the friendship theory of everything

in choosing who you spend time with you choose who you are

Ross Bleckner, Falling Birds, 1994

Housekeeping: if you’re interested in the kinds of conversations we have on this Substack, I’m doing a workshop on conflict and friendship in SF in exactly one week (!!) on May 18th. ​We will explore our personal relationship with conflict, experiment with initiating and receiving conversations that invoke conflict, and learn together about how conflict brings us towards better relationships. I would love to see you there :)

At dinner last night, B asked me if I was sure I would keep living in the Bay Area. I said yes. He said that he himself was feeling uncertain, since he wasn’t sure if he would continue working in tech. He asked if becoming a writer had similarly affected my desire to stay in San Francisco. When I first moved to San Francisco at 19 I thought it was for the technology industry, but I’ve since realized that I’m in fact just interested in the type of people who tend to be fascinated with technology, or at least some subset of them. My friends are all pretty anti-authoritarian, willful, dogged, and cheerful—as B said, “The type of people who believe they can fix the world’s problems through sheer force of will.” I think my favorite thing about them is that they’re all very creative. In the literal sense that many of them write and make art, but also in the sense that they’re very good at solving problems in unorthodox ways.

I lived in New York from 2021 to 2023, and one thing I noticed that is San Francisco, or specifically tech, is viewed with both fascination and disgust. Thanks to media portrayal of the 2010s (I’m looking at you, The Social Network)—San Francisco lives in the public consciousness (or at least the public consciousness of coastal elites, haha) as a mishmash bizarre new technologies, nerds wearing hoodies, evil tech billionaires, men with money who sleep on mattresses on the floor, and group houses. It’s exciting, because there are self-driving cars and lots of money. But it’s bad, because Big Tech is out to enslave us via Big Algorithm and drain every ounce of sensuality and joy out of our lives. This blogpost is not where I plan to mount a counter-narrative of the technology industry as a whole, but I certainly can say that how San Francisco is depicted in the Greater American Consciousness has little to do with my own experience here.

When I first moved to SF, I certainly lived much more of the stereotype: I was working on an AI startup, I lived in several group houses, I spent all day in various coffee shops typing on my laptop, I went to house parties regularly, and I did not purchase a bedframe until 2023. But even then, the city was primarily compelling to me because of the people. I had been a weird loner kid, and made great friends only in high school; I had gone to college with high expectations, and while I met a couple of best friends (K and C, love you guys), most of my friendships were relatively surface-level. I was surrounded by really nice, smart people, but I had been searching for a certain kind of soul connection I couldn’t even articulate to myself, and I didn’t find it at Penn. I immediately, instantly got along with the people I met in SF.

The friends I met here were inventive, thoughtful, friendly and generous. They were nice to me without expecting anything back; they invited me to hikes, happy hours, house parties. They wanted to be helpful about work. They wanted to make the world better. At 19, they were so smart, and so impervious to irony. They were hopeful; why shouldn’t they be hopeful? They had built nuclear reactors in their basements, they had gotten perfect grades at MIT. 10 years later, my friends’ ambitions have both been realized and tempered. Many of them now either run or work happily at successful businesses; almost all of them have now lived through extreme work and personal life disappointments. They are doing what they want to do, and they have discovered that it is hard.

My friends all believe that meaningful work was crucial to a good life. That was surprising to me when I first moved here. I wasn’t ambitious about work in the sense that I expected to be fulfilled; what mattered to me was survival, reassurance. Those were my parents’ values, and the values of the community I was raised in. Though I’m sure most of them were also hugely motivated by ego, validation, and financial success, I could also tell that they genuinely cared about liking what they did. Several of my friends told me over the years that I should write more—B in particular was insistent about it. And of course it was because of S, who I met in a group house because of K, that I started writing full-time at all. The truth is, I simply never believed I could do it. I always dreamed of writing, but I thought I’d do it once I’d finished another career, maybe in my 40s or 50s. It was because of the people who loved me that I started writing sooner.

