Pathways to emotional vulnerability
Published on 2024-09-15
A calendar year ago I got really into what I called "dredging the indieweb." Basically, open search.marginalia.nu, hit random, look for cool websites, repeat.
Marginalia Search - browse:random
I took note of a lot of them I found particularly interesting and shared some with friends, but there was one that really stuck out to me that has since been lost to time. Maybe it still exists, but I have no idea how to find it. It was something like this:
The website was kind of like a personal profile; I don't think it had a blog, but it had a lot of details about the person who maintained it. One of the pages the author described as a sort of friendship business card. Their idea was that if they noticed a stranger in public whom they thought was cool, they'd leave a little note complimenting them that included a link to this page, which talked about who they were and gave some context for the note.
They explained that they felt modern life didn't really offer opportunities for meaningful connection. They were frustrated with the fact that the only pathway to friendship they reliably found in their life was laddering off of existing connections from school, or work, or the rare community group. They saw people they thought they might be interested in getting to know everywhere in life, but they were too afraid to initiate.
The "friendship business card" as I'm calling it has two big advantages. The first is that it creates all kinds of opportunities to connect with strangers without needing to deal with the social expectations of approaching strangers in public (where I live, the social expectation concerning approaching strangers in public is usually "don't"). The second is that the person receiving the card isn't forced to act. They can take the polite compliment and ignore the link. They can open the link, read the page, and ultimately choose not to reach out. Or, if they really wanted, they could finish that connection.
It's kind of like the TCP model of friendship in real life.
This person was really into the idea of connection; I remember that much. They also ran some kind of mailing list that served as a match making service for shy people who needed an impetus to make connections online. But that's about all I remember.
I think a lot about this person, largely because of how brazen it all was. This sort of thing flies in the face of social norms in a really unexpected way. Like, maybe approaching strangers is a social transgression in some contexts, but it's one most people are familiar with. I know how to respond to strangers making small talk with me in public; I think most people do, even if they find it awkward. But this… this was a whole other thing.
I'm not really sure what I'd do if I got a card like this from a stranger. I think I'd like to. I imagine it'd feel similar to having someone reach out to me about something I wrote online. It's a rare and interesting example of how technology can facilitate healthy relationships. Of course, this is still a social problem; it'd be just as easy for someone to write something gross that makes you feel uncomfortable, and it's worth noting that a big part of what makes connecting with strangers so hard is that in most cases, you don't really have anything to go off of, except maybe how they look. But the spirit, in the right hands, is something that I really admire.
If I'd found that website today, I might have sent the person an email saying something along these lines. But, I didn't, and now I'm not really sure how, so I decided to share this with you instead.
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