Wanted: Just Friends [The Teardown]
The Atlantic tells us about the power of friends in our earlier years
The Teardown
Friday :: February 21st, 2020
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This week’s newsletter is, like my last, written about something interesting other than technology. It focuses on the role of friends based on research from a recent article in the Atlantic by Lydia Denworth. I’ve tied it together with my own friendship-making experiences.
One last note before I get to the newsletter: Substack now allows comments on free posts. Feel free to comment directly on the site in addition to responding via email like many of you already do.
Evolving Your Lunch Room Buddies
Friendships with folks who are or near my age (37) are quite different than those cemented earlier in life and aged later in life. Friends are, in some ways, extensions of our obligations to our kids. We develop friends watching toddlers try to swim or play together in music class. If you’re like my wife and me, friends are made at Happy Jour when you bump into another set of parents making sure their kids don’t kick over glasses, fork themselves in the eye, or scream bloody murder next to the first date from Tinder. These friends can achieve staying power through a combination of similar interests and, importantly, geographic proximity. I am on the verge of moving to the New York City suburbs, and we already have a solid base of friends in nearby towns. Our social lives will continue forward at pools, in backyards, and in palatial suburban kitchens when everyone under the drinking age is in bed.
Why you make one friend over another seems easy to decipher, but it’s based on a complicated and rapidly evolving set of factors. When you’re young — not yet in middle school — your parents exert significant influence over who is or isn’t your friend. Otherwise, you discover social links in smaller and relatively isolated groups like elementary school classrooms. Lydia Denworth summarized part of this equation in the Atlantic:
Initially, the biggest shift middle school brings is one of context. Most American students move from spending the bulk of the day in one classroom and with one set of classmates—a social bubble of sorts—to multiple classrooms and multiple new classmates. Their number of potential social possibilities swells. Children are entering a period of maximum concern over acceptance or rejection and over how they will be perceived.
I went to a smaller elementary school — one of five in town — and recall making friends mostly if not entirely through osmosis. The act occurred subconsciously. My friends were my friends because they were there, and less because of some symbiotic component. Some of my connections were my parents doing — often the kids of their friends and other social contexts. I was also fortunate to grow up with two cousins close to my age who lived in the same town. I graduated with my elementary school diploma, carefully crafted resume and friend-group in tow, and moved forward with the next chapter of life.
Middle school was, an the other hand, an experience I remember more vividly due to increasing maturity, recall capacity, and all of the good and the bad that comes with navigating the treacherous waters of ages twelve through fourteen. The previous quote continued:
No wonder lunch looms large. In many schools, it is the time in the day when these preteens have the most agency. It is why the movies are filled with so many scenes of anxious children holding a tray and not being sure where to sit.
The lunchroom entrance horrified me in retrospect. I started sixth grade with a lunch table and a group of friends and gradually blended that table with others. My agency was both a blessing and a curse: I wanted to sit with the small group of friends I already had, but also with other newer and seemingly fresher friends. It is a decision point we’ve all encountered, and all screwed up at least once, if not many times. Whether karma or not, seventh grade progressed far differently — with a few increasingly fleeting friends, and ultimately with zero real friends and only social acquaintances.
Seventh grade coincided with more demanding schoolwork and increasingly varied and more unsatisfactory academic performance. It progressed in parallel with increasing isolation as well. I spent lots of time eating lunch in classrooms instead of the cafeteria — those in which I had classes before or after lunch — either doing homework for the next day or more often scrambling through homework I hadn’t completed the night before. Lydia Denton described something that, in retrospect, probably happened to me:
…There is also a dark side to the social world of middle school, as anyone who has been through it will remember. Sixth graders who do not have friends are at risk of anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem. About 12 percent of the 6,000 sixth graders in Juvonen’s study were not named as a friend by anyone else. They had no one to sit with at lunch and no one to stick up for them when bullied. Of that group, boys outnumbered girls nearly two to one
Looking back, I can’t confirm I experienced those feelings because I wasn’t as aware of the broader context around what was happening. I was bit older as well. Still, it seems I followed a very familiar pattern. The article continued:
Their hypothesis was that not having friends in sixth grade triggered a greater sense of threat in seventh grade, which led to increased internalizing difficulties, such as depression and anxiety, by eighth grade. Their research confirmed that theory: It wasn’t friendlessness alone that created problems, it was the resulting sense of threat.
Said another way, I internalized many issues by avoiding mental strain of one kind — anguish over the lunch room and similar situations — and introducing another: spending lots of time alone, and in theory, more in control. The article exposed one critical reason why that time and presence or lack of friendships was so critical:
It seems logical that when parents no longer serve as social buffers, friends might take over, given how important friends are to teenagers. A 2011 study found evidence for exactly that in 11- and 12-year-olds. The children regularly recorded how they felt about themselves and their experiences throughout their days, and they recorded who was with them. Their cortisol levels were measured as well. Having a best friend present during an experience significantly buffered any negative feelings, lowering cortisol levels and boosting a sense of self-worth.
I look back at that experience today and believe it ties closely to some of my personality quirks: a strong fear-of-missing-out, a strong and sometimes unpredictable stress response, and a propensity to qualify things I do or say to others even if they don’t need or want my preface. It was necessary, at that time, to surround myself with friends to help manage stress, happiness, and confidence, but I instead moved partially in the other direction — priming my base personality for an even more challenging period (emphasis mine):
But things get more complicated later in adolescence. Researchers from the University of Minnesota induced stress in 15- and 16-year-olds using the same lab test we saw earlier that combines stressors like public speaking and mental arithmetic. Not only did the presence of friends not reduce stress, it made things worse. “We were blown away … until we thought about it,” said Megan Gunnar, the lead investigator and an expert on social buffering. She realized that the structure of the experiment increased the level of social evaluation because the speech teenagers had to give was about why someone would want to be their friend. “So your friend is actually sitting there helping you evaluate yourself. Oh my God!” Gunnar told me, with the wisdom of hindsight.
It seems logical to conclude that building an unstable social platform just before entering high school helped kick up anxiety when the presence of peers worked in precisely the opposite way. I struggled with that anxiety throughout high school — most acutely during sophomore year — when again, one group of friends washed out to shore without replacement.
Ultimately, I developed another set of friends by way of musical talent and think of many of them as the foundation for my relationships today. It was that group that allowed me to experience and better understand my mental and emotional reactions and capacities. It was that group that helped me develop my two most significant passions: music and technology.
That latter combination reads so typically and evident in a newsletter like this one. But those friends led to meaningful social activities like playing gigs in local Boston clubs, attending concerts, and discovering and listening to new music on long drives around the suburbs of Boston. It with then that I also taught myself how to create websites for my bands (here, here) and work with databases. I ultimately built a set of skills during junior and senior years that are fundamental to my professional career.
All of these experiences culminated in the group of friends I have today — some living far away and some nearby — that I love and trust for so many reasons. They are, in lots of different ways, all that we aspire to have around us: good people.