As a concept, "opportunity cost" might be one of the most damaging ideas to ever be mixed in with social relations. All of the language you mention in your opening: "investing", "networking", "energy", "use of time", "connections, leverage, social capital, value exchange, synergy", all hinge on opportunity cost. In other words, they're all centered around your attention being a finite resource that, once used in one place, on one friend, in one relationship, is then permanently spent and, in turn, wasted when it pays no dividends.
The logic sort of holds because we're all working with limited time and energy, but the valuation is wrong. Market logic dictates that value only exists where a price can be set, and all things that cannot be priced are worthless, and this logic has seeped into every aspect of our lives.
Opportunity cost is a phantom hazard. The idea that we value the things we do in relation to all the things we can't do is deranged. It's the equivalent of scrolling Netflix endlessly, looking for something to watch, but dismissing everything you come across because you're not sure it's worth the 90 minutes, and you'll be too preoccupied with all of the other things you could be watching instead. So the net result is that you end up watching nothing, and somehow that's more prudent than taking a shot on a random experience and seeing it through to the end. The fear of loss is so great, but the fear itself is vampiric, wasting more time and opportunity than any failed "investment", or spent opportunity cost, by orders of magnitude.
Brilliant and incisive as always, and uncomfortable in the best ways. Your values are curated and calibrated to a degree of precision that I deeply admire.
And here’s what the framework never bills you for. The hedging itself!!! Opportunity cost keeps one eye permanently on the exit and that divided gaze is the actual ruin. You sit through the whole film you did pick and take in almost none of it because the menu is still glowing faintly behind your eyes. Presence is the thing that gets killed off, and it never appears as a line item since the model only ever counts the roads not taken. Never the road you are on, the one you walk badly because you keep turning round to check the door.
There’s a smaller swindle folded in there too. The choice the analogy imagines never actually occurs. Nobody sits down once and selects this friend over every conceivable friend. You re-choose in tiny instalments, a returned call, a day you didn’t cancel. The big agonising menu is a fiction. We took a tool built for the sort of decision you make once and walk away from, and screwed it onto something that is nothing except small repeated returnings.
Thank you for your compliment, Andrew, I’ll cheerfully hand one word back. I don’t believe my values are calibrated. Calibration wants an instrument and a target. Mine mostly accreted, by accident, off people I happened to stand near for a long time. I’d take the credit if I could find any to take.
Grateful for “vampiric” especially (you know why)!!! Exactly the right register for the fear, and I’m sorry I didn’t reach it first. :)
And once again you identified something even deeper than the language of “investment” creeping into friendship. We’ve also imported the logic of optimization, that penetrates everything nowadays. Not only do we ask whether people are useful, we ask whether a friendship is the best possible use of our finite social resources. The tragedy is that this horrible optimization is the enemy of attachment. The most valuable people in my life would never have survived an efficiency review.
Years ago, I kept meeting an older man at the same café. We had almost nothing in common. Different generation, different politics, different profession. If I had evaluated that relationship the way modern life teaches us to evaluate everything, I would have concluded it offered no leverage, no opportunity, no measurable return. Yet over time he became one of the people whose perspective shaped my thinking the most. The friendship’s value was precisely that it could not have been predicted in advance. Networks reward relevance. Friendships reward surprise.
That insight runs beautifully through this essay. You remind us that friendship is one of the last places where uncertainty is a gift to receive. We do not know who will matter to us 20 years from now. We do not know which repetitive conversation, which pointless phone call, which cold cup of tea will become part of of a life.
And that may be the most impressive achievement of your essay, Tamara. In a culture obsessed with measurement, you make a compelling case for the immeasurable without becoming sentimental. That’s soooo rare today. Most writers either romanticize friendship or reduce it to sociology. You somehow managed to defend its mystery.
The efficiency review has a flaw nobody ever points at. It needs a stable judge, somebody with settled wants, sitting at the desk, ranking the candidates against a fixed idea of what would serve them. The whole point of your café man was that he kept rewriting the person doing the ranking. By the time you would have sat down to score the friendship, he had already changed what you were scoring it against. You cannot audit a thing that edits the auditor.
That alone wrecks the exercise!
Best-use thinking comes out of money, where it half works because a dollar spent here really is a dollar not spent there, and the two are comparable. Friendship won’t behave. The grey afternoon you supposedly “spent better” elsewhere never existed as an option. It only came into being because he was at that table. There was no rival afternoon waiting in the wings to be weighed against it. The alternative use was always a ghost.
But….. may I gently quarrel with one word, and only because it started as mine? I’m not sure friendship rewards anything. Reward still smells of the ledger, still wants the books to come out even. It just happens to you,and then twenty years on you find you’ve been carrying it about without noticing the weight.
Thank you for the café man, Céline, what a great example! I keep turning him over, this person I never met who apparently rearranged a stranger’s thinking from across a table. How delightful!
The darkest part is that people now “tailor” friendships the way corporations systematize inventory, just-in-time intimacy, zero surplus, no redundancy, no patience for maintenance that doesn’t yield visible return, which is disastrous, because the most important people in your life are often the ones who were useless to you for years until the precise moment your life fell apart.
I learned this embarrassingly late. The friends who mattered the most were rarely the impressive ones, not the high-status conversationalists or the “aligned” connections, but the people who kept reappearing without agenda, through boring seasons, failures, bad moods, long silences. Markets punish inefficiency. Friendship depends on it.
Your essay cuts straight through the managerial rot infecting modern intimacy without retreating into sentimentality. Sharp, unsparing, original and painfully true, Tamara, bravo encore une fois.
Clara, the supply-chain people learned this one the hard way and it nearly finished them. Lean systems run beautifully right up until the unexpected thing turns up, and then the slack you cut to look clever, the redundancy nobody could justify on a spreadsheet, is precisely what you find yourself on your knees praying for. The useless friend is slack in the system. You stripped them out the week before the canal got blocked.
But… I think there is a trap folded inside the trap, though. You can’t keep a few useless ones on hand as insurance because the second you keep them as insurance you have refiled them under assets, and the thing dies in your grip. The buffer only works if it was never intended as a buffer. It has to be real waste, surplus you weren’t even tracking. So the only way to have it is to stop counting, and counting is the one habit this age refuses to let us put down.
Late is fine, by the way! Most of us turn up to this out of breath and well after the fact. Thank you, and bravo right back for naming the inventory logic before I had properly got to it myself!
Careful, Clara, that’s the ledger again, smuggled back in wearing folk wisdom! “Deserve” only swaps cash for karma. It’s still keeping the books. I’d half hope we don’t get the friends we deserve. The good ones tend to love you well past your deserving, which is more or less the entire point of them.
Making a friend is quite literally falling in love, sometimes at first sight. I met a friend at a 12 step meeting. He was there to celebrate with another friend of mine that he had known since childhood but had moved away. We walked from the meeting house a few hundred yards to a parking lot and talked under a street lamp for 2 hours. We both went home at midnight to wives who wondered where the hell we were. The blossoming friendship was anchored in two places. A mutual love of a broad range of music, and a willingness to see the other’s spiritual experiences as mysterious stories to savor rather than myths in need of debunking.
We keep elaborate origin stories for the marriages…. how we met, who embarrassed themselves first, whether the bad first impression was even real or got invented afterwards because the story wanted one. Nobody keeps the friendship version. Ask most people when a close friend turned into a close friend and they go vague. Something about university, or a shared job, and then it trails off. You have yours down to the lamp post and the precise hour. That’s amazing!
Thank you for this, Robert, and for the two wives left wondering! I’ll be picturing all four of you for a while. What a great story!
