17 December

It’s so accepted now that friendship is a vitally important thing that nobody really questions it. And it is a vitally important part of life, but it has its time and place. It’s also the most powerful way to stunt a person’s growth to adult maturity. It’s a training ground for kids and early-20s to learn to live with non-family members, in wider society. One of the most famous TV series of all time, Friends, is about that life stage. After that, friends are mostly acquaintances attached to work and schools, the parents of your kids’ friends. People to socialise with because you’re doing things together anyway. It’s very common for these friendships to be transient, as you move through life. People interpret it though as some terrible thing, and there’s talk of ‘epidemics of loneliness’. That seems more like adults pining for an earlier stage of their lives. Friends will hold you back if you’re constantly self-monitoring to not put them offside, because your beliefs and desires may come into conflict with theirs. It’s very common for friends to actually not have a lot in common, because friendship is a fairly surface-level interaction. It’s why it’s important for kids and young adults to have friends, to learn that people are different, but you can still get along. Proper adult maturity is being comfortable on your own. To still socialise, sure, but not to NEED it. To come to the maturity of who you are, individually, with fewer and fewer compromises with how that might make your friends feel. To have ‘besties’ in adult life is a bit of an embarrassment, I think. To need that sort of close connection seems a type of arrested development. But then as I post about a lot, culturally all adult life is really still high school life now, with the different parts just renamed to disguise it.