This topic comes up every now and then and just reflecting on my own life, I don't see men being bad at making and keeping friends. We just seem to do so differently than women do.
Growing up, I played with an essentially feral pack of boys. Individuals came and went from the pack and it was no big deal. The pack usually hovered at about 8 individuals, enough to play pickup street hockey or a baseball-ish looking game. Today each of my daughters tends to maintain one intense friendship at a time rather than a loose collection of friendships. Maybe that is great but my observation is the fewer and more intense these friendships are, the sooner they self destruct and the more intense the emotions are when they do.
Is one way better than the other? I can't say from a clinical perspective but having lived one myself it seems clear to me that my lived experience was better and more healthy than the other. I'm guessing when you live the other you feel it was better. Here is where, I believe, lives the disconnect. People who value intense shared one on one connections dismiss loose connections as somehow inferior.
For me personally, my intense close connections are with my immediate family and I don't feel a need or pull to create connections like this with someone outside my family be they man or woman. After that, when I socialize, I do so in the context of shared enjoyed experiences and yes they are typically sports related.
I'm just not interested in some mate's struggles with their boss at work or their struggles with their aging parents or that great book they just read. The friends I have are (presumably) also not interested in those things from me or in sharing their experiences with me. My friends tend to be the cliché "listen with an ear to solve problems" not "listen with an ear to provide empathy" types. I'm sure at some level those who listen to provide empathy see my inclination as shallow. I just see it as different.
I have a larger group of life long friends than my wife. We don't send birthday cards or holiday cards to each other. We don't call once a month to check in on each other but when we do get together we will socialize as if we were still those same feral kids. My wife on the other hand not infrequently agonizes over deciding to actively unfriend someone who is not doing their part to maintain the required intimacy and intensity of the friendship. For her, these people are just too much work to maintain and are social/emotional vampires.
So I guess, my ultimate question is am I a bad friend, is my wife a bad friend or do we just maintain different types of friendships with neither being inherently bad or inferior. For what it is worth, I never feel "lonely" and I am certain that neither does my wife.
You mention your intense, close connections are with your immediate family. Do you think your method would still work for you if you didn't like your family and were single? Unfortunately, that happens to many lonely males.
Your comment was an interesting read, though. I never before got into the mind of someone who prefers the "feral pack" over individual, more intense connections, and your description worked well with that.
Best of luck to you and also to your daughters and wife.
I can't really say other than I can say that I am not close with my sister and never have been. I am similarly not close with my own parents who now live in a different country though we are close with my wife's parents. So when I say "immediate family", what I mean personally is my wife and daughters. What would it have been like to have the closeness with my own parents that I have with my daughters? I'm not sure other than reflecting back on those days that it would have seemed weird to me. Perhaps that is a missed opportunity.
Even with my family though I have to actively work to listen first for empathy and problem solve only when asked :-)
Typically one might expect a pickup to retain about 65% of the value after three years where as the Cybertruck seems to have lost about 65% so that is clearly a thing. I'm not really surprised though.
If we say a used three year old Cybertruck goes for $58k (per the article) and compare what we might get in the same class for that money it is a wonder that they can sell any.
For example almost any 1 year old full sized ICE pickup or even an F-250 Godzilla or Ram 2500 Cummins go for the same price. Hell for $60k you can be looking at a fully loaded 2026 Raptor if you don't need a big bed.
Why would anyone pay more that 45k for a used Cybertruck? At the moment the cheapest one I see on Carfax is asking 58K and ALL of them under $70k have Buyback/Lemon Titles. Who in their right mind is going to spend $60k on a certified lemon?
I come back because I am interested in what people think today about interesting topics that I might not even know exist. I don't chat casually with AI as I am not interested in an echo chamber of what I might have found interesting when the model was trained 6 months ago.
"Dream Team" as in what, like a list of people we would love to work with? A list of influential people in this domain? A list of people who are available today to join a start up? A list of VCs you hope will give you pre-concept funding?
If this is just a list of greats then here's my starting lineup:
AI is becoming the new search. There are efforts to do "SEO" directed at LLMs so that your results factor into responses. This is a potential financial win and thus companies may choose to pursue it. Prior to the existence of a perceived financial benefit, this type of activity (semantic and accessible web) was viewed as a cost and thus sometimes done begrudgingly only to satisfy legal requirements. I'm not saying that those ideals are without merit only that getting companies to address accessibility has typically required legislative support and that is just the unfortunate reality.