You're so right, most people don't remember when that feeling for a person went from like to love. I do remember that moment with my closest friend. We were having a conversation while I was driving, and I told her something I'd observed about her. It turned out no one had told her that before, and she said to me "Richard, I feel so close to you right now." That was the moment that began our big love of each other. I remember it as if it happened yesterday. The kicker? I can't for the life of me remember what the observation was. But whatever it was, it was a good one!
Thank you. Would you like another wonderful detail about our friendship? I have a photograph of 6 people, and 2 of them are her and I. And this picture was taken the day we met. And of course it is my favourite photograph on earth.
This is excellent, particularly because you resist the temptation to turn friendship into a moral lecture. Yet you do something much harder, you describe how market logic colonised our private lives until we started speaking about people the way accountants speak about inventory. The line about friendship being the last bond that enters the balance sheet as zero is my favorite.
One practical consequence deserves adding in my opinion. Once we start treating friendships as investments, we also begin expecting returns on a timetable. We become impatient with relationships that are not immediately rewarding. Yet most durable friendships spend long periods looking almost inactive. They are less like startups and more like old wells, months can pass without drawing much water, but when the drought arrives, you discover which ones were worth digging. The tragedy is that many people abandon the well because it wasn’t producing enough excitement in the quarterly report.
The irony is almost funny. We are all obsessed with the good old optimization, yet some of the best things in life arrive through deliberate inefficiency. Friendship may be one of the few areas where wasting time is not a bug.
A beautifully observed essay, as always. You managed to make a cultural critique feel personal rather than ideological, and that is extraordinary, Tamara.
The timetable did something sneakier than make us impatient, I think. It handed a respectable suit to a flaw we were already wearing underneath. People have always over-prized whatever pays out today and waved off whatever pays out in a decade. The economists have a dull name for it, “present bias”, the wiring that makes us grab the small thing now and dismiss the bigger thing that’s years away. Friendship has the worst possible payout schedule for that wiring. The return is enormous and it comes round maybe once a decade, with no warning whatsoever. Market language didn’t invent our impatience. But it dressed the impatience in something that sounds prudent at dinner.
And there’s a cruelty in the digging itself. It’s one thing to keep a dormant well you already sank years back, and quite another to start sinking a new one at 40, knowing it might give you nothing until you’re 60, assuming you both last that long. The starting problem is the worse of the two because the first thing the timetable kills off is your nerve to begin anything slow.
Alexander, thank you for the line about personal rather than ideological! I’m never certain I’ve earned it. The honest reason it reads personal is that I can’t manage the other kind. I tried once. It came out sounding like a leaflet, and I put it in the bin.
Friendships are “less like startups and more like old wells” well described. Whether a new friend you feel like you’ve known forever or an old friend you’ve not seen in years bonding again as if no time has separated you, the joy of a true friend is inestimable. Tamara’s essay followed by your comment is fantastic. Here’s to old wells that run deep with every drawn bucket of conversation!
That second phenomenon you mention is the one that demolishes the whole upkeep vocabulary. The friend you haven’t seen in years, and you resume as though the gap were a long bank holiday. If friendship really ran on maintenance, on regular inputs and steady contact, that reunion simply couldn’t happen. It would have lapsed like an unpaid subscription. Instead it goes dormant and comes back entire, no penalty charged for the silence. You don’t keep a real one up. It keeps without you.
The instant-familiar stranger is the same trick run the other direction. The clock that meters everything else just declines to apply.
Glad my essay and the thread together did something for you. Here’s to the wells, then, and to the buckets that come up full after years of nobody bothering to lower one!
Thank you, Tamara, for your thoughts on friends and friendship. Being 86 now, only three people are left that I have known over 65 years and two of them are my brother and his wife. Luckily, I have been involved in several activities and organizations for many years and those special people I can call friends have slipped into my life through that route. I feel very fortunate!
Ohhh wow, 65 years isn’t friendship the way the magazines sell it…. they have no word for what it becomes. Past a certain point the bond stops being something you choose and turns into something nearer to outlasting. You stayed while the rest of the cast thinned out, and the staying turns out to be its own devotion nobody warned us would matter this much!
Thank you for writing to me from the far end of it, Nancy! I’m taking notes I didn’t know I needed yet.
"Friends" took over the essay completely for me. "The visit with no purpose, the call about nothing in particular..." You could have written nothing but that and I would have spent hours contemplating those words and the people they bring to mind. I tend to associate those words with people I've known for many years - the three still alive have been my friends for 36, 45, and 51 years. The more recent friends, one or two I know will remain friends for as long as we have. The others, I don't know yet.
There's one friend who died during the pandemic, and although I'd not seen or heard from him in many years, we had a remarkable friendship for about twenty years. He was one of my high school English literature teachers, and the year after I'd had him for class, we met every Tuesday during the period when he had to walk the halls of the high school to keep order, and I walked with him, and we talked. We talked about anything and everything. He spoke to me as a peer, though also as a bit of a mentor. And when he signed my yearbook, he thanked me for a year of Tuesday afternoons. We kept in touch for quite a while after that, but that year of conversations has resonated through my life all these years.
The three who are still alive rarely call or write for anything specific. We just keep in touch with each other's lives because we care and we've shared a great deal. The ones I've mentioned here, and the ones I haven't, all the ones who are real friends, are like the figures in Vanessa Bell's painting, "The Conversation." We all leaned into each other, interested, listening, talking, occasionally simply being present together on the phone or in person. And with each of them, the best conversations were just the two of us, whether in person or on the phone, sometimes (in earlier days) via snail mail, now via email or message. There is no balance sheet. Impossible to weigh what each of them has meant and still mean to me. Thanks for reminding me of all of them. :))
The detail…. which way the gratitude ran. He thanked you. The older man, the one we would all assume was doing the giving, signed the yearbook to thank the student for the Tuesdays. Which gives the whole thing away. It wasn’t knowledge handed downward from the one who had it. He was getting his dreary corridor-patrol made bearable by your company, and he knew it, and he wrote it down. The favour ran both ways and neither of you was keeping count of the direction.
And notice where it grew. Inside an obligation neither of you chose. His duty to walk the halls and keep order, the deadest and most bureaucratic hour of his week, and that’s the soil the thing took root in. The accidental method again. Imposed recurrence, somebody else’s institution shoving you into the same corridor every Tuesday, and a twenty-year friendship germinating in the cracks of it.
We never learn what those women in Bell’s painting are saying. She didn’t paint the words. She painted the leaning-in, the bodies angled towards one another, because that is the actual content. Friendship is posture before it’s ever subject matter, and the call about nothing is only ever an excuse to assume the posture again.
Doc, thank you for the year of Tuesday afternoons, which I now feel oddly as though I half-attended myself! Fifty-one years stops being a friendship somewhere along the way and turns into a second spine.
Cioran is the right register. Friendship is a disruptive force that operates outside cultivation. Like his insomnia, it can be a brutal inner confrontation that animates some depth of life which otherwise remains dormant. His pessimism was more like negative space than negative emotion. Friendship follows that model. It grafts grounding energy onto living systems so that they flourish without notice. Knowing a friend exists tracks like knowing death-as-an-option does. One friend makes other encounters bearable.
The death-as-option line! Cioran’s whole trick was that the exit staying available is what let him stay. He never used it. Its entire value was in going unused. A friend works the same way more often than we admit. There’s a particular number in your phone you’d never actually ring in the middle of the night, and the fact that you could is most of what keeps you from ever needing to. The reserve does its work by sitting there undrawn, which means most of friendship’s weight gets carried while nothing whatsoever happens. Not during the crisis, in the long flat stretch before any crisis arrives, when simply knowing the person is out there lowers the temperature of everything else by a few degrees.
