The Case for Mindful Friendship
Why we should be more deliberate with who we’re friends with
Why are we friends with our friends? It’s not generally asked. We just are, and the causes are beside the point. Even asking the question is a bit gauche. But I think any discussion about friendship needs to start at conception, to illuminate their beginnings in the hazy dimness of our memory. Understanding how friendships begin clarifies how we should see them now.
I think most friendships trace a similar arc. They begin in the formative periods of our lives, forged at school, university, or work. Often, many years later, the relationships are still branded by the specific time and place they formed. The very best friendships evolve as we do, but many are burdened by their beginnings. We change but the relationships don’t, constricting but ill-fitting, locked to an identity we’ve shed.
We cling to friendships. They provide stability and nostalgia, enriching our lives with connections integral to health and happiness. Friends comfort us and encourage us and make us laugh. They were there through the years that defined us, with the braces, bad haircuts, and fumbling sexual experiences. In other words, friends and friendships are important. These relationships buttress our psyche and identity. They’re part of us.
As the scientific literature on friendship deepens, paper after paper¹ underscores the importance of close, intimate friendships. Of course, this is another case of science given credence to common sense. Most people don’t need social scientists to tell them friends are important. We experience that value as we live, traversing life’s treacherous slopes together. As fundamentally social animals, it’s transcribed in our DNA.
I want to dwell on this somewhat self-evident point because it obscures complexity. Friendships are good for us, but they’re also complicated. They’re entangled in a Gordion Knot of genetics, upbringing, culture and emotion. They depend on the intangibles of likeability, dominance hierarchies and intuition, and are shaped by aspects of our past and the wider culture we can’t control. In our society today we seem limited to a simplistic, child-like concept of friendship. Shorn of models to copy, our approach has developed little since we rescinded invites to our birthday on a playground whim.
How Friendships Define Us
In his seminal work On Liberty, the philosopher John Stuart Mill elaborated a concept of the individual that has informed the Western view of self ever since. In Mill’s view:
“Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”
He thought individuality and originality untrammelled by government violence or social pressure were crucial to a life well-lived and worried deeply about conformity and the “tyranny of the majority”. Mill’s worldview saw humans not as nodes in a complex network of social relationships, but rather
“…a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.”
Since Mill, our conception of the individual has atomized even further. Led by America, but with the rest of the world not far behind, individualism is on the rise. We now see ourselves as separate from society, undisturbed by the burden of social ties that dominated human lives until this recent moment. This unconsciously internalized philosophy makes us underestimate how strongly other people affect us. We understand relationships are important, but they’re still distinct from us. We exist as an entity apart from it all.
This is nonsense.
Our friendships define us. They shape the things we mistakenly think are innate; our tastes, our wants, our entire outlook on life. The trite phrase “you are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with” is trotted out by people who haven’t understood its full implications and don’t follow it, but it is true. I prefer the Stoic philosopher Epictetus’ less pithy but more colourful formulation:
“Place an extinguished piece of coal next to a live one, and either it will cause the other one to die out, or the live one will make the other reignite…remember that if you consort with someone covered in dirt you can hardly avoid getting a little grimy yourself.”
The French philosopher René Girard saw through society’s facade to the true causes of our desires. He realised what we want is copied from models we’re exposed to — the people around us. Our desires are mimetic. This has uncomfortable implications. Friendships provide an echo chamber of wants. We mimic what they want, and they what we want, in an infinite regress. When wanting the right thing is crucial to determining the course of our lives, and our desires are mimicked from others, selecting those models becomes one of the most important things we can do.
The Problem We Have
Given our friendships shape us so completely, you’d think we choose them with care. After all, many people spend hours researching purchases irrelevant to their lives. But we don’t. Often, the extent of our discernment is choosing the person the teacher sat next to us in Maths class. It’s startling to consider how the most influential people in our lives were selected by the whims of a university administrator allocating rooms, or the alphabetical order of surnames on a register.
It’s not necessarily a problem that our friendships were initiated by chance. Serendipity is a wonderful force, and deep, lifelong friendships can flourish from such a start. But the time in life they start in can be.
Our formative years, in which most of our friendships begin, tend to be early in life when our identity is a stunted version of what it will eventually become. Dramatic changes in self lie in our future. But these early friendships can lock us in stasis, forcing us into roles set when they began. The relationships are often inherently conservative, resisting the change constant in human life. They apply an inchoate pressure to play a certain part whether it suits us or not.
As we age this evokes a bitter contradiction of feelings. Our unease with the friendships jousts with nostalgia, loyalty and comfort. Many friendships trundle along bound together by ever-decreasing commonality, until at last they only rest on a shared history. Despite this, it’s hard to let go, even when we’re sure the relationships are empty. It feels like an attack on our identity and an existential threat to our ego, which works frantically to defend itself. Normally our ego wins, and we cling on.
Over a lifetime we grow into ourselves, constructing our identity experience by experience. We change, but we also come to know ourselves better. We know what we’re interested in and who we like. Generally free from the roiling angst of growing up, we have the confidence and self-awareness to choose friendships that are right for us. In theory.
In reality, with the business endemic to modernity we don’t have the time to make new friends. I think a lot of us have forgotten how². Part of our loyalty to existing relationships comes from the fear that we couldn’t if we tried. Yes, loyalty is a virtue. But like every virtue, in the extreme, it’s a vice. Misplaced loyalty is so insidious because it constrains our time. Time is finite. It’s zero-sum. Time spent on one thing is always at the expense of everything else. The number of deep relationships we have is, more than anything else, functionally limited by time. So every relationship we cling onto replaces one we might have had.
Montaigne, La Boétie and Conclusions
Michel de Montaigne only had one true friend in his life. He met Etienne de La Boétie as an adult and although they only knew each other for 4 years he wrote after La Boétie’s tragic death:
“If someone were to ask me why I loved him, I feel that it could not be expressed, except by answering, ‘Because it was him; because it was me.’”
This death would indelibly mark Montaigne and he mourned for the rest of his life. His thoughts on friendship, immortalized in his book of essays, were clearly shaped by their relationship despite its brevity. In his essay Of Friendship Montaigne writes:
“Common friendships will admit of division… but this friendship that possesses the whole soul, and there rules and sways with an absolute sovereignty, cannot possibly admit of a rival.”
When I think about what friendships could be I think of Montaigne and de La Boétie. I hold their friendship as a Platonic ideal, not necessarily as a goal to mimic but as a reminder of the intensity within us. Knowing what can be recalibrates our expectations of what should be.
Relationships are personal and individual, so sweeping advice is unwise. Instead, I want to finish by reiterating three principles from the essay that govern how I think about friendship:
- Our closest friends determine how our life turns out.
- Friendships should be judged on their present, not their history.
- We have inside us the potential for deep connection.
Mindful friendships start with reflection. Given how important our closest relationships are to us the least we can do is think about them. The principles above represent the start of the journey, and, perhaps, Montaigne and de La Boétie its end.
[1] There are literally hundreds of studies showing the benefits of friendship to both physical and mental health, so many that linking one didn’t seem to do the depth and breadth of the research justice. The most interesting was a meta-analysis of 150 studies with more than 300 000 participants, which found strong social relationships reduced all-cause mortality risk by 50%!
[2] If your own personal experience has inured you to this challenge, search “how to make friends as an adult” and scroll through the proliferation of mostly vacuous articles on the subject.
