Who Gets to Be Family?

Diego’s worldview on friendship and community

The chairs in this room are suspiciously close together. Some are being used by more than one person. This is intentional. Diego's model of friendship was formed in a world where friends occupied one another's houses, conversations, laps, and ordinary days. The seating plan is Brazilian; please adjust your expectations accordingly.

In November 2025, looking back at his old circles, he wrote:

To put it mildly, I REALLY liked my old friends. A better word is I was fascinated by them. I was a friend fanatic.¹

Friendship is one of the central goods of his life: a way of being happy, of discovering minds, of becoming someone, and of belonging to a group whose members actively enrich one another's existence. It is also a good he has struggled to preserve through age, migration, changing communities, and the modern habit of moving away just as things become excellent.

The governing question here is how to have people as a durable part of a life. Knowing many people is easy compared with keeping a world in which they are really present.

The third door

Watching the Friends reunion in 2021 prompted Diego to contemplate the life stage in which friends become one's family. The reunion also presented him with the end of that stage: the actors had aged, the fictional household had dispersed, and many people in the audience had moved toward their own households and children.

He had repeatedly sought ways to prolong the alternative. Different circles, communal houses, unusually youthful intellectual communities, and a move to a sociable residential environment all promised another chapter of the same kind of belonging.

His wish was explicit:

We desire to eternalize the friendship cohort which substitutes for family, because in that cohort, we have each other's back, bro's code, and someone to care for us.²

He did not experience conventional fatherhood as the inevitable next improvement. In his account, the role could ask a man to become responsible for everyone else without preserving the reciprocity he treasured among friends. Yet simply restarting youth with another younger cohort also left the durability problem unsolved.

He wanted another arrangement:

I want there to be a third door, to make a third door.²

This is chosen family as a life-design problem. He wants adult continuity, mutual care, and the freedom to remain curious, playful, and emotionally close. The desire is not exhausted by having someone available for occasional coffee. A friend who lives inside your actual week is a different social fact from someone whose name remains in your phone.

Intimacy has more than one entrance

In his 2022 essay Intimacy, Diego describes a category broader than romance or sex. It includes bodily ease, affectionate touch, emotional exposure, and a shared feeling of being inside another person's protective bubble. He can find it in music, quiet conversation, a cuddle pile, or an encounter under the stars.

He offers one particularly simple counterexample to the idea that intimacy must be sexual:

for me you can have a very intimate moment playing the piano together.³

Touch is nevertheless central. He distinguishes an enjoyable, intelligent political argument in a hot tub from an intimate encounter: bodily proximity alone did not make that antagonistic, abstract conversation intimate. The quality of attention and feeling mattered.

Nor does technological access to people necessarily satisfy the need. His compressed economic analysis is:

You can't hug a Bitcoin. :p³

That limitation remains severe even if the Bitcoin is doing very well.

The Brazilian theatrical circles of his youth supplied much of this contact as an ordinary part of friendship. In the United States, he often had to seek it deliberately through dance, festivals, and communities organized around embodied connection. He found intellectual companionship among rationalists, while observing that the ability to cultivate intimacy was unevenly distributed there. Some members contributed precisely by making that missing dimension more available.

His dream of community therefore includes several forms of excellence. Someone can help you understand a mathematical argument; someone else can help you become comfortable enough to be held. A good human environment has reasons to value both.

Friendship can be invited into the room

Diego does not think connection must arrive spontaneously to be real. In January 2023, he described social prompting: creating circumstances in which people are invited to attend to one another, exchange something personal, move together, or participate in a consensual exercise of trust.

His account of what such arrangements accomplish is:

You have opened people's souls, and bodies, and smiles, to connect with one another, as we used to do through hormonal means in our teenage years, but are often blocked from doing after we enter adulthood.⁴

The word consensual belongs to his description of the setup. The point is to gather people who want this kind of interaction and give it permission and shape. The structure can help an encounter travel beyond the ordinary exchange of occupations and weather reports.

He sees this as a way of recovering access to other humans. It can renew interest, bring forth stories and tenderness, and expand the felt density of time. The same afternoon becomes richer because more of the people in it have become visible.

His preferences here are concrete. He names Scandinavian hippies, Burners, the conscious community, and theatrical Brazilians as favorite companions for personal enjoyment, while separately naming effective altruists and researchers for the project of improving civilization. Sometimes these categories overlap. Sometimes the person best equipped to discuss the distant future needs a separate introduction to the blanket pile.

An excellent world, in Diego's view, needs both kinds of encounter. Intellectual purpose does not replace affectionate presence, and affectionate presence is valuable without having to produce a research paper afterward.

Live near the people who bring you alive

This is also why living arrangements matter so much to him. In 2013, he asked LessWrong readers about how living alone, with friends, or with family affected happiness and motivation. He wanted their actual experiences. His emerging explanation for difficulties among people he knew was:

living with fewer tribal affiliates than they "need".⁵

The phrase places the person inside a social habitat. Motivation and happiness depend partly on who is around, what happens without elaborate scheduling, and what forms of participation the environment continually invites.