Andrew, thank you for “negative space rather than negative emotion” ! Most accurate thing said to me about Cioran in years.I’m going to steal it. With attribution, eventually, probably not. :)
Last night I dreamed of the chamber players on the Titantic. And their plight has been gnawing at my imagination all day. It seems to me they were Cioranian to the core long before he wrote a single line. Plucking their strings till the dark wash of the North Atlantic swept them into their final oblivion. Not out of defiance. Not out of denial. Not out of a rejection of death. But out of a refusal to have their living taken from them before the depths took life itself. I wonder what note the final draw of the bow sounded into the pitch black of the starry sky before the bleak waters silenced their strings forever.
Such a lucid piece, Tamara. It feels particularly poignant for one like me, blessed with a few, true friends.
There is a marvelous song by the great poet and singer Joan Manuel Serrat (who sits in the same class that Moustaki, Brassens & Dylan). I copy it here with the English translation which fails, alas, to capture the rhymes and references. Yet, it transmits the essence of the poem.
Decir amigo
Es decir juegos, escuela, calle y niñez
Gorriones presos
De un mismo viento
Tras un olor de mujer
Decir amigo
Es decir vino, guitarra, trago y canción
Furcias y broncas
Y en los tres pinos
Una novia pa los dos
Decir amigo
Me trae del barrio
Luz de domingo
Y deja en los labios
Gusto a mistela
Y a natillas con canela
Decir amigo
Es decir aula, laboratorio y bedel
Billar y cine
Siesta en las ramblas
Y alemanas al clavel
Decir amigo
Es decir tienda, botas, charnaque y fusil
Y los domingos
A pelear hembras
Entre Salou y Cambrils
Decir amigo
No se hace extraño
Cuando se tiene sed de veinte años
Y pocas penas
Y el alma sin media suelas
Decir amigo
Es decir lejos
Y antes fue decir adiós
Y ayer, y siempre
Lo tuyo nuestro
Y lo mío de los dos
Decir amigo
Se me figura que
Decir amigo
Es decir ternura
Dios y mi canto
Saben a quién nombro tanto
Here is a translation of the Serrat song into English:
Serrat is doing the exact reverse of the thing my essay was grumbling about. The managers compress a person down into a single noun, asset or contact. He takes the one word, “amigo”, and presses on it until it bursts back into mistela, cinnamon custard, the shared girlfriend under the three pines, the German women for the carnation seller. The word flatly refuses to stay abstract. A friend can’t be summarised. He can only be listed out, and even the list is just pointing at something that won’t fit inside any single term. Thank you for this, Juan José, and for turning up here with the few-and-true instead of the many!
Tamara: "Yours, owing you nothing that either of us could ever put a figure to, and meaning to go on owing exactly that for as long as you will have me..." What a beautiful thing to say to each of us! I really like this essay, and I learned as much as a couple hours worth of reading can tell one about Cioran. 'Misanthrope' indeed...and yet, the seemingly conceptual contradiction of a 'human misanthrope' has an underground, rebel appeal to me! Exciting and thought-provoking essay...how many times will I say, "One of my favs"???/t
The contradiction dissolves the second you notice his contempt ran wholesale while his affection stayed strictly retail, sold off by the single unit. The species in the abstract, the great churning mass of Humanity with its capital H, that he would happily feed to the fire. But the friend in front of him, the letter sitting there wanting an answer, those he kept religiously.
“One of my favs” as often as you fancy. Thank you for wandering off to read him on the strength of a single stray paragraph, T! Mind the insomnia, though. It’s catching in print.
>>Mind the insomnia, though<< it got me about 15 years ago…and not only that, but the 3-4 times a week it happens, it wakes me up at the same time, about 2:30 am, if I’ve fallen asleep. I neither know why it happens nor why it doesn’t.
I am so very happy that when I first moved to Spain, I had a group of Spanish friends - several groups- that would include me in their company as one of them, and would sometimes show up at my house unannounced, en masse, to drag me somewhere. It doesn’t even matter that those particular friendships did not last. And well, in the end, we were young. Friendships do not always survive the march of time and the subsequent phases of a person's evolution. But the fact that I found that camaraderie so early in my ex pat experience was an invaluable one and a consolation for the emptiness I felt American society generated. What you describe is not new. American society has been moving in this direction for a long time, many decades.
For me, the detail that matters the most is “unannounced, en masse”. That mode is simply unavailable in a culture that treats your evening as private property you have to be buzzed into. Turning up at the door to drag someone out assumes their time is open, already half theirs to barge into. In Spain it was how you knew you’d been claimed. The warmth was only the surface of it. Underneath sat a whole different idea of who your Tuesday night belongs to.
And I would gently lift the small apology out of “it doesn’t matter they didn’t last”. It needs no apologising for because they did their entire work at the time. We’ve started grading friendships by their lifespan, as though one that ended must have failed somewhere along the line, and that’s the same warranty-thinking I kept hinting at. A friendship can be complete without also being permanent. The consolation was the whole return. It was never going to be itemised a second time.
You are right that none of it is new. Tocqueville clocked the solitude sitting inside American plenty almost two centuries ago. What’s new is only that the language finally caught up and started calling the loneliness prudence.
And yes, that unannounced arrival is the proof of your closing line! Nobody schedules unstrategic generosity into an ambush. It simply turns up at the door wanting to take you somewhere.
In the end, love is what matters. Content is conduit, sometimes, to connection. But the heart to heart, soul to soul, needs none of that. You see your friends with your heart. No words, no circumstances, no conditions required. Recognition: I see you, I know you, I love you. My friend.
I would only add that the wordless kind is almost always a late arrival. The silence that says everything is loud because of the decades of talk buried underneath it. Two strangers sitting in silence have only got silence. The comfortable sort is the residue of a thousand ordinary conversations, gone quiet at last because they no longer need saying aloud. So the content was never skipped. It sank into the marrow and quit needing words.
I see you too, and thank you, Gregg, for reaching the heart of it in five lines while it took me two thousand!
Maybe the differiention between the two categories parallels our twin hemisphere's engaging with reality from their distinct perspectives. Especially with all our technologically amped up left brain agency, the emissary's obsession with the logic of return, has become a compulsive disorder, holding on to causal efficiency as Ahab onto Moby Dick. The master of our right brain, all but neglected by the collective consensus, brings with it the values of form-giving identity.
A friend enters into the room of our whole personality, becoming part and parcel of who I am. Transactional relations are part of the machine that keeps the world going, as we become cogs and data points to each other in the tactics of survival.
We need both, to survive in an impersonal realm of civilized relations and to be able to thrive in the depths of the person of who one is. Soul mates and role players, each have their place in our lives.
The theme here of making the case for the elephant in the room of pretending that the one is the other, that there is no difference is what gives this essay such relevance to our social media gone agog world, today.
You have your finger on the pulse of what matters Tamara, thank you for the longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates comprising the parameters of your writing to the issues of the Zeitgeist of our shared horizons of embodiment!
Aho, Mitakuye Oyas'in: We are all related in the circle of life: to the trees, the winds, the winged ones, the four-legged, the creepers and crawlers, the Star People, the swimmwers and the waters of life. Let it be so.
The McGilchrist mapping holds, and I would press it on one point where I think it bites harder than “we need both”. His worry was never that we possess the two modes. It’s the order of command. The emissary was only ever meant to serve, to go out, gather, bring back, and report to the master who sees the whole. What’s happened is the servant has taken the throne and now narrates everything in his own flattened dialect, including the master’s own experience, which he cannot actually perceive. So when the transactional vocabulary swallows friendship, it isn’t exactly lying to us. It simply can’t see. It re-describes the thing it has no organ for and sincerely believes nothing went missing because from the left hemisphere’s chair nothing did. The loss is invisible from the only vantage point currently allowed to speak.
