You Don't Need Friends (?)
Friendship often feels like a mandatory part of modern society, connecting people and driving them forward together, as a group. Nobody likes to be alone, it’s a very scary feeling when the only person you could ever trust is yourself. It’s unhealthy.
However, this post isn’t about you, it’s actually about me and why I don’t need friends.
I’m a software engineer, we’re stereotypically often considered some of the anti-social weird people there’s to find. That’s absolute bullshit, though. Of course, there are some of us who prefer being alone and don’t get the modern society, but it is true for any profession.
The truth is, I’m a people’s person, I can’t stand feeling alone, it has actually been one of my biggest fears my whole life, ever since I was just a kid. A lot of my friendships and relationships were fakes, the only reason I even had them was because of that bug in my mind telling me I’m not going to get through this alone.
You might think what I just wrote makes myself a “fake”, but that’s not true at all. The real thing is, at any point in time, I was always a friend, willing to self-sacrifice in order to make someone happy, help them out when the times got tough, even if it often meant I had to do something that was absolutely against my principles or was immoral. They were always my friends, I was never theirs.
During my life, I’ve created a definition of a friend for myself, that cannot be written in text, I measure it in the same ways as people usually measure “love” for someone. They either feel it or they don’t.
There are symptoms of friendship though, here’s a short list I’ve created -
- You do not feel stressed when you’re next to your friends
- You can express your opinion without being oppressed no matter what it is
- You are not afraid to get back-stabbed
And now remember those symptoms, because we’re getting to the part why I don’t need friends.
“You do not feel stressed when you’re next to your friends”
Historically stress has helped us become stronger and evolve, both as individuals and a society. There’s healthy stress, the one that brings you forward and then there’s one which puts your whole life on a hand-brake.
Unhealthy stress has no positive drive on your life, experiencing this type of stress of prolonged amounts of time can actually lead to physical body issues, maybe not directly, but through means of insomnia or eating issues, excessive drinking or smoking — whatever floats, or better said — sinks , your boat.
This is the kind of stress we usually try to fix by talking with someone close to us, who’ll help us untangle the mess that has occurred in our mind. Yet what I often fail to acknowledge, is the fact that it’s completely impossible for one human being to understand another human being, no matter how close you are. Humans can show empathy towards one another, they can try to put themselves in others shoes, in fact, they could’ve been in the same situation, but the way two different people experience emotions aren’t the same and cannot be, hence the inability to understand.
People who don’t completely understand other people (nobody does) can still help, but they have to know how, one way would be to read a simple book on “psychology for dummies” or just learn it via the “trial and error” methods.
The problem is, I don’t want to be someone’s trial and error, whenever someone attempting to help me does an error, they leave an unhealthy scar on my mental/emotional state which they fail to recognise. Those scars accumulate over time and just amplify my depression.
“You can express your opinion without being oppressed no matter what it is”
Freedom of speech is a joke, no matter where you live or what country you are from, what isn’t regulated by government is regulated by society. What isn’t regulated by society will be regulated by you and the people near you.
You can see how you’re the last person in this chain of people groups, whose opinion actually matters, because it has to come through all these layers of filtering in order to appear normal to the rest of the people.
But wait, friends are not like that, they’ll listen.
Well, they might listen, but they’ll often do exactly that — listen — but they won’t hear.
They’ll interrupt you midway through your sentence to argue with something you just said, because they didn’t hear what you were saying, they listened to words and took them out of context.
In the ideal scenario which rarely occurs, the person will actually hear what you said, he won’t necessarily agree, but he will respect what you have said and make his own conclusions, using the power of their critical thinking.
So that will give you some time, you’ll now feel like you’ve had a conversation and someone listened and heard you, you feel so great to finally talk about your problems and express yourself.
That’s, of course, until the same person you just talked to comes back after a while and bring you a pack of “facts” in a format like “Hey, remember that talk we had, so I thought about it and here’s a million reasons why I think you’re wrong”.
Nobody. Asked.
This type of situation immediately removes all the healthy benefits of the prior conversation, completely wipes it out of your “good memories” brain section and starts a new paragraph in the negatives.
“You are not afraid to get back-stabbed”
It’s in the human nature to seek benefit in everything they do.
Some people are denying it, because they’re so caring and helpful, how could someone say they’re doing it for theirselves. That’s alright, but have they ever thought about why exactly are they so nice to everyone? Isn’t that just to “earn good karma” which in turn makes them feel better about themselves. Exactly, that’s the human nature, every living organism I know is always trying to do everything to make itself feel better, and that’s a really good thing.
The world is complex, society is a puzzle — there are different kinds of situations that can lead to a person backstabbing his own friends, and that’s also okay.
But that’s exactly why you shouldn’t completely trust even your closest friends, at the very least you have to expect a back-stab and base your decisions of what you do and tell them accounting for the fact it can hurt you in the future and you will have to deal with that. Better be safe than sorry.
This whole post is just a material for thought, I wrote this at an emotional moment and perhaps that’s because I really need friends.
I want to be back-stabbed and oppressed a million more times, I want to feel so stressed I can’t sleep for months.
That’s just so I don’t feel this alone, I want to be understood. I want someone to pretend to understand me. And I want to live. And I will.
