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Desrtopa comments on Be Happier - Less Wrong
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(nods) Yeah, I resonate emotionally with this, but on consideration I don't really endorse it.
Even things like humor and kindness are functions of attention, which is also a limited resource, and attractiveness plays a complex role in social-status economies. If someone were open about just pretending to be my friend in order to get access to those resources, it seems I ought to feel just as comfortable rebuffing them, although I expect that in practice I would mostly be confused, since I do not have as clear an understanding of social resources as I do of money.
Having friends at all costs attention, but I don't invest extra attentional resources into being funny or kind to people around me. If anything, it takes less energy for me to be friendly and funny around people I'm comfortable with than it does for me to be distant or awkward around people I'm uncomfortable with. If I'm going to invest my attention into spending time with people at all, I'd rather they be positive interactions.
Interesting. It definitely does consume extra resources for me. I became most vividly aware of this after my stroke, when attentional resources were very scarce, and I often ran out of them in mid-interaction, and even basic social interaction became incredibly exhausting; my irritation about this very much resembled the feeling of having all my employed friends insisting on going out to dinner when I was unemployed and poor. (I don't care about it so much anymore, in either area, because I'm now running a large surplus of both money and attention.)