Which is why I’d resist “each has their place”, gently. They don’t hold equal places. One was meant to be in service to the other, and our whole predicament is the inversion, the tool that stopped taking orders and began handing them out instead. Ahab is the right image, except notice that Ahab is also brilliant and ferociously competent. That’s the trap in it! The emissary is far from stupid. It’s superb at everything bar knowing what it’s actually for.
A friend entering the room of the whole personality, yes, that’s it precisely, and it’s also the one experience the measuring mind owns no instrument fine enough to register.
Thank you for the coordinates, Michael, and for closing the way you did! Mitakuye Oyas’in sits oddly well beside an essay that kept insisting on the bonds that show up as nothing on the ledger. The relations that don’t compute turn out to be most of the circle. Let it be so, then!
To make the tyranny of left-brain agency bite all the way through is to call it for what it is, OCD! Collectively, socially and individually, the master has been banished and our cultural milieu is on a relentless track to no where in particular because that is where we truly live, in the anima mundi of a place.
Like chickens with their heads cut off, the machine of agency, without its anchor in wholistic knowing, is only capable of consuming everything in the circle of life, till there is no more life! All the ameliorising aside, that is the telos of things with the emissary in total control of the world view, with its transactional language swamping all that stands in its way, like the tital wave of social media today speaking through a screen, like a Tooker. The physiognomy of presence has become a ghost.
Only question for each of us and our world is, can we reenter the circle of life in a way that can restore us in good standing with the next seven generations?
Thank you Tamara, for pushing the theme of your essay here into the dire straits we find ourselves in today, and for all your own brilliant replies to each of our comments on this substack platform, that is awaiting on another room to open for the Salon to gather in the presence of each other in the circle of life and all our relations. Let it be so, soon, somewhere on this spinning world of Gaia, in Spider Grandmother's own loom of words made flesh, in patterns that can speak to the master side of our soul!!
Totality, civilisation, the grand system, the seven generations held as one vast abstraction… precisely the altitude the left hemisphere loves the best. The master never worked up there. It only ever attends to the particular and the present, the actual face at the actual table. So here’s the trap, the instant you have diagnosed the machine. You answer it with a counter-machine, a grand programme to reenter the circle. But a grand programme is just the emissary in fresh robes. You can’t out-system the system, which means the seven-generations question, if it ever gets answered, gets answered in the next hour. With one friend. Phone face down. The macro only repairs at the micro because the micro is the single place the master can lay its hands. The salon isn’t a step toward the cure. It is the cure, in miniature, bodies in a room being unmeasured at one another for an evening. Build enough of those and there’s no movement to point at. We will only have declined the waiting room often enough that it loosens its grip.
And Tooker is the right ghost, though notice what he actually painted. Not a monster eating the world. A queue. People filing patiently through government corridors, complicit and orderly, and nobody anywhere holding the knife. That’s the harder horror, and it’s nearer to where we sit. The emissary’s victory was never going to arrive as a wildfire consuming the circle of life. It looks far more like a very tidy filing system that everyone agreed to join, which is worse, because there is nothing left to push against.
Thank you for taking my essay all the way to Spider Grandmother’s loom. I can’t follow you out to the scale of Gaia with any honesty, but I can meet you at the table, which is the only place I’ve ever found the thing worth saving. Let it be so there, then! Soon, and small enough to fit inside one room.
Thank you for another engaging read. Two points stood out to me that I'd love to bring up for discussion.
First, regarding the C.S. Lewis quote: I find that friendship and community are intrinsic to our survival, which is exactly why we are such a social species. Ironically, this deep need might be the very reason we've reduced our social lives to another capitalistic sprint, constantly trying to maximize their "value."
Second, your anecdote about the friend who moved to the city got me thinking. While intentionally maximizing their schedule didn't work well for them, I've noticed, or at least heard, some folks find success with this approach. A lot of advice on adult friendships boils down to "you aren't trying hard enough." There seems to be some truth to that, though I'm not entirely sure what kind. My own thoughts on this are inconclusive, but my gut feeling is that a hyper-intentional approach might satisfy our baseline need for socialization, while ultimately falling short of our deeper desire for real companionship. I constantly go back and forth between letting the randomness of the world foster relationships, versus treating friendship as a pursuit that requires serious time and devotion.
I guess you and Lewis are aiming at two different things that happen to share a name. What’s wired into us for survival is sociality, the alliance, the warm body who’ll stand beside you when the wolves turn up. That need is ancient and real and nobody’s disputing it but that’s the network, the very understudy the essay was grumbling about. Friendship in Lewis’s narrow sense is the freeloader sitting on top of all that survival hardware, using it for nothing adaptive whatsoever. So your irony runs deeper than you let on. The circuitry that kept us breathing is instrumental by design, built to chase an outcome and keep the score. Route intimacy through equipment like that and of course you end up sprinting to wring value out of it. We are running tenderness on hunting software.
On the whole “you aren’t trying hard enough” school…. Both things can be true, and the trick is where you point the effort. The people who pull this off by trying hard don’t pick better humans. They’ve simply worked out how to manufacture recurrence. Joining the choir, the Thursday five-a-side, whatever room they’ll be obliged to keep walking back into, then letting the accidental method do its slow work inside it. Effort spent on the conditions tends to pay off. Aim the identical effort at the outcome, this specific person, locked in by March, and it just stinks the room out. Your gut is right, for what it’s worth. The scheduling cures the surface loneliness and leaves the deeper thing untouched because depth needs you to forget you are being watched, and a hyper-deliberate frame keeps one eye permanently on the dial. The checking is what stops it working.
So I’d scrap the randomness-versus-pursuit fork altogether. Pursue, hard even. Just pursue the circumstances, and leave the people to turn up on their own clock.
Here is the smaller thing instead. Last winter a friend I had been slowly mislaying, to distance, to time zones, to the usual wordless drift, to the simple fact that neither of us ever “circled back”, rang me for no reason on a Sunday night. No favour attached. No news to deliver. She had read something and wanted to read it to me. We stayed on the line the better part of an hour and produced precisely nothing of value, and afterwards I sat in the dark with the owl figurines watching me from the shelf, and I thought, that. Whatever that just was. That is the one thing the whole machinery around me cannot put a price on, cannot sell back to me, and works very hard, every single day, to convince me I never needed.
I think I will ring her tonight. Not about anything.
No one is indispensable when it comes to complaints!”
Agreed! You can complain to almost anyone. Complaints are the most transferable currency we own. What won’t transfer is the call about nothing, the one with no grievance loaded into it at all. Maybe that’s the real test. The queue of people you’d happily complain to runs out the door. The list of people you’d ring with nothing whatsoever to report stays very, very short.
Thank you, Juan Carlos! You handed me the back half of the argument in a single line.
As a concept, "opportunity cost" might be one of the most damaging ideas to ever be mixed in with social relations. All of the language you mention in your opening: "investing", "networking", "energy", "use of time", "connections, leverage, social capital, value exchange, synergy", all hinge on opportunity cost. In other words, they're all centered around your attention being a finite resource that, once used in one place, on one friend, in one relationship, is then permanently spent and, in turn, wasted when it pays no dividends.
The logic sort of holds because we're all working with limited time and energy, but the valuation is wrong. Market logic dictates that value only exists where a price can be set, and all things that cannot be priced are worthless, and this logic has seeped into every aspect of our lives.
Opportunity cost is a phantom hazard. The idea that we value the things we do in relation to all the things we can't do is deranged. It's the equivalent of scrolling Netflix endlessly, looking for something to watch, but dismissing everything you come across because you're not sure it's worth the 90 minutes, and you'll be too preoccupied with all of the other things you could be watching instead. So the net result is that you end up watching nothing, and somehow that's more prudent than taking a shot on a random experience and seeing it through to the end. The fear of loss is so great, but the fear itself is vampiric, wasting more time and opportunity than any failed "investment", or spent opportunity cost, by orders of magnitude.
