Contra "Rich Friend, Poor Friend"
To make friends, receive requests as offers, not demands
In “Rich Friend, Poor Friend”, Jenn argues that it’s much harder to make friends when you’re rich, because you’re not forced by necessity to help others and ask for help, and regularly helping each other is one of the main ways to build friendship.
While overall, I disagree with this piece, as in my experience having more resources has led me to make friends more easily, there is one social pattern underlying her arguments that struck me, and that I’d like to bring into light.
I do look at my more well off friends weirdly if they ask me for serious favors/impositions, so it’s not like I’m not part of the problem. If I get a message from someone who wants to visit town and crash in my spare bedroom, but I’m not close enough to them that hosting them would be intrinsically valuable to me, and I know they’re making enough money to afford an airbnb, I think it’s rude if they ask.
Emphasis mine.
The pattern is interpreting requests for help as demands. For example, Alice asking Bob whether she can crash at his place, or asking him for emotional support. If Bob follows this pattern, he will evaluate whether to accept the request based on his evaluation of Alice’s needs.
Bob operates by the rule: “If you are sufficiently poor and desperate and have no alternative, then I will give you lodging and support. If you are not sufficiently desperate, you don’t deserve my help.”
If you could book a hotel or pay for a therapist, why are you asking for help? Are you trying to save money at my expense? How dare you claim a share of my limited resources? If you don’t need me, it would be rude to even ask for help.
Bob sees those requests as a bid for him to sacrifice himself for the greater good. Each request is evaluated on how much it costs Bob compared to how much value Alice would receive. Bob finds it costly to host people at his place, but if Alice has nowhere else to go, the discomfort for Bob is lower than the value of having a place to sleep for Alice. Bob is a utilitarian, he computes the total welfare after the trade, and if it’s larger than the status quo, he takes it, even if it costs him.
I don’t have anything against a bit of utilitarianism, and I’m sometimes doing such trades myself when someone is in a much worse position than me. However, having this as a default stance towards requests leads to unfortunate consequences.
By seeing every request as a bid for him to sacrifice himself for the greater good, Bob is locked into a zero-sum view of friendship. Anything others receive is a resource he gave up out of altruism.
So it’s understandable if Bob finds Alice rude, as she could have booked a hotel instead. She’s basically asking for a service to be provided to her for free, by leveraging Bob’s altruism.
Another way is possible.
What if, instead of seeing those requests as demands of Bob to self-sacrifice, he saw those as offers that may be taken if they are mutually beneficial?
My friends are the people I love interacting with. When they ask if they can stay over at my place, I receive it as an offer that I can take if I’m excited about it. And usually, I am excited about having them stay over! I get to spend more time with them, I get helping hands for my projects and managing my house, I get someone to talk about what I’m currently thinking, and I get an occasion to go on adventures. When they want me to listen while they talk about something that’s bothering them, I get to learn more about them, I learn to be a better friend, I learn more about what it is like to be other people, and I get perspective into my own life.
Sometimes, people I’ve never heard about ask if they can stay over. That’s exciting! I’ll learn even more! And they do tend to become my friends by the end of their stay.
I’ve made many great friends over the years by being the person who’s excited about helping out.
At a larger scale, that’s also why I do community building in Paris. I put effort into running meetups, organizing dinners, planning adventures, etc., because I get much more out of it than I put into it. And for this, having more resources helps a lot. I don’t have to ask people to pay for dinner. I can have friends stay over for free. With more resources, I don’t have to worry about getting back a fair share, so I can focus on creating the social scene I need. And my friends are grateful and are ready to help me in turn. Providing public goods is great.
This might be because I’m much more of a social butterfly than average. Having people over or organizing events is quite low cost for me, so it’s easier to get more out of it than I put in.
Or it might be because I have much more Slack. When time, attention and energy feel abundant, I can be the version of myself who intrinsically enjoys being useful and spending time with them.
Conversely, at times when my job was stressful and was sucking all my attention, it felt much more costly to host people. At those times, I felt myself sliding back towards seeing requests as demands for me to sacrifice myself for others.
Now, I make sure to keep some Slack, so I can be my best self and receive requests with grace, even when I ultimately reject them. A book that helped me a lot in this quest is Enjoy Existing. Check it out!
Becoming financially independent could have led me towards isolation, as I stopped having to rely on friends. However, I took it as an opportunity to get more free time and energy to spend building friendships, and to provide help without an expectation of reciprocation.
Material abundance breaks the system of mutual support driven by favors, needs and sacrifice, but enables a new system, based on excitement and appreciation for all opportunities to connect, and mutually beneficial interactions, both with current and future friends. Personally, I think the second one is much better.
So, if you find yourself financially independent and lonely, consider using your new abundance of resources to give yourself slack, and receive requests as offers for mutually beneficial trades.
What a great concept to learn about. Also great post :)