inflation of friendship
How many friends do you have? I mean — real friends. People who understand you and whom you understand. Can you call someone you care about a friend? What do we even mean by this word?
We constantly call everyone around us friends, although in reality they are just acquaintances or companions. We consider friends those with whom we have fun spending time or communicate daily due to common activities — work or school. Superficial friendship that ends the moment this common element disappears from life.
Many today consider their friends to be people from the internet whom they met somewhere online and communicate with on a daily basis. Is such a person your friend? Until a certain time, I thought so. Until I realized that physical proximity is an integral part of friendship. I don't mean intimate relationships, but real interaction with a person in the real world — meetings and eye contact, the ability to feel a person's laughter and emotions with your own eyes and ears, not through a phone screen.
In my understanding, true friendship should be based on complete and radical equality between people, without material benefit, feeling of dependency, or need for exchange. It should be based on the qualities of another person, unlike other types of friendship built on emotions or material gain.
Friendship is a relationship in which there is nothing for you except the relationship itself, based on mutual trust, respect, and honesty.
But how do you find a friend? First of all, you need to understand yourself — know your qualities, goals, views. You are a mirror of your personality. People attract those similar to themselves. There's no point in lying to a true friend. True friendship should strengthen human personality, not suppress it.
A true friend must have a reason to live without my help, must have their own principles that they will defend with all their heart and soul until the very end. They must have a dream for which they would fight even against me.
It's strange, but most people I've talked to consider love the most important thing in their lives — it needs to be sought, developed, preserved. Everyone considers friendship something temporary, not so important or relevant. And there's nothing surprising about this, because for many, friendship is limited to only the first two types — material and emotional, where people value not each other, but only the benefits that "friendship" brings between them.
And if we perceive true friendship as a new level of consciousness, it becomes clear why it's so rare in the real world and so common in various works of art.