Brilliant and incisive as always, and uncomfortable in the best ways. Your values are curated and calibrated to a degree of precision that I deeply admire.
And here’s what the framework never bills you for. The hedging itself!!! Opportunity cost keeps one eye permanently on the exit and that divided gaze is the actual ruin. You sit through the whole film you did pick and take in almost none of it because the menu is still glowing faintly behind your eyes. Presence is the thing that gets killed off, and it never appears as a line item since the model only ever counts the roads not taken. Never the road you are on, the one you walk badly because you keep turning round to check the door.
There’s a smaller swindle folded in there too. The choice the analogy imagines never actually occurs. Nobody sits down once and selects this friend over every conceivable friend. You re-choose in tiny instalments, a returned call, a day you didn’t cancel. The big agonising menu is a fiction. We took a tool built for the sort of decision you make once and walk away from, and screwed it onto something that is nothing except small repeated returnings.
Thank you for your compliment, Andrew, I’ll cheerfully hand one word back. I don’t believe my values are calibrated. Calibration wants an instrument and a target. Mine mostly accreted, by accident, off people I happened to stand near for a long time. I’d take the credit if I could find any to take.
Grateful for “vampiric” especially (you know why)!!! Exactly the right register for the fear, and I’m sorry I didn’t reach it first. :)
And once again you identified something even deeper than the language of “investment” creeping into friendship. We’ve also imported the logic of optimization, that penetrates everything nowadays. Not only do we ask whether people are useful, we ask whether a friendship is the best possible use of our finite social resources. The tragedy is that this horrible optimization is the enemy of attachment. The most valuable people in my life would never have survived an efficiency review.
Years ago, I kept meeting an older man at the same café. We had almost nothing in common. Different generation, different politics, different profession. If I had evaluated that relationship the way modern life teaches us to evaluate everything, I would have concluded it offered no leverage, no opportunity, no measurable return. Yet over time he became one of the people whose perspective shaped my thinking the most. The friendship’s value was precisely that it could not have been predicted in advance. Networks reward relevance. Friendships reward surprise.
That insight runs beautifully through this essay. You remind us that friendship is one of the last places where uncertainty is a gift to receive. We do not know who will matter to us 20 years from now. We do not know which repetitive conversation, which pointless phone call, which cold cup of tea will become part of of a life.
And that may be the most impressive achievement of your essay, Tamara. In a culture obsessed with measurement, you make a compelling case for the immeasurable without becoming sentimental. That’s soooo rare today. Most writers either romanticize friendship or reduce it to sociology. You somehow managed to defend its mystery.
The efficiency review has a flaw nobody ever points at. It needs a stable judge, somebody with settled wants, sitting at the desk, ranking the candidates against a fixed idea of what would serve them. The whole point of your café man was that he kept rewriting the person doing the ranking. By the time you would have sat down to score the friendship, he had already changed what you were scoring it against. You cannot audit a thing that edits the auditor.
That alone wrecks the exercise!
Best-use thinking comes out of money, where it half works because a dollar spent here really is a dollar not spent there, and the two are comparable. Friendship won’t behave. The grey afternoon you supposedly “spent better” elsewhere never existed as an option. It only came into being because he was at that table. There was no rival afternoon waiting in the wings to be weighed against it. The alternative use was always a ghost.
But….. may I gently quarrel with one word, and only because it started as mine? I’m not sure friendship rewards anything. Reward still smells of the ledger, still wants the books to come out even. It just happens to you,and then twenty years on you find you’ve been carrying it about without noticing the weight.
Thank you for the café man, Céline, what a great example! I keep turning him over, this person I never met who apparently rearranged a stranger’s thinking from across a table. How delightful!
“Networks reward relevance. Friendships reward surprise.”
Celine, this is wonderful! So true.
Ohhh thanks, Cathie.
The darkest part is that people now “tailor” friendships the way corporations systematize inventory, just-in-time intimacy, zero surplus, no redundancy, no patience for maintenance that doesn’t yield visible return, which is disastrous, because the most important people in your life are often the ones who were useless to you for years until the precise moment your life fell apart.
I learned this embarrassingly late. The friends who mattered the most were rarely the impressive ones, not the high-status conversationalists or the “aligned” connections, but the people who kept reappearing without agenda, through boring seasons, failures, bad moods, long silences. Markets punish inefficiency. Friendship depends on it.
Your essay cuts straight through the managerial rot infecting modern intimacy without retreating into sentimentality. Sharp, unsparing, original and painfully true, Tamara, bravo encore une fois.
Clara, the supply-chain people learned this one the hard way and it nearly finished them. Lean systems run beautifully right up until the unexpected thing turns up, and then the slack you cut to look clever, the redundancy nobody could justify on a spreadsheet, is precisely what you find yourself on your knees praying for. The useless friend is slack in the system. You stripped them out the week before the canal got blocked.
But… I think there is a trap folded inside the trap, though. You can’t keep a few useless ones on hand as insurance because the second you keep them as insurance you have refiled them under assets, and the thing dies in your grip. The buffer only works if it was never intended as a buffer. It has to be real waste, surplus you weren’t even tracking. So the only way to have it is to stop counting, and counting is the one habit this age refuses to let us put down.
Late is fine, by the way! Most of us turn up to this out of breath and well after the fact. Thank you, and bravo right back for naming the inventory logic before I had properly got to it myself!
Don’t they say that we have the friends we deserve?
Thank you, Tamara, you’re a wonderful writer and person.
Careful, Clara, that’s the ledger again, smuggled back in wearing folk wisdom! “Deserve” only swaps cash for karma. It’s still keeping the books. I’d half hope we don’t get the friends we deserve. The good ones tend to love you well past your deserving, which is more or less the entire point of them.
Making a friend is quite literally falling in love, sometimes at first sight. I met a friend at a 12 step meeting. He was there to celebrate with another friend of mine that he had known since childhood but had moved away. We walked from the meeting house a few hundred yards to a parking lot and talked under a street lamp for 2 hours. We both went home at midnight to wives who wondered where the hell we were. The blossoming friendship was anchored in two places. A mutual love of a broad range of music, and a willingness to see the other’s spiritual experiences as mysterious stories to savor rather than myths in need of debunking.
We keep elaborate origin stories for the marriages…. how we met, who embarrassed themselves first, whether the bad first impression was even real or got invented afterwards because the story wanted one. Nobody keeps the friendship version. Ask most people when a close friend turned into a close friend and they go vague. Something about university, or a shared job, and then it trails off. You have yours down to the lamp post and the precise hour. That’s amazing!
Thank you for this, Robert, and for the two wives left wondering! I’ll be picturing all four of you for a while. What a great story!
You're so right, most people don't remember when that feeling for a person went from like to love. I do remember that moment with my closest friend. We were having a conversation while I was driving, and I told her something I'd observed about her. It turned out no one had told her that before, and she said to me "Richard, I feel so close to you right now." That was the moment that began our big love of each other. I remember it as if it happened yesterday. The kicker? I can't for the life of me remember what the observation was. But whatever it was, it was a good one!
This is a wonderful story!
Thank you. Would you like another wonderful detail about our friendship? I have a photograph of 6 people, and 2 of them are her and I. And this picture was taken the day we met. And of course it is my favourite photograph on earth.
This is even more amazing! You should write a story about it.
This is excellent, particularly because you resist the temptation to turn friendship into a moral lecture. Yet you do something much harder, you describe how market logic colonised our private lives until we started speaking about people the way accountants speak about inventory. The line about friendship being the last bond that enters the balance sheet as zero is my favorite.
