Make friends with people who want the best for you.
Most of us are guilty of befriending the wrong person at some point in our life. But it is one thing to do it accidentally, which happens rarely, and it is whole another thing when you purposefully do that.
Why would anybody do that, you might ask?
Dr. Peterson in his book 12 Rules for Life, suggests that reasons might be:
You think low of yourself, so you assume you don’t deserve any better.
You prefer to have people around you compare to whom your own life choices look good (like your binge drinking is an irrelevant problem compared to your alcoholic friend).
You think you want to help your friends out (realistically, often because it distracts you from solving your own issues or gives you a reason to call the world’s injustice).
It is an unconscious drive to repeat horrors of the past for one or another reason.
But friends affect you on a great scale.
It is proven through multiple experiments that if you bring a dysfunctional worker into a well collaborating and effective team it will cause the team degradation, instead of the improvement of the bad worker. Apparently, it is easier to go down, than up.
It will do you good to first assume that you are associating with people who are bad for you not because it is better for anyone, but because it is easier for you. It is a more realistic outlook on things.
That said this is not an excuse to not help those who truly need it, but rather to be careful about your own motives and motives of others since none of us are perfect. As Carl Rogers, the famous humanistic psychologist, suggested you can’t help those who do not want to be helped.
So who is a good friend then?
The good rule of thumb is to not befriend a person whose friendship you would not recommend to your family members. Friendship has to happen out of honest interest in well-being of each other. A good friend will support you when you are aiming up, and will punish you carefully when you are doing something that is bad for you. They will feel good when you succeed. A bad friend will offer a cigarette to someone who tries to quit smoking. They will judge you harshly when you try to get out of your hole and improve something.
You should be wary of such friends because it is in their interest to keep you where you are, so that you do not challenge their own poor choices in life.
But don’t be fooled, it is not easy to befriend a good person. Such people will push you forward and expose your inadequacies. It requires strength to stand beside an ideal that is a good, healthy person. You will need some humility and courage to make good friends. However, be wary and use your judgment to protect yourself from over-compassionate pity of others.
Make friends with people who want the best for you.
Adapted from 12 Rules for life by J.B. Peterson
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