Speculative · Systems & Incentives · X (Twitter) Article

Friendship as Negative ROI

Pankaj (the2ndfloorguy) · 2026

"Treating friendship formation as a quantifiable investment — tracking the roughly 128-192 hours it takes to build a deep friendship from scratch against a fixed personal capacity for close relationships — makes an uncomfortable case that most new-friendship attempts are a worse use of time than deepening existing ones."

The idea

128 to 192 hours to build one meaningful friendship from scratch, a roughly 70% chance it fails within two years anyway, versus investing that same time in friendships that already cleared that bar.

Why it works

The takeaway — recall it first

Goodhart's Law

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Charles Goodhart · PaperContinue→