The Friend Manual: How to make friends when you're bad at it

All my blog posts…

  • The Friendship Portfolio

    I started to think of friendship like a stock portfolio that can be diversified to control for risk. You’ve got high intensity friendships that are high energy cost and (potential) high return, but also hard to get and maintain, and lower intensity friendships that are require less energy and are easier to have more of, Read more

  • Choosing events by stimulus levels

    When I was writing up my previous post about brain-body disconnect, I went down a rabbit hole thinking about stimulus levels at events. Usually I just think about them on an axis of less stimulation to more stimulation. But this time I used a quadrant model and came up with some interesting insights about events Read more

  • Brain-body disconnect in social situations

    What is a brain-body conflict? The brain-body conflict happens when social expectations come in direct conflict with my physical/cognitive ability to maintain the social rules of the situation. Often, physical/cognitive limitations and warning signs are ignored out of not wanting to violate a social taboo. Here’s an easy example of brain-body conflict: In the U.S. Read more

  • Brain chemistry and friendship

    *Caveat: there are no scientists here, but this is basic stuff. Most discussion of friendship starts with feelings, but I think it’s helpful to take a step back and discuss how the brain and body influences experiences. This is one of the building blocks of my theory, so I’m going to slow walk through this, Read more

  • Defining ‘friend’ and ‘friendship’

    I’ve never been happy with the general definitions of friendship. They lack something tangible, something that can be teased apart to lead to deeper understanding, tweaking, optimizing, and for me – more often than not – fixing. The working title of this blog is “How to make friends when you’re bad at it.” In it Read more

  • Friendship is hard

    Making friends is hard. Keeping friends is harder. What if there was a instruction manual for how friendship works? Read more