half-life

i’ve been thinking about this monologue from bojack recently: 

Here’s a story. When I was a teenager, I performed a comedy routine for my high school talent show. There was this, uh, cool jacket that I wanted to wear because I thought it would make me look like Albert Brooks. For months, I saved up for this jacket. But when I finally had enough, I went to the store and it was gone. They had just sold it to someone else. So, I went home and I told my mother, and she said, “Let that be a lesson. That’s the good that comes from wanting things.” She was really good at dispensing life lessons that always seemed to circle back to everything being my fault.

But then, on the day of the talent show, my mother had a surprise for me. She had bought me the jacket. Even though she didn’t know how to say it, I know this meant that she loved me.

Now that’s a good story about my mother. It’s not true, but it’s a good story, right? I stole it from an episode of Maude I saw when I was a kid, where she talks about her father. I remember when I saw it, thinking, “That’s the kind of story I want to tell about my parents when they die.” But I don’t have any stories like that. All I know about being good, I learned from TV. And in TV, flawed characters are constantly showing people they care with these surprising grand gestures. And I think that part of me still believes that’s what love is. But in real life, the big gesture isn’t enough. You need to be consistent, you need to be dependably good. You can’t just screw everything up and then take a boat out into the ocean to save your best friend, or solve a mystery, and fly to Kansas. You need to do it every day, which is so… hard.

and on one hand this is relieving, because i’m objectively awful at big gestures. there hasn’t really been an instance where me organizing an event or getting a gift or etc for someone else has ended well. i have become decent at a specific kind of planning — logistics centered on gruelling attention to detail and anticipation of breakdowns, like crafting busy schedules out of narrow time constraints or figuring out travel plans and houses to live in — but i don’t know how to arrange complicated things for other people in a way that makes them feel better. which is maybe a strange thing to realize given that i think i have pretty good mental models of my friends, but i’m genuinely clueless on what to do for people other than to just show up and hope that my presence is helpful

but being bad at gestures doesn’t make me good at consistency either. writing blog posts is pretty much the only activity visible to my friends which i do consistently, and even that behavior is mostly for myself. i have largely been a complete non-factor in instances where my friends had serious problems and needed help. i regularly forget about people for weeks or months at a time, and who i remember or forget about has long been dictated primarily by social media algorithms and gossip. most of my friends are fairly inconsistent people as well, and as i’ve written numerous times over the past few months my current solution to this problem has been to let go of the desire to have company all the time, but i do also realize that the types of people i attract are a partial reflection of what kind of friend i am

the other day i was talking to someone about the half-life of my friendships and guessed that it was probably around six months. then last night i decided to figure out what the actual value was, so i went through my facebook friends and listed how long i was friends with each of the people for. (if you want to try this yourself there are some technical details to take care of that i won’t flesh out here, like deciding who constitutes a friend, figuring out how to account for friendships that have not ended yet, choosing an approach for estimating the half-life from the sample, etc.) 

anyway, this activity became painful pretty quickly – after all, it consists of recalling and evaluating all your broken relationships – so i only got through a few dozen people before stopping, but the results were a bit better than i’d expected. the half-lives were roughly one year for general friends and two years for close friends. and i know this isn’t a great model in the sense that your friendship survival probabilities probably aren’t actually decaying exponentially over time, and even if that were the case the half-life would fluctuate with your own stability as you age, but these results fit my (admittedly small) dataset quite well so i’m sticking with them until someone suggests a better model

i know i’m doing all this wrong. i’m not supposed to understand friendship with a quantitative model. i’m not supposed to interpret friendship through a tv monologue, especially when one of the monologue’s messages literally is to not apply tv stories to your own relationships. but i can’t help it! stories and models, metaphors and numbers – these are the things i understand best, and in some sense they are the only means through which i can reason about relationships. nobody is teaching me how to gesture or be more consistent, nobody is teaching me how to be a better friend, and so all i can really do is cobble together my best guesses and try them out

so i really wish i were better for the people around me, and i am trying to be, but it might take me a while to get there