Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Intentionally Making Close Friends, published by Neel Nanda on the LessWrong. This is a linkpost for Introduction One of the greatest sources of joy in my life are my close friends. People who bring excitement and novelty into my life. Who expose me to new experiences, and ways of seeing the world. Who help me learn, point out my blind spots, and correct me when I am wrong. Who I can lean on when I need support, and who lean on me in turn. Friends who help me grow more into the kind of person I want to be. I am especially grateful for this, because up until about 4 years ago, I didn’t have any close friends in my life. I had friends, but struggled to form real emotional connections. Moreover, it didn’t even occur to me that I could try to do this. It wasn’t that I knew how to form close friends but was too anxious to try, rather, ‘try to form close friendships’ was a non-standard action, something that never even crossed my mind. And one of my most life-changing experiments was realising that this was something I wanted, and actually trying to intentionally form close friends. It’s easy to slip into a passive mindset here, to think of emotional connections as ‘something that take time’ or ‘need to happen naturally’. That to be intentional about things is ‘inauthentic’. I think this mindset is absolutely crazy. My close friendships are one of the most important components of my life happiness. Leaving it up to chance feels like passing up an incredible opportunity. As with all important things in life, this can be optimised - further, if done right, this adds a massive amount to the lives of me and of my future close friends. The first half of this post is the story of how I approached intentionally forming close friends, and the second half is an attempt to distill the lessons I learned from this. As such, this post is more autobiographical than most. Feel free to skip to the advice section if you don’t want that. Further, what you value in close friendships is highly personal - this post will focus on what I want in friendships and how I try to get it, but you should adapt this to your own situation, values, and what feels missing in your life! Exercise: Think about your closest friends, and how these friendships happened. What needs are you fulfilling in each other’s lives? Are you happy with this state of affairs, or is something missing? What could be better? My story The Problem Back when I was in school, I never had close friends. I had friends, people I liked, people I spent time with, whose company I genuinely enjoyed. But I was pretty terrible at being vulnerable and forming emotional connections. These friendships rarely went beyond the surface level. In hindsight, I expect these could have been far richer (and I’ve formed much stronger friendships with some of these friends since!), but I never really tried. I find it hard to introspect on exactly what the internal experience of past Neel was like, but I think the core was that trying wasn’t available as a possible action. That I spent much of my life doing what felt socially conventional, normal and expected, for the role I saw myself in. And ‘go out of your way to form emotional connections’ wasn’t part of that. It wasn’t an action I considered, weighed up the costs and benefits, and decided against - it never even occurred to me to try. It didn’t feel like a void missing from my life - things just felt normal. It was like playing a video game, and having a list of actions to choose from, like ‘ask about their day’, ‘complain about a shared experience’ or ‘discuss something cool I learned recently’; but this list contained nothing about ‘intentionally form an emotional connection’. It wasn’t in my reference class of things I could do. One of the core parts of my life philosophy now is the skill of agency...