This is a personal interdisciplinary essay on the question:
"What is friendship?"
Hope you enjoy it
Stiff pinstripe suits with short fat ties. Records of Elvis Presley and the Beach Boys. An inordinate amount of golf carts. These are some of the things that come to mind when I think of the journeys I would take with my friends down to Sun City, Arizona to check out their thrift shops. To live in Sun City proper, at least one member of the household must be 55 years of age or older and all other residents must be at least 19 years old (Recreation Centers of Sun City AZ, n.d.). With a community this old, these thrift shops were a gold mine for a teenager with little money and a desire to develop a personal style.
I can remember sifting through mountains of polo shirts, pants, jackets, suits, dress shoes, hats, t-shirts, books, ties, sweaters, and cardigans. I also learned that no matter how hard I tried, the cool looking jean jacket size XXL would never fit my frame no matter how hard I puffed my chest or tried to persuade myself that drowning in large clothes was stylish. I began to space my visits to be about 2 weeks apart so that the inventory could replenish. I rarely arrived with a specific piece of clothing in mind but instead searched for the piece that caught my eye. Over time, my visits became more efficient as my hands sifted quickly through hangars and my eyes scanned each section.
In the hustle and bustle of sorting through items, sometimes a fellow shopper would begin a conversation by telling me that they liked the cardigan I had chosen or that the music record I was holding was the bee's knees back in their day. These conversations reminded me that I was an outlier when it came to the median age of a shopper in these shops. Interestingly, I can remember from these brief conversations that they typically went longer than I expected as the old man or woman would begin to share stories of where they grew up or they would start asking what grade I was in and what I liked to do for fun. Due to my unintentional ignorance, I would primarily answer their questions and then return to my hunt not considering that they might enjoy being asked questions themselves.
I find that the world, in general, caters to my type of shopping. Online stores remember my credit card info, grocery stores offer self checkout, and I can ship an item to my door in less than a day. Almost before the faintest idea of purchasing something comes to mind, I can get it.
Yet the faster I can get things, those brief interactions between fellow shoppers fades away. Over time, thrift shopping has become less appealing to me as the unpredictable inventory and quality make me feel like I am wasting my time. Instead, I just search online for the exact product that Iâm looking for without talking to anyone. If I want to hear someone elseâs opinion before making a purchase, I watch a detailed Youtube video about it and then chat with an AI chatbot about the pros and cons of the product versus alternatives.
Despite these amazing technological developments, 10 years later, those fleeting conversations are still in my mind and Iâm not entirely sure why. I havenât seen any of these people since, they arenât close friends or family members, and the topics we discussed werenât particularly noteworthy. Even so, another human attempted to connect with me and in that brief moment, we were friendly to one another. What is friendship and how does it relate to the types of connection found in life?
While human connection decreases with modern shopping via screens and chatbots, some businesses are actively working to preserve it. The Netherlands-based supermarket, Jumbo, has recently decided to cater to my former senior co-consumers through the introduction of Kletskassa (Jumbo Supermarket, 2021). The Dutch word, Kletskassa, translates to "chit-chat checkout" which is a special lane for customers who are not in a rush and could use a little talk with the cashier. Jumbo introduced these âslow lanesâ back in summer 2019 as part of a wider initiative called One Against Loneliness, launched by the Dutch government. According to Statistics Netherlands, 1.3 million people in the Netherlands are over 75, and 33% have reported feeling at least moderately lonely (Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, 2018). The response has been so positive that Kletskassa has expanded to over 200 of its 700 stores across Jumbo's supermarkets. Some stores have even begun to introduce "chat corners" where customers can enjoy coffee and socialize.
The enduring human need for communal spaces has deep historical roots. Sociologists recognize three key environments in people's lives: the home (first place), the workplace (second place), and community gathering spots (third places). These third places, as sociologist Ray Oldenburg explains, serve as vital "anchors of community life" that foster creative social interaction (Oldenburg, 2023). The ancient Greek agora exemplifies this concept perfectly - a public square where merchants, philosophers, politicians, and ordinary citizens would converge not just for commerce, but for meaningful dialogue. This tradition of public discourse reached its pinnacle in the Socratic Method, transforming casual conversation into a systematic approach to exploring life's fundamental questions. These spaces succeeded because they maintained what Oldenburg calls a "playful nature," where wit and casual conversation were highly valued. These Socratic conversations formed the foundation of moral and philosophical western thought.
