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The Art of Sovereignty: Navigating Love, Friendship, and Ethical Relationships in 2026
To all my dear friends, my prayer is that the good Lord blesses your mind and resources abundantly, enabling you to be fully self-sufficient in your silver years. Friendship is the highest social value — not family, not lovers. If a relative or lover is also your friend, consider yourself truly blessed. However, friends do not need to be relatives or lovers to hold their unique and cherished place in your life.
In this journey of love and connection, it is essential to categorize your relationships wisely: traders, altruists, and takers. Too often, we conflate love with altruism and end up supporting takers who only drain us. Altruism, in its ethical form, must be your choice, and you must be a psychological beneficiary of your giving, for even God loves a cheerful giver. Remember, there is no such thing as unconditional love, but there is unconditional altruism — when it is freely chosen and leaves you enriched in spirit.
All relationships are transactional, but a transaction simply means the exchange of value. Transactional doesn’t imply that parties must trade commercially, whether using money or bartering as the medium of exchange. This is why an ethical friendship is so uplifting; the exchange of value is non-obligatory and based on mutual motivation. When both parties…