Skip to main content

4 rules for traveling to find your way back to old friendships.

Jessica Francis Kane "wrote a novel about a woman who rekindles old friendships with some strict rules" (Slate) and then tried to follow the rules herself in real life. The rules:
1. Make the visit for the purpose of friendship only—not because you have a business trip in the area, for example.

2. Stay at your friend’s house.

3. Be alive in the space of the friendship, meaning no social media during the visit. Take pictures for yourself, if you want, but no posting until later.

4. Don’t make special plans (spa, resort, fancy local restaurant), because the purpose is to see an ordinary day in the life of your friend.
Would you do this? Whether your answer is yes or no, is it because of the nature of your relationship with human beings who are distant from you in time and place? Is there something about these rules that inspires you or puts you off? If you wanted to find your way back to friends (are they still your friends?) what rules would you follow? Hmm. Maybe we need a set of rules about deciding whether to travel back into old friendships. I mean, how would I feel if someone I once had in my life as a friend emailed me about her plan to follow these rules? How would you feel? It's awfully... invasive! Suddenly, you're somebody's project.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"The theory that we are living in a computer simulation may sound bizarre, but it has found adherents."

"The technology entrepreneur Elon Musk has said that the odds that we are not simulated are 'one in billions.' Professor Smoot estimates that the ratio of simulated to real people might be as high as 10¹² to 1.... [I]f our universe has been created by an advanced civilization for research purposes, then it is reasonable to assume that it is crucial to the researchers that we don’t find out that we’re in a simulation. If we were to prove that we live inside a simulation, this could cause our creators to terminate the simulation — to destroy our world. Of course, the proposed experiments may not detect anything that suggests we live in a computer simulation. In that case, the results will prove nothing. This is my point: The results of the proposed experiments will be interesting only when they are dangerous." From "Are We Living in a Computer Simulation? Let’s Not Find Out/Experimental findings will be either boring or extremely dangerous" by philosophy pro...

"It's just a type of berry from Japan, unfortunately. Very cool though!"

Went to a small fruit farm were they grew strawberries crossed with raspberries. from r/pics Rubus illecebrosus — "a red-fruited species of Rubus that originally came from Japan (where is it called バライチゴ, roseberry), but is also very popular in some European countries like Lithuania. Common names include balloon berry and strawberry raspberry."

"Are You Rich? This Income- Rank Quiz Might Change How You See Yourself."

This is a little 5-question quiz in the NYT. One of the questions is "In your view, being 'rich' means having an income in the ..." — with various choices: "top 25%, top 20%, top 15%, top 10%, top 5%, top 1%." So the answer you get to "Are you rich?" is based on your own definition of who is rich. I only need to make $153,000 to be in the top 5% where I live and only $175,000 to be in the top 5% in the NYC metropolitan area. Who thinks they're rich if they make $175,000 in NYC? Can you even afford a 1-bedroom apartment?! From the article accompanying the quiz: The researchers found that a “vast majority” of their respondents believed they were poorer, relative to others, than they actually were. The people who thought they were right in the middle of the income distribution – perfectly middle class, you might say — were, on average, closer to the 75th percentile. And as a group, respondents whose incomes actually resembled the true median thou...