One practical consequence deserves adding in my opinion. Once we start treating friendships as investments, we also begin expecting returns on a timetable. We become impatient with relationships that are not immediately rewarding. Yet most durable friendships spend long periods looking almost inactive. They are less like startups and more like old wells, months can pass without drawing much water, but when the drought arrives, you discover which ones were worth digging. The tragedy is that many people abandon the well because it wasn’t producing enough excitement in the quarterly report.
The irony is almost funny. We are all obsessed with the good old optimization, yet some of the best things in life arrive through deliberate inefficiency. Friendship may be one of the few areas where wasting time is not a bug.
A beautifully observed essay, as always. You managed to make a cultural critique feel personal rather than ideological, and that is extraordinary, Tamara.
The timetable did something sneakier than make us impatient, I think. It handed a respectable suit to a flaw we were already wearing underneath. People have always over-prized whatever pays out today and waved off whatever pays out in a decade. The economists have a dull name for it, “present bias”, the wiring that makes us grab the small thing now and dismiss the bigger thing that’s years away. Friendship has the worst possible payout schedule for that wiring. The return is enormous and it comes round maybe once a decade, with no warning whatsoever. Market language didn’t invent our impatience. But it dressed the impatience in something that sounds prudent at dinner.
And there’s a cruelty in the digging itself. It’s one thing to keep a dormant well you already sank years back, and quite another to start sinking a new one at 40, knowing it might give you nothing until you’re 60, assuming you both last that long. The starting problem is the worse of the two because the first thing the timetable kills off is your nerve to begin anything slow.
Alexander, thank you for the line about personal rather than ideological! I’m never certain I’ve earned it. The honest reason it reads personal is that I can’t manage the other kind. I tried once. It came out sounding like a leaflet, and I put it in the bin.
Friendships are “less like startups and more like old wells” well described. Whether a new friend you feel like you’ve known forever or an old friend you’ve not seen in years bonding again as if no time has separated you, the joy of a true friend is inestimable. Tamara’s essay followed by your comment is fantastic. Here’s to old wells that run deep with every drawn bucket of conversation!
That second phenomenon you mention is the one that demolishes the whole upkeep vocabulary. The friend you haven’t seen in years, and you resume as though the gap were a long bank holiday. If friendship really ran on maintenance, on regular inputs and steady contact, that reunion simply couldn’t happen. It would have lapsed like an unpaid subscription. Instead it goes dormant and comes back entire, no penalty charged for the silence. You don’t keep a real one up. It keeps without you.
The instant-familiar stranger is the same trick run the other direction. The clock that meters everything else just declines to apply.
Glad my essay and the thread together did something for you. Here’s to the wells, then, and to the buckets that come up full after years of nobody bothering to lower one!
Thank you, Tamara, for your thoughts on friends and friendship. Being 86 now, only three people are left that I have known over 65 years and two of them are my brother and his wife. Luckily, I have been involved in several activities and organizations for many years and those special people I can call friends have slipped into my life through that route. I feel very fortunate!
Ohhh wow, 65 years isn’t friendship the way the magazines sell it…. they have no word for what it becomes. Past a certain point the bond stops being something you choose and turns into something nearer to outlasting. You stayed while the rest of the cast thinned out, and the staying turns out to be its own devotion nobody warned us would matter this much!
Thank you for writing to me from the far end of it, Nancy! I’m taking notes I didn’t know I needed yet.
"Friends" took over the essay completely for me. "The visit with no purpose, the call about nothing in particular..." You could have written nothing but that and I would have spent hours contemplating those words and the people they bring to mind. I tend to associate those words with people I've known for many years - the three still alive have been my friends for 36, 45, and 51 years. The more recent friends, one or two I know will remain friends for as long as we have. The others, I don't know yet.
There's one friend who died during the pandemic, and although I'd not seen or heard from him in many years, we had a remarkable friendship for about twenty years. He was one of my high school English literature teachers, and the year after I'd had him for class, we met every Tuesday during the period when he had to walk the halls of the high school to keep order, and I walked with him, and we talked. We talked about anything and everything. He spoke to me as a peer, though also as a bit of a mentor. And when he signed my yearbook, he thanked me for a year of Tuesday afternoons. We kept in touch for quite a while after that, but that year of conversations has resonated through my life all these years.
The three who are still alive rarely call or write for anything specific. We just keep in touch with each other's lives because we care and we've shared a great deal. The ones I've mentioned here, and the ones I haven't, all the ones who are real friends, are like the figures in Vanessa Bell's painting, "The Conversation." We all leaned into each other, interested, listening, talking, occasionally simply being present together on the phone or in person. And with each of them, the best conversations were just the two of us, whether in person or on the phone, sometimes (in earlier days) via snail mail, now via email or message. There is no balance sheet. Impossible to weigh what each of them has meant and still mean to me. Thanks for reminding me of all of them. :))
The detail…. which way the gratitude ran. He thanked you. The older man, the one we would all assume was doing the giving, signed the yearbook to thank the student for the Tuesdays. Which gives the whole thing away. It wasn’t knowledge handed downward from the one who had it. He was getting his dreary corridor-patrol made bearable by your company, and he knew it, and he wrote it down. The favour ran both ways and neither of you was keeping count of the direction.
And notice where it grew. Inside an obligation neither of you chose. His duty to walk the halls and keep order, the deadest and most bureaucratic hour of his week, and that’s the soil the thing took root in. The accidental method again. Imposed recurrence, somebody else’s institution shoving you into the same corridor every Tuesday, and a twenty-year friendship germinating in the cracks of it.
We never learn what those women in Bell’s painting are saying. She didn’t paint the words. She painted the leaning-in, the bodies angled towards one another, because that is the actual content. Friendship is posture before it’s ever subject matter, and the call about nothing is only ever an excuse to assume the posture again.
Doc, thank you for the year of Tuesday afternoons, which I now feel oddly as though I half-attended myself! Fifty-one years stops being a friendship somewhere along the way and turns into a second spine.
Cioran is the right register. Friendship is a disruptive force that operates outside cultivation. Like his insomnia, it can be a brutal inner confrontation that animates some depth of life which otherwise remains dormant. His pessimism was more like negative space than negative emotion. Friendship follows that model. It grafts grounding energy onto living systems so that they flourish without notice. Knowing a friend exists tracks like knowing death-as-an-option does. One friend makes other encounters bearable.
The death-as-option line! Cioran’s whole trick was that the exit staying available is what let him stay. He never used it. Its entire value was in going unused. A friend works the same way more often than we admit. There’s a particular number in your phone you’d never actually ring in the middle of the night, and the fact that you could is most of what keeps you from ever needing to. The reserve does its work by sitting there undrawn, which means most of friendship’s weight gets carried while nothing whatsoever happens. Not during the crisis, in the long flat stretch before any crisis arrives, when simply knowing the person is out there lowers the temperature of everything else by a few degrees.
Andrew, thank you for “negative space rather than negative emotion” ! Most accurate thing said to me about Cioran in years.I’m going to steal it. With attribution, eventually, probably not. :)
Last night I dreamed of the chamber players on the Titantic. And their plight has been gnawing at my imagination all day. It seems to me they were Cioranian to the core long before he wrote a single line. Plucking their strings till the dark wash of the North Atlantic swept them into their final oblivion. Not out of defiance. Not out of denial. Not out of a rejection of death. But out of a refusal to have their living taken from them before the depths took life itself. I wonder what note the final draw of the bow sounded into the pitch black of the starry sky before the bleak waters silenced their strings forever.
“Friendship is a disruptive force … it can be a brutal inner confrontation that animates some depth of life which otherwise remains dormant.”