He pursued that idea in the Bay Area, including his time running Event Horizon, the communal EA house in Berkeley. In a 2024 reflection, the memorable feature of that life was the extraordinary people who might simply appear in the living room. Proximity placed him inside a live intellectual conversation and provided incentives that were difficult to reproduce alone elsewhere.⁶

For him, community is therefore also a way to arrange agency. Being near people engaged in a shared project makes participation more likely. It turns an abstract commitment into something with voices, rooms, schedules, and people asking what happened to the thing you were going to do.

That does not mean every person who loves you shares your goals. In a 2013 self-experiment, he proposed directing discussion of his plans toward people who wanted the same kinds of outcomes. Family members could sincerely care for him while preferring a different life for him. He wanted to distinguish affection, genetic relationship, shared purpose, and simply enjoying one another's company.⁷

The Castle's guest list is consequently larger than one tribe. He looks for different forms of nourishment in different groups, and resists making a single affiliation responsible for the whole human menu.

A friend has more rooms than you have visited

His 2013 essay “I know what she has to offer already” is almost always false concerns a habit he dislikes in conversation. People exchange their basic biographies, find a shared topic, decide they are friends—and then let their curiosity relax. Once the bond exists, important questions can start to feel risky, while the previous two days of errands become the default subject.

His comic protest asks:

how likely is it that in those 26 years, the best I've done happened in the last 2 days?⁸

He wants friends to continue discovering one another's knowledge, experiences, and possibilities. The fact that someone is known for diet does not mean there is no architecture, cosmology, or surprising private expertise available behind that first door. The familiar category can conceal the person.

His recommendation is:

make more friends, engage them more thoroughly, keep the information flow up (in quality, importance, and quantity).⁸

This is the intellectual version of the intimacy argument. Do not reduce a living person to the role through which you first met them. Keep making room for more of them to arrive.

Loyalty has a long memory

Diego's attachment to old friends is persistent. Sometimes it persists beyond the relationship itself. His 2020 Dreams of Loyalty describes a dream in which old acquaintances continued to occupy a mental category of friendship despite distance or disconnection.

The dream supplied him with a filing-system metaphor:

if enough time passes, it moves all "people" files into the "friend" folder even when there's little to no reason to do.⁹

He interpreted this as an instruction to attend to the people available in his new life, rather than bringing every old attachment into the new city. The dream's encounters are a dream; the lesson he drew from them is his own account of a real difficulty.

The line he wanted to internalize was:

It is ok to let go of those who were once friends⁹

That belongs alongside his desire for permanence. His ideal is a durable bond between people who remain present for one another. He also recognizes that loyalty can become loyalty to an obsolete relationship, consuming the space in which a new one might grow.

The tenderness is visible precisely because letting go is difficult for him. A vanished friendship does not become insignificant simply because the practical advice is to move forward.

Please stop moving away

The later writing repeatedly returns to the contrast between the dense friendship of youth and the more scheduled, geographically unstable friendship of adulthood. In Do I miss my old friends?, he describes the shock of going from intense, readily available bonds to encounters that are partial, less physically affectionate, and liable to expire when someone changes cities.

His review of the replacement product is:

What the heck is this Temu friendship?¹

He also knows the problem cannot be solved by selecting an address from an old photograph. After a 2025 Bay Area visit, he wrote:

Berkeley is not a place it's a people. And the people that represent the Berkeley i lived in are gone.¹⁰

At that moment, the realization freed him to commit to his life in San Diego. By his January 2026 resolutions, however, he was again considering where durable community might be possible. He wanted a place with intelligent people, stable bonds, and tolerable weather. These are not independent amenities for him. They must coexist in the same life.

He was also explicit that his own withdrawal needed to change:

I need to go back into society despite being able to afford ignoring it altogether.¹¹

The desired return included shared sports, travel, learning, and perhaps work in a group setting. He was looking for recurring activity to do what adolescent proximity had once done automatically: put people in one another's path often enough for a real social world to form.

The same practical concern appears in a modest 2022 question:

How can I be a better friend at 35?¹²

He asked readers for examples of things their friends had done that made them feel cared for. The philosopher of enormous futures was requesting instructions for the smaller, stubbornly essential business of being good to someone nearby.

That is who gets to be family here: people who become part of one another's lived world, whose minds stay interesting, whose presence is welcome, and whose affection has somewhere to go. The third door is still a project. Meanwhile, there is room on the couch.

Further doors

• A Personal take on the Friends Reunion (2021): the desire for durable chosen family and the search for a third door.
• Intimacy (2022) and Social Connection Prompting as Time Dilation (2023): bodily closeness, nonsexual intimacy, and deliberately created connection.
• “I know what she has to offer already” is almost always false (2013): continuing curiosity after friendship has formed.
• Dreams of Loyalty (2020): attachment, memory, and learning to release an obsolete bond.
• Do I miss my old friends? (2025), Berkeley is a people, not a place (2025), and Diego First (2026): migration, adulthood, and the ongoing search for a social home.

Continue: Beauty Is Part of the Point