Positive Feedback Friendship Loops
I
I once read that you are the average of your three best friends. There are a lot of variations of this idea. In the religious sphere, Proverbs 13:20 says: “He that walketh with wise men shall be wise: but a companion of fools shall be destroyed.” In academia, research social psychology research has been summarized as '[the people you habitually associate with] determine as much as 95 percent of your success or failure in life.' And then there's Twitter: "You can fuck your whole life up by having close friends who have no goals and aspirations in life. "
Regardless of what flavor you prefer the message to come in, there seems to be a common theme. That is, you are the product of your environment, and one of the core components of your environment is the people you spend time with (which are presumably, but not necessarily, your friends). But this begs the question: how the people you hang out with influence you?
I present to you - The Theory of Positive Feedback Friendship Loops.
First, a definition. What is a world perspective? The short answer is it is a term I made up. The long answer is it is the framework someone uses to navigate life; this framework is the result of blending everything in your life together into one cohesive world view. Hobbies (playing Magic the Gathering, gardening, cryptocurrencies, cooking, dumpster diving, etc.), life philosophies (religious beliefs, political views, nihilistic tendencies, rationalism, people are generally _____, social justice stances, etc.), and experiences (memories, holidays, shibboleths, traditions, preferences, etc.) are some examples of the types of things that go into this blender. When your personal take on these different things is blended together, you end up with a world perspective that is unique to you.
The cool thing is, no one in the history (and future) of the universe, has or will ever have the same world perspective as you. Your upbringing, learned value system, personality biases, etc. are unique to you - like a psychological thumbprint. Only you get to stumble through life in your particular way. It's a game that only you get to play.
With that definition of world perspective in mind, what was that about a positive feedback loop? It works like this:
Your closest friend's world perspective is closer to your own than a stranger’s world perspective. I.e. You most likely share a few hobbies. You probably have similar outlooks on life. And you by definition have at least some shared memories.
The overlap between you and your friend sets you both on a trajectory to have more similarities and overlap in your world perspective in the future.
Time passes, and now you have even more overlap in your world perspectives.
More overlap means more momentum pulling your world perspectives together, and the positive feedback loop is in full swing.
II
In some sense, this is obvious. But the positive feedback nature of this system is interesting.
For starters, the Theory of Positive Feedback Friendship Loops suggests that whoever you spend time with, you will tend to befriend. Some people are better starting points than others, but the truth is that everyone you meet has the potential to become a close friend. All that's missing is time. That goes for the person sitting next to you on the train, the person in line behind you at the grocery store, the coworker you feel ambivalent about, and even someone you disagree with.
Friendship is a function of time, and that function is often exponential.
Also, you aren't the center of the universe; this positive feedback loop is bidirectional. Just as all the opening quotes suggest you are the product of your friends, your friends are largely a product of you. When they succeed it is, in part, because of your influence on them; you make them… them. You don't live forever, but your impact does. One of the deepest honors someone can give you is the adoption of one of your mannerisms (like a catchphrase).
Ultimately, you help create the path that your friends travel. And in a broader sense, you help create the friend that walks the path.
Positive feedback loops are a double-edged sword though. The nature of them means that... 1) with time, all relationships fade when measures aren’t taken to keep some minimal world perspective overlap (i.e. maybe we should value holidays with the family more) and 2) a lot of who you are is not determined by something innate to you, but by the people around you.
Outcomes in life are less a function of 'willpower’ and more a function of the environmental conditions (such as friends) and time.
III
It was probably clear before reading this that surrounding yourself with bad apples is a bad algorithm to succeed in life. You don't need a Theory of Positive Feedback Friendship Loop to tell you that. However, the positive feedback nature of our relationships means simply avoiding bad apples isn't enough. Things can go awry with good apples too.
Why? Positive feedback loops tend to be isolating.
You may have noticed that all the components of our world perspective have something in common. Spending time together to create shared experiences...putting time into hobbies… All these things take (drum roll please) time. And time is limited.
Limited time + exponential nature of our relationships = all of your eggs in one basket.
This is dangerous (irrespective of how good that one apple is) simply because it’s easy to lose a single apple. It's difficult to recover from this loss because so little time has been invested elsewhere.
The proverb goes that four quarters are better than a hundred pennies. I’d add on the corollary that a gold dollar is worse than four quarters. Call it hedging your bets. Call it diversifying your world perspective. Either way, the goal is to not get pulled too far down the positive feedback rabbit hole that naturally occurs.
Lastly, even if we resist the gold dollar for the four quarters, the nature of these positive feedback loops is more sinister than just limiting the number of people you surround yourself with. It tends to limit the type of people you surround yourself with. There's no easy fix to this. Constantly trying to surround yourself with people you disagree with is a surefire way to be unhappy. On the other hand, living in an echo chamber is not much better. I’m not sure how to address this other than to ‘be open-minded’ which is vague, unhelpful, nonspecific advice that doesn’t deserve the title of ‘advice’.
Good wisdom tells you how to think, not what to think. In that same vein, the goal here was not to tell you what to do. I.e., drop your friend group and family to seek out 'successful' people to associate with. After all, we often have limited control of what people we are around (coworkers, neighbors, family members, etc.). Instead, the aim was to highlight an insight that academics, old books, and strangers on Twitter all independently came across. Namely, that the 'change comes from within' approach to life is a bad mental model. Instead, change your inputs to change your outputs. Pay attention to what you are putting into your world perspective blender.