I'm the first to admit, I got a lot of search results that pointed to answers I found valuable on SO. I answered questions the best I could and always tried to be helpful.
I have no actual SO "questions asked", 1000 "answered" and 15k in "rep". I tried my best. I would never have actually asked a question and open myself up to the abuse fire hose.
SO killed itself in my opinion with overzealous power users with 10s of thousands of rep points to burn and an axe to grind. I know it is a dead horse at this point, but the new user experience was terrible and still is unless you choose "advice" rather than a traditional question.
AI was just the euthanasia. I am sure there are lots of people, not just me with the opinion that AI has never been rude to me when I ask for help.
I think some of the early push back on asking better more relevant questions was right. But it morphed fairly quickly into gate keeping power user hell hole. I did learn early how to ask better questions. Often to the point I could get an answer without someone else feeding it to me. I appreciate that from StackOverflow. I wish I could just send some of my colleagues who ask bad questions or ask for help in a bad way through the StackOverflow ringer. The number of times my "peers" would respond with a flat "didn't work" with no additional details is driving me crazy. What didn't work? Did it fail differently than before? Were there any error messages? Did you check the logs? What else have you tried? I have to play 20 questions to even start being able help them and all of that work somehow falls on my shoulders.
Knowing how to ask for help is an important skill. Honestly, I admit what SO was demanding was the really the foundation of debugging and I am sure that many people are now better developers because SO having taught them how to approach a problem and how to ask for help.
That said, while the core objective may have been sound, that approach and delivery of the SO "way" was often socially wanting.
Agreed. I used it a bit around 2010 when I was doing a lot of C# for custom GUI stuff. I also had a lot of help on there for Linux/Unix questions and AWK programming. There were a decent amount of smart people on SO, one who stuck out was an EE who gave lots of solid advice on PCB design (Ollie Lanthorp I think) in the electronics forum. But over times it felt that it became hostile and questions closed as duplicate when they were asking about specific edge cases. Once I moved out of programming I stopped using it though I still find a nugget of info on it from time to time.
Many videos now contain everyday video backdrops. I saw one the other day that was just chickens wandering around. I'm sure they are there to prevent copywrite bots from discovering IP theft. That is just my best guess though.
Well at least for the first few years as an incentive to move into that area. What happens later depends on lobbying and negotiation skills. And also assuming data-centers for AI are not bubbles that go Pop!
Growing up, I played with an essentially feral pack of boys. Individuals came and went from the pack and it was no big deal. The pack usually hovered at about 8 individuals, enough to play pickup street hockey or a baseball-ish looking game. Today each of my daughters tends to maintain one intense friendship at a time rather than a loose collection of friendships. Maybe that is great but my observation is the fewer and more intense these friendships are, the sooner they self destruct and the more intense the emotions are when they do.
Is one way better than the other? I can't say from a clinical perspective but having lived one myself it seems clear to me that my lived experience was better and more healthy than the other. I'm guessing when you live the other you feel it was better. Here is where, I believe, lives the disconnect. People who value intense shared one on one connections dismiss loose connections as somehow inferior.
For me personally, my intense close connections are with my immediate family and I don't feel a need or pull to create connections like this with someone outside my family be they man or woman. After that, when I socialize, I do so in the context of shared enjoyed experiences and yes they are typically sports related.
I'm just not interested in some mate's struggles with their boss at work or their struggles with their aging parents or that great book they just read. The friends I have are (presumably) also not interested in those things from me or in sharing their experiences with me. My friends tend to be the cliché "listen with an ear to solve problems" not "listen with an ear to provide empathy" types. I'm sure at some level those who listen to provide empathy see my inclination as shallow. I just see it as different.
I have a larger group of life long friends than my wife. We don't send birthday cards or holiday cards to each other. We don't call once a month to check in on each other but when we do get together we will socialize as if we were still those same feral kids. My wife on the other hand not infrequently agonizes over deciding to actively unfriend someone who is not doing their part to maintain the required intimacy and intensity of the friendship. For her, these people are just too much work to maintain and are social/emotional vampires.
So I guess, my ultimate question is am I a bad friend, is my wife a bad friend or do we just maintain different types of friendships with neither being inherently bad or inferior. For what it is worth, I never feel "lonely" and I am certain that neither does my wife.
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