Friendships and Betrayals

Human beings are not naturally inclined towards solitude. Early man found much more survival benefit in being part of a group than living on his own. Now after thousands of years of evolution, these traits manifest in different ways.

One of the great teachers I had told me that the people who will shape your potential the most in life would be your friends. They are what you compare yourself to, the standard that you think is both achievable and essential. Good peer pressure can push you towards excellence while bad peer pressure can lead one astray.

Friendship is all about convenience. The painful realisation that we will all make in life is that once the convenience disappears, often the friendship will follow suit. Maintaining an old friendship is much harder than just finding new, more convenient ones.

Most of the time, there is no big moment of separation. Rather, there will be a slow process of drifting apart until they become little more than strangers. These people will never be there when you need them because it will simply not be convenient for them to be there during that time. It's much easier to laugh and be merry than try to help someone during difficult times.

As you get older, you develop more disdain and suspicion towards friendship in general. And that includes family members as well. It is not the end of the friendship per se that is the problem, it is the expectation that a person would actually be there when you need them when they have no intention of doing so that hurts the most.

As my teacher did say, friendships should ideally be mutually advantageous, formal and help you advance in life in general. Nothing but pain can occur from expecting people to be anything but selfish. 

Comments

  1. Anonymous17 April 2020 at 22:34

    Touching...
    Slow process of drifting apart....well that is tru..

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous15 November 2023 at 07:04

    False ideals of love and friendship are required to prevent nihilism in kids. Unfortunately, that means these hard lessons are only learnt via experience.

    ReplyDelete

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