The truth is, even after I started writing the Substack and it was going pretty well, I wanted to find another job. I just didn’t have confidence that I could have a successful or fulfilling career as a creative. But my friends were always like: You should write! Like, you can do whatever else you want, but don’t do it because you’re afraid to commit to writing. They were persistent and so supportive.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that in San Francisco I’ve made close friends who have had very unusual lives where they’ve sought a lot of autonomy and the way they see their relationships, their lives, and the world has helped me become open to pursuing something unorthodox, too. People choose places; places shape people; people go on to shape other people. We should be thoughtful about the kind of transformation we opt into.

It’s impossible to overstate how much the people we’re close with affect us. I tweeted recently that “romantic relationships/best friends/therapists are critical for the same reason, where this person can become the primary person who explains you to *you*, the supplement to your internal monologue, and can rewire your understanding of yourself for way better or for way worse.” I know this for sure because I’ve lived it. We all know this is true in the romantic sense—good partners can make us way better people, and a bad person can make you way worse. But I think friends affect us to an even larger degree, because in your 20s many relationships only last for a year or two, whereas I have friends who I’ve seen regularly for almost 10 years at this point. I’ve talked to them at length about crushes, boyfriends, friend disputes, work anxieties, dreams, books. And in return I’ve listened to them talk about all the things on their minds, major and minor. Every job I’ve had I’ve pretty much gotten through a friend. Every person I’ve ever dated has been a friend of a friend.

I lived in San Francisco on and off between 2016 and 2020, and when the pandemic hit I was ready to leave. I wanted to live in New York; I was sick of what I perceived as the monoculture of San Francisco. And I really enjoyed my time away. But by mid-2022, I’d started realizing how much I missed it—how my favorite people were still here. And I was finally to subscribe to the Friendship Theory of Everything.

Some tenets of the friendship theory of everything:

1. You accept that in choosing who you spend time with you choose who you are.

2. Almost everyone who’s unhappy is unhappy because they feel isolated. The best cure for isolation is a strong friend group. So much of happiness is having someone you can get a last-minute dinner with on a Monday night, or ask to water your plants while you’re gone for a week. The opposite of loneliness, as it were.

3. You try your best to move to where your favorite people are. You do not agonize over whether this is, in fact, The Best City in the World. You do not Complain Relentlessly about Everything You Dislike About It. You simply suck it up and accept that if you like the people around you, everything else will work out.

4. You ask your friends to live close to you, though you accept that they might not want to. You say, Let’s all stay in California together. I want my kids to grow up with your kids.

5. When you value friendships more, they also get more fraught. I think this is what Rhaina Cohen referred to as “the problems of having community versus not having community.” When we ask for more from friendship, we also get more disappointment, conflict, mismatch. There is no such thing as closeness without friction.

6. Befriending people who are good communicators can make you a better communicator. Befriending people who are trustworthy makes you more trusting. Secure attachment can be a learned thing.

7. People will have periods when they disappear; people have times when they let you down. When you know someone for many many years you will have so many ups and downs. As with any kind of love, the most important thing is that you both keep coming back.

8. It’s okay to pursue and cherish romantic love, but sacrificing platonic love for it leads to disconnection and atomization.

9. You show up: you go to your friends’ birthday parties. You ask them to read your writing. You make an effort to make nice with whoever they date.

10. Your friends will change you, even in ways you initially reject. That’s a good thing. You will acquire new opinions and hobbies; you will find yourself into uncomfortable situations; you will learn to like the people they like.

Like many women I’ve always loved Sex and the City, which is a show that is sometimes about sex, and sometimes about the city, but mostly about the friendship theory of everything. It’s about how it’s critical to have people in your life who love you and see you when you’re fun and sparkly and on top of the world, but also love you when you’re stagnant and petulant and self-sabotaging and letting them down. It’s about how that kind of love makes you believe in other kinds of love. It’s about how the essential texture of life is, yes, maybe a little in the shoes and a little in your apartment, but mostly about who you call to complain about a boy. And then they complain to you about their parents and then you tell them about the movie you want to see on Wednesday. It’s about how no one tells us that friendship is a form of redemption because even if work goes wrong and your boyfriend dumps you if you have people who believe you’re going to be okay you believe that you’re going to be okay.

For a long time I used to have this sense of sadness about how I was never going to be able to explain San Francisco the way I see it to anyone else. And then I realized that for the people I love—I don’t need to explain anything. They already know.