Social optimizations
i.e understanding oneself better
Social butterfly
I’ve always considered myself to be a particularly extroverted, social animal with a wide circle of friends. It has always been important to me to keep regularly in touch with new and old friends. It has not been easy since I moved to/from/within both the US and Europe in the past few years. Yet I discovered that the type of friends I am particularly attracted to are also moving around in a constant state of flux.
One of the things I appreciate the most about my college education was that I attended a University rather than a purely technical school. Making it to Cambridge instead of Imperial gave me the breadth of friendships and POVs that I now crave and cannot easily give up on. Things that may not be fascinating to others like macroeconomics, technology policy, or history and law, are something that I love learning about. Discussions with my close friends often help me understand the world better. It is the diversity of thought one cannot get through engineering circles only.
I particularly resonate with people who are intriguing, intellectual, adventurous, and worldly. These characteristics often make conversations challenging and eye-opening. Perhaps not surprisingly, my social circles are filled with immigrants since they had to give up something, take a chance to live abroad and thus adapt to the new place. To a lesser extent we share similar life values as Europeans, but I don’t think shared roots are the main defining factor here.
Covid effect
It is both a curse and a blessing that I am usually lucky enough to be able to form deeper relationships everywhere I go as they often end abruptly with someone moving away. I virtually have had the same experience every time I moved be it to London, San Francisco, or to New York. It is a small world, they say, every time I bump into someone I used to know across the world.
Covid did what no one else had been able to do before — it created a large-scale natural experiment test of friendships that we can learn from. Suddenly all of the physical friendship ties were severed and forced to move online. This overnight shift showed me how dependent, as an extrovert, I was on social interactions. As sad as it is, it offered me a glimpse into the future where quality time with friends becomes sparser once people prioritize their new families.
Social partner?
Having my social life turned upside down made me wonder how I would split my time between starting my own family and friends. Having lived with roommates for the past 5 years it became hard to imagine sharing an apartment with a single person for the rest of my life. At the end of the day, social constraints, commitments, and arrangements are very different between friends and your significant other. For example, with roommates I would rarely coordinate daily activities while with SO I would do it often in order to build a meaningful life together.
The challenges of being socially distanced through the pandemic posed a question of what is important for building a long term relationship. In the past I have been optimizing for finding a partner in the same way I would be looking for a close friend. The experience of the past year made me realize that the challenges of living with one person for a long period of time may require a very different approach. I can organize fun things to do with friends but afterwards we all go our separate ways.
What is the long run for a relationship?
Things change significantly when you start thinking of the long term investment in another person to build a world together. One that does not magically end but, in fact, starts after a trip is over. With an infinite time horizon, the optimization changes and things that make friendships exciting and meaningful become important but no longer critical. Other aspects of life like ability to understand and support each other regardless of external stimulants take precedence. When all the fancy trips/hotels/dinners are over what is left is two human beings that need to stand and understand each other.
I always find it fascinating how life experience shapes and reshapes our thinking. In the past year I had conversations with two slightly older close male friends about how their approach to dating had changed over time. Both of them, albeit differently, had stressed how things they look for in a partner shifted towards empathy that they found critical to building a welcoming home together. Looking back I find it somewhat ironic that my initial reaction was dismissive to both of them yet a year later I arrived at a similar conclusion.
Maybe Theatrum Mundi does, in fact, exist and all we do is follow pre-determined paths or that there are greater truths in life that we keep re-discovering along the way with each new generation?
