EA - Friendship Forever (new EA cause area?) by rogersbacon1

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Friendship Forever (new EA cause area?), published by rogersbacon1 on November 15, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.I.I was surprised to learn recently that it was common for men in western cultures to hold hands throughout the 19th century, and that friendship for both men and women was generally valued much more highly than it is today, a time when people say things like “No New Friends” and this:Contrast this to:From the Civil War through the 1920′s, it was very common for male friends to visit a photographer's studio together to have a portrait done as a memento of their love and loyalty. Sometimes the men would act out scenes; sometimes they'd simply sit side-by-side; sometimes they'd sit on each other's laps or hold hands. The men's very comfortable and familiar poses and body language might make the men look like gay lovers to the modern eye — and they could very well have been — but that was not the message they were sending at the time... Because homosexuality, even if thought of as a practice rather than an identity, was not something publicly expressed, these men were not knowingly outing themselves in these shots; their poses were common, and simply reflected the intimacy and intensity of male friendships at the time — none of these photos would have caused their contemporaries to bat an eye.“Bosom Buddies: a Photo History of Male Affection”Photos of men with their wives, an often functional arrangement not rendered from romantic love, are often much less affectionate or loving. Women, too, thought of their best friends as more than what a husband could ever offer: loyal, supportive, sympathetic, clever, and funny. Same sex friendships were often considered the best relationships one had in life outside of one’s parents.“Men Holding Hands? Friendship in the 19th Century Was Quite Different”I'm not really sure why I was surprised that the friendship was regarded very different in the past—it seems obvious that romantic relationships have evolved considerably over time, for example. Maybe it’s just my personal ignorance (probably), but I have a suspicion that something deeper is going on here, a kind of blind spot that we have surrounding friendship, a under-appreciation for its importance in our lives that leads to a broader under-representation in the arts, politics, philosophy, and culture writ large.For instance, how often do we reflect on the fact that 65% of children up to the age of 7 have imaginary friends (“There is little research about the concept of imaginary friends in children's imaginations” according to Wikipedia,), or that adults, if desperate enough, will befriend inanimate objects such as volleyballs?The dynamic of friendship is almost always underestimated as a constant force in human life. A diminishing circle of friends is the first terrible diagnostic of a life in deep trouble: of overwork, of too much emphasis on a professional identity, of forgetting who will be there when our armoured personalities run into the inevitable natural disasters and vulnerabilities found in even the most average existence.David WhyteI suppose there is no a priori expectation for how much romantically-themed art there should be relative to friendship-themed art, but it’s hard not feel like there is a paucity of the latter (how many popular friendship songs can you think of besides this masterpiece?). The paucity of friendship-themed work may be even greater in “serious” intellectual domains; as one example, there is effectively no discussion of friendship amongst effective altruists (google it or search the effective altruism forum to see what I mean; what discussion does exist focuses on friendship as a tool for community building within EA, not as something that EA should focus on promoting in and of itself).Is it not strange that a phi...