Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Stop trying to have "interesting" friends, published by eq on April 19, 2023 on LessWrong.

Originally published on substack:

Within the tech and tech-adjacent circles I’m part of on the internet, a number of essays and tweets have been making the rounds about what makes someone a person you want to spend time with.

This is definitely a worthwhile question to answer. So much of our life experience is colored by the people we share it with. However, there is a concerning amount of emphasis on having friends and seeking out people who are smart, thoughtful, and (the worst one of all) “interesting.”

The obsession with interesting makes me uneasy. Friends aren’t resources for intellectual stimulation or new insights. I don’t want my friends to like me because I read niche blogs or have things to say about crypto. It comes dangerously close to conflating knowing a lot, reading a lot, or having thoughtful things to say with moral goodness. (Worth noting that interesting isn’t a negative trait. I would prefer my friends to be interesting, but it feels superficial to prioritize it.)

If I think about what kind of person I want to be close friends with—my best man at my wedding, people I would do anything for, the ones I can rely on when I’m at my lowest—smart and interesting really aren’t front of mind.

On top of that, it doesn’t feel right to pressure people to be “interesting” in your sense of the word. Everyone is interesting. Every person in the world has a literal lifetime of experiences that have shaped who they are. They have internal thought processes and distinct worldviews that you won’t find within anyone else. It’s a matter of giving your interactions enough time and care to discover these.

You shouldn’t feel obligated to be friends with everyone or pressured to get along with all people, but “interestingness” is a poor heuristic for finding genuine connection. It’s time we realign our priorities and recognize that our preoccupation with being interesting is symptomatic of a flawed view of friendship.

Ava of Bookbear Express made an observation I think about often:

It’s not about what you find intellectually cool, or what seems like the best “opportunity.” Those things can be important too, but they don’t matter if you hate doing the thing.

You have to do the thing you actually enjoy doing, not the thing you find conceptually exciting.

It’s easy to convince yourself you get along with someone because you like the same books or because they’re extremely perceptive in conversation. You can be intellectually stimulated when you spend time with them, but the feeling of leaving a thoughtful conversation is qualitatively different than the feeling of returning from a night of karaoke.

There is intellectual fun, and there is fun—old-fashioned, forget about the world, I could do this forever type fun. You might think you could spend the rest of your life debating AGI, but you’d be missing out on the fun that lets you surrender to life.

There’s a tendency to romanticize and overrate relationships with intellectually compatible people because we can clearly imagine how they play out. We can see how the other person might make us more thoughtful and inspired. We have ideas and fantasies of the person we’ll become after years of friendship.

But for friends we have old-fashioned fun with, it’s harder to see the evolution. We can imagine having a good time, but it feels like eating junk food—great in the moment, but not contributing to our long-term goals. This is wrong and short-sighted.

When have you felt most alive? What moments have changed you? The moments that come to mind often arrive in unexpected ways. If I think about my favorite (and most meaningful) interactions, they’re rooted in the emotional rather than intellectual. We attach more meaning and weight to moments th...