Are friends tearing us away from ourselves?

A friend of mine teaches philosophy. He wrote this to me:

Losing friends is quite a normal thing when you develop. The concept of friendship is strongly biased: I think it is something that tear you away from yourself; friends are confusing you.

At first, this seemed to me a very provocative and frankly sad thought. Is it true?

I thought immediately about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, where “Love and belonging” sits as the third most important need of humans. Humans are often seen as the most social animals on Earth, even though many other animals also live in organized groups, show affection, and communicate with each other. In The Hidden Life of the Trees, Peter Wohlleben beautifully writes about how trees also have a social life with one another and many other beings, such as the mycelial network.

Would friendship be a confusing distraction from the Self?

Social networks have redefined the concept of friendship. For the last thirty years or so, it has been easy to have enormous quantities of friends around the world and keep in touch with them.

Social networks also confuse us in mixing “friend” with “follower.” I won’t even start here, defining what a “follower” would be.

It is easy to observe, though, that we do not have so many “real” friends, the ones we keep in touch with regularly and throughout the years.

Business friends vanish when you change jobs. Friends based on a shared passion often disappear when you no longer share that passion; there isn’t much left to talk about.

The conscious crowd would say that you also change friends as you change “frequency.” It is true, our interests change, what we talk about changes, the way we talk changes, and those we might have loved hanging out with, we can only spend a little time with, suddenly. It goes both ways.

I can easily observe that those whom I consider the wisest have very few friends and generally spend considerable amounts of time alone.

Back to my philosophy teacher friend, and what I remember clearly, “friends tear you away from yourself and confuse you.”

Loneliness brings us back to ourselves. Meditation in heavy doses does it even more; there are no distractions at all.

Who do we find when we find ourselves? I’m working on it.

I still love my “real” friends and cannot be more grateful for their friendship. I will still take that “distraction” with pleasure, but consciously.