This was beautifully described!
I'm happy it reached you this way! Thank you so much.
It is with gratitude that I read you, Andrew!
Such a lucid piece, Tamara. It feels particularly poignant for one like me, blessed with a few, true friends.
There is a marvelous song by the great poet and singer Joan Manuel Serrat (who sits in the same class that Moustaki, Brassens & Dylan). I copy it here with the English translation which fails, alas, to capture the rhymes and references. Yet, it transmits the essence of the poem.
Decir amigo
Es decir juegos, escuela, calle y niñez
Gorriones presos
De un mismo viento
Tras un olor de mujer
Decir amigo
Es decir vino, guitarra, trago y canción
Furcias y broncas
Y en los tres pinos
Una novia pa los dos
Decir amigo
Me trae del barrio
Luz de domingo
Y deja en los labios
Gusto a mistela
Y a natillas con canela
Decir amigo
Es decir aula, laboratorio y bedel
Billar y cine
Siesta en las ramblas
Y alemanas al clavel
Decir amigo
Es decir tienda, botas, charnaque y fusil
Y los domingos
A pelear hembras
Entre Salou y Cambrils
Decir amigo
No se hace extraño
Cuando se tiene sed de veinte años
Y pocas penas
Y el alma sin media suelas
Decir amigo
Es decir lejos
Y antes fue decir adiós
Y ayer, y siempre
Lo tuyo nuestro
Y lo mío de los dos
Decir amigo
Se me figura que
Decir amigo
Es decir ternura
Dios y mi canto
Saben a quién nombro tanto
Here is a translation of the Serrat song into English:
To Say “Friend”
To say friend
is to say games, school, street, and childhood
sparrows caught
in the same wind
chasing the scent of a woman
To say friend
is to say wine, guitar, a drink, and song
barroom girls and brawls
and in the three pines
one girlfriend shared between us both
To say friend
brings back the neighborhood to me —
the light of Sunday morning —
and leaves upon my lips
the taste of mistela
and cinnamon custard
To say friend
is to say classroom, lab, and teacher
billiards and cinema
a nap on the ramblas
and German women for the carnation seller
To say friend
is to say shop, boots, greatcoat, and rifle
and on Sundays
chasing girls
between Salou and Cambrils
To say friend
feels not so strange
when you’re twenty years old and thirsty
with few sorrows
and a soul that hasn’t worn thin yet
To say friend
is to say far away
and once it meant goodbye
and yesterday, and always —
what’s yours is ours
and what’s mine belongs to both of us
To say friend —
it seems to me that
to say friend
is to say tenderness
God and my song
know well whom I name so often
Serrat is doing the exact reverse of the thing my essay was grumbling about. The managers compress a person down into a single noun, asset or contact. He takes the one word, “amigo”, and presses on it until it bursts back into mistela, cinnamon custard, the shared girlfriend under the three pines, the German women for the carnation seller. The word flatly refuses to stay abstract. A friend can’t be summarised. He can only be listed out, and even the list is just pointing at something that won’t fit inside any single term. Thank you for this, Juan José, and for turning up here with the few-and-true instead of the many!
Tamara: "Yours, owing you nothing that either of us could ever put a figure to, and meaning to go on owing exactly that for as long as you will have me..." What a beautiful thing to say to each of us! I really like this essay, and I learned as much as a couple hours worth of reading can tell one about Cioran. 'Misanthrope' indeed...and yet, the seemingly conceptual contradiction of a 'human misanthrope' has an underground, rebel appeal to me! Exciting and thought-provoking essay...how many times will I say, "One of my favs"???/t
The contradiction dissolves the second you notice his contempt ran wholesale while his affection stayed strictly retail, sold off by the single unit. The species in the abstract, the great churning mass of Humanity with its capital H, that he would happily feed to the fire. But the friend in front of him, the letter sitting there wanting an answer, those he kept religiously.
“One of my favs” as often as you fancy. Thank you for wandering off to read him on the strength of a single stray paragraph, T! Mind the insomnia, though. It’s catching in print.
>>Mind the insomnia, though<< it got me about 15 years ago…and not only that, but the 3-4 times a week it happens, it wakes me up at the same time, about 2:30 am, if I’ve fallen asleep. I neither know why it happens nor why it doesn’t.
I can relate….
I am so very happy that when I first moved to Spain, I had a group of Spanish friends - several groups- that would include me in their company as one of them, and would sometimes show up at my house unannounced, en masse, to drag me somewhere. It doesn’t even matter that those particular friendships did not last. And well, in the end, we were young. Friendships do not always survive the march of time and the subsequent phases of a person's evolution. But the fact that I found that camaraderie so early in my ex pat experience was an invaluable one and a consolation for the emptiness I felt American society generated. What you describe is not new. American society has been moving in this direction for a long time, many decades.
For me, the detail that matters the most is “unannounced, en masse”. That mode is simply unavailable in a culture that treats your evening as private property you have to be buzzed into. Turning up at the door to drag someone out assumes their time is open, already half theirs to barge into. In Spain it was how you knew you’d been claimed. The warmth was only the surface of it. Underneath sat a whole different idea of who your Tuesday night belongs to.
And I would gently lift the small apology out of “it doesn’t matter they didn’t last”. It needs no apologising for because they did their entire work at the time. We’ve started grading friendships by their lifespan, as though one that ended must have failed somewhere along the line, and that’s the same warranty-thinking I kept hinting at. A friendship can be complete without also being permanent. The consolation was the whole return. It was never going to be itemised a second time.
You are right that none of it is new. Tocqueville clocked the solitude sitting inside American plenty almost two centuries ago. What’s new is only that the language finally caught up and started calling the loneliness prudence.
And yes, that unannounced arrival is the proof of your closing line! Nobody schedules unstrategic generosity into an ambush. It simply turns up at the door wanting to take you somewhere.
Nevertheless, I believe human beings, even American ones, are capable of generosity that is not entirely strategic.
In the end, love is what matters. Content is conduit, sometimes, to connection. But the heart to heart, soul to soul, needs none of that. You see your friends with your heart. No words, no circumstances, no conditions required. Recognition: I see you, I know you, I love you. My friend.
I would only add that the wordless kind is almost always a late arrival. The silence that says everything is loud because of the decades of talk buried underneath it. Two strangers sitting in silence have only got silence. The comfortable sort is the residue of a thousand ordinary conversations, gone quiet at last because they no longer need saying aloud. So the content was never skipped. It sank into the marrow and quit needing words.
I see you too, and thank you, Gregg, for reaching the heart of it in five lines while it took me two thousand!
Maybe the differiention between the two categories parallels our twin hemisphere's engaging with reality from their distinct perspectives. Especially with all our technologically amped up left brain agency, the emissary's obsession with the logic of return, has become a compulsive disorder, holding on to causal efficiency as Ahab onto Moby Dick. The master of our right brain, all but neglected by the collective consensus, brings with it the values of form-giving identity.
A friend enters into the room of our whole personality, becoming part and parcel of who I am. Transactional relations are part of the machine that keeps the world going, as we become cogs and data points to each other in the tactics of survival.
We need both, to survive in an impersonal realm of civilized relations and to be able to thrive in the depths of the person of who one is. Soul mates and role players, each have their place in our lives.
The theme here of making the case for the elephant in the room of pretending that the one is the other, that there is no difference is what gives this essay such relevance to our social media gone agog world, today.
You have your finger on the pulse of what matters Tamara, thank you for the longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates comprising the parameters of your writing to the issues of the Zeitgeist of our shared horizons of embodiment!
Aho, Mitakuye Oyas'in: We are all related in the circle of life: to the trees, the winds, the winged ones, the four-legged, the creepers and crawlers, the Star People, the swimmwers and the waters of life. Let it be so.