Connecting Kletskassa and the Greek Agora, I can begin to see that the persistence of my memories with elderly people at thrift shops largely stemmed from the need for friendly connection and discourse that is taken care of commonly in third places. Those thrift shops were my Greek agora and my current focus on efficiency has removed me from a third space filled with people to an isolated one filled with screens and chatbots. Aside from the agora, what other things had the Greeks learned about friendship?
One of Socrates' most well-known students was Plato who went on to teach Aristotle. In contrast to the Socratic method, Aristotle developed more formal logical systems and scientific inquiry methods. Using this systematic approach, he attempted to deduce the true nature of things in a way that can be best summed up by looking at the literal definition of the name Aristotle in English. Aristotle breaks down into the two Greek words ÎŹĎΚĎĎÎżĎ (aristos) meaning best like the word aristocrat, and ĎÎÎťÎżĎ (telos) meaning purpose or result. Thus, the name Aristotle essentially means "the best result" or "superior" (Behind the Name, 2024).
In his seminal work, the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle explores relationships founded on utility, stating that "Those who love each other for their utility do not love each other for themselves but in virtue of some good which they get from each other". He continues by claiming that "Such friendships are easily dissolved, if the parties do not remain like themselves; for if the one party is no longer pleasant or useful the other ceases to love him" (Aristotle, 2004).
As someone with a logical, systematic worldview, I find myself contemplating the validity of the category that Aristotle describes. Would Jumbo employees continue to build friendships with the elderly if they weren't getting paid? And vice versa, would the elderly continue to shop at Jumbo, if the conversations with employees were curt and disingenuous?
Probably not. The employees would go find another job and the elderly would shop elsewhere. It appears that friendships formed around utility are brittle. While meaningful connections can occur in spaces like thrift shops and grocery stores, their foundation in utility often prevents deeper bonds from forming. When the original utility disappears, these relationships typically dissolve.
Pierre Bourdieu's framework of social capital offers a more nuanced view than Aristotle's binary categorization of this transactional relationship. Bourdieu defines social capital as the âthe aggregate of actual or potential resources linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognitionâ (Bourdieu, 1986). Unlike Aristotleâs rigid structure, Bourdieu sees these relationships as investments in social relationships that can be converted in other forms of value.
The Jumbo interaction, while seemingly based on utility, may represent more than simple transactions - they are investments in social capital that both parties can later convert into different forms of value. The elderly customers gain a friendly face and meaningful conversation during their shopping trips, helping combat loneliness and isolation, while the employees build relationships that create a more connected community. This social capital perspective helps explain how relationships based on utility, particularly in grocery stores where people shop regularly, can evolve beyond their transactional origins into ongoing investments that enrich the community - much like the ancient Greek agora, where commerce and social bonds were linked to create a vibrant public sphere.
I have found that this investment-based approach to relationships also exists in the workplace. Professionally, I co-founded and ran an AI startup for about two years. For those two years, I intensely worked around the clock writing code, talking with investors, learning from customers, and hiring contractors and employees. As I had dropped out of college and was relatively young to be hiring experienced engineers, I began listening to podcasts and reading books on how to become a good technical leader. One of the approaches to management that stood out to me was that of Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix. When asked how someone should build culture in their team In an interview with Katie Harris at Stanford GSB, he said, "The fundamental one is a high-performance team, not family... We were one of the early ones to just point this out and confront it directly by saying team, not family, and impeaching family and saying that loyalty is good as a bridge over temporary â either company performance or individual performance. But ultimately we were about performance just like a championship or wanting to be a championship sports teamâ (Hastings, 2024).
When it came to the success of the business, this approach worked. When I hired someone, my co-founder and I invested time and money in helping an employee become the best that they could be. Through this network we pooled together collective resources of knowledge and talent to strengthen each member of the team. Each member made investments into the other so that the team could succeed. And when they didn't deliver on the things the company expected of them for an extended period of time, I or my cofounder would cut them from the team explaining that the money that the investors had given us needed to be best used for the team to win and that unfortunately the current setup of the team didn't appear to guarantee that outcome. In the best scenarios, the capital of friendly relationships converted into lines of code that built our product and made happy customers.
While Bourdieu sees social capital as fluid and convertible, traditional biology has typically viewed symbiotic relationships as static, falling into fixed categories like mutualistic or parasitic. In the case of the Jumbo employee and the elderly person, the relationship is mutualistic meaning that both parties benefit from the association. This biological barter can be a parasitic relationship if one of the parties lives off another organism (the host), harming it and possibly causing death. For example, a flea that lives off a dog sucks its blood and potentially transmits disease to the dog. Given the systemic approach found in philosophy and biology, it appears that there are clear cut categories of positive and negative relationships.
