Surround yourself with the type of people you hope to become, they said. If you have positive and inspirational examples in your life, you’ll strive to be more like them and improve yourself. You don’t want to be around less successful people because they will just make you feel sad about their circumstances and content with yours.
Surround yourself with the type of people who aren’t quite at your level, they said. If your peers are less physically and intellectually capable than you are, you will feel better about your life. You’ll win most of your arguments and games and people will look up to you. When you compare yourself to others, you’ll be proud of how much more successful and capable you are than your friends. You don’t want to be around successful people because they will just make you feel pathetic about your lack of accomplishments.
How to balance these competing interests?
You could roll with the bad crowd. When you’re around the “worse” people, you are (theoretically) in a nice local maximum, but missing out on the feedback and motivation that would make you better off in the long run. In a lot of cases, that might be fine. Getting better at something might have no effect on your life satisfaction. For some people, this might even be true about all aspects of their life. For other people, this might never be true; constantly getting better might be the only form of contentment they know.
But in general, surrounding yourself with exclusively “do-ers” or “stew-ers” doesn’t seem like a great life strategy. Maybe it’s pretty simple. Make sure to have a mix of each (some friends who are “better” than you, some who live life “worse”, and some who are better and worse in different respects). Maybe the ideal mix includes as many “better” and inspiring people as you can handle without feeling hopelessly inept.
In reality, the right move really depends on the situation and the personality/long-term goals of the decision maker. So while I don’t have an easy formula for you to apply, I do think most people give little thought to who they surround themselves with, and that’s a mistake.
Some examples:
Beating up on noobs in sports or video games or chess. This is fun in the short term, but doesn’t challenge you to actually get better. This might be one of those times where that’s perfectly ok as long as you aren’t banking on an esports sponsorship.
Choosing to be one of the best DIII athletes instead of going DI. A lot of the time the decision is made for academic/lifestyle reasons, but the experiences of people with similar times who are either DIII All-Americans or potentially not even in their DI team’s starting lineups, are soooo different. Even within a division, being on a team where you will be the best vs a team where you’ll be fighting for your place are radically different experiences
Choosing a college for academics. If you go to the best school you can get into, there’s a good chance you will end up around the median student or worse. Alternatively, you can go to a much easier school and get a great GPA with little effort. The friends you end up with will vary quite a bit as well (even if you are friends with the smart kids at the easier school, they might be a lot less ambitious than similarly smart kids at the better school).
Choosing a company to work at. You can content yourself with being the best salesman at Dunder Mifflin Scranton Branch for your whole life or you can shoot for household name status at some big cutthroat firm
Weight loss strategies. Some fat people don’t like working out around skinny people because it makes them feel self-conscious. But it also provides some degree of motivation. It’s important to find the right balance (and mindset) to avoid becoming discouraged.
What about when you can’t change your circumstances? There might be a much stronger case here for some level of “better person avoidance”
Disabled people might feel sad being around athletic people and hearing about fun activities they will never be able to experience again
Scott Alexander has talked about people on his site that write to him about how they feel bad about having a much lower IQ than most readers and not being able to relate/comprehend some things. In this case, a shift in attitude is hopefully a better option than avoiding Slate Star Codex
Other Considerations:
Julia Galef’s The Scout Mindset makes the case for being more of a scout who searches for truth, and less of a soldier who defends their existing beliefs at all costs. I think this ties in really well here. When you try to be a better scout, you are choosing to see the world as it is (analogous to taking off the rose-tinted glasses of being surrounded by “stew-ers”), putting you in an ideal position to determine what areas of your life have the most room for improvement. While I am fully on board with shooting for maximum scoutery in my life, I wasn’t convinced that EVERYONE would be better off if they were more scouty about EVERYTHING. It’s pretty hard to know when you’re better off living in happy, ignorant bliss versus confronting cold, hard, reality.
Being around less successful people too much might not just make you less ambitious. It can be sad to spend too much time around people who are doing nothing with their lives.
There can also be some level of motivation from being around the “bad crowd”. Ex: “I gotta stay in school so I don’t end up like my drop-out friends that spend all day on the corner”
Being around more successful people too much might make you feel like your life pales in comparison and the gap between you and them is too far to even try to make positive progress. This is especially true since people typically exaggerate the good parts of their life and play down/ignore the bad.
Lastly, deciding who to surround yourself with is not quite as simple as just picking the group that will maximize your objective function (ie life satisfaction). Who you surround yourself with will CHANGE what you think makes your life worth living. At the moment you might feel pretty content with your life, but if you start spending all your time around strivers, that may not be the case after a while. It’s not obvious when a changing life satisfaction function is a good/bad thing, but it’s worth thinking about before making any big decisions.
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