Friends
Posted by Daniel Lyons Mon, 04 Sep 2006 07:47:39 GMT
There is a saying that starts with “you can pick your friends.”
It occurred to me today that nothing could be farther from the truth.
The reality is that you can choose to dislike or like some people, to a very limited degree. Your friends are those people who happen to like you back, and your enemies are those people who dislike you. We have very little control over any of this. It seems like the best we can do is to choose to make someone dislike us.
I like the simple style of your blog. Well done.
Not only that, opportunities to make new friends in our society are pretty sparse. When you think about it, your friends are the people you’ve been forced to be with for an extended period of time, whether it be for school or work or something else.
You can’t “pick up” friends at a bar. If you strike up a conversation with someone in a line somewhere, you can’t ask the guy for his number when it’s time to part ways, unless maybe you’re new in town.
The exception of course is college. But after that… good luck getting to know anyone of the same sex who isn’t exactly like you.
I don’t usually “me-too” but Navdeep’s point is excellent. Our social lives are over-institutionalized. Can’t we do something about this?