The McGilchrist mapping holds, and I would press it on one point where I think it bites harder than “we need both”. His worry was never that we possess the two modes. It’s the order of command. The emissary was only ever meant to serve, to go out, gather, bring back, and report to the master who sees the whole. What’s happened is the servant has taken the throne and now narrates everything in his own flattened dialect, including the master’s own experience, which he cannot actually perceive. So when the transactional vocabulary swallows friendship, it isn’t exactly lying to us. It simply can’t see. It re-describes the thing it has no organ for and sincerely believes nothing went missing because from the left hemisphere’s chair nothing did. The loss is invisible from the only vantage point currently allowed to speak.
Which is why I’d resist “each has their place”, gently. They don’t hold equal places. One was meant to be in service to the other, and our whole predicament is the inversion, the tool that stopped taking orders and began handing them out instead. Ahab is the right image, except notice that Ahab is also brilliant and ferociously competent. That’s the trap in it! The emissary is far from stupid. It’s superb at everything bar knowing what it’s actually for.
A friend entering the room of the whole personality, yes, that’s it precisely, and it’s also the one experience the measuring mind owns no instrument fine enough to register.
Thank you for the coordinates, Michael, and for closing the way you did! Mitakuye Oyas’in sits oddly well beside an essay that kept insisting on the bonds that show up as nothing on the ledger. The relations that don’t compute turn out to be most of the circle. Let it be so, then!
To make the tyranny of left-brain agency bite all the way through is to call it for what it is, OCD! Collectively, socially and individually, the master has been banished and our cultural milieu is on a relentless track to no where in particular because that is where we truly live, in the anima mundi of a place.
Like chickens with their heads cut off, the machine of agency, without its anchor in wholistic knowing, is only capable of consuming everything in the circle of life, till there is no more life! All the ameliorising aside, that is the telos of things with the emissary in total control of the world view, with its transactional language swamping all that stands in its way, like the tital wave of social media today speaking through a screen, like a Tooker. The physiognomy of presence has become a ghost.
Only question for each of us and our world is, can we reenter the circle of life in a way that can restore us in good standing with the next seven generations?
Thank you Tamara, for pushing the theme of your essay here into the dire straits we find ourselves in today, and for all your own brilliant replies to each of our comments on this substack platform, that is awaiting on another room to open for the Salon to gather in the presence of each other in the circle of life and all our relations. Let it be so, soon, somewhere on this spinning world of Gaia, in Spider Grandmother's own loom of words made flesh, in patterns that can speak to the master side of our soul!!
Totality, civilisation, the grand system, the seven generations held as one vast abstraction… precisely the altitude the left hemisphere loves the best. The master never worked up there. It only ever attends to the particular and the present, the actual face at the actual table. So here’s the trap, the instant you have diagnosed the machine. You answer it with a counter-machine, a grand programme to reenter the circle. But a grand programme is just the emissary in fresh robes. You can’t out-system the system, which means the seven-generations question, if it ever gets answered, gets answered in the next hour. With one friend. Phone face down. The macro only repairs at the micro because the micro is the single place the master can lay its hands. The salon isn’t a step toward the cure. It is the cure, in miniature, bodies in a room being unmeasured at one another for an evening. Build enough of those and there’s no movement to point at. We will only have declined the waiting room often enough that it loosens its grip.
And Tooker is the right ghost, though notice what he actually painted. Not a monster eating the world. A queue. People filing patiently through government corridors, complicit and orderly, and nobody anywhere holding the knife. That’s the harder horror, and it’s nearer to where we sit. The emissary’s victory was never going to arrive as a wildfire consuming the circle of life. It looks far more like a very tidy filing system that everyone agreed to join, which is worse, because there is nothing left to push against.
Thank you for taking my essay all the way to Spider Grandmother’s loom. I can’t follow you out to the scale of Gaia with any honesty, but I can meet you at the table, which is the only place I’ve ever found the thing worth saving. Let it be so there, then! Soon, and small enough to fit inside one room.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, Tamara! That about says it all, "wow!"
I have to thank you, Michael! :)
Thank you for another engaging read. Two points stood out to me that I'd love to bring up for discussion.
First, regarding the C.S. Lewis quote: I find that friendship and community are intrinsic to our survival, which is exactly why we are such a social species. Ironically, this deep need might be the very reason we've reduced our social lives to another capitalistic sprint, constantly trying to maximize their "value."
Second, your anecdote about the friend who moved to the city got me thinking. While intentionally maximizing their schedule didn't work well for them, I've noticed, or at least heard, some folks find success with this approach. A lot of advice on adult friendships boils down to "you aren't trying hard enough." There seems to be some truth to that, though I'm not entirely sure what kind. My own thoughts on this are inconclusive, but my gut feeling is that a hyper-intentional approach might satisfy our baseline need for socialization, while ultimately falling short of our deeper desire for real companionship. I constantly go back and forth between letting the randomness of the world foster relationships, versus treating friendship as a pursuit that requires serious time and devotion.
I guess you and Lewis are aiming at two different things that happen to share a name. What’s wired into us for survival is sociality, the alliance, the warm body who’ll stand beside you when the wolves turn up. That need is ancient and real and nobody’s disputing it but that’s the network, the very understudy the essay was grumbling about. Friendship in Lewis’s narrow sense is the freeloader sitting on top of all that survival hardware, using it for nothing adaptive whatsoever. So your irony runs deeper than you let on. The circuitry that kept us breathing is instrumental by design, built to chase an outcome and keep the score. Route intimacy through equipment like that and of course you end up sprinting to wring value out of it. We are running tenderness on hunting software.
On the whole “you aren’t trying hard enough” school…. Both things can be true, and the trick is where you point the effort. The people who pull this off by trying hard don’t pick better humans. They’ve simply worked out how to manufacture recurrence. Joining the choir, the Thursday five-a-side, whatever room they’ll be obliged to keep walking back into, then letting the accidental method do its slow work inside it. Effort spent on the conditions tends to pay off. Aim the identical effort at the outcome, this specific person, locked in by March, and it just stinks the room out. Your gut is right, for what it’s worth. The scheduling cures the surface loneliness and leaves the deeper thing untouched because depth needs you to forget you are being watched, and a hyper-deliberate frame keeps one eye permanently on the dial. The checking is what stops it working.
So I’d scrap the randomness-versus-pursuit fork altogether. Pursue, hard even. Just pursue the circumstances, and leave the people to turn up on their own clock.
Thank you for bringing real disagreement, Alex!
thanks for the perspective, tamara!
Here is the smaller thing instead. Last winter a friend I had been slowly mislaying, to distance, to time zones, to the usual wordless drift, to the simple fact that neither of us ever “circled back”, rang me for no reason on a Sunday night. No favour attached. No news to deliver. She had read something and wanted to read it to me. We stayed on the line the better part of an hour and produced precisely nothing of value, and afterwards I sat in the dark with the owl figurines watching me from the shelf, and I thought, that. Whatever that just was. That is the one thing the whole machinery around me cannot put a price on, cannot sell back to me, and works very hard, every single day, to convince me I never needed.
I think I will ring her tonight. Not about anything.
No one is indispensable when it comes to complaints!”
JC.
Agreed! You can complain to almost anyone. Complaints are the most transferable currency we own. What won’t transfer is the call about nothing, the one with no grievance loaded into it at all. Maybe that’s the real test. The queue of people you’d happily complain to runs out the door. The list of people you’d ring with nothing whatsoever to report stays very, very short.
Thank you, Juan Carlos! You handed me the back half of the argument in a single line.
Another God given piece. Thank you. 🙏🏼
Thank you so much, Thrixia!