Consider the study by researchers Shapiro and Turner who explored how bacteria and viruses can change their relationship over time by examining E. coli bacteria and a virus called M13 (Shapiro & Turner, 2018). Initially, they found that bacteria infected with M13 actually grew better than uninfected bacteria, suggesting a mutualistic, AKA friendly, partnership where both organisms benefited. However, when they took this evolved virus and introduced it to the original strain of bacteria, the relationship turned hostile, with the virus essentially becoming a parasite. The most intriguing part came when they let these organisms continue to evolve together for 20 generations - surprisingly, almost all of the harmful relationships transformed back into beneficial partnerships, with the remaining few becoming at least neutral. This discovery showed that relationships between microorganisms aren't fixed but can shift dramatically based on their environment and evolution.
The evolutionary biologist, Robert L. Trivers, found that human relationships follow comparable patterns seen between E. coli and M13. Just as the virus-bacteria relationship transitioned from parasitism to mutualism, animal cooperative behaviors can shift from selfish origins to a mutually beneficial arrangement. Similar to the co-evolutionary generations between E. coli and M13, animal relationships require repeated interactions to develop beneficial patterns. In addition to these repeated interactions, the animals must have an ability to recognize and remember previous interactions, and the cost to the helper must be less than the benefit to the recipient. (Trivers, 1971).
Consider a scenario of altruistic behavior where one person attempts to save an unrelated drowning individual. Assume that the chance of the drowning man dying is one-half if no one leaps in to save him, but that the chance that his potential rescuer will drown if he leaps in to save him is much smaller, say, one in twenty. Assume that the drowning man always drowns when his rescuer does and that he is always saved when the rescuer survives the rescue attempt. Also assume that the energy costs involved in rescuing are trivial compared to the survival probabilities.
Were this an isolated event, it is clear that the rescuer should not bother to save the drowning man from a pure survival-based perspective. But if the drowning man reciprocates at some future time, and if the survival chances are then exactly reversed, it will have been to the benefit of each participant to have risked his life for the other. Each participant will have traded a one-half chance of dying for about a one-tenth chance. If we assume that the entire population is sooner or later exposed to the same risk of drowning, the two individuals who risk their lives to save each other will be selected over those who face drowning on their own. Even when one person has to pay a certain cost to participate in a relationship, the potential future benefits of that payment outweigh the risk.
Maybe this is why relationships can last for a long time even when things take a turn for the worse. The person making the sacrifice predicts that the short-term losses are minuscule when compared to the long-term gains. This way of thinking falls in line with Bourdieuâs idea of investing in social capital and the general idea of investing capital. For if every investor sold their stocks when the company showed signs of poor performance, no one would invest.
This complexity matches my experiences in reality, for the "sports team" that I managed at my startup was made up of people that I spent 60+ hours a week with. Among these coworkers, no relationship would be considered parasitic, and we worked to help each other perform well. Were we just mutualistic towards each other in order to receive the utility of money, dealt with each othersâ faults for the social capital investment, and for the benefits of reciprocal altruism with the chance we might be âdrowningâ in the future?
All of these reasons add upon the concept of treating a coworker well. But what about when a coworker becomes a friend? Organizational Behavioral scientists label these relationships as multiplex relationships as they combine both professional relationships where âfriendship and task-focused interactions are superimposed". Methot and her colleagues found that "The number of multiplex workplace friendships in one's social network is positively associated with supervisor ratings of job performance" (Methot et al., 2015). Personally I feel that the individual with more multiplex relationships might be doing better on supervisor ratings because there may exist a relationship between the individual and the supervisor. On the other hand, I do think sociality is a core component of intelligence as demonstrated by the complex social interactions we have with each other as opposed to other species. I experienced this complexity first hand when I started to hire engineers to my startup.
After a successful remote interview process, one of the first people I hired was a software engineer at Berkeley, who I'll refer to as Walt. We arranged our first in-person meeting at WeWork, a co-working space on the 30th floor of a building in downtown San Francisco, to begin our work together. It was a rainy, cloudy day that made you feel cozy and grateful to be indoors looking out. I rode a rent-able city bike to the skyscraper from the Mission District while Walt had taken the Metro from Berkeley. I really loved living in a city, because there are so many methods of transportation which enable so many perspectives on viewing its buildings. When Walt and I met in the lobby, we chatted about how to make the product better and what he would start working on for his first task.
