating to places where the type of person you’d prefer to associate with, with respect to their intellectual/personal merit, is more common, and let the friendships develop naturally.
Somehow this reminded me of an advice to women: “Do not marry for money; you will be unhappy. Instead, select your environment so that you only ever meet rich men… and then marry for love.”