The pulse of friendship
15 September 2026
For most of my friendships, there’s a pulse.
Flashes of sound when we’re together. And in between those flashes are periods of quiet - periods of moving through the landscape separately, safe in the knowledge that we’ll convene again.
The reason that I think this is an interesting way to conduct a friendship is that the time away is a time of discovery and exploration. It allows you each to find things, gather things, collect things, that you each, in turn, bring back. It feels like the sort of mechanism that you might imagine in a hunter gatherer society, where people would go off and either hunt or gather and bring back to the center of the community everything that they had found. This allows huge disparity in experience to evolve and persevere through many years of interacting. If you are together all the time - i.e. it’s a singular beep instead of a pulse - things get homogenised and you find there is a shared language formed. There’s a shared culture formed. And this is fantastic. It allows for seamless communication. And it smooths out the sharp creases and rough contours of the individuals. But to me, the beauty is in the mixture of the two: it is in the pulse. Where you have ample time in quiet solidarity - those moments of deep exploration. And yet, when you come together, there is - due in a significant part to the time away - a sort of show and tell. An exciting duet. This is a phenomenon that I first really observed through my adventures. I would go out and do an adventure, and that was time alone. That was time doing things that my friends were not doing. I found that when I would return it was a really nice way of bringing forward intrigue and interest. And I really appreciated, equally, when my friends would do the same because it allowed me to vicariously explore the things that they had found. I could play with those new ideas and thoughts and behaviours in my own hands after having been given them by my friend, who had gone through significant effort to reach - and keep hold of - them through the furious chaos of life. When both parties bring novelty and enthusiasm you get a sort of conversational dance that can’t help but affirm life’s energy.
So for me, the ideal is to spend enough time away that you develop creases and folds, and peaks and troughs, unusual in shape. These may be in the form of thoughts, ideas, behaviours, actions or words - any or all of these things. But not too much that you lose the language, the shared language, that common sense of communication with the people that you love. And that balance is really difficult. When I spend a lot of time around people, I find that my creases get ironed out. I become closer to the average of the group that I’m in. As I said, this allows for seamless communication, less friction, more understanding, but also takes away individuality. And heterogeneity.
I’ve been thinking about this, also, in the context of the Internet, which I think in its current form homogenises almost entirely. We no longer have to be together to get that smoothing of our interactions and thoughts and behaviors. Everyone has the same reference points. Everyone has the same experiences. We’re losing that individuality.
I should say on a separate point that while I think that the homogenisation force of the internet is the more common experience, it also succeeds in pushing and polarising, i.e. you get profoundly homogenous groups which dominate culture, and in reaction to that, you get small fringe groups that roll away into extremist views, though they themselves tend to be homogenised. And because the internet is the internet, there are enough of these to create their own communities.
I want to go back to that feeling of growing your own individuality and feeling able to show it while not going feral. Back to the pulse metaphor, I think that that’s a nice way of viewing it - that each of your friendships has a certain pulse when you’re circumstantially very close, i.e. you work together or you live together or you live very close to each other or you go to school together. These are times of high tempo. These are times where you share a huge amount. You build that common language. You build those shared experiences which will come to eventually be the foundation on which the friendship is built. These are the good old days before they were old. But then you may move into - or evolve into - a scenario where there are longer times between seeing each other. And this can be looked upon melancholically with a negative sense of nostalgia, but I think it need not if you frame it in the way I have discussed here. What you’re doing in your time away is precisely finding things to show the other. You’re cultivating differences, which are then in turn future points of interest. And as long as you continue to share that corpus of experience, of language, of communication, of memory, it’s a beautiful way of adding to each other’s lives in a rich and fulfilling way.
They say distance makes the heart grow fonder. But it’s not just about the psychology of being away from each other. Distance itself makes us diverse and interesting.
So next time you say goodbye to a friend, ask them to be on their merry way. Ask them to pick stories and harvest memories so that when you next meet them the conversation can’t help but skip away. The pulse will continue.