At the time, the company was based in San Francisco to participate in the Winter 2023 batch offered by Y Combinator. Y Combinator is a startup accelerator that selectively chooses around 250 startups every six months. They help these startups by offering them not only capital but an opportunity to be in a high pressure, high focus environment to help them advance very quickly preparing them to raise their seed round which is their official first round of investing as a startup. To fully take advantage of that high focus opportunity, my cofounder and I moved into an apartment in the mission district in San Francisco, bought some whiteboards and monitors, and spent basically every day from sun up to sun down working. When Walt joined, we moved one of the couches in the apartment to the side and bought a table from Costco to put his laptop and monitor on. Over the next few weeks, we went to lunch together a few times, I learned about his family, he got know my background, and we celebrated together when we made a breakthrough in the product.
I can remember as if it were yesterday, the day I fired Walt.
After speaking with my co-founder and our mentors at Y Combinator, everyone was in agreement that we needed to fire him as he didn't have enough experience. My co-founder helped talk me through it and gave me advice on how to best make it a clean separation. After delaying for hours, I called him, told him the news, and gave him his two weeks. After a few hours, he texted me explaining that he would be okay with being paid way less and still being able to work. He explained that he really felt that this was going to be the place he would work at for a long time and he felt comfortable here. He said he needed the money for tuition for future semesters of college. My heart was in knots because although I was constantly focused on being a team and not a family there seemed to be a third relationship that made this difficult. Walt wasn't a family member, he wasn't just a coworker, Walt was a friend.
The words "family member," "coworker," and "friend" parallel Oldenburg's framework of fundamental human spaces: the home, the workplace, and community gathering spots. Through this lens, I can see that my relationship with Walt had unconsciously evolved into that third sphere - a friendship that transcended the traditional professional boundary. Just as Oldenburg's third places serve as vital spaces for authentic human connection, my relationship with Walt had developed beyond the simple employer-employee dynamic, which now gives me insight into why this had been such a difficult business decision. Reflecting on this experience through a biological lens, I wonder if our parting ways stemmed from the shift from mutualism to commensalism in our relationship. In biology, commensalism occurs when one organism benefits while the other is unaffected - similar to how Walt continued to benefit from our arrangement while I, as the business partner, wasn't seeing the necessary return to sustain the relationship.
Luckily, not all communities and organizations of humans are so cutthroat and demanding. There are communities that focus not on performance but interconnectedness. In African culture, the concept that best describes this interconnectedness is Ubuntu. Ubuntu can be simply described as the phrase, "I am because we are". For certain African cultures, one's identity clearly connects to his or her relationship with the community. To emphasize mutualism, each member of the community works to support each other in the raising of children, gathering of food, and many other tasks. Sanaa Gateja is a Ugandan artist who seeks to symbolize these principles in his work Voices of Peace. Gateja heads the Kwetu Africa Art and Development Centre in Kampala, Uganda, which employs about 15 artists who create small paper beads. These beads are made from recycled materials such as vintage advertisements, political posters, and outdated textbooks. The process of creating beads requires the work of multiple artists which Gateja then takes to create large-scale tapestries.
Symbolically, in the work Voice of Peace, each bead represents a person in the community that is woven together to demonstrate the interconnectedness shown in the tapestry between the people and the environment. This piece of art only exists because the beads exist.
When I first learned about Ubuntu, I had no idea it was connected to African culture. Instead I knew it from the popular open-source operating system based on Linux. In software engineering, an operating system is the primary software that connects the hardware to the software. For Apple computers, it's MacOS and for Microsoft computers, it's Windows. Both of these systems are developed independently by their respective companies and then sold to consumers. Ubuntu can be installed onto these computers to offer a different operating system for users. The main difference being that Ubuntu isnât made by any one company, instead it is maintained by thousands of individual software developers who then offer it to anyone for free. This operating system is aptly named as it symbolizes the principles of Ubuntu being that the OS could only exist by the individual contributions of each developer.
From the ages of eleven to fourteen, I was a part of the Phoenix Boys Choir. The layout from youngest to most experienced choirs went like this: Training choir, Cadet choir, Town choir, and Tour choir. I studied my music, usually for 45 minutes during the car ride there, paid attention to my director, did not get distracted, and respected the parent volunteers. Once I made it into Town choir, I began to get the chance to sing in smaller groups. By focusing and listening to my director, I was selected to sing the song Art Thou Troubled by Georg Friedrich Händel in a trio for our final concert.
