- 2025-09-02
- The only thing I’ve read about friendship is Tasshin’s post, and I didn’t even read it deeply, but one thing that stuck with me was that he gives permission to call pretty much anyone a friend
- https://tasshin.com/blog/the-practice-of-friendship/
Visa said that he considers a friend to be a person that you have a shared understanding or context with—that when you’ve talked to someone extensively, and met them, you have shared understanding and context and trust.
When I meet a new friend on the internet, we won’t be as close as I am with that old friend of mine. But we do have some shared context! Perhaps we’ve been hanging around the same Twitter circles together. Perhaps we both have a specific shared interest. Perhaps they’ve seen something I’ve created, or I’ve seen something they’ve made. There’s almost always at least some shared context—you’re both humans on the same planet, trying to be happy, after all—and then it’s just a matter of identifying it, connecting about it, building on it.
This definition dramatically expanded my perspective on friendship. Friendship transcends physical proximity and shared interests—it’s more fundamental than that. If friendship is shared context, all you need to do to make friends is to establish shared context, and all you need to deepen a friendship is to add more.
Over and above shared context, friendship is constituted of warmth: mutual heartfelt love and care, and the expression of that warmth as kind actions towards each other.
Warmth!!!! - I feel warmth for lots of people
First, I really pay attention to how it feels to be around someone. It should feel good to be around your friends—you should feel happy, enlivened, inspired, energized, excited during and after you spend time with them. I trust people who it generally feels good to be around, where it’s rare that I don’t.
Another really important feeling to pay attention to is who you feel drawn towards. If you are in tune with your body and your feelings, you will occasionally feel extremely drawn towards specific people. You may feel very curious about someone, interested in them—for example, wanting to pay attention to them when you’re around them, yearning to spend time with them or get to know them better, finding yourself thinking about them a lot.
What I value most in my friends these days is those who see me for who I am—in all my strength and beauty, in all my mess and imperfections, and who love me anyway—not merely in spite of it all, but because of it.
The internet allows us to find incredible people all over the world and be connected to them 24/7. I see it as a playground, where we can find our friends, and play together.
- I’d say that (I’m writing this from Ship It Week), I have like 2 really lovely friends here, who I already have shared context with. But there’s also a handful of people who I have a small amount of shared context with from pre-Ship It Week and feel very warmly towards, and then there’s a bigger group of people who I don’t know yet but know are good kind people