(No coherent theory of friendship, just thinking out loud.)
Seems to me that there are two aspects of friendship to consider:
One needs allies. We need someone to help when we get in trouble. We need someone to do various activities with. Even if we do not literally “need” someone, it often feels better to have someone.
Humans instinctively copy their friends. Conversely, your openness to copying someone will probably set a limit to how friendly you can get with them.
To put it shortly, you friends will help you, and they will change you. (And vice versa.)
The first one would suggest that you should have as many friends as possible, but there is a limit, because you need to spend time and energy cultivating the friendship: meeting your friends, helping them, etc.
Talking about “friendship” can be confusing, because we use it to refer to different intensities of relationships. Or we can use different words for different intensities, such as “acquaintance”; but different people do not use these words consistently. Extraverts probably need more friends than introverts. Different people can be differently calibrated, because of different life experience. (For example, if your life is all fun, you probably focus on the “fun to be with” part of friendship, and ignore the “help each other when needed” part.) If you are attractive, cultivating friendships may seem unnecessary, because you can always easily make new ones. If you really suck at connecting with new people, you may overestimate the value of the friendships you already have; maybe the people you call friends are actually just using you.
...so it makes sense that different people have different theories of “friendship”.
(Plus there is the usual human unconscious hypocrisy. Maybe you find it morally repulsive to choose your friends based on how instrumentally useful they are, and you are looking for fun and connection on the spiritual level instead. And yet, somehow, the people you connect with spiritually all just happen to be somehow useful to you. And the ones who stop being useful, you suddenly find less fun, and the spiritual link soon breaks...)
*
From the perspective of making allies, what is the value of “interesting” friends? First, they are useful instrumentally (literally: they do something that interests me). Second, to be “interesting” can be a proxy for social skills, intelligence, high status, and other qualities desirable in an ally.
What is the downside? Well, am I sufficiently interesting myself? If not, that is, if I am trying to make friends with people who are significantly smarter or more popular than me, chances are that they will not be interested, or that the result will be a painfully asymmetric relationship (e.g. the kind of relationship where you always do various things for your friend, but you friend is always too busy to help you). It would have been better to select friends e.g. between people who share the same hobby, because there the thing that makes them more interesting to you, happens to be the thing that also makes you more interesting to them.
From the perspective of copying, the question is whether the thing that makes the person “interesting” can really be copied. Because, some traits cannot be copied; most obviously, hanging out with tall people is not going to make you any taller (unless their secret is wearing high heels, and as a friend they will let you in on the secret). More controversially, what about rich people? I bet someone like Kiyosaki would argue that hanging out with rich people will let you unconsciously copy all the secrets of highly successful people. But what if you are kids, and the only secret is simply to be born to rich parents? You can’t copy that! More likely, you will copy the habit of spending money, which may actually make you poorer. (Why do I mention rich people in a comment about interesting people? Because being rich is one way of being interesting. You certainly have more time and opportunity to do interesting things, compared to e.g. people who need two boring jobs to pay their bills.)
On the other hand, if someone is interesting because they e.g. can juggle well, hanging out with them is a good way to become interesting yourself.
You can side-step the issue if you limit ‘friends’ to a more restrictive subset.
i.e. those who are both worthy allies and worthy of emulation.
(Personal anecdote, this is the internal definition I had growing up so I was continuously mystified by folks claiming they made dozens of friends in high school, college, etc...)
But the downside of this method is that some people could literally go their entire lives without a single ‘true friend’ which may cause problems of communication somewhere down the line.
(No coherent theory of friendship, just thinking out loud.)
Seems to me that there are two aspects of friendship to consider:
One needs allies. We need someone to help when we get in trouble. We need someone to do various activities with. Even if we do not literally “need” someone, it often feels better to have someone.
Humans instinctively copy their friends. Conversely, your openness to copying someone will probably set a limit to how friendly you can get with them.
To put it shortly, you friends will help you, and they will change you. (And vice versa.)
The first one would suggest that you should have as many friends as possible, but there is a limit, because you need to spend time and energy cultivating the friendship: meeting your friends, helping them, etc.
Talking about “friendship” can be confusing, because we use it to refer to different intensities of relationships. Or we can use different words for different intensities, such as “acquaintance”; but different people do not use these words consistently. Extraverts probably need more friends than introverts. Different people can be differently calibrated, because of different life experience. (For example, if your life is all fun, you probably focus on the “fun to be with” part of friendship, and ignore the “help each other when needed” part.) If you are attractive, cultivating friendships may seem unnecessary, because you can always easily make new ones. If you really suck at connecting with new people, you may overestimate the value of the friendships you already have; maybe the people you call friends are actually just using you.
...so it makes sense that different people have different theories of “friendship”.
(Plus there is the usual human unconscious hypocrisy. Maybe you find it morally repulsive to choose your friends based on how instrumentally useful they are, and you are looking for fun and connection on the spiritual level instead. And yet, somehow, the people you connect with spiritually all just happen to be somehow useful to you. And the ones who stop being useful, you suddenly find less fun, and the spiritual link soon breaks...)
*
From the perspective of making allies, what is the value of “interesting” friends? First, they are useful instrumentally (literally: they do something that interests me). Second, to be “interesting” can be a proxy for social skills, intelligence, high status, and other qualities desirable in an ally.
What is the downside? Well, am I sufficiently interesting myself? If not, that is, if I am trying to make friends with people who are significantly smarter or more popular than me, chances are that they will not be interested, or that the result will be a painfully asymmetric relationship (e.g. the kind of relationship where you always do various things for your friend, but you friend is always too busy to help you). It would have been better to select friends e.g. between people who share the same hobby, because there the thing that makes them more interesting to you, happens to be the thing that also makes you more interesting to them.
From the perspective of copying, the question is whether the thing that makes the person “interesting” can really be copied. Because, some traits cannot be copied; most obviously, hanging out with tall people is not going to make you any taller (unless their secret is wearing high heels, and as a friend they will let you in on the secret). More controversially, what about rich people? I bet someone like Kiyosaki would argue that hanging out with rich people will let you unconsciously copy all the secrets of highly successful people. But what if you are kids, and the only secret is simply to be born to rich parents? You can’t copy that! More likely, you will copy the habit of spending money, which may actually make you poorer. (Why do I mention rich people in a comment about interesting people? Because being rich is one way of being interesting. You certainly have more time and opportunity to do interesting things, compared to e.g. people who need two boring jobs to pay their bills.)
On the other hand, if someone is interesting because they e.g. can juggle well, hanging out with them is a good way to become interesting yourself.
You can side-step the issue if you limit ‘friends’ to a more restrictive subset.
i.e. those who are both worthy allies and worthy of emulation.
(Personal anecdote, this is the internal definition I had growing up so I was continuously mystified by folks claiming they made dozens of friends in high school, college, etc...)
But the downside of this method is that some people could literally go their entire lives without a single ‘true friend’ which may cause problems of communication somewhere down the line.