Then came Tour choir. Both Town and Tour choir have a joint annual summer camp up in Flagstaff, Arizona. For a whole week we sing for about 6 hours a day while only taking breaks for meals and exercise. One night, we united with the Town choir to practice with them. One of the new Tour Choir boys named Cam, was either getting his part wrong or not paying attention and Mr.S pinpointed him in under 10 seconds and swiftly reprimanded him and directed him to pay attention. Cam began to cry. I was stunned with how direct the feedback was. Mr.S stopped the choir and walked up to him and said something along the lines, "Are you crying? Please know Cam if you want to be in the Tour Choir, you'll need to be able to take feedback and improve." Cam continued to cry "If you are going to continue to cry, I'm going to have to ask you to take a step outside the room so we can continue the practice." Cam looked up in shock. "Why don't you grab a tissue, clean yourself up, and rejoin us when you're ready" The whole choir watched him leave in dead silence and we began once he left the room.
I was laser focused after that exchange. I looked around and the town choir, new tour choir boys were all wide eyed while the older tour choir boys looked perfectly relaxed. This observation gave me the impression that this was not a new thing. Getting direct feedback in front of the whole choir was normal and expected.
The rest of the summer camp finished intensely and I grew close to many of my choir mates. But years have passed and I havenât heard from them in years. Why did the friendships that we made in difficult times not last longer? I could point to the fact that once each of us grew out of the choir and went onto other things, our repeated interactions of choir stopped and so there wasnât an evolutionary need to continue the relationship. Or it's just that we lived in different parts of Phoenix, Arizona and none of us could drive at the time.
These types of temporary relationships have happened to me in so many times and places. A soccer team, high school friends, co-workers at a seasonal job, etc. What makes a relationship last longer than utility, become stronger than evolution, and get deeper than short-term gain?
It seems that even when there are clear benefits from so many disciplines such as social capital or interesting philosophical dialogue, none of these benefits outlast the ongoing march of time. And maybe thatâs ok. As I have considered what friendship and connection are, I have been on the hunt for something that is unfailing and consistent which might not exist as no human is perfect.
I met Parker in 5th grade at Coyote Hills Elementary in Arizona. I was the new kid in class as I had just moved from North Dakota. I was so new that when we took a geography test of the 50 states and their capitals in the U.S., I got two states in the wrong place, New Mexico and Arizona. I even pronounced my classmateâs name Jorge as âGeorgeâ. Parker and I would sometimes play football with a bunch of other boys but we didnât really hang out or talk.
Then in 6th grade, I made the move to Glendale Preparatory Academy, the liberal arts school I mentioned previously. When I arrived, I noticed a kid from class last year, Parker. He was in my class again. He was into basketball at the time though and I was into soccer so we still didnât really interact. I mainly would hang out with my friend Tommy and he would hang out with his friend Blake. 8th came along and Parker got paired up with Tommy for a science project while I got paired up with Blake. All four of us wanted to build a volcano, so we went to the dollar store, got some Coke and Mentos and started experimenting to see who could get the largest explosion. We had a blast, literally! Since that project, we all started hanging out together until we graduated from high school. Parker joined the soccer team, we played video games on the weekend, and took girls to prom together.
When we got to college, Parker and I were at different colleges but we would still call each other to check in on each other. Then, he transferred to my university. A few years had passed and so we found each other having different interests. I was into entrepreneurship and computer science and he was into marketing and video games. Our future career paths and current interests seemed to diverge. I began to ask myself questions such as âWouldnât it make sense to devote time and energy into relationships that could benefit my future self such as fellow computer science students or other entrepreneurs?â.
Fortunately, It feels deeper than that because even though our interactions have become less frequent as they were growing up, and our interests have begun to split, and our careers go different directions, we still chat with another seeing how the other is doing in an authentic way. As Aristotle aptly puts it, true friendship is when each person âwishes well to each other for their own sakeâ.
I think of my sister in-law, Micaâs relationship with her friend Kelsey from high school. They are now into adulthood and Kelsey has three kids. They are in completely different stages of life doing completely different things. Mica works with an artist helping him with operations such as maintaining a website and shipping orders. Kelsey is a full-time mom. Yet, they meet almost weekly to attend one of Kelseyâs sonâs hockey practices. They listen to find out whatâs going on in the other personâs life and chat about all the latest news and happenings in the world. They show up for each other authentically and genuinely in the present.
Perhaps the African concept of Ubuntu offers the most compelling explanation for these enduring bonds. Just as each bead in Gateja's tapestry contributes to the whole, these lasting friendships become part of our identity, weaving together to form the fabric of who we are. The relationship itself becomes valuable not for what it provides, but for how it shapes us - making true the wisdom that "I am because we are."
References
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