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Comment by JV on Intentionally Making Close Friends · 2023-04-17T23:35:50.534Z · LW · GW

I agree with your anylasis as I came to a very similar conclusion on my own. Due to my circumstances (19yo male, only conscoiusly aware of this problem since ~15yo, left school a year early) I unconsciously and then consciously proceeded with a conservative aproach in school and a net returns based aproach whenever I'm interacting with perfect strangers.

Unfortunately, despite the positive interactions with friends and the franky stellar home life I still find myself questioning whether my 'care' for these people is the same as theirs for me or if it is architipally different. When I reduce my 'care' for these people to it's constituant parts. (Mostly things that would be hard or impossable to replace: familialy shared traits, unconditional love, shared experiences, low shared intrests with the general population etc.) Then after removing personal/societal morals ('"good people" care about their friends' etc, that are irespective of the individual in question. I find that there is nothing left.

I believe that I already have the care of others but seek to, if I do not already, emulate their care and return it.

After reading what you've writen I notice the importance on 'vulnerablility' and often hear this from others aswell. I think this 'shared vulnerability' may be the problem with my approach, as I cannot think of anything that I would not feel perfectly fine discussing/'opening up' to literally anyone I know. Just that, it's best not to spring extremely personal, dark, or existential topics on people you have to see again incase they misunderstand. This is probably because I have divorced 'discussion' of all boundries and emotions in order to more efficiently build an map of knoledge. I don't think I can reverse this and am not sure I would want too even if I could.

Would you care to elaborate on what constitues a vulnerablity? Have you experienced a similar phenomena, and regardless, do you have any sugestions on how to proceed?

Edit: Apologies if this is already covered somwhere, I'm new.