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Friendships have costs. It’s trite to suggest that you are the average of your five closest associates, but it’s a truth that rings louder and louder in my ear each day. Today we’ll contemplate the costs of your closest contemporaries, professionally and personally, and their contribution to your wealth in happiness.
Stormy Coworkers
I was listening to a multi-exit, serial entrepreneur a couple years back and, toward the end of his speech, he casually dropped this little nugget that hit me like a ton of bricks:
“My goal with my next company is to only work with people I love, like, and trust.” - Ryan Wuerch
It’s a self-evident statement that you would think we all strive to achieve. Yet, we often compromise our workplaces with toxic, deleterious individuals simply because they “get the job done.” This is an infuriating and absurd work philosophy, and the subtlety of its logical fallacy is outlined nicely by Peter Thiel:
“We didn’t assemble a mafia [when forming PayPal] by sorting through resumes and simply hiring the most talented people. I had seen the mixed results of that approach firsthand when I worked at a New York law firm. The lawyers I worked with ran a valuable business, and they were impressive individuals one by one. But the relationships between them were oddly thin. They spent all day together, but few of them seemed to have much to say to each other outside the office. Why work with a group of people who don’t even like each other? Many seem to think it’s a sacrifice necessary for making money. But taking a merely professional view of the workplace, in which free agents check in and out on a transactional basis, is worse than cold: it’s not even rational. Since time is your most valuable asset, it’s odd to spend it working with people who don’t envision any long-term future together. If you can’t count durable relationships among the fruits of your time at work, you haven’t invested your time well- even in purely financial terms.” - Peter Thiel, Zero to One
If your network is your net worth, yet you’re extracting only vapid Office Space relationships from your time in the workplace, then your opportunity cost is more than a salary.
If your conversations with coworkers can’t dig deeper than a 20 second “So, how ‘bout them Cowboys?” at the watercooler, then I find it hard to imagine that that human connection adds any more value to either of your lives than a strictly short-term economic exchange.
Admittedly, you can’t always control your coworkers. But you can control your friends, and compromising with your closest compatriots is a recipe for ruin.
Fairweather Friends
In cooking up the thoughts for this piece on a rooftop a few months ago, a proper metaphor almost resulted in my tumbling off the edge:
As Papa Lemmons explained to me, we trim the dead branches to allow the rest of the tree to continue its journey skyward. You hack off a piece of dead branch, and immediately the remaining limb floats upward. This is an instructive idea for the curation of your own friend circle.
We often make friends inadvertently, especially in youth. Your best friend for life could be the result of a chance interaction in fourth grade. For example, my best childhood friendship was the result of his asking me “Do you want to be friends?” on the first day of kindergarten (I kid you not). That’s great for lifelong friendship, and the value of those that knew you when you were young and where you’ve come from is invaluable (see: Wear Sunscreen). Yet, as we mature and gain a better understanding of our motivations and aspirations, people are quick to cut major misalignments out of their life yet slow to trim the more subtle weights on their self actualization.
Keeping the company of wolves is pernicious to your life. Your closest company defines who you become and where you go. But that’s a bit hand-wavy. More tangibly, I think people underestimate the significant effect that their nearest friends have on their mental health as well as self image. We’re pretty good about cutting out the shittier people in our lives, those that have wronged us, stolen from us, or hurt us in a major way. But we’re much worse at trimming the more subtle influences. A ‘friend’ whose off-hand remarks about your weight, your looks, your style, or your goals are a monkey on your back is a far more insidious factor to your well-being than people appreciate…
“The rotten pretense of the man who says, ‘I prefer to be honest with you’! What are you on about, man? No need for this preface- the reality will show. It should be written on your forehead, immediately clear in the tone of your voice and the light of your eyes, just as the loved one can immediately read all in the glance of his lovers. In short, the good and honest man should have the same effect as the unwashed- anyone close by as he passes detects the aura, willy-nilly, at once. Calculated honesty is a stiletto. There is nothing more degrading than the friendship of wolves: avoid that above all. The good, honest, kindly man has it in his eyes, and you cannot mistake him.” - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
I remember a specific example of this from my time in Dallas. A (previously) close friend of mine once made an off-hand remark about my gut / weight as I was bulking up. Nothing major. Not an outright insult, but a subtle barb. It wasn’t until the hindsight of slowly cutting out our friendship some months later that I had the wherewithal to see his actions within the broader context of our toxic relationship. In some ways it was his own self-consciousness projected on me as I was really starting to hone my fitness, but it was also emblematic of a larger toxicity within that relationship wherein his actions and behaviors were self-sabotaging and permeated beyond his own life into mine. It was not a net positive to include him in my life to the detriment of my happiness.
For better or for worse, you can change people only so much, and even that is within the bounds of what would be acceptable to suggest changing. It is not your role, responsibility, or even place to pass judgements on the lifestyles of others, but it is within your power to control your own exposure. The drag is even more insidious when it’s a childhood friend, and the hooks they’ve latched onto your psyche are beneath the guise of advice with ‘your best interest’ at heart, the rotten pretenses Aurelius mentions. If you ever take a sober look in the mirror and ask yourself “Why am I friends with this person?”, the friendship should have been torched years ago.
Happiness Billionaire
A tangential to this point that I return to frequently is the idea of a Happiness Billionaire.
I want to be the happiest person I know. Not the richest, not the wealthiest, but the happiest. People often conflate this goal with wealth or status or any number of other consumables, but happiness in and of itself should really be your north star. This is simple, but often forgotten. A large function of your happiness is directly related to the company you keep, and the function it serves in your life. When I imagine my ideal life, it includes the smartest, happiest people I know within it. A toxic, taxing relationship kept from inertia will do little more than weigh you down for years at a time. If you are to be relentless in your life, you need the support and collaboration of those who are equally exceptional.
“Those are only to be reputed friendships, that are fortified and confirmed by judgment and length of time” - Cicero
Cicero puts it succinctly with his multifaceted axiom. Duration alone doesn’t define true friendship, but that it is continually renewed by your mutual support and assessment. It shouldn’t be a ‘judgment call’ to keep someone in your life.
Hopefully this piece doesn’t push you to finally cut me out (it’s been a long time coming, if we’re being honest with ourselves).
- W
And a bonus Bukowski, relevant to our discussion:
the telephone
will bring you people
with its ring,
people who do not know what to do with
their time
and they will ache to
infect you with
this
from a distance
(although they would prefer
to actually be in the same room
to better project their nullity upon
you).
the telephone is needed for
emergency purposes only.
these people are not
emergencies, they are
calamities.
I have never welcomed the ring of a
telephone.
“hello,” I will answer
guardedly.
“this is Dwight.”
already you can feel their imbecile
yearning to invade.
they are the people-fleas that
crawl the
psyche.
“yes, what is it?'‘
“well, I’m in town tonight and
I thought…”
“listen, Dwight, I’m tied up, I
can’t…”
“well, maybe another'
time?'“
“maybe not…”
each person is only given so many
evenings
and each wasted evening is
a gross violation against the
natural course of
your only
life;
besides, it leaves an aftertaste
which often lasts two or three days
depending upon the
visitor.
the telephone is only for
emergency purposes.
it has taken me
decades
but I have finally found out
how to say
“no.”
now
don’t be concerned for them,
please:
they will simply dial another
number.
it could be
yours.
“the telephone” - Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poems