Friends
A rising tide lifts all ships. Iron sharpens iron. You are the culmination of the five people closest to you; choose wisely. These are the modern standards of friendship. Friends are not just people you like hanging out with, they are the foundation of who you are. I’m not so sure how true that is.
I understand the take completely. In today’s hustle culture, it makes sense to surround yourself with people who make you a better person. I know for myself that my friends make me a better man. However, what I find to be the most crucial element of the equation is often left out. With all these statements, the focus is on friendship. Find people who make you better. Yet in order to do that, one must define what “better” even means.
What I am seeing happen is people trying to surround themselves with “winners” in an effort to become a “winner”. On the surface this may seem fine. After all, what’s wrong with being a winner? On a basic level, nothing is wrong with it. Winning is great. It feels good and it surely beats losing. However, when the sole focus is on being a winner, we fail to recognize what we’re giving up in exchange. There are costs to being a winner and surrounding ourselves with people who match our definition of winning.
An example of this came recently into my own life. I found myself wanting to expand my social circle and find friends who matched my ideals on winning. Then I found myself trying to be friends with other winners. See the issue?
The beauty of friendship is that you don’t have to try. It’s almost as if there is an invisible pull between two individuals that sparks a friendship. Speaking for myself, my best friends all came into my life by accident. We happened to work at the same shitty company or we both stopped a conversation to Shazam a song playing in the background. Even my longest friendship, one that originated in high school, didn’t start by trying to become friends. It started from a joke, more accurately a list, of the wildest soccer team names (I’m looking at you Brest and Grasshopper).
When it comes to friendship, I understand the temptation to try. Especially when the narrative in our modern culture is to align yourself with people that make you a better person. And yet that’s exactly what real friendships do. From the very moment you first become friends with someone, it’s not because you have an objective to better yourself. In fact, friendship originates from the opposite end of the spectrum. It’s born out of a liking who that person is in that moment. Not who they want to be or their potential. Friendship is saying, you can be whoever you want, I just like you for who you are now.
There shouldn’t be any pressure to better ourselves in our friendships. That is not what they are designed to do. Definitely strive to improve, your true friends will support that. But they’ll also be there when you’re a piece of shit. And if you have a handful of people that will be there for you for that, then you have something truly special.