To parallel my own life, I was recently binge-watching New Girl to further romanticise my experience moving out. During so, there was an interaction that really stuck with me:

Context: Jess and Cece are school friends, who remain close even in their 30s, despite having dramatically different lifestyles (Jess — Teacher, Cece — Model)

Jess: If we met today do you think we would even be friends? Cece: I don’t know, but we’re friends now

This raising various questions of:

1. How is friendship ‘built’, 2) What sustains friendship, 3) What purpose does friendship serve

As the current goal of Polka is to provide community-building tools for fitness outlets, these thematics of ‘what goes into friendship’ are particularly interesting. This also leads to the question of: whether it is possible to turn groups of users (defined by similar lifestyles) into friends *[1] *[1] friends being a heuristic for community

There are a few thoughts to contextualise this discussion:

• Friendships dissolve because of lack of chances to meet, socialise, connect
• Every 7 years, you lose 52% of your previous friend group *[2]
• Difficult to make ‘new friends’, after the age 30 (lack of social context+opportunities) *[3]
• Friends serve purpose of:
  • 1. network, 2) emotional assurance, 3) fun (to alleviate shame), 4) clarifying confusion

*[2] NB if have 100 RED friends in T=0, then T=7, it might be that you still have 100 friends, but only 48 should be the same RED, whereas the new 52 friends are new subset.

T=0 100 (100 RED), T=7 100 (48 RED, 52 BLUE) | NB in practice T=7, will be <100

*[3] In highschool+university, there are several opportunities to make new friends (ie in class, societies, campus activities); once you graduate, these opportunities are much rarer and there emerges an increasing dependence on pre-existing friendships, rather than the development of new friendships.